 | Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 |  |
ADDRESSES
I
CHARLESTON EXPOSITION, APRIL 9, 1902
Mr. President; Mr. Mayor; and you the men and women
of the Palmetto State, men and women of the South;
my fellow-citizens of the Union:
It is indeed to me a peculiar pleasure to have the chance
of coming here to this Exposition held in your old, your
beautiful, your historic city. My mother's people were
from Georgia; but before they came to Georgia, before
the Revolution, in the days of Colonial rule, they dwelt
for nearly a century in South Carolina; and therefore I
can claim your State as mine by inheritance no less than
by the stronger and nobler right which makes each
foot of American soil in a sense the property of all
Americans.
Charleston is not only a typical Southern city; it is
also a city whose history teems with events which link
themselves to American history as a whole. In the early
Colonial days Charleston was the outpost of our people
against the Spaniard in the South. In the days of the
Revolution there occurred here some of the events which
vitally affected the outcome of the struggle for Independence,
and which impressed themselves most deeply upon
the popular mind. It was here that the tremendous,
terrible drama of the Civil War opened.
With delicate and thoughtful courtesy you originally
asked me to come to this Exposition on the birthday of
Abraham Lincoln. The invitation not only showed a
also emphasized as hardly anything else could have emphasized
how completely we are now a united people.
The wounds left by the great Civil War, incomparably
the greatest war of modern times, have healed; and its
memories are now priceless heritages of honor alike to the
North and to the South. The devotion, the self-sacrifice,
the steadfast resolution and lofty daring, the high devotion
to the right as each man saw it, whether Northerner
or Southerner—all these qualities of the men and women
of the early sixties now shine luminous and brilliant before
our eyes, while the mists of anger and hatred that
once dimmed them have passed away forever.
All of us, North and South, can glory alike in the valor
of the men who wore the blue and of the men who wore
the gray. Those were iron times, and only iron men
could fight to its terrible finish the giant struggle between
the hosts of Grant and Lee, the struggle that came to an
end thirty-seven years ago this very day. To us of the
present day, and to our children and children's children,
the valiant deeds, the high endeavor, and abnegation of
self shown in that struggle by those who took part
therein will remain for evermore to mark the level to
which we in our turn must rise whenever the hour of the
Nation's need may come.
When four years ago this Nation was compelled to face
a foreign foe, the completeness of the reunion became
instantly and strikingly evident. The war was not one
which called for the exercise of more than an insignificant
fraction of our strength, and the strain put upon us was
slight indeed compared with the results. But it was a
satisfactory thing to see the way in which the sons of the
soldier of the Union and the soldier of the Confederacy
leaped eagerly forward, emulous to show in brotherly
rivalry the qualities which had won renown for their
fathers, the men of the great war. It was my good fortune
old Joe Wheeler, who commanded the cavalry division
at Santiago.
In my regiment there were certainly as many men
whose fathers had served in the Southern, as there were
men whose fathers had served in the Northern, army.
Among the captains there was opportunity to promote
but one to field rank. The man who was singled out for
this promotion because of conspicuous gallantry in the
field was the son of a Confederate general and was himself
a citizen of this, the Palmetto State; and no American
officer could wish to march to battle beside a more loyal,
gallant, and absolutely fearless comrade than my former
captain and major, your fellow-citizen, Micah Jenkins.
A few months ago, owing to the enforced absence of
the Governor of the Philippines, it became necessary to
nominate a Vice-Governor to take his place—one of the
most important places in our Government at this time.
I nominated as Vice-Governor an ex-Confederate, General
Luke Wright, of Tennessee. It is therefore an ex-Confederate
who now stands as the exponent of this Government
and this people in that great group of islands in the
eastern seas over which the American flag floats. General
Wright has taken a leading part in the work of steadily
bringing order and peace out of the bloody chaos in which
we found the islands. He is now taking a leading part
not merely in upholding the honor of the flag by making
it respected as the symbol of our power, but still more in
upholding its honor by unwearied labor for the establishment
of ordered liberty—of law-creating, law-abiding civil
government—under its folds.
The progress which has been made under General
Wright and those like him has been indeed marvellous.
In fact, a letter of the General's the other day seemed to
show that he considered there was far more warfare about
the Philippines in this country than there was warfare in
completeness of the reunion of our country that one of
the foremost men who have been instrumental in driving
forward the great work for civilization and humanity in
the Philippines has been a man who in the Civil War
fought with distinction in a uniform of Confederate
gray.
If ever the need comes in the future, the past has
made abundantly evident the fact that from this time on
Northerner and Southerner will in war know only the
generous desire to strive how each can do the more effective
service for the flag of our common country. The
same thing is true in the endless work of peace, the never-ending
work of building and keeping the marvellous fabric
of our industrial prosperity. The upbuilding of any part
of our country is a benefit to the whole, and every such
effort as this to stimulate the resources and industry of a
particular section is entitled to the heartiest support from
every quarter of the Union. Thoroughly good national
work can be done only if each of us works hard for himself,
and at the same time keeps constantly in mind that
he must work in conjunction with others.
You have made a particular effort in your Exhibition
to get into touch with the West Indies. This is wise.
The events of the last four years have shown us that the
West Indies and the Isthmus must in the future occupy
a far larger place in our national policy than in the past.
This is proved by the negotiations for the purchase of the
Danish islands, the acquisition of Porto Rico, the preparation
for building an Isthmian canal, and, finally, by
the changed relations which these years have produced
between us and Cuba. As a Nation we have an especial
right to take honest pride in what we have done for Cuba.
Our critics abroad and at home have insisted that we never
intended to leave the island. But on the 20th of next
month Cuba becomes a free republic, and we turn over
would be very difficult to find a parallel in the conduct of
any other great state that has occupied such a position as
ours. We have kept our word and done our duty, just
as an honest individual in private life keeps his word and
does his duty.
Be it remembered, moreover, that after our four years'
occupation of the island we turn it over to the Cubans in
a better condition that it ever has been in all the centuries
of Spanish rule. This has a direct bearing upon our own
welfare. Cuba is so near to us that we can never be indifferent
to misgovernment and disaster within its limits.
The mere fact that our administration in the island has
minimized the danger from the dreadful scourge of yellow
fever, alike to Cuba and to ourselves, is sufficient to emphasize
the community of interest between us. But there
are other interests which bind us together. Cuba's position
makes it necessary that her political relations with
us should differ from her political relations with other
powers. This fact has been formulated by us and accepted
by the Cubans in the Platt amendments. It follows
as a corollary that, where the Cubans have thus
assumed a position of peculiar relationship to our political
system, they must similarly stand in a peculiar relationship
to our economic system.
We have rightfully insisted upon Cuba adopting toward
us an attitude differing politically from that she adopts
toward any other power; and in return, as a matter of
right, we must give to Cuba a different—that is, a better
—position economically in her relations with us than
we give to other powers. This is the course dictated
by sound policy, by a wise and far-sighted view of our
own interest, and by the position we have taken during
the past four years. We are a wealthy and powerful
country, dealing with a much weaker one; and the contrast
in wealth and strength makes it all the more our
her, in a spirit of large generosity.
This Exposition is rendered possible because of the
period of industrial prosperity through which we are passing.
While material well-being is never all-sufficient to
the life of a nation, yet it is the merest truism to say
that its absence means ruin. We need to build a higher
life upon it as a foundation; but we can build little indeed
unless this foundation of prosperity is deep and
broad. The well-being which we are now enjoying can
be secured only through general business prosperity, and
such prosperity is conditioned upon the energy and hard
work, the sanity and the mutual respect, of all classes of
capitalists, large and small, of wage workers of every degree.
As is inevitable in a time of business prosperity,
some men succeed more than others, and it is unfortunately
also inevitable that when this is the case some
unwise people are sure to try to appeal to the envy and
jealousy of those who succeed least. It is a good thing
when these appeals are made to remember that, while it
is difficult to increase prosperity by law, it is easy enough
to ruin it, and that there is small satisfaction to the less
prosperous if they succeed in overthrowing both the more
prosperous and themselves in the crash of a common
disaster.
Every industrial exposition of this type necessarily calls
up the thought of the complex social and economic questions
which are involved in our present industrial system.
Our astounding material prosperity, the sweep and rush
rather than the mere march of our progressive material
development, have brought grave troubles in their train.
We cannot afford to blink these troubles, any more than
because of them we can afford to accept as true the
gloomy forebodings of the prophets of evil. There are
great problems before us. They are not insoluble, but
they can be solved only if we approach them in a spirit
intention to do fair and equal justice to all men alike.
We are certain to fail if we adopt the policy of the
demagogue who raves against the wealth which is simply
the form of embodied thrift, foresight, and intelligence;
who would shut the door of opportunity against
those whose energy we should especially foster, by penalizing
the qualities which tell for success. Just as little
can we afford to follow those who fear to recognize
injustice and to endeavor to cut it out because the task
is difficult or even—if performed by unskilful hands—
dangerous.
This is an era of great combinations both of labor
and of capital. In many ways these combinations have
worked for good; but they must work under the law, and
the laws concerning them must be just and wise, or they
will inevitably do evil; and this applies as much to the
richest corporation as to the most powerful labor union.
Our laws must be wise, sane, healthy, conceived in the
spirit of those who scorn the mere agitator, the mere
inciter of class or sectional hatred; who wish justice for
all men; who recognize the need of adhering so far as
possible to the old American doctrine of giving the widest
possible scope for the free exercise of individual initiative,
and yet who recognize also that after combinations have
reached a certain stage it is indispensable to the general
welfare that the Nation should exercise over them, cautiously
and with self-restraint, but firmly, the power of
supervision and regulation.
Above all, the administration of the Government, the
enforcement of the laws, must be fair and honest. The
laws are not to be administered either in the interest of
the poor man or the interest of the rich man. They are
simply to be administered justly; in the interest of justice
to each man be he rich or be he poor—giving immunity
to no violator, whatever form the violation may assume.
and to it he must be true under penalty of forfeiting the
respect both of himself and of his fellows.
And now, my fellow-countrymen, in closing, I am
going to paraphrase something said by Governor Aycock
last night. I have dwelt to-day upon the fact that we
are indeed a reunited people; that we are indeed and forever
one people. The time was when one could not have
made that statement with truth; now it can be truthfully
said. There was a time when it was necessary to keep
saying it, because it was already true, and because the
assertion made it more true; but the time is at hand, I
think the time has come, when it is not necessary to say
it again. Proud of the South! Of course we are proud
of the South; not only Southerners but Northerners are
proud of the South. Proud of your great, deeds! Of
course I am proud of your great deeds, for you are my
people. I thank you from my heart for the welcome you
have given me, and I assure you that few experiences in
my life have been more pleasant than the experiences of
these two days that I have spent among you.
II
AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., AUGUST 23, 1902
Mr. Governor; and you, my fellow-citizens:
We are passing through a period of great commercial
prosperity, and such a period is as sure as adversity itself
to bring mutterings of discontent. At a time when most
men prosper somewhat some men always prosper greatly;
and it is as true now as when the tower of Siloam fell
upon all alike, that good fortune does not come solely
to the just, nor bad fortune solely to the unjust. When
the weather is good for crops it is good for weeds.
Moreover, not only do the wicked flourish when the
times are such that most men flourish, but, what is
worse, the spirit of envy and jealousy springs up in the
breasts of those who, though they may be doing fairly
well themselves, see others no more deserving, who do
better.
Wise laws and fearless and upright administration of the
laws can give the opportunity for such prosperity as we
see about us. But that is all that they can do. When
the conditions have been created which make prosperity
possible, then each individual man must achieve it for
himself, by his own energy and thrift and business intelligence.
If when people wax fat they kick, as they have
kicked since the days of Jeshurun, they will speedily
destroy their own prosperity. If they go into wild
speculation and lose their heads, they have lost that which
no laws can supply. If in a spirit of sullen envy they
in the years of fatness, they will bury themselves in the
crash of the common disaster. It is difficult to make
our material condition better by the best laws, but it is
easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
The upshot of all this is that it is peculiarly incumbent
upon us in a time of such material well-being, both collectively
as a nation and individually as citizens, to show,
each on his own account, that we possess the qualities of
prudence, self-knowledge, and self-restraint. In our Government
we need above all things stability, fixity of
economic policy, while remembering that this fixity must
not be fossilization, that there must not be inability to
shift our laws so as to meet our shifting national needs.
There are real and great evils in our social and economic
life, and these evils stand out in all their ugly baldness in
time of prosperity; for the wicked who prosper are never
a pleasant sight. There is every need of striving in all
possible ways, individually and collectively, by combinations
among ourselves and through the recognized governmental
agencies, to cut out those evils. All I ask is to
be sure that we do not use the knife with an ignorant zeal
which would make it more dangerous to the patient than
to the disease.
One of the features of the tremendous industrial development
of the last generation has been the very great
increase in private, and especially in corporate, fortunes.
We may like this or not, just as we choose, but it is a
fact nevertheless; and as far as we can see it is an inevitable
result of the working of the various causes, prominent
among them steam and electricity. Urban population
has grown in this country, as in all civilized countries,
much faster than the population as a whole during the
last century. If it were not for that, Rhode Island
could not to-day be the State she is. Rhode Island has
flourished as she has flourished because of the conditions
There is evil in these conditions, but you can't destroy it
unless you destroy the civilization they have brought
about. Where men are gathered together in great masses,
it inevitably results that they must work far more largely
through combinations than where they live scattered and
remote from one another. Many of us prefer the old
conditions of life, under which the average man lived
more to himself and by himself, where the average community
was more self-dependent, and where even though
the standard of comfort was lower on the average, yet
there was less of the glaring inequality in worldly conditions
which we now see about us in our great cities. It
is not true that the poor have grown poorer; but some
of the rich have grown so very much richer that, where
multitudes of men are herded together in a limited space,
the contrast strikes the onlooker as more violent than
formerly. On the whole, our people earn more and live
better than ever before, and the progress of which we are
so proud could not have taken place had it not been for
the upbuilding of industrial centres, such as this in which
I am speaking.
But together with the good there has come a measure
of evil. Life is not so simple as it was; and surely, both
for the individual and the community, the simple life is
normally the healthy life. There is not in the great cities
the feeling of brotherhood which there is still in country
localities, and the lines of social cleavage are far more
deeply marked.
For some of the evils which have attended upon the
good of the changed conditions we can at present see no
complete remedy. For others the remedy must come by
the action of men themselves in their private capacity,
whether merely as individuals or by combination. For
yet others some remedy can be found in legislative and
executive action—national, State, or municipal. Much
Under present-day conditions it is as necessary
to have corporations in the business world as it is to have
organizations, unions, among wage workers. We have a
right to ask in each case only this: that good and not
harm shall follow. Exactly as labor organizations, when
managed intelligently and in a spirit of justice and
fair play, are of very great service not only to the wage
workers but to the whole community, as has been
shown again and again in the history of many such
organizations; so wealth, not merely individual, but corporate,
when used aright, is not merely beneficial to the
community as a whole, but is absolutely essential to the
upbuilding of such a series of communities as those whose
citizens I am now addressing. This is so obvious that it
ought to be too trite to mention, and yet it is necessary
to mention it when we see some of the attacks made upon
wealth, as such.
Of course a great fortune, if used wrongly, is a menace
to the community. A man of great wealth who does not
use that wealth decently is in a peculiar sense a menace
to the community, and so is the man who does not use
his intellect aright. Each talent—the talent for making
money, the talent for showing intellect at the bar, or in
any other way, if unaccompanied by character, makes the
possessor a menace to the community. But such a fact
no more warrants us in attacking wealth than it does in
attacking intellect. Every man of power by the very fact
of that power is capable of doing damage to his neighbors:
but we cannot afford to discourage the development of
such men merely because it is possible they may use their
power for wrong ends. If we did so we should leave our
history a blank, for we should have no great statesmen,
soldiers, merchants, no great men of arts, of letters, of
science. Doubtless on the average the most useful citizen
to the community as a whole is the, man to whom has
nor riches. But the great captain of industry, the man
of wealth, who alone or in combination with his fellows,
drives through our great business enterprises, is a factor
without whom the civilization that we see round about us
here could not have been built up. Good, not harm,
normally comes from the upbuilding of such wealth.
Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the
harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we
let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own
natures.
But there is other harm; and it is evident that we
should try to do away with that. The great corporations
which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts
are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has
the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control
them wherever the need of such control is shown.
There is clearly need of supervision—need to possess the
power of regulation of these great corporations through
the representatives of the public, wherever, as in our own
country at the present time, business corporations become
so very powerful alike for beneficent work and for
work that is not always beneficent. It is idle to say that
there is no need for such supervision. There is, and a
sufficient warrant for it is to be found in any one of the
admitted evils appertaining to them.
We meet a peculiar difficulty under our system of government,
because of the division of governmental power
between the Nation and the States. When the industrial
conditions were simple, very little control was needed,
and the difficulties of exercising such control under our
Constitution were not evident. Now the conditions are
complicated and we find it hard to frame national legislation
which shall be adequate; while as a matter of practical
experience it has been shown that the States either
cannot or will not exercise a sufficient control to meet the
laws—laws which it would be well indeed to have enacted
by the national legislature. But the widespread differences
in these laws, even between adjacent States, and
the uncertainty of the power of enforcement, result practically
in altogether insufficient control. I believe that
the nation must assume this power of control by legislation;
if necessary, by constitutional amendment. The
immediate necessity in dealing with trusts is to place
them under the real, not the nominal, control of some
sovereign to which, as its creatures, the trusts shall owe
allegiance, and in whose courts the sovereign's orders
may be enforced.
This is not the case with the ordinary so-called
"trust" to-day; for the trust nowadays is a large State
corporation, which generally does business in other
States, often with a tendency toward monopoly. Such
a trust is an artificial creature not wholly responsible
to or controllable by any legislation, either by State or
Nation, and not subject to the jurisdiction of any one
court. Some governmental sovereign must be given full
power over these artificial, and very powerful, corporate
beings. In my judgment this sovereign must be the National
Government. When it has been given full power,
then this full power can be used to control any evil influence,
exactly as the Government is now using the power
conferred upon it by the Sherman anti-trust law.
Even when the power has been granted, it would be
most unwise to exercise it too much, to begin by too
stringent legislation. The mechanism of modern business
is as delicate and complicated as it is vast, and nothing
would be more productive of evil to all of us, and especially
to those least well off in this world's goods, than
ignorant meddling with this mechanism—above all, meddling
in a spirit of class legislation or hatred or rancor.
It is eminently necessary that the power should be had,
wisdom and self-restraint. The first exercise of that
power should be the securing of publicity among all great
corporations doing an interstate business. The publicity,
though non-inquisitorial, should be real and thorough as
to all important facts with which the public has concern.
Daylight is a powerful discourager of evil. Such publicity
would by itself tend to cure the evils of which
there is just complaint; it would show us if evils existed,
and where the evils are imaginary, and it would show us
what next ought to be done.
Above all, let us remember that our success in accomplishing
anything depends very much upon our not
trying to accomplish everything. Distrust whoever pretends
to offer you a patent cure-all for every ill of the
body politic, just as you would a man who offers a
medicine which would cure every evil of your individual
body. A medicine that is recommended to cure both
asthma and a broken leg is not good for either. Mankind
has moved slowly upward through the ages, sometimes
a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but rarely,
indeed, by leaps and bounds. At times a great crisis
comes in which a great people, perchance led by a great
man, can at white heat strike some mighty blow for the
right—make a long stride in advance along the path of
justice and of orderly liberty. But normally we must be
content if each of us can do something—not all that we
wish, but something—for the advancement of those principles
of righteousness which underlie all real national
greatness, all true civilization and freedom. I see no
promise of any immediate and complete solution of
all the problems we group together when we speak of
the trust question. But we can make a beginning in
solving these problems, and a good beginning, if only we
approach the subject with a sufficiency of resolution, of
honesty, and of that hard common-sense which is one
common, assets in any nation's greatness. The existing
laws will be fully enforced as they stand on the statute
books without regard to persons, and I think good
has already come from their enforcement. I think
furthermore that additional legislation should be had and
can be had, which will enable us to accomplish much
more along the same lines. No man can promise a perfect
solution, at least in the immediate future. But
something has already been done, and much more can be
done if our people temperately and determinedly will
that it shall be done.
In conclusion let me add one word. While we are not
to be excused if we fail to do whatever is possible through
the agency of Government, we must keep ever in mind
that no action of the Government, no action by combination
among ourselves, can take the place-of the individual
qualities to which in the long run every man must owe
the success he can make of life. There never has been
devised, and there never will be devised, any law which
will enable a man to succeed save by the exercise of those
qualities which have always been the prerequisites of success—the
qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of
unflinching will. Such action can supplement those qualities,
but it cannot take their place. No action by the
State can do more than supplement the initiative of the
individual; and ordinarily the action of the State can do
no more than to secure to each individual the chance to
show under as favorable conditions as possible the stuff
that there is in him.
III
AT SYMPHONY HALL, BOSTON, AUGUST 25, 1902
Governor Crane, Mayor Collins, men and women of Boston:
I want to take up this evening the general question of
our economic and social relations, with specific reference
to that problem with which I think our people are now
greatly concerning themselves—the problem of our complex
social condition as intensified by the existence of the
great corporations which we rather loosely designate as
trusts. I have not come here to say that I have discovered
a patent cure-all for any evils. When people's
minds are greatly agitated on any subject, and
especially when they feel deeply but rather vaguely
that conditions are not right, it is far pleasanter in addressing
them to be indifferent as to what you promise;
but it is much less pleasant afterwards, when you come
to try to carry out what has been promised. Of course
the worth of a promise consists purely in the way in
which the performance squares with it. That has two
sides. In the first place, if a man is an honest man he
will try just as hard to keep a promise made on the
stump as one made off the stump. In the second place,
if the people keep their heads they won't wish promises
to be made which are impossible of performance. You
see, one side of that question represents my duty, and
the other side yours.
Mankind goes ahead but slowly, and it goes ahead
mainly through each of us trying to do the best that is in
our republic upon the theory that the average man will,
as a rule, do the right thing, that in the long run the majority
will decide for what is sane and wholesome. If our
fathers were mistaken in that theory, if ever the times
become such—not occasionally but persistently—that the
mass of the people do what is unwholesome, what is
wrong, then the republic cannot stand, I care not how
good its laws, I care not what marvellous mechanism its
Constitution may embody. Back of the laws, back of the
administration, back of the system of government lies
the man, lies the average manhood of our people, and in
the long run we are going to go up or go down accordingly
as the average standard of our citizenship does or
does not wax in growth and grace.
The first requisite of good citizenship is that the man
shall do the homely, every-day, humdrum duties well.
A man is not a good citizen, I do not care how lofty his
thoughts are about citizenship in the abstract, if in the
concrete his actions do not bear them out; and it does
not make much difference how high his aspirations for
mankind at large may be, if he does not behave well in
his own family those aspirations do not bear visible fruit.
He must be a good breadwinner, he must take care of his
wife and his children, he must be a neighbor whom his
neighbors can trust, he must act squarely in his business
relations,—he must do all these every-day, ordinary
duties first, or he is not a good citizen. But he must do
more. In this country of ours the average citizen must
devote a good deal of thought and time to the affairs of
the State as a whole or those affairs will go backward;
and he must devote that thought and that time steadily
and intelligently. If there is any one quality that is not
admirable, whether in a nation or in an individual, it is
hysterics, either in religion or in anything else. The
man or woman who makes up for ten days' indifference
duty is of scant use in the world. Now in the same way
it is of no possible use to decline to go through all the
ordinary duties of citizenship for a long space of time and
then suddenly to get up and feel very angry about something
or somebody, not clearly defined, and demand reform,
as if it was a concrete substance to be handed out
forthwith.
This is preliminary to what I want to say to you about
the whole question of great corporations as affecting the
public. There are very many and very difficult problems
with which we are faced as the results of the forces which
have been in play for more than the lifetime of a generation.
It is worse than useless for any of us to rail at or
regret the great growth of our industrial civilization during
the last half century. Speaking academically, we
can, according to our several temperaments, regret that
the old days with the old life have vanished, or not, just
as we choose; but we are here to-night only because of
the play of those great forces. There is but little use in
regretting that things have been shaping themselves differently
from what we might have preferred. The practical
thing to do is to face the conditions as they are and
see if we cannot get the best there is in them out of them.
Now we shall not get a complete or perfect solution for
all of the evils attendant upon the development of the
trusts by any single action on our part. A good many
actions in a good many different ways will be required
before we get many of those evils even partially remedied.
We must first of all think clearly; we must probably experiment
somewhat; we must above all show by our
actions that our interest is permanent and not spasmodic;
and we must see that all proper steps are taken toward
the solution. Now of course all this is perfectly trite.
Every one who thinks knows that the only way in which
any problem of great importance was ever successfully
given end—effort that did not cease with any one election
or with any one year, but was continued steadily, temperately,
but resolutely, toward a given end. It is a little
difficult to set clearly before us all of the evils attendant
upon the working of some of our great corporations, but
I think that those gentlemen, and especially those gentlemen
of large means, who deny that the evils exist, are
acting with great folly. So far from being against property
when I ask that the question of the trusts be taken
up, I am acting in the most conservative sense in property's
interest. When a great corporation is sued for
violating the anti-trust law, it is not a move against
property, it is a move in favor of property, because
when we make it evident that all men, great and small
alike, have to obey the law, we put the safeguard of the
law around all men. When we make it evident that no
man shall be excused for violating the law, we make it
evident that every man will be protected from violations
of the law.
Now one of the great troubles—I am inclined to think
much the greatest trouble—in any immediate handling
of the question of the trusts comes from our system of
government. Under this system it is difficult to say
where the power is lodged to deal with these evils. Remember
that I am not saying that even if we had all the
power we could completely solve the trust question. If
what we read in the papers is true, international trusts
are now being planned. It is going to be very difficult
for any set of laws on our part to deal completely with
the problem which becomes international in its bearings.
But a great deal can be done in various ways even now—
a great deal is being done, and a great deal more can be
done—if we see that the power is lodged somewhere to do
it. On the whole, our system of government has worked
marvellously well—the system of divided functions of
Louisiana, Oregon, Idaho, New York, Illinois, South
Carolina, can all come together for certain purposes, and
yet each be allowed to work out its salvation as it desires
along certain other lines. On the whole this has worked
well, but in some respects it has worked ill. While I most
firmly believe in fixity of policy, I do not believe that that
policy should be fossilized, and when conditions change we
must change our governmental methods to meet them. I
believe with all my heart in the New England town meeting,
but you can't work the New England town meeting
in Boston—it is too big. You must devise something else.
If you look back in the history of Boston you will find that
Boston was very reluctant to admit this particular truth for
some time in the first decades of the nineteenth century.
When this Government was founded there were no great
individual or corporate fortunes, and commerce and industry
were being carried on very much as they had been
carried on in the days when Nineveh and Babylon stood
in the Mesopotamian Valley. Sails, oars, wheels—these
were the instruments of commerce. The pack-train, the
wagon-train, the rowboat, the sailing craft—these were
the methods of commerce. Everything has been revolutionized
in the business world since then, and the progress
of civilization from being a dribble has become a torrent.
There was no particular need at that time of bothering
as to whether the Nation or the State had control of corporations.
They were easy to control. Now, however,
the exact reverse is the case. And remember when I
say corporations I do not mean merely trusts, technically
so-called, merely combinations of corporations, or corporations
under certain peculiar conditions. For instance,
some time ago the Attorney-General took action against
a certain trust. There was considerable discussion as to
whether the trust aimed at would not seek to get out
from under the law by becoming a single corporation.
evil no matter what shape it takes. I want to see the
Government able to get at it definitely, so that the action
of the Government cannot be evaded by any turning
within or without Federal or State statutes. At
present we have really no efficient control over a big corporation
which does business in more than one State.
Frequently the corporation has nothing whatever to do
with the State in which it is incorporated except to get
incorporated; and all its business may be done in entirely
different communities—communities which may object
very much to the methods of incorporation in the State
named. I do not believe that you can get any action by
any State, I do not believe it practicable to get action
by all the States that will give us satisfactory control of
the trusts, of big corporations; and the result is at present
that we have a great, powerful, artificial creation which
has no creator to which it is responsible. The creator
creates it and then it goes and operates somewhere else,
and there is no interest on the part of the creator to deal
with it. It does not do anything where the creator has
power; it operates entirely outside of the creator's jurisdiction.
It is, of course, a mere truism to say that the corporation
is the creature of the State, that the State is
sovereign. There should be a real and not a nominal
sovereign, some one sovereign to which the corporation
shall be really and not nominally responsible.
At present if we pass laws nobody can tell whether
they will amount to anything. That has two bad effects.
In the first place, the corporation becomes indifferent
to the law-making body; and in the next place,
the law-making body gets into that most pernicious
custom of passing a law not with reference to what
will be done under it, but with reference to its effects
upon the opinions of the voters. That is a bad thing.
with reference to whether that law will do good or ill,
but with the knowledge that not much will come of it,
and yet that perhaps the people as a whole will like to
see it on the statute books—it does not speak well for
the lawmakers and it does not speak well for the people
either. What I hope to see is power given to the national
legislature which shall make the control real. It would
be an excellent thing if you could have all the States act
on somewhat similar lines so that you would make it unnecessary
for the National Government to act; but all of
you know perfectly well that the States will not act on
similar lines. No advance whatever has been made in
the direction of intelligent dealing by the States as a
collective body with these great corporations. Here in
Massachusetts you have what I regard as on the whole
excellent corporation laws. Most of our difficulties would
be in a fair way of solution if we had the power to put
upon the national statute books, and did put upon them,
laws for the nation much like those you have here on the
subject of corporations in Massachusetts. So you can
see, gentlemen, I am not advocating anything very revolutionary.
I am advocating action to prevent anything
revolutionary. Now if we can get adequate control by
the nation of these great corporations, then we can pass
legislation which will give us the power of regulation and
supervision over them. If the nation had that power,
mind you, I should advocate as strenuously as I knew
how that the power should be exercised with extreme
caution and self-restraint. No good will come from
plunging in without having looked carefully ahead. The
first thing we want is publicity; and I do not mean publicity
as a favor by some corporations—I mean it as a
right from all corporations affected by the law. I want
publicity as to the essential facts in which the public has an
interest. I want the knowledge given to the accredited
representatives can if they see fit base their actions later.
The publicity itself would cure many evils. The light of
day is a great deterrer of wrong-doing. The mere fact of
being able to put out nakedly and with the certainty that
the statements were true a given condition of things
that was wrong, would go a long distance toward curing
that wrong; and even where it did not cure it it would
make the path evident by which to cure it. We would
not be leaping in the dark; we would not be striving
blindly to see what was good and what bad. We would
know what the facts were and be able to shape our course
accordingly.
A good deal can be done now, a good deal is being done
now. As far as the anti-trust laws go they will be enforced.
No suit will be undertaken for the sake of seeming
to undertake it. Every suit that is undertaken will
be begun because the great lawyer and upright man whom
we are fortunate enough to have as Attorney-General,
Mr. Knox, believes that there is a violation of the law
which we can get at; and when the suit is undertaken it
will not be compromised except upon the basis that the
Government wins. Of course, gentlemen, no laws amount
to anything unless they are administered honestly and
fearlessly. We must have such administration or the law
will amount to nothing. I believe that it is possible to
frame national legislation which shall give us far more
power than we now have, at any rate over corporations
doing an interstate business. I cannot guarantee that,
because in the past it has more than once happened that
we have put laws on the statute books which those who
made them intended to mean one thing, and when they
came up for decision by the courts it was found that the
intention had not been successfully put into effect. But
I believe that additional legislation can be had. If my
belief is wrong, if it proves evident that we cannot under
sufficient power to deal with these great corporations,
then, no matter what our reverence for the past, our duty
to the present and the future will force us to see that
some power is conferred upon the National Government.
And when that power has been conferred, then it will
rest with the National Government to exercise it.
IV
AT HAVERHILL, MASS., AUGUST 26, 1902
My fellow-citizens:
Naturally at the home of Secretary Moody I should
like to say a word or two about the navy. I think that
whenever we touch on the navy we are sure of a hearty
response from any American audience; we are just as
sure of such a response in the mountains and great
plains of the West as upon the Atlantic or Pacific seaboards.
The entire country is vitally interested in the
navy, because an efficient navy of adequate size is not
only the best guarantee of peace, but is also the surest
means for seeing that if war does come the result shall
be honorable to our good name and favorable to our
national interests.
Any really great nation must be peculiarly sensitive to
two things: stain on the national honor at home, and
disgrace to the national arms abroad. Our honor at
home, our honor in domestic and internal affairs is at all
times in our own keeping and depends simply upon the
national possession of an awakened public conscience.
But the only way to make safe our honor as affected, not
by our own deeds, but by the deeds of others, is by readiness
in advance. In three great crises in our history
during the nineteenth century—in the War of 1812, in
the Civil War, and again in the Spanish War—the navy
rendered to the nation services of literally incalculable
worth. In the Civil War we had to meet antagonists even
occasions we encountered foreign foes, and the fighting
was done entirely by ships built long in advance, and by
officers and crews who had been trained during years of
sea service for the supreme day when their qualities were
put to the final test. The ships which won at Manila
and Santiago under the administration of President McKinley
had been built years before under Presidents
Arthur and Cleveland and Harrison. The officers in
those ships had been trained from their earliest youth to
their profession, and the enlisted men, in addition to their
natural aptitude, their intelligence, and their courage, had
been drilled as marksmen with the great guns and as
machinists in the engine-rooms, and perfected in all the
details of their work during years of cruising on the high
seas and of incessant target practice. It was this preparedness
which was the true secret of the enormous
difference in efficiency between our navy and the Spanish
navy. There was no lack of courage and self-devotion
among the Spaniards, but on our side, in addition to the
courage and devotion, for the lack of which no training
could atone, there was also that training—the training
which comes only as the result of years of thorough and
painstaking practice.
Annapolis is, with the sole exception of its sister academy
at West Point, the most typically democratic and
American school of learning and preparation that there is
in the entire country. Men go there from every State,
from every walk of life, professing every creed—the chance
of entry being open to all who perfect themselves in the
necessary studies and who possess the necessary moral
and physical qualities. There each man enters on his
merits, stands on his merits, and graduates into a service
where only his merit will enable him to be of value.
The enlisted men are of fine type, as they needs must
be to do their work well, whether in the gun turret or in
the finished man-of-war's man is evolved by years
of sea service.
It is impossible after the outbreak of war to improvise
either the ships or the men of a navy. A war vessel is a
bit of mechanism as delicate and complicated as it is
formidable. You might just as well expect to turn an
unskilled laborer off-hand into a skilled machinist or into
the engineer of a flyer on one of our big railroad systems,
as to put men aboard a battleship with the expectation
that they will do anything but discredit themselves until
they have had months and years in which thoroughly to
learn their duties. Our shipbuilders and gunmakers must
keep ever on the alert so that no rivals pass them by;
and the officers and enlisted men on board the ships must
in their turn, by the exercise of unflagging and intelligent
zeal, keep themselves fit to get the best use out of the
weapons of war intrusted to their care. The instrument
is always important, but the man who uses it is more important
still. We must constantly endeavor to perfect
our navy in all its duties in time of peace, and above all
in manoeuvring in a sea-way and in marksmanship with
the great guns. In battle the only shots that count are
those that hit, arid marksmanship is a matter of long
practice and of intelligent reasoning. A navy's efficiency
in a war depends mainly upon its preparedness at the
outset of that war. We are not to be excused as a nation
if there is not such preparedness of our navy. This is
especially so in view of what we have done during the
last four years. No nation has a right to undertake a big
task unless it is prepared to do it in masterful and effective
style. It would be an intolerable humiliation for us
to embark on such a course of action as followed from
our declaration of war with Spain, and not make good
our words by deeds—not be ready to prove our truth by
our endeavor whenever the need calls. The good work of
modern warship cannot with advantage be allowed to
rust in disuse. It must be used up in active service even
in time of peace. This means that there must be a constant
replacement of the ineffective by the effective. The
work of building up and keeping up our navy is therefore
one which needs our constant and unflagging vigilance.
Our navy is now efficient; but we must be content with
no ordinary degree of efficiency. Every effort must be
made to bring it ever nearer to perfection. In making
such effort the prime factor is to have at the head of the
navy such an official as your fellow-townsman, Mr. Moody;
and the next is to bring home to our people as a whole
the need of thorough and ample preparation in advance;
this preparation to take the form not only of continually
building ships, but of keeping these ships in commission
under conditions which will develop the highest degree
of efficiency in the officers and enlisted men aboard them.
V
AT BANGOR, MAINE, AUGUST 27, 1902
My fellow-citizens:
I am glad to greet the farmers of Maine. During the
century that has closed, the growth of industrialism has
necessarily meant that cities and towns have increased in
population more rapidly than the country districts. And
yet it remains true now, as it always has been, that in
the last resort the country districts are those in which we
are surest to find the old American spirit, the old American
habits of thought and ways of living. Conditions
have changed in the country far less than they have
changed in the cities, and in consequence there has been
little breaking away from the methods of life which have
produced the great majority of the leaders of the republic
in the past. Almost all of our great Presidents have been
brought up in the country, and most of them worked
hard on the farms in their youth and got their early mental
training in the healthy democracy of farm life.
The forces which made these farm-bred boys leaders of
men when they had come to their full manhood are still
at work in our country districts. Self-help and individual
initiative remain to a peculiar degree typical of life in the
country, life on a farm, in the lumbering camp, on a
ranch. Neither the farmers nor their hired hands can
work through combinations as readily as the capitalists
or wage workers of cities can work.
It must not be understood from this that there has
is the case. There has been much change, much progress,
The granges and similar organizations, the farmers' institutes,
and all the agencies which promote intelligent cooperation
and give opportunity for social and intellectual
intercourse among the farmers, have played a large part
in raising the level of life and work in the country districts.
In the domain of government, the Department
of Agriculture since its foundation has accomplished results
as striking as those obtained under any other branch
of the national administration. By scientific study of all
matters connected with the advancement of farm life; by
experimental stations; by the use of trained agents, sent
to the uttermost countries of the globe; by the practical
application of anything which in theory has been demonstrated
to be efficient; in these ways, and in many others,
great good has been accomplished in raising the standard
of productiveness in farm work throughout the country.
We live in an era when the best results can only be
achieved, if to individual self-help we add the mutual
self-help which comes by combination, both of citizens in
their individual capacity and of citizens working through
the State as an instrument. The farmers of the country
have grown more and more to realize this, and farming
has tended more and more to take its place as an applied
science—though as with everything else the theory must
be tested in practical work and can avail only when applied
in practical fashion.
But after all this has been said it remains true that the
countryman,—the man on the farm, more than any other
of our citizens to-day, is called upon continually to exercise
the qualities which we like to think of as typical of
the United States throughout its history—the qualities
of rugged independence, masterful resolution, and individual
energy and resourcefulness. He works hard (for
which no man is to be pitied), and often he lives hard
healthy surroundings, surroundings which tend to develop
a fine type of citizenship. In the country, moreover, the
conditions are fortunately such as to allow a closer touch
between man and man than, too often, we find to be the
case in the city. Men feel more vividly the underlying
sense of brotherhood, of community of interest. I do
not mean by this that there are not plenty of problems
connected with life in our rural districts. There are many
problems; and great wisdom and earnest disinterestedness
in effort are needed for their solution.
After all, we are one people, with the same fundamental
characteristics, whether we live in the city or in the country,
in the east or in the west, in the north or in the south.
Each of us, unless he is contented to be a cumberer of
the earth's surface, must strive to do his life-work with
his whole heart. Each must remember that while he will
be noxious to every one unless he first do his duty by
himself, he must also strive ever to do his duty by his
fellow. The problem of how to do these duties is acute
everywhere. It is most acute in great cities, but it exists
in the country too. A man, to be a good citizen, must
first be a good breadwinner, a good husband, a good
father—I hope the father of many healthy children; just
as a woman's first duty is to be a good housewife and
mother. The business duties, the home duties, the duties
to one's family, come first. The couple who bring up
plenty of healthy children, who leave behind them many
sons and daughters fitted in their turn to be good citizens,
emphatically deserve well of the State.
But duty to one's self and one's family does not exclude
duty to one's neighbor. Each of us, rich or poor,
can help his neighbor at times; and to do this-he must be
brought into touch with him, into sympathy with him.
Any effort is to be welcomed that brings people closer
together, so as to secure a better understanding among
apart. Probably the good done is almost equally great
on both sides, no matter which one may seem to be helping
the other. But it must be kept in mind that no good
will be accomplished at all by any philanthropic or charitable
work, unless it is done along certain definite lines.
In the first place, if the work is done in a spirit of condescension
it would be better never to attempt it. It is
almost as irritating to be patronized as to be wronged.
The only safe way of working is to try to find out some
scheme by which it is possible to make a common effort
for the common good. Each of us needs at times to
have a helping hand stretched out to him or her. Every
one of us slips on some occasion, and shame to his fellow
who then refuses to stretch out the hand that should
always be ready to help the man who stumbles. It is
our duty to lift him up; but it is also our duty to remember
that there is no earthly use in trying to carry him. If
a man will submit to being carried, that is sufficient to
show that he is not worth carrying. In the long run, the
only kind of help that really avails is the help which
teaches a man to help himself. Such help every man
who has been blessed in life should try to give to those
who are less fortunate, and such help can be accepted
with entire self-respect.
The aim to set before ourselves in trying to aid one
another is to give that aid under conditions which will
harm no man's self-respect and which will teach the less
fortunate how to help themselves as their stronger brothers
do. To give such aid it is necessary not only to possess
the right kind of heart, but also the right kind of head.
Hardness of heart is a dreadful quality, but it is doubtful
whether, in the long run, it works more damage than
softness of head. At any rate, both are undesirable.
The prerequisite to doing good work in the field of philanthropy—in
the field of social effort, undertaken with
undertaken in a spirit of broad sanity no less than of
broad and loving charity.
The other day I picked up a little book called The
Simple Life, written by an Alsatian, Charles Wagner,
and he preaches such wholesome, sound doctrine that I
wish it could be used as a tract throughout our country.
To him the whole problem of our complex, somewhat
feverish modern life can be solved only by getting men
and women to lead better lives. He sees that the permanence
of liberty and democracy depends upon a majority
of the people being steadfast in morality and in that
good plain sense which as a national attribute comes only
as the result of the slow and painful labor of centuries,
and which can be squandered in a generation by the
thoughtlessness and vicious. He preaches the doctrine
of the superiority of the moral to the material. He does
not undervalue the material, but he insists, as we of this
nation should always insist, upon the infinite superiority
of the moral, and the sordid destruction which comes
upon either the nation or the individual if it or he becomes
absorbed only in the desire to get wealth. The
true line of cleavage lies between good citizen and bad
citizen; and the line of cleavage may, and often does, run
at right angles to that which divides the rich and the poor.
The sinews of virtue lie in man's capacity to care for what
is outside himself. The man who gives himself up to the
service of his appetites, the man who the more goods he
has the more he wants, has surrendered himself to destruction.
It makes little difference whether he achieves
his purpose or not. If his point of view is all wrong, he
is a bad citizen whether he be rich or poor. It is a small
matter to the community whether in arrogance and insolence
he has misused great wealth, or whether, though
poor, he is possessed by the mean and fierce desire to
seize a morsel, the biggest possible, of that prey which
simply, and justly, and honorably, whether rich or poor,
is a good citizen. Those who dream only of idleness and
pleasure, who hate others, and fail to recognize the duty of
each man to his brother, these, be they rich or poor, are
the enemies of the State. The misuse of property is one
manifestation of the same evil spirit which under changed
circumstances denies the right of property because this
right is in the hands of others. In a purely material
civilization the bitterness of attack on another's possession
is only additional proof of the extraordinary importance
attached to possession itself. When outward
well-being, instead of being regarded as a valuable
foundation on which happiness may with wisdom be built,
is mistaken for happiness itself, so that material prosperity
becomes the one standard, then, alike by those who
enjoy such prosperity in slothful or criminal ease, and by
those who in no less evil manner rail at, envy, and long
for it, poverty is held to be shameful, and money, whether
well or ill gotten, to stand for merit.
All this does not mean condemnation of progress. It
is mere folly to try to dig up the dead past, and scant
is the good that comes from asceticism and retirement
from the world. But let us make sure that our progress
is in the essentials as well as in the incidentals. Material
prosperity without the moral lift toward righteousness
means a diminished capacity for happiness and a debased
character. The worth of a civilization is the worth of the
man at its centre. When this man lacks moral rectitude,
material progress only makes bad worse, and social problems
still darker and more complex.
VI
AT FITCHBURG, MASS., SEPTEMBER 2, 1902
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow-citizens:
There are two or three things that I should like to say
to this audience, but before beginning what I have to say
on some of the problems of the day, I wish to thank for
their greeting, not only all of you, my fellow-citizens here,
but particularly the men of the great war, and second only
to them my comrades of a lesser war, where, I hope, we
showed that we were anxious to do our duty, as you had
done yours, only the need did not come to us.
We have great problems before us as a nation. I will
not try to discuss them at length with you to-day, but I
can speak a word as to the manner in which they must be
met if they are to be met successfully. All great works,
though they'differ in the method of doing them, must be
solved by substantially the same qualities. You who upheld
the arms of Lincoln, who followed the sword of
Grant, were able to do your duty not because you found
some patent device for doing it, but by going down to
the bedrock principles which had made good soldiers
since the world began.
There was no method possible to devise which would
have spared you from heart-breaking fatigue on the
marches, from hardships at night, from danger in battle.
The only way to overcome those difficulties and dangers
was by drawing on every ounce of hardihood, of courage,
of loyalty, and of iron resolution. That is how you had
38
had won before you, as we of the younger generation
must win if ever the call should be made upon us to face
a serious foe. Arms change, tactics change, but the
spirit that makes the real soldier does not change. The
spirit that makes for victory does not change.
It is just so in civic life. The problems change, but
fundamentally the qualities needed to face them in the
average citizen are the same. Our new and highly complex
industrial civilization has produced a new and complicated
series of problems. We need to face those
problems and not to run away from them. We need to
exercise all our ingenuity in trying to devise some effective
solution, but the only way in which that solution can
be applied is the old way of bringing honesty, courage,
and common-sense to bear upon it. One feature of
honesty and common-sense combined is never to promise
what you do not think you can perform, and then never
to fail to perform what you have promised. And that
applies to public life just as much as in private life.
If some of those who have seen cause for wonder in
what I have said this summer on the subject of the great
corporations, which are popularly, although with technical
inaccuracy, known as trusts, would take the trouble to
read my messages when I was Governor, what I said on
the stump two years ago, and what I put into my first
message to Congress, I think they would have been less
astonished. I said nothing on the stump that I did not
think I could make good, and I shall not hesitate now to
take the position which I then advocated.
I am even more anxious that you who hear what I say
should think of it than that you should applaud it. I am
not going to try to define with technical accuracy what
ought to be meant when we speak of a trust. But if by
trust we mean merely a big corporation, then I ask you
to ponder the utter folly of the man who either in a spirit
without giving you an idea of what he means really to do.
I will go with him gladly if he says "Destroy the evil in
the trusts." I will try to find out that evil, I will seek to
apply remedies, which I have already outlined in other
speeches. But if his policy, from whatever motive,
whether hatred, fear, panic, or just sheer ignorance, is
to destroy the trusts in a way that will destroy all our
property—no. Those men who advocate wild and foolish
remedies which would be worse than the disease, are doing
all in their power to perpetuate the evils against which
they nominally war, because, if we are brought face to
face with the naked issue of either keeping or totally destroying
a prosperity in which the majority share, but in
which some share improperly, why, as sensible men, we
must decide that it is a great deal better that some
people should prosper too much than that no one should
prosper enough. So that the man who advocates destroying
the trusts by measures which would paralyze the industries
of the country is at least a quack, and at worst an
enemy to the Republic.
In 1893 there was no trouble about anybody making
too much money. The trusts were down, but the trouble
was that we were all of us down. Nothing but harm to
the whole body politic can come from ignorant agitation,
carried on partially against real evils, partially against
imaginary evils, but in a spirit which would substitute for
the real evils evils just as real and infinitely greater.
Those men, if they should succeed, could do nothing to
bring about a solution of the great problems with which
we are concerned. If they could destroy certain of the
evils at the cost of overthrowing the well-being of the
entire country, it would mean merely that there would
come a reaction in which they and their remedies would
be hopelessly discredited.
Now, it does not do anybody any good, and it will do
check any proper growth in a corporation. We wish not
to penalize but to reward a great captain of industry or
the men banded together in a corporation who have the
business forethought and energy necessary to build up a
great industrial enterprise. Keep that in mind. A big
corporation may be doing excellent work for the whole
country, and you want, above all things, when striving
to get a plan which will prevent wrong-doing by a corporation
which desires to do wrong, not at the same time
to have a scheme which will interfere with a corporation
doing well, if that corporation is handling itself honestly
and squarely. What I am saying ought to be treated as
simple, elementary truths. The only reason it is necessary
to say them at all is that apparently some people
forget them.
I believe something can be done by national legislation.
When I state that, I ask you to note my words. I say I
believe. It is not in my power to say I know. When
I talk to you of my own executive duties, I can tell you
definitely what will and what will not be done. When I
speak of the actions of any one else, I can only say that
I believe something more can be done by national legislation.
I believe it will be done. I think we can get laws
which will increase the power of the Federal Government
over corporations; if we fail, then there will have to be an
amendment to the Constitution of the nation conferring
additional power upon the Federal Government to deal
with corporations. To get that will be a matter of difficulty,
and a matter of time.
Let me interrupt here by way of illustration. You of
the great war recollect that about six weeks after Sumter
had been fired on there began to be loud clamor in the
North among people who were not at the front, that you
should go to Richmond; and there were any number of
people who told you how to go there. Then came Bull
had been yelling "On to Richmond at once," turned
around and said the war was over. All the hysteric
brotherhood said so. But you did n't think so. The
war was not over. It was not over for three years and
nine months, and then it was over the other way.
And you got it over by setting your faces steadily toward
the goal, by not relying upon anything impossible,
but by each doing everything possible that came in his
line to do, by each man doing his duty. You did not
win by any patent device; you won by the generalship
of Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan, and,
above all, by the soldiership of the men who carried the
muskets and the sabres. It did not come as quick as you
wanted, and the men who said it would come at once did
not help you much either.
In dealing with any great problem in civil life, be it the
trusts or anything else, you are going to get along in just
about the same fashion. There is not any patent remedy
for all the ills. All we can do is to make up our minds
definitely that we intend to find some method by which
we shall be able to tell, in the first place, what are the
real evils and what of the alleged evils are imaginary; in
the next place, what of those real evils it is possible to
cure by legislation, and then to cure them by legislation
and by an honest administration of the laws after they
have been enacted. That statement of the problem will
never be attractive to the man who thinks that somehow,
by turning your hand, you are going to get a complete
solution at once.
Grant's plan of fighting it out on that line, if it took all
summer, was not attractive to the men who wanted it
done in a week. But it was the only plan that won.
The only way we can ever work out even an approximately
satisfactory solution of these great industrial problems,
of which this so-called problem of the trusts is but
equally sanity and self-restraint on the one hand and
resolute purpose on the other.
It is not given to me or to any one else to promise a
perfect solution. It is not given to me or to any one else
to promise you even an approximately perfect solution in
a short time. But I think that we can work out a very
great improvement over the present conditions, and the
steps taken must, I am sure, be along these lines—along
the lines, in the first place, of getting power somewhere
so that we shall be able to say, the nation has power, let
it use that power—and not as it is at present, where it is
out of the question to say exactly where the power is.
We must get power first, then use that power fearlessly,
but with moderation. Let me say that again—with
moderation, with sanity, with self-restraint. The mechanism
of modern business is altogether too delicate and
too complicated for us to sanction for one moment any
intermeddling with it in a spirit of ignorance, above all
in a spirit of rancor. Something can be done, something
is being done now. Much more can be done if
our people resolutely but temperately will that it shall
be done. But the certain way of bringing greatest harm
upon ourselves, without in any way furthering the solution
of the problem, but, on the contrary, deferring indefinitely
its proper solution, would be to act in a spirit
of ignorance, of violence, of rancor, in a spirit which
would make us tear down the temple of industry in which
we live because we are not satisfied with some of the
details of its management.
I want you to think of what I have said, because it
represents all of the sincerity and earnestness that I have,
and I say to you here, from this platform, nothing that
I have not already stated in effect, and nothing I would
not say at a private table with any of the biggest corporation
managers in the land.
VII
AT WHEELING, WEST VIRGINIA, SEPTEMBER 6,
1902
My friends and fellow-citizens:
It is a pleasure to come here to your city. I wish to
thank the Mayor, and through the Mayor all of your citizens,
for the way in which, upon your behalf, he has
greeted me; and I wish to state that it is a special pleasure
to be introduced by my friend, Senator Scott. I
have known the Senator for some time, and I like him,
because when he gives you his word you don't have to
think about it again.
I am glad to have the chance of saying a few words
here in this great industrial centre in one of those regions
which have felt to a notable degree the effects of the
period of prosperity through which we are now passing.
Probably never before in our history has the country been
more prosperous than it is at this moment; and it is a
prosperity which has come alike to the tillers of the soil and
to those connected with our great industrial enterprises.
Every period has its own troubles and difficulties. A
period of adversity, of course, troubles us all; but there
are troubles in connection with a period of prosperity
also. When all things flourish it means that there is a
good chance for things that we don't like to flourish also,
just exactly as for things that we do like. A period of great
national material well-being is inevitably one in which
men's minds are turned to the way in which those flourish
capitalistic corporations, whose growth has been so noted
a feature of the last half-century—the corporations which
we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts—accepting
the word in its usual and common significance
as a big corporation usually doing business in several
States at least, besides the State in which it is incorporated,
and often, though not always, with some element of
monopoly in it.
It seems to me that in dealing with this problem of the
trusts—perhaps it would be more accurate to say the
group of problems which come into our minds when we
think of the trusts—we have two classes of our fellow-citizens
whom we have to convert or override. One is
composed of those men who refuse to admit that there is
any action necessary at all. The other is composed of
those men who advocate some action so extreme, so foolish,
that it would either be entirely non-effective or, if
effective, would be so only by destroying everything,
good and bad, connected with our industrial development.
In every governmental process the aim that a people
capable of self-government should steadfastly keep in
mind is to proceed by evolution rather than revolution.
On the other hand, every people fit for self-government
must beware of that fossilization of mind which refuses to
allow of any change as conditions change. Now, in dealing
with the whole problem of the change in our great
industrial civilization—in dealing with the tendencies
which have been accentuated in so extraordinary a degree
by steam and electricity and by the tremendous upbuilding
of industrial centres which steam and electricity
have been the main factors in bringing about—I think we
must set before ourselves the desire not to accept less
than the possible, and at the same time not to bring ourselves
to a complete standstill by attempting the impossible.
It is a good deal as it is in taking care, through
can dam the Mississippi. If the nation started to dam it,
the nation would waste its time. It would not hurt the
Mississippi, but it would not only throw away its own
means, but would incidentally damage the population
along the banks. You can't dam the current. You
can build levees to keep the current within bounds and
to shape its direction. I think that is exactly what
we can do in connection with these great corporations
known as trusts. We cannot reverse the industrial tendency
of the age. If you succeed in doing it, then all
cities like Wheeling will have to go out of business. Remember
that. You cannot put a stop to or reverse the
industrial tendencies of the age, but you can control and
regulate them and see that they do no harm.
A flood comes down the Mississippi—you can't stop it.
If you tried to build a dam across it, it would not hurt
the flood, and it would not benefit you. You can guide
it between levees so as to prevent its doing injury, and
so as to insure its doing good. Another thing; you don't
build those levees in a day or in a month. A man who
told you that he had a patent device by which in sixty
days he would solve the whole question of the floods
along the lower Mississippi would not be a wise man; but
he would be a perfect miracle of wisdom compared to
the man who tells you that by any one patent remedy
he can bring the millennium in our industrial and social
affairs.
We can do something; I believe we can do a good deal,
but our accomplishing what I expect to see accomplished
is conditioned upon our setting to work in a spirit as far
removed as possible from hysteria—a spirit of sober,
steadfast, kindly—I want to emphasize that—kindly determination
not to submit to wrong ourselves and not to
wrong others, not to interfere with the great business
development of the country, and at the same time so to
if we cannot eradicate, the unpleasant and vicious features
connected with that industrial development. I
have said that there can be no patent remedy. There
is not any one thing which can be done to remove all of
the existing evils. There are a good many things which,
if we do them all, will, I believe, make a very appreciable
betterment in the existing conditions. To do that is not
to make a promise that will evoke wild enthusiasm, but a
promise that can be kept; and in the long run it is much
more comfortable only to make promises that can be kept
than to make promises which are sure of an immense reception
when made, but which entail intolerable humiliation
when it is attempted to carry them out.
I am sufficiently fortunate to be advocating now, as
President, precisely the remedies that I advocated two
years ago—advocating them not in any partisan spirit,
because, gentlemen, this problem is one which affects the
life of the nation as a whole—but advocating them simply
as the American citizen who, for the time being, stands
as the Chief Executive and, therefore, the special representative
of his fellow-American citizens of all parties.
A century and a quarter ago there had been no development
of industry such as to make it a matter of the
least importance whether the Nation or the State had
charge of the great corporations or supervised the great
business and industrial organizations. A century and a
quarter ago, here at Wheeling, commerce was carried on
by pack train, by wagon train, by boat. That was the
way it was carried on throughout the whole civilized
world—oars and sails, wheeled vehicles and beasts of
burden—those were the means of carrying on commerce
at the end of the eighteenth century, when this country
became a nation.
There had been no radical change, no essential change,
in the means of carrying on commerce from the days when
For four or five thousand years, perhaps
longer, from the immemorial past when Babylon and
Nineveh stood in Mesopotamia, when Thebes and Memphis
were mighty in the valley of the Nile—from that
time on through the supremacy of Greece and of Rome,
through the upbuilding of the great trading cities like
Venice and Genoa in Italy, like the cities of the Rhine
and the Netherlands in Northern Europe—on through
the period of the great expansion of European civilization
which followed the voyages of Columbus and Vasco
da Gama, down to the time when this country became a
nation—the means of commercial intercourse remained
substantially unchanged. Those means, therefore, limited
narrowly what could be done by any corporation,
the growth that could take place in any community.
Suddenly, during our own lifetime as a nation—a lifetime
trivial in duration compared to the period of recorded
history—there came a revolution in the means of intercourse
which made a change in commerce, and in all that
springs from commerce, in industrial development, greater
than all the changes of the preceding thousands of years.
A greater change in the means of commerce of mankind
has taken place since Wheeling was founded, since the
first settlers built their log huts in the great forests on the
banks of this river, than in all the previous period during
which man had led an existence that can be called civilized.
Through the railway, the electric telegraph, and other
developments, steam and electricity worked a complete
revolution. This has meant, of course, that entirely new
problems have sprung up. You have right in this immediate
neighborhood a very much larger population than
any similar region in all the United States held when the
Continental Congress began its sessions; and the change
in industrial conditions has been literally immeasurable.
Those changed conditions need a corresponding change in
and supervision.
Such agencies were not provided, and could not have
been provided, in default of a knowledge of prophecy by
the men who founded the Republic. In those days each
State could take care perfectly well of any corporations
within its limits, and all it had to do was to try to encourage
their upbuilding. Now the big corporations, although
nominally the creatures of one State, usually do business
in other States, and in a very large number of cases the
wide variety of State laws on the subject of corporations
has brought about the fact that the corporation is made
in one State, but does almost all its work in entirely different
States.
It has proved utterly impossible to get anything like
uniformity of legislation among the States. Some States
have passed laws about corporations which, if they had
not been ineffective, would have totally prevented any
important corporate work being done within their limits.
Other States have such lax laws that there is no effective
effort made to control any of the abuses. As a result we
have a system of divided control—where the nation has
something to say, but it is a little difficult to know exactly
how much, and where the different States have each
something to say, but where there is no supreme power
that can speak with authority. It is, of course, a mere
truism to say that every corporation, the smallest as well
as the largest, is the creature of the State. Where the
corporation is small there is very little need of exercising
much supervision over it, but the stupendous corporations
of the present day certainly should be under governmental
supervision and regulation. The first effort to
make is to give somebody the power to exercise that
supervision, that regulation. We have already laws on
the statute books. Those laws will be enforced, and
are being enforced, with all the power of the National
the power is very limited. Now I want you to take my
words at their exact value. I think—I cannot say I am
sure, because it has often happened in the past that Congress
has passed a law with a given purpose in view, and
when that law has been judicially interpreted it has
proved that the purpose was not achieved—but I think
that by legislation additional power in the way of regulation
of at least a number of these great corporations
can be conferred. But, gentlemen, I firmly believe that
in the end power must be given to the National Government
to exercise in full supervision and regulation of these
great enterprises; and if necessary a constitutional amendment
must be resorted to for this purpose.
That is not new doctrine for me. That is the doctrine
that I advocated on the stump two years ago. Some of
my ultra-conservative friends have professed to be greatly
shocked at my advocating it now. I would explain to
those gentlemen, once for all, that they err whenever they
think that I advocate on the stump anything that I will
not try to put into effect after election. The objection
is made that working along these lines will take time. So
it will. Let me go back to my illustration of the Mississippi
River. It took time to build the levees, but we
built them. And if we have the proper intelligence, the
proper resolution, and the proper self-restraint, we can
work out the solution along the lines that I have indicated.
Thus, the first thing is to give the National Government
the power. All the power that is given, I can
assure you, will be used in a spirit as free as possible from
rancor of any kind, but with the firmest determination to
make big man and little man alike obey the law.
What we need first is power. Having gotten the power,
remember the work won't be ended—it will be only fairly
begun. And let me say again and again and again that
you will not get the millennium—the millennium is some
stride in advance in the direction of securing a juster,
fairer, wiser management of many of these corporations,
both as regards the general public and as regards their
relationship among themselves and to the investing public.
When we have the power I most earnestly hope, and
should most earnestly advocate, that it be used with the
greatest wisdom and self-restraint.
The first thing to do would be to find out the facts.
For that purpose I am absolutely clear that we need publicity—that
we need it not as a matter of favor from any
one corporation, but as a matter of right, secured through
the agents of the Government, from all the corporations
concerned. The mere fact of the publicity itself will tend
to stop many of the evils, and it will show that some
other alleged evils are imaginary, and finally in making
evident the remaining evils-those that are not imaginary
and that are not cured by the simple light of day—it will
give us an intelligent appreciation of the methods to take
in getting at them. We should have, under such circumstances,
one sovereign to whom the big corporations
should be responsible—a sovereign in whose courts a
corporation could be held accountable for any failure to
comply with the laws of the legislature of that sovereign.
I do not think you can accomplish that among the forty-six
sovereigns of the States. I think that it will have to
be through the National Government.
VIII
TO THE BROTHERHOOD OF LOCOMOTIVE FIREMEN,
CHATTANOOGA, TENN., SEPTEMBER
8, 1902
Mr. Grand Master, Governor McMillin, Mr. Mayor, my
brothers, men and women of Tennessee, my fellow-citizens:
I am glad to be here to-day. I am glad to come as the
guest of the Brotherhood. Let me join with you, the
members of the Brotherhood of this country, in extending
a most cordial welcome to our fellows from Canada
and Mexico. The fact that we are good Americans only
makes us all the better men, all the more desirous of seeing
good fortune to all mankind. I needed no pressing
to accept the invitation tendered through you, Mr. Hannahan,
and through Mr. Arnold, to come to this meeting.
I have always admired greatly the railroad men of the
country, and I do not see how any one who believes in what
I regard as the fundamental virtues of citizenship can fail to
do so. I want to see the average American a good man,
an honest man, and a man who can handle himself, and
does handle himself, well under difficulties. The last time
I ever saw General Sherman, I dined at his house, and we
got to talking over the capacity of different types of soldiers,
and the General happened to say that if ever there
were another war, and he were to have a command, he
should endeavor to get as many railway men as possible
under him. I asked him why, and he said: "Because on
qualities which are essential in a soldier." In the first
place, they are accustomed to taking risks. There are a
great many men who are naturally brave, but who, being
entirely unaccustomed to risks, are at first appalled by
them. Railroad men are accustomed to enduring hardship;
they are accustomed to irregular hours; they are
accustomed to act on their own responsibility, on their
own initiative, and yet they are acccustomed to obeying
orders quick. There is not anything more soul-harrowing
for a man in time of war, or for a man engaged in
a difficult job in time of peace, than to give an order and
have the gentleman addressed say "What?" The railroad
man has to learn that when an order is issued there
may be but a fraction of a second in which to obey it.
He has to learn that orders are to be obeyed, and, on the
other hand, that there will come plenty of crises in which
there will be no orders to be obeyed, and he will have to
act for himself.
Those are all qualities that go to the very essence of
good soldiership, and I am not surprised at what General
Sherman said. In raising my own regiment, which was
raised mainly in the Southwest, partly in the Territory in
which Mr. Sargent himself served as a soldier at one time
—in Arizona,—I got a number of railroad men. Of course,
the first requisite was that a man should know how to
shoot and how to ride. We were raising the regiment in
a hurry, and we did not have time to teach him, either.
He had to know how to handle a horse and how to handle
a rifle, to start with. But given the possession of those
two qualities, I found that there was no group of our citizens
from whom better men could be drawn to do a
soldier's work in a tight place and at all times than the
railroad men.
But, gentlemen, the period of war is but a fractional
part of the life of our Republic, and I earnestly hope and
than it has been in the past. It was the work that you
have done in time of peace that especially attracted me
to you, that made me anxious to come down here and see
you, and that made me glad to speak to you, not for
what I can tell you, but for the lesson it seems to me
can be gained by all of our people from what you have
done.
At the opening of the twentieth century we face conditions
vastly changed from what they were in this country
and throughout the world a century ago. Our complex
industrial civilization under which progress has been so
rapid, and in which the changes for good have been so
great, has also inevitably seen the growth of certain tendencies
that are not for good, or at least that are not
wholly for good; and we in consequence, as a people,
like the rest of civilized mankind, find set before us for
solution during the coming century problems which need
the best thought of all of us, and the most earnest desire
of all to solve them well if we expect to work out a solution
satisfactory to our people, a solution for the advantage
of the nation. In facing these problems, it must be
a comfort to every well-wisher of the nation to see what
has been done by your organization. I believe emphatically
in organized labor. I believe in organizations of
wage-workers. Organization is one of the laws of our
social and economic development at this time. But I
feel that we must always keep before our minds the fact
that there is nothing sacred in the name itself. To call
an organization an organization does not make it a good
one. The worth of an organization depends upon its
being handled with the courage, the skill, the wisdom,
the spirit of fair dealing as between man and man, and
the wise self-restraint which, I am glad to be able to say,
your Brotherhood has shown. You now number close
upon 44,000 members. During the two years ending
funds close upon a million and a half dollars. More than
six and one-half millions have been paid in since the starting
of the insurance clause in the Constitution—have been
paid to disabled members and their beneficiaries. Over
fifty per cent, of the amount paid was paid on account of
accidents. Gentlemen, that is a sufficient commentary
upon the kind of profession which is yours. You face
death and danger in time of peace, as in time of war the
men wearing Uncle Sam's uniform must face them.
Your work is hard. Do you suppose I mention that because
I pity you? No; not a bit. I don't pity any man
who does hard work worth doing. I admire him. I pity
the creature who does n't work, at whichever end of the
social scale he may regard himself as being. The law
of worthy work well done is the law of successful American
life. I believe in play, too—play, and play hard while
you play; but don't make the mistake of thinking that
that is the main thing. The work is what counts, and if
a man does his work well and it is worth doing, then it
matters but little in which line that work is done; the
man is a good American citizen. If he does his work in
slipshod fashion, then no matter what kind of work it is,
he is a poor American citizen.
I speak to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen,
but what I say applies to all railroad men—not only to
the engineers who have served an apprenticeship as firemen,
to the conductors, who, as a rule, have served an
apprenticeship as brakemen, but to all the men of all the
organizations connected with railroad work. I know you
do not grudge my saying that, through you, I am talking
to all the railroad men of the country. You, in your
organization as railroad men, have taught two lessons:
the lesson of how much can be accomplished by organization,
by mutual self-help of the type that helps another
in the only way by which, in the long run, a man who is
him to help himself. You teach the benefits of
organization, and you also teach the indispensable need
of keeping absolutely unimpaired the faculty of individual
initiative, the faculty by which each man brings himself
to the highest point of perfection by exercising the
special qualities with which he is himself endowed. The
Brotherhood has developed to this enormous extent since
the days, now many years ago, when the first little band
came together; and it has developed, not by crushing out
individual initiative, but by developing it, by combining
many individual initiatives.
The Brotherhood of Firemen does much for all firemen,
but I firmly believe that the individual fireman, since the
growth of the Brotherhood has been more, not less,
efficient than he was twenty years ago. Membership in
the Brotherhood comes, as I understand it, after a nine
months' probationary period; after a man has shown his
worth, he is then admitted and stands on his footing as a
brother. Now, any man who enters with the purpose of
letting the Brotherhood carry him is not worth much.
The man who counts in the Brotherhood is the man
who pulls his own weight and a little more. Much can
be done by the Brotherhood. I have just hinted, in the
general figures I gave you, at how much has been done,
but it still remains true in the Brotherhood, and everywhere
else throughout American life, that in the last
resort nothing can supply the place of the man's own
individual qualities. We need those, no matter how perfect
the organization is outside. There is just as much
need of nerve, hardihood, power to face risks and accept
responsibilities, in the engineer and the fireman, whether
on a flyer or a freight train, now as there ever was.
Much can be done by the Association. A great deal can
be accomplished by working each for all and all for each;
but we must not forget that the first requisite in accomplishing
working for himself, by developing his own capacity.
The steady way in which a man can rise is illustrated
by a little thing that happened yesterday. I came down
here over the Queen and Crescent Railroad, and the General
Manager, who handled my train and who handled
yours, was Mr. Maguire. I used to know him in the old
days when he was on his way up, and he began right at
the bottom. He was a fireman at one time. He worked
his way straight up, and now he is General Manager.
I believe so emphatically in your organization because,
while it teaches the need of working in union, of working
in association, of working with deep in our hearts, not
merely on our lips, the sense of Brotherhood, yet of
necessity it still keeps, as your organization always must
keep, to the forefront the worth of the individual qualities
of a man. I said to you that I came here in a sense
not to speak to you, but to use your experience as an
object-lesson for all of us, an object-lesson in good American
citizenship. All professions, of course, do not call
for the exercise to the same degree of the qualities of
which I have spoken. Your profession is one of those
which I am inclined to feel play in modern life a greater
part from the standpoint of character than we entirely
realize. There is in modern life, with the growth of
civilization and luxury, a certain tendency to softening
of the national fibre. There is a certain tendency to forget,
in consequence of their disuse, the rugged virtues
which lie at the back of manhood; and I feel that professions
like yours, like the profession of the railroad men of
the country, have a tonic effect upon the whole body
politic.
It is a good thing that there should be a large body of
our fellow-citizens—that there should be a profession—
whose members must, year in and year out, display
those old, old qualities of courage, daring, resolution,
to see all our people develop the softer, gentler virtues
to an ever-increasing degree, but I hope never to see
them lose the sterner virtues that make men men.
A man is not going to be a fireman or an engineer, or
serve well in any other capacity on a railroad long if he
has a "streak of yellow" in him. You are going to find
it out, and he is going to be painfully conscious of it,
very soon. It is a fine thing for our people that we should
have those qualities in evidence before us in the life-work
of a big group of our citizens.
In American citizenship, we can succeed permanently
only upon the basis of standing shoulder to shoulder,
working in association, by organization, each working for
all, and yet remembering that we need each so to shape
things that each man can develop to best advantage all
the forces and powers at his command. In your organization
you accomplish much by means of the Brotherhood,
but you accomplish it because of the men who
go to make up that brotherhood.
If you had exactly the organization, exactly the laws,
exactly the system, and yet were yourselves a poor set
of men, the system would not save you. I will guarantee
that, from time to time, you have men go in to try to
serve for the nine months who prove that they do not
have the stuff in them out of which you can make good
men. You have to have the stuff in you, and, if you have
the stuff, you can make out of it a much finer man by
means of the association—but you must have the material
out of which to make it. So it is in citizenship.
And now let me say a word, speaking not merely especially
to the Brotherhood, but to all our citizens. Governor
McMillin, Mr. Mayor: I fail to see how any American
can come to Chattanooga and go over the great battlefields
in the neighborhood—the battle-fields here in this
State and just across the border in my mother's State of
of the mighty deeds done by the men who wore
the blue and the men who wore the gray, and not go away
a better American, prouder of the country, prouder because
of the valor displayed on both sides in the contest
—the valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to the right as
each side saw the right. Yesterday I was presented with
a cane cut from the Chickamauga battle-field by some
young men of northern Georgia. On the cane were
engraved the names of three Union generals and three
Confederate generals. One of those Union generals was
at that time showing me over the battle-field—General
Boynton. Under one of the Confederate generals—General
Wheeler—I myself served. In my regiment there
served under me in the ranks a son of General Hood,
who commanded at one time the Confederate army against
General Sherman. The only captain whom I had the
opportunity of promoting to field rank, and to whom this
promotion was given for gallantry on the field, was Micah
Jenkins, of South Carolina, the son of a Confederate
general, whose name you will find recorded among those
who fought at Chickamauga.
Two of my captains were killed at Santiago: one was
Allyn Capron, the fifth in line who, from father to son,
had served in the regular army of the United States, who
had served in every war in which our country had been
engaged; the other, Bucky O'Neill. His father had
fought under Meagher, when, on the day at Fredericksburg,
his brigade left more men under the stone wall than
did any other brigade. I had in my regiment men from the
North and the South; men from the East and the West;
men whose fathers had fought under Grant, and whose
fathers had fought under Lee; college graduates, capitalists'
sons, wage workers, the man of means and the man
who all his life had owed each day's bread to the day's toil.
I had Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and Gentile under me.
among the first white men to settle on Massachusetts Bay
and on the banks of the James, and others whose parents
had come from Germany, from Ireland, from England,
from France. They were all Americans, and nothing
else, and each man stood on his worth as a man, to be
judged by it, and to succeed or fail accordingly as he did
well or ill. Compared to the giant death-wrestles that
reeled over the mountains round about this city the fight
at Santiago was the merest skirmish; but the spirit in
which we handled ourselves there, I hope, was the spirit in
which we have to face our duties as citizens if we are to
make this Republic what it must be made.
Yesterday, in passing over the Chickamauga battlefield,
I was immensely struck by the monument raised by
Kentucky to the Union and Confederate soldiers from
Kentucky who fell on that battle-field. The inscription
reads as follows: "As we are united in life, and they
united in death, let one monument perpetuate their
deeds, and one people, forgetful of all asperities, forever
hold in grateful remembrance all the glories of that terrible
conflict which made all men free and retained every
star on the nation's flag." That is a good sentiment.
That is a sentiment by which we can all stand. And oh,
my friends! what does that sentiment have as its underlying
spirit? The spirit of brotherhood!
I firmly believe in my countrymen, and therefore I believe
that the chief thing necessary in order that they shall
work together is that they shall know one another—that
the Northerner shall know the Southerner, and the man
of one occupation know the man of another occupation;
the man who works in one walk of life know the man who
works in another walk of life, so that we may realize that
the things which divide us are superficial, are unimportant,
and that we are, and must ever be, knit together into one
indissoluble mass by our common American brotherhood.
IX
AT MUSIC HALL, CINCINNATI, OHIO, ON THE
EVENING OF SEPTEMBER 20, 1902
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow-Americans:
I shall ask your attention to what I say to-night, because
I intend to make a perfectly serious argument to
you, and I shall be obliged if you will remain as still as
possible; and I ask that those at the very back will remember
that if they talk or make a noise it interferes
with the hearing of the rest. I intend to speak to you
on a serious subject and to make an argument as the
Chief Executive of a nation, who is the President of all
the people, without regard to party, without regard to
section. I intend to make to you an argument from the
standpoint simply of one American talking to his fellow-Americans
upon one of the great subjects of interest to
all alike; and that subject is what are commonly known
as the trusts. The word is used very loosely and almost
always with technical inaccuracy. The average man,
however, when he speaks of the trusts means rather
vaguely all of the very big corporations, the growth of
which has been so signal a feature of our modern civilization,
and especially those big corporations which, though
organized in one State, do business in several States, and
often have a tendency to monopoly.
The whole subject of the trusts is of vital concern to us,
because it presents one, and perhaps the most conspicuous,
of the many problems forced upon our attention by
place during the last century, a development which is
occurring in all civilized countries, notably in our own.
There have been many factors responsible for bringing
about these changed conditions. Of these, steam and
electricity are the chief. The extraordinary changes in
the methods of transportation of merchandise and of
transmission of news have rendered not only possible, but
inevitable, the immense increase in the rate of growth of
our great industrial centres—that is, of our great cities.
I want you to bring home to yourselves that fact. When
Cincinnati was founded, news could be transmitted and
merchandise carried exactly as had been the case in the
days of the Roman Empire. You had here on your river
the flatboat, you had on the ocean the sailing-ship, you
had the pack-train, you had the wagon, and every one of
the four was known when Babylon fell. The change in the
last hundred years has been greater by far than the changes
in all the preceding three thousand. Those are the facts.
Because of them have resulted the specialization of industries,
and the unexampled opportunities offered for the
employment of huge amounts of capital, and therefore
for the rise in the business world of those master minds
through whom alone it is possible for such vast amounts
of capital to be employed with profit. It matters very
little whether we like these new conditions or whether
we dislike them; whether we like the creation of
these new opportunities or not. Many admirable qualities
which were developed in the older, simpler, less progressive
life, have tended to atrophy under our rather
feverish, high-pressure, complex life of to-day. But our
likes and dislikes have nothing to do with the matter.
The new conditions are here. You can't bring back the
old days of the canal-boat and stage-coach if you wish.
The steamboat and the railroad are here. The new forces
have produced both good and evil. We cannot get rid
them; and our instant duty is to try to accommodate
our social, economic, and legislative life to them, and to
frame a system of law and conduct under which we shall
get out of them the utmost possible benefit and the least
possible amount of harm. It is foolish to pride ourselves
upon our progress and prosperity, upon our commanding
position in the international industrial world, and at the
same time have nothing but denunciation for the men to
whose commanding position we in part owe this very
progress and prosperity, this commanding position.
Whenever great social or industrial changes take place,
no matter how much good there may be to them, there
is sure to be some evil, and it usually takes mankind a
number of years and a good deal of experimenting before
they find the right ways in which, so far as possible, to
control the new evil, without at the same time nullifying
the new good. I am stating facts so obvious that if each
one of you will think them over, you will think them
trite, but if you read or listen to some of the arguments
advanced, you will come to the conclusion that there is
need of learning these trite truths. In these circumstances
the effort to bring the new tendencies to a standstill
is always futile and generally mischievous; but it is
possible somewhat to develop them aright. Law can to
a degree guide, protect, and control industrial development,
but it can never cause it, or play more than a subordinate
part in its healthy development—unfortunately
it is easy enough by bad laws to bring it to an almost
complete stop.
In dealing with the big corporations which we call
trusts, we must resolutely purpose to proceed by evolution
and not revolution. We wish to face the facts, declining
to have our vision blinded either by the folly of
. those who say there are no evils, or by the more dangerous
folly of those who either see, or make believe that
who if given their way would destroy the evil by the
simple process of bringing ruin and disaster to the entire
country. The evils attendant upon over-capitalization
alone are, in my judgment, sufficient to warrant a far
closer supervision and control than now exist over the
great corporations. Wherever a substantial monopoly can
be shown to exist, we should certainly try our utmost
to devise an expedient by which it can be controlled.
Doubtless some of the evils existing in or because of the
great corporations, cannot be cured by any legislation
which has yet been proposed, and doubtless others, which
have really been incident to the sudden development in
the formation of corporations of all kinds, will in the
end cure themselves. But there will remain a certain
number which can be cured if we decide that by the
power of the Government they are to be cured. The
surest way to prevent the possibility of curing any of
them is to approach the subject in a spirit of violent rancor,
complicated with total ignorance of business interests,
and fundamental incapacity or unwillingness to understand
the limitations upon all law-making bodies. No
problem, and least of all so difficult a problem as this,
can be solved if the qualities brought to its solution are
panic, fear, envy, hatred, and ignorance. There can
exist in a free republic no man more wicked, no man
more dangerous to the people, than he who would
arouse these feelings in the hope that they would redound
to his own political advantage. Corporations
that are handled honestly and fairly, so far from being
an evil, are a natural business evolution and make
for the general prosperity of our land. We do not wish
to destroy corporations, but we do wish to make them
subserve the public good. All individuals, rich or poor,
private or corporate, must be subject to the law of the.
land; and the Government will hold them to a rigid obedience
private citizen, must be held to strict compliance with the
will of the people as expressed in the fundamental law.
The rich man who does not see that this is in his interest
is, indeed, short-sighted. When we make him obey the
law we insure for him the absolute protection of the law.
The savings banks show what can be done in the way
of genuinely beneficent work by large corporations when
intelligently administered and supervised. They now
hold over twenty-six hundred millions of the people's
money and pay annually about one hundred millions of
interest or profit to their depositors. There is no talk of
danger from these corporations; yet they possess great
power, holding over three times the amount of our present
national debt; more than all the currency, gold,
silver, greenbacks, etc., in circulation in the United
States. The chief reason for there being no talk of danger
from them is that they are, on the whole, faithfully
administered for the benefit of all, under wise laws which
require frequent and full publication of their condition,
and which prescribe certain needful regulations with which
they have to comply, while at the same time giving full
scope for the business enterprise of their managers within
these limits.
Now, of course, savings banks are as highly specialized
a class of corporations as railroads, and we cannot force
too far the analogy with other corporations; but there
are certain conditions which I think we can lay down as
indispensable to the proper treatment of all corporations
which from their size have become important factors in
the social development of the community.
Before speaking, however, of what can be done by way
of remedy, let me say a word or two as to certain proposed
remedies which, in my judgment, would be ineffective or
mischievous. The first thing to remember is that if we
are to accomplish any good at all it must be by resolutely
in the conduct of big corporations, while steadfastly refusing
to assent to indiscriminate assault upon all forms
of corporate capital as such. The line of demarcation we
draw must always be on conduct, not upon wealth; our
objection to any given corporation must be, not that it is
big, but that it behaves badly. Perfectly simple again,
my friends, but not always heeded by some of those who
would strive to teach us how to act toward big corporations.
Treat the head of the corporation as you would
treat all other men. If he does well stand by him. You
will occasionally find the head of a big corporation who
objects to that treatment; very good, apply it all the
more carefully. Remember, after all, that he who objects
because he is the head of a big corporation to being
treated like any one else is only guilty of the same sin as
the man who wishes him treated worse than any one else
because he is the head of a big corporation. Demagogic
denunciation of wealth is never wholesome and generally
dangerous; and not a few of the proposed methods of
curbing the trusts are dangerous chiefly because all insincere
advocacy of the impossible is dangerous. It is
an unhealthy thing for a community when the appeal is
made to follow a course which those who make the appeal
either do know or ought to know cannot be followed;
and which if followed would result in disaster to
everybody. Loose talk about destroying monopoly out
of hand, without a hint as to how the monopoly should
even be defined, offers a case in point.
Nor can we afford to tolerate any proposal which will
strike at the so-called trusts only by striking at the general
well-being. We are now enjoying a period of great prosperity.
The prosperity is generally diffused through all
sections and through all classes. Doubtless there are some
individuals who do not get enough of it, and there are
others who get too much. That is simply another way of
the best human system does not work perfectly. You don't
have to take my word for that. Look back just nine years.
In 1893 nobody was concerned in downing the trusts.
Everybody was concerned in trying to get up himself.
The men who propose to get rid of the evils of the trusts
by measures which would do away with the general wellbeing,
advocate a policy which would not only be a damage
to the community as a whole, but which would defeat
its own professed object. If we are forced to the alternative
of choosing either a system under which most of
us prosper somewhat, though a few of us prosper too
much, or else a system under which no one prospers
enough, of course we will choose the former. If the
policy advocated is so revolutionary and destructive as
to involve the whole community in the crash of common
disaster, it is as certain as anything can be that when the
disaster has occurred all efforts to regulate the trusts will
cease, and that the one aim will be to restore prosperity.
A remedy much advocated at the moment is to take
off the tariff from all articles which are made by trusts.
To do this it will be necessary first to define trusts. The
language commonly used by the advocates of the method
implies that they mean all articles made by large corporations,
and that the changes in tariff are to be made with
punitive intent towards these large corporations. Of
course, if the tariff is to be changed in order to punish
them, it should be changed so as to punish those that do
ill, not merely those that are prosperous. It would be
neither just nor expedient to punish the big corporations
as big corporations; what we wish to do is to protect the
people from any evil that may grow out of their existence
or mal-administration. Some of those corporations do
well and others do ill. If in any case the tariff is found
to foster a monopoly which does ill, of course no protectionist
would object to a modification of the tariff
the so-called trust really monopolize the market. Take
any very big corporation—I could mention them by the
score—which controls say something in the neighborhood
of half of the products of a given industry. It is the kind
of corporation that is always spoken of as a trust. Surely,
in rearranging the schedules affecting such a corporation
it would be necessary to consider the interests of its
smaller competitors which control the remaining part, and
which, being weaker, would suffer most from any tariff
designed to punish all the producers; for, of course, the
tariff must be made light or heavy for big and little producers
alike. Moreover, such a corporation necessarily
employs very many thousands, often very many tens of
thousands of workmen, and the minute we proceeded
from denunciation to action it would be necessary to consider
the interests of these workmen. Furthermore, the
products of many trusts are unprotected, and would be
entirely unaffected by any change in the tariff, or at most
very slightly so. The Standard Oil Company offers a
case in point; and the corporations which control the
anthracite coal output offer another—for there is no duty
whatever on anthracite coal.
I am not now discussing the question of the tariff
as such; whether from the standpoint of the fundamental
difference between those who believe in a protective
tariff and those who believe in free trade; or
from the standpoint of those who, while they believe
in a protective tariff, feel that there could be a rearrangement
of our schedules, either by direct legislation
or by reciprocity treaties, which would result in enlarging
our markets; nor yet from the standpoint of those
who feel that stability of economic policy is at the moment
our prime economic need, and that the benefits to be
derived from any change in schedules would not compensate
for the damage to business caused by the widespread
revision of the tariff at this moment. Without regard to
the wisdom of any one of those three positions, it remains
true that the real evils connected with the trusts cannot
be remedied by any change in the tariff laws. The trusts
can be damaged by depriving them of the benefits of a
protective tariff, only on condition of damaging all their
smaller competitors, and all the wage workers employed
in the industry. This point is very important, and it is
desirable to avoid any misunderstanding concerning it.
I am not now considering whether or not, on grounds
totally unconnected with the trusts, it would be well
to lower the duties on various schedules, either by direct
legislation, or by legislation or treaties designed to secure
as an offset reciprocal advantages from the nations
with which we trade. My point is that changes in the
tariff would have little appreciable effect on the trusts save
as they shared in the general harm or good proceeding
from such changes. No tariff change would help one of
our smaller corporations, or one of our private individuals
in business, still less one of our wage workers, as against
a large corporation in the same business; on the contrary,
if it bore heavily on the large corporation, it would inevitably
be felt still more by that corporation's weaker rivals,
while any injurious result would of necessity be shared by
both the employer and the employed in the business concerned.
The immediate introduction of substantial free
trade in all articles manufactured by trusts, that is, by the
largest and most successful corporations, would not affect
some of the most powerful of our business combinations
in the least, save by the damage done to the general business
welfare of the country; others would undoubtedly
be seriously affected, but much less so than their weaker
rivals, while the loss would be divided between the capitalists
and the laborers; and after the years of panic and
distress had been lived through, and some return to
plane of prosperity than before, the relative difference between
the trusts and their rivals would remain as marked
as ever. In other words, the trust, or big corporation,
would have suffered relatively to, and in the interest of,
its foreign competitor; but its relative position towards
its American competitors would probably be improved;
little would have been done towards cutting out or minimizing
the evils in the trusts; nothing towards securing
adequate control and regulation of the large modern corporations.
In other words, the question of regulating
the trusts with a view to minimizing or abolishing the
evils existent in them, is separate and apart from the
question of tariff revision.
You must face the fact that only harm will come from
a proposition to attack the so-called trusts in a vindictive
spirit by measures conceived solely with a desire of hurting
them, without regard as to whether or not discrimination
should be made between the good and evil in them,
and without even any regard as to whether a necessary
sequence of the action would be the hurting of other
interests. The adoption of such a policy would mean
temporary damage to the trusts, because it would mean
temporary damage to all of our business interests; but
the effect would be only temporary, for exactly as the
damage affected all alike, good and bad, so the reaction
would affect all alike, good and bad. The necessary
supervision and control in which I firmly believe as the
only method of eliminating the real evils of the trusts
must come through wisely and cautiously framed legislation
which shall aim, in the first place, to give definite
control to some sovereign over the great corporations,
and which shall be followed, when once this power has
been conferred, by a system giving to the Government
the full knowledge which is the essential for satisfactory
action. Then when this knowledge—one of the essential
what further steps of any kind are necessary can be taken
with the confidence born of the possession of power to
deal with the subject, and of a thorough knowledge of
what should and can be done in the matter.
We need additional power; and we need knowledge.
Our Constitution was framed when the economic conditions
were so different that each State could wisely be
left to handle the corporations within its limits as it saw
fit. Nowadays all the corporations which I am considering
do what is really an interstate business, and as the States
have proceeded on very different lines in regulating them,
at present a corporation will be organized in one State, not
because it intends to do business in that State, but because
it does not, and therefore that State can give it better
privileges, and then it will do business in some other
States, and will claim not to be under the control of the
States in which it does business; and of course it is not
the object of the State creating it to exercise any control
over it, as it does not do any business in that State.
Such a system cannot obtain. There must be some sovereign.
It might be better if all the States could agree
along the same lines in dealing with these corporations,
but I see not the slightest prospect of such an agreement.
Therefore I personally feel that ultimately the nation will
have to assume the responsibility of regulating these very
large corporations which do an interstate business. The
States must combine to meet the way in which capital
has combined; and the way in which the States can combine
is through the National Government. But I firmly
believe that all these obstacles can be met if only we face
them, both with the determination to overcome them,
and with the further determination to overcome them in
ways which shall not do damage to the country as a
whole; which, on the contrary, shall further our industrial
development, and shall help instead of hindering all
are just and fair towards all men.
Without the adoption of a constitutional amendment
my belief is that a good deal can be -done by law. It is
difficult to say exactly how much, because experience has
taught us that in dealing with these subjects where the
lines dividing the rights and duties of the States and of
the nation are in doubt it has sometimes been difficult
for Congress to forecast the action of the courts upon its
legislation. Such legislation (whether obtainable now,
or obtainable only after a constitutional amendment)
should provide for a reasonable supervision, the most
prominent feature of which at first should be publicity;
that is, the making public both to the governmental
authorities and to the people at large the essential facts
in which the public is concerned. This would give us
exact knowledge of many points which are now not only
in doubt but the subject of fierce controversy. Moreover,
the mere fact of the publication would cure some
very grave evils, for the light of day is a deterrent to
wrong-doing. It would doubtless disclose other evils
with which for the time being we could devise no way to
grapple. Finally, it would disclose others which could
be grappled with and cured by further legislative action.
Remember, I advocate the action which the President
can only advise, and which he has no power himself to
take. Under our present legislative and constitutional
limitations, the national executive can work only between
narrow lines in the field of action concerning great corporations.
Between those lines, I assure you that exact
and even-handed justice will be dealt, and is being dealt,
to all men, without regard to persons.
I wish to repeat with all emphasis that, desirable though
it is that the nation should have the power I suggest, it is
equally desirable that it should be used with wisdom and
self-restraint. The mechanism of modern business is
with it would be disastrous. We should
not be made timid or daunted by the size of the problem;
we should not fear to undertake it; but we should undertake
it with ever present in our minds dread of the sinister
spirits of rancor, ignorance, and vanity. We need to
keep steadily in mind the fact that besides the tangible
property in each corporation there lies behind the spirit
which brings it success, and in the case of each very successful
corporation this is usually the spirit of some one
man or set of men. Under exactly similar conditions
one corporation will make a stupendous success where
another makes a stupendous failure, simply because one
is well managed and the other is not. While making it
clear that we do not intend to allow wrong-doing by one
of the captains of industry any more than by the humblest
private in the industrial ranks, we must also in the interests
of all of us avoid cramping a strength which, if
beneficently used, will be for the good of all of us. The
marvellous prosperity we have been enjoying for the past
few years has been due primarily to the high average of
honesty, thrift, and business capacity among our people
as a whole; but some of it has also been due to the ability
of the men who are the industrial leaders of the nation.
In securing just and fair dealing by these men let us remember
to do them justice in return, and this not only
because it is our duty, but because it is our interest; not
only for their sakes, but for ours. We are neither the
friend of the rich man as such nor the friend of the poor
man as such; we are the friend of the honest man, rich or
poor; and we intend that all men, rich and poor alike,
shall obey the law alike and receive its protection alike.
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.
XI
AT THE BANQUET OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE
OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK, AT
NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 11, 1902
Mr. President, gentlemen, and you, the guests, whom we
welcome here this evening:
I do not wish to speak to you in the language of idle
compliment, and yet it is but a bare statement of fact to
say that nowhere in our country could there be gathered
an audience which would stand as more typically characteristic
than this of all those qualities and attributes which
have given us of the United States our commanding position
in the industrial world. There is no need of my
preaching to this gathering the need of combining efficiency
with upright dealing, for as an American and as a
citizen of New York I am proud to feel that the name of
your organization carries with it a guaranty of both; and
your practice counts for more than any preaching could
possibly count. New York is a city of national importance,
because its position toward the nation is unique,
and the Chamber of Commerce of New York must of
necessity be an element of weight in the commercial
and industrial welfare of the entire people. New York is
the great port of entry for our country—the port in which
centres the bulk of the foreign commerce of the country,
—and her welfare is therefore no matter of mere local or
municipal, but of national, concern. The conduct of the
Government in dealing with all matters affecting the financial
take into account this fact; and it must be taken into
account in appreciating the importance of the part played
by the New York Chamber of Commerce.
This body stands for the triumphs of peace both abroad
and at home. We have passed that stage of national development
when depreciation of other peoples is felt as a
tribute to our own. We watch the growth and prosperity
of other nations, not with hatred or jealousy, but with
sincere and friendly good-will. I think I can say safely
that we have shown by our attitude toward Cuba, by our
attitude toward China, that as regards weaker powers our
desire is that they may be able to stand alone, and that
if they will only show themselves willing to deal honestly
and fairly with the rest of mankind we on our side will do
all we can to help, not to hinder, them. With the great
powers of the world we desire no rivalry that is not honorable
to both parties. We wish them well. We believe
that the trend of the modern spirit is ever stronger toward
peace, not war; toward friendship, not hostility, as the
normal international attitude. We are glad indeed that
we are on good terms with all the other peoples of mankind,
and no effort on our part shall be spared to secure
a continuance of these relations. And remember, gentlemen,
that we shall be a potent factor for peace largely in
proportion to the way in which we make it evident that
our attitude is due, not to weakness, not to inability to
defend ourselves, but to a genuine repugnance to wrongdoing,
a genuine desire for self-respecting friendship with
our neighbors. The voice of the weakling or the craven
counts for nothing when he clamors for peace; but the
voice of the just man armed is potent. We need to keep
in a condition of preparedness, especially as regards our
navy, not because we want war, but because we desire to
stand with those whose plea for peace is listened to with
respectful attention.
Important though it is that we should have peace
abroad, it is even more important that we should have
peace at home. You, men of the Chamber of Commerce,
to whose efforts we owe so much of our industrial wellbeing,
can, and I believe surely will, be influential in
helping toward that industrial peace which can obtain in
society only when in their various relations employer and
employed alike show not merely insistence each upon his
own rights, but also regard for the rights of others, and
a full acknowledgment of the interests of the third party
—the public. It is no easy matter to work out a system
or rule of conduct, whether with or without the help of
the lawgiver, which shall minimize that jarring and clashing
of interests in the industrial world which causes so
much individual irritation and suffering at the present
day, and which at times threatens baleful consequences
to large portions of the body politic. But the importance
of the problem can not be overestimated, and it deserves
to receive the careful thought of all men such as those
whom I am addressing to-night. There should be no
yielding to wrong; but there should most certainly be
not only desire to do right, but a willingness each to try
to understand the view-point of his fellow, with whom,
for weal or for woe, his own fortunes are indissolubly
bound.
No patent remedy can be devised for the solution of
these grave problems in the industrial world; but we may
rest assured that they can be solved at all only if we
bring to the solution certain old-time virtues, and if we
strive to keep out of the solution some of the most
familiar and most undesirable of the traits to which mankind
has owed untold degradation and suffering throughout
the ages. Arrogance, suspicion, brutal envy of the
well-to-do, brutal indifference toward those who are not
well-to-do, the hard refusal to consider the rights of
others, the foolish refusal to consider the limits of beneficent
greed, whether it take the form of plunder of the fortunate
or of oppression of the unfortunate—from these and
from all kindred vices this nation must be kept free if it
is to remain in its present position in the forefront of the
peoples of mankind. On the other hand, good will come,
even out of the present evils, if we face them armed with
the old homely virtues; if we show that we are fearless
of soul, cool of head, and kindly of heart; if, without
betraying the weakness that cringes before wrong-doing,
we yet show by deeds and words our knowledge that in
such a government as ours each of us must be in very
truth his brother's keeper.
At a time when the growing complexity of our social
and industrial life has rendered inevitable the intrusion
of the State into spheres of work wherein it formerly
took no part, and when there is also a growing tendency
to demand the illegitimate and unwise transfer to the
Government of much of the work that should be done
by private persons, singly or associated together, it is a
pleasure to address a body whose members possess to an
eminent degree the traditional American self-reliance of
spirit which makes them scorn to ask from the Government,
whether of State or of Nation, anything but a fair
field and no favor—who confide not in being helped by
others, but in their own skill, energy, and business capacity
to achieve success. The first requisite of a good
citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and
willing to pull his weight—that he shall not be a mere
passenger, but shall do his share in the work that each
generation of us finds ready to hand; and, furthermore,
that in doing his work he shall show not only the capacity
for sturdy self-help, but also self-respecting regard for the
rights of others.
The Chamber of Commerce, it is no idle boast to say,
stands in a pre-eminent degree for those qualities which
man, whose success is won in ways honorable to himself
and beneficial to his fellows. There are very different
kinds of success. There is the success that brings with it
the seared soul—the success which is achieved by wolfish
greed and vulpine cunning—the success which makes
honest men uneasy or indignant in its presence. Then
there is the other kind of success—the success which
comes as the reward of keen insight, of sagacity, of resolution,
of address, combined with unflinching rectitude of
behavior, public and private. The first kind of success
may, in a sense—and a poor sense at that—benefit the
individual, but it is always and necessarily a curse to the
community; whereas the man who wins the second kind,
as an incident of its winning, becomes a beneficiary to
the whole commonwealth. Throughout its history the
Chamber of Commerce has stood for this second and
higher kind of success. It is therefore fitting that I should
come on here as the Chief Executive of the nation to wish
you well in your new home; for you belong not merely
to the city, not merely to the State, but to all the country,
and you stand high among the great factors in building
up that marvellous prosperity which the entire country
now enjoys. The continuance of this prosperity depends
in no small measure upon your sanity and common-sense,
upon the way in which you combine energy in action
with conservative refusal to take part in the reckless
gambling which is so often bred by, and which so inevitably
puts an end to, prosperity. You are men of might
in the world of American effort; you are men whose
names stand high in the esteem of our people; you are
spoken of in terms like those used in the long-gone
ages when it was said of the Phoenician cities that
their merchants were princes. Great is your power and
great, therefore, your responsibility. Well and faithfully
have you met this responsibility in the past. We look
future, and it is therefore with sincerity that I bid you
Godspeed this evening and wish for you, in the name
of the nation, a career of ever-increasing honor and
usefulness.
XII
AT THE DEDICATORY EXERCISES OF THE NEW
HIGH-SCHOOL BUILDING, PHILADELPHIA,
PA., NOVEMBER 22, 1902
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of being present at the
formal dedication of this new building, which in its management
stands in line of succession to a series of buildings,
themselves typifying in no small degree the extraordinary
development of the public-school system of the United
States. It was some sixty-four years ago that this institution
was first established under a man of great eminence
alike in the work of pedagogy and in other fields—Professor
Biggs. At the time when it was started the public-school
system of the United States had begun and was in
the process of its first development. Now, in the city of
Philadelphia in attendance upon the public schools, including
the night schools, there are some hundred and
seventy thousand pupils and over four thousand teachers.
The development of the high school, especially during
the last half century, has been literally phenomenal.
Nothing like our present system of education was known
in earlier times. No such system of popular education
for the people by the representatives of the people
existed.
It is, of course, a mere truism to say that the stability
and future welfare of our institutions of government depend
upon the grade of citizenship turned out from our
of individuals associated in private life, are better worth
the admiration and respect of all who value citizenship at
its true worth, than the body composed of the teachers
in the public schools throughout the length and breadth
of this Union. They have to deal with citizenship in the
raw and turn it out something like a finished product. I
think that all of us who also endeavor to deal with that
citizenship in the raw in our own homes appreciate the
burden and the responsibility. The training given in the
public schools must, of course, be not merely a training
in intellect, but a training in what counts for infinitely
more than intellect,—a training in character. And the
chief factor in that training must be the personal equation
of the teachers; the influence exerted, sometimes consciously
and sometimes unconsciously, by the man or
woman who stands in so peculiar a relation to the boys
and girls under his or her care—a relation closer, more
intricate, and more vital in its after-effects than any other
relation save that of parent and child. Wherever a burden
of that kind is laid, those who carry it necessarily
carry a great responsibility. There can be no greater.
Scant should be our patience with any man or woman
doing a bit of work vitally worth doing, who does not
approach it in the spirit of sincere love for the work, and
of desire to do it well for the work's sake.
Doubtless most of you remember the old distinction
drawn between the two kinds of work, the work done for
the sake of the fee and the work done for the sake of the
work itself. The man or woman in public or private life
who ever works only for the sake of the reward that comes
outside of the work, will in the long run do poor work.
The man or woman who does work worth doing is the
man or woman who lives, who breathes that work; with
whom it is ever present in his or her soul; whose ambition
is to do it well and to feel rewarded by the thought of
whole country under an obligation. As a body all those
connected with the education of our people are entitled
to the heartiest praise from all lovers of their country,
because as a body they are devoting heart and soul
to the welfare of those under them.
It is a poor type of school nowadays that has not
a good playground attached. It is not so long since,
in my own city at least, this was held as revolutionary
doctrine, especially in the crowded quarters where playgrounds
were most needed. People said they did n't
need playgrounds. It was a new-fangled idea. They
expected to make good citizens of the boys and girls who,
when they were not in school, were put upon the streets
in the crowded quarters of New York to play at the kind
of games alone that they could play at in the streets. We
have passed that stage. I think we realize what a good
healthy playground means to children. I think we understand
not only the effects for good upon their bodies, but
for good upon their minds. We need healthy bodies.
We need to have schools physically developed.
Sometimes you can develop character by the direct inculcation
of moral precept; a good deal more often you
cannot. You develop it less by precept than by your
practice. Let it come as an incident of the association
with you; as an incident to the general tone of the whole
body, the tone which in the aggregate we all create. Is
not that the experience of all of you, in dealing with
these children in the schools, in dealing with them in the
family, in dealing with them in bodies anywhere? They
are quick to take the tone of those to whom they look
up, and if they do not look up to you, then you can
preach virtue all you wish, but the effect will be small.
I have not come here to try to make any extended
speech to you, but I should hold myself a poor citizen if I
did not welcome the chance to wish you Godspeed in
your work as representatives of that great body of public-school
teachers, upon the success of whose efforts to train
aright the children of to-day depends the safety of our
institutions of to-morrow.
XIII
AT THE FOUNDERS' DAY BANQUET OF THE
UNION LEAGUE, PHILADELPHIA, NOVEMBER
22, 1902
Mr. President, gentlemen of the Union League:
Forty years ago this Club was founded, in the dark
days of the Civil War, to uphold the hands of Abraham
Lincoln and give aid to those who battled for the Union
and for human liberty. Two years ago President McKinley
came here as your guest to thank you, and through
you all those far-sighted and loyal men who had supported
him in his successful effort to keep untarnished the national
good faith at home and the national honor abroad,
and to bring back to this country the material well-being,
which we now so abundantly enjoy. It was no accident
which made the men of this Club who stood as in a peculiar
sense the champions and upholders of the principles
of Lincoln in the early sixties stand no less stoutly for
those typified in the person of McKinley during the closing
years of the century. The qualities apt to make men
respond to the call of duty in one crisis are also apt to
make them respond to a similar call in a crisis of a different
character. The traits which enabled our people to
pass unscathed through the fiery ordeal of the Civil War
were the traits upon which we had to rely in the less serious,
but yet serious, dangers by which we were menaced
in 1896, 1898, and 1900.
From the very beginning our people have markedly
combined practical capacity for affairs with power of devotion
rendered the possession of the other of small value. Mere
ability to achieve success in things concerning the body
would not have atoned for the failure to live the life
of high endeavor; and, on the other hand, without a
foundation of those qualities which bring material prosperity
there would be nothing on which the higher life
could be built. The men of the Revolution would have
failed if they had not possessed alike devotion to liberty
and ability (once liberty had been achieved) to show
common-sense and self-restraint in its use. The men of
the great Civil War would have failed had they not possessed
the business capacity which developed and organized
their resources in addition to the stern resolution to
expend these resources as freely as they expended their
blood in furtherance of the great cause for which their
hearts leaped. It is this combination of qualities that has
made our people succeed. Other peoples have been as
devoted to liberty, and yet, because of lack of hardheaded
common-sense and of ability to show restraint
and subordinate individual passions for the general good,
have failed so signally in the struggle of life as to become
a byword among the nations. Yet other peoples, again,
have possessed all possible thrift and business capacity,
but have been trampled under foot, or have played a sordid
and ignoble part in the world, because their business
capacity was unaccompanied by any of the lift toward
nobler things which marks a great and generous nation.
The stern but just rule of judgment for humanity is that
each nation shall be known by its fruits; and if there are
no fruits, if the nation has failed, it matters but little
whether it has failed through meanness of soul or through
lack of robustness of character. We must judge a nation
by the net result of its life and activity. And so we must
judge the policies of those who at any time control the
destinies of a nation.
Therefore I ask you to-night to look at the results of
the policies championed by President McKinley on both
the occasions when he appealed to the people for their suffrages,
and to see how well that appeal has been justified
by the event. Most certainly I do not claim all the good
that has befallen us during the past six years as due solely
to any human policy. No legislation, however wise, no
Administration, however efficient, can secure prosperity
to a people or greatness to a nation. All that can be
done by the lawmaker and the administrator is to give
the best chance possible for the people of the country
themselves to show the stuff that is in them. President
McKinley was elected in 1896 on the specific pledge
that he would keep the financial honor of the nation
untarnished and would put our economic system on a
stable basis, so that our people might be given a chance
to secure the return of prosperity. Both pledges have
been so well kept that, as is but too often the case,
men are beginning to forget how much the keeping of
them has meant. When people have become very prosperous
they tend to become sluggishly indifferent to the
continuation of the policies that brought about their
prosperity. At such times as these it is of course a mere
law of nature that some men prosper more than others,
and too often those who prosper less, in their jealousy of
their more fortunate brethren, forget that all have prospered
somewhat. I ask you soberly to remember that
the complaint made at the present day of our industrial
or economic conditions never takes the form of stating
that any of our people are less well off than they were
seven or eight years back, before President McKinley
came in and his policies had a chance to be applied; but
that the complaint is that some people have received
more than their share of the good things of the world.
There was no such complaint eight years ago, in the summer
of 1894. Complaint was not then that any one had
enough. Let each one of us think of the affairs of his
own household and his own business, let each of us compare
his standing now with his standing eight years back,
and then let him answer for himself whether it is not true
that the policies for which William McKinley stood in
1896 have justified themselves thrice over by the results
they have brought about.
In 1900 the issues were in part the same, but new ones
had been added. Prosperity had returned; the gold
standard was assured; our tariff was remodelled on the
lines that have marked it at all periods when our wellbeing
was greatest. But, as must often happen, the Presi
dent elected on certain issues was obliged to face others
entirely unforeseen. Rarely indeed have our greatest
men made issues—they have shown their greatness by
meeting them as they arose. President McKinley faced
the problems of the Spanish war and those that followed
it exactly as he had faced the problems of our economic
and financial needs. As a sequel to the war with Spain
we found ourselves in possession of the Philippines under
circumstances which rendered it necessary to subdue a
formidable insurrection which made it impossible for us
with honor or with regard to the welfare of the islands
to withdraw therefrom. The occasion was seized by the
opponents of the President for trying to raise a new
issue, on which they hoped they might be more successful
than on the old. The clamor raised against him was
joined in not only by many honest men who were led
astray by a mistaken view or imperfect knowledge of the
facts, but by all who feared effort, who shrank from the
rough work of endeavor. The campaign of 1900 had to
be fought largely upon the new issue thus raised. President
McKinley met it squarely. Two years and eight
months ago, before his second nomination, he spoke as
follows:
We believe that the century of free government which the
American people have enjoyed has not rendered them irresolute
and faithless, but has fitted them for the great task of lifting
up and assisting to better conditions and larger liberty
those distant peoples who through the issue of battle have
become our wards. Let us fear not. There is no occasion
for faint hearts, no excuse for regrets. Nations do not grow
in strength, the cause of liberty and law is not advanced by
the doing of easy things. The harder the task the greater will
be the result, the benefit, and the honor. To doubt our power
to accomplish it is to lose faith in the soundness and strength
of our popular institutions. . . . We have the new care
and cannot shift it. And, breaking up the camp of ease and
isolation, let us bravely and hopefully and soberly continue
the march of faithful service, and falter not until the work is
done. . . . The burden is our opportunity. The opportunity
is greater than the burden.
