*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74681 ***


  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

  Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.

  Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.

  The original edition did not include a Table of Contents. For the
  convenience of the reader one has been created:


  Presidential Addresses and State Papers                              5

  Remarks at the Dinner of the Periodical Publishers’ Association of
     America. the New Willard, Washington, D. C., April 7, 1904        5

  Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School, Groton, Mass.,
     May 24, 1904                                                      8

  Address at Gettysburg, Pa., Memorial Day, May 30, 1904              21

  Remarks at the Washington Memorial Chapel, Valley Forge, Pa.,
     June 19, 1904                                                    29

  Address at Oyster Bay, N. Y., July 27, 1904, in Response to the
     Committee Appointed to Notify Him of His Nomination For the
     Presidency                                                       36

  Letter Accepting the Republican Nomination For President of the
     United States                                                    47

  Remarks at the White House, Sept. 24, 1904, on the Occasion of the
     Reception of the Interparliamentary Union                        95

  Correspondence, November 4, 1904 - Re: Judge Parker                 97

  Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of Frederick the Great, at
     Washington, Nov. 19, 1904                                       101

  Remarks at St. Patrick’s Church, Washington, D. C., Nov. 20, 1904  108

  Remarks Introducing Rev. Charles Wagner, at the Lafayette Opera
     House, Washington, D. C., Nov. 22, 1904                         112

  Message of the President of the United States, Communicated to the
     Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Third Session of
     the Fifty-eighth Congress                                       119

  Address to the Forest Congress, Washington, D. C., Jan. 5, 1905    190

  Speech at the Dinner of the American Institute of Architects, at
     the Arlington Hotel, Washington, D. C., Jan. 11, 1905           201

  Address at Luther Place Memorial Church, Washington, D. C.,
     Jan. 29, 1905                                                   205

  Address to the Graduating Class of the Naval Academy at Annapolis,
     Maryland, Jan. 30, 1905                                         209

  Address at the Union League Club, Philadelphia, Pa., Jan. 30, 1905 217

  Address at the Lincoln Dinner of the Republican Club of the City of
     New York, Waldorf-astoria Hotel, Feb. 13, 1905                  224

  Address at the Hungarian Club Dinner, New York City, Feb. 14, 1905 236

  Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting
     a Protocol of an Agreement Between the United States and the
     Dominican Republic, Providing For the Collection and Disbursement
     by the United States of the Customs Revenues of the Dominican
     Republic, Signed on February 4, 1905                            241

  Address at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.,
     Feb. 22, 1905                                                   261

  Inaugural Address, March 4, 1905                                   269

  Correspondence, March 6, 1905 - To the Senate                      273

  Address at the Meeting of the American Tract Society, at Grace
     Reformed Church, Washington, D. C., March 12, 1905              276

  Address Before the National Congress of Mothers, Washington, D. C.,
     March 13, 1905                                                  282

  Address at the Dinner of the Society of Friendly Sons of St.
     Patrick, Delmonico’s, New York City, March 17, 1905             292

  Address at the Dinner of the Sons of the American Revolution, Hotel
     Astor, New York City, March 17, 1905                            300

  Address to the Graduates of the United States Naval Medical School,
     Washington, D. C., March 25, 1905                               309

  At Outdoor Meeting at Dallas, Tex., April 5, 1905                  314

  At the Banquet at Dallas, Tex., April 5, 1905                      319

  To the Legislature of Texas, Austin, Tex., April 6, 1905           324

  Outside of Capitol Building, Austin, Tex., April 6, 1905           330

  In Front of the Alamo, San Antonio, Tex., April 7, 1905            334

  To the Congregation Assembled at the Blue Schoolhouse on Upper
     Divide Creek, Colo., Sunday, April 30, 1905                     345

  At the Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade,
     Denver, Colo., May 9, 1905                                      350




  [Illustration: (Image of Theodore  Roosevelt seated, June 6th, 1905)]




                         Homeward Bound Edition

                         PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES
                            AND STATE PAPERS

                    _April 7, 1904, to May 9, 1905_

                                   BY

                           THEODORE ROOSEVELT

                      [Illustration: (colophon)]

                  PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE
                   AUTHOR THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

                               VOLUME III

                                NEW YORK

                     THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY

                                  MCMX




  The Publishers desire to make clear to the readers that Ex-president
   Roosevelt retains no pecuniary interest in the sale of the volumes
   containing these speeches. He feels that the material contained in
      these addresses has been dedicated to the public, and that it
      is, therefore, not to be handled as copyrighted material from
        which Mr. Roosevelt should receive any pecuniary return.




                         PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES
                            AND STATE PAPERS

                             APRIL 7, 1904

                                   TO

                              MAY 9, 1905




                PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS




REMARKS AT THE DINNER OF THE PERIODICAL PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION OF
AMERICA. THE NEW WILLARD, WASHINGTON, D. C., APRIL 7, 1904


_Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen_:

It is always a pleasure to a man in public life to meet the real
governing classes. I wish to bid you welcome to Washington this
evening, and to say but one word of greeting to you, and that word
shall take the form of a warning. I did not speak in jest when I
alluded to you as representatives of the governing classes. I think
that we of the United States can not keep too fresh in our minds the
fact that the men ultimately responsible for the Government are not
the representatives of the people, but the people themselves, and that
therefore heavy is the responsibility that lies upon the people and
above all upon those who do the most toward shaping the thought of
the people. In the days of my youth I was a literary man myself. In
reading a book recently, a series of essays, I was immensely struck by
one thought developed in it. The writer, one of our greatest scholars,
was speaking of the fact that freedom could not exist unless there
went with it a thorough appreciation of responsibility, and he used
a phrase somewhat like this—that among all peoples there must be
restraint; if there is no restraint the result is inevitably anarchy.
That means the negation of all government, and the negation of all
government of course means the negation of popular government; and that
therefore there must be restraint, and that therefore a free people
had merely substituted self-restraint for external restraint; and the
permanence of our freedom as a people, the permanence of our liberties,
depends upon the way in which we show and exercise that self-restraint.

There must be much more than good laws to make a good people. The man
whose morality is expressed simply in the non-infringement of the law
is a pretty poor creature. Unless our average citizenship is based upon
a good deal more than the mere observance of the laws on the statute
books—that, of course, is the preliminary—that, of course, is the
beginning—but unless it is based on more than that then our average
citizenship can never produce the kind of government which it must
and will produce. So far from liberty, from freedom, from responsible
self-government, being things that come easily and to any peoples,
they are peculiarly things that can come only to the highly developed
peoples. Only peoples capable, not merely of mastering others, but
of mastering themselves, can achieve real liberty, can achieve real
self-government; and for that self-mastery, for the cultivation of the
spirit of self-restraint which is but another side of the spirit of
self-reliance, we must rely to no small degree upon those who furnish
us much of the thought of the great bulk of our people who think most.
Therefore, gentlemen, in greeting you here to-night I wish not merely
to welcome you, but to say that I trust every man of you feels the
weight of the responsibility that rests upon him. The man who writes,
the man who month in and month out, week in and week out, day in and
day out, furnishes the material which is to do its part in shaping the
thoughts of our people is fundamentally the man who, more than any
other, determines what kind of character, and therefore ultimately what
kind of government, this people shall possess. I believe in the future
of this people; I believe in the growth and greatness of this country,
because I believe that fundamentally you and those like you approach
your task in the proper spirit. It seems to me that because of the
very fact that we are so confident in the greatness of our country and
in our country’s future, we should beware of any undue levity, of any
spirit of mere boastfulness, of that most irritating of all qualities,
not the most noxious, but the most irritating of all qualities—the
tendency to depreciate others and thereby exalt ourselves.

Courtesy among individuals is a good thing, but international courtesy
is quite as good a thing. If there is any one quality to be deprecated
in a public man and in a public writer alike, it is the using of
language which without any corresponding gain to ourselves tends to
produce irritation among nations with whom we ought to be on friendly
terms. Nations are now brought much nearer together than they formerly
were. Steam, electricity, the immense spread of the newspaper press
in all countries, the way in which so much of what is written in any
country is translated into the language of another country, all of
these facts have tended to bring peoples closer together now. That
ought to and I think in the future will tell predominantly for good;
but it does not help us in the least to be brought closer together with
other peoples if they merely find our unamiable traits more strongly
marked than they thought. We can rest assured that no man ever thinks
better of us because we point out his salient defects; and no nation is
ever won to a kindlier feeling toward us if we adopt toward it a tone
which we would resent if adopted toward us.

We have a very large field for warring against evil here at home.
When we have made things all as they should be in Nation, State, and
municipality here at home, then we can talk about reforming the rest of
mankind; but meanwhile let us begin at home.




ADDRESS AT THE PRIZE DAY EXERCISES AT GROTON SCHOOL, GROTON, MASS., MAY
24, 1904


_Mr. Rector, and Boys, and Fellow-Parents_:

All I shall have to say to you to-day will be simply in the line of
illustrating what the Rector has said, for it seems to me that he has
preached just about the right gospel of life as we ought to learn it;
and let me at the beginning thank the Rector for what I shall hope was
a personal allusion to me, because it is the only time in my life that
I have been even indirectly compared to Apollo. When the comparison was
made I saw the Bishop look self-conscious, so I wish to put in my claim
first.

I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and
in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things
hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent
man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the
same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a
pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and
lacks any one of those three traits.

I was struck, Mr. Peabody, by what you said as to the attitude these
boys should have in college. The boys from a school like this—from
Groton, from St. Mark’s, from St. Paul’s, from any of these schools—if
they are worth their salt, if they have real loyalty and not merely
lip-loyalty to their schools, ought to go to Columbia, Princeton, Yale,
Harvard, with the firm intention of so carrying themselves that Groton,
St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and the other schools shall not be sneered at
because of anything they do. You are not entitled, either in college
or in after life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been at
Groton—not an ounce; but we are entitled to hold you to an exceptional
accountability because you have been at Groton. Because much has been
given to you, therefore we have a right to expect much from you; and
we have a right to expect that you shall begin to give that much just
as soon as you leave school and go to college, so that you shall count
when you are there.

I read the other day in a very bright college book a sentence that
grated on me because of a sneer it contained at the “shoals of freshmen
from church schools,” which implied that they did not so conduct
themselves as to add weight for what was best in college life. I do not
think such sneers are justified; but you are peculiarly liable to such
sneers, and therefore you should be peculiarly careful to walk so as
not to be suspected of deserving them. We have a right to expect that
you will, from the outset, and without showing yourselves varieties of
that most obnoxious of creatures, the prig, handle yourselves decently,
so as to be a force for what is decent and right in college.

Another thing: I was glad to hear the Rector, in describing one pitfall
that you are to avoid, use just exactly the right word when he asked
you to be careful not to turn out snobs. Now, there are in our civic
and social life very much worse creatures than snobs, but none more
contemptible. (By the way—this is not speaking to the boys, but to
the parents—I have had the good luck to have my boys go to the public
schools before they came here.) If you have any stuff in you at all,
and try to amount to anything in after life, you will not remain snobs
even if you start as such. It will be taken out of you very soon and
very roughly if you go into any real work. Go into politics—go to your
district convention, and try to carry it on the snob basis and see
how far you will get. The thing that will strike you in just about a
week is that there are a whole lot of able people sliding around this
planet. The fact that the individual opposed to you does not wear a
cravat, and does wear a saw-edge collar, does not imply that you are
going to carry the convention against him! You will soon find that it
is not his clothes but his political sense and energy that control.
You will find that if you expect to do anything there will be mighty
little temptation to try to treat the men with whom you are working on
any basis save the fundamental democratic basis of what they amount
to, and what you can show you amount to as compared to them. So that
if you go into life to do anything, it is perfectly useless for me to
tell you to get rid of snobbery, because you will have to. It is just
as true in every other field as in politics. Every man who works in
philanthropy—and he can do nothing in philanthropy unless he combines a
very earnest desire to accomplish what is decent with the determination
to accomplish it in practical fashion (I shall speak of that later)—if
he goes into philanthropy and tries to do something in a college
settlement, tries to do his part in working to disentangle the tangled
knot of our social and civic life, he will find just as soon as he gets
interested in his work he won’t care and won’t know who the people are
who are with him except as he judges them by their fruits. The interest
that you take in him is, can a given man accomplish something? If he
can not, then let him give place to the man who can.

You see, all I am doing is to amplify here and there the Rector’s
speech. Take what was said about scholarship. I came here intending to
speak to you along that same line, although in a slightly different
way, approaching it from a slightly different aspect. I believe with
all my heart in athletics, in sport, and have always done as much
thereof as my limited capacity and my numerous duties would permit; but
I believe in bodily vigor chiefly because I believe in the spirit that
lies back of it. If a boy can not go into athletics because he is not
physically able to, that does not count in the least against him. He
may be just as much of a man in after life as if he could, because it
is not physical address but the moral quality behind it which really
counts. But if he has the physical ability and keeps out because he is
afraid, because he is lazy, because he is a mollycoddle, then I haven’t
any use for him. If he has not the right spirit, the spirit which makes
him scorn self-indulgence, timidity and mere ease, that is if he has
not the spirit which normally stands at the base of physical hardihood,
physical prowess, then that boy does not amount to much, and he is
not ordinarily going to amount to much in after life. Of course, there
are people with special abilities so great as to outweigh even defects
like timidity and laziness, but the man who makes the Republic what it
is, if he has not courage, the capacity to show prowess, the desire for
hardihood; if he has not the scorn of mere ease, the scorn of pain,
the scorn of discomfort (all of them qualities that go to make a man’s
worth on an eleven or a nine or an eight); if he has not something of
that sort in him then the lack is so great that it must be amply atoned
for, more than amply atoned for, in other ways, or his usefulness to
the community will be small. So I believe heartily in physical prowess,
in the sports that go to make physical prowess. I believe in them not
only because of the amusement and pleasure they bring, but because I
think they are useful. Yet I think you had a great deal better never
go into them than to go into them with the idea that they are the
chief end even of school or college; still more of life. There was an
article in one of the “Atlantic” monthlies last year which all parents
(even those of the most limited intellectual home development, Mr.
Peabody!) should read, by Lawrence Lowell, on the careers in after life
of those who have distinguished themselves as scholars and as athletes
in college; and the showing for the athletes was not as good, either,
as I had hoped or as I had expected that it would have been. I believe
that to have been in athletics is an advantage to a man only if he
realizes that even when he is in college it is not his chief end,
and if he realizes that once out of college it can not be his end at
all. It is a mighty good thing to be a halfback on a varsity eleven;
but it is a mighty poor thing, when a man reaches the age of forty,
only to be able to say that he was once halfback on an eleven. Do not
lose the sense of proportion. Remember that in life, and above all in
the very active, practical, workaday life on this continent, the man
who wins out must be the man who works. He can not play all the time.
He can not have play as his principal occupation and win out. Let him
play; let him have as good a time as he can have. I have a pity that
is akin to contempt for the man who does not have as good a time as he
can out of life. But let him work. Let him count in the world. When
he comes to the end of his life let him feel he has pulled his weight
and a little more. A sound body is good; a sound mind is better; but a
strong and clean character is better than either. In college it is not
necessary to get into Phi Beta Kappa, though that is desirable; but
it is necessary to work hard at your studies. It is necessary to have
the habit of application, the habit of subordinating mere pleasure to
serious duty, if you are going to do really good work once you are out
of school and out of college. And while I would be very sorry to see
those who are in control here in Groton lose that personal touch with
their students which has made them again and again keep a poor scholar
and thereby make in the end a good citizen; while I should be very
sorry to see that policy reversed, still I am glad—I do not know that
the boys will share my joy on this point—I am glad that the standard of
scholarship is to be raised.

Now, what I have to say to you yourselves, boys, as to what you will
amount to when you are men, is in substance but a repetition of what I
have already said. If you leave Groton, and the college to which you
afterward go, if you go to any—if you leave simply with the feeling
that you have had ten delightful years; that you have _just_ barely
got through your examinations; that you have graduated; that you are
not positively disgraced; that you have met decent people, and that
life has been easy and it won’t be your fault if it does not continue
as easy—if that is the feeling with which you have left school and
college, then you are poor creatures, and there is small good that
will ever come out of you. Of course, the worst of all lives is the
vicious life; the life of a man who becomes a positive addition
to the forces of evil in a community. Next to that—and when I am
speaking to people who, by birth and training and standing, ought to
amount to a great deal, I have a right to say only second to it in
criminality—comes the life of mere vapid ease, the ignoble life of a
man who desires nothing from his years but that they shall be led with
the least effort, the least trouble, the greatest amount of physical
enjoyment—or intellectual enjoyment of a mere dilettante type. The life
that is worth living, and the only life that is worth living, is the
life of effort, the life of effort to attain what is worth striving
for. Incidentally, of all the miserable people that I know I should
put high in the top rank those who reach middle age having steadfastly
striven only to amuse themselves as they went through life. If there
ever was a pursuit which stultified itself by its very conditions, it
is the pursuit of pleasure as the all-sufficing end of life. Happiness
can not come to any man capable of enjoying true happiness unless it
comes as the sequel to duty well and honestly done. To do that duty you
need to have more than one trait. You will meet plenty of well-meaning
people who speak to you as if one trait were enough. That is not so.
You might just as well in any rough sport in any game, think that a man
could win by mere strength if he was clumsy; or by mere agility and
precision of movement without strength; or by strength and agility if
he had no heart. You need a great many qualities to make a successful
man on a nine or an eleven; and just so you need a great many different
qualities to make a good citizen. In the first place, of course it is
almost tautological to say that to make a good citizen the prime need
is to be decent, clean in thought, clean in mind, clean in action; to
have an ideal and not to keep that ideal purely for the study—to have
an ideal which you will in good faith strive to live up to when you
are out in life. If you have an ideal only good while you sit at home,
an ideal that nobody can live up to in outside life, then I advise you
strongly to take that ideal, examine it closely, and then cast it
away. It is not a good one. The ideal that it is impossible for a man
to strive after in practical life is not the type of ideal that you
wish to hold up and follow. Be practical as well as generous in your
ideals. Keep your eyes on the stars, but remember to keep your feet on
the ground. Be truthful; a lie implies fear, vanity or malevolence;
and be frank; furtiveness and insincerity are faults incompatible with
true manliness. Be honest, and remember that honesty counts for nothing
unless back of it lie courage and efficiency. If in this country we
ever have to face a state of things in which on one side stand the men
of high ideals who are honest, good, well-meaning, pleasant people,
utterly unable to put those ideals into shape in the rough field
of practical life, while on the other side are grouped the strong,
powerful, efficient men with no ideals: then the end of the Republic
will be near. The salvation of the Republic depends—the salvation of
our whole social system depends—upon the production year by year of a
sufficient number of citizens who possess high ideals combined with the
practical power to realize them in actual life.

