It is given to few men to serve their country as greatly as President Roosevelt has done, yet vastly smaller services are still tremendously worth while.  I question whether there has ever been a time and place (except in violent crises) when the demand for public spirit was greater than now and the results of it more assured.  Public spirit is never needed more than in times of prosperity, and it is never more effective.  It is the boat which is floating easily and rapidly with the stream that is most in danger of striking the rocks.

The reasons why public opinion may be so effective in the United States are not far to seek.  The extreme sensitiveness of our form of government to political control is one of the commonplaces that has real meaning.  We seldom realize that ours is actually what it pretends to be—­a representative government—­and our legislatures are extraordinarily sensitive to what the people, the politically effective people, really want.  The Senators and Representatives in Congress do actually and accurately represent the men who send them there, and they respond like lightning to a clear order from the controlling element at home.  It is in the power of public spirit to say whether men or money shall control.

If public spirit is in the saddle, the fundamental purpose of all the people, which is good, will govern.  If not, the bosses and the great private interests will have their way.  Without the backing of the public spirit of good men, even the President himself loses by far the greater portion of his power.  For the power to do what we hope to see accomplished, we must look most of all to the public spirit of the young men.

But some one will say that great service is beyond his individual power.  I do not believe that great service is beyond the power of any young man.  This is not a matter in which obstacles decide.  The man for whom all the barriers to success have been broken down is not, as a rule, the man who succeeds.  On the contrary, conflict is the condition of success.  The quality of the man himself decides.  The more I study men, which is the daily occupation of every man in affairs, the more firmly I am assured that the great fundamental difference between men, the reason why some fail and some succeed, is not a difference in ability or opportunity, but a difference in vision and in relentless loyalty to ideals—­vision to see the great object, and relentless, unwavering, uninterrupted loyalty in its service.  What young men determine to do at whatever cost of effort, self-denial, and endurance, provided that their objects are good and within the possibility of attainment, they will surely accomplish in so large a proportion of cases that the failures are negligible.  If all that a man has or is, if his death and his daily life, are wholly and relentlessly at the service of his ideal, without hesitancy or reservation, then he will achieve his object.  Either by himself or his successors he will achieve it, for he disposes of the greatest power to which humanity can attain.  Under such conditions there is no man among us who cannot render high service to our beloved country.