There spoke the man who preached the gospel of hope
as well as the gospel of duty, and on the issue thus fairly
drawn between those who said we would do our new
work well and triumphantly and those who said we would
fail lamentably in the effort, the contest was joined. We
won. And now I ask you, two years after the victory,
to look across the seas and judge for yourselves whether
or not the promise has been kept. The prophets of disaster
have seen their predictions so completely falsified
by the event that it is actually difficult to arouse even a
passing interest in their failure. To answer them now,
to review their attack on our army, is of merely academic
interest. They played their brief part of obstruction and
clamor; they said their say; and the current of our life
went over them and they sank under it as did their predecessors
who, thirty-six years before, had declared that
another and greater war was a failure, that another and
greater struggle for true liberty was only a contest for
subjugation in which the United States could never succeed.
absolutely quelled. The war has been brought to an end
sooner than even the most sanguine of us dared to hope.
The world has not in recent years seen any military task
done with more soldierly energy and ability; and done,
moreover, in a spirit of great humanity. The strain on
the army was terrible, for the conditions of climate and
soil made their work harassing to an extraordinary degree,
and the foes in the field were treacherous and cruel,
not merely toward our men, but toward the great multitude
of peaceful islanders who welcomed 'our rule.
Under the strain of well-nigh intolerable provocation
there were shameful instances, as must happen in all
wars, where the soldiers forgot themselves, and retaliated
evil for evil. There were one hundred thousand of our
men in the Philippines, a hundred thousand hired for a
small sum a month apiece, put there under conditions
that strained their nerves to the breaking point, and some
of the hundred thousand did what they ought not to have
done. But out of a hundred thousand men at home,
have all been faultless? Every effort has been made to
detect such cases, to punish the offenders, and to prevent
any recurrence of the deed. It is a cruel injustice to the
gallant men who fought so well in the Philippines not to
recognize that these instances were exceptional, and that
the American troops who served in the far-off tropic
islands deserve praise the same in kind that has always
been given to those who have well and valiantly fought
for the honor of our common flag and common country.
The work of civil administration has kept pace with the
work of military administration, and when on July 4th
last amnesty and peace were declared throughout the
islands the civil government assumed the complete control.
Peace and order now prevail and a greater measure
of prosperity and of happiness than the Filipinos have
ever hitherto known in all their dark and checkered
liberty, a greater chance of happiness, and greater safety
for his life and property than he or his forefathers have
ever before known.
Thus we have met each task that has confronted us
during the past six years. Thus we have kept every
promise made in 1896 and 1900. We have a right to be
proud of the memories of the last six years. But we
must remember that each victory only opens the chance
for a new struggle; that the remembrance of triumphs
achieved in the past is of use chiefly if it spurs us to fresh
effort in the present. No nation has ever prospered as
we are prospering now, and we must see to it that by
our own folly we do not mar this prosperity. Yet we
must see to it also that wherever wrong flourishes it be
repressed. It is not the habit of our people to shirk
issues, but squarely to face them. It is not the habit of
our people to treat a good record in the past as anything
but a reason for expecting an even better record in the
present; and no administration, gentlemen, should ask to
be judged save on those lines. The tremendous growth
of our industrialism has brought to the front many problems
with which we must deal; and I trust that we shall
deal with them along the lines indicated in speech and in
action by that profound jurist and upright and fearless
public servant who represents Pennsylvania in the Cabinet
—Attorney-General Knox. The question of the so-called
trusts is but one of the questions we must meet in connection
with our industrial system. There are many of
them and they are serious; but they can and will be met.
Time may be needed for making the solution perfect;
but it is idle to tell this people that we have not the
power to solve such a problem as that of exercising adequate
supervision over the great industrial combinations
of to-day. We have the power and we shall find out the
way. We shall not act hastily or recklessly; but we have
solution, shall be found, and found it will be.
No nation as great as ours can expect to escape the
penalty of greatness, for greatness does not come without
trouble and labor. There are problems ahead of us
at home and problems abroad, because such problems are
incident to the working out of a great national career.
We do not shrink from them. Scant is our patience with
those who preach the gospel of craven weakness. No
nation under the sun ever yet played a part worth playing
if it feared its fate overmuch—if it did not have the
courage to be great. We of America, we, the sons of a
nation yet in the pride of its lusty youth, spurn the
teachings of distrust, spurn the creed of failure and despair.
We know that the future is ours if we have in us
the manhood to grasp it, and we enter the new century
girding our loins for the contest before us, rejoicing in
the struggle, and resolute so to bear ourselves that the
nation's future shall even surpass her glorious past.
XIV
AT THE BANQUET AT CANTON, OHIO, JANUARY
27, 1903, IN HONOR OF THE BIRTHDAY OF
THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY
Mr. Toastmaster, ladies, and gentlemen:
Throughout our history, and indeed throughout history
generally, it has been given to only a very few thrice-favored
men to take so marked a lead in the crises faced
by their several generations that thereafter each stands as
the embodiment of the triumphant effort of his generation.
President McKinley was one of these men.
If during the lifetime of a generation no crisis occurs
sufficient to call out in marked manner the energies of the
strongest leader, then of course the world does not and
cannot know of the existence of such a leader; and in
consequence there are long periods in the history of every
nation during which no man appears who leaves an indelible
mark in history. If, on the other hand, the crisis
is one so many-sided as to call for the development and
exercise of many distinct attributes, it may be that more
than one man will appear in order that the requirements
shall be fully met. In the Revolution and in the period of
constructive statesmanship immediately following it, for
our good fortune it befell us that the highest military and
the highest civic attributes were embodied in Washington,
and so in him we have one of the undying men of
history—a great soldier, if possible an even greater statesman,
and above all a public servant whose lofty and disinterested
alike on fought fields and in council chambers—of the
most far-reaching service to the Republic. In the Civil
War the two functions were divided, and Lincoln and
Grant will stand forevermore with their names inscribed
on the honor roll of those who have deserved well of mankind
by saving to humanity a precious heritage. In
similar fashion Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson
stand each as the foremost representative of the great
movement of his generation, and their names symbolize
to us their times and the hopes and aspirations of their
times.
It was given to President McKinley to take the foremost
place in our political life at a time when our country
was brought face to face with problems more momentous
than any whose solution we have ever attempted, save
only in the Revolution and in the Civil War; and it was
under his leadership that the nation solved these mighty
problems aright. Therefore he shall stand in the eyes of
history not merely as the first man of his generation, but
as among the greatest figures in our national life, coming
second only to the men of the two great crises in which
the Union was founded and preserved.
No man could carry through successfully such a task
as President McKinley undertook, unless trained by long
years of effort for its performance. Knowledge of his
fellow-citizens, ability to understand them, keen sympathy
with even their innermost feelings, and yet power
to lead them, together with far-sighted sagacity and resolute
belief both in the people and in their future—all
these were needed in the man who headed the march of
our people during the eventful years from 1896 to 1901.
These were the qualities possessed by McKinley and developed
by him throughout his whole history previous to
assuming the Presidency. As a lad he had the inestimable
privilege of serving, first in the ranks, and then as a
righteousness, and grandeur; he was one of those whom
a kindly Providence permitted to take part in a struggle
which ennobled every man who fought therein. He who
when little more than a boy had seen the grim steadfastness
which after four years of giant struggle restored the
Union and freed the slave was not thereafter to be daunted
by danger or frightened out of his belief in the great
destiny of our people.
Some years after the war closed McKinley came to
Congress, and rose, during a succession of terms, to
leadership in his party in the lower House. He also became
governor of his native State, Ohio. During this
varied service he received practical training of the kind
most valuable to him when he became Chief Executive
of the nation. To the high faith of his early years was
added the capacity to realize his ideals, to work with his
fellow-men at the same time that he led them.
President McKinley's rise to greatness had in it nothing
of the sudden, nothing of the unexpected or seemingly
accidental. Throughout his long term of service in Congress
there was a steady increase alike in his power of
leadership and in the recognition of that power both by
his associates in public life and by the public itself. Session
after session his influence in the House grew greater;
his party antagonists grew to look upon him with constantly
increasing respect, his party friends with constantly
increasing faith and admiration. Eight years
before he was nominated for President he was already
considered a Presidential possibility. Four years before
he was nominated only his own high sense of honor prevented
his being made a formidable competitor of the
chief upon whom the choice of the convention then
actually fell. In 1896 he was chosen because the great
mass of his party knew him and believed in him and regarded
him as symbolizing their ideals, as representing
about his nomination and election I do not undervalue
that devoted personal friendship which he had the faculty
to inspire in so marked a degree among the ablest and
most influential leaders; this leadership was of immense
consequence in bringing about the result; but, after all,
the prime factor was the trust in and devotion to him felt
by the great mass of men who had come to accept him
as their recognized spokesman. In his nomination the
national convention of a great party carried into effect
in good faith the deliberate judgment of that party as to
who its candidate should be.
But even as a candidate President McKinley was far
more than the candidate of a party, and as President he
was in the broadest and fullest sense the President of all
the people of all sections of the country.
His first nomination came to him because of the qualities
he had shown in healthy and open political leadership,
the leadership which by word and deed impresses itself as
a virile force for good upon the people at large and which
has nothing in common with mere intrigue or manipulation.
But in 1896 the issue was fairly joined, chiefly
upon a question which as a party question was entirely
new, so that the old lines of political cleavage were in
large part abandoned. All other issues sank in importance
when compared with the vital need of keeping our
financial system on the high and honorable plane imperatively
demanded by our position as a great civilized
power. As the champion of such a principle President
McKinley received the support not only of his own
party, but of hundreds of thousands of those to whom
he had been politically opposed. He triumphed, and he
made good with scrupulous fidelity the promises upon
which the campaign was won. We were at the time in a
period of great industrial depression, and it was promised
for and on behalf of McKinley that if he were elected
but improved and our economic system shaped in
accordance with those theories which have always marked
our periods of greatest prosperity.
The promises were kept and following their keeping
came the prosperity which we now enjoy. All that was
foretold concerning the well-being which would follow the
election of McKinley has been justified by the event,
But, as so often happens in our history, the President
was forced to face questions other than those at issue
at the time of his election. Within a year the situation
in Cuba had become literally intolerable. President McKinley
had fought too well in his youth, he knew too
well at first hand what war really was, lightly to enter
into a struggle. He sought by every honorable means
to preserve peace, to avert war. He made every effort
consistent with the national honor to bring about an
amicable settlement of the Cuban difficulty. Then, when
it became evident that these efforts were useless, that
peace could not be honorably entertained, he devoted his
strength to making the war as short and as decisive as
possible. It is needless to tell the result in detail. Suffice
it to say that rarely indeed in history has a contest
so far-reaching in the importance of its outcome been
achieved with such ease. There followed a harder task.
As a result of the war we came into possession of Cuba,
Porto Rico, and the Philippines. In each island the conditions
were such that we had to face problems entirely
new to our national experience, and, moreover, in each
island or group of islands the problems differed radically
from those presented in the others. In Porto Rico the
task was simple. The island could not be independent.
It became in all essentials a part of the Union. It has
been given all the benefits of our economic and financial
system. Its inhabitants have been given the highest
individual liberty, while yet their government has been
the island can be appealed to as affording a model for all
such experiments in the future; and this result was
mainly owing to the admirable choice of instruments by
President McKinley when he selected the governing
officials.
In Cuba, where we were pledged to give the island independence,
the pledge was kept not merely in letter but
in spirit. It would have been a betrayal of our duty to
have given Cuba independence out of hand. President
McKinley, with his usual singular sagacity in the choice
of agents, selected in General Leonard Wood the man of
all others best fit to bring the island through its uncertain
period of preparation for independence, and the result of
his wisdom was shown when last May the island became
in name and in fact a free republic, for it started with a
better equipment and under more favorable conditions
than had ever previously been the case with any Spanish-American
commonwealth.
Finally, in the Philippines, the problem was one of
great complexity. There was an insurrectionary party
claiming to represent the people of the islands and putting
forth their claim with a certain speciousness which deceived
no small number of excellent men here at home,
and which afforded to yet others a chance to arouse a
factious party spirit against the President. Of course,
looking back, it is now easy to see that it would have
been both absurd and wicked to abandon the Philippine
Archipelago and let the scores of different tribes—Christian,
Mohammedan, and pagan, in every stage of semicivilization
and Asiatic barbarism—turn the islands into a
welter of bloody savagery, with the absolute certainty
that some strong power would have to step in and take
possession. But though now it is easy enough to see
that our duty was to stay in the islands, to put down
the insurrection by force of arms, and then to establish
to see this and to act accordingly at the time of
the first revolt. A weaker and less far-sighted man than
President McKinley would have shrunk from a task very
difficult in itself, and certain to furnish occasion for attack
and misrepresentation no less than for honest misunderstanding.
But President McKinley never flinched.
He refused to consider the thought of abandoning our
duty in our new possessions. While sedulously endeavoring
to act with the utmost humanity toward the insurrectionists,
he never faltered in the determination to put
them down by force of arms, alike for the sake of our
own interest and honor, and for the sake of the interest
of the islanders, and particularly of the great numbers of
friendly natives, including those most highly civilized,
for whom abandonment by us would have meant ruin
and death. Again his policy was most amply vindicated.
Peace has come to the islands, together with a greater
measure of individual liberty and self-government than
they have ever before known. All the tasks set us as a
result of the war with Spain have so far been well and
honorably accomplished, and as a result this nation stands
higher than ever before among the nations of mankind.
President McKinley's second campaign was fought
mainly on the issue of approving what he had done in
his first administration, and specifically what he had done
as regards these problems springing out of the war with
Spain. The result was that the popular verdict in his
favor was more overwhelming than it had been before.
No other President in our history has seen high and
honorable effort crowned with more conspicuous personal
success. No other President entered upon his second
term feeling such right to a profound and peaceful satisfaction.
Then by a stroke of horror, so strange in its
fantastic iniquity as to stand unique in the black annals
of crime, he was struck down. The brave, strong, gentle
woman who wept that she was to walk thenceforth alone
in the shadow. The hideous infamy of the deed shocked
the nation to its depths, for the man thus struck at was
in a peculiar sense the champion of the plain people, in a
peculiar sense the representative and the exponent of those
ideals which, if we live up to them, will make, as they
have largely made, our country a blessed refuge for all
who strive to do right and to live their lives simply and
well as light is given them. The nation was stunned, and
the people mourned with a sense of bitter bereavement
because they had lost a man whose heart beat for them
as the heart of Lincoln once had beaten. We did right
to mourn; for the loss was ours, not his. He died in the
golden fulness of his triumph. He died victorious in
that highest of all kinds of strife—the strife for an ampler,
juster, and more generous national life. For him the
laurel; but woe for those whom he left behind; woe to
the nation that lost him; and woe to mankind that there
should exist creatures so foul that one among them should
strike at so noble a life!
We are gathered together to-night to recall his memory,
to pay our tribute of respect to the great chief and leader
who fell in the harness, who was stricken down while his
eyes were bright with "the light that tells of triumph
tasted." We can honor him best by the way we show in
actual deed that we have taken to heart the lessons of his
life. We must strive to achieve, each in the measure
that he can, something of the qualities which made President
McKinley a leader of men, a mighty power for good
—his strength, his courage, his courtesy and dignity, his
sense of justice, his ever-present kindliness and regard for
the rights of others. He won greatness by meeting and
solving the issues as they arose—not by shirking them—
meeting them with wisdom, with the exercise of the most
skilful and cautious judgment, but with fearless resolution
own merits; he never sought excuse for shirking a task in
the fact that it was different from the one he had expected
to face. The long public career, which opened
when as a boy he carried a musket in the ranks and closed
when as a man in the prime of his intellectual strength he
stood among the world's chief statesmen, came to what
it was because he treated each triumph as opening the
road to fresh effort, not as an excuse for ceasing from
effort. He undertook mighty tasks. Some of them he
finished completely; others we must finish; and there
remain yet others which he did not have to face, but
which if we are worthy to be the inheritors of his principles
we will in our turn face with the same resolution,
the same sanity, the same unfaltering belief in the greatness
of this country, and unfaltering championship of the
rights of each and all of our people, which marked his
high and splendid career.
XV
AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., FEBRUARY
26, 1903, UPON THE OCCASION OF THE BICENTENNIAL
CELEBRATION OF THE BIRTH
OF JOHN WESLEY
Mr. Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of addressing this representative
body of the great church which Wesley founded,
on the occasion of the commemoration of the two hundredth
anniversary of his birth. America, moreover, has
a peculiar proprietary claim on Wesley's memory, for it
is on our continent that the Methodist Church has received
its greatest development. In the days of our
Colonial life Methodism was not, on the whole, a great
factor in the religious and social life of the people. The
Congregationalists were supreme throughout most of New
England; the Episcopalians on the seaboard from New
York southward; while the Presbyterian congregations
were most numerous along what was then the entire
western frontier; and the Quaker, Catholic, and Dutch
Reformed churches each had developments in special
places. The great growth of the Methodist Church, like
the great growth of the Baptist Church, began at about
the time of the Revolutionary War. To-day my theme
is purely Methodism.
Since the days of the Revolution not only has the
Methodist Church increased greatly in the old communities
of the thirteen original States, but it has played a
country and has in consequence assumed a position of
immense importance throughout the vast region west of
the Alleghanies which has been added to our nation since
the days when the Continental Congress first met.
For a century after the Declaration of Independence the
greatest work of our people, with the exception only of the
work of self-preservation under Lincoln, was the work of
the pioneers as they took possession of this continent.
During that century we pushed westward from the Alleghanies
to the Pacific, southward to the Gulf and the Rio
Grande, and also took possession of Alaska. The work of
advancing our boundary, of pushing the frontier across forest
and desert and mountain chain, was the great typical
work of our nation; and the men who did it—the frontiersmen,
the pioneers, the backwoodsmen, plainsmen, mountain
men—formed a class by themselves. It was an iron
task, which none but men of iron soul and iron body could
do. The men who carried it to a successful conclusion
had characters strong alike for good and for evil. Their
rugged natures made them powers who served light or
darkness with fierce intensity; and together with heroic
traits they had those evil and dreadful tendencies which
are but too apt to be found in characters of heroic possibilities.
Such men make the most efficient servants of
the Lord if their abounding vitality and energy are
directed aright; and if misdirected their influence is
equally potent against the cause of Christianity and true
civilization. In the hard and cruel life of the border,
with its grim struggle against the forbidding forces of
wild nature and wilder men, there was much to pull the
frontiersman down. If left to himself, without moral
teaching and moral guidance, without any of the influences
that tend toward the uplifting of man and the subduing
of the brute within him, sad would have been his,
and therefore our, fate. From this fate we have been
the pioneers went the pioneer preachers; and all honor
be given to the Methodists for the great proportion of
these pioneer preachers whom they furnished.
These preachers were of the stamp of old Peter Cartwright—men
who suffered and overcame every hardship
in common with their flock, and who in addition tamed
the wild and fierce spirits of their fellow-pioneers. It was
not a task that could have been accomplished by men
desirous to live in the soft places of the earth and to walk
easily on life's journey. They had to possess the spirit of
the martyrs; but not of martyrs who could merely suffer,
not of martyrs who could oppose only passive endurance
to wrong. The pioneer preachers warred against the
forces of spiritual evil with the same fiery zeal and energy
that they and their fellows showed in the conquest of the
rugged continent. They had in them the heroic spirit,
the spirit that scorns ease if it must be purchased by
failure to do duty, the spirit that courts risk and a life of
hard endeavor if the goal to be reached is really worth
attaining. Great is our debt to these men and scant the
patience we need show toward their critics. At times
they seemed hard and narrow to those whose training and
surroundings had saved them from similar temptations;
and they have been criticised, as all men, whether missionaries,
soldiers, explorers, or frontier settlers, are
criticised when they go forth to do the rough work that
must inevitably be done by those who act as the first
harbingers, the first heralds, of civilization in the world's
dark places. It is easy for those who stay at home in
comfort, who never have to see humanity in the raw, or
to strive against the dreadful naked forces which appear
clothed, hidden, and subdued in civilized life—it is easy
for such to criticise the men who, in rough fashion, and
amid grim surroundings, make ready the way for the
higher life that is to come afterwards; but let us all
be cautious in passing too heavy judgment upon their
brethren who may show hardness, who may be guilty of
shortcomings, but who nevertheless do the great deeds
by which mankind advances. These pioneers of Methodism
had the strong, militant virtues which go to the
accomplishment of such great deeds. Now and then
they betrayed the shortcomings natural to men of their
type; but their shortcomings seem small indeed when
we place beside them the magnitude of the work they
achieved.
And now, friends, in celebrating the wonderful growth
of Methodism, in rejoicing at the good it has done to the
country and to mankind, I need hardly ask a body like
this to remember that the greatness of the fathers becomes
to the children a shameful thing if they use it only
as an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to effort for
noble aims. I speak to you not only as Methodists—I
speak to you as American citizens. The pioneer days
are over. We now all of us form parts of a great civilized
nation, with a complex industrial and social life and infinite
possibilities both for good and for evil. The instruments
with which, and the surroundings in which, we
work, have changed immeasurably from what they were
in the days when the rough backwoods preachers ministered
to the moral and spiritual needs of their rough
backwoods congregations. But if we are to succeed, the
spirit in which we do our work must be the same as the
spirit in which they did theirs. These men drove forward,
and fought their way upward, to success, because
their sense of duty was in their hearts, in the very marrow
of their bones. It was not with them something to
be considered as a mere adjunct to their theology, standing
separate and apart from their daily life. They had it
with them week days as well as Sundays. They did not
divorce the spiritual from the secular. They did not
another for another.
If we are to succeed as a nation we must have the
same spirit in us. We must be absolutely practical, of
course, and must face facts as they are. The pioneer
preachers of Methodism could not have held their own
for a fortnight if they had not shown an intense practicality
of spirit, if they had not possessed the broadest and
deepest sympathy for, and understanding of, their fellow-men.
But in addition to the hard, practical common-sense
needed by each of us in life, we must have a lift
toward lofty things or we shall be lost, individually, and
collectively as a nation. Life is not easy, and least of all
is it easy for either the man or the nation that aspires to
do great deeds. In the century opening, the play of the
infinitely far-reaching forces and tendencies which go to
make up our social system bids fair to be even fiercer in
its activity than in the century which has just closed. If
during this century the men of high and fine moral sense
show themselves weaklings; if they possess only that
cloistered virtue which shrinks shuddering from contact
with the raw facts of actual life; if they dare not go down
into the hurly-burly where the men of might contend for
the mastery; if they stand aside from the pressure and
conflict; then as surely as the sun rises and sets all of
our great material progress, all the multiplication of the
physical agencies which tend for our comfort and enjoyment,
will go for naught and our civilization will become
a brutal sham and mockery. If we are to do as I believe
we shall and will do, if we are to advance in broad
humanity, in kindliness, in the spirit of brotherhood,
exactly as we advance in our conquest over the hidden
forces of nature, it must be by developing strength in
virtue and virtue in strength, by breeding and training
men who shall be both good and strong, both gentle and
valiant—men who scorn wrong-doing and who at the same
mightily for the right. Wesley accomplished so much for
mankind because he refused to leave the stronger, manlier
qualities to be availed of only in the interest of evil.
The church he founded has throughout its career been a
church for the poor as well as for the rich and has known
no distinction of persons. It has been a church whose
members, if true to the teachings of its founder, have
sought for no greater privilege than to spend and be spent
in the interest of the higher life, who have prided themselves,
not on shirking rough duty, but on undertaking it
and carrying it to a successful conclusion.
I come here to-night to greet you and to pay my tribute
to your past because you have deserved well of mankind,
because you have striven with strength and courage to
bring nearer the day when peace and justice shall obtain
among the peoples of the earth.
XVI
AT CHICAGO, ILLINOIS, APRIL 2, 1903
Mr. Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen:
To-day I wish to speak to you, not merely about the
Monroe Doctrine, but about our entire position in the
Western Hemisphere—a position so peculiar and predominant
that out of it has grown the acceptance of the
Monroe Doctrine as a cardinal feature of our foreign
policy; and in particular I wish to point out what has
been done during the lifetime of the last Congress to
make good our position in accordance with this historic
policy.
Ever since the time when we definitely extended our
boundaries westward to the Pacific and southward to the
Gulf, since the time when the old Spanish and Portuguese
colonies to the south of us asserted their independence,
our nation has insisted that because of its primacy in
strength among the nations of the Western Hemisphere
it has certain duties and responsibilities which oblige it to
take a leading part thereon. We hold that our interests
in this hemisphere are greater than those of any European
power possibly can be, and that our duty to ourselves
and to the weaker republics who are our neighbors requires
us to see that none of the great military powers
from across the seas shall encroach upon the territory of
the American republics or acquire control thereover.
This policy, therefore, not only forbids us to acquiesce
in such territorial acquisition, but also causes us to object
be equal to territorial aggrandizement. This is why the
United States has steadily believed that the construction
of the great Isthmian canal, the building of which is to
stand as the greatest material feat of the twentieth century,
—greater than any similar feat in any preceding
century,—should be done by no foreign nation but by
ourselves. The canal must of necessity go through the
territory of one of our smaller sister republics. We have
been scrupulously careful to abstain from perpetrating
any wrong upon any of these republics in this matter.
We do not wish to interfere with their rights in the least,
but, while carefully safeguarding them, to build the canal
ourselves under provisions which will enable us, if necessary,
to police and protect it, and to guarantee its neutrality,
we being the sole guarantor. Our intention was
steadfast; we desired action taken so that the canal could
always be used by us in time of peace and war alike, and
in time of war could never be used to our detriment by
any nation which was hostile to us. Such action, by the
circumstances surrounding it, was necessarily for the
benefit and not the detriment of the adjacent American
republics.
After considerably more than half of a century these
objects have been exactly fulfilled by the legislation and
treaties of the last two years. Two years ago we were
no further advanced toward the construction of the
Isthmian canal on our terms than we had been during
the preceding eighty years. By the Hay-Pauncefote
treaty, ratified in December, 1901, an old treaty with
Great Britain, which had been held to stand in the way,
was abrogated and it was agreed that the canal should be
constructed under the auspices of the Government of the
United States, and that this Government should have
the exclusive right to regulate and manage it, becoming
the sole guarantor of its neutrality.
It was expressly stipulated, furthermore, that this
guaranty of neutrality should not prevent the United
States from taking any measures which it found necessary
in order to secure by its own forces the defence of the
United States and the maintenance of public order. Immediately
following this treaty Congress passed a law
under which the President was authorized to endeavor to
secure a treaty for acquiring the right to finish the construction
of, and to operate, the Panama Canal, which
had already been begun in the territory of Colombia by a
French company. The rights of this company were accordingly
obtained and a treaty negotiated with the Republic
of Colombia. This treaty has just been ratified
by the Senate. It reserves all of Colombia's rights,
while guaranteeing all of our own and those of neutral
nations, and specifically permits us to take any and all
measures for the defence of the canal, and for the preservation
of our interests, whenever in our judgment an
exigency may arise which calls for action on our part.
In other words, these two treaties, and the legislation to
carry them out, have resulted in our obtaining on exactly
the terms we desired the rights and privileges which we
had so long sought in vain. These treaties are among
the most important that we have ever negotiated in their
effects upon the future welfare of this country, and mark
a memorable triumph of American diplomacy—one of
those fortunate triumphs, moreover, which redound to
the benefit of the entire world.
About the same time trouble arose in connection with
the Republic of Venezuela because of certain wrongs
alleged to have been committed, and debts overdue, by
this republic to citizens of various foreign powers, notably
England, Germany, and Italy. After failure to reach an
agreement, these powers began a blockade of the Venezuelan
coast and a condition of quasi-war ensued. The concern
of our Government was of course not to interfere
interests or our honor, and not to take the attitude of
protecting from coercion any power unless we were willing
to espouse the quarrel of that power, but to keep an
attitude of watchful vigilance and see that there was no
infringement of the Monroe Doctrine—no acquirement of
territorial rights by a European power at the expense of
a weak sister republic—whether this acquisition might
take the shape of an outright and avowed seizure of territory
or of the exercise of control which would in effect
be equivalent to such seizure. This attitude was expressed
in the two following published memoranda, the
first being the letter addressed by the Secretary of State
to the German Ambassador, the second the conversation
with the Secretary of State reported by the British
Ambassador:
Washington, December 16, 1901.
Dear Excellency: I inclose a memorandum by way of
reply to that which you did me the honor to leave with me on
Saturday, and am, as ever,
Memorandum
The President in his message of the 3d of December, 1901,
used the following language:
"The Monroe Doctrine is a declaration that there must be
no territorial aggrandizement by any non-American power at
the expense of any American power on American soil. It is
in no wise intended as hostile to any nation in the Old World."
The President further said:
"This doctrine has nothing to do with the commercial relations
of any American power, save that it in truth allows each
of them to form such as it desires. . . . We do not guarantee
any state against punishment if it misconducts itself,
of territory by any non-American power."
His Excellency the German Ambassador, on his recent
return from Berlin, conveyed personally to the President the
assurance of the German Emperor that His Majesty's Government
had no purpose or intention to make even the smallest
acquisition of territory on the South American continent or
the islands adjacent. This voluntary and friendly declaration
was afterwards repeated to the Secretary of State, and was received
by the President and the people of the United States
in the frank and cordial spirit in which it was offered. In
the memorandum of the 11th of December, His Excellency
the German Ambassador repeats these assurances as follows:
"We declare especially that under no circumstances do we
consider in our proceedings the acquisition or the permanent
occupation of Venezuelan territory."
In the said memorandum of the 11th of December, the
German Government informs that of the United States that it
has certain just claims for money and for damages wrongfully
withheld from German subjects by the Government of Venezuela,
and that it proposes to take certain coercive measures
described in the memorandum to enforce the payment of these
just claims.
The President of the United States, appreciating the courtesy
of the German Government in making him acquainted
with the state of affairs referred to, and not regarding himself
as called upon to enter into the consideration of the claims in
question, believes that no measures will be taken in this matter
by the agents of the German Government which are not in
accordance with the well-known purpose, above set forth, of
His Majesty the German Emperor.
Sir Michael Herbert to the Marquis of Lansdowne:
I communicated to Mr. Hay this morning the substance of
Your Lordship's telegram of the 11th instant.
His Excellency stated in reply, that the United States Government,
although they regretted that European powers should
not object to their taking steps to obtain redress for injuries
suffered by their subjects, provided that no acquisition of
territory was contemplated.
Both powers assured us in explicit terms that there
was not the slightest intention on their part to violate
the principles of the Monroe Doctrine, and this assurance
was kept with an honorable good faith which merits full
acknowledgment on our part. At the same time, the
existence of hostilities in a region so near our own borders
was fraught with such possibilities of danger in the future
that it was obviously no less our duty to ourselves than
our duty to humanity to endeavor to put an end to that.
Accordingly, by an offer of our good services in a spirit
of frank friendliness to all the parties concerned, a spirit
in which they quickly and cordially responded, we secured
a resumption of peace—the contending parties agreeing
that the matters which they could not settle among
themselves should be referred to The Hague Tribunal
for settlement. The United States had most fortunately
already been able to set an example to other nations by
utilizing the great possibilities for good contained in The
Hague Tribunal, a question at issue between ourselves
and the Republic of Mexico being the first submitted to
this international court of arbitration.
The terms which we have secured as those under which
the Isthmian canal is to be built, and the course of events
in the Venezuela matter, have shown not merely the ever
growing influence of the United States in the Western
Hemisphere, but also, I think I may safely say, have
exemplified the firm purpose of the United States that
its growth and influence and power shall redound not to
the harm but to the benefit of our sister republics whose
strength is less. Our growth, therefore, is beneficial to
human kind in general. We do not intend to assume
Our adherence to the rule of human right is not merely
profession. The history of our dealings with Cuba shows
that we reduce it to performance.
The Monroe Doctrine is not international law, and
though I think one day it may become such, this is not
necessary as long as it remains a cardinal feature of our
foreign policy and as long as we possess both the will and
the strength to make it effective. This last point, my
fellow-citizens, is all important, and is one which as a
people we can never afford to forget. I believe in the
Monroe Doctrine with all my heart and soul; I am convinced
that the immense majority of our fellow-countrymen
so believe in it; but I would infinitely prefer to see
us abandon it than to see us put it forward and bluster
about it, and yet fail to build up the efficient fighting
strength which in the last resort can alone make it respected
by any strong foreign power whose interest it
may ever happen to be to violate it.
Boasting and blustering are as objectionable among
nations as among individuals, and the public men of a
great nation owe it to their sense of national self-respect
to speak courteously of foreign powers, just as a brave
and self-respecting man treats all around him courteously.
But though to boast is bad, and causelessly to insult
another, worse; yet worse than all is it to be guilty of
boasting, even without insult, and when called to the
proof to be unable to make such boasting good. There
is a homely old adage which runs: "Speak softly and
carry a big stick; you will go far." If the American
nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a
pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly efficient navy,
the Monroe Doctrine will go far. I ask you to think
over this. If you do, you will come to the conclusion
that it is mere plain common-sense, so obviously sound
that only the blind can fail to see its truth and only the
into force.
In the last two years I am happy to say we have
taken long strides in advance as regards our navy. The
last Congress, in addition to smaller vessels, provided nine
of those formidable fighting ships upon which the real
efficiency of any navy in war ultimately depends. It
provided, moreover, for the necessary addition of officers
and enlisted men to make the ships worth having. Meanwhile
the Navy Department has seen to it that our ships
have been constantly exercised at sea, with the great guns,
and in manoeuvres, so that their efficiency as fighting
units, both individually and when acting together, has
been steadily improved. Remember that all of this is
necessary. A warship is a huge bit of mechanism, well-nigh
as delicate and complicated as it is formidable. It
takes years to build it. It takes years to teach the officers
and men how to handle it to good advantage. It is an
absolute impossibility to improvise a navy at the outset
of war. No recent war between any two nations has
lasted as long as it takes to build a battleship; and it is
just as impossible to improvise the officers or the crews as
to improvise the navy.
To lay up a battleship and only send it afloat at the
outset of a war, with a raw crew and untried officers,
would be not merely a folly but a crime, for it would
invite both disaster and disgrace. The navy which so
quickly decided in our favor the war in 1898 had been
built and made efficient during the preceding fifteen
years. The ships that triumphed off Manila and Santiago
had been built under previous Administrations with
money appropriated by previous Congresses. The officers
and the men did their duty so well because they had
already been trained to it by long sea service. All honor
to the gallant officers and gallant men who actually did
the fighting; but remember, too, to honor the public
the shipyards and armor plants, to whose united foresight
and exertion we owe it that in 1898 we had craft so
good, guns so excellent, and American seamen of so high
a type in the conning towers, in the gun turrets, and in
the engine-rooms. It is too late to prepare for war when
war has come; and if we only prepare sufficiently no war
will ever come. We wish a powerful and efficient navy,
not for purposes of war, but as the surest guaranty of
peace. If we have such a navy—if we keep on building
it up—we may rest assured that there is but the smallest
chance that trouble will ever come to this nation; and we
may likewise rest assured that no foreign power will ever
quarrel with us about the Monroe Doctrine.