You often hear people speaking as if life was like striving upward
toward a mountain peak. That is not so. Life is as if you were
traveling a ridge crest. You have the gulf of inefficiency on one side
and the gulf of wickedness on the other, and it helps not to have
avoided one gulf if you fall into the other. It shall profit us nothing
if our people are decent and ineffective. It shall profit us nothing
if they are efficient and wicked. In every walk of life, in business,
politics; if the need comes, in war; in literature, science, art, in
everything, what we need is a sufficient number of men who can work
well and who will work with a high ideal. The work can be done in a
thousand different ways. Our public life depends primarily not upon the
men who occupy public positions for the moment, because they are but
an infinitesimal fraction of the whole. Our public life depends upon
men who take an active interest in that public life; who are bound to
see public affairs honestly and competently managed; but who have the
good sense to know what honesty and competency actually mean. And any
such man, if he is both sane and high-minded, can be a greater help and
strength to any one in public life than you can easily imagine without
having had yourselves the experience. It is an immense strength to a
public man to know a certain number of people to whom he can appeal
for advice and for backing; whose character is so high that baseness
would shrink ashamed before them; and who have such good sense that
any decent public servant is entirely willing to lay before them every
detail of his actions, asking only that they know the facts before
they pass final judgment. And now, gentlemen and ladies, I must be
pardoned for one personal allusion. We have here to-day one man whom
I have found exactly to answer to that need, who stands as a strong
pillar for decency because he has high ideals combined with practical
common-sense; and that is Bishop Lawrence.

Well, I guess I have said about all I have to say. Success does not
lie entirely in the hands of any one of us. From the day the tower of
Siloam fell, misfortune has fallen sometimes upon the just as well as
the unjust. We sometimes see the good man, the honest man, the strong
man, broken down by forces over which he had no control. If the hand of
the Lord is heavy upon us the strength and wisdom of man shall avail
nothing. But as a rule in the long run each of us comes pretty near
to getting what he deserves. Each of us can, as a rule—there are, of
course, exceptions—finally achieve the success best worth having, the
success of having played his part honestly and manfully; of having
lived so as to feel at the end he has done his duty; of having been a
good husband, a good father; of having tried to make the world a little
better off rather than worse off because he has lived; of having been a
doer of the word and not a hearer only—still less a mere critic of the
doers. Every man has it in him, unless fate is indeed hard upon him, to
win out that measure of success if he will honestly try.

There are two kinds of success to be won. In the first place, there is
success in doing the thing that can only be done by the exceptional
man. Therefore most of us can not achieve this kind of success. It
comes only to the man who has very exceptional qualities. The other
kind, a very, very high kind, is the ordinary kind of success, the
success that comes to the man who does the things which most men could
do, but which they do not do; which comes to the man who develops or
possesses to a higher degree the qualities that all of us have to
a greater or less extent. In the history of the world some of the
men who stand high—who stand in all but the very highest places—are
those who have not possessed any wonderful genius in statecraft, war,
art, literature—in whatever calling; but who have developed within
themselves, by long, patient effort, resolutely maintained in spite of
repeated failure, the ordinary, everyday, humdrum qualities of courage,
of resolution, of proper appreciation of the relative importance
of things; of honesty, of truth, of good sense, of unyielding
perseverance. We can each one of us develop to a very high degree these
qualities; and if we do so develop them, each one of us is sure of a
measure of success; and I greet you here on this twentieth anniversary
of the founding of Groton School because I feel that Groton School is
one of those institutions which pre-eminently stand for the development
of precisely those qualities among the boys whom it sends forth to be
American men, American citizens, to do honor to themselves and their
school by honoring the commonwealth to which we all belong.




ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG, PA., MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 30, 1904


  _Governor, and You, my Fellow-Citizens_:

It is indeed a pleasure to greet you to-day. In greeting all I, of
course, greet above all others the men to whom we owe it that we are
here to-day, or that we have a country of which to be proud—the men
who fought to a finish the great Civil War. And, having greeted first
those at one end of the line, I want to speak of the others and say I
was exceedingly pleased to see the children. Also let me say a word
of greeting in your behalf, my comrades of the Civil War, to the
regulars who were here to-day as an escort—to the men who now wear the
uniform of “Uncle Sam,” and wear it honorably to defend the flag as
you defended it in your youth and early manhood. The memories of this
field are inextricably entwined in our hearts with the great deeds of
the leaders of the past, as one by one the men who here signalized
themselves have passed away.

Governor Pennypacker alluded to the fact that to-day Pennsylvania
mourns its senior Senator. The regiment which Senator Quay was
instrumental in raising took part in the battle of Gettysburg—the
battle in which Governor Pennypacker shared. Senator Quay was not with
it here; he had gone with another regiment, and it is appropriate at
this time to recall the fact that when the term of service of that
regiment expired, just before the battle of Fredericksburg, Senator
Quay declined to accept the discharge and continued as a volunteer with
the army that fought at Fredericksburg and won the medal of honor on
that bloody day.

The place where we now are has won a double distinction. Here was
fought one of the great battles of all time, and here was spoken one
of the few speeches which shall last through the ages. As long as this
Republic endures or its history is known, so long shall the memory of
the Battle of Gettysburg likewise endure and be known; and as long
as the English tongue is understood, so long shall Abraham Lincoln’s
Gettysburg speech thrill the hearts of mankind.

The Civil War was a great war for righteousness; a war waged for the
noblest ideals, but waged also in thoroughgoing, practical fashion.
That is why you won then—because you had the ideals, because you had
the lift of soul in you, and because also you had the right stuff in
you to make those ideals count in actual life. You had to have the
ideals, but if you had not been able to march and shoot you could not
have put them into practice. It was one of the few wars which mean, in
their successful outcome, a lift toward better things for the nations
of mankind. Some wars have meant the triumph of order over anarchy
and licentiousness masquerading as liberty; some wars have meant
the triumph of liberty over tyranny masquerading as order; but this
victorious war of ours meant the triumph of both liberty and order,
the triumph of orderly liberty, the bestowal of civil rights upon
the freed slaves, and at the same time the stern insistence on the
supremacy of the national law throughout the length and breadth of the
land. Moreover, this was one of those rare contests in which it was
to the immeasurable interest of the vanquished that they should lose,
while at the same time the victors acquired the precious privilege
of transmitting to those who came after them, as a heritage of honor
forever, not only the memory of their own valiant deeds, but the memory
of the deeds of those who, no less valiantly and with equal sincerity
of purpose, fought against the stars in their courses. The war left to
us all, as fellow-countrymen, as brothers, the right to rejoice that
the Union has been restored in indestructible shape in a country where
slavery no longer mocks the boast of freedom, and also the right to
rejoice with exultant pride in the courage, the self-sacrifice, and the
devotion, alike of the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the
gray.

He is but a poor American who, looking at this field, does not feel
within himself a deeper reverence for the Nation’s past and a higher
purpose to make the Nation’s future rise level to her past. Here fought
the chosen sons of the North and the South, the East and the West.
The armies which on this field contended for the mastery were veteran
armies, hardened by long campaigning and desperate fighting into such
instruments of war as no other nation then possessed. The severity of
the fighting is attested by the proportionate loss—a loss unrivaled
in any battle of similar size since the close of the Napoleonic
struggles; a loss which in certain regiments was from three-fourths to
four-fifths of the men engaged. Every spot on this field has its own
associations of soldierly duty nobly done, of supreme self-sacrifice
freely rendered. The names of the chiefs who served in the two armies
form a long honor roll; and the enlisted men were worthy, and even more
than worthy, of those who led them. Every acre of this ground has its
own associations. We see where the fight thundered through and around
the village of Gettysburg; where the artillery formed on the ridges;
where the cavalry fought; where the hills were attacked and defended;
and where, finally, the great charge surged up the slope only to break
on the summit in the bloody spray of gallant failure.

But the soldiers who won at Gettysburg, the soldiers who fought to a
finish the Civil War and thereby made their countrymen forever their
debtors, have left us far more even than the memories of the war
itself. They fought for four years in order that on this Continent
those who came after them, their children and their children’s
children, might enjoy a lasting peace. They took arms not to destroy,
but to save liberty; not to overthrow, but to establish the supremacy
of the law. The crisis which they faced was to determine whether or
not this people was fit for self-government and, therefore, fit for
liberty. Freedom is not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those
who show themselves worthy of it. In this world no privilege can
be permanently appropriated by men who have not the power and the
will successfully to assume the responsibility of using it aright.
In his recent admirable little volume on freedom and responsibility
in democratic government, President Hadley of Yale has pointed
out that the freedom which is worth anything is the freedom which
means self-government and not anarchy. Freedom thus conceived is a
constructive force, which enables an intelligent and good man to do
better things than he could do without it; which is in its essence the
substitution of self-restraint for external restraint—the substitution
of a form of restraint which promotes progress for the form which
retards it. This is the right view to take of freedom; but it can only
be taken if there is a full recognition of the close connection between
liberty and responsibility in every domain of human thought and action.
It was essentially the view taken by Abraham Lincoln, and by all those
who, when the Civil War broke out, realized that in a self-governing
democracy those who desire to be considered fit to enjoy liberty must
show that they know how to use it with moderation and justice in peace,
and how to fight for it when it is jeoparded by malice domestic or
foreign levy.

The lessons they taught us are lessons as applicable in our everyday
lives now as in the rare times of great stress. The men who made this
field forever memorable did so because they combined the power of
fealty to a lofty ideal with the power of showing that fealty in hard,
practical, common-sense fashion. They stood for the life of effort, not
the life of ease. They had that love of country, that love of justice,
that love of their fellow-men, without which power and resourceful
efficiency but make a man a danger to his fellows. Yet, in addition
thereto, they likewise possessed the power and the efficiency; for
otherwise their high purpose would have been barren of result. They
knew each how to act for himself, and yet each how to act with his
fellows. They learned, as all the generation of the Civil War learned,
that rare indeed is the chance to do anything worth doing by one sudden
and violent effort. The men who believed that the Civil War would be
ended in ninety days, the men who cried loudest “On to Richmond,” if
they had the right stuff in them speedily learned their error; and the
war was actually won by those who settled themselves steadfastly down
to fight for three years, or for as much longer as the war might last,
and who gradually grew to understand that the triumph would come, not
by a single brilliant victory, but by a hundred painful and tedious
campaigns. In the East and the West the columns advanced and recoiled,
swayed from side to side, and again advanced; along the coasts the
black ships stood endlessly off and on before the hostile forts;
generals and admirals emerged into the light, each to face his crowded
hour of success or failure; the men in front fought; the men behind
supplied and pushed forward those in front; and the final victory was
due to the deeds of all who played their parts well and manfully, in
the scores of battles, in the countless skirmishes, in march, in camp,
or in reserve, as commissioned officers, or in the ranks—wherever and
whenever duty called them. That is why the title that most appeals to
you now is the title of comrade, by which the private in the ranks
and the lieutenant-general address one another, because each did his
duty and asks no more than recognition of that fact. Just so it must
be for us in civil life. We can make and keep this country worthy of
the men who gave their lives to save it, only on condition that the
average man among us on the whole does his duty bravely, loyally, and
with common-sense, in whatever position life allots to him. Exactly
as in time of war courage is the cardinal virtue of the soldier, so
in time of peace honesty, using the word in its deepest and broadest
significance, is the essential basic virtue, without which all else
avails nothing. National greatness is of slow growth. It can not be
forced and yet be stable and enduring; for it is based fundamentally
upon national character, and national character is stamped deep in a
people by the lives of many generations. The men who went into the army
had to submit to discipline, had to submit to restraint through the
government of the leaders they had chosen, as the price of winning.
So we, the people, can preserve our liberty and our greatness in
time of peace only by ourselves exercising the virtues of honesty, of
self-restraint, and of fair dealing between man and man. In all the
ages of the past men have seen countries lose their liberty, because
their people could not restrain and order themselves, and therefore
forfeited the right to what they were unable to use with wisdom.

It was because you men of the Civil War both knew how to use liberty
temperately and how to defend it at need that we and our children
and our children’s children shall hold you in honor forever. Here,
on Memorial Day, on this great battlefield, we commemorate not only
the chiefs who actually won this battle; not only Meade, and his
lieutenants, Hancock and Reynolds and Howard and Sickles, and the
many others whose names flame in our annals; but also the chiefs
who had made the Army of the Potomac what it was, and those who
afterward led it in the campaigns which were crowned at Appomattox;
and furthermore those who made and used its sister armies: McClellan,
with his extraordinary genius for organization; Rosecrans; Buell;
Thomas, the unyielding, the steadfast; and that great trio, Sherman,
Sheridan, and last and greatest of all, Grant himself, the silent
soldier whose hammer-like blows finally beat down even the prowess of
the men who fought against him. Above all we meet here to pay homage to
the officers and enlisted men who served and fought and died, without
having, as their chiefs had, the chance to write their names on the
tablets of fame; to the men who marched and fought in the ranks, who
were buried in long trenches on the field of battle, who died in cots
marked only by numbers in the hospitals; who, if they lived, when the
war was over, went back each to his task on the farm or in the town, to
do his duty in peace as he had done it in war; to take up the threads
of his working life where he had dropped them when the trumpets of the
Nation pealed to arms. To-day, all over this land our people meet to
pay reverent homage to the dead who died that the Nation might live;
and we pay homage also to their comrades who are still with us.

All are at one now, the sons of those who wore the blue and the sons
of those who wore the gray, and all can unite in paying respect to the
memory of those who fell, each of them giving his life for his duty
as he saw it; and all should be at one in learning from the deaths of
these men how to live usefully while the times call for the performance
of the countless necessary duties of everyday life, and how to hold
ourselves ready to die nobly should the Nation ever again demand of her
sons the splendid ultimate proof of loyalty to her and to the flag.




REMARKS AT THE WASHINGTON MEMORIAL CHAPEL, VALLEY FORGE, PA., JUNE 19,
1904


It is a great pleasure to come here this afternoon and say a word
on behalf of the project to erect a memorial chapel on this great
historic site. Three weeks ago I was at the field where the bloodiest
and most decisive battle of the Civil War was fought, and it is a
noteworthy thing that this State of Pennsylvania should have within
its borders the places which mark the two turning points in our
history—Gettysburg, which saw the high-tide of the Rebellion—Valley
Forge, which saw the getting beyond the danger point of the Revolution.

There have been two great crises in our national history—two crises
where failure meant the absolute breaking asunder of the Nation—one
the Revolutionary War, one the Civil War. If the men who took to arms
in ’76 for national independence had failed, then not merely would
there never have been a national growth on this Continent, but the
whole spirit of nationality for the younger lands of the world would
have perished still-born. If the men of ’61 had failed in the great
struggle for national unity it would have meant that the work done by
Washington and his associates might almost or quite as well have been
left undone. There would have been no point in commemorating what was
done at Valley Forge if Gettysburg had not given us the national right
to commemorate it. If we were now split up into a dozen wrangling
little communities, if we lacked the power to keep away here on our own
Continent, within our own lines, or to show ourselves a unit as against
foreign aggression, then, indeed, the Declaration of Independence would
read like empty sound, and the Constitution would not be worth the
paper upon which it was written, save as a study for antiquarians.

There have been other crises than those that culminated during the War
for Independence and the great Civil War, there have been great deeds
and great men at other periods of our national history, but there never
has been another deed vital to the welfare of the Nation save the
two—the deed of those who founded and the deed of those who saved the
Republic. There never has been another man whose life has been vital to
the Republic save Washington and Lincoln. I am not here to say anything
about Lincoln, but I do not see how any American can think of either of
them without thinking of the other too, because they represent the same
work. Think how fortunate we are as a Nation. Think what it means to
us as a people that our young men should have as their ideals two men,
not conquerors, not men who have won glory by wrongdoing; not men whose
lives were spent in their own advancement, but men who lived, one of
whom died, that the Nation might grow steadily greater and better—the
man who founded the Republic and took no glory from it himself save
what was freely given him by his fellow-citizens, and that only in the
shape of a chance of rendering them service, and the man who afterward
saved the Republic, who saved the state, without striking down
liberty. Often in history a state has been saved and liberty struck
down at the same time. Lincoln saved the Union and lifted the cause of
liberty higher than before. Washington created the Republic, rose by
statecraft to the highest position, and used that position only for the
welfare of his fellows and for so long as his fellows wished him to
keep it.

It is a good thing that of these great landmarks of our
history—Gettysburg and Valley Forge—one should commemorate a single
tremendous effort and the other what we need, on the whole, much more
commonly, and what I think is, on the whole, rather more difficult to
do—long-sustained effort. Only men with a touch of the heroic in them
could have lasted out that three days’ struggle at Gettysburg. Only
men fit to rank with the great men of all time could have beaten back
the mighty onslaught of that gallant and wonderful army of Northern
Virginia, whose final supreme effort faded at the stone wall on
Cemetery Ridge on that July day forty-one years ago.

But after all, hard though it is to rise to the supreme height of
self-sacrifice and of effort at a time of crisis that is short, to
rise to it for a single great effort—it is harder yet to rise to the
level of a crisis when that crisis takes the form of needing constant,
patient, steady work, month after month, year after year, when, too, it
does not end after a terrible struggle in a glorious day—when it means
months of gloom and effort steadfastly endured, and triumph wrested
only at the very end.

Here at Valley Forge Washington and his Continentals warred not
against the foreign soldiery, but against themselves, against all
the appeals of our nature that are most difficult to resist—against
discouragement, discontent, the mean envies and jealousies, and
heart-burnings sure to arise at any time in large bodies of men, but
especially sure to arise when defeat and disaster have come to large
bodies of men. Here the soldiers who carried our national flag had to
suffer from cold, from privation, from hardship, knowing that their
foes were well housed, knowing that things went easier for the others
than it did for them. And they conquered, because they had in them the
spirit that made them steadfast, not merely on an occasional great day,
but day after day in the life of daily endeavor to do duty well.

When two lessons are both indispensable, it seems hardly worth while
to dwell more on one than on the other. Yet I think that as a people
we need more to learn the lesson of Valley Forge even than that of
Gettysburg. I have not the slightest anxiety but that this people, if
the need should come in the future, will be able to show the heroism,
the supreme effort that was shown at Gettysburg, though it may well
be that it would mean a similar two years of effort, checkered by
disaster, to lead up to it. But the vital thing for this Nation to do
is steadily to cultivate the quality which Washington and those under
him so pre-eminently showed during the winter at Valley Forge—the
quality of steady adherence to duty in the teeth of difficulty, in the
teeth of discouragement, and even disaster, the quality that makes a
man do what is straight and decent, not one day when a great crisis
comes, but every day, day in and day out, until success comes at the
end.

Of course, all of us are agreed that a prime national need is the need
of commemorating the memories of the men who did greatly, thought
highly, who fought, suffered, endured, for the Nation. It is a great
thing to commemorate their lives; but, after all, the worthy way to do
so is to try to show by our lives that we have profited by them. If
we show that the lives of the great men of the past have been to us
incitements to do well in the present, then we have paid to them the
only homage which is really worthy of them. If we treat their great
deeds as matters merely for idle boasting, not as spurring us on to
effort, but as excusing us from effort, then we show that we are not
worthy of our sires, of the people who went before us in the history of
our land. What we as a people need more than aught else is the steady
performance of the everyday duties of life, not with hope of reward,
but because they are duties.

