 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
X
AT LOGANSPORT, INDIANA, SEPTEMBER 23, 1902
Fellow-citizens:
I am going to ask you to take what I say at its exact
face value, as I like whatever I say to be taken. It is
suggested by coming to this great Western State and
speaking to one of its thriving cities. We believe that
the American business man is of a peculiar type; and
probably the qualities of energy, daring, and resourcefulness
which have given him his prominence in the international
industrial world find their highest development
here in the West. It is the merest truism to say that in
the modern world industrialism is the great factor in the
growth of nations. Material prosperity is the foundation
upon which every mighty national structure must be
built. Of course there must be more than this. There
must be a high moral purpose, a life of the spirit which
finds its expression in many different ways; but unless
material prosperity exists also there is scant room in
which to develop the higher life. The productive activity
of our vast army of workers, of those who work with
head or hands, is the prime cause of the giant growth of
this nation. We have great natural resources, but such
resources are never more than opportunities, and they
count for nothing if the men in possession have not the
power to take advantage of them. You have built up in
the West these cities of the Mississippi Valley and the
Great Lakes, as all the region round about them has been
and brain, the qualities of moral and physical fibre, which
enabled you to use to the utmost advantage whatever
you found ready to your hands. You win not by shirking
difficulties, but by facing and overcoming them.
In such development laws play a certain part, but individual
characteristics a still greater part. A great and
successful commonwealth like ours in the long run works
under good laws, because a people endowed with honest
and practical common-sense ultimately demands good
laws. But no law can create industrial well-being, although
it may foster and safeguard it, and although a bad
law may destroy it. The prime factor in securing industrial
well-being is the high average of citizenship found in
the community. The best laws that the wit of man can
devise would not make a community of thriftless and
idle men prosperous. No scheme of legislation or of
social reform will ever work good to the community
unless it recognizes as fundamental the fact that each
man's own individual qualities must be the prime factors
in his success. Work in combination may help and the
State can do a good deal in its own sphere, but in the
long run each man must rise or fall on his own merits;
each man must owe his success in life to whatever of
hardihood, of resolution, of common-sense, and of capacity
for lofty endeavor he has within his own soul. It
is a good thing to act in combination for the common
good, but it is a very unhealthy thing to let ourselves
think for one moment that anything can ever supply the
want of our own individual watchfulness and exertion.
Yet given this high average of individual ability and
invention, we must ever keep in mind that it may be
nullified by bad legislation, and that it can be given a
chance to develop under the most favorable conditions
by good legislation. Probably the most important aid
which can be contributed by the National Government to
financial stability. An honest currency is the strongest
symbol and expression of honest business life. The business
world must exist largely on credit, and to credit confidence
is essential. Any tampering with the currency,
no matter with what purpose, if fraught with the suspicion
of dishonesty in result, is fatal in its effects on business
prosperity. Very ignorant and primitive communities
are continually obliged to learn the elementary truth that
the repudiation of debts is in the end ruinous to the
debtors as a class; and when communities have moved
somewhat higher in the scale of civilization they also
learn that anything in the nature of a debased currency
works similar damage. A financial system of assured
honesty is the first essential.
Another essential for any community is perseverance in
the economic policy which for a course of years is found
best fitted to its peculiar needs. The question of combining
such fixedness of economic policy as regards the tariff,
while at the same time allowing for a necessary and proper
readjustment of duties in particular schedules, as such
readjustment becomes a matter of pressing importance,
is not an easy one. It is, perhaps, too much to expect
that from the discussion of such a question it would be
possible wholly to eliminate political partisanship. Yet
those who believe, as we all must when we think seriously
of the subject, that the proper aim of the party system
is, after all, simply to subserve the public good, cannot
but hope that where such partisanship on a matter of this
kind conflicts with the public good it shall at least be
minimized. It is all right and inevitable that we should
divide on party lines, but woe to us if we are not Americans
first and party men second! What we really need in
this country is to treat the tariff as a business proposition
from the standpoint of the interests of the country as a
whole, and not from the standpoint of the temporary
necessary to dwell upon the extreme unwisdom, from a
business standpoint, from the standpoint of national prosperity,
of violent and radical changes amounting to the
direct upsetting of tariff policies at intervals of every few
years. A nation like ours can adjust its business after a
fashion to any kind of tariff. But neither our nation nor
any other can stand the ruinous policy of readjusting its
business to radical changes in the tariff at short intervals.
This is more true now than ever it was before, for, owing
to the immense extent and variety of our products, the
tariff schedules of to-day carry rates of duty on more than
four thousand articles. Continual sweeping changes in
such a tariff, touching so intimately the commercial interests
of the nation which stands as one of the two or three
greatest in the whole industrial world, cannot but be disastrous.
Yet, on the other hand, where the industrial
needs of the nation shift as rapidly as they do with us, it
is a matter of prime importance that we should be able
to readjust our economic policy as rapidly as possible and
with as little friction as possible to these needs.
We need a scheme which will enable us to provide a
reapplication of the principle to the changed conditions.
The problem, therefore, is to devise some method by
which these shifting needs can be recognized and the necessary
readjustments of duties provided without forcing
the entire business community, and therefore the entire
nation, to submit to a violent surgical operation, the
mere threat of which, and still more the accomplished fact
of which, would probably paralyze for a considerable time
all the industries of the country. Such radical action
might very readily reproduce the conditions from which
we suffered nine years ago, in 1893. It is on every account
most earnestly to be hoped that this problem can
be solved in some manner into which partisanship shall
enter as a purely secondary consideration, if at all—that
effort by non-partisan inquiry and action to secure any
changes the need of which is indicated by the effect found
to proceed from a given rate of duty on a given article:
its effect, if any, as regards the creation of a substantial
monopoly; its effect upon domestic prices, upon the
revenue of the Government, upon importations from
abroad, upon home production, and upon consumption.
In other words, we need to devise some machinery by
which, while persevering in the policy of a protective
tariff, in which I think the nation as a whole has now
generally acquiesced, we would be able to correct the
irregularities and remove the incongruities produced by
changing conditions, without destroying the whole structure.
Such machinery would permit us to continue our
definitely settled tariff policy, while providing for the
changes in duties upon particular schedules which must
inevitably and necessarily take place from time to time
as matters of legislative and administrative detail. This
would secure the needed stability of economic policy,
which is a prime factor in our industrial success, while
doing away with any tendency to fossilization. It would
recognize the fact that as our needs shift it may be found
advisable to alter rates and schedules, adapting them to
the changed conditions and necessities of the whole people;
and this would be in no wise incompatible with
preserving the principle of protection, for belief in the
wisdom of a protective tariff is in no way inconsistent
with frankly admitting the desirability of changing a set
of schedules, when from any cause such change is in the
interests of the nation as a whole—and our tariff policy
is designed to favor the interests of the nation as a whole
and not those of any particular set of individuals save
as an incident to this building up of national well-being.
There are two or three different methods by which it will
be possible to provide such readjustment without any
would be for action which should be taken only after preliminary
inquiry by, and upon the findings of, a body of
experts of such high character and ability that they could
be trusted to deal with the subject purely from the standpoint
of our business and industrial needs; but of course
Congress would have to determine for itself the exact
method to be followed. The Executive has at its command
the means for gathering most of the necessary data,
and can act whenever it is the desire of Congress that it
should act. That the machinery for carrying out the
policy above outlined can be provided I am very certain,
if only our people will make up their minds that the
health of the community will be subserved by treating
the whole question primarily from the standpoint of the
business interests of the entire country, rather than from
the standpoint of the fancied interests of any group of
politicians.
Of course, in making any changes we should have to
proceed in accordance with certain fixed and definite
principles, and the most important of these is an avowed
determination to protect the interests of the American
producer, be he business man, wage-worker, or farmer.
The one consideration which must never be omitted in
a tariff change is the imperative need of preserving the
American standard of living for the American workingman.
The tariff rate must never fall below that which
will protect the American workingman by allowing for
the difference between the general labor cost here and
abroad, so as at least to equalize the conditions arising from
the difference in the standard of labor here and abroad—
a difference which it should be our aim to foster in so far
as it represents the needs of better educated, better paid,
better fed, and better clothed workingmen of a higher
type than any to be found in a foreign country. At
all hazards, and no matter what else is sought for or
must be protected in his standard of wages—that
is, in his standard of living, and must be secured the fullest
opportunity of employment. Our laws should in no
event afford advantage to foreign industries over American
industries. They should in no event do less than
equalize the difference in conditions at home and abroad.
The general tariff policy to which, without regard to
changes in detail, I believe this country to be irrevocably
committed, is fundamentally based upon ample recognition
of the difference in labor cost here and abroad; in
other words, the recognition of the need for full development
of the intelligence, the comfort, the high standard of
civilized living and the inventive genius of the American
workingman as compared to the workingman of any
other country in the world.
It is pretty simple to go just one way and turn another
way, and then go another way, if somebody tells you
how, but if you have got to think for yourself, then you
appreciate the fact that the man on your right hand is
thinking too, and that he will "stay put." We won in
the Civil War because we had the manhood to which to
appeal. We are going to win as a nation in the great industrial
contest of the present day, because the average
American has in him the stuff out of which victors are
made—victors in the industrial and victors in the military
world. And we can preserve the marvellous prosperity
which we now enjoy not by shirking facts, not by being
afraid—that was not how you won from '61 to '65.
There were people who said you could not win, but you
did, and the people who won were those who looked
up and not those who looked down. You recollect that
before Bull Run there were some excellent people who
denounced Abraham Lincoln because he did not go into
Richmond at once; and after Bull Run they said the war
was ended; but it was not ended; it took three years and
Now, gentlemen, we can win and we will win as citizens
of this Republic by showing in the complex, hard, pushing
life of this century, the same qualities that were shown by
the men of the Civil War in that contest; and above all
by keeping the high average of individual citizenship
which made the armies that saw Appomattox the finest
which the world has ever seen.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |