 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
XXXVI
AT THE STATE FAIR, SYRACUSE, N. Y.,
SEPTEMBER 7, 1903
Governor Higgins; my fellow-citizens:
In speaking on Labor Day at the annual fair of the New
York State Agricultural Association, it is natural to keep
especially in mind the two bodies who compose the majority
of our people and upon whose welfare depends the
welfare of the entire State. If circumstances are such
that thrift, energy, industry, and forethought enable the
farmer, the tiller of the soil, on the one hand, and the
wage worker, on the other, to keep themselves, their
wives, and their children in reasonable comfort, then the
State is well off, and we can be assured that the other
classes in the community will likewise prosper. On the
other hand, if there is in the long run a lack of prosperity
among the two classes named, then all other prosperity
is sure to be more seeming than real, It has been our profound
good fortune as a nation that hitherto, disregarding
exceptional periods of depression and the normal and inevitable
fluctuations, there has been, on the whole, from
the beginning of our Government to the present day a
progressive betterment alike in the condition of the tiller
of the soil and in the condition of the man who, by his
manual skill and labor, supports himself and his family,
and endeavors to bring up his children so that they may
be at least as well off as, and if possible better off than,
he himself has been. There are, of course, exceptions,
of our country has risen from generation to generation,
and the wealth represented on the farms has steadily
increased, while the wages of labor have likewise risen,
both as regards the actual money paid and as regards the
purchasing power which that money represents.
Side by side with this increase in the prosperity of the
wage worker and the tiller of the soil has gone on a great
increase in prosperity among the business men and
among certain classes of professional men; and the prosperity
of these men has been partly the cause and partly
the consequence of the prosperity of farmer and wage
worker. It can not be too often repeated that in this
country, in the long run, we all of us tend to go up or go
down together. If the average of well-being is high, it
means that the average wage worker, the average farmer,
and the average business man are all alike well off. If
the average shrinks, there is not one of these classes
which will not feel the shrinkage. Of course there are
always some men who are not affected by good times,
just as there are some men who are not affected by bad
times. But speaking broadly, it is true that if prosperity
comes all of us tend to share more or less therein, and
that if adversity comes each of us, to a greater or less extent,
feels the tension. Unfortunately, in this world the
innocent frequently find themselves obliged to pay some
of the penalty for the misdeeds of the guilty; and so if
hard times come, whether they be due to our own fault
or to our misfortune; whether they be due to some burst
of speculative frenzy that has caused a portion of the
business world to lose its head—la loss which no legislation
can possibly supply; or whether they be due to any
lack of wisdom in a portion of the world of labor—in each
case the trouble once started is felt more or less in every
walk of life.
It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy
interest among our people. The welfare of each of us is
dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us,
and therefore in public life that man is the best representative
of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing
good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is, not
to represent any special class and promote merely that
class's selfish interests, but to represent all true and
honest men of all sections and all classes, and to work for
their interests by working for our common country.
We can keep our Government on a sane and healthy
basis, we can make and keep our social system what it
should be, only on condition of judging each man, not as
a member of a class, but on his worth as a man. It is an
infamous thing in our American life, and fundamentally
treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any man any
test save that of his personal worth, or to draw between
two sets of men any distinction save the distinction of
conduct, the distinction that marks off those who do well
and wisely from those who do ill and foolishly. There
are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in
every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward
great public and social questions should be determined,
not by the accidental questions of employment or locality,
but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost
souls of men.
The failure in public and in private life thus to treat
each man on his own merits, the recognition of this Government
as being either for the poor as such or for the
rich as such, would prove fatal to our Republic, as such
failure and such recognition have always proved fatal in
the past to other republics. A healthy republican government
must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or
sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class
or by a section it departs from the old American ideal.
