The conditions accentuate vices and virtues, energy and ruthlessness, all the good qualities and all the defects of an intense individualism, self-reliant, self-centered, far more conscious of its rights than of its duties, and blind to its own shortcomings. The children of their successors and supplanters, and then their children and their children and children's children, change and develop with extraordinary rapidity. The pioneer days pass the stump-dotted clearings expand into vast stretches of fertile farm land the stockaded clusters of log cabins change into towns the hunters of game, the fellers of trees, the rude frontier traders and tillers of the soil, the men who wander all their lives long through the wilderness as the heralds and harbingers of an oncoming civilization, themselves vanish before the civilization for which they have prepared the way. At first only the rudest school can be established, for no others would meet the needs of the hard-driven, sinewy folk who thrust forward the frontier in the teeth of savage men and savage nature and many years elapse before any of these schools can develop into seats of higher learning and broader culture. In conditions so primitive there can be but a primitive culture. The primaeval conditions must be met by the primaeval qualities which are incompatible with the retention of much that has been painfully acquired by humanity as through the ages it has striven upward toward civilization. To conquer the wilderness means to wrest victory from the same hostile forces with which mankind struggled on the immemorial infancy of our race. To conquer a continent, to tame the shaggy roughness of wild nature, means grim warfare and the generations engaged in it cannot keep, still less add to, the stores of garnered wisdom which where once theirs, and which are still in the hands of their brethren who dwell in the old land. Its services to the cause of human knowledge already stretched far back into the remote past at a time when my forefathers, three centuries ago, were among the sparse bands of traders, ploughmen, wood-choppers, and fisherfolk who, in hard struggle with the iron unfriendliness of the Indian-haunted land, were laying the foundations of what has now become the giant republic of the West. This was the most famous university of mediaeval Europe at a time when no one dreamed that there was a New World to discover. Before his eyes pass the shadows of mighty kings and war-like nobles, of great masters of law and theology through the shining dust of the dead centuries he sees crowded figures that tell of the power and learning and splendor of times gone by and he sees also the innumerable host of humble students to whom clerkship meant emancipation, to whom it was well-nigh the only outlet from the dark thraldom of the Middle Ages. Strange and impressive associations rise in the mind of a man from the New World who speaks before this august body in this ancient institution of learning. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena." The former president (he had been out of office a year) addressed the question of the quality of the individual citizen: "It is not the critic who counts not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. Officially titled, Citizenship in a Republic, more popularly referred to as The Man in the Arena speech, Theodore Roosevelt delivered it at the Sorbonne in Paris on April 23, 1910.
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