I spoke of how we felt that we had in Washington and Lincoln national
ideals. I contrasted their names with the names of many others in
history, names which will shine as brightly, but oh! with how much less
power and light. I think you will find that the fundamental difference
between our two great national heroes and almost any other men of equal
note in the world’s history, is that when you think of our two men you
think inevitably not of glory, but of duty, not of what the man did
for himself in achieving name, or fame, or position, but of what he
did for his fellows. They set the right ideal and also they lived up to
it in practical fashion. Had either of them possessed that fantastic
quality of mind which sets an impossible, and, perhaps, an undesirable
ideal, or which declines to do the actual work of the present because
forsooth the implements with which it is necessary to work are not to
that man’s choice, his fame would have been missed, his achievement
would have crumbled into dust, and he would not have left one stroke on
the book which tells of effort accomplished for the good of mankind.

A man, to amount to anything, must be practical. He must actually do
things, not talk about doing them, least of all cavil at how they are
accomplished by those who actually go down into the arena, and actually
face the dust and the blood and the sweat, who actually triumphed in
the struggle. The man must have the force, the power, the will to
accomplish results, but he must have also the lift toward lofty things
which shall make him incapable of striving for aught unless that for
which he strives is something honorable and high—something well worth
striving for.

I congratulate you that it is your good fortune to be engaged in
erecting a memorial to the great man who was equal to the great days—to
the man and the men who showed by their lives that they were indeed
doers of the word and not hearers only.




ADDRESS AT OYSTER BAY, N. Y., JULY 27, 1904, IN RESPONSE TO THE
COMMITTEE APPOINTED TO NOTIFY HIM OF HIS NOMINATION FOR THE PRESIDENCY


  _Mr. Speaker and Gentlemen of the Notification Committee_:

I am deeply sensible of the high honor conferred upon me by the
representatives of the Republican party assembled in convention, and I
accept the nomination for the Presidency with solemn realization of the
obligations I assume. I heartily approve the declaration of principles
which the Republican National Convention has adopted, and at some
future day I shall communicate to you, Mr. Chairman, more at length and
in detail a formal written acceptance of the nomination.

Three years ago I became President because of the death of my lamented
predecessor. I then stated that it was my purpose to carry out his
principles and policies for the honor and the interest of the country.
To the best of my ability I have kept the promise thus made. If
next November my countrymen confirm at the polls the action of the
convention you represent, I shall, under Providence, continue to work
with an eye single to the welfare of all our people.

A party is of worth only in so far as it promotes the national
interest, and every official, high or low, can serve his party
best by rendering to the people the best service of which he is
capable. Effective government comes only as the result of the
loyal co-operation of many different persons. The members of a
legislative majority, the officers in the various departments of the
Administration, and the Legislative and Executive branches as toward
each other, must work together with subordination of self to the common
end of successful government. We who have been intrusted with power
as public servants during the past seven years of administration and
legislation now come before the people content to be judged by our
record of achievement. In the years that have gone by we have made the
deed square with the word; and if we are continued in power we shall
unswervingly follow out the great lines of public policy which the
Republican party has already laid down; a public policy to which we are
giving, and shall give, a united, and therefore an efficient, support.

In all of this we are more fortunate than our opponents, who now appeal
for confidence on the ground, which some express and some seek to have
confidentially understood, that if triumphant they may be trusted to
prove false to every principle which in the last eight years they have
laid down as vital, and to leave undisturbed those very acts of the
Administration because of which they ask that the Administration itself
be driven from power. Seemingly their present attitude as to their past
record is that some of them were mistaken and others insincere. We
make our appeal in a wholly different spirit. We are not constrained
to keep silent on any vital question; we are divided on no vital
question; our policy is continuous, and is the same for all sections
and localities. There is nothing experimental about the Government we
ask the people to continue in power, for our performance in the past,
our proved governmental efficiency, is a guarantee as to our promises
for the future. Our opponents, either openly or secretly, according to
their several temperaments, now ask the people to trust their present
promises in consideration of the fact that they intend to treat their
past promises as null and void. We know our own minds and we have kept
of the same mind for a sufficient length of time to give to our policy
coherence and sanity. In such a fundamental matter as the enforcement
of the law we do not have to depend upon promises, but merely to ask
that our record be taken as an earnest of what we shall continue to
do. In dealing with the great organizations known as trusts, we do not
have to explain why the laws were not enforced, but to point out that
they actually have been enforced, and that legislation has been enacted
to increase the effectiveness of their enforcement. We do not have to
propose to “turn the rascals out,” for we have shown in very deed that
whenever by diligent investigation a public official can be found who
has betrayed his trust he will be punished to the full extent of the
law without regard to whether he was appointed under a Republican or
a Democratic Administration. This is the efficient way to turn the
rascals out and to keep them out, and it has the merit of sincerity.
Moreover, the betrayals of trust in the last seven years have been
insignificant in number when compared with the extent of the public
service. Never has the administration of the Government been on a
cleaner and higher level; never has the public work of the Nation been
done more honestly and efficiently.

Assuredly it is unwise to change the policies which have worked so well
and which are now working so well. Prosperity has come at home. The
national honor and interest have been upheld abroad. We have placed the
finances of the Nation upon a sound gold basis. We have done this with
the aid of many who were formerly our opponents, but who would neither
openly support nor silently acquiesce in the heresy of unsound finance;
and we have done it against the convinced and violent opposition of the
mass of our present opponents who still refuse to recant the unsound
opinions which for the moment they think it inexpedient to assert. We
know what we mean when we speak of an honest and stable currency. We
mean the same thing from year to year. We do not have to avoid definite
and conclusive committal on the most important issue which has recently
been before the people, and which may at any time in the near future be
before them again. Upon the principles which underlie this issue the
convictions of half of our number do not clash with those of the other
half. So long as the Republican party is in power the gold standard is
settled, not as a matter of temporary political expediency, not because
of shifting conditions in the production of gold in certain mining
centres, but in accordance with what we regard as the fundamental
principles of national morality and wisdom.

Under the financial legislation which we have enacted there is now
ample circulation for every business need; and every dollar of
this circulation is worth a dollar in gold. We have reduced the
interest-bearing debt, and in still larger measure the interest on
that debt. All of the war taxes imposed during the Spanish War have
been removed with a view to relieve the people and to prevent the
accumulation of an unnecessary surplus. The result is that hardly ever
before have the expenditures and income of the Government so closely
corresponded. In the fiscal year that has just closed the excess of
income over the ordinary expenditures was nine millions of dollars.
This does not take account of the fifty millions expended out of the
accumulated surplus for the purchase of the Isthmian Canal. It is an
extraordinary proof of the sound financial condition of the Nation that
instead of following the usual course in such matters and throwing the
burden upon posterity by an issue of bonds, we were able to make the
payment outright and yet after it to have in the treasury a surplus of
one hundred and sixty-one millions. Moreover, we were able to pay this
fifty millions of dollars out of hand without causing the slightest
disturbance to business conditions.

We have enacted a tariff law under which during the past few years
the country has attained a height of material well-being never before
reached. Wages are higher than ever before. That whenever the need
arises there should be a readjustment of the tariff schedules is
undoubted; but such changes can with safety be made only by those whose
devotion to the principle of a protective tariff is beyond question;
for otherwise the changes would amount not to readjustment, but to
repeal. The readjustment when made must maintain and not destroy the
protective principle. To the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer
this is vital; but perhaps no other man is so much interested as the
wage-worker in the maintenance of our present economic system, both
as regards the finances and the tariff. The standard of living of our
wage-workers is higher than that of any other country, and it can not
so remain unless we have a protective tariff which shall always keep as
a minimum a rate of duty sufficient to cover the difference between the
labor cost here and abroad. Those who, like our opponents, “denounce
protection as a robbery” thereby explicitly commit themselves to the
proposition that if they were to revise the tariff no heed would be
paid to the necessity of meeting this difference between the standards
of living for wage-workers here and in other countries; and therefore
on this point their antagonism to our position is fundamental. Here
again we ask that their promises and ours be judged by what has been
done in the immediate past. We ask that sober and sensible men compare
the workings of the present tariff law, and the conditions which obtain
under it, with the workings of the preceding tariff law of 1894 and the
conditions which that tariff of 1894 helped to bring about.

We believe in reciprocity with foreign nations on the terms outlined
in President McKinley’s last speech, which urged the extension of
our foreign markets by reciprocal agreements whenever they could be
made without injury to American industry and labor. It is a singular
fact that the only great reciprocity treaty recently adopted—that
with Cuba—was finally opposed almost alone by the representatives of
the very party which now states that it favors reciprocity. And here
again we ask that the worth of our words be judged by comparing their
deeds with ours. On this Cuban reciprocity treaty there were at the
outset grave differences of opinion among ourselves; and the notable
thing in the negotiation and ratification of the treaty, and in the
legislation which carried it into effect, was the highly practical
manner in which without sacrifice of principle these differences of
opinion were reconciled. There was no rupture of a great party, but an
excellent practical outcome, the result of the harmonious co-operation
of two successive Presidents and two successive Congresses. This is
an illustration of the governing capacity which entitles us to the
confidence of the people not only in our purposes but in our practical
ability to achieve those purposes. Judging by the history of the last
twelve years, down to this very month, is there justification for
believing that under similar circumstances and with similar initial
differences of opinion, our opponents would have achieved any practical
result?

We have already shown in actual fact that our policy is to do fair and
equal justice to all men, paying no heed to whether a man is rich or
poor; paying no heed to his race, his creed, or his birthplace.

We recognize the organization of capital and the organization of
labor as natural outcomes of our industrial system. Each kind of
organization is to be favored so long as it acts in a spirit of justice
and of regard for the rights of others. Each is to be granted the full
protection of the law, and each in turn is to be held to a strict
obedience to the law; for no man is above it and no man below it. The
humblest individual is to have his rights safeguarded as scrupulously
as those of the strongest organization, for each is to receive justice,
no more and no less. The problems with which we have to deal in our
modern industrial and social life are manifold; but the spirit in which
it is necessary to approach their solution is simply the spirit of
honesty, of courage, and of common-sense.

In inaugurating the great work of irrigation in the West the
Administration has been enabled by Congress to take one of the longest
strides ever taken under our Government toward utilizing our vast
national domain for the settler, the actual homemaker.

Ever since this Continent was discovered the need of an Isthmian Canal
to connect the Pacific and the Atlantic has been recognized; and ever
since the birth of our Nation such a canal has been planned. At last
the dream has become a reality. The Isthmian Canal is now being built
by the Government of the United States. We conducted the negotiation
for its construction with the nicest and most scrupulous honor, and in
a spirit of the largest generosity toward those through whose territory
it was to run. Every sinister effort which could be devised by the
spirit of faction or the spirit of self-interest was made in order to
defeat the treaty with Panama and thereby prevent the consummation of
this work. The construction of the canal is now an assured fact; but
most certainly it is unwise to intrust the carrying out of so momentous
a policy to those who have endeavored to defeat the whole undertaking.

Our foreign policy has been so conducted that, while not one of our
just claims has been sacrificed, our relations with all foreign nations
are now of the most peaceful kind; there is not a cloud on the horizon.
The last cause of irritation between us and any other nation was
removed by the settlement of the Alaskan boundary.

In the Caribbean Sea we have made good our promises of independence to
Cuba, and have proved our assertion that our mission in the island was
one of justice and not of self-aggrandizement; and thereby no less than
by our action in Venezuela and Panama we have shown that the Monroe
Doctrine is a living reality, designed for the hurt of no nation, but
for the protection of civilization on the Western Continent, and for
the peace of the world. Our steady growth in power has gone hand in
hand with a strengthening disposition to use this power with strict
regard for the rights of others, and for the cause of international
justice and goodwill.

We earnestly desire friendship with all the nations of the New and
Old Worlds; and we endeavor to place our relations with them upon
a basis of reciprocal advantage instead of hostility. We hold that
the prosperity of each nation is an aid and not a hindrance to the
prosperity of other nations. We seek international amity for the same
reasons that make us believe in peace within our own borders; and we
seek this peace not because we are afraid or unready, but because we
think that peace is right as well as advantageous.

American interests in the Pacific have rapidly grown. American
enterprise has laid a cable across this, the greatest of oceans. We
have proved in effective fashion that we wish the Chinese Empire well
and desire its integrity and independence.

Our foothold in the Philippines greatly strengthens our position in
the competition for the trade of the East; but we are governing the
Philippines in the interest of the Philippine people themselves. We
have already given them a large share in their government, and our
purpose is to increase this share as rapidly as they give evidence of
increasing fitness for the task. The great majority of the officials
of the islands, whether elective or appointive, are already native
Filipinos. We are now providing for a legislative assembly. This is the
first step to be taken in the future; and it would be eminently unwise
to declare what our next step will be until this first step has been
taken and the results are manifest. To have gone faster than we have
already gone in giving the islanders a constantly increasing measure
of self-government would have been disastrous. At the present moment
to give political independence to the islands would result in the
immediate loss of civil rights, personal liberty, and public order, as
regards the mass of the Filipinos, for the majority of the islanders
have been given these great boons by us, and only keep them because we
vigilantly safeguard and guarantee them. To withdraw our Government
from the islands at this time would mean to the average native the loss
of his barely won civil freedom. We have established in the islands a
Government by Americans assisted by Filipinos. We are steadily striving
to transform this into self-government by the Filipinos assisted by
Americans.

The principles which we uphold should appeal to all our countrymen, in
all portions of our country. Above all they should give us strength
with the men and women who are the spiritual heirs of those who upheld
the hands of Abraham Lincoln; for we are striving to do our work in the
spirit with which Lincoln approached his. During the seven years that
have just passed there is no duty, domestic or foreign, which we have
shirked; no necessary task which we have feared to undertake, or which
we have not performed with reasonable efficiency. We have never pleaded
impotence. We have never sought refuge in criticism and complaint
instead of action. We face the future with our past and our present as
guarantors of our promises; and we are content to stand or to fall by
the record which we have made and are making.




LETTER ACCEPTING THE REPUBLICAN NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED
STATES


                        OYSTER BAY, N. Y., _Sept. 12, 1904_

  HON. J. G. CANNON, _Chairman of the Notification Committee_,

  MY DEAR SIR:

I accept the nomination for the Presidency tendered me by the
Republican National Convention, and cordially approve the platform
adopted by it. In writing this letter there are certain points upon
which I desire to lay especial stress.

It is difficult to find out from the utterances of our opponents what
are the real issues upon which they propose to wage this campaign. It
is not unfair to say that, having abandoned most of the principles
upon which they have insisted during the last eight years, they now
seem at a loss, both as to what it is that they really believe, and
as to how firmly they shall assert their belief in anything. In fact,
it is doubtful if they venture resolutely to press a single issue; as
soon as they raise one they shrink from it and seek to explain it away.
Such an attitude is the probably inevitable result of the effort to
improvise convictions; for when thus improvised, it is natural that
they should be held in a tentative manner.

The party now in control of the Government is troubled by no such
difficulties. We do not have to guess at our own convictions, and
then correct the guess if it seems unpopular. The principles which we
profess are those in which we believe with heart and soul and strength.
Men may differ from us; but they can not accuse us of shiftiness or
insincerity. The policies we have pursued are those which we earnestly
hold as essential to the national welfare and repute. Our actions
speak even louder than our words for the faith that is in us. We base
our appeal upon what we have done and are doing, upon our record of
administration and legislation during the last seven years, in which we
have had complete control of the Government. We intend in the future to
carry on the Government in the same way that we have carried it on in
the past.

       *       *       *       *       *

A party whose members are radically at variance on most vital issues,
and if united at all, are only united on issues where their attitude
threatens widespread disaster to the whole country, can not be trusted
to govern in any matter. A party which, with facile ease, changes all
its convictions before election can not be trusted to adhere with
tenacity to any principle after election. A party fit to govern must
have convictions. In 1896 the Republican party came into power, and
in 1900 it retained power on certain definite pledges, each of which
was scrupulously fulfilled. But in addition to meeting and solving the
problems which were issues in these campaigns, it also became necessary
to meet other problems which arose after election; and it is no small
part of our claim to public confidence that these were solved with the
same success that had attended the solution of those concerning which
the battles at the polls were fought. In other words, our governmental
efficiency proved equal not only to the tasks that were anticipated,
but to doing each unanticipated task as it arose.

When the contest of 1896 was decided, the question of the war with
Spain was not an issue. When the contest of 1900 was decided, the shape
which the Isthmian Canal question ultimately took could not have been
foreseen. But the same qualities which enabled those responsible for
making and administering the laws at Washington to deal successfully
with the tariff and the currency, enabled them also to deal with the
Spanish War; and the same qualities which enabled them to act wisely
in the Philippines, and in Cuba, also enabled them to do their duty
as regards the problems connected with the trusts, and to secure the
building of the Isthmian Canal. We are content to rest our case before
the American people upon the fact that to adherence to a lofty ideal we
have added proved governmental efficiency. Therefore, our promises may
surely be trusted as regards any issue that is now before the people;
and we may equally be trusted to deal with any problem which may
hereafter arise.

So well has the work been done that our opponents do not venture to
recite the facts about our policies or acts and then oppose them.
They attack them only when they have first misrepresented them; for a
truthful recital would leave no room for adverse comment.

       *       *       *       *       *

Panama offers an instance in point. Our opponents can criticise what
we did in Panama only on condition of misstating what was done. The
Administration behaved throughout not only with good faith, but with
extraordinary patience and large generosity toward those with whom
it dealt. It was also mindful of American interests. It acted in
strict compliance with the law passed by Congress. Had not Panama been
promptly recognized, and the transit across the Isthmus kept open, in
accordance with our treaty rights and obligations, there would have
ensued endless guerilla warfare and possibly foreign complications;
while all chance of building the canal would have been deferred,
certainly for years, perhaps for a generation or more. Criticism of
the action in this matter is simply criticism of the only possible
action which could have secured the building of the canal; as well
as the peace and quiet which we were, by treaty, bound to preserve
along the line of transit across the Isthmus. The service rendered
this country in securing the perpetual right to construct, maintain,
operate, and defend the canal was so great that our opponents do not
venture to raise the issue in straightforward fashion; for if so raised
there would be no issue. The decisive action which brought about this
beneficent result was the exercise by the President of the powers
vested in him, and in him alone, by the Constitution; the power to
recognize foreign Governments by entering into diplomatic relations
with them, and the power to make treaties which, when ratified by
the Senate, become under the Constitution part of the supreme law of
the land. Neither in this nor in any other matter has there been the
slightest failure to live up to the Constitution in letter and in
spirit. But the Constitution must be observed positively as well as
negatively. The President’s duty is to serve the country in accordance
with the Constitution; and I should be derelict in my duty if I used
a false construction of the Constitution as a shield for weakness and
timidity, or as an excuse for governmental impotence.

