There are two kinds of success.  One is the very rare kind that comes to the man who has the power to do what no one else has the power to do.  That is genius.  I am not discussing what form that genius takes; whether it is the genius of a man who can write a poem that no one else can write, The Ode on a Grecian Urn, for example, or Helen, thy beauty is to me; or of a man who can do 100 yards in nine and three-fifths seconds.  Such a man does what no one else can do.  Only a very limited amount of the success of life comes to persons possessing genius.  The average man who is successful,—­the average statesman, the average public servant, the average soldier, who wins what we call great success—­is not a genius.  He is a man who has merely the ordinary qualities that he shares with his fellows, but who has developed those ordinary qualities to a more than ordinary degree.

Take such a thing as hunting or any form of vigorous bodily exercise.  Most men can ride hard if they choose.  Almost any man can kill a lion if he will exercise a little resolution in training the qualities that will enable him to do it. [Taking a tumbler from the table, Mr. Roosevelt held it up.] Now it is a pretty easy thing to aim straight at an object about that size.  Almost any one, if he practises with the rifle at all, can learn to hit that tumbler; and he can hit the lion all right if he learns to shoot as straight at its brain or heart as at the tumbler.  He does not have to possess any extraordinary capacity, not a bit,—­all he has to do is to develop certain rather ordinary qualities, but develop them to such a degree that he will not get flustered, so that he will press the trigger steadily instead of jerking it—­and then he will shoot at the lion as well as he will at that tumbler.  It is a perfectly simple quality to develop.  You don’t need any remarkable skill; all you need is to possess ordinary qualities, but to develop them to a more than ordinary degree.

It is just the same with the soldier.  What is needed is that the man as soldier should develop certain qualities that have been known for thousands of years, but develop them to such a point that in an emergency he does, as a matter of course, what a great multitude of men can do but what a very large proportion of them don’t do.  And in making the appeal to the soldier, if you want to get out of him the stuff that is in him, you will have to use phrases which the intellectual gentlemen who do not fight will say are platitudes.  (Laughter and applause.)

It is just so in public life.  It is not genius, it is not extraordinary subtlety, or acuteness of intellect, that is important.  The things that are important are the rather commonplace, the rather humdrum, virtues that in their sum are designated as character.  If you have in public life men of good ability, not geniuses, but men of good abilities, with character,—­and, gentlemen, you must include as one of the most important elements of character commonsense—­if you possess such men, the Government will go on very well.