Reading: Liberty and Character (Dr. Lawrence Reed) Transcript

I'm happy to be the final speaker and sum things up a little bit with a topic that takes us in a little bit different direction than most, or maybe, all of the talks we've had to date. I'd like to say that this subject is a rather big-picture one. This is a big-picture speech. It's a combination of prepared text and some spontaneous storytelling a little later on. Bear with me in the first part of this talk, because it is from largely a prepared text. But this is a big-picture speech at a time when Americans and many people around the world are absorbed with what I think are small-picture things. By small-picture things, I mean things like the financial crisis, the current recession, the $14.5 trillion national debt. And you're thinking, "What do you mean small-picture things? That's pretty important stuff."

In my book, it's small potatoes compared to the larger issue that I want to address at this time. In fact, those small-picture items that we are so gripped with and absorbed with every day these days are really problems that are symptomatic of something much bigger that I want to focus on today. Another way to put it is that people are focused today on some trees, but they are missing the forest.

One of the trees might be the housing bust. Another one is the credit crisis. Another one is Congress's spending spree. Those are big trees, but there's a blight on the forest as a whole that if we leave unaddressed will surely overwhelm all the trees and anything else that we might do to fix or take care of any of them.

What I'm talking about is character. The blight that we are suffering from, not just in America, but in many other countries, is an erosion of character. It's at the root of, I think, all of our major social and economic problems today.

I want to share with you some findings from a survey of about 40,000 America high school seniors. This is a survey done by the Josephson Institute of Ethics every two years. They've done it now for something on the order of 30 years. Don't think for a moment I'm focusing on just young people, because these are problems that I guess you could find plenty of in any age cohort that you might look at. But the Josephson Institute looks at high school seniors. They found that more than one in three boys - about 35% - and on-fourth of the girls - 26% - a total of about 30% overall - admitted to stealing from a store within the previous year. 23% said that they stole something from a parent or other relative. And 20% confessed that they stole something from a friend. More than two of five - two out of five - 42% said that they sometimes lie to save money.

When it comes to cheating, cheating in school continues to be rampant. It's getting worse - a substantial majority. 64% of high school seniors in this survey cheated on a test or said they did during the past year. 38% did so two or more times. More than one in three said that they used the Internet to plagiarize an assignment. As bad as these numbers are, it appears they may even understate the level of dishonesty exhibited by many citizens.

More than one in four - 26%-- think of this-- more than one in four confessed that they lied on at least one or two questions on the survey. Experts usually agree that dishonesty on surveys is usually an attempt to conceal misconduct. So maybe things are even worse. Despite these high levels of dishonesty, the respondents, none the less, have a high self-image when it comes to their ethics.  A whopping 93% of them said that they were "satisfied with my personal ethics and character".

Can you imagine that? You have one-third admitting to stealing and yet you've got 93% who say they're perfectly satisfied with their ethics and character. 77% said that when it comes to doing what is right, "I am better than most people I know."

Well, we use this term 'character' in many different ways. Some people, we say have character. Some people, we say are characters. Some of those characters don't have character. But the way I'm using the term today is in its most positive sense. What I'm referring to are those personality traits-- I bet if I ask for a listing of them, you'd come up with a lot of good ones. Those personality traits that most people, even if they admit to falling short themselves in possessing them, they would none the less admit, "Yeah, the world would be a better place if more people practiced, including me, those traits of character." And we'll talk about specific ones here shortly.

In the meantime, let me tell you that your character - each and every one of you - your specific, particular, individual character is not defined by what you say you believe. That's because talk is pretty cheap. It's defined by the actual choices that you make. That's what really tells the tale. The choices you make in tough situations say more about you than perhaps anything. If there was a way you could add up all of your choices and express them somehow, they would roughly approximate or equate or describe your character. Your choices describe or define your character.

If you say you're honest but you cut corners, you prevaricate, you lie, you steal when you think you can get away with it, it doesn't matter what you say, you have none the less, by your choices and by your actions, subtracted substantially from your character.

This is important to freedom. Freedom is something that almost everybody says, "Yeah, I'm for." They may not fully appreciate, though, how important the choices they make that define their character are to the maintenance of freedom. But it's critically important in the larger scheme of things. History shows us time and again that when a people allow their character to dissipate, they become like putty in the hands of tyrants. It really comes down to this. If you do not govern yourself - maintain high standards is another way of saying that - if you do not govern yourself, you will be governed. Because there are plenty of people who are more than happy to take advantage of a difficult situation stemming from the people's lack of character and get themselves in charge and tell the people what to do.

We like to say in America that our political system is one of self-government. By that, we mean thankfully we have a lot of say in who our government is. We can run for office. We can vote for whom we pick or whom we want. But that kind of self-government - surely superior to any kind of dictatorship - still, it depends upon real self-government, which is how each of us governs ourselves in the choices we make in our own lives every single day.

A little over 20 years ago, something quite remarkable happened in a little town not far from where I now live. It was in the little town of Conyers, Georgia. It really touched me at the time. I have remembered it ever since, told the story quite a few times.

