Quote of the Day (Joseph Pulitzer, on a ‘Public-Spirited Press’ and Public Virtue)

“Our Republic and its press will rise or fall together. An able, disinterested, public-spirited press, with trained intelligence to know the right and courage to do it, can preserve that public virtue without which popular government is a sham and a mockery. A cynical, mercenary, demagogic press will produce in time a people as base as itself. The power to mould the future of the Republic will be in the hands of the journalists of future generations.”—Hungarian-born American newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer (1847-1911), “The College of Journalism,” North American Review, May 1904

Quote of the Day (Theodore Roosevelt, on a Republic’s ‘Wide Differences of Opinion’)

“In a republic, to be successful we must learn to combine intensity of conviction with a broad tolerance of difference of conviction. Wide differences of opinion in matters of religious, political, and social belief must exist if conscience and intellect alike are not to be stunted, if there is to be room for healthy growth. Bitter internecine hatreds, based on such differences, are signs, not of earnestness of belief, but of that fanaticism which, whether religious or anti-religious, democratic or anti-democratic, is itself but a manifestation of the gloomy bigotry which has been the chief factor in the downfall of so many, many nations.”— U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), “Citizenship in a Republic” speech delivered at the Sorbonne in Paris, Apr. 23, 1910, reprinted in The Man in the Arena: Speeches andEssays by Theodore Roosevelt, edited by John Allen Gable (1990)

Quote of the Day (Mark Twain, on Republics vs. Monarchies)

“Citizenship is what makes a republic; monarchies can get along without it.” —American novelist and humorist Mark Twain (1835-1910), “Layman’s Sermon” to Young Men’s Christian Association, New York, Mar. 4, 1906, reprinted in Mark Twain`s Speeches, edited by William Dean Howells (1910)

Remember this, as you take in the breathless post-mortems on the coronation of King Charles. As you read Twain’s quote, please also be sure to mentally insert the words “An active, well-informed” before “citizenship.” Otherwise, a republic, even one of long standing, can veer towards something worse than a monarchy: a dictatorship.

(For a serious consideration of what Charles’ coronation means to the future of the Commonwealth of Nations, the 56-member association of states that (mostly) once belonged to the British Empire, see this blog post from earlier this week on the Council of Foreign Relations Website from Manjari Chatterjee Miller and Clare Harris.)