       *       *       *       *       *

Similar misrepresentation is the one weapon of our opponents in regard
to our foreign policy, and the way the Navy has been made useful in
carrying out this policy. Here again all that we ask is that they
truthfully state what has been done, and then say whether or not
they object to it; for if continued in power we shall continue our
foreign policy and our handling of the Navy on exactly the same lines
in the future as in the past. To what phase of our foreign policy,
and to what use of the Navy, do our opponents object? Do they object
to the way in which the Monroe Doctrine has been strengthened and
upheld? Never before has this doctrine been acquiesced in abroad as
it is now; and yet, while upholding the rights of the weaker American
republics against foreign aggression, the Administration has lost no
opportunity to point out to these republics that those who seek equity
should come with clean hands, and that whoever claims liberty as a
right must accept the responsibilities that go with the exercise of the
right. Do our opponents object to what was done in reference to the
petition of American citizens against the Kishineff massacre? or to
the protest against the treatment of the Jews in Roumania? or to the
efforts that have been made in behalf of the Armenians in Turkey? No
other Administration in our history, no other Government in the world,
has more consistently stood for the broadest spirit of brotherhood in
our common humanity, or has held a more resolute attitude of protest
against every wrong that outraged the civilization of the age at home
or abroad. Do our opponents object to the fact that the international
tribunal at The Hague was rescued from impotence, and turned into a
potent instrument for peace among the nations? This Government has
used that tribunal, and advocated its use by others, in pursuance of
its policy to promote the cause of international peace and goodwill
by all honorable methods. In carrying out this policy, it has settled
dispute after dispute by arbitration or by friendly agreement. It has
behaved toward all nations, strong or weak, with courtesy, dignity, and
justice; and it is now on excellent terms with all.

Do our opponents object to the settlement of the Alaska boundary
line? Do they object to the fact that after freeing Cuba we gave her
reciprocal trade advantages with the United States, while at the same
time keeping naval stations in the island and providing against its
sinking into chaos, or being conquered by any foreign Power? Do they
object to the fact that our flag now flies over Porto Rico? Do they
object to the acquisition of Hawaii? Once they “hauled down” our flag
there; we have hoisted it again; do they intend once more to haul it
down? Do they object to the part we played in China? Do they not know
that the voice of the United States would now count for nothing in the
Far East if we had abandoned the Philippines and refused to do what
was done in China? Do they object to the fact that this Government
secured a peaceful settlement of the troubles in Venezuela two years
ago? Do they object to the presence of the ship-of-war off Colon when
the revolution broke out in Panama, and when only the presence of
this ship saved the lives of American citizens, and prevented insult
to the flag? Do they object to the fact that American warships
appeared promptly at the port of Beirut when an effort had been made
to assassinate an American official, and in the port of Tangier when
an American citizen had been abducted? and that in each case the wrong
complained of was righted and expiated? and that within the last few
days the visit of an American squadron to Smyrna was followed by
the long-delayed concession of their just rights to those Americans
concerned in educational work in Turkey? Do they object to the trade
treaty with China, so full of advantage for the American people in the
future? Do they object to the fact that the ships carrying the national
flag now have a higher standard than ever before in marksmanship
and in seamanship, as individual units and as component parts of
squadrons and fleets? If they object to any or all of these things,
we join issue with them. Our foreign policy has been not only highly
advantageous to the United States, but hardly less advantageous to the
world as a whole. Peace and goodwill have followed in its footsteps.
The Government has shown itself no less anxious to respect the rights
of others than insistent that the rights of Americans be respected
in return. As for the Navy, it has been and is now the most potent
guarantee of peace; and it is such chiefly because it is formidable,
and ready for use.

       *       *       *       *       *

When our opponents speak of “encroachments” by the Executive upon
the authority of Congress or the Judiciary, apparently the act they
ordinarily have in view is Pension Order No. 78, issued under the
authority of existing law. This order directed that hereafter any
veteran of the Civil War who had reached the age of sixty-two should
be presumptively entitled to the pension of six dollars a month, given
under the dependent pension law to those whose capacity to earn their
livelihood by manual labor has been decreased fifty per cent, and that
by the time the age of seventy was reached the presumption should be
that the physical disability was complete; the age being treated as an
evidential fact in each case. This order was made in the performance
of a duty imposed upon the President by an act of Congress, which
requires the Executive to make regulations to govern the subordinates
of the Pension Office in determining who are entitled to pensions.
President Cleveland had already exercised this power by a regulation
which declared that seventy-five should be set as the age at which
total disability should be conclusively presumed. Similarly, President
McKinley established sixty-five as the age at which half disability
should be conclusively presumed. The regulation now in question, in the
exercise of the same power, supplemented these regulations made under
Presidents Cleveland and McKinley.

The men who fought for union and for liberty in the years from 1861 to
1865 not only saved this Nation from ruin, but rendered an inestimable
service to all mankind. We of the United States owe the fact that
to-day we have a country to what they did; and the Nation has decreed
by law that no one of them, if disabled from earning his own living,
shall lack the pension to which he is entitled, not only as a matter
of gratitude, but as a matter of justice. It is the policy of the
Republican party, steadily continued through many years, to treat the
veterans of the Civil War in a spirit of broad liberality. The order
in question carried out this policy, and is justified not merely on
legal grounds, but also on grounds of public morality. It is a matter
of common knowledge that when the average man who depends for his
wages upon bodily labor has reached the age of sixty-two his earning
ability is in all probability less by half than it was when he was in
his prime; and that by the time he has reached the age of seventy he
has probably lost all earning ability. If there is doubt upon this
point let the doubter examine the employees doing manual labor in any
great manufactory or any great railroad, and find out how large is
the proportion of men between the ages of sixty-two and seventy, and
whether these men are still employed at the highly paid tasks which
they did in their prime. As a matter of fact, many railroads pension
their employees when they have reached these ages, and in nations where
old-age pensions prevail they always begin somewhere between the two
limits thus set. It is easy to test our opponents’ sincerity in this
matter. The order in question is revocable at the pleasure of the
Executive. If our opponents come into power they can revoke this order
and announce that they will treat the veterans of sixty-two to seventy
as presumably in full bodily vigor and not entitled to pensions. Will
they now authoritatively state that they intend to do this? If so, we
accept the issue. If not, then we have the right to ask why they raise
an issue which, when raised, they do not venture to meet.

       *       *       *       *       *

In addition to those acts of the Administration which they venture to
assail only after misrepresenting them, there are others which they
dare not overtly or officially attack, and yet which they covertly
bring forward as reasons for the overthrow of the party. In certain
great centres and with certain great interests our opponents make
every effort to show that the settlement of the Anthracite Coal Strike
by the individual act of the President, and the successful suit
against the Northern Securities Company—the Merger suit—undertaken
by the Department of Justice, were acts because of which the present
Administration should be thrown from power. Yet they dare not openly
condemn either act. They dare not in any authoritative or formal manner
say that in either case wrong was done or error committed in the method
of action, or in the choice of instruments for putting that action into
effect. But what they dare not manfully assert in open day, they seek
to use furtively and through special agents. It is perhaps natural that
an attack so conducted should be made sometimes on the ground that too
much, sometimes on the ground that too little, has been done. Some
of our opponents complain because under the anti-trust and interstate
commerce laws suits were undertaken which have been successful; others,
because suits were not undertaken which would have been unsuccessful.

The Democratic State Convention in New York dealt with the Anthracite
Coal Strike by demanding in deliberate and formal fashion that the
National Government should take possession of the coal fields; yet
champions of that convention’s cause now condemn the fact that there
was any action by the President at all—though they must know that it
was only this action by the President which prevented the movement for
national ownership of the coal fields from gaining what might well have
been an irresistible impetus. Such mutually destructive criticisms
furnish an adequate measure of the chance for coherent action or
constructive legislation if our opponents should be given power.

       *       *       *       *       *

So much for what our opponents openly or covertly advance in the
way of an attack on the acts of the Administration. When we come to
consider the policies for which they profess to stand we are met with
the difficulty always arising when statements of policy are so made
that they can be interpreted in different ways. On some of the vital
questions that have confronted the American people in the last decade,
our opponents take the position that silence is the best possible
way to convey their views. They contend that their lukewarm attitude
of partial acquiescence in what others have accomplished entitles
them to be made the custodians of the financial honor and commercial
interests which they have but recently sought to ruin. Being unable to
agree among themselves as to whether the gold standard is a curse or
a blessing, and as to whether we ought or ought not to have free and
unlimited coinage of silver, they have apparently thought it expedient
to avoid any committal on these subjects, and individually each to
follow his particular bent. Their nearest approach to a majority
judgment seems to be that it is now inexpedient to assert their
convictions one way or the other, and that the establishment of the
gold standard by the Republican party should not be disturbed unless
there is an alteration in the relative quantity of production of silver
and gold. Men who hold sincere convictions on vital questions can
respect equally sincere men with whose views they radically differ; and
men may confess a change of faith without compromising their honor or
their self-respect. But it is difficult to respect an attitude of mind
such as has been fairly described above; and where there is no respect
there can be no trust. A policy with so slender a basis of principle
would not stand the strain of a single year of business adversity.

       *       *       *       *       *

We, on the contrary, believe in the gold standard as fixed by the usage
and verdict of the business world, and in a sound monetary system, as
matters of principle; as matters not of momentary political expediency,
but of permanent organic policy. In 1896 and again in 1900 farsighted
men, without regard to their party fealty in the past, joined to
work against what they regarded as a debased monetary system. The
policies which they championed have been steadfastly adhered to by the
Administration; and by the act of March 14, 1900, Congress established
the single gold standard as the measure of our monetary value. This act
received the support of every Republican in the House, and of every
Republican except one in the Senate. Of our opponents, eleven supported
it in the House and two in the Senate; and one hundred and fifty
opposed it in the House and twenty-eight in the Senate. The record of
the last seven years proves that the party now in power can be trusted
to take the additional action necessary to improve and strengthen our
monetary system, and that our opponents can not be so trusted. The
fundamental fact is that in a popular government such as ours no policy
is irrevocably settled by law unless the people keep in control of the
Government men who believe in that policy as a matter of deep-rooted
conviction. Laws can always be revoked; it is the spirit and the
purpose of those responsible for their enactment and administration
which must be fixed and unchangeable. It is idle to say that the
monetary standard of the Nation is irrevocably fixed so long as the
party which at the last election cast approximately forty-six per cent
of the total vote refuses to put in its platform any statement that
the question is settled. A determination to remain silent can not be
accepted as equivalent to a recantation. Until our opponents as a party
explicitly adopt the views which we hold and upon which we have acted
and are acting, in the matter of sound currency, the only real way to
keep the question from becoming unsettled is to keep the Republican
party in power.

       *       *       *       *       *

As for what our opponents say in reference to capital and labor,
individual or corporate, here again all we need by way of answer is to
point to what we have actually done, and to say that if continued in
power we shall continue to carry out the policy we have been pursuing,
and to execute the laws as resolutely and fearlessly in the future as
we have executed them in the past. In my speech of acceptance I said:

“We recognize the organization of capital and the organization of
labor as natural outcomes of our industrial system. Each kind of
organization is to be favored so long as it acts in a spirit of justice
and of regard for the rights of others. Each is to be granted the full
protection of the law, and each in turn is to be held to a strict
obedience to the law; for no man is above it and no man below it. The
humblest individual is to have his rights safeguarded as scrupulously
as those of the strongest organization, for each is to receive justice,
no more and no less. The problems with which we have to deal in our
modern industrial and social life are manifold; but the spirit in which
it is necessary to approach their solution is simply the spirit of
honesty, of courage, and of common-sense.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The action of the Attorney-General in enforcing the anti-trust and
interstate commerce laws, and the action of the last Congress in
enlarging the scope of the interstate commerce law, and in creating
the Department of Commerce and Labor, with a Bureau of Corporations,
have for the first time opened a chance for the National Government
to deal intelligently and adequately with the questions affecting
society, whether for good or for evil, because of the accumulation of
capital in great corporations, and because of the new relations caused
thereby. These laws are now being administered with entire efficiency;
and as, in their working, need is shown for amendment or addition
to them—whether better to secure the proper publicity, or better to
guarantee the rights of shippers, or in any other direction—this need
will be met. It is now asserted “that the common law, as developed,
affords a complete legal remedy against monopolies.” But there is no
common law of the United States. Its rules can be enforced only by
the State courts and officers. No Federal court or officer could take
any action whatever under them. It was this fact, coupled with the
inability of the States to control trusts and monopolies, which led to
the passage of the Federal statutes known as the Sherman Anti-Trust Act
and the Interstate Commerce Act; and it is only through the exercise
of the powers conferred by these acts, and by the statutes of the last
Congress supplementing them, that the National Government acquires any
jurisdiction over the subject. To say that action against trusts and
monopolies should be limited to the application of the common law is
equivalent to saying that the National Government should take no action
whatever to regulate them.

Undoubtedly, the multiplication of trusts and their increase in power
has been largely due to the “failure of officials charged with the duty
of enforcing the law to take the necessary procedure.” Such stricture
upon the failure of the officials of the National Government to do
their duty in this matter is certainly not wholly undeserved as far as
the Administration preceding President McKinley’s is concerned; but
it has no application at all to Republican administration. It is also
undoubtedly true that what is most needed is “officials having both the
disposition and the courage to enforce existing law.” This is precisely
the need that has been met by the consistent and steadily continued
action of the Department of Justice under the present Administration.

       *       *       *       *       *

So far as the rights of the individual wage-worker and the individual
capitalist are concerned, both as regards one another, as regards
the public, and as regards organized capital and labor, the position
of the Administration has been so clear that there is no excuse
for misrepresenting it, and no ground for opposing it unless
misrepresented. Within the limits defined by the National Constitution
the National Administration has sought to secure to each man the full
enjoyment of his right to live his life and dispose of his property
and his labor as he deems best, so long as he wrongs no one else. It
has shown in effective fashion that in endeavoring to make good this
guarantee, it treats all men, rich or poor, whatever their creed, their
color, or their birthplace, as standing alike before the law. Under our
form of government the sphere in which the Nation as distinguished from
the State can act is narrowly circumscribed; but within that sphere
all that could be done has been done. All thinking men are aware of
the restrictions upon the power of action of the National Government
in such matters. Being ourselves mindful of them, we have been
scrupulously careful on the one hand to be moderate in our promises,
and on the other hand to keep these promises in letter and in spirit.
Our opponents have been hampered by no such considerations. They
have promised, and many of them now promise, action which they could
by no possibility take in the exercise of constitutional power, and
which, if attempted, would bring business to a standstill; they have
used, and often now use, language of wild invective and appeal to all
the baser passions which tend to excite one set of Americans against
their fellow-Americans; and yet whenever they have had power they
have fittingly supplemented this extravagance of promise by absolute
nullity in performance.

       *       *       *       *       *

This Government is based upon the fundamental idea that each man, no
matter what his occupation, his race, or his religious belief, is
entitled to be treated on his worth as a man, and neither favored nor
discriminated against because of any accident in his position. Even
here at home there is painful difficulty in the effort to realize this
ideal; and the attempt to secure from other nations acknowledgment
of it sometimes encounters obstacles that are wellnigh insuperable;
for there are many nations which in the slow procession of the ages
have not yet reached that point where the principles which Americans
regard as axiomatic obtain any recognition whatever. One of the chief
difficulties arises in connection with certain American citizens of
foreign birth, or of particular creed, who desire to travel abroad.
Russia, for instance, refuses to admit and protect Jews. Turkey refuses
to admit and protect certain sects of Christians. This Government
has consistently demanded equal protection abroad for all American
citizens, whether native or naturalized. On March 27, 1899, Secretary
Hay sent a letter of instructions to all the diplomatic and consular
officers of the United States, in which he said: “This Department
does not discriminate between native-born and naturalized citizens in
according them protection while they are abroad, equality of treatment
being required by the laws of the United States.” These orders to
our agents abroad have been repeated again and again, and are treated
as the fundamental rule of conduct laid down for them, proceeding
upon the theory “that all naturalized citizens of the United States
while in foreign countries are entitled to and shall receive from this
Government the same protection of person and property which is accorded
to native-born citizens.” In issuing passports the State Department
never discriminates, or alludes to any man’s religion; and in granting
to every American citizen, native or naturalized, Christian or Jew,
the same passport, so far as it has power it insists that all foreign
Governments shall accept the passport as prima facie proof that the
person therein described is a citizen of the United States and entitled
to protection as such. It is a standing order to every American
diplomatic and consular officer to protect every American citizen, of
whatever faith, from unjust molestation; and our officers abroad have
been stringently required to comply with this order.

Under such circumstances, the demand of our opponents that negotiations
be begun to secure equal treatment of all Americans from those
Governments which do not now accord it, shows either ignorance of the
facts or insincerity. No change of policy in the method or manner
of negotiation would add effectiveness to what the State Department
has done and is doing. The steady pressure which the Department has
been keeping up in the past will be continued in the future. This
Administration has on all proper occasions given clear expression to
the belief of the American people that discrimination and oppression
because of religion, wherever practiced, are acts of injustice before
God and man; and in making evident to the world the depth of American
convictions in this regard we have gone to the very limit of diplomatic
usage.

It is a striking evidence of our opponents’ insincerity in this matter
that with their demand for radical action by the State Department they
couple a demand for a reduction in our small military establishment.
Yet they must know that the heed paid to our protests against
ill-treatment of our citizens will be exactly proportionate to the
belief in our ability to make these protests effective should the need
arise.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our opponents have now declared themselves in favor of the Civil
Service law, the repeal of which they demanded in 1900 and in 1896. If
consistent, they should have gone one step further and congratulated
the country upon the way in which the Civil Service law is now
administered, and the way in which the classified service has been
extended. The exceptions from examinations are fewer by far than ever
before, and are confined to individual cases, where the application of
the rules would be impracticable, unwise, unjust, or unnecessary. The
administration of the great body of the classified civil service is
free from politics, and appointments and removals have been put upon
a business basis. Statistics show that there is little difference
between the tenure of the Federal classified employees and that of the
employees of private business corporations. Less than one per cent of
the classified employees are over seventy years of age, and in the main
the service rendered is vigorous and efficient. Where the merit system
was of course most needed was in the Philippine Islands; and a civil
service law of very advanced type has there been put into operation and
scrupulously observed. Without one exception every appointment in the
Philippines has been made in accordance with the strictest standard of
fitness, and without heed to any other consideration.

Finally, we come to certain matters upon which our opponents do in
their platform of principles definitely take issue with us, and where,
if they are sincere, their triumph would mean disaster to the country.
But exactly as it is impossible to call attention to the present
promises and past record of our opponents without seeming offensive,
so it is impossible to compare their platform with their other and
later official utterances and not create doubt as to their sincerity.
In their private or unofficial utterances many of them frankly advance
this insincerity as a merit, taking the position that as regards the
points on which I am about to speak they have no intention of keeping
their promises or of departing from the policies now established, and
that therefore they can be trusted not to abuse the power they seek.