When school officials there discovered that one of their basketball players, who had played 45 seconds in the first of the school's five post-season games had actually been ineligible because of his grades, they returned the state championship trophy that the team had won just a few weeks before. If they had simply kept quiet, probably no one else would have ever known about it and they could have retained the trophy. But to their eternal credit, the team and the town, dejected and disappointed though they were, rallied behind the school's decision. Here's what the coach said. "We didn't know he was ineligible at the time. But you've got to do what's honest and right and what the rules say. I told my team that people forget the scores of the games, but they don't ever forget what you're made of."

Now, that's character, isn't it? That's something that probably all of us can admire.

In the minds of most people, it didn't matter, at least in that town that the championship title was forfeited. The coach and the team were still champions and now, in more ways than one. I often wonder how many of the rest of us could have mustered the kind of integrity, character, courage to come forward, come clean, and make the choices that that coach and that team made.

Here's something I've shared with graduates in a commencement address a few years ago, and I've never found a way to say it better. So I'm going to read it verbatim. But it's just as relevant to an audience of any age as it was to the high school seniors I was talking to. I told them this. "I want to talk to you about one thing that is more important than all the good grades you've earned, more important than all the high school and college degrees that you'll ever accumulate, and indeed, more important than all the knowledge you'll ever accumulate in your lifetimes. It's something over which every responsible thinking adult has total personal control. Yet millions of people sacrifice it every year for very little."

"What I'm talking about will not only define and shape your future, it will put either a concrete floor under it or an iron ceiling over it. It's what the world will likely remember you for more than probably anything else. It's not your looks, it's not your talents, it's not your ethnicity, and ultimately, it may not even be anything you ever actually say. This incredibly powerful thing I'm talking about that you have complete control over is your character. When a person spurns his conscience and fails to do what he knows is right, he subtracts from his character. When he evades his responsibilities, succumbs to temptation, foists his problems and burdens upon others, or fails to exert self-discipline, he subtracts from his character.

When he attempts to reform the world without reforming himself first, he subtracts from his character. I've beaten around the bush, and I've suggested that this thing we call character, we all think we know what it is - that it's pretty important. Let me site for you some elements of character that I think are among the most important. We could probably come up with a list of 50 of them, but here are seven or eight or so of what I think are the most important elements of character over which you have enormous if not total control. They're not in any particular order of importance, but they're among the most important.

1. Honesty

2. Humility

3. Responsibility

4. Principle

5. Self-discipline

6. Courage

7. Self-reliance

8. Optimism

9. Long-term focus

I think these elements of character are so important that I think I could make a pretty strong case that a free society is not possible without them. You just can't have freedom, you can't have a free society if people in huge numbers don't elevate these traits to a high level and try to live by them. It's just not possible. If you think about the opposite of each of those traits that I mentioned, look at the opposite of each one of them. Dishonest people will lie and cheat. They'll become even bigger liars and cheaters if they ever get elected to public office. There's nothing about government that says it will be better than the people who comprise it or elect it or vote for it. In fact, if anything the incentives are to make you worse than what you came from, once you're there. It takes a person of strong character, once he or she has gone to government to keep that character high, given all the temptations.

People who lack humility, have you ever met anybody like that, people who are not humble? What are they like? Well, they're arrogant, they're condescending, they're know-it-all central planner types who are convinced they know how to run your life better than you could run it yourself.

The opposite of responsibility is irresponsibility. What do irresponsible citizens do? Among many things, irresponsible citizens blame others for the consequences of their own poor judgment. "It's not my fault. It's somebody else. Blame them." We see it all the time.

People who will not discipline themselves invite the intrusive control of others. Others will say, "If you're not going to take care of yourself, I'm going to have to do it for you." And you lose your liberty in the process.

People who abandon self-reliance are easily manipulated by those upon whom they've become dependent. He who pays the piper calls the tune.

I mentioned optimism. The opposite of that, of course, is pessimism. Pessimists dismiss what individuals can accomplish when given the freedom to try. They say, "Woe is me. Woe is the world. How can you possibly do that?" The pessimist can hardly ever be an entrepreneur. Thank God entrepreneurs are inherent optimists who feel that they can make a difference. They can take a risk, make the world better, make something for themselves in the process. If they were pessimists, they would sit back and let the world go by.

I mentioned long-term focus. The opposite of that is myopia - thinking short-term only. Short-term minded people will mortgage their future and that of their children for the sake of some short-term solution. Does that sound familiar? What are they doing in Washington these days to the tune of $1.5 trillion each year, spending more than they have, sending you the bill? You and your kids are going to pay for that. All because, "We don't want to pay for it today. We've got to stimulate." Or, "We've got to bail this one out." Or, "We've got to get by for the moment or win the next election." But they're doing it at the expense of people even yet unborn.

There are a lot of ways at which we pay a price for the erosion of character. Sometimes it's in very little, small ways. You've all bought things like iPods, iPads, things like that at Best Buy for instance. And you know those impenetrable plastic things that they come in that you cut yourself on trying to get into? Why do manufacturers do that? Because there apparently is some level of some percentage of people higher than, surely anyone could justify, who are willing to steal. Some manufacturers have to go to the extra expense of putting things in that, which means that the rest of us have to pay a character premium every time we buy something encased in one of those things.