It is, of course, the merest truism to say that free institutions
and peculiar characteristics needed to take advantage of
such institutions. The century that has just closed has
witnessed many and lamentable instances in which people
have seized a government free in form, or have had it bestowed
upon them, and yet have permitted it under the
forms of liberty to become some species of despotism or
anarchy, because they did not have in them the power to
make this seeming liberty one of deed instead of one
merely of word. Under such circumstances the seeming
liberty may be supplanted by a tyranny or despotism in
the first place, or it may reach the road of despotism by
the path of license and anarchy. It matters but little
which road is taken. In either case the same goal is
reached. People show themselves just as unfit for liberty
whether they submit to anarchy or to tyranny; and class
government, whether it be the government of a plutocracy
or the government of a mob, is equally incompatible with
the principles established in the days of Washington and
perpetuated in the days of Lincoln.
Many qualities are needed by a people which would
preserve the power of self-government in fact as well as
in name. Among these qualities are forethought, shrewdness,
self-restraint, the courage which refuses to abandon
one's own rights, and the disinterested and kindly good
sense which enables one to do justice to the rights of
others. Lack of strength and lack of courage unfit men
for self-government on the one hand; and on the other,
brutal arrogance, envy,—in short, any manifestation of
the spirit of selfish disregard, whether of one's own duties
or of the rights of others, are equally fatal.
In the history of mankind many republics have risen,
have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have
fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing
themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in
no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly
government primarily for the benefit of one class instead
of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.
Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece,
in those of mediæval Italy and mediæval Flanders, this
tendency was shown, and wherever the tendency became
a habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the
State. In the final result it mattered not one whit
whether the movement was in favor of one class or of another.
The outcome was equally fatal, whether the
country fell into the hands of a wealthy oligarchy which
exploited the poor or whether it fell under the domination
of a turbulent mob which plundered the rich. In
both cases there resulted violent alternations between
tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty
to all citizens—destruction in the end overtaking the class
which had for the moment been victorious, as well as that
which had momentarily been defeated. The death-knell
of the Republic had rung as soon as the active power became
lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do
justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for
one special class and for its interests as opposed to the
interests of others.
The reason why our future is assured lies in the fact
that our people are genuinely skilled in and fitted for
self-government and therefore will spurn the leadership
of those who seek to excite this ferocious and foolish
class antagonism. The average American knows not only
that he himself intends to do about what is right, but
that his average fellow-countryman has the same intention
and the same power to make his intention effective.
He knows, whether he be business man, professional man,
farmer, mechanic, employer, or wage worker, that the
welfare of each of these men is bound up with the welfare
of all the others; that each is neighbor to the other, is
actuated by the same hopes and fears, has fundamentally
virtues and the same faults. Our average fellow-citizen
is a sane and healthy man, who believes in decency and
has a wholesome mind. He therefore feels an equal scorn
alike for the man of wealth guilty of the mean and base
spirit of arrogance toward those who are less well off, and
for the man of small means who in his turn either feels
or seeks to excite in others the feeling of mean and base
envy for those who are better off. The two feelings,
envy and arrogance, are but opposite sides of the same
shield, but different developments of the same spirit.
Fundamentally, the unscrupulous rich man who seeks to
exploit and oppress those who are less well off is in
spirit not opposed to, but identical with, the unscrupulous
poor man who desires to plunder and oppress those
who are better off. The courtier and the demagogue are
but developments of the same type under different conditions,
each manifesting the same servile spirit, the same
desire to rise by pandering to base passions; though one
panders to power in the shape of a single man and the
other to power in the shape of a multitude. So likewise
the man who wishes to rise by wronging others must
by right be contrasted, not with the man who likewise
wishes to do wrong, though to a different set of people,
but with the man who wishes to do justice to all people
and to wrong none.
The line of cleavage between good and bad citizenship
lies, not between the man of wealth who acts squarely
by his fellows and the man who seeks each day's wage by
that day's work, wronging no one and doing his duty by
his neighbor; nor yet does this line of cleavage divide the
unscrupulous wealthy man who exploits others in his own
interest, from the demagogue, or from the sullen and envious
being who wishes to attack all men of property,
whether they do well or ill. On the contrary, the line of
cleavage between good citizenship and bad citizenship
who does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the
poor man of bad conduct. This line of cleavage lies at
right angles to any such arbitrary line of division as that
separating one class from another, one locality from
another, or men with a certain degree of property from
those of a less degree of property.
The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth
or his poverty, strives manfully to do his duty to himself,
to his family, to his neighbor, to the State; who is incapable
of the baseness which manifests itself either in arrogance
or in envy, but who, while demanding justice for
himself, is no less scrupulous to do justice to others. It
is because the average American citizen, rich or poor, is
of just this type that we have cause for our profound
faith in the future of the Republic.
Ours is a government of liberty, by, through, and under
the law. Lawlessness and connivance at law-breaking
—whether the law-breaking take the form of a crime
of greed and cunning or of a crime of violence—are
destructive not only of order, but of the true liberties
which can only come through order. If alive to their
true interests rich and poor alike will set their faces like
flint against the spirit which seeks personal advantage by
overriding the laws, without regard to whether this spirit
shows itself in the form of bodily violence by one set of
men or in the form of vulpine cunning by another set of
men.
Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar
watchwords of honesty, decency, fair-dealing, and common-sense.
The qualities denoted by these words are
essential to air of us, as we deal with the complex industrial
problems of to-day, the problems affecting not
merely the accumulation but even more the wise distribution
of wealth. We ask no man's permission when we
require him to obey the law; neither the permission of
the man of great wealth afford to break the law, even for
his own financial advantage; for the law is his prop and
support, and it is both foolish and profoundly unpatriotic
for him to fail in giving hearty support to those who
show that there is in very fact one law, and one law only,
alike for the rich and the poor, for the great and the
small.
Men sincerely interested in the due protection of property,
and men sincerely interested in seeing that the just
rights of labor are guaranteed, should alike remember not
only that in the long run neither the capitalist nor the
wage worker can be helped in healthy fashion save by
helping the other; but also that to require either side to
obey the law and do its full duty toward the community
is emphatically to that side's real interest.
There is no worse enemy of the wage worker than the
man who condones mob violence in any shape or who
preaches class hatred; and surely the slightest acquaintance
with our industrial history should teach even the
most shortsighted that the times of most suffering for
our people as a whole, the times when business is stagnant,
and capital suffers from shrinkage and gets no return
from its investments, are exactly the times of hardship,
and want, and grim disaster among the poor. If all the
existing instrumentalities of wealth could be abolished,
the first and severest suffering would come among those
of us who are least well off at present. The wage worker
is well off only when the rest of the country is well off;
and he can best contribute to this general well-being by
showing sanity and a firm purpose to do justice to
others.
In his turn the capitalist who is really a conservative,
the man who has forethought as well as patriotism, should
heartily welcome every effort, legislative or otherwise,
which has for its object to secure fair dealing by capital,
employee. Such laws as the franchise-tax law in this
State, which the Court of Appeals recently unanimously
decided constitutional; such a law as that passed in Congress
last year for the purpose of establishing a Department
of Commerce and Labor, under which there should
be a bureau to oversee and secure publicity from the
great corporations which do an interstate business; such
a law as that passed at the same time for the regulation
of the great highways of commerce so as to keep these
roads clear on fair terms to all producers in getting their
goods to market—these laws are in the interest not
merely of the people as a whole, but of the propertied
classes. For in no way is the stability of property better
assured than by making it patent to our people that
property bears its proper share of the burdens of the
State; that property is handled not only in the interest
of the owner, but in the interest of the whole community.
In other words, legislation to be permanently good for
any class must also be good for the nation as a whole;
and legislation which does injustice to any class is certain
to work harm to the nation. Take our currency system,
for example. This nation is on a gold basis. The
Treasury of the public is in excellent condition. Never
before has the per capita of circulation been as large as it
is this day; and this circulation, moreover, is of money,
every dollar of which is at par with gold. Now, our
having this sound currency system is of benefit to banks,
of course, but it is of infinitely more benefit to the people
as a whole, because of the healthy effect on business
conditions.
In the same way, whatever is advisable in the way of
remedial or corrective currency legislation—and nothing
revolutionary is advisable under present conditions—must
be undertaken only from the standpoint of the business
community as a whole, that is, of the American body
to take any step backward or to cast any doubt upon the
certain redemption in standard coin of every circulating
note.