When we take up the great question of the tariff we are at once
confronted by the doubt as to whether our opponents do or do not mean
what they say. They say that “protection is robbery,” and promise to
carry themselves accordingly if they are given power. Yet prominent
persons among them assert that they do not really mean this and that
if they come into power they will adopt our policy as regards the
tariff; while others seem anxious to prove that it is safe to give them
partial power, because the power would be only partial, and therefore
they would not be able to do mischief. The last is certainly a curious
plea to advance on behalf of a party seeking to obtain control of the
Government.

At the outset it is worth while to say a word as to the attempt to
identify the question of tariff revision or tariff reduction with a
solution of the trust question. This is always a sign of desire to
avoid any real effort to deal adequately with the trust question. In
speaking on this point at Minneapolis, on April 4, 1903, I said:

  “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. Almost all the others that
  are of any importance have 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
  only into competition 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.”

There is little for me to add to this. It is but ten years since the
last attempt was made, by means of lowering the tariff, to prevent some
people from prospering too much. The attempt was entirely successful.
The tariff law of that year was among the causes which in that year and
for some time afterward effectually prevented anybody from prospering
too much, and labor from prospering at all. Undoubtedly it would
be possible at the present time to prevent any of the trusts from
remaining prosperous by the simple expedient of making such a sweeping
change in the tariff as to paralyze the industries of the country. The
trusts would cease to prosper; but their smaller competitors would be
ruined, and the wage-workers would starve, while it would not pay the
farmer to haul his produce to market. The evils connected with the
trusts can be reached only by rational effort, step by step, along
the lines taken by Congress and the Executive during the past three
years. If a tariff law is passed under which the country prospers,
as the country has prospered under the present tariff law, then all
classes will share in the prosperity. If a tariff law is passed aimed
at preventing the prosperity of some of our people, it is as certain as
anything can be that this aim will be achieved only by cutting down the
prosperity of all of our people.

Of course, if our opponents are not sincere in their proposal to
abolish the system of a protective tariff, there is no use in arguing
the matter at all, save by pointing out again that if on one great
issue they do not mean what they say, it is hardly safe to trust
them on any other issue. But if they are sincere in this matter,
then their advent to power would mean domestic misfortune and misery
as widespread and far-reaching as that which we saw ten years ago.
When they speak of protection as “robbery,” they of course must mean
that it is immoral to enact a tariff designed (as is the present
protective tariff) to secure to the American wage-worker the benefit
of the high standard of living which we desire to see kept up in
this country. Now to speak of the tariff in this sense as “robbery,”
thereby giving it a moral relation, is not merely rhetorical; it is on
its face false. The question of what tariff is best for our people is
primarily one of expediency, to be determined not on abstract academic
grounds, but in the light of experience. It is a matter of business;
for fundamentally ours is a business people—manufacturers, merchants,
farmers, wage-workers, professional men, all alike. Our experience as a
people in the past has certainly not shown us that we could afford in
this matter to follow those professional counselors who have confined
themselves to study in the closet; for the actual working of the
tariff has emphatically contradicted their theories. From time to time
schedules must undoubtedly be rearranged and readjusted to meet the
shifting needs of the country; but this can with safety be done only
by those who are committed to the cause of the protective system. To
uproot and destroy that system would be to ensure the prostration of
business, the closing of factories, the impoverishment of the farmer,
the ruin of the capitalist, and the starvation of the wage-worker.
Yet, if protection is indeed “robbery,” and if our opponents really
believe what they say, then it is precisely to the destruction and
uprooting of the tariff, and therefore of our business and industry,
that they are pledged. When our opponents last obtained power it was
on a platform declaring a protective tariff “unconstitutional”; and
the effort to put this declaration into practice was one of the causes
of the general national prostration lasting from 1893 to 1897. If a
protective tariff is either “unconstitutional” or “robbery,” then it
is just as unconstitutional, just as much robbery, to revise it down,
still leaving it protective, as it would be to enact it. In other
words, our opponents have committed themselves to the destruction of
the protective principle in the tariff, using words which if honestly
used forbid them from permitting this principle to obtain in even the
smallest degree.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our opponents assert that they believe in reciprocity. Their action
on the most important reciprocity treaty recently negotiated—that
with Cuba—does not bear out this assertion. Moreover, there can be
no reciprocity unless there is a substantial tariff; free trade
and reciprocity are not compatible. We are on record as favoring
arrangements for reciprocal trade relations with other countries,
these arrangements to be on an equitable basis of benefit to both the
contracting parties. The Republican party stands pledged to every
wise and consistent method of increasing the foreign commerce of the
country. That it has kept its pledge is proven by the fact that while
the domestic trade of this country exceeds in volume the entire export
and import trade of all the nations of the world, the United States
has in addition secured more than an eighth of the export trade of the
world, standing first among the nations in this respect. The United
States has exported during the last seven years nearly ten billions of
dollars’ worth of goods—on an average half as much again annually as
during the previous four years, when many of our people were consuming
nothing but necessaries, and some of them a scanty supply even of these.

Two years ago, in speaking at Logansport, Indiana, I said:

“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 accomplished by changes of the
tariff, the American workingman 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.”

       *       *       *       *       *

It is a matter of regret that the protective tariff policy, which,
during the last forty-odd years, has become part of the very fibre of
the country, is not now accepted as definitely established. Surely we
have a right to say that it has passed beyond the domain of theory, and
a right to expect that not only its original advocates but those who
at one time distrusted it on theoretic grounds should now acquiesce
in the results that have been proved over and over again by actual
experience. These forty-odd years have been the most prosperous years
this Nation has ever seen; more prosperous years than any other nation
has ever seen. Beyond question this prosperity could not have come if
the American people had not possessed the necessary thrift, energy, and
business intelligence to turn their vast material resources to account.
But it is no less true that it is our economic policy as regards the
tariff and finance which has enabled us as a nation to make such good
use of the individual capacities of our citizens, and the natural
resources of our country. Every class of our people is benefited by
the protective tariff. During the last few years the merchant has seen
the export trade of this country grow faster than ever in our previous
history. The manufacturer could not keep his factory running if it
were not for the protective tariff. The wage-worker would do well
to remember that if protection is “robbery,” and is to be punished
accordingly, he will be the first to pay the penalty; for either he
will be turned adrift entirely, or his wages will be cut down to the
starvation point. As conclusively shown by the bulletins of the Bureau
of Labor, the purchasing power of the average wage received by the
wage-worker has grown faster than the cost of living, and this in
spite of the continual shortening of working hours. The accumulated
savings of the workingmen of the country, as shown by the deposits
in the savings banks, have increased by leaps and bounds. At no time
in the history of this or any other country has there been an era so
productive of material benefit alike to workingman and employer as
during the seven years that have just passed.

       *       *       *       *       *

The farmer has benefited quite as much as the manufacturer, the
merchant, and the wage-worker. The most welcome and impressive fact
established by the last census is the wide and even distribution
of wealth among all classes of our countrymen. The chief agencies
in producing this distribution are shown by the census to be the
development of manufactures, and the application of new inventions
to universal use. The result has been an increasing interdependence
of agriculture and manufactures. Agriculture is now, as it always
has been, the basis of civilization. The six million farms of the
United States, operated by men who, as a class, are steadfast,
single-minded, and industrious, form the basis of all the other
achievements of the American people and are more fruitful than all
their other resources. The men on those six million farms receive
from the protective tariff what they most need, and that is the best
of all possible markets. All other classes depend upon the farmer,
but the farmer in turn depends upon the market they furnish him for
his produce. The annual output of our agricultural products is nearly
four billions of dollars. Their increase in value has been prodigious,
although agriculture has languished in most other countries; and the
main factor in this increase is the corresponding increase of our
manufacturing industries. American farmers have prospered because the
growth of their market has kept pace with the growth of their farms.
The additional market continually furnished for agricultural products
by domestic manufacturers has been far in excess of the outlet to
other lands. An export trade in farm products is necessary to dispose
of our surplus; and the export trade of our farmers, both in animal
products and in plant products, has very largely increased. Without
the enlarged home market to keep this surplus down, we should have
to reduce production or else feed the world at less than the cost
of production. In the forty years ending in 1900 the total value of
farm property increased twelve and a half billions of dollars; the
farmer gaining even more during this period than the manufacturer.
Long ago overproduction would have checked the marvelous development
of our national agriculture, but for the steadily increasing demand
of American manufacturers for farm products required as raw materials
for steadily expanding industries. The farmer has become dependent
upon the manufacturer to utilize that portion of his produce which
does not go directly to food supply. In 1900 fifty-two per cent, or
a little over half, of the total value of the farm products of the
Nation was consumed in manufacturing industries as the raw materials
of the factories. Evidently the manufacturer is the farmer’s best and
most direct customer. Moreover, the American manufacturer purchases
his farm supplies almost exclusively in his own country. Nine-tenths
of all the raw materials of every kind and description consumed in
American manufactories are of American production. The manufacturing
establishments tend steadily to migrate into the heart of the great
agricultural districts. The centre of the manufacturing industry in
1900 was near the middle of Ohio, and it is moving westward at the rate
of about thirty miles in every decade; and this movement is invariably
accompanied by a marked increase in the value of farm lands. Local
causes, notably the competition between new farm lands and old farm
lands, tend here and there to obscure what is happening; but it is as
certain as the operation of any economic law that in the country as a
whole farm values will continue to increase as the partnership between
manufacturer and farmer grows more intimate through further advance of
industrial science. The American manufacturer never could have placed
this Nation at the head of the manufacturing nations of the world if
he had not had behind him, securing him every variety of raw material,
the exhaustless resources of the American farm, developed by the skill
and the enterprise of intelligent and educated American farmers. On the
other hand, the debt of the farmers to the manufacturers is equally
heavy, and the future of American agriculture is bound up in the future
of American manufactures. The two industries have become, under the
economic policy of our Government, so closely interwoven, so mutually
interdependent, that neither can hope to maintain itself at the
high-water mark of progress without the other. Whatever makes to the
advantage of one is equally to the advantage of the other.

       *       *       *       *       *

So it is as between the capitalist and the wage-worker. Here and there
there may be an unequal sharing as between the two in the benefits that
have come by protection; but benefits have come to both; and a reversal
in policy would mean damage to both; and while the damage would be
heavy to all, it would be heaviest, and it would fall soonest, upon
those who are paid in the form of wages each week or each month for
that week’s or that month’s work.

Conditions change and the laws must be modified from time to time
to fit new exigencies. But the genuine underlying principle of
protection, as it has been embodied in all but one of the American
tariff laws for the last forty years, has worked out results so
beneficent, so evenly and widely spread, so advantageous alike to
farmers and capitalists and workingmen, to commerce and trade of every
kind, that the American people, if they show their usual practical
business sense, will insist that when these laws are modified they
shall be modified with the utmost care and conservatism, and by the
friends and not the enemies of the protective system. They can not
afford to trust the modification to those who treat protection and
robbery as synonymous terms.

In closing what I have to say about the system of promoting American
industry let me add a word of cordial agreement with the policy of in
some way including within its benefits, by appropriate legislation, the
American merchant marine. It is not creditable to us as a nation that
our great export and import trade should be wellnigh exclusively in the
hands of foreigners.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is difficult to know if our opponents are really sincere in their
demand for the reduction of the Army. If insincere, there is no need
for comment, and if sincere, what shall we say in speaking to rational
persons of an appeal to reduce an Army of sixty thousand men which is
taking care of the interests of over eighty million people? The Army
is now relatively smaller than it was in the days of Washington, when
on the peace establishment there were thirty-six hundred soldiers,
while there were a little less than four millions of population;
smaller than it was in the peaceful days of Jefferson, when there were
fifty-one hundred soldiers to five million three hundred thousand
population. There is now one soldier to every fourteen hundred people
in this country—less than one-tenth of one per cent. We can not be
asked seriously to argue as to the amount of possible tyranny contained
in these figures. The Army as it is now is as small as it can possibly
be and serve its purpose as an effective nucleus for the organization,
equipment, and supply of a volunteer army in time of need. It is now
used, as never before, for aiding in the upbuilding of the organized
militia of the country. The War Department is engaged in a systematic
effort to strengthen and develop the National Guard in the several
States; as witness, among many other instances, the great field
manœuvres at Manassas, which have just closed. If our opponents should
come into power they could not reduce our Army below its present size
without greatly impairing its efficiency and abandoning part of the
national duty. In short, in this matter, if our opponents should come
into power they would either have to treat this particular promise of
the year 1904 as they now treat the promises they made in 1896 and
1900, that is, as possessing no binding force; or else they would have
to embark on a policy which would be ludicrous at the moment, and
fraught with grave danger to the national honor in the future.

Our opponents contend that the Government is now administered
extravagantly, and that whereas there was “a surplus of $80,000,000 in
1900” there is “a deficit of more than $40,000,000” in the year that
has just closed.

       *       *       *       *       *

This deficit is imaginary, and is obtained by including in the ordinary
current expenses the sum of fifty millions, which was paid for the
right of way of the Panama Canal out of the accumulated surplus in
the Treasury. Comparing the current or ordinary expenditures for the
two years, there was a surplus of nearly eighty millions for the year
1900, and of only a little more than eight millions for the year
that has just closed. But this diminution of the annual surplus was
brought about designedly by the abolition of the war taxes in the
interval between the two dates. The acts of March 2, 1901, and April
12, 1902, cut down the internal revenue taxes to an amount estimated
at one hundred and five millions a year. In other words, the reduction
of taxation has been considerably greater than the reduction in the
annual surplus. Since the close of the war with Spain there has been
no substantial change in the rate of annual expenditures. As compared
with the fiscal year ending in June, 1901, for example, the fiscal year
that has just closed showed a relatively small increase in expenditure
(excluding the canal payment already referred to), while the year
previous showed a relatively small decrease.

The expenditures of the Nation have been managed in a spirit of economy
as far removed from waste as from niggardliness; and in the future
every effort will be continued to secure an economy as strict as is
consistent with efficiency. Once more our opponents have promised what
they can not or should not perform. The prime reason why the expenses
of the Government have increased of recent years is to be found in the
fact that the people, after mature thought, have deemed it wise to have
certain new forms of work for the public undertaken by the public.
This necessitates such expenditures, for instance, as those for rural
free delivery, or for the inspection of meats under the Department
of Agriculture, or for irrigation. But these new expenditures are
necessary; no one would seriously propose to abandon them; and yet it
is idle to declaim against the increased expense of the Government
unless it is intended to cut down the very expenditures which cause the
increase. The pensions to the veterans of the Civil War are demanded
by every sentiment of regard and gratitude. The rural free-delivery
is of the greatest use and convenience to the farmers, a body of men
who live under conditions which make them ordinarily receive little
direct return for what they pay toward the support of the Government.
The irrigation policy in the arid and semi-arid regions of the West
is one fraught with the most beneficent and far-reaching good to the
actual settlers, the homemakers, whose encouragement is a traditional
feature in America’s National policy. Do our opponents grudge the fifty
millions paid for the Panama Canal? Do they intend to cut down on the
pensions to the veterans of the Civil War? Do they intend to put a stop
to the irrigation policy? or to the permanent census bureau? or to
immigration inspection? Do they intend to abolish rural free-delivery?
Do they intend to cut down the Navy? or the Alaskan telegraph system?
Do they intend to dismantle our coast fortifications? If there is to
be a real and substantial cutting down in national expenditures it
must be in such matters as these. The Department of Agriculture has
done service of incalculable value to the farmers of this country in
many different lines. Do our opponents wish to cut down the money for
this service? They can do it only by destroying the usefulness of the
service itself.

       *       *       *       *       *

The public work of the United States has never been conducted with a
higher degree of honesty and efficiency than at the present time; and a
special meed of praise belongs to those officials responsible for the
Philippines and Porto Rico, where the administrations have been models
of their kind. Of course, wrong has occasionally occurred, but it has
been relentlessly stamped out. We have known no party in dealing with
offenders, and have hunted down without mercy every wrong-doer in the
service of the Nation whom it was possible by the utmost vigilance to
detect; for the public servant who betrays his trust and the private
individual who debauches him stand as the worst of criminals, because
their crimes are crimes against the entire community, and not only
against this generation, but against the generations that are yet to be.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our opponents promise independence to the Philippine Islands. Here
again we are confronted by the fact that their irreconcilable
differences of opinion among themselves, their proved inability to
create a constructive policy when in power, and their readiness, for
the sake of momentary political expediency, to abandon the principles
upon which they have insisted as essential, conspire to puzzle us
as to whether they do or do not intend in good faith to carry out
this promise if they are given control of the Government. In their
platform they declare for independence, apparently—for their language
is a little obscure—without qualification as to time; and indeed a
qualification as to time is an absurdity, for we have neither right
nor power to bind our successors when it is impossible to foretell the
conditions which may confront them; while if there is any principle
involved in the matter, it is just as wrong to deny independence for
a few years as to deny it for an indefinite period. But in later and
equally official utterances by our opponents the term self-government
was substituted for independence; the words used being so chosen that
in their natural construction they described precisely the policy now
being carried on. The language of the platform indicated a radical
change of policy; the later utterances indicated a continuance of the
present policy. But this caused trouble in their own ranks; and in
a still later, although less formal, utterance, the self-government
promise was recanted, and independence at some future time was promised
in its place. They have occupied three entirely different positions
within fifty days. Which is the promise they really intend to keep?
They do not know their own minds; and no one can tell how long they
would keep of the same mind, should they by any chance come to a
working agreement among themselves. If such ambiguity affected only
the American people it would not so greatly matter; for the American
people can take care of themselves. But the Filipinos are in no such
condition. Confidence is with them a plant of slow growth. They
have been taught to trust the word of this Government because this
Government has promised nothing which it did not perform. If promised
independence they will expect independence; not in the remote future,
for their descendants, but immediately, for themselves. If the promise
thus made is not immediately fulfilled they will regard it as broken,
and will not again trust to American faith; and it would be indeed
a wicked thing to deceive them in such fashion. Moreover, even if
the promise were made to take effect only in the distant future, the
Filipinos would be thrown into confusion thereby. Instead of continuing
to endeavor to fit themselves for moral and material advancement in the
present, they would abandon all effort at progress and begin factional
intrigues for future power.

To promise to give them independence when it is “prudent” to do so, or
when they are “fit” for it, of course implies that they are not fit
for it now, and that it would be imprudent to give it to them now. But
as we must ourselves be the judges as to when they become “fit,” and
when it would be “prudent” to keep such a promise if it were made, it
necessarily follows that to make such a promise now would amount to a
deception upon the Filipinos.

       *       *       *       *       *

It may well be that our opponents have no real intention of putting
their promise into effect. If this is the case, if, in other words,
they are insincere in the promise they make, it is only necessary to
say again that it is unwise to trust men who are false in one thing to
deal with anything. The mere consciousness of broken faith would hamper
them in continuing our policy in the islands; and only by continuing
unchanged this policy can the honor of the country be maintained, or
the interests of the islands subserved. If, on the other hand, our
opponents came into power and attempted to carry out their promises to
the Filipinos by giving them independence, and withdrawing American
control from the islands, the result would be a frightful calamity to
the Filipinos themselves, and in its larger aspect would amount to
an international crime. Anarchy would follow; and the most violent
anarchic forces would be directed partly against the civil government,
partly against all forms of religious and educational civilization.
Bloody conflicts would inevitably ensue in the archipelago, and just as
inevitably the islands would become the prey of the first Power which
in its own selfish interest took up the task we had cravenly abandoned.
Of course, the practical difficulty in adopting any such course of
action—such a “policy of scuttle,” as President McKinley called
it—would be found wellnigh insuperable. If it is morally indefensible
to hold the archipelago as a whole under our tutelage in the interest
of its own people, then it is morally indefensible to hold any part of
it. In such case, what right have we to keep a coaling station? What
right to keep control over the Moro peoples? What right to protect the
Igorrotes from their oppressors? What right to protect the law-abiding
friends of America in the islands from treachery, robbery, and murder?
Yet, to abandon the islands completely, without even retaining a
coaling station, would mean to abandon the position in the competition
for the trade of the Orient which we have acquired during the last
six years; and what is far more important, it would mean irreparable
damage to those who have become the wards of the Nation. To abandon
all control over the Moros would amount to releasing these Moros to
prey upon the Christian Filipinos, civilized or semi-civilized, as well
as upon the commerce of other peoples. The Moros are in large part
still in the stage of culture where the occupations of the bandit and
the pirate are those most highly regarded; and it has not been found
practical to give them self-government in the sense that we have been
giving it to the Christian inhabitants. To abandon the Moro country
as our opponents propose in their platform, would be precisely as if
twenty-five years ago we had withdrawn the Army and the civil agents
from within and around the Indian reservations in the West, at a time
when the Sioux and the Apache were still the terror of our settlers.
It would be a criminal absurdity; and yet our opponents have pledged
themselves thereto. If successful in the coming election they would
either have to break faith, or else to do an act which would leave
an indelible stain upon our national reputation for courage, and for
good sense. During the last five years more has been done for the
material and moral well-being of the Filipinos than ever before since
the islands first came within the ken of civilized man. We have opened
before them a vista of orderly development in their own interest, and
not a policy of exploitation. Every effort is being made to fit the
islanders for self-government, and they have already in large measure
received it, while for the first time in their history their personal
rights and civil liberties have been guaranteed. They are being
educated; they have been given schools; they have been given libraries;
roads are being built for their use; their health is being cared for;
they have been given courts in which they receive justice as absolute
as it is in our power to guarantee. Their individual rights to life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are now by act of Congress
jealously safeguarded under the American flag; and if the protection
of the flag were withdrawn their rights would be lost, and the islands
would be plunged back under some form of vicious tyranny. We have given
them more self-government than they have ever before had; we are taking
steps to increase it still further by providing them with an elected
legislative assembly; and surely we had better await the results of
this experiment—for it is a wholly new experiment in Asia—before we
make promises which as a Nation we might be forced to break, or which
they might interpret one way and we another. It may be asserted without
fear of successful contradiction that nowhere else in recent years has
there been as fine an example of constructive statesmanship and wise
and upright Administration as has been given by the civil authorities,
aided by the Army, in the Philippine Islands. We have administered them
in the interest of their own people; and the Filipinos themselves have
profited most by our presence in the islands; but they have also been
of very great advantage to us as a nation.

So far from having “sapped the foundations” of free popular government
at home by the course taken in the Philippines, we have been spreading
its knowledge, and teaching its practice, among peoples to whom it
had never before been more than an empty name. Our action represents
a great stride forward in spreading the principles of orderly liberty
throughout the world. “Our flag has not lost its gift of benediction
in its world-wide journey to their shores.” We have treated the power
we have gained as a solemn obligation, and have used it in the interest
of mankind; and the peoples of the world, and especially the weaker
peoples of the world, are better off because of the position we have
assumed. To retrace our steps would be to give proof of an infirm and
unstable national purpose.

Four years ago, in his speech of acceptance, President McKinley said:

“We have been moving in untried paths, but our steps have been guided
by honor and duty. There will be no turning aside, no wavering, no
retreat. No blow has been struck except for liberty and humanity,
and none will be. We will perform without fear every national and
international obligation. The Republican party was dedicated to freedom
forty-four years ago. It has been the party of liberty and emancipation
from that hour; not of profession, but of performance. It broke the
shackles of four million slaves, and made them free, and to the party
of Lincoln has come another supreme opportunity which it has bravely
met in the liberation of ten millions of the human family from the yoke
of imperialism. In its solution of great problems, in its performance
of high duties, it has had the support of members of all parties in the
past, and it confidently invokes their co-operation in the future.”

This is as true now as four years ago. We did not take the Philippines
at will, and we can not put them aside at will. Any abandonment of the
policy which we have steadily pursued in the islands would be fraught
with dishonor and disaster; and to such dishonor and disaster I do not
believe that the American people will consent.

       *       *       *       *       *

Alarm has been professed lest the Filipinos should not receive all the
benefits guaranteed to our people at home by the Fourteenth Amendment
to the Constitution. As a matter of fact, the Filipinos have already
secured the substance of these benefits. This Government has been true
to the spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment in the Philippines. Can our
opponents deny that here at home the principles of the Fourteenth and
Fifteenth Amendments have been in effect nullified? In this, as in
many other matters, we at home can well profit by the example of those
responsible for the actual management of affairs in the Philippines. In
our several commonwealths here in the United States we, as a people,
now face the complex problem of securing fair treatment to each man
regardless of his race or color. We can do so only if we approach
the problem in the spirit of courage, common-sense, and high-minded
devotion to the right, which has enabled Governor Taft, Governor
Wright, and their associates, to do so noble a work in giving to the
Philippine people the benefit of the true principles of American
liberty.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our appeal is made to all good citizens who hold the honor and the
interest of the Nation close to their hearts. The great issues
which are at stake, and upon which I have touched, are more than
mere partisan issues, for they involve much that comes home to the
individual pride and individual well-being of our people. Under
conditions as they actually are, good Americans should refuse, for
the sake of the welfare of the Nation, to change the national policy.
We, who are responsible for the administration and legislation under
which this country, during the last seven years, has grown so greatly
in well-being at home and in honorable repute among the nations of the
earth abroad, do not stand inertly upon this record, do not use this
record as an excuse for failure of effort to meet new conditions. On
the contrary, we treat the record of what we have done in the past
as incitement to do even better in the future. We believe that the
progress that we have made may be taken as a measure of the progress
we shall continue to make if the people again intrust the Government
of the Nation to our hands. We do not stand still. We press steadily
forward toward the goal of moral and material well-being for our own
people, of just and fearless dealing toward all other peoples, in the
interest not merely of this country, but of mankind. There is not a
policy, foreign or domestic, which we are now carrying out, which it
would not be disastrous to reverse or abandon. If our opponents should
come in and should not reverse our policies, then they would be branded
with the brand of broken faith, of false promise, of insincerity in
word and deed; and no man can work to the advantage of the Nation with
such a brand clinging to him. If, on the other hand, they should come
in and reverse any or all of our policies, by just so much would the
Nation as a whole be damaged. Alike as lawmakers and as administrators
of the law we have endeavored to do our duty in the interest of the
people as a whole. We make our appeal to no class and to no section,
but to all good citizens, in whatever part of the land they dwell, and
whatever may be their occupation or worldly condition. We have striven
both for civic righteousness and for national greatness; and we have
faith to believe that our hands will be upheld by all who feel love of
country and trust in the uplifting of mankind. We stand for enforcement
of the law and for obedience to the law; our Government is a government
of orderly liberty equally alien to tyranny and to anarchy; and its
foundation-stone is the observance of the law, alike by the people and
by the public servants. We hold ever before us as the all-important end
of policy and administration the reign of peace at home and throughout
the world; of peace, which comes only by doing justice.

                                                       Faithfully yours,

                                                     THEODORE ROOSEVELT.




REMARKS AT THE WHITE HOUSE, SEPT. 24, 1904, ON THE OCCASION OF THE
RECEPTION OF THE INTERPARLIAMENTARY UNION


_Gentlemen of the Interparliamentary Union_:

I greet you with profound pleasure as representatives in a special
sense of the great international movement for peace and goodwill
among the nations of the earth. It is a matter of gratification to
all Americans that we have had the honor of receiving you here as
the Nation’s guests. You are men skilled in the practical work of
government in your several countries; and this fact adds weight to
your championship of the cause of international justice. I thank you
for your kind allusions to what the Government of the United States
has accomplished for the policies you have at heart, and I assure you
that this Government’s attitude will continue unchanged in reference
thereto. We are even now taking steps to secure arbitration treaties
with all other Governments which are willing to enter into them with us.

In response to your resolutions I shall at an early date ask the
other nations to join in a second Congress at The Hague. I feel, as
I am sure you do, that our efforts should take the shape of pushing
forward toward completion the work already begun at The Hague, and
that whatever is now done should appear not as something divergent
therefrom, but as a continuance thereof. At the first conference at
The Hague several questions were left unsettled, and it was expressly
provided that there should be a second conference. A reasonable time
has elapsed, and I feel that your body has shown sound judgment in
concluding that a second conference should now be called to carry some
steps further toward completion the work of the first. It would be
visionary to expect too immediate success for the great cause you are
championing; but very substantial progress can be made if we strive
with resolution and good sense toward the goal of securing among the
nations of the earth, as among the individuals of each nation, a just
sense of responsibility in each toward others, and a just recognition
in each of the rights of others. The right and the responsibility must
go hand in hand. Our effort must be unceasing both to secure in each
nation full acknowledgment of the rights of others, and to bring about
in each nation an ever growing sense of its own responsibilities.

At an early date I shall issue the call for the conference you request.

I again greet you and bid you welcome in the name of the American
people, and wish you Godspeed in your efforts for the common good of
mankind.




                                                 WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON

                                                      _November 4, 1904_


Certain slanderous accusations as to Mr. Cortelyou and myself have
been repeated time and again by Judge Parker, the candidate of his
party for the office of President. He neither has produced nor can
produce any proof of their truth; yet he has not withdrawn them;
and as his position gives them wide currency, I speak now lest the
silence of self-respect be misunderstood. Mr. Parker’s charges are
in effect that the President of the United States and Mr. Cortelyou,
formerly Mr. Cleveland’s executive clerk, then Mr. McKinley’s and my
secretary, then Secretary of Commerce and Labor, and now Chairman
of the Republican National Committee, have been in a conspiracy to
blackmail corporations, Mr. Cortelyou using his knowledge gained while
he was Secretary of the Department of Commerce and Labor to extort
money from the corporations, and I, the President, having appointed
him for this especial purpose. The gravamen of these charges lies
in the assertion that the corporations have been blackmailed into
contributing, and in the implication, which in one or two of Mr.
Parker’s speeches has taken the form practically of an assertion, that
they have been promised certain immunities or favors, or have been
assured that they would receive some kind of improper consideration
in view of their contributions. That contributions have been made to
the Republican Committee, as contributions have been made to the
Democratic Committee, is not the question at issue. Mr. Parker’s
assertion is in effect that such contributions have been made for
improper motives, either in consequence of threats or in consequence of
improper promises, direct or indirect, on the part of the recipients.
Mr. Parker knows best whether this is true of the contributions to his
campaign fund which have come through his trusted friends and advisers
who represent the great corporate interests that stand behind him.
But there is not one particle of truth in the statement as regards
anything that has gone on in the management of the Republican campaign.
Mr. Parker’s accusations against Mr. Cortelyou and me are monstrous.
If true they would brand both of us forever with infamy; and inasmuch
as they are false, heavy must be the condemnation of the man making
them. I chose Mr. Cortelyou as Chairman of the National Committee
after having failed successively to persuade Mr. Elihu Root, Mr. W.
Murray Crane, and Mr. Cornelius N. Bliss to accept the position. I
chose him with extreme reluctance, because I could ill spare him from
the Cabinet. But I felt that he possessed the high integrity which I
demanded in the man who was to manage my campaign. I am content that
Mr. Parker and I should be judged by the public on the characters of
the two men whom we chose to manage our campaigns; he by the character
of his nominee, Mr. Thomas Taggart, and I by the character of Mr.
Cortelyou. The assertion that Mr. Cortelyou had any knowledge, gained
while in an official position, whereby he was enabled to secure and
did secure any contributions from any corporation is a falsehood.
The assertion that there has been any blackmail, direct or indirect,
by Mr. Cortelyou or by me is a falsehood. The assertion that there
has been made in my behalf and by my authority, by Mr. Cortelyou or
by any one else, any pledge or promise, or that there has been any
understanding as to future immunities or benefits, in recognition of
any contributions from any source, is a wicked falsehood.

That Mr. Parker should desire to avoid the discussion of principles I
can well understand; for it is but the bare truth to say that he has
not attacked us on any matter of principle or upon any action of the
Government save after first misstating that principle or that action.
But I can not understand how any honorable man, a candidate for the
highest office in the gift of the people, can take refuge not merely in
personalities, but in such base and unworthy personalities. If I deemed
it necessary to support my flat denial by any evidence, I would ask all
men of common-sense to ponder well what has been done in this campaign
by Mr. Cortelyou, and to compare it with what Mr. Parker himself did
when he was managing Mr. Hill’s campaign for Governor; and to compare
what has been done as regards the great corporations and moneyed
interests under this Administration with what was done under the last
Democratic Administration while Mr. Olney was Attorney-General; I
would ask all honest men whether they seriously deem it possible that
the course this Administration has taken in every matter, from the
Northern Securities suit to the settlement of the anthracite coal
strike, is compatible with any theory of public behavior save the
theory of doing exact justice to all men without fear and without
favoritism; I would ask all honest and fair-minded men to remember that
the agents through whom I have worked are Mr. Knox and Mr. Moody in the
Department of Justice, Mr. Cortelyou in the Department of Commerce and
Labor, and Mr. Garfield in the Bureau of Corporations, and that no such
act of infamy as Mr. Parker charges could have been done without all
these men being parties to it.

The statements made by Mr. Parker are unqualifiedly and atrociously
false. As Mr. Cortelyou has said to me more than once during the
campaign, if elected I shall go into the Presidency unhampered by any
pledge, promise, or understanding of any kind, sort or description,
save my promise, made openly to the American people, that so far as in
my power lies I shall see to it that every man has a square deal, no
less and no more.

                                                     THEODORE ROOSEVELT.




ADDRESS AT THE UNVEILING OF THE STATUE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT, AT
WASHINGTON, NOV. 19, 1904


_Mr. Ambassador_:

Through you I wish on behalf of the people of the United States to
thank his Majesty, the German Emperor, and the people of Germany for
the gift to the Nation which you have just formally delivered to
me. I accept it with deep appreciation of the friendly regard which
it typifies for the people of this Republic both on the part of the
Emperor and on the part of the German people. I accept it not merely as
the statue of one of the half-dozen greatest soldiers of all time, and
therefore peculiarly appropriate for placing in this War College, but I
accept it as the statue of a great man, whose life was devoted to the
service of a great people, and whose deeds hastened the approach of the
day when a united Germany should spring into being.

As a soldier Frederick the Great ranks in that very, very small
group which includes Alexander, Cæsar, and Hannibal in antiquity,
and Napoleon, and possibly Gustavus Adolphus, in modern times. He
belonged to the ancient and illustrious house of Hohenzollern, which,
after playing a strong and virile part in the Middle Ages, and after
producing some men, like the great Elector, who were among the most
famous princes of their time, founded the royal house of Prussia two
centuries ago, and at last in our own day established the mighty
German Empire as among the foremost of world powers. We receive this
gift now at the hands of the present Emperor, himself a man who has
markedly added to the lustre of his great house and his great nation,
a man who has devoted his life to the welfare of his people, and who,
while keeping ever ready to defend the rights of that people, has also
made it evident in emphatic fashion that he and they desire peace and
friendship with the other nations of the earth.

It is not my purpose here to discuss at length the career of the
mighty King and mighty General whose statue we have just received.
In all history no other great commander save only Hannibal fought so
long against such terrible odds, and while Hannibal finally failed,
Frederick finally triumphed. In almost every battle he fought against
great odds, and he almost always won the victory. When defeated he
rose to an even greater altitude than when victorious. The memory of
the Seven Years’ War will last as long as there lives in mankind the
love of heroism, and its operations will be studied to the minutest
detail as long as the world sees a soldier worthy of the name. It is
difficult to know whether to admire most the victories of Leuthen
and Prague, Rossbach and Zorndorf, or the heartbreaking campaigns
after Kunersdorf, when the great King, after having been beaten to
the ground by the banded might of Europe, yet rose again and by an
exhibition of skill, tenacity, energy, and daring such as had never
before been seen united in one person, finally wrested triumph from
defeat. Not only must the military scholar always turn to the career of
Frederick the Great for lessons in strategy and tactics; not only must
the military administrator always turn to his career for lessons in
organizing success; not only will the lover of heroism read the tales
of his mighty feats as long as mankind cares for heroic deeds; but even
those who are not attracted by the valor of the soldier must yet, for
the sake of the greatness of the man, ponder and admire the lessons
taught by his undaunted resolution, his inflexible tenacity of purpose,
his farsighted grasp of lofty possibilities, and his unflinching,
unyielding determination in following the path he had marked out.
It is eminently fitting that the statue of this iron soldier, this
born leader of men, should find a place in this War College; for when
soldierly genius and soldierly heroism reach the highest point of
achievement the man in whom they are displayed grows to belong not
merely to the nation from which he sprang, but to all nations capable
of showing, and therefore capable of appreciating, the virile and
masterful virtues which alone make victors in those dread struggles
where resort is at last had to the arbitrament of arms.

But, Mr. Ambassador, in accepting the statue given us to-day through
you from the German Emperor, I accept it not merely because it is the
statue of a mighty and terrible soldier, but I accept it as a symbol
of the ties of friendship and goodwill which I trust as the years go
on will bind ever closer together the American and the German peoples.
There is kinship of blood between the two nations. We of the United
States are of mixed stock. In our veins runs the blood of almost all
the peoples of middle, northern, and western Europe. We already have
a history of which we feel that we have the right to be legitimately
proud, and yet our nationality is still in the formative period. Nearly
three centuries have elapsed since the landing of the English at
Jamestown marked the beginning of what has since grown into the United
States.

During these three centuries streams of newcomers from many different
countries abroad have in each generation contributed to swell the
increase of our people. Soon after the English settled in Virginia and
New England, the Hollander settled at the mouth of the Hudson and the
Swede at the mouth of the Delaware. Even in Colonial days the German
element had become very strong among our people in various parts of
this country; the Irish element was predominant in the foothills of
the Alleghenies; French Huguenots were numerous. By the time of the
Declaration of Independence that process of fusion which has gone on
ever since was well under way. From the beginning of our national
history men of German origin or German parentage played a distinguished
part in the affairs both of peace and of war. In the Revolutionary War
one of the leading generals was Muhlenberg, an American of German
descent, just as among the soldiers from abroad who came to aid us one
of the most prominent was the German, Steuben. Muhlenberg was the first
Speaker of the House of Representatives; and the battle which in the
Revolution saved the valley of the Mohawk to the American cause was
fought under the lead of the German, Herkimer. As all the different
races here tend rapidly to fuse together, it is rarely possible after
one or two generations to draw a sharp line between the various
elements; but there is no student of our national conditions who has
failed to appreciate what an invaluable element in our composite stock
the German is. Here, on this platform, Mr. Ambassador, among those
present to-day are many men partly or wholly of German blood, and
among the officers of the Army and Navy who have listened to you and
who now join with me in greeting you there are many whose fathers or
grandfathers were born in Germany, and not a few who themselves first
saw the light there.

Each nation has its allotted tasks to do; each nation has its peculiar
difficulties to encounter; and as the peoples of the world tend to
become more closely knit together alike for good and for evil, it
becomes ever more important to all that each should prosper; for
the prosperity of one is normally not a sign of menace but a sign
of hope for the rest. Here on this Continent where it is absolutely
essential that the different peoples coming to our shores should
not remain separate, but should fuse into one, our unceasing effort
is to strive to keep and profit by the good that each race brings
to our shores, and at the same time to do away with all racial and
religious animosities among the various stocks. In both efforts we
have met with an astonishing measure of success. As the years go by
it becomes not harder but easier to live in peace and goodwill among
ourselves; and I firmly believe that it will also become not harder
but easier to dwell in peace and friendship with the other nations
of the earth. A young people, a people of composite stock, we have
kinship with many different nations, but we are identical with none of
them, and are developing a separate national stock as we have already
developed a separate national life. We have in our veins the blood of
the Englishman, the Irishman, and the Welshman, the German and the
Frenchman, the Scotchman, the Dutchman, the Scandinavian, the Italian,
the Magyar, the Finn, the Slav, so that to each of the great powers of
the Old World we can claim a more or less distant kinship by blood; and
to each strain of blood we owe some peculiar quality in our national
life or national character. As such is the case it is natural that we
should have a peculiar feeling of nearness to each of many peoples
across the water. We most earnestly wish not only to keep unbroken our
friendship for each, but so far as we can without giving offence by an
appearance of meddling, to seek to bring about a better understanding
and a broader spirit of fair dealing and toleration among all nations.
It has been my great pleasure, Mr. Ambassador, in pursuance of this
object, recently to take with you the first steps in the negotiation of
a treaty of friendly arbitration between Germany and the United States.

In closing, let me thank you, and through you the German Emperor and
the German people, for this statue, which I accept in the name of the
American people; a people claiming blood kinship with your own; a
people owing much to Germany; a people which, though with a national
history far shorter than that of your people, nevertheless, like your
people, is proud of the great deeds of its past, and is confident in
the majesty of its future. I most earnestly pray that in the coming
years these two great nations shall move on toward their several
destinies knit together by ties of the heartiest friendship and
goodwill.




REMARKS AT ST. PATRICK’S CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., NOV. 20, 1904


  _Cardinal Gibbons, Father Stafford, and you, my Fellow-Americans_:

It is a great pleasure to me to be present with you to-day to assist
at the dedication of the school, hall, and rectory of this Parish, a
Parish whose one hundred and tenth anniversary we also now celebrate;
for this Parish was founded six years before the national capital was
placed in the present District of Columbia. I am glad indeed to have
been introduced, Cardinal Gibbons, by you, the spiritual representative
in a peculiar sense of that Bishop Carroll who played so illustrious
a part in the affairs of the Church, and whose kinsfolk played as
illustrious a part in the affairs of the Nation at the dawning of this
Government. In greeting all of you I wish to say that I am especially
glad to see the children present. You know I believe in children. I
want to see enough of them and of the right kind.

I wish to-day, in the very brief remarks that I have to make, to
dwell upon this thought—the thought that ought to be in the mind of
every man and woman here, the thought that while in this country we
need wise laws honestly and fearlessly executed, and while we can not
afford to tolerate anything but the highest standard in the public
service of the Government, yet that in the last analysis the future of
the country must depend upon the quality of the individual home, of
the individual man or woman in that home. The future of this country
depends upon the way in which the average man and the average woman in
it does his or her duty, and that very largely depends upon the way
in which the average boy or girl is brought up. Therefore, a peculiar
responsibility rests upon those whose lifework it is to see to the
spiritual welfare of our people and upon those who make it their
lifework to try to train the citizens of the future so that they shall
be worthy of that future. In wishing you well to-day, I wish you well
in doing the most important work which is allotted to any of our people
to do. The rules of good citizenship are tolerably simple. The trouble
is not in finding them out; the trouble is in living up to them after
they have been found out. I think we all of us know fairly well what
qualities they are which in their sum make up the type of character
we like to see in man or wife, son or daughter; but I am afraid we do
not always see them as well developed as we would like to. I wish to
see in the average American citizen the development of the two sets of
qualities which we can roughly indicate as sweetness and strength—the
qualities on the one hand which make the man able to hold his own,
and those which on the other hand make him jealous for the rights of
others just as much as for his own rights. We must have both sets of
qualities. In the first place, the man must have the power to hold his
own. You probably know that I do not care very much for the coward
or the moral weakling. I want each of you boys, and the girls just as
much, and each of you young men and young women, to have the qualities
without which people may be amiable and pleasant while things go well,
but without which they can not succeed in times of stern trial. I wish
to see in the man manliness, in the woman womanliness. I wish to see
courage, perseverance, the willingness to face work, to face, you men,
if it is necessary, danger, the determination not to shrink back when
temporarily beaten in life, as each one will be now and then, but to
come up again and wrest triumph from defeat. I want to see you men
strong men and brave men, and in addition I wish to see each man of you
feel that his strength and his courage but make him the worse unless to
that strength and courage are joined the qualities of tenderness toward
those he loves, who are dependent upon him, and of right dealing with
all his neighbors.

Finally, I want to congratulate all of us here on certain successes
that we have achieved in the century and a quarter that has gone by
of our American life. We have difficulties enough, and we are a long
ways short of perfection. I do not see any immediate danger of our
growing too good; there is ample room for effort yet left. But we have
achieved certain results, we have succeeded in measurably realizing
certain ideals. We have grown to accept it as an axiomatic truth of
our American life that the man is to be treated on his worth as a
man, without regard to the accidents of his position; that this is not
a Government designed to favor the rich man as such, or the poor man
as such, but that it is designed to favor every man, rich or poor, if
he is a decent man who acts fairly by his fellows. We have grown to
realize that part of the foundations upon which our liberty rests is
the right of each man to worship his Creator according to the dictates
of his conscience, and the duty of each man to respect his fellow who
so worships Him. And, oh! my countrymen, one of the best auguries for
the future of this country, for the future of this mighty and majestic
Nation of ours, lies in the fact that we have grown to regard one
another, that we brothers have grown to regard one another, with a
broad and kindly charity, and to realize the field for human endeavor
is wide, that the field for charitable, philanthropic, religious
work is wide, and that while a corner of it remains untilled we do a
dreadful wrong if we fail to welcome the work done in that field by
every man, no matter what his creed, provided only he works with a
lofty sense of his duty to God and his duty to his neighbor.




REMARKS INTRODUCING REV. CHARLES WAGNER, AT THE LAFAYETTE OPERA HOUSE,
WASHINGTON, D. C., NOV. 22, 1904


  _Mr. Macfarland, Mr. Wagner, Men and Women of Washington_:

This is the first and will be the only time during my Presidency that
I shall ever introduce a speaker to an audience; and I am more than
glad to do it in this instance, because if there is one book which I
should like to have read as a tract, and also, what is not invariably
true of tracts, as an interesting tract, by all our people, it is “The
Simple Life,” written by Mr. Wagner. There are other books which he
has written from which we can gain great good, but I know of no other
book written of recent years anywhere, here or abroad, which contains
so much that we of America ought to take to our hearts as is contained
in “The Simple Life.” I like the book because it does not merely preach
to the rich, and does not merely preach to the poor. It is a very easy
thing to address a section of the community in reprobation of the forms
of vice to which it is not prone. What we need to have impressed upon
us is that it is not usually the root principle of the vice that varies
with variation in social conditions, but that it is the manifestation
of the vice that varies; and Mr. Wagner has well brought out the great
fundamental truth that the brutal arrogance of a rich man who looks
down upon a poor man because he is poor, and the brutal envy and
hatred felt by a poor man toward a rich man merely because he is rich,
are at bottom twin manifestations of the same vice. They are simply
different sides of the same shield. The arrogance that looks down in
the one case, the envy that hates in the other, are really exhibitions
of the same mean, base, and unlovely spirit which happens in one case
to be in different surroundings from what it is in the other case. The
kind of man who would be arrogant in one case is precisely the kind
of man who would be envious and filled with hatred in the other. The
ideal should be the just, the generous, the broad-minded man who is as
incapable of arrogance if rich as he is of malignant envy and hatred if
poor.

No republic can permanently exist when it becomes a republic of
classes, where the man feels not the interest of the whole people, but
the interest of the particular class to which he belongs, or fancies
that he belongs, as being of prime importance. In antiquity, republics
failed as they did because they tended to become either a republic of
the few who exploited the many, or a republic of the many who plundered
the few, and in either case the end of the republic was inevitable;
just as much so in one case as in the other, and no more so in one case
than in the other. We can keep this Republic true to the principles of
those who founded, and of those who afterward preserved it, we can keep
it a Republic at all, only by remembering that we must live up to the
theory of its founders, to the theory, of treating each man on his
worth as a man; neither holding it for nor against him that he occupies
any particular station in life, so long as he does his duty fairly and
well by his fellows and by the Nation as a whole.

So much for the general philosophy taught so admirably in Mr.
Wagner’s book—I might say books, but I am thinking especially of “The
Simple Life,” because that has been the book that has appealed to me
particularly. Now, a word with special reference to his address to
this audience, to the Young Men’s Christian Association: The profound
regard which I have always felt for those responsible for the work of
the Young Men’s Christian Association and the Young Women’s Christian
Association, is largely because they have practically realized, or at
least have striven practically to realize, the ideal of adherence to
the text which reads, “Be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only.”
If you here to-day came here only with the idea of passing a pleasant
afternoon and then go home and do not actually practice somewhat of
what Mr. Wagner preaches and practices, then small will be the use of
your coming. It is not of the slightest use to hear the word if you
do not try to put it into effect afterward. The Young Men’s Christian
Associations have accomplished so much because those who have managed
them have tried practically to do their part in bringing about what is
expressed in the phrase “the fatherhood of God, and the brotherhood
of men.” We can act individually or we can act by associations. I
intend this afternoon to illustrate by a couple of examples what I
mean by a man acting individually, and what I mean by a man acting in
associations with his fellows. I hesitated whether I would use, as I
shall use, the names of the people whom I meant, but I came to the
conclusion that I would, because the worth of an example consists very
largely in the knowledge that the example is a real one.

I have been immensely interested for a number of years in the working
of the Civic Club in New York, which has been started and superintended
by Mr. Norton Goddard. It is a club on the East Side of New York City,
the range of whose membership includes a big district of the city,
extending from about Lexington Avenue to the East River. Mr. Goddard
realized that such work can be done to best advantage only upon
condition of there being genuine and hearty sympathy among those doing
it. There are a great many people so made in this world (I think most
of us come under the category) that they would resent being patronized
about as much as being wronged. Great good can never be done if it
is attempted in a patronizing spirit. Mr. Goddard realized that the
work could be done efficiently only on condition of getting into close
and hearty touch with the people through whom and with whom he was to
work. In consequence, this Civic Club was founded, and it has gradually
extended its operations until now the entire club membership of three
or four thousand men practically form a committee of betterment in
social and civic life; a committee spread throughout that district,
each member keeping a sharp lookout over the fortunes of all his
immediate neighbors, of all of those of his neighborhood who do not
come within the ken of some other member of the club. Therefore, any
case of great destitution, of great suffering, in the district, almost
inevitably comes to the attention of some member of the club, who then
reports it at headquarters, so that steps can be taken to alleviate the
misery; and I have reason to believe that there has been in consequence
a very sensible general uplifting, a general increase of happiness,
throughout the district. If we had a sufficient number of clubs of this
kind throughout our great cities, while we would not by any means have
solved all of the terrible problems that press upon us for solution
in connection with municipal misgovernment and with the overcrowding,
misery, vice, disease, and poverty of great cities, yet we would
have taken a long stride forward in the right direction toward their
solution. So much for the example that I use to illustrate what I mean
by work in combination.

As an example of what can be done, and should be done, by the
individual citizen, I shall mention something that recently occurred
in this city of Washington, a thing that doubtless many of you know
about, but which was unknown to me until recently. A few weeks ago
when I was walking back from church one Sunday I noticed a great fire
and found that it was Downey’s livery stable—you recollect it, three
or four weeks ago when the livery stable burned. Through a train of
circumstances that I need not mention, my attention was particularly
called to the case, and I looked into it. I had long known of the very
admirable work done with singular modesty and self-effacement by Mr.
Downey in trying to give homes to the homeless, and to be himself a
friend of those in a peculiar sense friendless in this community; and
I now by accident found out what had happened in connection with this
particular incident. It appears that last spring Mr. Downey started
to build a new livery stable; his stable is next door to a colored
Baptist church. Mr. Downey is a white man and a Catholic and these
neighbors of his are colored men and Baptists, and their kinship was
simply the kinship of that broad humanity that should underlie all our
feelings toward one another. Mr. Downey started to build his stable,
and naturally wanted to have it as big a stable as possible and build
it right up to the limits of his land. That brought the wall close up
against the back of the colored Baptists’ church, cutting out the light
and air. The preacher called upon him and told him that they would like
to purchase a strip six feet broad of the ground of Mr. Downey, upon
which he was intending to build, as it would be a great inconvenience
to them to lose the light and the air; that they were aware that it
was asking a good deal of him to cramp the building out of which he
intended to make his livelihood, but that they hoped he would do it
because of their need. After a good deal of thought, Mr. Downey
came to the conclusion that he ought to grant the request, and so he
notified them that he would change his plans, make a somewhat smaller
building, and sell them the six feet of land in the strip adjoining
their church. After a little while the preacher came around with the
trustees of his church and said that they very much appreciated Mr.
Downey’s courtesy, and were sorry they had bothered him as they had,
because, on looking into the affairs of the church, they found that
as they were already in debt they did not feel warranted in incurring
any further financial obligations, and so they had to withdraw their
request. They thanked him for his kindly purpose, and said good-by. But
Mr. Downey found he could not get to sleep that night until finally
he made up his mind that as they could not buy it he would give it
to them anyway; which he did. But, unfortunately, we know that the
tower of Siloam often falls upon the just and the unjust alike, and
Mr. Downey’s livery stable caught fire, and burned down. It was Sunday
morning, and the Baptist church was in session next door to him; and
the clergyman stopped and said, “Now, you women stay here and pray,
and you men go straight out and help our benefactor, Mr. Downey”; and
go out they did, and got his horses all out, so that none of them was
burned, although he suffered otherwise a total loss. Now, I call that a
practical application of Mr. Wagner’s teachings. Here in Washington we
have a right to be proud of a citizen like Mr. Downey; and if only we
can develop enough such citizens, we shall turn out just the kind of
community that does not need to, but will always be glad to, study “The
Simple Life,” the author of which I now introduce to you.




MESSAGE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, COMMUNICATED TO THE
TWO HOUSES OF CONGRESS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE THIRD SESSION OF THE
FIFTY-EIGHTH CONGRESS


_To the Senate and House of Representatives_:

The Nation continues to enjoy noteworthy prosperity. Such prosperity
is of course primarily due to the high individual average of our
citizenship, taken together with our great natural resources; but
an important factor therein is the working of our long-continued
governmental policies. The people have emphatically expressed their
approval of the principles underlying these policies, and their desire
that these principles be kept substantially unchanged, although of
course applied in a progressive spirit to meet changing conditions.

       *       *       *       *       *

The enlargement of scope of the functions of the National Government
required by our development as a nation involves, of course, increase
of expense; and the period of prosperity through which the country is
passing justifies expenditures for permanent improvements far greater
than would be wise in hard times. Battleships and forts, public
buildings, and improved waterways are investments which should be made
when we have the money; but abundant revenues and a large surplus
always invite extravagance, and constant care should be taken to guard
against unnecessary increase of the ordinary expenses of government.
The cost of doing Government business should be regulated with the same
rigid scrutiny as the cost of doing a private business.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the vast and complicated mechanism of our modern civilized life
the dominant note is the note of industrialism; and the relations of
capital and labor, and especially of organized capital and organized
labor, to each other and to the public at large come second in
importance only to the intimate questions of family life. Our peculiar
form of government, with its sharp division of authority between
the Nation and the several States, has been on the whole far more
advantageous to our development than a more strongly centralized
government. But it is undoubtedly responsible for much of the
difficulty of meeting with adequate legislation the new problems
presented by the total change in industrial conditions on this
continent during the last half century. In actual practice it has
proved exceedingly difficult, and in many cases impossible, to get
unanimity of wise action among the various States on these subjects.
From the very nature of the case this is especially true of the laws
affecting the employment of capital in huge masses.

With regard to labor the problem is no less important, but it is
simpler. As long as the States retain the primary control of the
police power the circumstances must be altogether extreme which
require interference by the Federal authorities, whether in the way of
safeguarding the rights of labor or in the way of seeing that wrong is
not done by unruly persons who shield themselves behind the name of
labor. If there is resistance to the Federal courts, interference with
the mails or interstate commerce, or molestation of Federal property,
or if the State authorities in some crisis which they are unable to
face call for help, then the Federal Government may interfere; but
though such interference may be caused by a condition of things arising
out of trouble connected with some question of labor, the interference
itself simply takes the form of restoring order without regard to the
questions which have caused the breach of order—for to keep order is a
primary duty and in a time of disorder and violence all other questions
sink into abeyance until order has been restored. In the District of
Columbia and in the Territories the Federal law covers the entire
field of government; but the labor question is only acute in populous
centres of commerce, manufactures, or mining. Nevertheless, both in the
enactment and in the enforcement of law the Federal Government within
its restricted sphere should set an example to the State Governments,
especially in a matter so vital as this affecting labor. I believe
that under modern industrial conditions it is often necessary, and
even where not necessary it is yet often wise, that there should be
organization of labor in order better to secure the rights of the
individual wage-worker. All encouragement should be given to any such
organization, so long as it is conducted with a due and decent regard
for the rights of others. There are in this country some labor unions
which have habitually, and other labor unions which have often, been
among the most effective agents in working for good citizenship and
for uplifting the condition of those whose welfare should be closest
to our hearts. But when any labor union seeks improper ends, or seeks
to achieve proper ends by improper means, all good citizens and more
especially all honorable public servants must oppose the wrongdoing
as resolutely as they would oppose the wrongdoing of any great
corporation. Of course any violence, brutality, or corruption should
not for one moment be tolerated. Wage-workers have an entire right
to organize and by all peaceful and honorable means to endeavor to
persuade their fellows to join with them in organizations. They have
a legal right, which, according to circumstances, may or may not be a
moral right, to refuse to work in company with men who decline to join
their organizations. They have under no circumstances the right to
commit violence upon those, whether capitalists or wage-workers, who
refuse to support their organizations, or who side with those with whom
they are at odds; for mob rule is intolerable in any form.