We also pay for the erosion of character in horrific ways, in violent crime, in the abandonment of families, in a $14 trillion national debt. These are symptoms of character falling down. Bad character leads to bad economics, which is bad for liberty. And ultimately, whether we live free and in harmony with the laws of economics or whether we stumble in the dark thrall of serfdom like most people in history have, ultimately, that's going to be determined as a character issue, not so much a political or economic issue. It's character issue.

Think about it. There are very few people who have ever lived on this planet who could say that they lived in any meaningful measure of freedom. Six billion plus today - who knows how many more over time - a very small percentage of them have lived in freedom. Most have lived in destitution and in serfdom of one kind or another. It's a pretty special thing to be free. We're among a very tiny minority in the history of the planet. It's a very fragile thing. And I contend that it hinges on, more than anything else, our character.

I want to focus on some of those traits that I mentioned and depart now from this largely prepared text and share with you some stories to dramatize people who have exhibited some of the traits I've mentioned. I'm a firm believer that if you want to inculcate or instill character traits, the best way to do it is not by lecturing and preaching and saying, "You've got to be good." But rather tell stories about real people and the difference they made because they were people of character. So I'll do this through stories about people, in some cases, I have actually met, who are still living. And in a few cases, people I know only from the pages of history.

The first trait I want to focus on is honesty. I'll tell you story about a man I did come to know briefly, but I’ve always regretted that I didn't his contact information. I couldn't even tell you his name. But I think to this day, 22 years after this happened, it's one of the best examples I can think of, of honesty. And I look up to this guy even though I'll never likely meet him again and couldn't even tell you his name.

This goes back to 1989 when I had the occasion to visit the ravaged southeast Asian nation of Cambodia. If you know the history of the 70s, you know that Cambodia really suffered under the thumb of one of the most tyrannical regimes of all time. In fact, the deaths at the hands of this regime, as a percentage of the population, exceed anything that happened in WWII. The regime I'm referring to governed Cambodia from 1975 until very early 1978 - about a three-and-a-half-year period, they were known as the-- who were these people governing these people, responsible for a horrific raid of genocide? The Khmer Rouge. They radical egalitarians. By that I mean, they really thought it was the force of government to make everybody equal, especially economically. That it was bad for anybody to have more than the next guy. You shouldn't have anything unless the government either provided it or at least knew that you had it. And to have more than someone else, no matter how you might have come upon it, was itself suspect at the very least.

This regime decided it was going to remake society from the ground up. When they came to power in the spring of 1975, they even re-defined the year. To the rest of the world, it was 1975. The Khmer Rouge said, "Uh-uh. In Cambodia, it is the year 0. We're starting from scratch." They even made it illegal to refer to the year as 1975. It was the year 0. Because they were going to remake everything from the ground up. They even made it illegal, in many parts of Cambodia anyway, to wear glasses. People were killed because they wore glasses. Why? Because wearing glasses meant that you probably thought you were smarter than other people. You had a little more education than somebody else and we're going to teach you a lesson.

There was phrase that some of the Khmer Rouge leaders used by bullhorn as they ordered people to work in the rice patties. And it was this. In Cambodian, they would say, "It is always better to kill by mistake than to not kill at all."

I happen to know a man in Cambodia who heard that on many occasions. He became an Oscar-winning actor. How many of you have seen the movie The Killing Fields? Anybody? I highly recommend it. It's a chilling film, but a true story. The man who won an Oscar for his role in that film, Dr. Haing S. Ngor, was a good friend of mine. I met him after he made the film in 1985. He was a Cambodian who had escaped in 1978, after having been tortured on multiple occasions. His wife died in his arms in childbirth. He was a doctor, but he couldn't use his doctor skills to assist her, because that would have revealed that he was of the upper crust. Then they both would have been killed.

So he had to disguise himself as a lowly taxi driver until he was able to escape. In 1989, 10 years after the Khmer Rouge were finally expelled by the invading Vietnamese. Imagine that. Many Cambodians welcomed an invasion from the Vietnamese. Even though they were Communist too, the feeling was they couldn't possibly be better than this bunch. And they did make a lot of improvements and allow a little more freedom, and the massacre stopped for the most part.

Anyway, in 1989, my friend Dr. Ngor called me and said, "I'm going back to Cambodia for the first time since I left 10 years ago," and the first time since he made that film.

He said, "Come with me." So just before going, there was a story in our local paper about I was going back to Cambodia with Dr. Ngor, looking for medical supplies to take back with us.

And a woman who saw the story in the paper called me and said, "Mr. Reed, I have some Cambodian friends who had escaped a few years before. And our church helped these three families, and now they're settled in different places here in America. But they would love you to take some letters, with some money in them, back to their loved ones when you go back to Cambodia. Would you do that? Because every time they mail stuff, it never gets there. "

So I said, "Sure, I'll be happy to try to find those families and give them their letters and cash."

