University of Virginia Library

XXX
AT SPOKANE, WASHINGTON, MAY 26, 1903

Senator Turner, and you, my fellow-Americans:

I am in a city at the eastern gateway of this State, with
the great railroad systems of the State running through
it. On the western edge of this State, in Puget Sound,
I have seen the homing places of the great steamship
lines which, in connection with these great railroads, are
doing so much to develop the Oriental trade of this
country and this State. Washington will owe no small
part of its future greatness (and that greatness will be
great indeed) to the fact that it is thus dging its share in
acquiring for the United States the dominance of the
Pacific. Those railroads, the men and the corporations
that have built them, have rendered a very great service
to the community. The men who are building, the corporations
which are building! the great steamship lines
have likewise rendered a very great service to the community.
Every man who has made wealth or used it
in developing great legitimate business enterprises has
been of benefit and not harm to the country at large.
This city has grown by leaps and bounds only when the
railroads came to it, when the railroads came to the State;
and if the State were now cut off from its connection by
rail and by steamship with the rest of the world its position
would, of course, diminish incalculably. Great good
has come from the development of our railroad system;
great good has been done by the individuals and corporations

that have made that development possible; and in
return good is done to them, and not harm, when they
are required to obey the law. Ours is a government of
liberty by, through, and under the law. No man is above
it and no man is below it. The crime of cunning, the
crime of greed, the crime of violence, are all equally
crimes, and against them all alike the law must set its face.
This is not and never shall be a government either of
plutocracy or of a mob. It is, it has been, and it will be a
government of the people; including alike the people of
great wealth, of moderate wealth, the people who employ
others, the people who are employed, the wage worker,
the lawyer, the mechanic, the banker, the farmer; including
them all, protecting each and every one if he acts
decently and squarely, and discriminating against any
one of them, no matter from what class he comes, if he
does not act squarely and fairly, if he does not obey the
law. While all people are foolish if they violate or rail
against the law, wicked as well as foolish, but all foolish
—yet the most foolish man in this Republic is the man
of wealth who complains because the law is administered
with impartial justice against or for him. His folly is
greater than the folly of any other man who so complains;
for he lives and moves and has his being because
the law does in fact protect him and his property.

We have the right to ask every decent American citizen
to rally to the support of the law if it is ever broken
against the interest of the rich man; and we have the
same right to ask that rich man cheerfully and gladly to
acquiesce in the enforcement against his seeming interest
of the law, if it is the law. Incidentally, whether he acquiesces
or not, the law will be enforced; and this whoever
he may be, great or small, and at whichever end of
the social scale he may be.

I ask that we see to it in our country that the line of
division in the deeper matters of our citizenship be drawn,

never between section and section, never between creed
and creed, never, thrice never, between class and class;
but that the line be drawn on the line of conduct, cutting
through sections, cutting through creeds, cutting through
classes; the line that divides the honest from the dishonest,
the line that divides good citizenship from bad
citizenship, the line that declares a man a good citizen
only if, and always if, he acts in accordance with the immutable
law of righteousness, which has been the same
from the beginning of history to the present moment
and which will be the same from now until the end of
recorded time.