The use of this text or audio material is subject to the TR American Patriot user agreement located at: TR American Patriot.com 

THEODORE ROOSEVELT
1919

CHAPTER 32

 THE GREAT ADVENTURE

IN the Metropolitan Magazine for last October Colonel Roosevelt wrote his famous article, '' The Great Adventure," every word of which is worth its weight in diamonds.   It will be read, with deepest interest, by people a thousand years from now, as one of the greatest essays on the problem of life and death in the history of the literature of the world.   Through the courtesy of this magazine we copy it entire for this closing chapter:

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 true 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 peace time 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 ever 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 over seas 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 ensured 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 sty of materialism, and unless the women of ideals bring forth 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 Angel.

In America to-day ail 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.

Having been requested by the New York Methodist Preachers' Meeting to prepare an estimate of Mr. Roosevelt's character and service to be spread on the minutes of the meeting as a permanent record, I read such a paper at the Memorial service on January 13th, which was addressed by Hon. Chauncey Depew and Bishop Luther B. Wilson. The title of that paper was, '' Theodore Roosevelt, the Man, as I Knew Him,'' and was as follows:
Theodore Roosevelt was one of the three greatest men the nation ever produced, and the greatest, the most widely known, and intensely loved man in the world at the time of his death.

Theodore Roosevelt was great every way; all the departments of his mind were developed in colossal proportion. Few men ever had broader mental vision, or saw farther into questions and the years than he. His intellectual virility was expressed in the mastery of three learned professions. By his Harvard course, his omnivorous reading and painstaking study he became an accomplished scholar, acquired an excellent literary style, and became the author of a score of volumes that will have a permanent place in the best literature of the nation. He was passionately fond of nature, he loved the flowers, the rocks, the stars, the birds, the insects, and the big game of the forest, and in his study of them took long journeys to find out about them, and the specimens he secured often at the risk of his life made him a scientist of no mean service or fame. His books on nature study are attractive, and will be sources of information and education to the student for years to- come. He was a statesman of the highest rank; as a practical politician he was the equal of Martin Van Buren, or Lincoln. His administration as President was one of the most successful and wholesome in the history of the republic. It held back and defeated the illegal combination of interests that prostituted the State Legislatures and National Congress with money and threatened the destruction of our form of government. The people believed so much in his wisdom, his honor and loyalty that he was as potential as a statesman without office as he was with it.

Great as was his intellect, he was greater in his affections. The greatest-hearted men are the greatest men. Fame has never given a permanent record to one of a little mean or selfish spirit. His heart, which cherished his wife and children as idols, was wide enough to take in the inhabitants of our country and of the wide world as his brothers and sisters, whom he loved better than himself and to whose advancement and happiness he devoted his strenuous life, a heart large" enough to take in the woes and wrongs of the oppressed peoples of the world, and which like his Master's broke in the garden of sorrow in his agonizing struggle to bear the world's burdens, and right its wrongs. He was a republican of republicans, a democrat of democrats, and the idol of the common people of our country and the world. Great as he was in intellect, broad as were his affections, he was greatest in his character. The summit and crown of his greatness was his goodness. No man living had a keener sense of the right, nor a stronger propulsion toward it, nor an intenser hatred of wrong, nor a deeper determination to fight it, nor more all daring^1 courage to overthrow it. His Integrity was as scrupulous as that of Cato, Aristides, or "Honest. Old Abe," whom he loved so well and so faithfully copied. That tongue would blister that would charge a single penny of fraud, or an intentional act of wrong-doing against him.

We are most proud and grateful to record the fact that Theodore Roosevelt was a Christian in deed and in truth; that he had implicit faith in the Bible as the standard of individual character, and national virtue; that he believed in Jesus Christ the Son of God as the Saviour of the world, and as his own personal Redeemer; that loyalty to that Christ who died for him and a desire to establish his Kingdom in the hearts and institutions of men was the chief motive which impelled him in his private and public life. We are grateful to God for baring raised up Theodore Roosevelt in our day and generation to show how large and good a man can grow to be who feeds on the Bible and Christ as the bread of life, and how nearly universal in its influence is such a life irradiated, inspired, and impelled by God's Holy Spirit.

We rejoice at the clear views our great and good friend had of the future life, and of his confident expectation of enjoying a blessed immortality there.

We call Theodore Roosevelt dead, but in reality he has just begun to live in this world. For twenty years he has so impressed his views, his deep moral convictions on the people of this country, and has had such a sacred place in their personal confidence and love, that he has done much to shape the events that have given us a greater and safer democracy, and his influence on the popular heart for the best things for the individual and state will continue in ever-widening circles for generations to come. Now that America has become a world power and Roosevelt, a worldwide figure, has become a world-wide favorite, his words and services and sacrifices will have still a potential influence in the settlement of those problems that involve world-wide democracy and universal Christianity. The immortality of the cause after the leader had dropped out is mentioned by Mr. Roosevelt in a speech made in Carnegie Hall in 1912, which is as follows:

"The leader for the time being, whoever he may be, is but an instrument, to be used until broken and then to be cast aside; and if he is worth his salt he will care no more when he is broken than a soldier cares when he is sent where his life is forfeit in order that the victory may be won. In the long fight for righteousness the watchword for all of us is, spend and be spent. It is a little matter whether any one man fails or succeeds; but the cause shall not fail, for it is the cause of mankind. We here in America, hold in our hands the hope of the world, the fate of the coming years; and shame and disgrace will be ours if in our eyes the light of high resolve is dimmed, if we trail in the dust the golden hopes of men."

So long as the Hudson shall flow or the Atlantic roll, so long as snow-capped mountain range shall speak to snow-capped mountain range and snow-capped mountain range to the blue sea; so long as the violet shall speak of modesty, the lily of purity or the rose tell of love, so long as there shall be the appreciation of the true, the beautiful, the good, the heroic in human conduct, so long will Theodore Roosevelt live in the hearts and institutions of our country, in the hearts and institutions of mankind. 
The End

A concluding word from Robert J. Kuniegel

TR AMERICAN PATRIOT hopes you enjoy our books.  Theodore Roosevelt lived his life in a manner that is the only way possible to make government responsive to the people.  He has written how to make meaningful reform possible not only for his generation but for future generations, if we read what he has said.  We only need to interest others in reading what he has said to transform our government. 

Reading the books on TR AMERICAN PATRIOT DOT COM  and having others do the same, will develop citizens and leaders capable of transforming American politics into a system of government that will be honest, and responsive to “a square deal”.  A square deal has no special deals for the rich, the middle class, or the poor.  Our government today has degenerated into a system that rewards citizens for not being productive.  It promotes entitlements under the guise of helping people, when in fact it only helps politicians to protect their own royal positions.  Policies that foster a special privileged class was the type of government policies Theodore Roosevelt fought against and won.  He was a visionary.  He knew this fight would need to be fought through the ages if we were to keep our country strong.  He was an intrepid pioneer that blazed a trail through a jungle of corrupt government, so that others might follow his proven and highly successful common sense approach toward honest government.  His fearless course helped make America a beacon of hope to all that seek justice.  His endless devotion to America helped make America a super power that no just nation has needed to fear as long as our citizens value his lofty resolute square deal policy toward our fellow citizens and those of other nations. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s greatest gift to this country is before us.  It is not in the past, if we as Americans recognize that his message is not just a story from American history pages.  His message is an example, clearly defined.  It details actions that are required if we desire to do something meaningful for our country.  Join the good fight today.  You only need to read and interest others to do the same.  

David Boyd, repeating what he had read, once said, “The person we become is because of our experiences in life, the people we meet, and the books we read. ” It is time to have others meet Theodore Roosevelt.  It is time for a Theodore Roosevelt revival, “Fear God and do your own part”.  Dare to help make Theodore Roosevelt the standard and not the exception.  America needs to adopt a wise, fearless and honest role model as the standard we revere, so that our public servants know what we expect.  The first step to honest government is no harder than setting proper standards of conduct for our public servants through the use of a proper role model.  Can you find one quality in Theodore Roosevelt that is not right in a public servant?  If you think you can, I bet your conjecture is based upon something other than truth and honest reasoning and this American would love an opportunity to debate any such conjecture.