I found two of the families rather easily, but the third one was in a distant city called Battambang. I held onto the letter that I had for them and the $200 that was in it until the night before I was to leave. I was told before I left for Cambodia, "Don't come back with the money. If you can't find the families, at least leave it there with somebody who can put it to good use. God knows there are plenty of them."

So the night before, I realize I wasn't going to get there. I had to decide, "Who am I going to give this to?" There was a man who had come to my assistance on several occasions during the week as a rickshaw driver. He drove me around town. He came up to the hotel and waited on other customers as well. He spoke broken English, but enough we carried on short conversations. He smiled a lot, seemed like a great guy. I knew he didn't have two nickels to rub together, so before I left, I said, "I have a letter here destined for a family in Battambang. You can see the address. There's $200 in here. If you can get this $200 to that family, you can keep $50 of it," which was a lot of money in Cambodia in 1989.

So I gave it to him, left the country, thought I'd never hear anything again. Then several months later, that woman in my little town called me, all excited. She said, "Larry, one of the Cambodian families, the relatives of the ones in Battambang, heard from the family back there. And I have part of the letter that they wrote from Battambang, and I want to share with you this part."

It said, "Thank you for sending the $200." That man had not only gotten the letter and the money. He didn't keep even the $50. How honest could you be? He could have walked off with that $200. Nobody would have ever known the difference. He got it there and didn't even keep the $50. He probably felt that the family he was to deliver this to needed it even more than he did.

If I was ever in a situation where somebody said, "You know? Your life now depends on a man and it just so happens to be that guy from Cambodia," I think I'd trust him with it. That is my example for you of honesty.

Wouldn't it be a better world if the vast majority of people tried to live up to a standard like that? Just imagine how much better life would be. That's honesty.

Here's an example about humility. At first, as I tell you this story, you might wonder, "Where's the humbleness come in here?" It comes in near the end.

It's about a man that one young man among this group has met. Kyle, my neighbor from Georgia, has met this man I'm about to tell you about, this past February near London. This man is named Nicky Winton. He's a remarkable guy who just this past May turned 102 years of age. And he still flies around Europe. We took him to lunch in February. And like all the previous times I've taken him to lunch, he orders a big meal, he orders a big, tall glass of lager, downs it all. I asked him one time, "Nicky, to what do you ascribe your long life and good health?"

He held up that glass of lager and said, "Drink a little poison every day." He's still going strong at 102. Here is his story, which incidentally, if you're interested in learning more about this wonderful story, I cannot recommend too highly a DVD documentary that you can get. I know it's available on Amazon for $20 or $25. It's called The Power of Good. It's an international Emmy award-winning documentary about this man I'm going to tell you about - Nicky Winton. The Power of Good wouldn't leave a dry eye in the house if we showed it here today. It's a remarkable, uplifting story of this man who's still living.

Here's his story. In 1938, Nicky Winton was a 29-year-old stockbroker in London, England. If you know your history of the 20th century, you know 1938 was a pretty pivotal year, wasn't it? It was the last full year before the second world war broke out. It was the year when Hitler was on the move. He had taken Austria earlier in the year, and the western powers complained but did nothing about it.

In late summer, he began rattling his saber, demanding a part of Czechoslovakia called the Sudetenland, saying it was really German. There was a famous conference held in September of that year to try to settle the crisis. The conference was held where? Those of you who know your history. This was the conference where the allies gave Hitler the Sudetenland in exchange for his promise not to go any further. The British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, came back to London, got off the plane, waved that piece of paper and famously said, "Peace in our time." That conference was in Munich - the Munich Conference.

Today, to talk about the Munich Conference brings to mind the notion of appeasement, of giving in to the dictator. Feeding the alligator, hoping he'll eat you last, is another way to think of it. That's what the allies did. They said to Hitler, "Okay. Don't go any further. You can have this big chunk of Czechoslovakia."

Some of the world thought we had peace. We had purchased peace at the price of the Czechs. But people like Nicky Winton and a lot of others said, "Wait a minute. Hitler's not going to stop with this."

Jewish people who are already under assault within Germany were fleeing Germany, fleeing even Poland, yet to be embroiled in this whole controversy. It was in the fall of 1938 when Nicky Winton planned a vacation in Switzerland at Christmastime. He was going to go to Switzerland. He was worried about the clouds of war, expecting this wasn't going to hold, and the world could be plunged into war at some point. He didn't have any allusions about what Hitler was all about. But he none the less was planning to go to Switzerland at Christmastime when a friend of his, who worked in the British embassy in Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, called him and said, "Nicky, don't go to Switzerland. Come here instead. There's something I want to show you."

He prevailed upon him. He came to Prague. And what his friend wanted him to see were refugee camps full of thousands of mostly Jewish families who had fled Germany, Poland, the Sudetenland that Hitler had just taken as a result of the Munich Conference. They were in these freezing makeshift tent cities in December, 1938 full of families with young children desperate to get out but no place to go. No country would give them visas to enter. No country wanted to anger Hitler. "We just signed an agreement. He says peace. He won't go any further. We can't admit there's a problem here. Stay there." And yet, they knew they were in harm's way.