Among ourselves we differ in many qualities, of body,
head, and heart; we are unequally developed, mentally as
well as physically. But each of us has the right to ask
that he shall be protected from wrongdoing as he does
his work and carries his burden through life. No man
needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has
a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life
offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing;
and this is a prize open to every man, for there can be no
work better worth doing than that done to keep in health
and comfort and with reasonable advantages those immediately
dependent upon the husband, the father, or
the son.
There is no room in our healthy American life for the
mere idler, for the man or the woman whose object it is
throughout life to shirk the duties which life ought to
bring. Life can mean nothing worth meaning, unless its
prime aim is the doing of duty, the achievement of results
worth achieving. A recent writer has finely said: "After
all, the saddest thing that can happen to a man is to carry
no burdens. To be bent under too great a load is bad;
to be crushed by it is lamentable; but even in that there
are possibilities that are glorious. But to carry no load
at all—there is nothing in that. No one seems to arrive
at any goal really worth reaching in this world who does
not come to it heavy laden."
Surely from our own experience each one of us knows
that this is true. From the greatest to the smallest, happiness
and usefulness are largely found in the same soul,
and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense
only by those who have not shirked life's burdens. The
men whom we most delight to honor in all this land are
shoulders the burden of saving the Union. They did
not choose the easy task. They did not shirk the difficult
duty. Deliberately and of their own free will they strove
for an ideal, upward and onward across the stony slopes
of greatness. They did the hardest work that was then
to be done; they bore the heaviest burden that any generation
of Americans ever had to bear; and because they
did this they have won such proud joy as it has fallen to
the lot of no other men to win, and have written their
names forevermore on the golden honor roll of the nation.
As it is with the soldier, so it is with the civilian. To win
success in the business world, to become a first-class
mechanic, a successful farmer, an able lawyer or doctor,
means that the man has devoted his best energy and
power through long years to the achievement of his ends.
So it is in the life of the family, upon which in the last
analysis the whole welfare of the nation rests. The man
or woman who as bread-winner and home-maker, or as
wife and mother, has done all that he or she can do, patiently
and uncomplainingly, is to be honored; and is to
be envied by all those who have never had the good fortune
to feel the need and duty of doing such work. The
woman who has borne, and who has reared as they
should be reared, a family of children, has in the most
emphatic manner deserved well of the Republic. Her
burden has been heavy, and she has been able to bear it
worthily only by the possession of resolution, of good
sense, of conscience, and of unselfishness. But if she has
borne it well, then to her shall come the supreme blessing,
for in the words of the oldest and greatest of books,
"Her children shall rise up and call her blessed"; and
among the benefactors of the land her place must be with
those who have done the best and the hardest work
whether as lawgivers or as soldiers, whether in public or
in private life.
This is not a soft and easy creed to preach. It is a
creed willingly learned only by men and women who,
together with the softer virtues, possess also the stronger;
who can do, and dare, and die at need, but who while
life lasts will never flinch from their allotted task. You
farmers, and wage workers, and business men of this
great State, of this mighty and wonderful nation, are
gathered together to-day, proud of your State and still
prouder of your Nation, because your forefathers and
predecessors have lived up to just this creed. You have
received from their hands a great inheritance, and you
will leave an even greater inheritance to your children and
your children's children, provided only that you practise
alike in your private and your public lives the strong
virtues that have given us as a people greatness in the
past. It is not enough to be well-meaning and kindly,
but weak; neither is it enough to be strong, unless morality
and decency go hand in hand with strength. We
must possess the qualities which make us do our duty in
our homes and among our neighbors, and in addition we
must possess the qualities which are indispensable to the
makeup of every great and masterful nation—the qualities
of courage and hardihood, of individual initiative and
yet of power to combine for a common end, and, above
all, the resolute determination to permit no man and no
set of men to sunder us one from the other by lines of
caste or creed or section. We must act upon the motto
of all for each and each for all. There must be ever
present in our minds the fundamental truth that in a republic
such as ours the only safety is to stand neither for
nor against any man because he is rich or because he is
poor, because he is engaged in one occupation or another,
because he works with his brains or because he works with
his hands. We must treat each man on his worth and
merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square
deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive
such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly
liberty which comes through the equal domination of the
law over all men alike, and through its administration in
such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all that
no man is above it and no man below it.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |