The Great Adventure
Written by President
Theodore Roosevelt in the Metropolitan Magazine, October 1918, and The Great
Adventure, 1918
Only
those are fit to live who do not fear to die; and none are fit to die who have
shrunk from the joy of life and the duty of life. Both life and death are
parts of the same Great Adventure. Never yet was worthy adventure worthily
carried through by the man who put his personal safety first. Never yet
was a country worth living in unless its sons and daughters were of that stern
stuff which bade them die for it at need; and never yet was a country worth
dying for unless its sons and daughters thought of life not as something
concerned only with the selfish evanescence of the individual, but as a link in
the great chain of creation and causation, so that each person is seen in his
relations as an essential part of the whole, whose life must be made to serve
the larger and continuing life of the
whole.
Therefore it is that the man who
is not willing to die, and the woman who is not willing to send her man to die,
in a war for a great cause, are not worthy to live. Therefore it is that the man
and woman who in peacetime fear or ignore the primary and vital duties and the
high happiness of family life, who dare not beget and bear and rear the life
that is to last when they are in their graves, have broken the chain of
creation, and have shown that they are unfit for companionship with the souls
ready for the Great Adventure.
The wife of a fighting soldier at the front recently wrote as follows to the mother of a gallant boy, who at the front had
fought in high air like an eagle, and, like an eagle, fighting had
died:
I write these few lines, not
of condolence--for who would dare to pity you?--but of deepest sympathy to you
and yours as you stand in the shadow which is the earthly side of those clouds
of glory in which your son's life has just passed. Many will envy you that
when the call to sacrifice came you were not found among the paupers to whom no
gift of life worth offering had been entrusted. They are the ones to be
pitied, not we whose dearest are jeoparding their lives unto the death in the
high places of the field. I hope my two sons will live as worthily
and
die as greatly as yours.
There spoke one
dauntless soul to another! America is safe while her daughters are of this
kind; for their lovers and their sons cannot fail, as long as beside the
hearthstones stand such wives and mothers. And we
have many, many such
women; and their men are like unto them.
With
all my heart I believe in the joy of living; but those who achieve it do not
seek it as an end in itself, but as a seized and prized incident of hard work
well done and of risk and danger never wantonly courted, but never shirked when
duty commands that they be faced. And those who have earned joy, but are
rewarded only with
sorrow, must learn the stern comfort dear to great souls,
the comfort that springs from the knowledge taught in times of iron that the law
of worthy living is not fulfilled by pleasure, but by service, and by sacrifice
when only thereby can service be rendered.
No nation can be great unless its sons and daughters have in them the quality to rise level to the needs of heroic
days. Yet this heroic quality is but the apex of a pyramid of which the
broad foundations must solidly rest on the performance of duties so ordinary
that to impatient minds they seem commonplace. No army was every great
unless its soldiers possessed the fighting edge. But the finest natural
fighting edge is utterly useless unless the soldiers and the junior officers
have been through months, and the officers of higher command and the general
staff through years, of hard, weary, intensive training.
So likewise the citizenship of any country is
worthless unless in a crisis it shows the spirit of the two million Americans
who in this mighty war have eagerly come forward to serve under the Banner of
the Stars, afloat and ashore, and of the other millions who would now be beside
them overseas if the chance had been given them; and yet such spirit will in the
long run avail nothing unless in the years of peace the average man and average
woman of the duty-performing type realize that the highest of all duties, the
one essential duty, is the duty of perpetuating the family life, based on the
mutual love and respect of the one man and the one woman, and on their purpose
to rear the healthy and fine-souled children whose coming into life means
that the family and, therefore, the nation shall continue in life and shall not
end in a sterile death.
Woe to those who invite a sterile death; a death not for them only, but for the
race; the death which is insured by a life of sterile
selfishness.
But honor, highest honor, to
those who fearlessly face death for a good cause; no life is so honorable or so
fruitful as such a death. Unless men are willing to fight and die for great
ideals, including love of country, ideals will vanish, and the world will become
one huge stye of materialism. And unless the women of ideals bring forth
the men who are ready thus to live and die, the world of the future will be
filled by the spawn of the unfit. Alone of human beings the good and wise
mother stands on a plane of equal honor with the bravest soldier; for she has
gladly gone down to the brink of the chasm of darkness to bring back the
children in whose hands rests the future of the years. But the mother, and
far more the father, who flinch from the vital task earn the scorn visited on
the soldier who flinches in battle.
And the
nation should by action mark its attitude alike toward the fighter in war and
toward the child-bearer in peace and war. The vital need of the nation is
that its men and women of the future shall be the sons and daughters of the
soldiers of the present. Excuse no man from going to war because he is
married; but put all unmarried men above a fixed age at the hardest and most
dangerous tasks; and provide amply for the children of soldiers, so as to give
their wives the assurance of material safety.
In such a matter one can only speak in general terms. At this moment there
are hundreds of thousands of gallant men eating out their hearts because the
privilege of facing death in battle is denied them. So there are
innumerable women and men whose undeserved misfortune it is that they have no
children or but one child. These soldiers denied the perilous honor they
seek, these men and women heart-hungry for the children of their longing dreams,
are as worthy of honor as the men who are warriors in fact, as the women whose
children are of flesh and blood. If the only son who is killed at the
front has no brother because his parents coldly dreaded to play their part
in the Great Adventure of Life, then our sorrow is not for them, but solely for
the son who himself dared the Great Adventure of Death. If, however, he is
the only son because the Unseen Powers denied others to the love of his father
and mother, then we mourn doubly with them because their darling went up to the
sword of Azrael, because he drank the dark drink proffered by the Death
Angle.
In America today all our people are
summoned to service and sacrifice. Pride is the portion only of those who
know bitter sorrow or the foreboding of bitter sorrow. But all of us who
give service, and stand ready for sacrifice, are the torch-bearers. We run
with the torches until we fall, content if we can then pass them to the hands of
other runners. The torches whose flame is brightest are borne by the
gallant men at the front, and by the gallant women whose husbands and lovers, whose sons and brothers are at the
front. These men are high of
soul, as they face their fate on the shell-shattered earth,
or in the skies above or in the waters beneath; and no less high of soul are the
women with torn hearts and shining eyes; the girls whose boy lovers have been
struck down in their golden morning, and the mothers and wives to whom word has
been brought that henceforth they must walk in the shadow.
These are the
torch-bearers; these are they who have dared the Great Adventure.
Transcribed and Submitted by marybeth_smith@excite.com