So as he went through these camps, the thing that struck him the most were the parents who said, "We know we can't get out, but can you help get our children out?" There were literally dozens and dozens of parents who were begging with this perfect stranger, saying, "Please, can you get our children out of harm's way?" Parents wanting to give up their children to a stranger because they knew what was coming.

Nicky could have said, "I feel for you. Sorry about this. Tough situation. I'm only one guy. What could I do? Besides I have a vacation planned." He could have said, "Sorry." Probably a lot of people would have.

But he saw a need, and he put himself in a position where he could do something. He first started writing letters to governments all over the world, telling them, "There's this desperate situation, thousands of these families. If I can get the children out, will you at least allow them to come into your country?" Guess how many countries of the dozens that he wrote to said yes? Two. The United States was not one of them. The Roosevelt Administration said, "No. Sorry. Nothing we can do."

His own Britain and Sweden were the only two countries that said, "Yes. If you can get them out, they can come here."

But even his own Britain said, "But you have to raise about $3,500," in today's money, "per child and put it on deposit with the home office, because we think this is all going to blow over. Our official policy is 'Peace in our time,' and we don't want to get stuck with a bill of having to send all these kids back. So you've got to raise the money. You have to find the foster parents and the homes that are willing to take them in."

He said, "Great. Fine. I'll do what I can."

He organized a small group of volunteers. They did everything from forging passports-- later when the Germans took the rest of Czechoslovakia in the spring of '39, he actually works under their noses, forging documents to fool the Germans. He ends up getting 669 children out of the country in eight different rail transports. In every case, before they could leave the country, he had to have a foster family back in Britain. There were a few in Sweden, but they almost all went to Britain. He had to have foster families who would say, "I will take them." He had to line all that up, raise the money, get them out of the country by rail - 669 on eight transports. The largest of his transports, the ninth one, had 250 kids on board, on the train at Prague station on the first of September, 1939, the day that war broke out. Before the train could leave, the Nazis stopped all rail transportation and not a single one of those 250 children in that ninth transport survived. They were all sent to concentration camps.

If you wonder why Nicky Winton couldn't talk about this for 50 years, it was largely because he kept thinking not just of the 669 he saved but the 250 he couldn't, and all the others that never even made it as far as the train station. Almost none of the children he got out ever saw their parents again, because they were killed during the Holocaust. Nicky, as soon as the war began, joined the RAF, and for six years will fight for Britain until the war is over. He later meets a woman who becomes his wife. He never tells anybody in the years thereafter about what he was involved in in saving those children. He just couldn't talk about it.

Fifty years go by and these kids are now in their 60s and 70s, scattered around the world. Many of them stay in Britain, but many others scattered. They don't who it was that got them out of the country, who saved them all those decades before. Then one day, and this is depicted in the film I told you about, Nicky's wife is going through the attic and she comes across this box with a scrapbook in it, listing hundreds of names of children and visa material and other kinds of stuff. She wants to know, "What is this stuff?"

This is 1988, 50 years after he started all of this, he finally tells his wife about this effort all so many years before.

Word gets out from there, and the result is one of the most dramatic results within a year. There was a television show in Britain-- if you get this documentary, I told you about, you'll see a clip from that actual documentary-- called It's Life or That's Life, something like that. We had a show like this where they focus on somebody, bring them into the studio and then they surprise them with guests or long-lost relatives or something and tell the story for the television audience.

Well, Nicky was summoned to a TV station. He knew they were going to tell the story. The scrapbook had gotten out and so forth. In this television show, the hostess is telling the Winton story. He's seated in the front row with all these people in the audience behind him. She's showing the scrapbook and then at one point, she says to the television audience and the people assembled, "If there's anyone here in this audience who might have been among the children that Nicky Winton saved half a century ago, will you please stand?"

Of course, they had gone out from that list trying to find as many-- they found several hundred of the kids. When she said that, everybody in the audience stands up. It's the first time in 50 years that Nicky is reunited with so many of the children that he saved.

Now, where does the humility come in here? By the way, he later goes on to be knighted by Queen Elizabeth. So he is now Sir Nicholas Winton. He is also the oldest man to fly in an ultralight aircraft. He started doing that at the age of 94. Every two years on his birthday, he goes up in an ultralight flown by the daughter of one of the children he saved 50 years before. He does it as a fundraiser for Abbeyfield homes for the aged, which he started some years before.

When we saw him in February, remember Kyle, I asked him, "Well, Nicky, you’re going to be 102 in May. Are you going to do it again?"

He said, "That's the plan."

I don't know if he did in May, but that was the plan in February. Where does the humility come in? Here's a guy who could have cashed in on this. He could have made a lot of money. You couldn't have blamed him. Why wouldn't the world want to know about this shortly after it happened, write a book, and make a movie or something? He didn't tell anybody. He did what he could and saved lives in the process because it was the right thing to do. He felt he was in a position where he might make a difference. He didn't do it for fame or for fortune.

Today, when you meet him and you say, "Nicky, what a hero. There are 5,000 plus people who are alive today because of what you did." Many of the 669 that he saved, who were still living plus their children and grandchildren include many scientists, engineers, philanthropists, artists, a member of Parliament, among those who would never have lived had it not been for him. "You're a hero."

Do you know what he says? He says, "Don't call me that. Stop calling me that. I'm Nicky Winton. I did what I could. Others would have done the same."

I don't know that that's true. But what humility. His story is important because he possesses just about all the other character traits I'm talking about too. He's one big ball of wax of all this stuff in one, and I so admire him - 102 years of age and still going strong.

I mentioned principle. It may have kind of stood out as a little odd in that list. By that, I mean you ought to believe in something. And you ought to know what it is you believe in. You ought to have some set of principles that you've decided, "These are right. I'm going to live by them. I'm going to be consistent with them. They are things I believe in because I'm convinced that they're right."

There are so many people who go through life not knowing what it is they believe in at all. So they never stand for anything, so that means they'll usually fall for anything. So what I'm saying to you whether it's liberty or something else we've talked about here or not, know what you believe. Stand for it. Let others know it. Defend it. Speak up for it. Don't go through life blowing in the wind every time somebody comes along and says, "Believe this instead." Stand for something.

Don't be like that character that Groucho Marx played. He's otherwise a great comedian. I love Groucho Marx, but in one of his movies, he played the leader of a fictional country, and he says at one point, "Those are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others." You don't want to be like that.

In other words, "Tell me what I should believe. Tell me what my principles are." No, you ought to say, "These are what they are. And I will live my life by them so that someday I can look back and say, 'I wasn't just a jumbled mess of nothing. I believed in things, and I stood by them, and I did my darnedest to advance them,'" whether it be liberty or something else that motivates you.

My favorite example of principle, by the way, is my favorite president, Grover Cleveland. He is a much unappreciated president but one who believed strongly in certain things. He believed it was his duty to uphold the Constitution. It was his duty to keep government small and in its place. He vetoed more bills than all the previous 21 presidents combined. In his vetoes, he often expressed his beliefs, and they were consistent throughout his lifetime.

In one of his most famous vetoes, he killed a bill that would have given $10,000 to drought-stricken farmers in Texas. In his veto, he said, "I can't find anything in the Constitution that says we can do this, that we can take from some and give to others for public charity." He said, "We have to rely upon the voluntary charity of our fellow countrymen in times of destress. They'll do it cheaper and better."

In his most famous line of that veto was, "Though the people may support the government, it's not the duty of the government to support the people." If you ever want to read about a great president, he's the one I'd most recommend. He was a man of principle who was admired even by his political opponents as a guy who knew where he stood, told people what his stance was, and let the political chips fall where they may.

Here's a story about courage. How many of you have ever seen the movie Amazing Grace? Oh, good. Did you like it? Maybe now you'll want to re-see it, or others who hadn't seen it will want to see it for the first time. I think it's a great movie. I've seen it 24 or 25 times, usually dragging other people to come watch it with me. I want to focus on not the man who was the principle character in the move but the number two guy. That movie focuses on William Wilberforce, the famous parliamentarian who led the effort in Parliament for 20 years to end the trade in slaves and then for a long period thereafter to end slavery itself from within Parliament. He was that guy.

But he relied heavily upon a second guy I want to tell you about. His name was Thomas Clarkson. One of my two dogs is named Clarkson, by the way, for this reason. When people ask me where I got that name, it gives me the opportunity to tell them the story I'm going to tell you - maybe bore them to tears. But here's the story. Thomas Clarkson was a young man studying to become a minister in the early 1780s. He was in his early 20s. He was at Cambridge planning to be an Anglican minister. This was at a time when slavery was a widespread institution and Britain was the greatest slave trading power on the planet. They've been engaging in it for a couple of hundred or more years. Lots of people were making money off of it. It wasn't something you could see in Britain, because slavery in 1770, it wasn't allowed itself. But it was something that some Britains were making a lot of money off of. They would leave in slave ships from Portsmouth and Bristol and go to the coast of Africa, rounding up as many as they needed to pack a ship - 400, 500, or 600 sometimes - and then go off to the West Indies, islands like Jamaica and Granada, and sell them at auction to be worked to an early death on plantations raising things like sugar.

It was widely accepted. People thought, "That's just the way things are. It's always been this way. Some people are destined to live at the lash of another." But there was an incident on the high seas that caught the attention of someone who had affected the life of Thomas Clarkson. It involved a slave ship called the Zong. The Zong had a particularly lengthy voyage, trying to round up a full shipload of slaves. It had to stop at a lot of places on the African coast and that meant that those who had been enslaved first were on the ship the longest and subject to the terrible conditions on board the longest and to the disease that that often produced.

So by the time the ship began to approach Jamaica, a lot of them were in terrible health. The slave ship captain had to make a decision, and he made a very coldly calculated decision a few hundred miles off of Jamaica. He realized that with so many of these people being so emaciated and sick, he wasn't going to get much for them at auction in Jamaica. So he makes this decision that he could get more money by putting in an insurance claim if he could get rid of them than if he finished the voyage and sold them at auction in Jamaica. So he gives the order to throw overboard 132 living souls. One hundred thirty-two people are thrown overboard by the slave ship captain.

This was not all that uncommon, but in this instance some of the crew members were so aghast at this that they began to talk back in Britain. There was a lawyer in London named Granville Sharp who heard of this, and he decides he's going to file a murder suit against the slave ship captain. But in the end, the judge in the case throws the case out and says, "This is nothing but a civil dispute between a slave ship captain and an insurance company. Throwing those people overboard was nothing more than like throwing horses overboard." Those are his exact words.

There was a professor at Cambridge at the time who was in charge of the annual Latin essay contest, where the students could enter this contest, win a coveted prize if they got first place. But they had to write their essays in Latin. This professor decides, "I'm going to make the issue this year that the students will write about slavery and the question will be, 'Is it right for one to own another?'"

Thomas Clarkson decides to enter the contest. He doesn't know anything about slavery. But he's a very diligent student who does his research. He actually goes down to Bristol and interviews the few crew members he can find who will talk. He writes a brilliant essay in which he argues that slavery is a blot on the conscience, "a stain on the conscience of Britain and must be abolished." And he wins first prize.

Shortly thereafter, he's on horseback, leaving London for his home at Wisbech, a little village outside of London, and he's agonizing over what he had learned. In his diary, in later years, he writes something very important. The spot where this happened on his ride from London back to Wisbech is marked, to this day, by an obelisk. You can see it. It happened at this very spot. He got off of his horse in total anguish and later as he writes in his diary, he said, "It was at that point that I said to myself as I thought about what I had learned, I said to myself, 'If what I have written is true, I must see these calamities to an end.'" He then devotes the next 61 years of his life-- he had no idea of course, how long he was going to live-- but it turns out 61 more years, he devotes to ending the trade in slaves - later, slavery itself. He lives for 13 more years to the age of 86 after that. In those last 13 years, he devotes his life to improving the lot of those who had been enslaved. He was a remarkable man.

But those first 20 years after he wins that contest and decides to commit himself to putting aside his career and trying to end the trade in slaves, he's going to take on the whole British nation. He's going to change the conscience of a country. That's a pretty tall order. So the first thing is he looks around and tries to find other people who think as he does. There are not very many. They tend to be Quakers. The Quakers of that day were the only ones who really spoke out much against slavery. So in 1787, around a printshop table in London, he gets 12 people, mostly Quakers, and they form the world's first think tank. That's important to me, because we work for a think tank. This was the world's first - The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. They're going to commit themselves to producing publications and speeches and whatever it takes, testimony, petitions to get the Parliament to end the trade in slaves. It takes 20 years of relentless effort, putting their lives on the line, being threatened all the time. They start to gain votes in Parliament and then in the early 1790s, war with France breaks out.

Now, they're branded as traitors. Opponents in Parliament, apologists for the slave trade, they say, "You people like Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce, you're traitors. You want Britain to abandon slavery and give that lucrative business to the enemy."

Thomas Clarkson will ride 35,000 miles on horseback in that 20-year period, until 1807, rustling up signatures on petitions. If you saw the movie, you remember when Wilberforce rolls out that petition? That was a petition that Clarkson had circulated, getting people to sign to end the trade in slaves. Giving speeches, sermons, distributing pamphlets and publications to change the thinking of a nation.

That great moment finally comes at 4:00 a.m. - it's depicted in that wonderful movie - when Parliament votes to end the trade in slaves. It's one of the most remarkable victories for human rights and individual liberty in the history of the world. A great nation votes “no more trading slaves”. That didn't free those who had already been enslaved however.  

You might say, "After this 20-year fight that Clarkson and Wilberforce might have said, 'Wow, we've got to find something else to do now. Let somebody else carry on the battle.'"

Huh-uh. They knew this was just the first stage of a bigger battle. They committed themselves to the ultimate victory, which was abolishing slavery itself. Guess how many years of effort that will take them. Twenty-six. So they're in this for what turns out to be 46 years until in 1833, the British Parliament votes to end slavery itself, liberating tens of thousands of people from the yoke of slavery.

There's a great book called Bury the Chains by Adam Hochschild that talks about what happens on so many of these Caribbean islands, where the black people had been enslaved. When word came that they were to be free, they gathered on the highest point of many of these islands the night before the [video skips 00:53:23] so they could be there when the sun rose the next day. Because for them, it was a new beginning in more ways than one. What a great day for human freedom.

Clarkson lived another 13 years to 1846, when he dies at the age of 86, a man who was once ridiculed, threatened, now is [video skips 00:53:50]. London sees one of the biggest funerals that it had ever seen.

The Quakers had this odd habit that they wouldn't take their hats off in the presence of nobility, because they thought it offended a higher authority. The sons and the grandsons of the Quakers who had been involved with him from the very beginning came to the funeral and the men did something they never did. They took off their hats.

One of Clarkson's biographers, Ellen Gibson Wilson, sums him up very well. She wrote in her book, "Thomas Clarkson, 1760 to 1846, the man who gave is life for the liberation of those he never met from lands he never saw." Courage, commitment, character from start to finish.

If you go to our website and type in Thomas Clarkson, you'll see some other things about him.

I want to work towards a conclusion here by saying something briefly about a couple other of those. I want to say something about self-reliance. How many of you know who Fanny Crosby was? One person. This is great. A lot of you will learn something totally new then.

Fanny Crosby is one of the most remarkable people in American history and yet sadly, she's largely forgotten. Barely 100 years ago, she was regarded very widely as a virtual saint. She would have been on everybody's top 10 most popular Americans list just a century ago before she died in 1915 at the age of 95. She was born in 1820.

Here are some remarkable things about her before I tell you the really big thing about her. She knew more American presidents - met them, knew them personally either when they were president or afterwards - than probably any other single American in our history. She knew every president from John Quincy Adams, whom she met years after he served in the White House, to Woodrow Wilson. That's 21 presidents. That's half of all of the presidents who have served in the White House just about. She knew them all.

They sought her out. She was that noted for something I have yet to tell you. She was the first woman to address the United States Congress. She still holds the record to this day; she wrote the lyrics to more songs (almost all of them were hymns) than any other person in the history of the world. She wrote almost 10,000 songs. On any given Sunday, there may be maybe several million Americans who are singing Fanny Crosby hymns and not knowing it. Those of you who are Christians, you may know To God be the Glory, Blessed Assurance. Those are Fanny Crosby hymns.

What is most remarkable about this woman is that she had no recollection of ever having seen a thing. She was completely blind from the age of six months. She never saw a thing. When she went to the Congress and became the first woman to address the Congress, she didn't say, "Well, I'm from a disadvantaged group and I'm wondering where my check is." Her message was, "It doesn't matter what your handicap, what the obstacles are you may face. It's your duty to be the best person you can, to be the best example you can be to others, to use whatever talents you have to go as far as you can to accomplish good for as many people as you possibly can." She could say that because she had done so.

I mentioned optimism. Here, I'm going to get a little personal. I'm a pathological optimist I guess might be the phrase. I learned this first hand in 1980. I always knew before that I was an optimist. I always tended to see the glass half full, not half empty. But I was driving to work one icy February morning in Midland, Michigan, and there was a car coming from the other direction. It stopped, waiting to turn left after I passed through. Then at the last second, decided it had time to turn anyway. It turned right in front of me. I swerved to miss the car, lost control of mine, and rolled the car into the ravine on the left side of the road - upside down. I remember vividly what was going through my mind as the car was turning over. Have you ever had any of those moments where you knew where you were, what you were thinking just seared into your memory? This bothered me for a long time. I thought, "This is not normal. Why would I think that?" But I was completely calm about it as if nothing has happened. I wasn't the slightest bit nervous. As the car was rolling over, I thought to myself, "I'm going to get a new car out of this." Which I did. That's optimism.

But I think optimism is an important trait of character. Have you ever noticed the people you most want to be around tend to be the ones who have a sunny attitude, who look forward to a new challenge, a new day? It's a real downer to hang around somebody who's just down on everything. "Woe is me. The world's going to hell. There's nothing we can do about it. Tomorrow's going to be worse than today."

If you're pessimistic, you will not work very hard for whatever it is you're pessimistic about. It it's the future of liberty, but you think all is lost, you're probably not going to work for it very hard. You're not going to attract others to the cause. So you've got to make yourself optimistic if you have a financially pessimistic nature. Convince yourself that you're on the side of right and that things can change.

There are too many examples in history of where all seemed to be dark, but because somebody who had principle and had character and knew where we should go worked hard for it, convinced that we could win. There are too many examples of where that happened and the day did turn and better things happened. I would encourage you to be as optimistic as you can.

I'll just sum up by saying those are a few of the character traits I would hope you would try to hold high and practice. But remember that the major thrust of this talk was "The future of the world depends upon the character of the people who will live in it". And those of solid and sound character will make, I hope, the biggest difference. And it isn't something that is the result of a collective decision. It's an individual decision. It's the only way it can be. Each and every one of you has to decide, "What do I want to live for? What do I want to be able to look back on someday?" Whether you're a Christian or not is beside the point, but I would hope you would all want to be able to say something like what the Apostle Paul said the night before his martyrdom. He wrote it anyway. He said, "I have fought the fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith."

In other words, he was able to say that from the day I made a commitment, came to my senses, made a change in my life, committed myself to principles, I did my best to live up to them. He could proudly look back on a life and say, "I did the best that I could."

Wouldn't that be a wonderful thing to be able to say some day? When you're about to check out of this world, if you're able to look back and say, "Well, I wasn't always perfect, but once I knew what was right, I worked for it, I tried to be an example for it. I did the best I could. I tried not to miss an opportunity to advance what I thought was right."

Wouldn't that be a great thing to be able to say? Wouldn't it be awful if you had to say, "I flopped. I knew I only had one life, but I screwed it up. And I regret the harm that I did to other people. But now it's too late to make a difference."

Don't every put yourself in that position. Realize as soon as you can that character building is a lifelong pursuit and that someday, you want to be in a position of being able to say you were a darned good example and that the world will remember you for things you would want them to remember you for.

With that, I'll say thank you. Thank you for being such a good audience all week long. Thank you very much.