 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
XIX
AT MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, APRIL 4, 1903
My fellow-citizens:
At the special session of the Senate held in March the
Cuban reciprocity treaty was ratified. When this treaty
goes into effect, it will confer substantial economic benefits
alike upon Cuba, because of the widening of her
market in the United States, and upon the United States,
because of the equal widening and the progressive control
it will give to our people in the Cuban market. This
treaty is beneficial to both parties and justifies itself on
several grounds. In the first place, we offer to Cuba her
natural market. We can confer upon her a benefit which
no other nation can confer; and for the very reason that
we have started her as an independent republic and that
we are rich, prosperous, and powerful, it behooves us to
stretch out a helping hand to our feebler younger sister.
In the next place, it widens the market for our products,
both the products of the farm and certain of our manufactures;
and it is therefore in the interests of our
farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and wage workers.
Finally, the treaty was not merely warranted but demanded,
apart from all other considerations, by the
enlightened consideration of our foreign policy. More
and more in the future we must occupy a preponderant
position in the waters and along the coasts in the region
south of us; not a position of control over the republics
of the South, but of control of the military situation so
Under the Platt amendment Cuba agreed to give us certain
naval stations on her coast. The Navy Department
decided that we needed but two, and we have specified
where these two are to be. President Palma has concluded
an agreement giving them to us—an agreement
which the Cuban legislative body will doubtless soon
ratify. In other words, the Republic of Cuba has assumed
a special relation to our international political
system, under which she gives us outposts of defence,
and we are morally bound to extend to her in a degree
the benefit of our own economic system. From every
standpoint of wise and enlightened home and foreign
policy the ratification of the Cuban treaty marked a step
of substantial progress in the growth of our nation
toward greatness at home and abroad.
Equally important was the action on the tariff upon
products of the Philippines. We gave them a reduction
of twenty-five per cent., and would have given them a
reduction of twenty-five per cent. more had it not been
for the opposition, in the hurried closing days of the last
session, of certain gentlemen who, by the way, have been
representing themselves both as peculiarly solicitous for
the interests of the Philippine people and as special
champions of the lowering of tariff duties. There is a
distinctly humorous side to the fact that the reduction of
duties which would benefit Cuba and the Philippines as
well as ourselves was antagonized chiefly by those who
in theory have been fond of proclaiming themselves the
advanced guardians of the oppressed nationalities in the
islands affected and the ardent advocates of the reduction
of duties generally, but who instantly took violent ground
against the practical steps to accomplish either purpose.
Moreover, a law was enacted putting anthracite on the
free list and completely removing the duties on all other
kinds of coal for one year.
We are now in a condition of prosperity unparalleled
not merely in our own history but in the history of any
other nation. This prosperity is deep-rooted and stands
on a firm basis because it is due to the fact that the average
American has in him the stuff out of which victors
are made in the great industrial contests of the present
day, just as in the great military contests of the past;
and because he is now able to use and develop his qualities
to best advantage under our well-established economic
system. We are winning headship among the nations of
the world because our people are able to keep their high
average of individual citizenship and to show their mastery
in the hard, complex, pushing life of the age. There
will be fluctuations from time to time in our prosperity,
but it will continue to grow just so long as we keep up
this high average of individual citizenship and permit
it to work out its own salvation under proper economic
legislation.
The present phenomenal prosperity has been won
under a tariff which was made in accordance with certain
fixed and definite principles, the most important of
which is an avowed determination to protect the interests
of the American producer, business man, wage worker,
and farmer alike. The general tariff policy, to which,
without regard to changes in detail, I believe this country
is irrevocably committed, is fundamentally based upon
ample recognition of the difference between the cost of
production—that is, the cost of labor—here and abroad,
and of the need to see to it that our laws shall in no event
afford advantage in our own market to foreign industries
over American industries, to foreign capital over American
capital, to foreign labor over our own labor. This
country has and this country needs better-paid, better-educated,
better-fed, and better-clothed workingmen, of
a higher type, than are to be found in any foreign country.
It has and it needs a higher, more vigorous, and
by any other country. The business men, the
merchants and manufacturers, and the managers of the
transportation interests show the same superiority when
compared with men of their type abroad. The events
of the last few years have shown how skilfully the leaders
of American industry use in international business competition
the mighty industrial weapons forged for them
by the resources of our country, the wisdom of our laws,
and the skill, the inventive genius, and the administrative
capacity of our people.
It is, of course, a mere truism to say that we want to
use everything in our power to foster the welfare of our
entire body politic. In other words, we need to treat the
tariff as a business proposition, from the standpoint of
the interests of the country as a whole, and not with
reference to the temporary needs of any political party.
It is almost as necessary that our policy should be stable
as that it should be wise. A nation like ours could not
long stand the ruinous policy of readjusting its business
to radical changes in the tariff at short intervals, especially
when, as now, owing to the immense extent and variety
of our products, the tariff schedules carry rates of duty
on thousands of different articles. Sweeping and violent
changes in such a tariff, touching so vitally the interests
of all of us, embracing agriculture, labor, manufactures,
and commerce, would be disastrous in any event, and
they would be fatal to our present well-being if approached
on the theory that the principle of the protective
tariff was to be abandoned. The business world,
that is, the entire American world, cannot afford, if it
has any regard for its own welfare, even to consider the
advisability of abandoning the present system.
Yet, on the other hand, where the industrial conditions
so frequently change, as with us must of necessity be the
case, it is a matter of prime importance that we should
to the changed conditions. Our aim should be to preserve
the policy of a protective tariff, in which the nation
as a whole has acquiesced, and yet wherever and whenever
necessary to change the duties in particular paragraphs
or schedules as matters of legislative detail, if
such change is demanded by the interests of the nation
as a whole.
In making any readjustment there are certain important
considerations which cannot be disregarded. If a tariff
law has on the whole worked well, and if business has
prospered under it and is prospering, it may be better to
endure some inconveniences and inequalities for a time
than by making changes to risk causing disturbance and
perhaps paralysis in the industries and business of the
country. The fact that the change in a given rate of
duty may be thought desirable does not settle the question
whether it is advisable to make the change immediately.
Every tariff deals with duties on thousands of
articles arranged in hundreds of paragraphs and in many
schedules. These duties affect a vast number of interests
which are often conflicting. If necessary for our welfare,
then of course Congress must consider the question of
changing the law as a whole or changing any given rates
of duty, but we must remember that whenever even a
single schedule is considered some interests will appear
to demand a change in almost every schedule in the law;
and when it comes to upsetting the schedules generally
the effect upon the business interests of the country
would be ruinous.
One point we must steadily keep in mind. The question
of tariff revision, speaking broadly, stands wholly
apart from the question of dealing with the trusts. No
change in tariff duties can have any substantial effect in
solving the so-called trust problem. Certain great trusts
or great corporations are wholly unaffected by the tariff.
as a matter of fact numbers of smaller American competitors;
and of course a change in the tariff which would
work injury to the large corporation would work not
merely injury but destruction to its smaller competitors;
and equally of course such a change would mean disaster
to all the wage workers connected with either the large
or the small corporations. From the standpoint of those
interested in the solution of the trust problem, such a
change would therefore merely mean that the trust was
relieved of the competition of its weaker American competitors,
and thrown into competition only with foreign
competitors; and that the first effort to meet this new
competition would be made by cutting down wages, and
would therefore be primarily at the cost of labor. In the
case of some of our greatest trusts such a change might
confer upon them a positive benefit. Speaking broadly,
it is evident that the changes in the tariff will affect the
trusts for weal or for woe simply as they affect the whole
country. The tariff affects trusts only as it affects all
other interests. It makes all these interests, large or
small, profitable; and its benefits can be taken from the
large only under penalty of taking them from the small
also.
To sum up, then, we must as a people approach a matter
of such prime economic importance as the tariff from
the standpoint of our business needs. We cannot afford
to become fossilized or to fail to recognize the fact that
as the needs of the country change it may be necessary
to meet these new needs by changing certain features of
our tariff laws. Still less can we afford to fail to recognize
the further fact that these changes must not be
made until the need for them outweighs the disadvantages
which may result; and when it becomes necessary to
make them they should be made with full recognition of
the need of stability in our economic system and of
now become a settled policy in our national life. We
have prospered marvellously at home. As a nation we
stand in the very forefront in the giant international industrial
competition of the day. We can not afford by
any freak of folly to forfeit the position to which we
have thus triumphantly attained.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |