Violent crises in the lives of men and nations usually produce their own remedies. They grasp the attention and stir the consciences of men, and usually they evolve leaders and measures to meet their imperious needs. But the great evident crises are by no means the only ones of importance. The quiet turning point, reached and passed often with slight attention and wholly without struggle, is frequently not less decisive. Great decisions are made or great impulses given or withheld in the life of a man or a nation often so quietly that their critical character is seen only in retrospect. It is only the historian who can say just when some unnoticed, yet decisive and irrevocable, step was actually accomplished.

The United States has been in the midst of such a period of decision since the Spanish War called into blossom the quiet growth of years, and we are still face to face with questions of the most vital bearing upon our future. The changes now in progress are accompanied by no convulsions, yet the whole character of our civilization is being rapidly crystallized anew as our country takes its inevitable place in the world.

So quietly are the great forces at work that some of our most vital problems have remained almost unrecognized by the public until the last two years. Yet the fact that these decisions are being made is almost appalling in its magnitude, and their indescribable consequence not only to the United States, but to all the nations of the earth, needs to be vividly realized by every one of us, for it is one of the great compelling reasons why the public spirit of young men is needed so urgently and at once. And more specific reasons press upon us from every side.

Recently the attention of our people, thanks largely to President Roosevelt, was focussed upon the presence or absence of the common virtues and the common decencies in public life. The revelation of corruption in politics, in business, and here and there in the public service, is a testimony not of unwonted wickedness in high places, but of unwonted sensitiveness in public opinion, and so far as it goes it is a most hopeful sign; but it does not yet go far enough.

The opportunity to set a new standard in political morality is here now. Public sensitiveness on every subject ebbs and flows and must be taken at the flood if the use of it is to be really effective. Decision made now as to the character of our public life will be valid for many years, for it is but seldom that the question comes so clearly before us. The war for righteousness is endless, but this is one of the great battles, and its results will endure.

We are now in the throes of decision on the whole question of business in politics, of politics for business purposes, and we must take our share in determining whether the object of our political system is to be unclean money or free men. The present strong movement to prevent the political control of public men, law-courts, and legislatures by great commercial enterprises will either flash in the pan or it will succeed; it will leave either the man or the dollar in control. The decision will be made by the young men, and it is not far ahead.

The question of efficiency in public office has been brought to the front as never before in the history of the Nation. As a whole, our public service is honest, but we should be able to take honesty for granted. What we lack is the tradition of high efficiency that makes great enterprises succeed. The national house-keeping, the Government's vast machinery, should he the cleanest, the most effective, and the best in methods and in men, for its touch upon the life of the Nation at every point is constant and vital.

There is no hunger like land hunger, and no object for which men are more ready to use unfair and desperate means than the acquisition of land. Under the influence of this compelling desire, assisted by obsolete land laws warped from their original purpose, we are facing in the public-land States west of the Mississippi the great question whether the Western people are to be predominately a people of tenants under the degrading tyranny of pecuniary and political vassalage, or free-holders and free men; and there is no exaggerating the importance of the decision.

We have been deciding, and the decision is not yet fully made, whether the future shall suffer the long train of ills which everywhere has followed, and must always follow, the abuse of the forest, or whether by protecting the timberlands we shall assure the prosperity of all of the users of the wood, the water, and the forage which our forests supply. Nothing less than the whole agricultural and commercial welfare of the country is in the balance. No other conservation question compares with this in the vital intimacy of its touch on every portion of our national life.

Other great questions only less vital I cannot even refer to, but one of the central ones remains—our whole future is at stake in the education of our young men in politics and public spirit. The greatest work that Theodore Roosevelt did for the United States, the great fact which will give his influence vitality and power long after we shall all have gone to our reward, greater than his great services in bringing peace, in settling strikes, in preaching the crusade of honesty and decency in business and in daily life, is the fact that he changed the attitude of the American people toward conserving the natural resources, and toward public questions and public life. The time was, not long ago, when it was not respectable to be interested in politics. The time is coming, and I do not believe it is far ahead, when it will not be respectable not to be interested in public affairs. Few changes can mean so much.

Among the first duties of every man is to help in bringing the Kingdom of God on earth. The greatest human power for good, the most efficient earthly tool for the future uplifting of the nations, is without question the United States; and the presence or absence of a vital public spirit in the young men of the United States will determine the quality of that great tool and the work that it can do. This is the final object of the best citizenship. Public spirit is the means by which every man can help toward this great end. Public spirit is patriotism in action; it is the application of Christianity to the commonwealth; it is effective loyalty to our country, to the brotherhood of man, and to the future. It is the use of a man by himself for the general good.

Public spirit is the one great antidote for all the ills of the Nation, and greatly the Nation needs it now. In a day when the vast increase in wealth tends to reduce all things, moral, intellectual and material, to the measure of the dollar; in a day when we have with us always the man who is working for his own pocket all the time; when the monopolist of land, of opportunity, of power or privilege in any form, is ever in the public eye—it is good to remember that the real leaders are the men who value the right to give themselves more highly than any gain whatsoever.

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.