XVII
AT WAUKESHA, WISCONSIN, APRIL 3, 1903
Gentlemen and ladies, my fellow-citizens of Wisconsin:
You are men and women of Wisconsin, but you are
men and women of America first. I am glad of having
the chance of saying a few words to you to-day. I believe
with all my heart in this nation playing its part
manfully and well. I believe that we are now, at the
outset of the twentieth century, face to face with great
world problems; that we cannot help playing the part of
a great world power; that all we can decide is whether
we will play it well or ill. I do not want to see us shrink
from any least bit of duty. We have not only taken
during the past five years a position of even greater importance
in this Western Hemisphere than ever before,
but we have taken a position of great importance even in
the furthest Orient, in that furthest West, which is the
immemorial East. We must hold our own. If we show
ourselves weaklings we will earn the contempt of mankind,
and—what is of far more consequence—our own
contempt; but I would like to impress upon every public
man, upon every writer in the press, the fact that strength
should go hand in hand with courtesy, with scrupulous
regard in word and deed, not only for the rights, but for
the feelings, of other nations. I want to see a man able
to hold his own. I have no respect for the man who will
put up with injustice. If a man will not take his part,
the part is not worth taking. That is true. On the
is always walking about waiting to pick a quarrel, and
above all, wanting to say something unpleasant about
some one else. He is not an agreeable character anywhere;
and the fact that he talks loud does not necessarily
mean that he fights hard either. Sometimes you will see
a man who will talk loud and fight hard; but he does not
fight hard because he talks loud, but in spite of it. I
want the same thing to be true of us as a nation. I am
always sorry whenever I see any reflection that seems to
come from America upon any friendly nation. To write
or say anything unkind, unjust, or inconsiderate about
any foreign nation does not do us any good, and does not
help us toward holding our own if ever the need should
arise to hold our own. I am sure you will not misunderstand
me; I am sure that it is needless for me to say that
I do not believe the United States should ever suffer a
wrong. I should be the first to ask that we resent a wrong
from the strong, just as I should be the first to insist that
we do not wrong the weak. As a nation, if we are to be
true to our past, we must steadfastly keep these two
positions—to submit to no injury by the strong and to
inflict no injury on the weak. It is not at all necessary
to say disagreeable things about the strong in order to
impress them with the fact that we do not intend to submit
to injury. Keep our navy up to the highest point of
efficiency; have good ships, and enough of them; have
the officers and the enlisted men on them trained to
handle them, so that in the future the American navy
shall rise level, whenever the need comes, to the standard
it has set in the past. Keep in our hearts the rugged,
manly virtues, which have made our people formidable as
foes, and valuable as friends throughout the century and
a quarter of our national life. Do all that; and having
done it, remember that it is a sensible thing to speak
courteously of others.
I believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I shall try to see
that this nation lives up to it; and as long as I am President
it will be lived up to. But I do not intend to make
the doctrine an excuse or a justification for being unpleasant
to other powers, for speaking ill of other powers.
We want the friendship of mankind. We want to
get on well with the other nations of mankind, with the
small nations and with the big nations. We want so to
carry ourselves that if (which I think most unlikely) any
quarrel should arise, it would be evident that it was not
a quarrel of our own seeking, but one that was forced
on us. If it is forced on us, I know you too well not
to know that you will stand up to it if the need comes;
but you will stand up to it all the better if you have not
blustered or spoken ill of other nations in advance. We
want friendship; we want peace. We wish well to the
nations of mankind. We look with joy at any prosperity
of theirs, we wish them success, not failure. We rejoice
as mankind moves forward over the whole earth. Each
nation has its own difficulties. We have difficulties
enough at home. Let us improve ourselves, lifting what
needs to be lifted here, and let others do their own; let
us attend to our own, keep our own hearthstone swept
and in order. Do not shirk any duty; do not shirk any
difficulty that is forced upon us, but do not invite it by
foolish language. Do not assume a quarrelsome and unpleasant
attitude toward other people. Let the friendly
expressions of foreign powers be accepted as tokens of
their sincere good-will, and reflecting their real sentiments;
and let us avoid any language on our part which
might tend to turn their good-will into ill-will. All that
is mere common-sense; the kind of common-sense that
we apply in our own lives, man to man, neighbor to
neighbor; and remember that substantially what is true
among nations, is true on a small scale among ourselves.
The man who is a weakling, who is a coward, we all despise,
his own work and take his own part, he does not count;
and I have no patience with those who would have the
United States unable to take its own part, to do its work
in the world. But remember that a loose tongue is just
as unfortunate an accompaniment for a nation as for an
individual. The man who talks ill of his neighbors, the
man who invites trouble for himself and them, is a nuisance.
The stronger, the more self-confident the nation is,
the more carefully it should guard its speech as well as its
action, and should make it a point, in the interest of its
own self-respect, to see that it does not say what it cannot
made good, that it avoids giving needless offence, that it
shows genuinely and sincerely its desire for friendship
with the rest of mankind, but that it keeps itself in shape
to make its weight felt should the need arise.
That is in substance my theory of what our foreign
policy should be. Let us not boast, not insult any one,
but make up our minds coolly what it is necessary to say,
say it, and then stand to it, whatever the consequences
may be.
XVIII
AT MILWAUKEE, WISCONSIN, APRIL 3, 1903
Mr. Toastmaster, gentlemen:
To-day I wish to speak to you on the question of the
control and regulation of those great corporations which
are popularly, although rather vaguely, known as trusts;
dealing mostly with what has actually been accomplished
in the way of legislation and in the way of enforcement
of legislation during the past eighteen months, the period
covering the two sessions of the Fifty-seventh Congress.
At the outset I shall ask you to remember that I do not
approach the subject either from the standpoint of those
who speak of themselves as anti-trust or anti-corporation
people, nor yet from the standpoint of those who are
fond of denying the existence of evils in the trusts, or
who apparently proceed upon the assumption that if a
corporation is large enough it can do no wrong.
I think I speak for the great majority of the American
people when I say that we are not in the least against
wealth as such, whether individual or corporate; that we
merely desire to see any abuse of corporate or combined
wealth corrected and remedied; that we do not desire the
abolition or destruction of big corporations, but, on the
contrary, recognize them as being in many cases efficient
economic instruments, the results of an inevitable process
of economic evolution, and only desire to see them regulated
and controlled so far as may be necessary to subserve
the public good. We should be false to the historic
principles of our Government if we discriminated, either
128
man because of either his wealth or his poverty. There
is no proper place in our society either for the rich man
who uses the power conferred by his riches to enable him
to oppress and wrong his neighbors, nor yet for the
demagogic agitator who, instead of attacking abuses as
all abuses should be attacked wherever found, attacks
property, attacks prosperity, attacks men of wealth, as
such, whether they be good or bad, attacks corporations
whether they do well or ill, and seeks, in a spirit of ignorant
rancor, to overthrow the very foundations upon
which rest our national well-being.
In consequence of the extraordinary industrial changes
of the last half-century, and notably of the last two or
three decades, changes due mainly to the rapidity and
complexity of our industrial growth, we are confronted
with problems which in their present shape were unknown
to our forefathers. Our great prosperity, with its accompanying
concentration of population and of wealth, its
extreme specialization of faculties, and its development of
giant industrial leaders, has brought much good and some
evil, and it is as foolish to ignore the good as wilfully to
blind ourselves to the evil.
The evil has been partly the inevitable accompaniment
of the social changes, and where this is the case it can be
cured neither by law nor by the administration of the law,
the only remedy lying in the slow change of character
and of economic environment. But for a portion of the
evil, at least, we think that remedies can be found. We
know well the danger of false remedies, and we are
against all violent, radical, and unwise change. But we
believe that by proceeding slowly, yet resolutely, with
good sense and moderation, and also with a firm determination
not to be swerved from our course either by
foolish clamor or by any base or sinister influence, we
can accomplish much for the betterment of conditions.
Nearly two years ago, speaking at the State Fair in
Minnesota, I said:
It is probably true that the large majority of the fortunes
that now exist in this country have been amassed, not by
injuring our people, but as an incident to the conferring of
great benefits upon the community, and this, no matter what
may have been the conscious purpose of those amassing them.
There is but the scantiest justification for most of the outcry
against the men of wealth as such; and it ought to be unnecessary
to state that any appeal which directly or indirectly leads
to suspicion and hatred among ourselves, which tends to limit
opportunity, and therefore to shut the door of success against
poor men of talent, and, finally, which entails the possibility
of lawlessness and violence, is an attack upon the fundamental
properties of American citizenship. Our interests are at bottom
common; in the long run we go up or go down together.
Yet more and more it is evident that the State, and if necessary
the Nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and
control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures;
particularly as regards the great business combinations
which derive a portion of their importance from the existence
of some monopolistic tendency. The right should be exercised
with caution and self-restraint; but it should exist, so that it
may be invoked if the need arises.
Last fall, in speaking at Cincinnati, I said:
The necessary supervision and control, in which I firmly
believe as the only method of eliminating the real evils of the
trusts, must come through wisely and cautiously framed legislation,
which shall aim in the first place to give definite control
to some sovereign over the great corporations, and which shall
be followed, when once this power has been conferred, by a
system giving to the Government the full knowledge which is
the essential for satisfactory action. Then, when this knowledge—one
of the essential features of which is proper publicity
—has been gained, what further steps of any kind are necessary
of power to deal with the subject, and of a thorough knowledge
of what should and can be done in the matter. We need
additional power, and we need knowledge, . . . Such
legislation—whether obtainable now or obtainable only after
a constitutional amendment—should provide for a reasonable
supervision, the most prominent feature of which at first
should be publicity—that is, the making public, both to the
Government authorities and to the people at large, the essential
facts in which the public is concerned. This would give
us exact knowledge of many points which are now not only in
doubt but the subject of fierce controversy. Moreover, the
mere fact of the publication would cure some very grave evils,
for the light of day is a deterrent to wrong-doing. It would
doubtless disclose other evils with which, for the time being,
we could devise no way to grapple. Finally, it would disclose
others which could be grappled with and cured by further
legislative action.
In my message to Congress for 1901 I said:
In the interest of the whole people the Nation should, without
interfering with the power of the States in the matter,
itself also assume power of supervision and regulation over all
corporations doing an interstate business.
The views thus expressed have now received effect by
the wise, conservative, and yet far-reaching legislation
enacted by Congress at its last session. In its wisdom
Congress enacted the very important law providing a
Department of Commerce and Labor, and further providing
therein under the Secretary of Commerce and
Labor for a Commissioner of Corporations, charged with
the duty of supervision of, and of making intelligent
investigation into, the organization and conduct of corporations
engaged in interstate commerce. His powers
to expose illegal or hurtful practices and to obtain all
information needful for the purposes of further intelligent
and proper for public purposes is satisfactorily guaranteed.
The law was passed at the very end of the session
of Congress. Owing to the lateness of its passage
Congress was not able to provide proper equipment for
the new Department; and the first few months must
necessarily be spent in the work of organization, and the
first investigations must necessarily be of a tentative
character. The satisfactory development of such a system
requires time and great labor. Those who are intrusted
with the administration of the new law will assuredly administer
it in a spirit of absolute fairness and justice and
of entire fearlessness, with the firm purpose not to hurt
any corporation doing a legitimate business—on the contrary,
to help it—and, on the other hand, not to spare
any corporation which may be guilty of illegal practices,
or the methods of which may make it a menace to the
public welfare. Some substantial good will be done in
the immediate future; and as the Department gets fairly
to work under the law an ever larger vista for good work
will be opened along the lines indicated. The enactment
of this law is one of the most significant contributions
which have been made in our time toward the proper
solution of the problem of the relations to the people of
the great corporations an-d corporate combinations.
But much though this is, it is only a part of what has
been done in the effort to ascertain and correct improper
trust or monopolistic practices. Some eighteen months
ago the Industrial Commission, an able and non-partisan
body, reported to Congress the result of their investigation
of trusts and industrial combinations. One of the
most important of their conclusions was that discriminations
in freight rates and facilities were granted favored
shippers by the railroads and that these discriminations
clearly tended toward the control of production and
prices in many fields of business by large combinations.
That this conclusion was justifiable was shown by the
disclosures in the investigation of railroad methods pursued
in the fall and winter of 1901–1902. It was then
shown that certain trunk lines had entered into unlawful
agreements as to the transportation of food products
from the West to the Atlantic seaboard, giving a few
favored shippers rates much below the tariff charges imposed
upon the smaller dealers and the general public.
These unjust practices had prevailed to such an extent
and for so long a time that many of the smaller shippers
had been driven out of business, until practically one
buyer of grain on each railway system had been able by
his illegal advantages to secure a monopoly on the line
with which his secret compact was made; this monopoly
enabling him to fix the price to both producer and consumer.
Many of the great packing-house concerns were
shown to be in combination with each other and with
most of the great railway lines, whereby they enjoyed
large secret concessions in rates and thus obtained a practical
monopoly of the fresh- and cured-meat industry
of the country. These fusions, though violative of the
statute, had prevailed unchecked for so many years that
they had become intrenched in and interwoven with the
commercial life of certain large distributing localities;
although this was of course at the expense of the vast
body of law-abiding merchants, the general public, and
particularly of unfavored localities.
Under those circumstances it was a serious problem to
determine the wise course to follow in vitalizing a law
which had in part become obsolete or proved incapable
of enforcement. Of what the Attorney-General did in
enforcing it I shall speak later. The decisions of the
courts upon the law had betrayed weaknesses and imperfections,
some of them so serious as to render abortive
efforts to apply any effective remedy for the existing
evils.
It is clear that corporations created for quasi-public
purposes, clothed for that reason with the ultimate
power of the State to take private property against the
will of the owner, hold their corporate powers as carriers
in trust for the fairly impartial service of all the public.
Favoritism in the use of such powers, unjustly enriching
some and unjustly impoverishing others, discriminating
in favor of some places and against others, is palpably
violative of plain principles of justice. Such a practice
unchecked is hurtful in many ways. Congress, having
had its attention drawn to the matter, enacted a most
important anti-rebate law, which greatly strengthens the
interstate-commerce law. This new law prohibits under
adequate penalties the giving and as well the demanding
or receiving of such preferences, and provides the preventive
remedy of injunction. The vigorous administration
of this law, and it will be enforced, will, it is hoped,
afford a substantial remedy for certain trust evils which
have attracted public attention and have created public
unrest.
This law represents a noteworthy and important advance
toward just and effective regulation of transportation.
Moreover, its passage has been supplemented by
the enactment of a lav/ to expedite the hearing of actions
of public moment under the anti-trust act, known as the
Sherman law, and under the act to regulate commerce,
at the request of the Attorney-General; and furthermore,
additional funds have been appropriated to be expended
under the direction of the Attorney-General in the enforcement
of these laws.
All of this represents a great and substantial advance
in legislation. But more important even than legislation
is the administration of the law, and I ask your attention
for a moment to the way in which the law has been administered
by the profound jurist and fearless public
servant who now occupies the position of Attorney-General,
President that he shall take care that the laws be faithfully
executed, and under this provisron the Attorney-General
formulated a policy which was in effect nothing but the
rigid enforcement, by suits managed with consummate
skill and ability, both of the anti-trust law and of the
imperfect provisions of the act to regulate commerce.
The first step taken was the prosecution of fourteen suits
against the principal railroads of the Middle West, restraining
them by injunction from further violations of
either of the laws in question.
About the same time the case against the Northern
Securities Company was initiated. This was a corporation
organized under the laws of the State of New Jersey
with a capital of four hundred million dollars, the alleged
purpose being to control the Great Northern and the
Northern Pacific railroad companies, two parallel and
competing lines extending across the northern tier of
States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.
Whatever the purpose its consummation would have resulted
in the control of the two great railway systems
upon which the people of the Northwestern States were
so largely dependent for their supplies and to get their
products to market, being practically merged into the
New Jersey corporation. The proposition that these independent
systems of railroads should be merged under
a single control alarmed the people of the States concerned,
lest they be subjected to what they deemed a
monopoly of interstate transportation and the suppression
of competition. The governors of the States most deeply
affected held a meeting to consider how to prevent the
merger becoming effective, and passed resolutions calling
upon the National Government to enforce the anti-trust
laws against the alleged combination. When these resolutions
were referred to the Attorney-General for consideration
and advice, he reported that in his opinion the
mentioned was a combination in restraint of trade
and was attempting a monopoly in violation of the
national anti-trust law. Thereupon a suit in equity,
which is now pending, was begun by the Government to
test the validity of this transaction under the Sherman law.
At nearly the same time the disclosures respecting the
secret rebates enjoyed by the great packing-house companies,
coupled with the very high price of meats, led
the Attorney-General to direct an investigation into the
methods of the so-called beef trust. The result was that
he filed bills for injunction against six of the principal
packing-house companies, and restrained them from combining
and agreeing upon prices at which they would sell
their products in States other than those in which their
meats were prepared for market. Writs of injunction
were issued accordingly, and since then, after full argument,
the United States Circuit Court has made the
injunction perpetual.
The cotton interests of the South, including growers,
buyers, and shippers, made complaint that they were
suffering great injury in their business from the methods
of the Southern railroads in the handling and transportation
of cotton. They alleged that these railroads, by
combined action under a pooling arrangement to support
their rate schedules, had denied to the shippers the right
to elect over what roads their commodities should be
shipped, and that by dividing upon a fixed basis the cotton
crop of the South all inducement to compete in rates
for the transportation thereof was eliminated. Proceedings
were instituted by the Attorney-General under the
anti-trust law, which resulted in the destruction of the
pool and in restoring to the growers and shippers of
the South the right to ship their products over any road
they elected, thus removing the restraint upon the freedom
of commerce.
In November, 1902, the Attorney-General directed
that a bill for an injunction be filed in the United States
Circuit Court at San Francisco against the Federal Salt
Company—a corporation which had been organized under
the laws of an Eastern State, but had its main office and
principal place of business in California—and against a
number of other companies and persons constituting
what was known as the salt trust. These injunctions
were to restrain the execution of certain contracts between
the Federal Salt Company and the other defendants,
by which the latter agreed neither to import nor buy
or sell salt, except from and to the Federal Salt Company,
and not to engage or assist in the production of salt west
of the Mississippi River during the continuance of such
contracts. As the result of these agreements the price
of salt had been advanced about four hundred per cent.
A temporary injunction order was obtained, which the
defendants asked the court to modify on the ground that
the anti-trust law had no application to contracts for purchases
and sales within a State. The Circuit Court overruled
this contention and sustained the Government's
position. This practically concluded the case, and it is
understood that in consequence the Federal Salt Company
is about to be dissolved and that no further contest
will be made.
The above is a brief outline of the most important
steps, legislative and administrative, taken during the
past eighteen months in the direction of solving, so far as
at present it seems practicable by national legislation or
administration to solve, what we call the trust problem.
They represent a sum of very substantial achievement.
They represent a successful effort to devise and apply
real remedies; an effort which so far succeeded because it
was made not only with resolute purpose and determination,
but also in a spirit of common-sense and justice,
as far removed as possible from rancor, hysteria, and
will continue to be enforced. Not only is the legislation
recently enacted effective, but in my judgment it was
impracticable to attempt more. Nothing of value is to
be expected from ceaseless agitation for radical and extreme
legislation. The people may wisely, and with
confidence, await the results which are reasonably to be
expected from the impartial enforcement of the laws
which have recently been placed upon the statute books.
Legislation of a general and indiscriminate character
would be sure to fail, either because it would involve all
interests in a common ruin, or because it would not really
reach any evil. We have endeavored to provide a discriminating
adaptation of the remedy to the real mischief.
Many of the alleged remedies advocated are of the unpleasantly
drastic type which seeks to destroy the disease
by killing the patient. Others are so obviously futile
that it is somewhat difficult to treat them seriously or as
being advanced in good faith. High among the latter I
place the effort to reach the trust question by means of
the tariff. You can, of course, put an end to the prosperity
of the trusts by putting an end to the prosperity
of the nation; but the price for such action seems high.
The alternative is to do exactly what has been done during
the life of the Congress which has just closed—that
is, to endeavor, not to destroy corporations, but to regulate
them with a view of doing away with whatever is of
evil in them and of making them subserve the public use.
The law is not to be administered in the interest of the
poor man as such, nor yet in the interest of the rich man
as such, but in the interest of the law-abiding man, rich
or poor. We are no more against organizations of capital
than against organizations of labor. We welcome
both, demanding only that each shall do right and shall
remember its duty to the Republic. Such a course we
consider not merely a benefit to the poor man, but a
when we require him to obey the law. On the contrary,
if he is a man whose safety and well-being depend in a
peculiar degree upon the existence of the spirit of law
and order, we are rendering him the greatest service when
we require him to be himself an exemplar of that spirit.
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.
XX
AT SIOUX FALLS, SOUTH DAKOTA, APRIL 6, 1903
Fellow-citizens:
There are many, many lesser problems which go to
make up in their entirety the huge and complex problems
of our modern industrial life. Each of these problems is,
moreover, connected with many of the others. Few indeed
are simple or stand only by themselves. The most
important are those connected with the relation of the
farmers, the stock-growers, and soil-tillers, to the community
at large, and those affecting the relations between
employer and employed. In a country like ours it is
fundamentally true that the well-being of the tiller of the
soil and the wage worker is the well-being of the State.
If they are well off, then we need concern ourselves but
little as to how other classes stand, for they will inevitably
be well off too; and, on the other hand, there can be no
real general prosperity unless based on the foundation of
the prosperity of the wage worker and the tiller of the
soil.
But the needs of these two classes are often not the
same. The tiller of the soil has been of all our citizens
the one on the whole the least affected in his ways of life
and methods of industry by the giant industrial changes
of the last half century. There has been change with
him, too, of course. He also can work to best advantage
if he keeps in close touch with his fellows; and the success
of the national Department of Agriculture has shown
Government. Nor is it only through the Department
that the Government can act. One of the greatest and
most beneficent measures passed by the last Congress,
or indeed by any Congress in recent years, is the Irrigation
Act, which will do for the States of the Great Plains
and the Rocky Mountain region at least as much as ever
has been done for the States of the humid region by river
and harbor improvements. Few measures that have
been put upon the statute books of the nation have done
more for the people than this law will, I firmly believe,
directly and indirectly accomplish for the States in
question.
The Department of Agriculture devotes its whole
energy to working for the welfare of farmers and stock-growers.
In every section of our country it aids them in
their constantly increasing search for a better agricultural
education. It helps not only them, but all the nation,
in seeing that our exports of meats have clean bills of
health, and that there is rigid inspection of all meats
that enter into interstate commerce. Thirty-eight million
carcasses were inspected during the last fiscal year. Our
stock-growers sell forty-five million dollars' worth of live
stock annually, and these animals must be kept healthy
or else our people will lose their trade. Our export of
plant products to foreign countries amounts to over six
hundred million dollars a year, and there is no branch of
its work to which the Department of Agriculture devotes
more care. Thus the Department has been successfully
introducing a macaroni wheat from the headwaters of the
Volga, which grows successfully in ten inches of rainfall,
and by this means wheat-growing has been successfully
extended westward into the semi-arid region. Two million
bushels of this wheat were grown last year; and
being suited to dry conditions it can be used for forage
as well as for food for man.
The Department of Agriculture has been helping our
fruit men to establish markets abroad by studying
methods of fruit preservation through refrigeration and
through methods of handling and packing. On the Gulf
coasts of Louisiana and Texas, thanks to the Department
of Agriculture, a rice suitable to the region was imported
from the Orient and the rice crop is now practically equal
to our needs in this country, whereas a few years ago it
supplied but one fourth of them. The most important
of our farm products is the grass crop; and to show what
has been done with grasses, I need only allude to the
striking change made in the entire West by the extended
use of alfalfa.
Moreover, the Department has taken the lead in the
effort to prevent the deforestation of the country.
Where there are forests we seek to preserve them; and
on the once treeless plains anc the prairies we are doing
our best to foster the habit of tree planting among our
people. In my own lifetime I have seen wonderful
changes brought about by this tree planting here in your
own State and in the States immediately around it.
There are a number of very important questions, such
as that of good roads, with which the States alone can
deal, and where all that the National Government can do
is to co-operate with them. The same is true of the
education of the American farmer. A number of the
States have themselves started to help in this work and
the Department of Agriculture does an immense amount
which is in the proper sense of the word educational, and
educational in the most practical way.
It is therefore clearly true that a great advance has
been made in the direction of finding ways by which the
Government can help the farmer to help himself—the
only kind of help which a self-respecting man will accept,
or, I may add, which will in the end do him any good.
Much has been done in these ways, and farm life and
farmer himself still retains, because of his surroundings
and the nature of his work, to a pre-eminent degree the
qualities which we like to think of as distinctly American
in considering our early history. The man who tills his
own farm, whether on the prairie or in the woodland, the
man who grows what we eat and the raw material which
is worked up into what we wear, still exists more nearly
under the conditions which obtained when the "embattled
farmers" of '76 made this country a nation than
is true of any others of our people.
But the wage workers in our cities, like the capitalists
in our cities, face totally changed conditions. The development
of machinery and the extraordinary change
in business conditions have rendered the employment of
capital and of persons in large aggregations not merely
profitable but often necessary for success, and have
specialized the labor of the wage worker at the same time
that they have brought great aggregations of wage
workers together. More and more in our great industrial
centres men have come to realize that they cannot live as
independently of one another as in the old days was the
case everywhere, and as is now the case in the country
districts.
Of course, fundamentally each man will yet find that
the chief factor in determining his success or failure in
life is the sum of his own individual qualities. He can
not afford to lose his individual initiative, his individual
will and power; but he can best use that power if for
certain objects he unites with his fellows. Much can be
done by organization, combination, union among the
wage workers; finally, something can be done by the
direct action of the State. It is not possible empirically
to declare when the interference of the State should be
deemed legitimate and when illegitimate.
The line of demarcation between unhealthy over-interference
well defined, and shifts with the change in our industrial
needs. Most certainly we should never invoke the interference
of the State or Nation unless it is absolutely
necessary; but it is equally true that when confident of
its necessity we should not on academic grounds refuse it.
Wise factory laws, laws to forbid the employment of
child labor and to safeguard the employees against the
effects of culpable negligence by the employer, are necessary,
not merely in the interest of the wage worker, but
in the interest of the honest and humane employer, who
should not be penalized for his honesty and humanity
by being exposed to unchecked competition with an unscrupulous
rival. It is far more difficult to deal with the
greed that works through cunning than with the greed
that works through violence. But the effort to deal with
it must be steadily made.
Very much of our effort in reference to labor matters
should be by every device and expedient to try to secure
a constantly better understanding between employer and
employee. Everything possible should be done to increase
the sympathy and fellow-feeling between them,
and every chance taken to allow each to look at all
questions, especially at questions in dispute, somewhat
through the other's eyes. If met with a sincere desire
to act fairly by one another, and if there is, furthermore,
power by each to appreciate the other's standpoint, the
chance for trouble is minimized. I suppose every thinking
man rejoices when by mediation or arbitration it
proves possible to settle troubles in time to avert the
suffering and bitterness caused by strikes. Moreover, a
conciliation committee can do best work when the trouble
is in its beginning, or at least has not come to a head.
When the break has actually occurred, damage has been
done, and each side feels sore and angry; and it is difficult
to get them together—difficult to make either forget
If possible the effort at conciliation or mediation or arbitration
should be made in the earlier stages, and should
be marked by the wish on the part of both sides to try to
come to a common agreement which each shall think in
the interests of the other as well as of itself.
When we deal with such a subject we are fortunate in
having before us an admirable object-lesson in the work
that has just been closed by the Anthracite Coal Strike
Commission. This was the Commission which was appointed
last fall at the time when the coal strike in the
anthracite regions threatened our nation with a disaster
second to none which has befallen us since the days of
the Civil War. Their report was made just before the
Senate adjourned at the special session; and no Government
document of recent years marks a more important
piece of work better done, and there is none which teaches
sounder social morality to our people. The Commission
consisted of seven as good men as were to be found in the
country, representing the bench, the church, the army,
the professions, the employers, and the employed. They
acted as a unit, and the report which they unanimously
signed is a masterpiece of sound common-sense and of
sound doctrine on the very questions with which our
people should most deeply concern themselves. The
immediate effect of this Commission's appointment and
action was of vast and incalculable benefit to the nation;
but the ultimate effect will be even better, if capitalist,
wage worker, and lawmaker alike will take to heart and
act upon the lessons set forth in the report they have
made.
Of course the National Government has but a small
field in which it can work in labor matters. Something
it can do, however, and that something ought to be done.
Among other things I should like to see the District of
Columbia, which is completely under the control of the
Washington is not a city of very large industries, but
still it has some. Wise labor legislation for the city of
Washington would be a good thing in itself, and it would
be a far better thing, because a standard would thereby
be set for the country as a whole.
In the field of general legislation relating to these subjects
the action of Congress is necessarily very limited.
Still there are certain ways in which we can act. Thus
the Secretary of the Navy has recommended, with my
cordial and hearty approval, the enactment of a strong
employers' liability law in the navy-yards of the nation.
It should be extended to similar branches of the Government
work. Again, sometimes such laws can be enacted
as an incident to the nation's control over interstate
commerce. In my last annual message to Congress I advocated
the passage of a law in reference to car couplings
—to strengthen the features of the one already on the
statute books so as to minimize the exposure to death
and maiming of railway employees. Much opposition
had to be overcome. In the end an admirable law was
passed "to promote the safety of employees and travellers
upon railroads by compelling common carriers engaged
in interstate commerce to equip their cars with
automatic couplers and continuous brakes, and their
locomotives with driving-wheel brakes." This law received
my signature a couple of days before Congress
adjourned. It represents a real and substantial advance
in an admirable kind of legislation.
XXI
AT FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA, APRIL 7, 1903
My fellow-citizens:
The Northwest, whose sons in the Civil War added such
brilliant pages to the honor roll of the Republic, likewise
bore a full share in the struggle of which the war with
Spain was the beginning,—a struggle slight indeed when
compared with the gigantic death-wrestle which for four
years stamped to and fro across the Southern States in
the Civil War, but a struggle fraught with consequences
to the nation, and indeed to the world, out of all proportion
to the smallness of the effort upon our part.
Three and a half years ago President McKinley spoke
in the adjoining State of Minnesota on the occasion of
the return of the Thirteenth Minnesota Volunteers from
the Philippine Islands, where they had served with your
own gallant sons of the North Dakota regiment. After
heartily thanking the returned soldiers for their valor and
patriotism, and their contemptuous refusal to be daunted
or misled by the outcry raised at home by the men of
little faith who wished us to abandon the islands, he
spoke of the islands themselves as follows:
That Congress will provide for them a government which
will bring them blessings, which will promote their material
interests as well as advance their people in the path of civilization
and intelligence, I confidently believe. They will not be
governed as vassals or serfs or slaves. They will be given a
government of liberty, regulated by law, honestly administered,
without bribe, education without distinction of social condition,
freedom of religious worship, and protection in "life, liberty,
and the pursuit of happiness."
What he said then lay in the realm of promise. Now
it lies in the realm of positive performance.
It is a good thing to look back upon what has been said
and compare it with the record of what has actually been
done. If promises are violated, if plighted word is not
kept, then those who have failed in their duty should be
held up to reprobation. If, on the other hand, the
promises have been substantially made good; if the
achievement has kept pace and more than kept pace with
the prophecy, then they who made the one and are responsible
for the other are entitled of just right to claim
the credit which attaches to those who serve the nation
well. This credit I claim for the men who have managed
so admirably the military and the civil affairs of the
Philippine Islands, and for those other men who have so
heartily backed them in Congress, and without whose aid
and support not one thing could have been accomplished.
When President McKinley spoke, the first duty was the
restoration of order; and to this end the use of the army
of the United States—an army composed of regulars
and volunteers alike—was necessary. To put down the
insurrection and restore peace to the islands was a duty
not only to ourselves but to the islanders also. We could
not have abandoned the conflict without shirking this
duty, without proving ourselves recreants to the memory
of our forefathers. Moreover, if we had abandoned it
we would have inflicted upon the Filipinos the most cruel
wrong and would have doomed them to a bloody jumble
of anarchy and tyranny. It seems strange, looking back,
that any of our people should have failed to recognize
a duty so obvious; but there was such failure, and the
and above all our gallant army, had to do their
work amid a storm of detraction. The army in especial
was attacked in a way which finally did good, for in the
end it aroused the hearty resentment of the great body
of the American people, not against the army, but
against the army's traducers. The circumstances of the
war made it one of peculiar difficulty, and our soldiers
were exposed to peculiar wrongs from their foes. They
fought in dense tropical jungles against enemies who were
very treacherous and very cruel, not only toward our own
men, but toward the great numbers of friendly natives,
the most peaceable and most civilized among whom
eagerly welcomed our rule. Under such circumstances,
among a hundred thousand hot-blooded and powerful
young men serving in small detachments on the other
side of the globe, it was impossible that occasional instances
of wrong-doing should not occur. The fact that
they occurred in retaliation for well-nigh intolerable provocation
cannot for one moment be admitted in the way
of excuse or justification. All good Americans regret
and deplore them, and the War Department has taken
every step in its power to punish the offenders and to
prevent or minimize the chance of repetition of the
offence. But these offences were the exception and not
the rule. As a whole, our troops showed not only signal
courage and efficiency, but great humanity and the most
sincere desire to promote the welfare and liberties of the
islanders. In a series of exceedingly harassing and difficult
campaigns they completely overthrew the enemy,
reducing them finally to a condition of mere brigandage;
and wherever they conquered, they conquered only to
make way for the rule of the civil government, for the
introduction of law, and of liberty under the law. When,
by last July, the last vestige of organized insurrection
had disappeared, peace and amnesty were proclaimed.
As rapidly as the military rule was extended over the
islands by the defeat of the insurgents, just so rapidly
was it replaced by the civil government. At the present
time the civil government is supreme and the army in the
Philippines has been reduced until it is sufficient merely
to provide against the recurrence of trouble. In Governor
Taft and his associates we sent to the Filipinos as
upright, as conscientious, and as able a group of administrators
as ever any country has been blessed with having.
With them and under them we have associated the best
men among the Filipinos, so that the great majority of the
officials, including many of the highest rank, are themselves
natives of the islands. The administration is incorruptibly
honest; justice is as jealously safeguarded as
here at home. The government is conducted purely in
the interests of the people of the islands; they are protected
in their religious and civil rights; they have been
given an excellent and well-administered school system,
and each of them now enjoys rights to "life, liberty, and
the pursuit of happiness" such as were never before
known in all the history of the islands.
The Congress which has just adjourned has passed
legislation of high importance and great wisdom in the
interests of the Filipino people. First and foremost,
they conferred upon them by law the present admirable
civil government; in addition they gave them an excellent
currency; they passed a measure allowing the organization
of a native constabulary; and they provided, in
the interests of the islands, for a reduction of twenty-five
per cent, in the tariff on Filipino articles brought to this
country. I asked that a still further reduction should be
made. It was not granted by the last Congress, but I
think that in some shape it will be granted by the next.
And even without it, the record of legislation in the interests
of the Filipinos is one with which we have a right
to feel great satisfaction.
Moreover, Congress appropriated three million dollars,
following the precedent it set when the people of Porto
Rico were afflicted by sudden disaster; this money to be
used by the Philippine Government in order to meet the
distress occasioned primarily by the terrible cattle disease
which almost annihilated the carabao or water-buffalo,
the chief and most important domestic animal in the
islands. Coming as this disaster did upon the heels of
the havoc wrought by the insurrectionary war, great suffering
has been caused; and this misery, for which this
Government is in no way responsible, will doubtless in
turn increase the difficulties of the Philippine Government
for the next year or so. In consequence there will
doubtless here and there occur sporadic increases of the
armed brigandage to which the islands have been habituated
from time immemorial, and here and there for their
own purposes the bandits may choose to style themselves
patriots or insurrectionists; but these local difficulties will
be of little consequence save as they give occasion to a
few men here at home again to try to mislead our people.
Not only has the military problem in the Philippines
been worked out quicker and better than we had dared
to expect, but the progress socially and in civil government
has likewise exceeded our fondest hopes.
The best thing that can be done in handling such a
problem as that in the Philippine Islands, so peculiar, so
delicate, so difficult, and so remote, is to put the best
man possible in charge and then give him the heartiest
possible support and the freest possible hand. This is
what has been done with Governor Taft. There is not
in this nation a higher or finer type of public servant
than Governor Taft. He has rendered literally inestimable
service, not only to the people of the Philippine
Islands but also to the people of the United States, by
what he has done in those islands. He has been able to
do it, because from the beginning he has been given
Root. With the cessation of organized resistance
the civil government assumed its proper position of headship.
The army in the Philippines is now one of the
instruments through which Governor Taft does his admirable
work. The civil government, of which Governor
Taft is the head, is supreme, and it will do well in the
future as it has in the past, because it will be backed up
in the future as it has been in the past.
Remember always that in the Philippines the American
Government has tried and is trying to carry out exactly
what the greatest genius and most revered patriot ever
known in the Philippine Islands—José Rizal—steadfastly
advocated. This man, shortly before his death, in a
message to his countrymen, under date of December 16,
1896, condemned unsparingly the insurrection of Aguinaldo,
terminated just before our navy appeared upon the
scene, and pointed out the path his people should follow
to liberty and enlightenment. Speaking of the insurrection
and of the pretence that Filipino independence of a
wholesome character could thereby be obtained, he wrote:
When, in spite of my advice, a movement was begun, I
offered of my own accord, not only my services, but my life
and even my good name to be used in any way they might
believe effective in stifling the rebellion. I thought of the disaster
which would follow the success of the revolution, and I
deemed myself fortunate if by any sacrifice I could block the
progress of such a useless calamity.
My countrymen, I have given proof that I was one who
sought liberty for our country and I still seek it. But as a
first step I insisted upon the development of the people in
order that, by means of education and of labor, they might
acquire the proper individual character and force which would
make them worthy of it. In my writings I have commended
to you study and civic virtue, without which our redemption
does not exist. . . . I cannot do less than condemn this
which dishonors us before the Filipinos and discredits us with
those who otherwise would argue in our behalf. I abominate
its cruelties and disavow any kind of connection with it, regretting
with all the sorrow of my soul that these reckless men
have allowed themselves to be deceived. Let them return,
then, to their homes, and may God pardon those who have
acted in bad faith.
This message embodied precisely and exactly the
avowed policy upon which the American Government has
acted in the Philippines. What the patriot Rizal said
with such force in speaking of the insurrection before we
came to the islands applies with tenfold greater force to
those who foolishly or wickedly opposed the mild and
beneficent government we were instituting in the islands.
The judgment of the martyred public servant, Rizal,
whose birthday the Philippine people celebrate, and
whom they worship as their hero and ideal, sets forth
the duty of American sovereignty,—a duty from which
the American people will never flinch.
While we have been doing these great and beneficent
works in the islands, we have yet been steadily reducing
the cost at which they are done. The last Congress repealed
the law for the war taxes, and the War Department
has reduced the army from the maximum number
of one hundred thousand allowed under the law to very
nearly the minimum of sixty thousand.
Moreover, the last Congress enacted some admirable
legislation affecting the army, passing first of all the
militia bill and then the bill to create a general staff.
The militia bill represents the realization of a reform
which had been championed ineffectively by Washington,
and had been fruitlessly agitated ever since. At last we
have taken from the statute books the obsolete militia
law of the Revolutionary days and have provided for efficient
aid to the National Guard of the States. I believe
for volunteer soldiers as we have, and it is the obvious
duty of the Nation and of the States to make such provision
as will enable this volunteer soldiery to be organized
with all possible rapidity and efficiency in time of
war; and, furthermore, to help in every way the National
Guard in time of peace. The militia law enacted by the
Congress marks the first long step ever taken in this
direction by the National Government. The general-staff
law is of immense importance and benefit to the
regular army. Individually, I would not admit that
the American regular, either officer or enlisted man, is
inferior to any other regular soldier in the world. In
fact, if it were worth while to boast, I should be tempted
to say that he was the best. But there must be proper
training, proper organization, and administration, in
order to get the best service out of even the best troops.
This is particularly the case with such a small army as
ours, scattered over so vast a country. We do not need
a large regular army, but we do need to have our small
regular army the very best that can possibly be produced.
Under the worn-out and ineffective organization
which has hitherto existed, a sudden strain is absolutely
certain to produce the dislocation and confusion we saw
at the outbreak of the war with Spain; and when such
dislocation and confusion occur it is easy and natural,
but entirely improper, to blame the men who happen to
be in office, instead of the system which is really responsible.
Under the law just enacted by Congress this system
will be changed immensely for the better, and every
patriotic American ought to rejoice; for when we come
to the army and the navy we deal with the honor and
interests of all our people; and when such is the case
party lines are as nothing, and we all stand shoulder to
shoulder as Americans, moved only by pride in and love
for our common country.
XXII
AT OMAHA, NEBRASKA, APRIL 27, 1903
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow-citizens:
It is a great pleasure to come before you this evening.
Since Saturday I have been travelling through your great
and beautiful State. I know your people; I have been
with them; I have worked with them; and it is indeed a
joy to come here now and see from one end of your State
to the other the signs of your abounding prosperity. I
feel that the future of Nebraska is secure. There will be
temporary ups and downs, and of course if any of you
are guilty of folly, from your own folly nothing can save
you but yourselves. But if you act as I believe and trust
that you will act, this State has a future before it second
to that of no other State in this great Nation.
I address you to-night on the anniversary of the birth
of the great silent soldier—Ulysses Grant,—and I am glad
to have the chance of saying a few words to an audience
such as this in this great typical city of the West on the
occasion of the birthday of the great Western general,
the great American general. It is a good thing to pay
homage with our lips to the illustrious dead. It is a
good thing to keep in mind what we owe to the memories
of Washington and his fellows, who founded this mighty
Republic, to Abraham Lincoln and Grant and their fellows,
who saved it. It is a far better thing to pay the
homage that counts—the homage of our lives and our
deeds. Illustrious memories of the nation's past are but
curses if they serve the men of the nation at present as
blessings if they serve to spur on the men of now to see
that they act as well in their time as the men of yesterday
did in theirs.
Each generation has its peculiar problems; each generation
has certain tasks allotted to it to do. Shame to it if
it treats the glorious deeds of a generation that went before
as an excuse for its own failure to do the peculiar
task it finds ready to hand. Upon the way in which we
solve our problems will depend whether our children and
our children's children shall look back or shall not look
back to us with the veneration which we feel for the men
of the mighty years of the Civil War. Our task is a
lighter one than theirs, but it is an important one, and do
it we must, if we wish to rise level to the standard set us
by our forefathers. You in Nebraska have passed through
periods of terrible privation, of misery and hardship.
They were evil times. And yet, there is no experience,
no evil, that out of it good cannot come, if only we look
at it right. Things are better now. Things can be kept
better, but only on condition that we face facts with coolness
and sanity, with clear-eyed vision that tells us what
is true and what is false. When things go wrong there
is another tendency in humanity to wish to blame some
of its fellows. It is a natural tendency, and by no means
always a wholesome tendency. There is always a tendency
to feel that somehow by legislation, by the enactment
of some law, by the trying of some patent scheme,
things can be made permanently better. Now, something
can be done by law. A good deal can be done by law.
Even more can be done by the honest administration of
the law; an administration which knows neither fear nor
favor, which treats each man exactly as that man's record
entitles him to be treated; the kind of enforcement of
the law which I think I may promise that you will have
while Mr. Knox remains Attorney-General. But more
law, depends upon the individual quality of the average
citizen. The chief factor in winning success for your
State, for the people in the State, must be what the chief
factor in winning the success of a people has been from
the beginning of time—the character of the individual
man, of the individual woman.
I have spoken of the homage we should pay to the
memory of Grant. It is the homage we should pay to
the memory of Lincoln, the homage we should pay to
all of our fellow-countrymen who have at any time rendered
great service to the Republic, and it can be rendered
in most efficient form not by merely praising them for
having dealt with problems which now we do not have to
face, but by facing our problems in the same spirit in
which they faced theirs. Nothing was more noteworthy
in all of Lincoln's character than the way in which he
combined fealty to the loftiest ideal with a thoroughly
practical capacity to achieve that ideal by practical
methods. He did not war with phantoms; he did not
struggle among the clouds; he faced facts; he endeavored
to get the best results he could out of the warring forces
with which he had to deal. When he could not get the
best he was forced to content himself, and did content
himself, with the best possible. What he did in his day
we must do in ours. It is not possible to lay down any
rule of conduct so specific that it will enable us to meet
each particular issue as it arises. All that can be done is
to lay down certain general rules, and then to try, each
man for himself, to apply those general rules to the
specific cases that come up.
Our complex industrial civilization has not only been
productive of much benefit, but has also brought us face
to face with many puzzling problems; problems that are
puzzling, partly because there are men that are wicked,
partly because there are good men who are foolish or
of labor and capital, the problems which we group
together rather vaguely when we speak of the problems
of the trusts, the problems affecting the farmers on the
one hand, the railroads on the other. It would not be possible
in any one place to deal with the particular shapes
which these problems take at that time and in that place.
And yet, there are certain general rules which can be laid
down for dealing with them, and those rules are the immutable
rules of justice, of sanity, of courage, of common-sense.
Six months ago it fell to my lot to appoint
a commission to investigate into and conclude about
matters connected with the great and menacing strike in
the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. On that commission
I appointed representatives of the church, of the
bench, of the army, a representative of the capitalists of
the region, and a representative of organized labor. They
published a report which was not only of the. utmost moment
because of dealing with the great and vital problem
with which they were appointed to deal, but also because
in its conclusions it initiated certain general rules in so
clear and masterful a fashion that I wish most earnestly
it could receive the broadest circulation as a tract wherever
there exists or threatens to exist trouble in any way
akin to that with which those commissioners dealt.
If I might give a word of advice to Omaha, I should
like to see your daily press publish in full the concluding
portion of that report of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission,
signed by all the members thereof, by those in
a special sense the champion of the wage worker, and by
those in a special sense identified with capital, organized
or unorganized, because, men and women of Omaha,
those people did not speak first as capitalist or as laborer,
did not speak first as judge, as army man, as church man,
but all of them signed that report as American citizens
anxious to see right and justice prevail. No one quality
one; we need a good many. We need, as I said, the
power first of each man's honestly trying to look at
the problem from his fellow's standpoint. Capitalist and
wage worker alike, should honestly endeavor each to look
at any matter from the other's standpoint, with a freedom
on the one hand from the contemptible arrogance
which looks down upon the man of less means, and, on
the other, from the no less contemptible envy, jealousy,
and rancor, which hates another because he is better off.
Each quality is the supplement of the other, and in point
of baseness there is not the weight of a finger to choose
between them. Look at the report signed by those men;
look at it in the spirit in which they wrote it, and if you
can only make yourselves, make this community, approach
the problems of to-day in the spirit that those
men, your fellows, showed in approaching the problem
of yesterday, your problems will be solved.
Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate,
hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community,
though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class
he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty
that class's own worst enemy. In the long run, and as a
whole, we are going to go up or go down together. Of
course there will be individual exceptions, small, local exceptions,
exceptions in kind, exceptions in place; but as
a whole, if the commonwealth prospers, some measure of
prosperity comes to all of us. If it is not prosperous,
then the adversity, though it may fall unequally upon us,
will weigh more or less upon all. It lies with us ourselves
to determine our own fate. I cannot too often say
that the wisest law, the best administration of the law, can
do naught more than give us a fair field in which to work
out that fate aright. If as individuals, or as a community,
we mar our future by our own folly, let us remember
that it is upon ourselves that the responsibility must rest.
XXIII
AT ODEON HALL, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, BEFORE
THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL GOOD
ROADS CONVENTION, APRIL 29, 1903
Mr. Chairman, ladies, and gentlemen:
When we wish to use descriptive terms fit to characterize
great empires and the man who made those empires
great, invariably one of the terms used is to signify that
that empire built good roads. When we speak of the
Romans, we speak of them as rulers, as conquerors, as
administrators, as road-builders. There were empires
that rose overnight and fell overnight, empires whose
influence was absolutely evanescent, which have passed
away without leaving a trace of their former existence;
but wherever the Roman established his rule the traces
of that rule remain deep to-day, stamped on the language
and customs of the people, or stamped in tangible form
upon the soil itself. And so passing through Britain
fifteen centuries and over after the dominion of Rome
passed away the Roman roads as features still remain;
going through Italy where power after power has arisen,
and flourished, and vanished since the days when the
temporal dominion of the Roman Emperors transferred
its seat from Rome to Byzantium—going through Italy
after the Lombard, the Goth, the Byzantine, and all the
people of the Middle Ages that have ruled that country,
—it is the imperishable Roman road that reappears.
The faculty, the art, the habit, of road building marks
in a nation those solid, stable qualities which tell for
permanent greatness. Merely from the standpoint of
people which has tamed a continent, which has built up a
country with a continent for its base, which boasts itself,
with truth, as the mightiest Republic that the world has
ever seen, which I firmly believe will in the century now
opening rise to a position of headship and leadership such
as no other nation has ever yet attained,—merely from
historic analogy, I say, we should have a right to demand
that such a nation build good roads. Much more have
we the right to demand it from the practical standpoint.
The great difference between the semi-barbarism of the
Middle Ages and the civilization which succeeded it was
the difference between poor and good means of communication.
And we to whom space is less of an obstacle
than ever it was in the history of any other nation, we who
have spanned a continent, who have thrust our border
westward in the course of a century and a quarter until
it has gone from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies, from
the Alleghanies down into the valley of the Mississippi,
across the great plains, over the Rockies to where the
Golden Gate lets through the long heaving waters of the
Pacific, and finally to Alaska, to the Arctic regions, to
the tropic islands of the sea—we who take so little account
of mere space, must see to it that the best means
of nullifying the existence of space are at our command.
Of course, during the last century there has been an
altogether phenomenal growth of one kind of road wholly
unknown to the people of an earlier period—the iron
road. The railroad is, of course, something purely
modern. A great many excellent people have proceeded
upon the assumption that somehow or other having good
railways should be a substitute for having good highways,
good ordinary roads. A more untenable position
cannot be imagined. What the railway does is to develop
the country; and of course its development implies that
the developed country will need more and better roads.
A few years ago it was a matter of national humiliation
that there should be so little attention paid to our roads;
that there should be a willingness not merely to refrain
from making good roads, but to let the roads that were
in existence become worse. I cannot too heartily congratulate
our people upon the existence of a body such
as this, ramifying into every section of the country, having
its connections in every State of the country, and
bent upon that eminently proper work of making the
conditions of life easier and better for the people whom
of all others we can least afford to see grow discontented
with their lot in life—the people who live in the country
districts. The extraordinary, the wholly unheard-of, rate
of our industrial development during the past seventy-five
years, together with the good sides has had some evil
sides. It is a fine thing to see our cities built up, but
not at the expense of the country districts. The healthy
thing to see is the building up of both the country and
city go hand in hand. But we cannot expect the ablest,
the most eager, the most ambitious young men to stay in
the country, to stay on the farm, unless they have certain
advantages. If the farm life is a life of isolation, a life in
which it is a matter of great and real difficulty for one
man to communicate with his neighbor, you can rest assured
that there will be a tendency to leave it on the part
of those very people whom we should most wish to see
stay in it. It is a good thing to encourage in every way
any tendency which will tend to check an unhealthy flow
from the country to the city. There are several such
tendencies in evidence at present. The growth of electricity
as a means of transportation tends to a certain
degree to exercise a centrifugal force to offset the centripetal
force of steam. Exactly as steam and electricity
have tended to gather men in masses, so now electricity,
as applied to the purposes which steam has so long
claimed as exclusively its own, tends again to scatter out
are doing a great deal to render it more possible to
live in the country and yet not to lose wholly the advantages
of the town. The telephone is not to be minimized
as an instrument with a tendency in the same direction;
and rural free delivery is playing its part along the same
lines. But no one thing can do more to offset the tendency
toward an unhealthy growth from the country into
the city than the making and keeping of good roads.
They are needed for the sake of their effect upon the industrial
conditions of the country districts; and I am almost
tempted to say they are needed for the sake of social
conditions in the country districts. If winter means to
the average farmer the existence of a long line of liquid
morasses through which he is to move his goods if bent
on business, or to wade and swim if bent on pleasure; if
winter means that after an ordinary rain the farmer boy
or girl cannot use his or her bicycle; if a little heavy
weather means a stoppage of all communication not only
with industrial centres but with the neighbors, you must
expect that there will be a great many young people of
both sexes who will not find farm life attractive. It is
for this reason that I feel the work you are doing is so
pre-eminently one in the interest of the nation as a whole.
I congratulate you upon the fact that you are doing it.
In our American life it would be hard to overestimate
the amount of good that has been accomplished by associations
of individuals who have gathered together to
work for a common object which was to be of benefit to
the community as a whole; and among all the excellent
objects for which men and women combine to work today,
there are few indeed which have a better right to
command the energies of those engaged in the movement,
and the hearty sympathy and support of those outside,
than this movement in which you are engaged.
XXIV
AT ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI,
APRIL 29, 1903
Cardinal Gibbons, gentlemen, and ladies:
It is indeed a pleasure to be received here as a guest of
the first and oldest university founded in our country
west of the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Purchase.
I know your work. I have myself been much in the
West, and I have come across the traces of your work,
both among the communities of our own people and
among the Indian tribes.
I thank you personally for your kind allusions to me,
and would hold myself recreant to the principles upon
which this Government was founded did I not strive as
Chief Executive to do fair and equal justice to all men
without regard to the way in which any man chooses to
worship his Maker. I thank you for your greeting. I
appreciate it, and I can assure you, you are not as glad
to have me as I am to be here.
XXV
AT THE DEDICATION CEREMONIES OF THE
LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, ST.
LOUIS, MISSOURI, APRIL 30, 1903
Mr. President, ladies, and gentlemen:
At the outset of my address let me recall to the minds
of my hearers that the soil upon which we stand, before
it was ours, was successively the possession of two mighty
empires, Spain and France, whose sons made a deathless
record of heroism in the early annals of the New World.
No history of the Western country can be written without
paying heed to the wonderful part played therein in
the early days by the soldiers, missionaries, explorers,
and traders, who did their work for the honor of the
proud banners of France and Castile. While the settlers
of English-speaking stock, and those of Dutch, German,
and Scandinavian origin who were associated with them,
were still clinging close to the Eastern seaboard, the
pioneers of Spain and of France had penetrated deep
into the hitherto unknown wilderness of the West,
and had wandered far and wide within the boundaries
of what is now our mighty country. The very cities
themselves—St. Louis, New Orleans, Santa Fé—bear
witness by their titles to the nationalities of their founders.
It was not until the Revolution had begun that
the English-speaking settlers pushed west across the
Alleghanies, and not until a century ago that they entered
in to possess the land upon which we now stand.
We have met here to-day to commemorate the hundredth
other, after the foundation of the Government and always
excepting its preservation, determined the character of
our national life—determined that we should be a great
expanding nation instead of relatively a small and stationary
one.
Of course it was not with the Louisiana Purchase that
our career of expansion began. In the middle of the
Revolutionary War the Illinois region, including the
present States of Illinois and Indiana, was added to our
domain by force of arms, as a sequel to the adventurous
expedition of George Rogers Clarke and his frontier riflemen.
Later the treaties of Jay and Pinckney materially
extended our real boundaries to the west. But none of
these events was of so striking a character as to fix the
popular imagination. The old thirteen colonies had
always claimed that their rights stretched westward to
the Mississippi, and vague and unreal though these claims
were until made good by conquest, settlement, and diplomacy,
they still served to give the impression that the earliest
westward movements of our people were little more
than the filling in of already existing national boundaries.
But there could be no illusion about the acquisition of
the vast territory beyond the Mississippi, stretching westward
to the Pacific, which in that day was known as
Louisiana. This immense region was admittedly the
territory of a foreign power, of a European kingdom.
None of our people had ever laid claim to a foot of it.
Its acquisition could in no sense be treated as rounding
out any existing claims. When we acquired it we made
evident once for all that consciously and of set purpose
we had embarked on a career of expansion, that we had
taken our place among those daring and hardy nations
who risk much with the hope and desire of winning high
position among the great powers of the earth. As is
so often the case in nature, the law of development of a
wiser than the wisdom of the wisest.
This work of expansion was by far the greatest work
of our people during the years that intervened between
the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of the
Civil War. There were other questions of real moment
and importance, and there were many which at the time
seemed such to those engaged in answering them; but
the greatest feat of our forefathers of those generations
was the deed of the men who, with pack-train or wagon-train,
on horseback, on foot, or by boat upon the waters,
pushed the frontier ever westward across the continent.
Never before had the world seen the kind of national
expansion which gave our people all that part of the
American continent lying west of the thirteen original
States; the greatest landmark in which was the Louisiana
Purchase. Our triumph in this process of expansion was
indissolubly bound up with the success of our peculiar
kind of federal government; and this success has been so
complete that because of its very completeness we now
sometimes fail to appreciate not only the all-importance
but the tremendous difficulty of the problem with which
our nation was originally faced.
When our forefathers joined to call into being this
nation, they undertook a task for which there was but
little encouraging precedent. The development of civilization
from the earliest period seemed to show the truth
of two propositions: In the first place, it had always
proved exceedingly difficult to secure both freedom and
strength in any government; and in the second place, it
had always proved well-nigh impossible for a nation to
expand without either breaking up or becoming a centralized
tyranny. With the success of our effort to combine
a strong and efficient national union, able to put down
disorder at home and to maintain our honor and interest
abroad, I have not now to deal. This success was signal
in the same sense that our type of expansion was unprecedented.
The history of Rome and of Greece illustrates
very well the two types of expansion which had taken
place in ancient time and which had been universally accepted
as the only possible types up to the period when
as a nation we ourselves began to take possession of this
continent. The Grecian states performed remarkable
feats of colonization, but each colony as soon as created
became entirely independent of the mother state, and in
after years was almost as apt to prove its enemy as its
friend. Local self-government, local independence, was
secured, but only by the absolute sacrifice of anything
resembling national unity. In consequence, the Greek
world, for all its wonderful brilliancy and the extraordinary
artistic, literary, and philosophical development which
has made all mankind its debtors for the ages, was yet
wholly unable to withstand a formidable foreign foe, save
spasmodically. As soon as powerful, permanent empires
arose on its outskirts, the Greek states in the neighborhood
of such empires fell under their sway. National power
and greatness were completely sacrificed to local liberty.
With Rome the exact opposite occurred. The imperial
city rose to absolute dominion over all the peoples of
Italy and then expanded her rule over the entire civilized
world by a process which kept the nation strong and
united, but gave no room whatever for local liberty and
self-government. All other cities and countries were
subject to Rome. In consequence this great and masterful
race of warriors, rulers, road-builders, and administrators
stamped their indelible impress upon all the
after-life of our race, and yet let an over-centralization eat
out the vitals of their empire until it became an empty
shell; so that when the barbarians came they destroyed
only what had already become worthless to the world.
The underlying viciousness of each type of expansion
enough. But when the fathers of the Republic first
formulated the Constitution under which we live this
remedy was untried and no one could foretell how it
would work. They themselves began the experiment
almost immediately by adding new States to the original
thirteen. Excellent people in the East viewed this
initial expansion of the country with great alarm.
Exactly as during the colonial period many good people
in the mother country thought it highly important that
settlers should be kept out of the Ohio valley in the interest
of the fur companies, so after we had become a
nation many good people on the Atlantic coast felt
grave apprehension lest they might somehow be hurt by
the westward growth of the nation. These good people
shook their heads over the formation of States in the
fertile Ohio valley which now forms part of the heart of
our nation; and they declared that the destruction of
the Republic had been accomplished when through the
Louisiana Purchase we acquired nearly half of what is
now that same Republic's present territory. Nor was
their feeling unnatural. Only the adventurous and the
far-seeing can be expected heartily to welcome the process
of expansion, for the nation that expands is a nation
which is entering upon a great career, and with greatness
there must of necessity come perils which daunt all save
the most stout-hearted.
We expanded by carving the wilderness into Territories
and out of these Territories building new States when
once they had received as permanent settlers a sufficient
number of our own people. Being a practical nation we
have never tried to force on any section of our new territory
an unsuitable form of government merely because
it was suitable for another section under different conditions.
Of the territory covered by the Louisiana Purchase
a portion was given statehood within a few years.
although a century has elapsed—although doubtless it
soon will be. In each case we showed the practical governmental
genius of our race by devising methods suitable
to meet the actual existing needs; not by insisting upon
the application of some abstract shibboleth to all our new
possessions alike, no matter how incongruous this application
might sometimes be.
Over by far the major part of the territory, however,
our people spread in such numbers during the course of
the nineteenth century that we were able to build up
State after State, each with exactly the same complete
local independence in all matters affecting purely its own
domestic interests as in any of the original thirteen States
—each owing the same absolute fealty to the Union of all
the States which each of the original thirteen States also
owes,—and finally each having the same proportional right
to its share in shaping and directing the common policy
of the Union which is possessed by any other State,
whether of the original thirteen or not.
This process now seems to us part of the natural order
of things, but it was wholly unknown until our own people
devised it. It seems to us a mere matter of course,
a matter of elementary right and justice, that in the deliberations
of the national representative bodies the representatives
of a State which came into the Union but
yesterday stand on a footing of exact and entire equality
with those of the Commonwealths whose sons once signed
the Declaration of Independence. But this way of looking
at the matter is purely modern, and in its origin
purely American. When Washington during his Presidency
saw new States come into the Union on a footing
of complete equality with the old, every European nation
which had colonies still administered them as dependencies,
and every other mother country treated the colonist
not as a self-governing equal but as a subject.
The process which we began has since been followed
by all the great peoples who were capable both of expansion
and of self-government, and now the world accepts
it as the natural process, as the rule; but a century and a
quarter ago it was not merely exceptional, it was unknown.
This, then, is the great historic significance of the
movement of continental expansion in which the Louisiana
Purchase was the most striking single achievement.
It stands out in marked relief even among the feats of a
nation of pioneers, a nation whose people have from the
beginning been picked out by a process of natural selection
from among the most enterprising individuals of the
nations of western Europe. The acquisition of the territory
is a credit to the broad and far-sighted statesmanship
of the great statesmen to whom it was immediately due,
and above all to the aggressive and masterful character of
the hardy pioneer folk to whose restless energy these
statesmen gave expression and direction, whom they followed
rather than led. The history of the land comprised
within the limits of the Purchase is an epitome of the
entire history of our people. Within these limits we
have gradually built up State after State until now they
many times over-surpass in wealth, in population, and
in many-sided development the original thirteen States
as they were when their delegates met in the Continental
Congress. The people of these States have shown themselves
mighty in war with their fellow-man, and mighty
in strength to tame the rugged wilderness. They could
not thus have conquered the forest and the prairie, the
mountain and the desert, had they not possessed the
great fighting virtues, the qualities which enable a people
to overcome the forces of hostile men and hostile nature.
On the other hand, they could not have used aright their
conquest had they not in addition possessed the qualities
of self-mastery and self-restraint, the power of acting in
obedience to the law and of building up an orderly
civilization. Courage and hardihood are indispensable
virtues in a people; but the people which possesses no
others can never rise high in the scale either of power
or of culture. Great peoples must have in addition the
governmental capacity which comes only when individuals
fully recognize their duties to one another and to the
whole body politic, and are able to join together in feats
of constructive statesmanship and of honest and effective
administration.
The old pioneer days are gone, with their roughness
and their hardship, their incredible toil and their wild
half-savage romance. But the need for the pioneer
virtues remains the same as ever. The peculiar frontier
conditions have vanished; but the manliness and stalwart
hardihood of the frontiersmen can be given even freer
scope under the conditions surrounding the complex
industrialism of the present day. In this great region
acquired for our people under the Presidency of Jefferson,
this region stretching from the Gulf to the Canadian
border, from the Mississippi to the Rockies, the material
and social progress has been so vast that alike for weal
and for woe its people now share the opportunities and
bear the burdens common to the entire civilized world.
The problems before us are fundamentally the same east
and west of the Mississippi, in the new States and in the
old, and exactly the same qualities are required for their
successful solution.
We meet here to-day to commemorate a great event,
an event which marks an era in statesmanship no less
than in pioneering. It is fitting that we should pay our
homage in words; but we must in honor make our words
good by deeds. We have every right to take a just pride
in the great deeds of our forefathers; but we show ourselves
unworthy to be their descendants if we make what
to the effort to show ourselves by our acts worthy
of them. In the administration of City, State, and
Nation, in the management of our home life and the conduct
of our business and social relations, we are bound to
show certain high and fine qualities of character under
penalty of seeing the whole heart of our civilization eaten
out while the body still lives.
We justly pride ourselves on our marvellous material
prosperity, and such prosperity must exist in order to
establish a foundation upon which a higher life can be
built; but unless we do in very fact build this higher life
thereon, the material prosperity itself will go for but very
little. Now, in 1903, in the altered conditions, we must
meet the changed and changing problems with the spirit
shown by the men who in 1803 and in the subsequent
years gained, explored, conquered, and settled this vast
territory, then a desert, now filled with thriving and
populous States.
The old days were great because the men who lived in
them had mighty qualities; and we must make the new
days great by showing these same qualities. We must
insist upon courage and resolution, upon hardihood, tenacity,
and fertility in resource; we must insist upon the
strong virile virtues; and we must insist no less upon the
virtues of self-restraint, self-mastery, regard for the rights
of others; we must show our abhorrence of cruelty, brutality,
and corruption, in public and in private life alike.
If we come short in any of these qualities we shall measurably
fail; and if, as I believe we surely shall, we develop
these qualities in the future to an even greater degree
than in the past, then in the century now beginning we
shall make of this Republic the freest and most orderly,
the most just and most mighty, nation which has ever
come forth from the womb of time.
XXVI
AT TOPEKA, KANSAS, MAY 1, 1903
Colonel Mc Cook, gentlemen, and ladies:
It needed no urging to get me to accept your invitation.
I hailed the chance of speaking a few words to you on this
occasion, because it seems to me that the railroad branch
of the Young Men's Christian Association exemplifies in
practice just exactly what I like to preach—that is, the
combination of efficiency with decent living and high
ideals.
In our present advanced civilization we have to pay
certain penalties for what we have obtained. Among the
penalties is the fact that in very many occupations there
is so little demand upon nerve, hardihood, and endurance,
that there is a tendency to unhealthy softening of fibre
and relaxation of fibre; and such being the case I think
it is a fortunate thing for our people as a whole that
there should be certain occupations, prominent among
them railroading, in which the man has to show the very
qualities of courage, of hardihood, of willingness to face
danger, the cultivation of the power of instantaneous decision
under difficulties, and the other qualities which go
to make up the virile side of a man's character—the
qualities, Colonel McCook, which you and those like you
showed when as boys, as young men, they fought to a
finish the great Civil War.
So much for the manliness, so much for the strength,
so much for the courage developed by your profession,
not succeed in doing the work you are doing as your life-work.
These qualities are all-important, but they are
not all-sufficient. It is necessary absolutely to have
them. No nation can rise to greatness without them,
but by them alone no nation will ever become great.
Reading through the pages of history you come upon
nation after nation in which there has been a high average
of individual strength, bravery, and hardihood, and
yet in which there has been nothing approaching to
national greatness, because those qualities were not supplemented
by others just as necessary. With the courage,
with the hardihood, with the strength, must come
the power of self-restraint, the power of self-mastery, the
capacity to work for and with others as well as for one's
self, the power of giving to others the love which each
of us must bear for his neighbor, if we are to make our
civilization really great. And these are the qualities
which are fostered and developed, which are given full
play, by institutions such as the Young Men's Christian
Association.
The other day in a little Lutheran church at Sioux
Falls I listened to a most interesting and most stimulating
sermon, which struck me particularly because of the
translation of a word which, I am ashamed to say, I myself
had always before mistranslated. It was on the old
text of faith, hope, and charity. The sermon was delivered
in German, and the word that the preacher used
for charity was not charity, but love; preaching that the
greatest of all the forces with which we deal for betterment
is love. Looking it up I found, of course, what I
ought to have known, but did not, that the Greek word
which we have translated into the word charity should
be more properly translated love. That is, we use the
word charity at present in a sense which does not make
it correspond entirely to the word used in the original
striking but very happy fashion the absolute need of love
in the broadest sense of the word, in order to make mankind
even approximately perfect.
We need then the two qualities—the quality of which
I first spoke to you, which has many shapes, the quality
which rests upon courage, upon bodily and mental
strength, upon will, upon daring, upon resolution, the
quality which makes a man work; and then we need the
quality of which the preacher spoke when he spoke of
love as being the great factor, the ultimate factor, in
bringing about the kind of human fellowship which will
even approximately enable us to come up towards the
standard after which I think all of us with many shortcomings
strive. Work and love, using each in its broadest
sense—work, the quality which makes a man ashamed
not to be able to pull his own weight, not to be able to
do for himself as well as for others without being beholden
to any one for what he is doing. No man is happy if he
does not work. Of all miserable creatures the idler, in
whatever rank of society, is in the long run the most miserable.
If a man does not work, if he has not in him not
merely the capacity for work but the desire for work, then
nothing can be done with him. He is out of place in our
community. We have in our scheme of government no
room for the man who does not wish to pay his way
through life by what he does for himself and for the community.
If he has leisure which makes it unnecessary
for him to devote his time to earning his daily bread,
then all the more he is bound to work just as hard in
some way that will make the community the better off
for his existence. If he fails in that, he fails to justify
his existence. Work, the capacity for work, is absolutely
necessary; and no man's life is full, no man can be said to
live in the true sense of the word, if he does not work.
This is necessary; and yet it is not enough. If a man is
others, if he has no ideals, if he works simply for the sake
of ministering to his own base passions, if he works
simply to gratify himself, small is his good in the community.
I think even then he is probably better off than
if he is an idler, but he is of no real use unless together
with the quality which enables him to work he has the
quality which enables him to love his fellows, to work
with them and for them for the common good of all.
It seems to me that these Young Men's Christian Associations
play a part of the greatest consequence, not
merely because of the great good they do in themselves,
but because of the lesson of brotherhood that they teach
all of us. All of us here are knit together by bonds
which we cannot sever. For weal or for woe our fates
are inextricably intermingled. All of us in our present
civilization are dependent upon one another to a degree
never before known in the history of mankind, and in the
long run we are going to go up or go down together.
For a moment some man may rise by trampling on his
fellows; for a moment, and much more commonly, some
men may think they will rise or gratify their envy and
hatred by pulling down others. But any such movement
upward is probably illusory, and is certainly short-lived.
Any permanent movement upward must come in such a
shape that all of us feel the lift a little, and if there is a
tendency downward all of us will feel that tendency too.
We must, if we are to raise ourselves, realize that each of
us in the long run can with certainty be raised only if the
conditions are such that all of us are somewhat raised.
In order to bring about these conditions the first essential
is that each shall have a genuine spirit of regard and
friendship for the others, and that each of us shall try to
look at the problems of life somewhat from his neighbor's
standpoint—that we shall have the capacity to understand
one another's position, one another's needs, and also the
To do that wisely, wisely to strive with that as the aim,
is not very easy. Many qualities are needed in order
that we can contribute our mite toward the upward
movement of the world—among them the quality of self-abnegation,
and yet combined with it the quality which
will refuse to submit to injustice. I want to preach the
two qualities going hand in hand. I do not want a man
to fail to try to strive for his own betterment, I do not
want him to be quick to yield to injustice; I want him to
stand for his rights; I want him to be very certain that
he knows what his rights are, and that he does not make
them the wrongs of some one else.
I have a great deal of faith in the average American
citizen. I think he is a pretty good fellow, and I think
he can generally get on with the other average American
citizen if he will only know him. If he does not know
him, but makes him a monster in his mind, then he will
not get on with him. But if he will take the trouble to
know him and realize that he is a being just like himself,
with the same instincts, not all of them good, the same
desire to overcome those that are not good, the same purposes,
the same tendencies, the same shortcomings, the
same desires for good, the same need of striving against
evil; if he will realize all this, then if you can get the two
together with an honest desire each to try not only to
help himself but to help the other, most of our problems
will be solved. And I can imagine no way more likely
to hurry forward such a favorable solution than to encourage
the building up of just such institutions as this.
Therefore, I congratulate you with all my heart upon
this meeting to-day. Therefore I esteem myself most
fortunate in having the chance of addressing you. It is
a very good thing to attend to the material side of life.
We must, in the first instance, attend to our material
prosperity. Unless we have that as a foundation we
lead a miserable and sordid life if we spend our whole
time in doing nothing but attend to our material needs.
If the building up of the railroads, of the farms, of the
factories, of the industrial centres, means nothing whatever
but an increase in the instruments of production
and an increase in the fevered haste with which those
instruments are used, progress amounts to but a little
thing. If, however, the developing of our material prosperity
is to serve as a foundation upon which we raise a
higher, a purer, a fuller, a better life, then indeed things
are well with the Republic. If as our wealth increases the
wisdom of our use of the wealth increases in even greater
proportion, then the wealth has abundantly justified its
existence many times over. If with the industry, the
skill, the hardihood, of those whom I am addressing and
their fellows, nothing comes beyond save a selfish desire
each to grasp for himself whatever he can of material enjoyment,
then the outlook for the future is indeed grave,
then the advantages of living in the twentieth century
surrounded by all our modern improvements, our modern
symbols of progress, is indeed small. But if we mean to
make of each fresh development in the way of material
betterment a step toward a fresh development in moral and
spiritual betterment, then we are to be congratulated.
To me the future seems full of hope because, although
there are many conflicting tendencies, and although some
of these tendencies of our present life are for evil, yet, on
the whole, the tendencies for good are in the ascendancy.
And I greet this audience, this great body of delegates,
with peculiar pleasure because they are men who embody,
and embody by the very fact of their presence here, the
two essential sets of qualities of which I have been speaking.
They embody the capacity for self-help with the
desire mutually to help one the other. You have several
qualities I like. You have sound bodies. Your profession
its branches, without the sound body. You have sound
minds, and that is better than sound bodies, and finally,
the fact that you are here, the fact that you have
done what you have done, shows that you have that
which counts for more than body, for more than mind—
character.
I congratulate you upon what you are doing for yourselves,
and I congratulate you even more upon what you
are doing for all men who hope to see the day brought
nearer when the people of all nations shall realize—not
merely talk of, but realize—what the essence of brotherhood
is. I congratulate you, as I say, not only because
you are bettering yourselves, but because to you, for
your good fortune, it is given to better others, to teach,
in the way in which teaching is most effective, not merely
by precept but by action. The railroad men of this
country are a body entitled to the well-wishes of their
fellow-men in any event, but peculiarly is this true of the
railroad men of the country who join in such work as that
of these Young Men's Christian Associations, because they
are showing by their actions—and oh, how much louder
actions speak than words!—that it is not only possible,
but very, very possible and easy to combine the manliness
which makes a man able to do his own share of the
world's work, with that fine and lofty love of one's fellow-men,
which makes you able to come together with your
fellows and work hand in hand with them for the common
good of mankind in general.
XXVII
AT LELAND STANFORD, JUNIOR, UNIVERSITY,
PALO ALTO, CALIFORNIA, MAY 12, 1903
President Jordan, and you, my fellow-citizens, and especially
you, my fellow college men and women:
I thank you for your greeting, and I know you will not
grudge my saying, first of all, a special word of thanks to
the men of the Grand Army. It is a fine thing to have
before a body of students men who by their practice
have rendered it unnecessary that they should preach;
for what we have to teach by precept, you, the men of
'61 to '65, have taught by deed, by action. I am proud
as an American college man myself to have seen the tablet
outside within the court which shows that this young
university sent eighty-five of her sons to war when the
country called for them. I come from a college which
boasts as its proudest building that which stands to the
memory of Harvard's sons who responded to the call of
Lincoln when the hour of the nation's danger was at
hand. It will be a bad day for this country and a worse
day for all educative institutions in this country, if ever
such a call is made and the men of college training do
not feel it peculiarly incumbent upon them to respond.
President Jordan has been kind enough to allude to me
as an old friend. Mr. Jordan is too modest to say that
he has long been not only a friend, but a man to whom
I have turned for advice and help before and since I
became President. I am glad to have the chance of acknowledging
that when I ask you to strive toward productive scholarship,
toward productive citizenship, I can use the President
of the University as an example. Of course in any of our
American institutions of learning, even more important
than the production of scholarship is the production of
citizenship. That is the most important thing that any
institution of learning can produce. There are a great
number of students who cannot and should not try,
in after-life, to lead a career of scholarship, but no university
can take high rank if it does not aim at the
production of, and succeed in producing, a certain number
of deep and thorough scholars—not scholars whose
scholarship is of the barren kind, but men of productive
scholarship, men who do good work, I trust great work,
in the fields of literature, of art, of science, in all their
manifold activities. Here in California this nation, composite
in its race stocks, speaking an old-world tongue,
and with an inherited old-world culture, has acquired an
absolutely new domain. I do not mean new only in the
sense of additional territory like that already possessed, I
mean new in the sense of new surroundings,—to use the
scientific phrase, of a new environment. Being new, I
think we have a right to look for a substantial achievement
on the part of your people along new lines. I do
not mean the self-conscious striving after newness, which
is only too apt to breed eccentricity, but I mean that
those among you whose bent is toward scholarship as a
career should keep in mind the fact that such scholarship
should be productive, and should therefore aim at giving
to the world some addition to the world's stock of what
is useful or beautiful; and if you work simply and naturally,
taking advantage of your surroundings as you find
them, then in my belief a new mark will be made in the
history of intellectual achievement by our race. You of
this institution are blessed in its extraordinary physical
with a suggestion of what I might call Americanized
Greek. Such is your institution, situated on
the shores of this great ocean, built by a race which has
come steadily westward, and which has come to where
the Occident looks west to the Orient, a race whose
members here, fresh, vigorous, have the boundless possibilities
of the future brought to their very doors in a
sense that cannot be possible for the members of the
race situated farther east. Surely there will be some
great outcome in the way not merely of physical but of
moral and intellectual work worth doing. I do not want
you to turn out prigs, I do not want you to turn out the
self-conscious. I believe with all my heart in play. I
want you to play hard without encroaching on your
work. I do nevertheless think you ought to have at least
the consciousness of the serious side of what all this
means, and of the necessity of effort, thrust upon you,
so that you may justify by your deeds in the future your
training and the extraordinary advantages under which
that training has been obtained.
America, the Republic of the United States, is, of
course, in a peculiar sense typical of the present age.
We represent the fullest development of the democratic
spirit acting on the extraordinary and highly complex
industrial growth of the last half century. It behooves
us to justify by our acts the claims made for that political
and economic progress. We will never justify the existence
of the Republic by merely talking each Fourth of
July about what the Republic has done. If our homage
is lip loyalty merely, the great deeds of those who went
before us, the great deeds of the times of Washington
and of the times of Lincoln, the great deeds of the men
who won the Revolution and founded the Nation, and the
men who preserved it, who made it a Union and a free
Republic, will simply arise to shame us. We can honor
striving to rise level to their standard. There are plenty
of tendencies for evil in what we see round about us.
Thank Heaven, there are an even greater number of
tendencies for good; and one of the things, Mr. Jordan,
which it seems to me give this nation cause for hope is
the national standard of ambition which makes it possible
to recognize in admiration and regard such work as the
founding of a university of this character. It speaks well
for our nation that men and women should desire during
their lives to devote the fortunes which they were able to
gain or to inherit because of our system of government,
because of our social system, to objects so entirely
worthy and so entirely admirable as the foundation of a
great seat of learning such as this. All that we outsiders
can do is to pay our tribute of respect to the dead and
to the living and at least to make it evident that we
appreciate to the full what has been done.
I have spoken of scholarship; I want to go back to the
question of citizenship, a question of not merely scholars
among you, not merely those who are hereafter to
lead lives devoted to science, to art, to productivity in
literature. And when you come into science, art, and
literature remember that one first-class bit of work is
better than one thousand pretty good bits of work; that
as the years roll on the man or the woman who has
been able to make a masterpiece with the pen, the brush,
the pencil, in any way, has rendered a service to the
country such as not all his or her compeers who merely
do fairly good second-rate work can ever accomplish.
Only a limited number of us can ever become scholars or
work successfully along the lines I have spoken of, but
we can all be good citizens. We can all lead a life of
action, a life of endeavor, a life that is to be judged
primarily by the effort, somewhat by the result, along
the lines of helping the growth of what is right and
in the State, in the Nation.
You, men and women, you who have had the advantages
of a college training are not to be excused if you
fail to do, not as well as, but more than the average man
outside who has not had your advantages. Every now
and then I meet (at least I meet him in the East and
I dare say he is to be found here) the man who having
gone through college feels that somehow that confers
upon him a special distinction which relieves him
from the necessity of showing himself as good as his
fellows, I see you recognize the type. That man is
not only a curse to the community, and incidentally
to himself, but he is a curse to the cause of academic
education, the college and university training, because
by his insistence he serves as an excuse for those who
like to denounce such education. Your education, your
training, will not confer on you one privilege in the way
of excusing you from effort or from work. All it can
do, and what it should do, is to make you a little better
fitted for such effort, for such work; and I do not care
whether that is in business, politics, in no matter what
branch of endeavor, all it can do is by the training you
have received, by the advantages you have received, to fit
you to do a little better than the average man that you
meet. It is incumbent upon you to show that the training
has had that effect. It ought to enable you to do a
little better for yourselves, and if you have in you souls
capable of a thrill of generous emotion, souls capable of
understanding what you owe to your training, to your
alma mater, to the past and the present that have given
you all that you have—if you have such souls it ought to
make you doubly bent upon disinterested work for the
State and the Nation.
Such work can be done along many different lines.
I want to-day here in California to make a special appeal
along a certain line—the line of preserving your great
natural advantages alike from the standpoint of use and
from the standpoint of beauty. If the students of this
institution have not by the mere fact of their surroundings
learned to appreciate beauty, then the fault is in
you and not in the surroundings. Here in California you
have some of the great wonders of the world. You have
a singularly beautiful landscape, singularly beautiful and
singularly majestic scenery, and it should certainly be
your aim to try to preserve for those who are to come
after you that beauty, to try to keep unmarred that
majesty. Closely entwined with keeping unmarred the
beauty of your scenery, of your great natural attractions,
is the question of making use of, -not for the moment
merely, but for future time, your great natural products.
Yesterday I saw for the first time a grove of your
trees, a grove which it has taken the ages several thousands
of years to build up; and I feel most emphatically
that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was
old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the
valley of the Euphrates, which it has taken so many
thousands of years to build up, and which can be put to
better use. That you may say is not looking at the matter
from the practical standpoint. There is nothing more
practical in the end than the preservation of beauty, than
the preservation of anything that appeals to the higher
emotions in mankind. But furthermore I appeal to you
from the standpoint of use. A few big trees, of unusual
size and beauty, should be preserved for their own sake;
but the forests as a whole should be used for business
purposes, only they should be used in a way that will
preserve them as permanent sources of national wealth.
In many parts of California the whole future welfare of
the State depends upon the way in which you are able
to use your water supply; and the preservation of the
inseparably connected. I believe we are past the stage
of national existence when we could look on complacently
at the individual who skinned the land and was content
for the sake of three years' profit for himself to leave a
desert for the children of those who were to inherit the
soil. I think we have passed that stage. We should
handle, and I think we now do handle, all problems such
as those of forestry and of the preservation and use of
our waters from the standpoint of the permanent interests
of the home maker in any region, the man who comes
in not to take what he can out of the soil and leave,
having exploited the country, but who comes to dwell
therein, to bring up his children, and to leave them a
heritage in the country not merely unimpaired, but if
possible even improved. That is the sensible view of
civic obligation, and the policy of the State and of the
Nation should be shaped in that direction. It should be
shaped in the interest of the home maker, the actual
resident, the man who is not only to be benefited himself,
but whose children and children's children are to
be benefited by what he has done. California has for
years, I am happy to say, taken a more sensible, a more
intelligent interest in forest preservation than any other
State. It early appointed a forest commission; later on
some of the functions of that commission were replaced
by the Sierra Club, a club which has done much on the
Pacific coast to perpetuate the spirit of the explorer and
the pioneer. Then, I am happy to say, a great many
business interests showed an intelligent and far-sighted
spirit which is of happy augury, for the Redwood Manufacturers
of San Francisco were first among lumbermen's
associations to give assistance to the cause of practical
forestry. The study of the redwood, which the action
of this association made possible, was the pioneer study
in the co-operative work which is now being carried out
Federal Bureau of Forestry. All of this kind of work is
peculiarly the kind of work in which we have a right
to expect not merely hearty co-operation but leadership
from college men trained in the universities of this
Pacific coast State. For the forests of the State stand
alone in the world. There are none others like them
anywhere. There are no other trees anywhere like the
giant Sequoias; nowhere else is there a more beautiful
forest than that which clothes the western slope of the
Sierra. Very early your forests attracted lumbermen
from other States, and by the course of timber-land investments
some of the best of the big trees were threatened
with destruction. Destruction came upon some of
them, but the women of California rose to the emergency
through the California Club, and later the Sempervirens
Club took vigorous action. But the Calaveras grove is
not yet safe, and there should be no rest until that safety
is secured, by the action of private individuals, by the
action of the State, by the action of the Nation. The
interest of California in forest protection was shown even
more effectively by the purchase of the Big Basin Redwood
Park, a superb forest property, the possession of
which should be a source of just pride to all people
jealous and proud of California's good name.
I appeal to you, as I say, to protect these mighty
trees, these wonderful monuments of beauty. I appeal
to you to protect them for the sake of their beauty, but
I also make the appeal just as strongly on economic
grounds, and I am well aware that in dealing with great
questions a far-sighted economic policy must be that to
which in the long run one appeals. The interests of California
in forests depend directly, of course, upon the
handling of her wood and water supplies and the supply
of material from the lumber woods and the production
of agricultural products on irrigated farms, The great
Sierra Nevada and Coast Ranges must owe their future
development, as they owe their present prosperity,
to irrigation. Whatever tends to destroy the water
supply of the Sacramento, the San Gabriel, and other
valleys strikes vitally at the welfare of California. So
that the welfare of California depends in no small measure
upon the preservation of water for the purposes of irrigation
in those beautiful and fertile valleys which cannot
grow crops by rainfall alone. The forest cover upon the
drainage basins of streams used for irrigation purposes
is of prime importance to the interests of the entire State.
Now keep in mind that the whole object of forest protection
is, as I have said again and again, the making and
maintaining of prosperous homes. I am not advocating
forest protection from the æsthetic standpoint only. I
do advocate the keeping of big trees, the great monarchs
of the woods, for the sake of their beauty, but I advocate
the preservation of the forests because I feel it essential
to the interests of the actual settlers. I am asking that
the forests be kept for the sake of the successors of the
pioneers, for the sake of the settlers who dwell on the
land and by doing so extend the borders of our civilization.
I ask it for the sake of the man who makes his
farm in the woods, or lower down along the sides of the
streams which have their rise in the mountains. Every
phase of the land policy of the United States is, as it by
right ought to be, directed to the upbuilding of the home
maker. The one sure test of all public-land legislation
should be: Does it help to make and to keep prosperous
homes? If it does, the legislation is good. If it does
not, the legislation is bad. Any legislation which has a
tendency to give land in large tracts to people who will
lease it out to tenants is undesirable. We do not want
ever to let our land policy be shaped so as to create a big
class of proprietors who rent to others. We want to
rent, actual proprietors. We want to shape our policy
so that these men themselves shall be the land owners,
the makers of homes, the keepers of homes.
Certain of our land laws, however beneficent their purposes,
have been twisted into an improper use, so that
there have grown up abuses under them by which they
tend to create a class of men who under one color and
another obtain large tracts of soil for speculative purposes,
but to rent out to others; and there should be
now a thorough scrutiny of our land laws with the object
of so amending them as to do away with the possibility
of such abuses. If it were not for the national irrigation
act we would be about past the time when Uncle Sam
could give every man a farm. (You know that has been
a saying for a long time in our nation, but if it were not
for the passage by the Federal Congress of the national
irrigation act we would be well toward the end of the
time when that saying would any longer be true.) Comparatively
little of our land is left which is adapted to
farming without irrigation. The home maker on the
public land must hereafter in the great majority of cases
have water for irrigation, or the making of his home will
fail. Let us keep that fact before our minds. Do not
misunderstand me when I have spoken of the defects of
our land laws. Our land laws have served a noble purpose
in the past and have become the models for other
governments. The homestead law has been a notable
instrument for good. To establish a family permanently
upon a quarter section of land, or of course upon a less
quantity if it is irrigated land, is the best use to which it
can be put. The first need of any nation is intelligent
and honest citizens. Such can come only from honest
and intelligent homes, and to get the good citizenship we
must get the good homes. It is absolutely necessary
that the remainder of our public land should be reserved
that there should be a revision of the land laws and a
cutting out of such provisions from them as in actual
practice under present conditions tend to make possible
the acquisition of large tracts for speculative purposes or
for the purpose of leasing to others.
Citizenship is the prime test in the welfare of the
nation, but we need good laws, and above all we need
good land laws throughout the West. We want to see
the free farmer own his home. The best of the public
lands are already in private hands, and yet the rate
of their disposal is steadily increasing. More than six
million acres were patented during the first three months
of the present year. It is time for us to see that our
remaining public lands are saved for the home maker
to the utmost limit of his possible use. I say this to you
of this university because we have a right to expect that
the best trained, the best educated men on the Pacific
slope, the Rocky Mountains, and great plains States will
take the lead in the preservation and right use of the
forests, in securing the right use of the waters, and in
seeing to it that our land policy is not twisted from its
original purpose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by
change when such change is necessary in the line of that
purpose, the purpose being to turn the public domain
into farms each to be the property of the man who actually
tills it and makes his home on it.
Infinite are the possibilities for usefulness that lie before
such a body as that I am addressing. Work? Of
course you will have to work. I should be sorry for you
if you did not have to work. Of course you will have to
work, and I envy you the fact that before you, before
the graduates of this university, lies the chance of lives
to be spent in hard labor for great and glorious and useful
causes, hard labor for the uplifting of your States, of the
Union, of all mankind.
XXVIII
AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY,
CALIFORNIA, MAY 14, 1903
President Wheeler, fellow-members of the University:
Last night, in speaking to one of my new friends in
California, he told me that he thought enough had been
said to me about the fruits and flowers; that enough had
been said to me about California being an Eden, and
that he wished I would pay some attention to Adam as
well. Much though I have been interested in the wonderful
physical beauty of this wonderful State, I have
been infinitely more interested in its citizenship, and
perhaps most in its citizenship, in the making.
When I come to the University of California and am
greeted by its President I am greeted by an old and
valued friend, a friend whom I have not merely known
socially but upon whom, while I was Governor of New
York, I leaned often for advice and assistance in the
problems with which I had to deal. When he accepted
your offer I grudged him to you. And it was not
until I came here, not until I have seen you, that I have
been fully reconciled to the loss. But now I am, for I
can conceive of no happier life for any man to lead to
whom life means what it should mean, than the life of the
President of this great university.
This same friend last night suggested to me a thought
that I intend to work out in speaking to you to-day.
We were talking over the University of California, and
our country. Facts tend to become commonplace, and
we tend to lose sight of their importance when once they
are ingrained into the life of the nation. Although we
talk a good deal about what the widespread education of
this country means, I question if many of us deeply consider
its meaning. From the lowest grade of the public
school to the highest form of university training, education
in this country is at the disposal of every man, every
woman, who chooses to work for and obtain it. The
State has done very much; witness this university.
Private benefaction has done much, very much; witness
also this university. And each one of us who has obtained
an education has obtained something for which he
or she has not personally paid. No matter what the
school, what the university, every American who has a
school training, a university training, has obtained something
given to him outright by the State, or given to him
by those dead or those living who were able to make provision
for that training because of the protection of the
State, because of existence within its borders. Each one
of us then who has an education, school or college, has
obtained something from the community at large for
which he or she has not paid, and no self-respecting man
or woman is content to rest permanently under such an
obligation. Where the State has bestowed education the
man who accepts it must be content to accept it merely
as a charity unless he returns it to the State in full, in
the shape of good citizenship. I do not ask of you,
men and women here to-day, good citizenship as a favor
to the State. I demand it of you as a right, and hold
you recreant to your duty if you fail to give it.
Here you are in this university, in this State with
its wonderful climate, which is permitting people of a
Northern stock for the first time in the history of that
Northern stock to gain education in physical surroundings,
Greeks. Here you have all those advantages, and you
are not to be excused if you do not show in tangible
fashion your appreciation of them and your power to
give practical effect to that appreciation. From all our
citizens we have a right to expect good citizenship; but
most of all from those who have received most; most of
all from those who have had the training of body, of
mind, of soul, which comes from association in and with
a great university. From those to whom much has been
given we have Biblical authority to expect and demand
much in return; and the most that can be given to
any man is education. I expect and demand in the
name of the nation much more from you who have had
training of the mind than from those of mere wealth.
To the man of means much has been given, too, and
much will be expected from him, and ought to be, but
not as much as from you, because your possession is
more valuable than his. If you envy him I think poorly
of you. Envy is merely the meanest form of admiration,
and a man who envies another admits thereby his own
inferiority. We have a right to expect from the college-bred
man, the college-bred woman, a proper sense of proportion,
a proper sense of perspective, which will enable
him or her to see things in their right relation one to another,
and when thus seen while wealth will have a proper
place, a just place, as an instrument for achieving happiness
and power, for conferring happiness and power, it
will not stand as high as much else in our national life.
I ask you to take that not as a conventional statement
from the university platform, but to test it by thinking
of the men whom you admire in our past history and
seeing what are the qualities which have made you admire
them, what are the services they have rendered. For,
as President Wheeler said to-day, it is true now as it ever
has been true that the greatest good-fortune, the greatest
that he shall serve the nation, serve his people, serve
mankind; and looking back in history the names that
come up before us, the names to which we turn, the
names of the men of our own people which stand as
shining honor marks in our annals, the names of those
men typifying qualities which rightly we should hold in
reverence, are the names of the statesmen, of the soldiers,
of the poets, and after them, not abreast of them,
the names of the architects' of our material prosperity
also.
Of recent years I have been thrown in contact with a
number of college graduates doing good service to the
country, and as I wish to make it perfectly evident what
I mean by the kind of service which I should hope to
have from you and which it seems to me worth while to
render, I want to say just a word about two college
graduates who have during the last five years rendered
and are now rendering such services: Governor Taft in
the Philippines, and Brigadier-General Leonard Wood,
lately Governor of Cuba. When we acquired the Philippines
and took possession for the time being of Cuba to
train its people in citizenship, we assumed heavy responsibilities;
so heavy that some very excellent persons
thought we ought to shirk them. I hold that a great
and masterful people forfeits its title to greatness if it
shirks any work because that work is difficult and responsible.
The difficulty and responsibility impose upon
us the high duty of doing the work well, but they in no
way excuse us for refusing to do it. We had to do the
work and the question came of the choice of instruments
in doing it. The most important and most difficult
task after the establishment of order by the army
in the Philippines was the establishment of civil government
therein; and second only in importance to
that came the administration of Cuba, during the
to turn its government over to its own people and start
it as a free republic. When tasks are all-important
the most important factor in doing them right is the
choice of the agents; and among the many debts of
gratitude which this nation owes to President McKinley,
no debt is greater than the debt we owe him for the
choice of his instruments, such a choice as that of Taft,
such a choice as that of Wood. We sent Taft to the
Philippines; we sent Wood to Cuba; both of them as
tested by the standard of our commercial life, poor men;
each man with little more than his salary to keep himself
and his family; each man to handle millions upon millions
of dollars, to have the power by mere conniving at
what was improper to acquire untold wealth,—and sent
them knowing that we did not ever have to consider
whether such opportunities would be temptations toward
them; sent them knowing that they had the ideals of the
true American and that, therefore, we did not have to
consider the chance of such a temptation appealing to
them.
Taft went to the Philippines to stay there; not only
forfeiting thereby the certainty of brilliant rise in his profession
on the bench or at the bar here if he had stayed,
but at imminent risk to his own health; because he felt
that his duty as an American made him go; that, as
President McKinley told me of him, he had been drafted
into the service of the country and he could not honorably
refuse. We have seen in consequence the Philippine
Islands administered by the American official who is at
the head of the Government and by his colleagues in the
interest primarily of their people, and seeking to obtain
for the United States, for the dominant race, that spent
its blood and its treasure in making firm and stable the
government of those islands, the reward that comes from
the consciousness of duty well done. Under Taft, by and
well-being come to those islands to a degree never before
known in their recorded history, and to a degree infinitely
greater than had ever been dreamed possible by
those who knew them best, but more than that, a greater
measure of self-government has been given to them than
is now given to any other Asiatic people under alien rule,
than to any other Asiatic people under their own rulers,
save Japan alone. That is an achievement of the past
five years which I hold to be absolutely unparalleled in
history; and when the debit and credit side of our
national life is finally made up a long stroke shall be put
to the credit side for what has been done in the Philippines
under Taft and his associates.
In the same way Leonard Wood worked in Cuba. Put
down there to do an absolutely new task, to take a
people of a different race, a different speech, a different
creed, a people just emerging from the hideous welter of
a war, cruel and sanguinary, beyond what we in this
fortunate country can readily conceive, to take a people
down in the depths of poverty and misery, just recovering
from suffering which makes one shudder to
think of, a people untrained utterly and absolutely in
self-government, and fit them for it; and he did it. For
three years he worked. He established a school system
as good as the best that we have in any of our States.
He cleaned cities which had never been cleaned in their
existence before. He secured absolute safety for life and
property. He did the kind of governmental work which
should be the undying honor of our people forever. And
he came home to what? He came home to be thanked
by a few, to be attacked by others—not to their credit,—
and to have as his real reward the sense that though his
work had been done at pecuniary sacrifice to him, that
though the demands upon him had been such as to eat
into his private means, yet he had worthily and well done
upon the uniform of the United States Army.
I have chosen Taft and Wood simply as instances of
what other men by the hundred have done, Americans
who have graduated from no college, Americans who
have graduated from all our different colleges, and especially
by practically all those Americans who have graduated
from the two great typical American institutions of
learning—West Point and Annapolis. Taft and Wood
and their fellows are spending or have spent the best
years of their prime in doing a work which means to
them pecuniary loss, at the best a bare livelihood while
they are doing it, and are doing it gladly because they realize
the truth that the highest privilege that can be given
to any American is the privilege of serving his country,
his fellow-Americans. As I am speaking to an audience
with proper ideals, when I say that Taft and Wood have
done all this service to their pecuniary loss I am holding
them up not for pity but for admiration. Every man,
every woman here, should feel it incumbent upon him or
her to welcome with joy the chance to render service
to the country, service to our people at large,
and to accept the rendering of the service as in itself
ample repayment therefor. Do not misunderstand me.
The average man, the average woman must earn his or
her living in one way or another, and I most emphatically
do not advise any one to decline to do the humdrum,
every-day duties because there may come a chance for the
display of heroism.
I ask of you the straightforward, earnest performance
of duty in all the little things that come up day by day in
business, in domestic life, in every way, and then when
the opportunity comes, if you have thus done your duty
in the lesser things, I know you will rise level to the
heroic needs.
XXIX
AT CARSON CITY, NEVADA, MAY 19, 1903
Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow-citizens:
It has been a great pleasure to be introduced in the
more than kind words the Governor has used, because
the Governor has been a genuine pioneer.
Here in this great western country, the country which
it is what it is purely because the pioneers who came here
had iron in their veins, because they were able to conquer
plain and mountain, and to make the wilderness blossom,
we are not to be excused if we do not see to it that the
generation that comes after us is trained to have the sum
of the fundamental qualities which enabled their fathers
to succeed.
I want to say one special word to-day here in Carson
City on a subject in which all of our people from the
Atlantic to the Pacific take an interest, but which affects
in especial the people of the States of the great plains
and mountains and affects no State more than it does
Nevada—the question of irrigation. Now as I say I do
not regard that as in any way merely a question of the
Rocky Mountain States, or of the great plains States,
because anything which tends for the well-being of any
portion of the Union is therefore for the well-being of all
of it, and it was for that reason that I felt warranted in
appealing to the people of the seaboard States on the
Atlantic, to the people of the States of the Great Lakes
and the Mississippi Valley, to say that it was their duty
because the interest of any part of this country is the
interest of all of it; and no man is a really good American
who fails to grasp that fact.
The National Government is still, as you all well know,
but as many Easterners do not know, the greatest landowner
in the Western States, and among all those States
Nevada holds the great proportion of vacant public land,
and the need of Nevada for Federal assistance was one
of the strongest arguments used in the discussion which
preceded the reclamation act of June, 1902, the irrigation
act of a year ago. The great extent of the vacant public
lands in the State, the fact that its water supply came
chiefly from streams rising in the adjoining State of California,
and the overwhelming difficulties which for these
and other reasons prevented the people of Nevada from
efficiently acting in their own interest, made, in my judgment,
and, as it proved, in the judgment of the Congress,
Federal interference absolutely imperative. It is a matter
for the strongest congratulation not only for the West,
but for the whole Nation that the policy went into effect.
It is a matter of special congratulation to Nevada that the
Secretary of the Interior, guided in his choice wholly by
actual conditions on the ground, has been led to undertake
one of the five sets of works which have been first
undertaken, here in Nevada, particularly near Reno on
the Truckee River, as one of the national projects for the
starting and working of the methods of the law. Extensive
surveys have already been made, and the projects for
water storage and water distribution are at a point which
warrants our belief that immediate action is in sight.
There are vast tracts of excellent land still in the ownership
of the General Government here in Nevada and elsewhere
to which the reclamation act will bring the flood
waters that now annually go to waste. For Nevada most
of these waters originate in the high mountains lying in
Some of these mountains have been included in
the forest reserves, and your interests and the interests
of the irrigators in California imperatively demand the
extension of the forest-reserve system so that the source
of supply for the great reservoirs and irrigation works
may be safe from fire, from over-grazing, and from destructive
lumbering. I ask you to pay attention to what
I say when I use the word destructive lumbering; no one
can desire to prevent, or do anything but help, practical
and conservative lumbering. In other words, my fellow-citizens,
we have reached a condition in which it must be
the object of the Nation and the State to favor the development
of the home maker, of the man who takes up
the land intending to keep it for himself and for his
children, so that it shall be even of better use to them
than to him.
The opportunities for the development of Nevada are
very great. Until recently Nevada was only thought of
as a mineral and stock-raising State. Much can be done
yet as regards both the mineral exploitation and the raising
of stock within the State; but now under the stimulus
of irrigation it is probable that irrigated agriculture will
come to the front, and when it does the population will
increase with a rapidity and permanence never before
known. The State of Nevada has led the way not only
in the strength of its plea for national aid in irrigation,
but also in its willingness to assist in the work. I wish
to lay emphasis on the fact that in Nevada the authorities
have been anxious in every way to help in working
out the problem of irrigation; and to pay all acknowledgment
to them now. The recent legislature passed laws
which in many respects should serve as models for the
legislation of other States. The union of land and water
under the national law has been recognized, and so has
the fundamental proposition which necessarily underlies
is the chief industry—namely, that the water
belongs to the people and cannot be made a monopoly.
The public appreciation of this fundamental truth, that
the water belongs to the people to be taken and put to
beneficial use, will wipe out many controversies which are
at present so harmful to the development of the West.
And the example of Nevada will be of material aid in
bringing about this fortunate result.
As I said of the forests so it is even more true of
the water supply. It should be our constant policy by
National and by State legislation to see that the water is
used for the benefit of the occupants of the soil, of those
who till and use the soil, that it is not exploited by any
one man or set of men in his or their interests as against
the interests of those on the land who are to use it. It
is a fundamental truth that the prosperity of any people
is simply another term for the prosperity of the home
makers among that people. Our entire policy in irrigation,
in forestry, in handling the public lands, should be in
recognition of that truth, to favor in every way the man
who wishes to take up a given area of soil and thereon to
build a home in which he will rear his children as useful
citizens of the State.
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
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,
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.
XXXI
AT COLUMBIA GARDENS, BUTTE, MONTANA,
MAY 27, 1903
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow-citizens:
It would have been a great pleasure to come to Butte
in any event; it is a double pleasure to come here at the
invitation of the representatives of the wage workers of
Butte. I do not say merely working men, because I hold
that every good American who does his duty must be a
working man. There are many different kinds of work
to do; but so long as the work is honorable, is necessary,
and is well done the man who does it well is entitled to
the respect of his fellows.
I have come here to this meeting especially as the invited
guest of the wage workers, and I am happy to be
able to say that the kind of speech I will make to you I
would make in just exactly the same language to any
group of employers or any set of our citizens in any
corner of this Republic. I do not think so far as I
know that I have ever promised beforehand anything I did
not make a strong effort to make good afterwards. It is
sometimes very attractive and very pleasant to make any
kind of a promise without thinking whether or not you
can fulfil'it; but in the after event it is always unpleasant
when the time for fulfilling comes; for in the long run
the most disagreeable truth is a safer companion than the
most pleasant falsehood.
To-night I have come hither looking on either hand at
the results of the enterprises which have made Butte so
great. The man who by the use of his capital develops
a great mine, the man who by the use of his capital
builds a great railroad, the man who by the use of his
capital either individually or joined with others like him
does any great legitimate business enterprise, confers a
benefit, not a harm, upon the community, and is entitled
to be so regarded. He is entitled to the protection of
the law, and in return he is to be required himself to
obey the law. The law is no respecter of persons. The
law is to be administered neither for the rich man as such,
nor for the poor man as such. It is to be administered
for every man, rich or poor, if he is an honest and law-abiding
citizen; and it is to be invoked against any
man, rich or poor, who violates it, without regard to
which end of the social scale he may stand, without
regard to whether his offence takes the form of greed
and cunning, or the form of physical violence; in either
case if he violates the law, the law is to be invoked
against him; and in so invoking it I have the right to
challenge the support of all good citizens and to demand
the acquiescence of every good man. I hope I will have
it; but once for all I wish it understood that even if I do
not have it I shall enforce the law.
The soldiers who fought in the great Civil War fought
for liberty under, by, and through the law; and they
fought to put a stop once for all to any effort to sunder
this country on the lines of sectional hatred; therefore
their memory shall be forever precious to our people.
We need to keep ever in mind that he is the worst
enemy of this country who would strive to separate its
people along the lines of section against section, of creed
against creed, or of class against class. There are two
sides to that. It is a base and an infamous thing for the
man of means to act in a spirit of arrogant and brutal disregard
it is no less infamous, no less base, to act in a spirit of
rancor, envy, and hatred against the man of greater
means, merely because of his greater means. If we are
to preserve this Republic as it was founded, as it was
handed down to us by the men of '61 to '65, and as it is
and will be, we must draw the line never between section
and section, never between creed and creed, thrice never
between class and class, but along the line of conduct, the
line that separates the good citizen wherever he may be
found from the bad citizen wherever he may be found.
This is not and never shall be a government of a plutocracy;
it is not and never shall be a government by a
mob. It is as it has been and as it will be a government
in which every honest man, every decent man, be he employer
or employed, wage worker, mechanic, banker,
lawyer, farmer, be he who he may, if he acts squarely and
fairly, if he does his duty by his neighbor and the State,
receives the full protection of the law and is given the
amplest chance to exercise the ability that there is within
him, alone or in combination with his fellows as he
desires.
My friends, it is sometimes easier to preach a doctrine
under which the millennium will be promised offhand if
you have a particular kind of law, or follow a particular
kind of conduct—it is easier, but it is not better. The
millennium is not here; it is some thousand years off yet.
Meanwhile there must be a good deal of work and struggle,
a good deal of injustice; we shall often see the tower
of Siloam fall on the just as well as the unjust. We are
bound in honor to try to remedy injustice, but if we are
wise we will seek to remedy it in practical ways. Above
all, remember this: that the most unsafe adviser to follow
is the man who would advise us to do wrong in order that
we may benefit by it. That man is never a safe man to
follow; he is always the most dangerous of guides. The
comes in wronging or oppressing others can be depended
upon, if the opportunity comes, to do wrong to us in his
own interest, just as he has endeavored to make us in our
supposed interest do wrong to others.
XXXII
AT THE TABERNACLE, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH,
MAY 29, 1903
Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, Senator Kearns, and you, my
fellow-Americans:
I am particularly glad to have the chance to speak to
you here in this city, in Utah, this morning, because you
have exemplified a doctrine which it seems to me all-essential
for our people ever to keep fresh in their minds
—the fact that though natural resources can do a good
deal, though the law can do a good deal, the fundamental
requisite in building up prosperity and civilization is
the requisite of individual character in the individual man
or woman. Here in this State the pioneers and those
who came after them took not the land that would ordinarily
be chosen as land that would yield return with little
effort. You took a territory which at the outset was
called after the desert, and you literally—not figuratively
—you literally made the wilderness blossom as the rose.
The fundamental element in building up Utah has been
the work of the citizens of Utah. And you did it because
your people entered in to possess the land and to
leave it after them to their children arid their children's
children. You here whom I am addressing and your predecessors
did not come in to exploit the land and then go
somewhere else. You came in, as the Governor has said,
as home makers, to make homes for yourselves and those
who should come after you; and that is the only way in
built up. You have built up this great community because
you came here with the purpose of making this
your abiding home, and of leaving to your children not
an impoverished, but an enriched heritage; and I ask that
all our people from one ocean to the other, but especially
the people of the arid and the semi-arid regions, the people
of the great plains, the people of the mountains,
approach the problem of taking care of the physical
resources of the country in the spirit which has made
Utah what it is. You have developed your metal wealth
wonderfully; and your growth is not a boom growth—it
is a thoroughly healthy, normal growth. During the past
decade the population has doubled and the wealth quadrupled;
and labor is employed at as high a compensation
as is paid elsewhere in the world. Although you are not
essentially a mining State, in the last year you marketed
thirty millions worth of ore; and again you showed your
good sense in the way you handled it; for you paid five
millions in dividends and you invested the balance in
labor and surplus. The effort to make a big showing in
dividends is not always healthy for the future. Here
you have shown your wonderful capacity to develop
the earth so as to make both irrigated agriculture
and stock-raising in all its forms two great industries.
When you deal with a mine you take the ore out of
the earth and take it away, and in the end exhaust the
mine. The time may be very long in coming before
it is exhausted, or it may be a short time; but in any
event, mining means the exhaustion of the mine. But
that is exactly what agriculture does not and must not
mean.
So far from agriculture properly exhausting the land,
it is always the sign of a vicious system of agriculture if
the land is rendered poorer by it. The direct contrary
should be the fact. After the farmer has had the farm
a better farm than it was when he had it.
In these regions, in the Rocky Mountain regions, it is
especially incumbent upon us to treat the question of the
natural pasturage, the question of the forests, and the
question of the use of the waters, all from the one standpoint—the
standpoint of the far-seeing statesman, of the
far-seeing citizen, who wishes to preserve and not to
exhaust the resources of the country, who wishes to see
those resources come into the hands not of a few men of
great wealth, least of all into the hands of a few men who
will speculate in them; but be distributed among many
men, each of whom intends to make his home in the
land.
This whole so-called arid and semi-arid region is by
nature the stock range of the nation. One of the questions
which are rising to confront us is how this range
may be made to produce the greatest number and best
quality of horses, cattle, and sheep, not only this year,
not only next year, but for this generation and the next
generation. The old system of grazing the ranges so
closely as to injure the whole crop of grass was a serious
detriment to the development of the West, a serious
detriment to the development of our people. The ranges
must be treated as a great invested capital; and that old
system tended to dissipate and partially to destroy that
capital. That is something that we cannot as a nation of
home makers permit. The wise man, the wise industry,
the wise nation, maintains such capital unimpaired and
tries to increase it; and more and more the range lands
will be used in conjunction with the small irrigable areas
which they include; so that the industry can take on a
more stable character than ever before. It is impossible
permanently, although it may be advisable for the time
being, to move stock in a body from summer to winter
ranges across country which can be made into homesteads,
actual settlers, in the long run it will only be possible to
move the stock through hundreds of miles of dusty lanes
where they cannot graze, where they cannot live. Our
aim must be steadily to help develop the settler, the man
who lives in the land and is growing up with it and raising
his children to own it after him. More and more
hereafter the stock owners will have the necessity forced
upon them of providing green summer pasturage within
the limits of their own ranges; and so the question of
irrigation is well-nigh as important to the stockmen as to
the agriculturist proper.
In the same way our mountain forests must be preserved
from the harm done by over-grazing. Let all the
grazing be done in them that can be done without injury
to them, but do not let the mountain forests be despoiled
by the man who will over-graze them and destroy them
for the sake of three years' use, and then go somewhere
else, and leave by so much diminished the heritage of
those who remain permanently in the land. I believe
that already the movement has begun which will make in
the long run the stock-raisers, of whom I have been one
myself, whose business I know, and with whom I feel
the heartiest sympathy—through the enlightenment of
their own self-interest—become the heartiest defenders
and the chief beneficiaries of the wise and moderate use
of forest ranges, both within and without the forest reserves.
It is and it must be the definite policy of this
Government to consider the good of all its citizens—
stockmen, lumbermen, irrigators, and all others—in dealing
with the forest reserves; and for that reason I most
earnestly desire in every way to bring about the heartiest
co-operation between the men who are doing the actual
business of stock-raising, the actual business of irrigated
agriculture, the actual business of lumbering—the closest
and most intimate relations, the heartiest co-operation
through the Department of Agriculture. Of course I do
not have to say to any audience of intelligent people that
nothing is such an enemy to the stock industry as persistent
over-grazing. We shall have not far hence to raise
the problem of the best method of making use of the
public range. Our people have not as yet settled in their
own minds what is that best method. In some way there
will have to be formed such regulation as shall without
undue restriction prevent the needless over-grazing, while
keeping the public lands open to settlement through
homestead entry. Such a policy would of course be of
the most far-reaching benefit to the whole range industry.
It is the same in dealing with our forest reserves. Almost
every industry depends in some more or less vital
way upon the preservation of the forests; and while citizens
die, the Government and the Nation do not die, and
we are bound in dealing with the forests to exercise the
foresight necessary to use them now, but to use them in
such a way as will also keep them for those who are to
come after us.
The first great object of the forest reserves is of course
the first great object of the whole land policy of the
United States,—the creation of homes, the favoring of
the home-maker. That is why we wish to provide for the
home-makers of the present and the future the steady
and continuous supply of timber, grass, and, above all,
of water. That is the object of the forest reserves, and
that is why I bespeak your cordial co-operation in their
preservation. Remember you must realize, what I
thoroughly realize, that however wise a policy may be it
can be enforced only if the people of the States believe
in it. We can enforce the provisions of the forest-reserve
law or of any other law only so far as the best
sentiment of the community or the State will permit
that enforcement. Therefore it lies primarily not with
see that such policies are supported as will redound to the
benefit of the home-makers and therefore the sure and
steady building up of the State as a whole.
One word as to the greatest question with which our
people as a whole have to deal in the matter of internal
development to-day—the question of irrigation. Not
of recent years has any more important law been put
upon the statute books of the Federal Government than
the law a year ago providing for the first time that the
National Government should interest itself in aiding and
building up a system of irrigated agriculture in the Rocky
Mountains and plains States. Here the Government
had to a large degree to sit at the feet of Gamaliel in the
person of Utah; for what you had done and learned was
of literally incalculable benefit to those engaged in framing
and getting through the national irrigation law. Irrigation
was first practised on a large scale in this State.
The necessity of the pioneers here led to the development
of irrigation to a degree absolutely unknown before on
this continent. In no respect is the wisdom of the early
pioneers made more evident than in the sedulous care
they took to provide for small farms, carefully tilled by
those who lived on and benefited from them; and hence
it comes about that the average amount of land required
to support a family in Utah is smaller than in any other
part of the United States. We all know that when you
once get irrigation applied rain is a very poor substitute
for it. The Federal Government must co-operate with
Utah and Utah people for a further extension of the irrigated
area. Many of the simpler problems of obtaining
and applying water have already been solved and so well
solved that, as I have said, some of the most important
provisions of the Federal act, such as the control of the
irrigating works by the communities they serve, such
as making the water appurtenant to the land and not a
upon the experience of Utah. Of course the control of
the larger streams which flow through more than one
State must come under the Federal Government. Many
of the great tracts which will ultimately so enlarge the
cultivated area of Utah, which will ultimately so increase
its population and wealth, are surrounded with intricate
complications because of the high development which
irrigation has already reached in this State. Necessarily
the Federal officers charged with the execution of the
law must proceed with great caution so as not to disturb
present vested rights; but, subject to that, they will go
forward as fast as they can. They realize, and all men
who have actually done irrigating here will realize, that
no man is more timid than the practical irrigator regarding
any change in the water distribution. He wants to
look well before he leaps. He has learned from bitter
experience what damage can come from well-meant
changes hastily made. The Government can do a good
deal; the Government will do a good deal; but your experience
here in Utah has shown that the greatest results
which are accomplishing most spring directly from the
sturdy courage, the self-denial, the willingness with iron
resolution to endure the risk and the suffering of the
pioneers; for they were the men who sought and found a
livelihood in what was once a desert, and they must be
protected in the legitimate fruits of their toil.
One of the tasks that the Government must do here in
Utah is to build reservoirs for the storage of the flood
waters, to undertake works too great to be undertaken
by private capital. Great as the task is, and great as its
benefits will become, the Government must do still more.
Beside the storage of the water there must be protection
of the watersheds; and that is why I ask you to help the
National Government protect the watersheds by protecting
the forests upon them.
XXXIII
AT THE LINCOLN MONUMENT, SPRINGFIELD,
ILLINOIS, JUNE 4, 1903
It is a good thing that the guard around the tomb of
Lincoln should be composed of colored soldiers. It was
my own good fortune at Santiago to serve beside colored
troops. A man who is good enough to shed his blood for
the country is good enough to be given a square deal
afterwards. More than that no man is entitled to, and
less than that no man shall have.
XXXIV
AT THE CONSECRATION OF GRACE MEMORIAL
REFORMED CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
JUNE 7, 1903
I shall ask your attention to three lines of the Dedication
Canticle: "Serve the Lord with gladness: enter into
His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with
praise. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or
who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean
hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul
unto vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.
Better lines could surely not be brought into any
dedication service of a church; and it is a happy thing
that we should have repeated them this morning. This
church is consecrated to the service of the Lord; and we
can serve Him by the way we serve our fellow-men.
This church is consecrated to service and duty. It was
written of old that "By their fruits ye shall know them";
and we can show the faith that is in us, we can show the
sincerity of our devotion, by the fruits we bring forth.
The man who is not a tender and considerate husband, a
loving and wise father, is not serving the Lord when he
goes to church; so with the woman; so with all who
come here. Our being in this church, our communion
here with one another, our sitting under the pastor and
hearing from him the Word of God, must, if we are sincere,
show the effects in our lives outside. We of the
Dutch and German Reformed Churches, like our brethren
in this great country of ours, a country still in the making,
for we have the duty peculiarly incumbent upon us
to take care of our brethren who come each year from
overseas to our shores. The man going to a new country
is torn by the roots from all his old associations, and
there is great danger to him in the time before he gets
his roots down into the new country, before he brings
himself into touch with his fellows in the new land. For
that reason I always take a peculiar interest in the attitude
of our churches toward the immigrants who come to
these shores. I feel that we should be peculiarly watchful
over them, because of our own history, because we
or our fathers came here under like conditions. Now
that we have established ourselves let us see to it that we
stretch out the hand of help, the hand of brotherhood, toward
the new-comers, and help them as speedily as possible
to get into such relations that it will be easy for
them to walk well in the new life. We are not to be excused
if we selfishly sit down and enjoy gifts that have
been given to us and do not try to share them with our
poorer fellows coming from every part of the world, who,
many of them, stand in such need of the helping hand;
who often not only meet too many people anxious to associate
with them for their detriment, but often too few
anxious to associate with them for their good.
I trust that with the consecration of each new church
of the Reformed creed in this our country there will be
established a fresh centre of effort to get at and to help
for their good the people that yearly come from overseas
to us. No more important work can be done by our
people; important to the cause of Christianity, important
to the cause of true national life and greatness here in our
own land.
Another thing: let us, so far as strength is given us,
make it evident to those who look on and who are not of
expression in deeds. One sad, one lamentable phase of
human history is that the very loftiest words, implying
the loftiest ideas, have often been used as cloaks for the
commission of dreadful deeds of iniquity. No more
hideous crimes have ever been committed by men than
those that have been committed in the name of liberty,
of order, of brotherhood, of religion. People have butchered
one another under circumstances of dreadful atrocity,
claiming all the time to be serving the object of the
brotherhood of man or of the fatherhood of God. We
must in our lives, in our efforts, endeavor to further the
cause of brotherhood in the human family; and we must
do it in such a way that the men anxious to find subject
for complaint or derision in the churches of the United
States, in our Church, may not be able to find it by
pointing out any contrast between our professions and
our lives.
This church is consecrated to-day to duty and to service,
to the worship of the Creator, and to an earnest
effort on our part so to shape our lives among ourselves
and in relation to the outside world that we may feel that
we have done our part in bringing a little nearer the day
when there shall be on this earth a genuine brotherhood
of man.
XXXV
TO THE HOLY NAME SOCIETY, AT OYSTER BAY,
N. Y., AUGUST 16, 1903
Very Reverend Dean, Reverend Clergy, and you, of the
Holy Name Society:
I count myself fortunate in having the chance to say a
word to you to-day; and at the outset let me, Father
Power, on behalf of my neighbors, your congregation,
welcome all your guests here to Oyster Bay. I have a
partial right to join in that welcome myself, for it was my
good fortune in the days of Father Power's predecessor,
Father Belford, to be the first man to put down a small
contribution for the erection of your church here. I am
particularly glad to see such a society as this flourishing
as your society has flourished, because the future welfare
of our nation depends upon the way in which we can
combine in our men—in our young men—decency and
strength. Just this morning, when attending service on
the great battleship Kearsarge, I listened to a sermon addressed
to the officers and enlisted men of the navy, in
which the central thought was that each American must
be a good man or he could not be a good citizen. And
one of the things dwelt upon in that sermon was the fact
that a man must be clean of mouth as well as clean of life
—must show by his words as well as by his actions his
fealty to the Almighty if he was to be what we have a
right to expect from men wearing the national uniform.
We have good Scriptural authority for the statement that
out of it that counts. I am not addressing weaklings, or
I should not take the trouble to come here. I am addressing
strong, vigorous men who are engaged in the
active, hard work of life; and life to be worth living must
be a life of active and hard work. I am speaking to men
engaged in the hard, active work of life, and therefore to
men who will count for good or. for evil. It is peculiarly
incumbent upon you who have strength to set a right example
to others. I ask you to remember that you cannot
retain your self-respect if you are loose and foul of
tongue; that a man who is to lead a clean and honorable
life must inevitably suffer if his speech likewise is not
clean and honorable. Every man here knows the temptations
that beset all of us in this world. At times any
man will slip. I do not expect perfection, but I do expect
genuine and sincere effort toward being decent and
cleanly in thought, in word, and in deed. As I said at
the outset, I hail the work of this society as typifying
one of those forces which tend to the betterment and uplifting
of our social system. Our whole effort should be
toward securing a combination of the strong qualities
with those qualities which we term virtues. I expect
you to be strong. I would not respect you if you were
not. I do not want to see Christianity professed only by
weaklings; I want to see it a moving spirit among men of
strength. I do not expect you to lose one particle of
your strength or courage by being decent. On the contrary,
I should hope to see each man who is a member
of this society, from his membership in it become all the
fitter to do the rough work of the world; all the fitter to
work in time of peace; and if, which may Heaven forfend!
war should come, all the fitter to fight in time of war. I
desire to see in this country the decent men strong and
the strong men decent, and until we get that combination
in pretty good shape we are not going to be by any
tendency among very young men, and among boys who
are not quite young men as yet, to think that to be
wicked is rather smart; to think it shows that they are
men. Oh, how often you see some young fellow who
boasts that he is going to "see life," meaning by that
that he is going to see that part of life which it is a
thousand-fold better should remain unseen! I ask that
every man here constitute himself his brother's keeper by
setting an example to that younger brother which will
prevent him from getting such a false estimate of life.
Example is the most potent of all things. If any one of
you in the presence of younger boys, and especially the
younger people of your own family, misbehaves yourself,
if you use coarse and blasphemous language before them,
you can be sure that these younger people will follow
your example and not your precept. It is no use to
preach to them if you do not act decently yourself. You
must feel that the most effective way in which you can
preach is by your practice.
As I was driving up here a friend who was with us said
that in his experience the boy who went out into life with
a foul tongue was apt so to go because his kinsfolk, at
least his intimate associates, themselves had foul tongues.
The father, the elder brothers, the friends, can do much
toward seeing that the boys as they become men become
clean and honorable men.
I have told you that I wanted you not only to be decent,
but to be strong. These boys will not admire virtue
of a merely anemic type. They believe in courage,
in manliness. They admire those who have the quality
of being brave, the quality of facing life as life should be
faced, the quality that must stand at the root of good
citizenship in peace or in war. If you are to be effective
as good Christians you must possess strength and courage,
or your example will count for little with the young
the men of the Holy Name Society, you who embody
the qualities which the younger people admire, by your
example give those young people the tendency, the trend,
in the right direction; and remember that this example
counts in many other ways besides cleanliness of speech.
I want to see every man able to hold his own with the
strong, and also ashamed to oppress the weak. I want
to see each young fellow able to do a man's work in the
world, and of a type which will not permit imposition to
be permitted upon him. I want to see him too strong
of spirit to submit to wrong, and, on the other hand,
ashamed to do wrong to others. I want to see each man
able to hold his own in the rough work of actual life outside,
and also, when he is at home, a good man, unselfish
in dealing with wife, or mother, or children. Remember
that the preaching does not count if it is not backed up
by practice. There is no good in your preaching to your
boys to be brave, if you run away. There is no good in
your preaching to them to tell the truth if you do not.
There is no good in your preaching to them to be unselfish
if they see you selfish with your wife, disregardful
of others. We have a right to expect that you will come
together in meetings like this; that you will march in
processions; that you will join in building up such a
great and useful association as this; and even more we
have a right to expect that in your own homes and among
your own associates you will prove by your deeds that
yours is not a lip loyalty merely; that you show in actual
practice the faith that is in you.
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.
XXXVII
AT ANTIETAM, SEPTEMBER 17, 1903
Governor Murphy, Veterans of New Jersey, men of the
Grand Army:
I thank you of New Jersey for the monument to the
troops of New Jersey who fought at Antietam, and on
behalf of the nation I accept the gift. We meet to-day
upon one of the great battlefields of the Civil War. No
other battle of the Civil War lasting but one day shows
as great a percentage of loss as that which occurred here
upon the day on which Antietam was fought. Moreover,
in its ultimate effects this battle was of momentous and
even decisive importance; for when it had ended and Lee
had retreated south of the Potomac, Lincoln forthwith
published that immortal paper, the preliminary declaration
of emancipation; the paper which decided that the
Civil War, besides being a war for the preservation of the
Union, should be a war for the emancipation of the slave,
so that from that time onward the causes of Union and
of Freedom, of national greatness and individual liberty,
were one and the same.
Men of New Jersey, I congratulate your State because
she has a right to claim her full share in the honor and
glory of that memorable day; and I congratulate you,
Governor Murphy, because on that day you had the high
good fortune to serve as a lad with credit and honor in
one of the five regiments which your State sent to the
battle. Four of those regiments, by the way, served in
W. Slocum, whom we of New York can claim as our
own. The other regiment, that in which Governor Murphy
served, although practically an entirely new regiment,
did work as good as that of any veteran organization
upon the field, and suffered a proportional loss. This
regiment was at one time ordered to the support of a
division commanded by another New York soldier, the
gallant General Greene, whose son himself served as a
major-general in the war with Spain and is now, as Police
Commissioner of New York, rendering as signal service
in civil life as he had already rendered in military life.
If the issue of Antietam had been other than it was,
it is probable that at least two great European powers
would have recognized the independence of the Confederacy;
so that you who fought here forty-one years ago
have the profound satisfaction of feeling that you played
well your part in one of those crises big with the fate of
all mankind. You men of the Grand Army by your victory
not only rendered all Americans your debtors forevermore,
but you rendered all humanity your debtors.
If the Union had been dissolved, if the great edifice built
with blood and sweat and tears by mighty Washington
and his compeers had gone down in wreck and ruin, the
result would have been an incalculable calamity, not only
for our people—and most of all for those who, in such
event would have seemingly triumphed—but for all mankind.
The great American Republic would have become
a memory of derision; and the failure of the experiment
of self-government by a great people on a great scale
would have delighted the heart of every foe of republican
institutions. Our country, now so great and so wonderful,
would have been split into little jangling rival nationalities,
each with a history both bloody and contemptible.
It was because you, the men who wear the button of the
Grand Army, triumphed in those dark years, that every
that he belongs to a nation whose glorious past and
great present will be succeeded by an even mightier future;
whereas had you failed we would all of us, North
and South, East and West, be now treated by other
nations at the best with contemptuous tolerance; at the
worst with overbearing insolence.
Moreover, every friend of liberty, every believer in
self-government, every idealist who wished to see his
ideals take practical shape, wherever he might be in the
world, knew that the success of all in which he most believed
was bound up with the success of the Union armies
in this great struggle. I confidently predict that when
the final judgment of history is recorded it will be said
that in no other war of which we have written record was
it more vitally essential for the welfare of mankind that
victory should rest where it finally rested. There have
been other wars for individual freedom. There have been
other wars for national greatness. But there has never
been another war in which the issues at stake were so
large, looked at from either standpoint. We take just
pride in the great deeds of the men of 1776, but we must
keep in mind that the Revolutionary War would have
been shorn of well-nigh all its results had the side of
union and liberty been defeated in the Civil War. In
such case we should merely have added another to the
lamentably long list of cases in which peoples have shown
that after winning their liberty they are wholly unable to
make good use of it.
It now rests with us in civil life to make good by our
deeds the deeds which you who wore the blue did in the
great years from '61 to '65. The patriotism, the courage,
the unflinching resolution, and steadfast endurance
of the soldiers whose triumph was crowned at Appomattox
must be supplemented on our part by civic courage,
civic honesty, cool sanity, and steadfast adherence to the
country; reunited in fact as well as in name. You left us
the right of brotherhood with your gallant foes who wore
the gray; the right to feel pride in their courage and their
high fealty to an ideal, even though they warred against
the stars in their courses. You left us also the most
splendid example of what brotherhood really means; for
in your careers you showed in practical fashion that the
only safety in our American life lies in spurning the accidental
distinctions which sunder one man from another,
and in paying homage to each man only because of what
he essentially is; in stripping off the husks of occupation,
of position, of accident, until the soul stands forth revealed,
and we know the man only because of his worth
as a man.
There was no patent device for securing victory by
force of arms forty years ago; and there is no patent device
for securing victory for the forces of righteousness in
civil life now. In each case the all-important factor was
and is the character of the individual man. Good laws in
the State, like a good organization in an army, are the
expressions of national character. Leaders will be developed
in military and in civil life alike; and weapons and
tactics change from generation to generation, as methods
of achieving good government change in civic affairs; but
the fundamental qualities which make for good citizenship
do not change any more than the fundamental qualities
which make good soldiers. In the long run in the Civil
War the thing that counted for more than aught else was
the fact that the average American had the fighting edge;
had within him the spirit which spurred him on through
toil and danger, fatigue and hardship, to the goal of the
splendid ultimate triumph. So in achieving good government
the fundamental factor must be the character of
the average citizen; that average citizen's power of hatred
for what is mean and base and unlovely; his fearless scorn
against the dark and sordid forces of evil.
The Continental troops who followed Washington were
clad in blue and buff, and were armed with clumsy, flintlock
muskets. You, who followed Grant, wore the famous
old blue uniform, and your weapons had changed
as had your uniform; and now the men of the American
Army who uphold the honor of the flag in the far tropic
lands are yet differently armed and differently clad and
differently trained; but the spirit that has driven you all
to victory has remained forever unchanged. So it is in
civil life. As you did not win in a month or a year, but
only after long years of hard and dangerous work, so the
fight for governmental honesty and efficiency can be won
only by the display of similar patience and similar resolution
and power of endurance. We need the same type
of character now that was needed by the men who with
Washington first inaugurated the system of free popular
government, the system of combined liberty and order
here on this continent; that was needed by the men
who under Lincoln perpetuated the government which had
thus been inaugurated in the days of Washington. The
qualities essential to good citizenship and to good public
service now are in all their essentials exactly the same as
in the days when the first Congresses met to provide for
the establishment of the Union; as in the days, seventy
years later, when the Congresses met which had to provide
for its salvation.
There are many qualities which we need alike in private
citizen and in public man, but three above all,—three for
the lack of which no brilliancy and no genius can atone,—
and those three are courage, honesty, and common sense.
XXXVIII
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE SHERMAN STATUE,
WASHINGTON, OCTOBER 15, 1903
General Dodge, Veterans of the Four Great Armies, and
you, my fellow-citizens:
To-day we meet together to do honor to the memory
of one of the great men whom, in the hour of her agony,
our nation brought forth for her preservation. The Civil
War was, not only in the importance of the issues at stake
and of the outcome the greatest of modern times, but it
was also, taking into account its duration, the severity
of the fighting, and the size of the armies engaged, the
greatest since the close of the Napoleonic struggles.
Among the generals who rose to high position as leaders
of the various armies in the field are many who will be
remembered in our history as long as this history itself is
remembered. Sheridan, the incarnation of fiery energy
and prowess; Thomas, far-sighted, cool-headed, whose
steadfast courage burned ever highest in the supreme
moment of the crisis; McClellan, with his extraordinary
gift for organization; Meade, victor in one of the decisive
battles of all time; Hancock, type of the true fighting
man among the regulars; Logan, type of the true fighting
man among the volunteers—the names of these and
of many others will endure so long as our people hold
sacred the memory of the fight for union and for liberty.
High among these chiefs rise the figures of Grant and of
the national capital is to-day to be unveiled. It is not
necessary here to go over the long roll of Sherman's
mighty feats. They are written large throughout the history
of the Civil War. Our memories would be poor
indeed if we did not recall them now, as we look along
Pennsylvania Avenue and think of the great triumphal
march which surged down its length when at the close
of the war the victorious armies of the East and of the
West met here in the capital of the nation they had
saved.
There is a peculiar fitness in commemorating the great
deeds of the soldiers who preserved this nation, by suitable
monuments at the national capital. I trust we shall
soon have a proper statue of Abraham Lincoln, to whom
more than to any other one man this nation owes its salvation.
Meanwhile, on behalf of the people of the nation,
I wish to congratulate all of you who have been instrumental
in securing the erection of this statue to General
Sherman.
The living can best show their respect for the memory
of the great dead by the way in which they take to heart
and act upon the lessons taught by the lives which made
these dead men great. Our homage to-day to the memory
of Sherman comes from the depths of our being.
We would be unworthy citizens did we not feel profound
gratitude toward him, and those like him and under him,
who, when the country called in her dire need, sprang
forward with such gallant eagerness to answer that call.
Their blood and their toil, their endurance and patriotism,
have made us and all who come after us forever their
debtors. They left us not merely a reunited country,
but a country incalculably greater because of its rich heritage
in the deeds which thus left it reunited. As a nation
we are the greater, not only for the valor and devotion
to duty displayed by the men in blue, who won in the
the loyalty toward what they regarded as right of the
men in gray; for this war, thrice fortunate above all
other recent wars in its outcome, left to all of us the
right of brotherhood alike with valiant victor and valiant
vanquished.
Moreover, our homage must not only find expression
on our lips; it must also show itself forth in our deeds.
It is a great and glorious thing for a nation to be stirred
to present triumph by the splendid memories of triumphs
in the past. But it is a shameful thing for a nation, if
these memories stir it only to empty boastings, to a pride
that does not shrink from present abasement, to that self-satisfaction
which accepts the high resolve and unbending
effort of the father as an excuse for effortless ease or
wrongly directed effort in the son. We of the present,
if we are true to the past, must show by our lives that we
have learned aright the lessons taught by the men who
did the mighty deeds of the past. We must have in us
the spirit which made the men of the Civil War what they
were; the spirit which produced leaders such as Sherman;
the spirit which gave to the average soldier the grim tenacity
and resourcefulness that made the armies of Grant
and Sherman as formidable fighting machines as this
world has ever seen. We need their ruggedness of body,
their keen and vigorous minds, and, above all, their dominant
quality of forceful character. Their lives teach us
in our own lives to strive after, not the thing which is
merely pleasant, but the thing which it is our duty to do.
The life of duty, not the life of mere ease or mere pleasure—that
is the kind of life which makes the great man,
as it makes the great nation.
We cannot afford to lose the virtues which made the
men of '61 to '65 great in war. No man is warranted in
feeling pride in the deeds of the army and the navy of the
past if he does not back up the army and the navy of
will be no let-up in the work of building, and of keeping
at the highest point of efficiency, a navy suited to the
part the United States must hereafter play in the world,
and of making and keeping our small regular army,
which in the event of a great war can never be anything
but the nucleus around which our volunteer armies must
form themselves, the best army of its size to be found
among the nations.
So much for our duties in keeping unstained the honor
roll our fathers made in war. It is of even more instant
need that we should show their spirit of patriotism in
the affairs of peace. The duties of peace are with us always;
those of war are but occasional; and with a nation
as with a man, the worthiness of life depends upon the
way in which the everyday duties are done. The home
duties are the vital duties. The nation is nothing but the
aggregate of the families within its border; and if the
average man is not hard-working, just, and fearless in his
dealings with those about him, then our average of public
life will in the end be low; for the stream can rise no
higher than its source. But in addition we need to remember
that a peculiar responsibility rests upon the man
in public life. We mean in the capital of the nation, in
the city which owes its existence to the fact that it is the
seat of the National Government. It is well for us in
this place, and at this time, to remember that exactly as
there are certain homely qualities the lack of which will
prevent the most brilliant man alive from being a useful
soldier to his country, so there are certain homely qualities
for the lack of which in the public servant no shrewdness
or ability can atone. The greatest leaders, whether
in war or in peace, must of course show a peculiar quality
of genius; but the most redoubtable armies that have
ever existed have been redoubtable because the average
soldier, the average officer, possessed to a high degree
and hardihood. And so the most successful governments
are those in which the average public servant possesses
that variant of loyalty which we call patriotism, together
with common sense and honesty. We can as little afford
to tolerate a dishonest man in the public service as a
coward in the army. The murderer takes a single life;
the corruptionist in public life, whether he be bribe-giver
or bribe-taker, strikes at the heart of the commonwealth.
In every public service, as in every army, there will be
wrongdoers, there will occur misdeeds. This cannot be
avoided; but vigilant watch must be kept, and as soon as
discovered the wrongdoing must be stopped and the
wrongdoers punished. Remember that in popular government
we must rely on the people themselves alike for
the punishment and the reformation. Those upon whom
our institutions cast the initial duty of bringing malefactors
to the bar of justice must be diligent in its discharge;
yet in the last resort the success of their efforts to purge
the public service of corruption must depend upon the
attitude of the courts and of the juries drawn from the
people. Leadership is of avail only so far as there is wise
and resolute public sentiment behind it.
In the long run, then, it depends upon us ourselves,
upon us, the people as a whole, whether this Government
is or is not to stand in the future as it has stood in the
past; and my faith that it will show no falling off is based
upon my faith in the character of our average citizenship.
The one supreme duty is to try to keep this average high.
To this end it is well to keep alive the memory of those
men who are fit to serve as examples of what is loftiest
and best in American citizenship. Such a man was General
Sherman. To very few in any generation is it given
to render such services as he rendered; but each of us in
his degree can try to show something of those qualities of
character upon which, in their sum, the high worth of
and simple living, his sturdy good sense, his manliness
and tenderness in the intimate relations of life, and
finally, his inflexible rectitude of soul, and his loyalty
to all that in this free republic is hallowed and symbolized
by the national flag.
XXXIX
AT THE PAN-AMERICAN MISSIONARY SERVICE,
CATHEDRAL OF SAINT PETER AND SAINT
PAUL, MOUNT SAINT ALBAN, WASHINGTON,
D. C., OCTOBER 25, 1903
Bishop Satterlee, and to you, representatives of the Church,
both at home and abroad, and to all of you, my friends
and fellow-citizens:
I extend greeting, and in your name I especially welcome
those who are in a sense the guests of the nation
to-day. In what I am about to say to you, I wish to
dwell upon certain thoughts suggested by three different
quotations: In the first place, "Thou shalt serve the
Lord with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all
thy mind"; the next, "Be ye therefore wise as serpents
and harmless as doves"; and finally, in the Collect which
you, Bishop Doane, just read, "that we being ready,
both in body and soul, may cheerfully accomplish those
things which Thou commandest."
To an audience such as this I do not have to say anything
as to serving the cause of decency with heart and
with soul. I want to dwell, however, upon the fact that
we have the right to claim from you not merely that you
shall have heart in your work, not merely that you shall
put your souls into it, but that you shall give the best
that your minds have to it also. In the eternal, the unending
warfare for righteousness and against evil, the
friends of what is good need to remember that in addition
high purposes, cannot be in themselves effective,
that they are in no sense a substitute for power to make
those purposes, those intentions felt in action. Of course
we must first have the purpose and the intention. If
our powers are not guided aright, it is better that we
should not have them at all; but we must have the power
itself before we can guide it aright.
In the second text we are told not merely to be harmless
as doves, but also to be wise as serpents. One of our
American humorists who veils under jocular phrases
much deep wisdom—one of those men has remarked that
it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.
Now, we are not to be excused if we do not show
both qualities. It is not very much praise to give a man
to say that he is harmless. We have a right to ask that
in addition to the fact that he does no harm to anyone
he shall possess the wisdom and the strength to do good
to his neighbor; that together with innocence, together
with purity of motive, shall be joined the wisdom and
strength to make that purity effective, that motive translated
into substantial result.
Finally, in the quotation from the Collect, we ask that
we may be made ready both in body and in soul that we
may cheerfully accomplish those things that we are commanded
to do. Ready both in body and in soul: that
means that we must fit ourselves physically and mentally,
fit ourselves to work with the weapons necessary for dealing
with this life no less than with the higher, spiritual
weapons; fit ourselves thus to do the work commanded,
and, moreover, to do it cheerfully. Small is our use for
the man who individually helps any of us and shows that
he does it grudgingly. We would rather not be helped
than be helped in such fashion. A favor extended in a
manner which shows that the man is sorry that he has to
grant it is robbed, sometimes of all, and sometimes of
serve Him, if we serve the cause of decency, the cause of
righteousness, in a way that impresses others with the fact
that we are sad in doing it, our service is robbed of an
immense proportion of its efficacy. We have a right
to ask a cheerful heart, a right to ask a buoyant and
cheerful spirit among those to whom is granted the
inestimable privilege of doing the Lord's work in this
world. The chance to do work, the duty to do work,
is not a penalty, it is a privilege. Let me quote a
sentence that I have quoted once before: "In this life
the man who wins to any goal worth winning almost
always comes to that goal with a burden bound on his
shoulders. The man who does best in this world, the
woman who does best, almost invariably does it because
he or she carries some burden. Life is so constituted
that the man or the woman who has not some responsibility
is thereby deprived of the deepest happiness that
can come to mankind, because each and every one of us,
if he or she is fit to live in the world, must be conscious
that responsibility always rests on him or on her—the
responsibility of duty toward those dependent upon us:
toward our families, toward our friends, toward our fellow-citizens;
the responsibility of duty to wife and child,
to the State, to the Church. Not only can no man shirk
some or all of those responsibilities, but no man worth his
salt will wish to shirk them. On the contrary, he will
welcome, thrice over, the fortune that puts them upon
him.
In closing I want to call your attention to something
that is especially my business for the time being, and
that is measurably your business all the time, or else you
are unfit to be citizens of this republic: In the seventh
hymn which we sung, in the last line, you all joined in
singing "God save the State." Do you intend merely to
sing that, or to try to do it? If you intend merely to sing
be saved if the Lord puts it into the heart of the average
man so to shape his life that the State shall be worth saving;
and only on those terms. We need civic righteousness.
The best constitution that the wit of man has ever
devised, the best institutions that the ablest statesmen in
the world ever have reduced to practice by law or by custom,
will be of no avail if they are not vivified by the
spirit which makes a State great by making its citizens
honest, just, and brave. I do not ask you as practical
believers in applied Christianity to take part one way or
the other in matters that are merely partisan. There are
plenty of questions about which honest men can and do
differ very greatly and very intensely, but as to which the
triumph of either side may be compatible with the welfare
of the State—a lesser degree of welfare or a greater degree
of welfare—but compatible with the welfare of the State.
But there are certain great principles, such as those which
Cromwell would have called "fundamentals," concerning
which no man has a right to have more than one opinion.
Such a principle is honesty. If you have not honesty in
the average private citizen, or public servant, then all else
goes for nothing. The abler a man is, the more dexterous,
the shrewder, the bolder, why, the more dangerous
he is if he has not the root of right living and right
thinking in him—and that in private life, and even more in
public life. Exactly as in time of war, although you need
in each fighting man far more than courage, yet all else
counts for nothing if there is not that courage upon which
to base it; so in our civil life, although we need that the
average man in private life, that the average public servant,
shall have far more than honesty, yet all other
qualities go for nothing or for worse than nothing unless
honesty underlie them—not only the honesty that keeps
its skirts technically clear, but the honesty that is such
according to the spirit as well as the letter of the law; the
deplores corruption,—it is easy enough to deplore corruption,—but
that wars against it and tramples it under foot.
I ask for that type of honesty, I ask for militant honesty,
for the honesty of the kind that makes those who have it
discontented with themselves as long as they have failed
to do everything that in them lies to stamp out dishonesty
wherever it can be found, in high place or in low.
And let us not flatter ourselves, we who live in countries
where the people rule, that it is ultimately possible for
the people to cast upon any but themselves the responsibilities
for the shape the government and the social and
political life of the community assume. I ask, then,
that our people feel quickened within them indignation
against wrong in every shape, and condemnation of that
wrong, whether found in private or in public life. We
have a right to demand courage of every man who wears
the uniform; it is not so much a credit to him to have
it as it is shame unutterable to him if he lacks it. So
when we demand honesty we demand it not as entitling
the possessor to praise, but as warranting the heartiest
condemnation possible if he lacks it. Surely in every
movement for the betterment of our life, our life social in
the truest and deepest sense, our life political, we have a
special right to ask not merely support, but leadership
from those of the Church. We ask that you here to whom
much has been given will remember that from you rightly
much will be expected in return. For all of us here the
lines have been cast in pleasant places. Each of us has
been given one talent, or five, or ten talents, and each of
us is in honor bound to use that talent or those talents
aright, and to show at the end that he is entitled to the
praise of having done well as a faithful servant.
I greet you this afternoon, and am glad to see you
here, and I trust and believe that after this service
every one of us will go home feeling that he or she
he or she, after going home, takes up with fresh heart,
with fresh courage, and with fresh and higher purpose the
burden of life as that burden has been given to him or to
her to carry.
| Addresses and presidential messages of Theodore Roosevelt, 1902-1904 | |