BUFFALO INDEPENDENT CLUB 311
processes are side by side. When you find the weak sentimentality that
will hesitate to hold the taker of life, the most vicious and dangerous
of criminals, to accountability, you will find that inevitably there goes
hand in hand with it, a readiness to resort to the brute violence of our
barbarian ancestors 1,500 or 2,000 years ago, a going back to the
methods of vengeance which obtained in our homes in the Old World
before the light of Christianity dawned; and in condemning that brutal
violence do not forget to condemn the mawkish sentimentality which
partly produces it and which goes hand and hand with it.
I intend to try, not to show you, for it is hardly necessary to show
you, but to state the case to you, that fundamentally the remedy for the
evils which we must meet in that regard, as for all other evils which
we are to meet — fundamentally the remedy is to be found in the
application simply of common honesty and of common sense, and to
warn you — oh, how I wish I could warn all my countrymen — against
that most degrading of processes, the deification of any man for what
we are pleased to term smartness, the deification of mere intellectual
acuteness, wholly unaccompanied by moral responsibility, wholly
without reference to whether it is exercised in accordance or not in
accordance with the elementary rules of morality.
If there is one thing which I should like to eradicate from the
character of every American, it is the dreadful practice of paying a
certain mean admiration and homage to the man who, whether in
business or politics, achieves success at the cost of sacrificing all
those principles for the lack of which, in the eye of any righteous man,
no possible achievement of success can in any way compensate. That