       *       *       *       *       *

The wage-workers are peculiarly entitled to the protection and the
encouragement of the law. From the very nature of their occupation
railroad men, for instance, are liable to be maimed in doing the
legitimate work of their profession, unless the railroad companies
are required by law to make ample provision for their safety. The
Administration has been zealous in enforcing the existing law for this
purpose. That law should be amended and strengthened. Wherever the
National Government has power there should be a stringent employers’
liability law, which should apply to the Government itself where the
Government is an employer of labor.

In my Message to the Fifty-seventh Congress, at its second session,
I urged the passage of an employers’ liability law for the District
of Columbia. I now renew that recommendation, and further recommend
that the Congress appoint a commission to make a comprehensive study
of employers’ liability with the view of extending the provisions of
a great and constitutional law to all employments within the scope of
Federal power.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Government has recognized heroism upon the water, and bestows
medals of honor upon those persons who by extreme and heroic daring
have endangered their lives in saving, or endeavoring to save, lives
from the perils of the sea in the waters over which the United States
has jurisdiction, or upon an American vessel. This recognition should
be extended to cover cases of conspicuous bravery and self-sacrifice in
the saving of life in private employments under the jurisdiction of the
United States, and particularly in the land commerce of the Nation.

       *       *       *       *       *

The ever-increasing casualty list upon our railroads is a matter of
grave public concern, and urgently calls for action by the Congress.
In the matter of speed and comfort of railway travel our railroads
give at least as good service as those of any other nation, and there
is no reason why this service should not also be as safe as human
ingenuity can make it. Many of our leading roads have been foremost
in the adoption of the most approved safeguards for the protection
of travelers and employees, yet the list of clearly avoidable
accidents continues unduly large. The passage of a law requiring the
adoption of a block-signal system has been proposed to the Congress.
I earnestly concur in that recommendation, and would also point out
to the Congress the urgent need of legislation in the interest of
the public safety limiting the hours of labor for railroad employees
in train service upon railroads engaged in interstate commerce, and
providing that only trained and experienced persons be employed in
positions of responsibility connected with the operation of trains. Of
course, nothing can ever prevent accidents caused by human weakness or
misconduct; and there should be drastic punishment for any railroad
employee, whether officer or man, who by issuance of wrong orders or
by disobedience of orders causes disaster. The law of 1901, requiring
interstate railroads to make monthly reports of all accidents to
passengers and employees on duty, should also be amended so as to
empower the Government to make a personal investigation, through
proper officers, of all accidents involving loss of life which seem
to require investigation, with a requirement that the results of such
investigation be made public.

The safety-appliance law, as amended by the Act of March 2, 1903,
has proved beneficial to railway employees, and in order that its
provisions may be properly carried out, the force of inspectors
provided for by appropriation should be largely increased. This service
is analogous to the Steamboat-Inspection Service, and deals with even
more important interests. It has passed the experimental stage and
demonstrated its utility, and should receive generous recognition by
the Congress.

       *       *       *       *       *

There is no objection to employees of the Government forming or
belonging to unions; but the Government can neither discriminate for
nor discriminate against non-union men who are in its employment,
or who seek to be employed under it. Moreover, it is a very grave
impropriety for Government employees to band themselves together for
the purpose of extorting improperly high salaries from the Government.
Especially is this true of those within the classified service. The
letter carriers, both municipal and rural, are as a whole an excellent
body of public servants. They should be amply paid. But their payment
must be obtained by arguing their claims fairly and honorably
before the Congress, and not by banding together for the defeat of
those Congressmen who refuse to give promises which they can not in
conscience give. The Administration has already taken steps to prevent
and punish abuses of this nature; but it will be wise for the Congress
to supplement this action by legislation.

       *       *       *       *       *

Much can be done by the Government in labor matters merely by giving
publicity to certain conditions. The Bureau of Labor has done excellent
work of this kind in many different directions. I shall shortly lay
before you in a special message the full report of the investigation
of the Bureau of Labor into the Colorado mining strike, as this is a
strike in which certain very evil forces, which are more or less at
work everywhere under the conditions of modern industrialism, became
startlingly prominent. It is greatly to be wished that the Department
of Commerce and Labor, through the Labor Bureau, should compile and
arrange for the Congress a list of the labor laws of the various
States, and should be given the means to investigate and report to the
Congress upon the labor conditions in the manufacturing and mining
regions throughout the country, both as to wages, as to hours of labor,
as to the labor of women and children, and as to the effect in the
various labor centres of immigration from abroad. In this investigation
especial attention should be paid to the conditions of child labor and
child-labor legislation in the several States. Such an investigation
must necessarily take into account many of the problems with which this
question of child labor is connected. These problems can be actually
met, in most cases, only by the States themselves; but the lack of
proper legislation in one State in such a matter as child labor often
renders it excessively difficult to establish protective restriction
upon the work in another State having the same industries, so that the
worst tends to drag down the better. For this reason, it would be well
for the Nation at least to endeavor to secure comprehensive information
as to the conditions of labor of children in the different States. Such
investigation and publication by the National Government would tend
toward the securing of approximately uniform legislation of the proper
character among the several States.

       *       *       *       *       *

When we come to deal with great corporations the need for the
Government to act directly is far greater than in the case of labor,
because great corporations can become such only by engaging in
interstate commerce, and interstate commerce is peculiarly the field
of the General Government. It is an absurdity to expect to eliminate
the abuses in great corporations by State action. It is difficult to
be patient with an argument that such matters should be left to the
States, because more than one State pursues the policy of creating on
easy terms corporations which are never operated within that State
at all, but in other States whose laws they ignore. The National
Government alone can deal adequately with these great corporations.
To try to deal with them in an intemperate, destructive, or demagogic
spirit would, in all probability, mean that nothing whatever would
be accomplished, and, with absolute certainty, that if anything were
accomplished it would be of a harmful nature. The American people need
to continue to show the very qualities that they have shown—that is,
moderation, good sense, the earnest desire to avoid doing any damage,
and yet the quiet determination to proceed, step by step, without halt
and without hurry, in eliminating or at least in minimizing whatever
of mischief or of evil there is to interstate commerce in the conduct
of great corporations. They are acting in no spirit of hostility to
wealth, either individual or corporate. They are not against the rich
man any more than against the poor man. On the contrary, they are
friendly alike toward rich man and toward poor man, provided only that
each acts in a spirit of justice and decency toward his fellows. Great
corporations are necessary, and only men of great and singular mental
power can manage such corporations successfully, and such men must have
great rewards. But these corporations should be managed with due regard
to the interests of the public as a whole. Where this can be done under
the present laws it must be done. Where these laws come short others
should be enacted to supplement them.

Yet we must never forget the determining factor in every kind of
work, of head or hand, must be the man’s own good sense, courage, and
kindliness. More important than any legislation is the gradual growth
of a feeling of responsibility and forbearance among capitalists and
wage-workers alike; a feeling of respect on the part of each man for
the rights of others; a feeling of broad community of interest, not
merely of capitalists among themselves, and of wage-workers among
themselves, but of capitalists and wage-workers in their relations to
each other, and of both in their relations to their fellows who with
them make up the body politic. There are many captains of industry,
many labor leaders, who realize this. A recent speech by the president
of one of our great railroad systems to the employees of that system
contains sound common-sense. It runs in part as follows:

“It is my belief we can better serve each other, better understand the
man as well as his business, when meeting face to face, exchanging
views, and realizing from personal contact we serve but one interest,
that of our mutual prosperity.

“Serious misunderstandings can not occur where personal goodwill exists
and opportunity for personal explanation is present.

“In my early business life I had experience with men of affairs of
a character to make me desire to avoid creating a like feeling of
resentment to myself and the interests in my charge, should fortune
ever place me in authority, and I am solicitous of a measure of
confidence on the part of the public and our employees that I shall
hope may be warranted by the fairness and good-fellowship I intend
shall prevail in our relationship.

“But do not feel I am disposed to grant unreasonable requests, spend
the money of our company unnecessarily or without value received,
nor expect the days of mistakes are disappearing, or that cause for
complaint will not continually occur; simply to correct such abuses
as may be discovered, to better conditions as fast as reasonably
may be expected, constantly striving, with varying success, for
that improvement we all desire, to convince you there is a force at
work in the right direction, all the time making progress—is the
disposition with which I have come among you, asking your goodwill and
encouragement.

“The day has gone by when a corporation can be handled successfully in
defiance of the public will, even though that will be unreasonable and
wrong. A public may be led, but not driven, and I prefer to go with it
and shape or modify, in a measure, its opinion, rather than be swept
from my bearings, with loss to myself and the interests in my charge.

“Violent prejudice exists toward corporate activity and capital to-day,
much of it founded in reason, more in apprehension, and a large measure
is due to the personal traits of arbitrary, unreasonable, incompetent,
and offensive men in positions of authority. The accomplishment of
results by indirection, the endeavor to thwart the intention, if not
the expressed letter of the law (the will of the people), a disregard
of the rights of others, a disposition to withhold what is due, to
force by main strength or inactivity a result not justified, depending
upon the weakness of the claimant and his indisposition to become
involved in litigation, has created a sentiment harmful in the extreme
and a disposition to consider anything fair that gives gain to the
individual at the expense of the company.

“If corporations are to continue to do the world’s work, as they are
best fitted to, these qualities in their representatives that have
resulted in the present prejudice against them must be relegated to the
background. The corporations must come out into the open and see and be
seen. They must take the public into their confidence and ask for what
they want, and no more, and be prepared to explain satisfactorily what
advantage will accrue to the public if they are given their desires;
for they are permitted to exist not that they may make money solely,
but that they may effectively serve those from whom they derive their
power.

“Publicity, and not secrecy, will win hereafter, and laws be construed
by their intent and not by their letter, otherwise public utilities
will be owned and operated by the public which created them, even
though the service be less efficient and the result less satisfactory
from a financial standpoint.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The Bureau of Corporations has made careful preliminary investigation
of many important corporations. It will make a special report on the
beef industry.

The policy of the Bureau is to accomplish the purposes of its creation
by co-operation, not antagonism; by making constructive legislation,
not destructive prosecution, the immediate object of its inquiries;
by conservative investigation of law and fact, and by refusal to
issue incomplete and hence necessarily inaccurate reports. Its policy
being thus one of open inquiry into, and not attack upon, business,
the Bureau has been able to gain not only the confidence, but, better
still, the co-operation of men engaged in legitimate business.

The Bureau offers to the Congress the means of getting at the cost of
production of our various great staples of commerce.

Of necessity the careful investigation of special corporations will
afford the Commissioner knowledge of certain business facts, the
publication of which might be an improper infringement of private
rights. The method of making public the results of these investigations
affords, under the law, a means for the protection of private rights.
The Congress will have all facts except such as would give to another
corporation information which would injure the legitimate business of
a competitor and destroy the incentive for individual superiority and
thrift.

The Bureau has also made exhaustive examinations into the legal
condition under which corporate business is carried on in the various
States; into all judicial decisions on the subject; and into the
various systems of corporate taxation in use. I call special attention
to the report of the chief of the Bureau; and I earnestly ask that
the Congress carefully consider the report and recommendations of the
Commissioner on this subject.

       *       *       *       *       *

The business of insurance vitally affects the great mass of the
people of the United States and is national and not local in its
application. It involves a multitude of transactions among the people
of the different States and between American companies and foreign
Governments. I urge that the Congress carefully consider whether
the power of the Bureau of Corporations can not constitutionally be
extended to cover interstate transactions in insurance.

       *       *       *       *       *

Above all else, we must strive to keep the highways of commerce open to
all on equal terms; and to do this it is necessary to put a complete
stop to all rebates. Whether the shipper or the railroad is to blame
makes no difference; the rebate must be stopped, the abuses of the
private car and private terminal-track and side-track systems must
be stopped, and the legislation of the Fifty-eighth Congress which
declares it to be unlawful for any person or corporation to offer,
grant, give, solicit, accept, or receive any rebate, concession, or
discrimination in respect of the transportation of any property in
interstate or foreign commerce whereby such property shall by any
device whatever be transported at a less rate than that named in the
tariffs published by the carrier must be enforced. For some time after
the enactment of the Act to Regulate Commerce it remained a mooted
question whether that act conferred upon the Interstate Commerce
Commission the power, after it had found a challenged rate to be
unreasonable, to declare what thereafter should, prima facie, be the
reasonable maximum rate for the transportation in dispute. The Supreme
Court finally resolved that question in the negative, so that as the
law now stands the Commission simply possess the bare power to denounce
a particular rate as unreasonable. While I am of the opinion that at
present it would be undesirable, if it were not impracticable, finally
to clothe the Commission with general authority to fix railroad rates,
I do believe that, as a fair security to shippers, the Commission
should be vested with the power, where a given rate has been challenged
and after full hearing found to be unreasonable, to decide, subject to
judicial review, what shall be a reasonable rate to take its place;
the ruling of the Commission to take effect immediately, and to obtain
unless and until it is reversed by the court of review. The Government
must in increasing degree supervise and regulate the workings of the
railways engaged in interstate commerce; and such increased supervision
is the only alternative to an increase of the present evils on the one
hand or a still more radical policy on the other. In my judgment the
most important legislative act now needed as regards the regulation
of corporations is this act to confer on the Interstate Commerce
Commission the power to revise rates and regulations, the revised rate
to at once go into effect, and to stay in effect unless and until the
court of review reverses it.

Steamship companies engaged in interstate commerce and protected in
our coastwise trade, should be held to a strict observance of the
interstate commerce act.

       *       *       *       *       *

In pursuing the set plan to make the city of Washington an example to
other American municipalities several points should be kept in mind
by the legislators. In the first place, the people of this country
should clearly understand that no amount of industrial prosperity,
and above all no leadership in international industrial competition,
can in any way atone for the sapping of the vitality of those who are
usually spoken of as the working classes. The farmers, the mechanics,
the skilled and unskilled laborers, the small shopkeepers, make up
the bulk of the population of any country; and upon their well-being,
generation after generation, the well-being of the country and the
race depends. Rapid development in wealth and industrial leadership
is a good thing, but only if it goes hand in hand with improvement,
and not deterioration, physical and moral. The overcrowding of cities
and the draining of country districts are unhealthy and even dangerous
symptoms in our modern life. We should not permit overcrowding in
cities. In certain European cities it is provided by law that the
population of towns shall not be allowed to exceed a very limited
density for a given area, so that the increase in density must be
continually pushed back into a broad zone around the centre of the
town, this zone having great avenues or parks within it. The death-rate
statistics show a terrible increase in mortality, and especially in
infant mortality, in overcrowded tenements. The poorest families
in tenement houses live in one room, and it appears that in these
one-room tenements the average death-rate for a number of given cities
at home and abroad is about twice what it is in a two-room tenement,
four times what it is in a three-room tenement, and eight times what
it is in a tenement consisting of four rooms or over. These figures
vary somewhat for different cities, but they approximate in each
city those given above; and in all cases the increase of mortality,
and especially of infant mortality, with the decrease in the number
of rooms used by the family and with the consequent overcrowding is
startling. The slum exacts a heavy total of deaths from those who dwell
therein; and this is the case not merely in the great crowded slums
of high buildings in New York and Chicago, but in the alley slums of
Washington. In Washington people can not afford to ignore the harm that
this causes. No Christian and civilized community can afford to show a
happy-go-lucky lack of concern for the youth of to-day; for, if so, the
community will have to pay a terrible penalty of financial burden and
social degradation in the to-morrow. There should be severe child-labor
and factory-inspection laws. It is very desirable that married women
should not work in factories. The prime duty of the man is to work, to
be the breadwinner; the prime duty of the woman is to be the mother,
the housewife. All questions of tariff and finance sink into utter
insignificance when compared with the tremendous, the vital importance
of trying to shape conditions so that these two duties of the man and
of the woman can be fulfilled under reasonably favorable circumstances.
If a race does not have plenty of children, or if the children do not
grow up, or if when they grow up they are unhealthy in body and stunted
or vicious in mind, then that race is decadent, and no heaping up of
wealth, no splendor of momentary material prosperity, can avail in any
degree as offsets.

The Congress has the same power of legislation for the District of
Columbia which the State Legislatures have for the various States. The
problems incident to our highly complex modern industrial civilization,
with its manifold and perplexing tendencies both for good and for
evil, are far less sharply accentuated in the city of Washington than
in most other cities. For this very reason it is easier to deal with
the various phases of these problems in Washington, and the District
of Columbia government should be a model for the other municipal
governments of the Nation, in all such matters as supervision of the
housing of the poor, the creation of small parks in the districts
inhabited by the poor, in laws affecting labor, in laws providing for
the taking care of the children, in truant laws, and in providing
schools.

In the vital matter of taking care of children, much advantage could
be gained by a careful study of what has been accomplished in such
States as Illinois and Colorado by the juvenile courts. The work
of the juvenile court is really a work of character building. It
is now generally recognized that young boys and young girls who go
wrong should not be treated as criminals, not even necessarily as
needing reformation, but rather as needing to have their characters
formed, and for this end to have them tested and developed by a
system of probation. Much admirable work has been done in many of our
Commonwealths by earnest men and women who have made a special study
of the needs of those classes of children which furnish the greatest
number of juvenile offenders, and therefore the greatest number of
adult offenders; and by their aid, and by profiting by the experiences
of the different States and cities in these matters, it would be easy
to provide a good code for the District of Columbia.

Several considerations suggest the need for a systematic investigation
into and improvement of housing conditions in Washington. The hidden
residential alleys are breeding grounds of vice and disease, and
should be opened into minor streets. For a number of years influential
citizens have joined with the District Commissioners in the vain
endeavor to secure laws permitting the condemnation of unsanitary
dwellings. The local death-rates, especially from preventable diseases,
are so unduly high as to suggest that the exceptional wholesomeness of
Washington’s better sections is offset by bad conditions in her poorer
neighborhoods. A special “Commission on Housing and Health Conditions
in the National Capital” would not only bring about the reformation
of existing evils, but would also formulate an appropriate building
code to protect the city from mammoth brick tenements and other evils
which threaten to develop here as they have in other cities. That the
Nation’s Capital should be made a model for other municipalities is
an ideal which appeals to all patriotic citizens everywhere, and such
a special Commission might map out and organize the city’s future
development in lines of civic social service, just as Major L’Enfant
and the recent Park Commission planned the arrangement of her streets
and parks.

It is mortifying to remember that Washington has no compulsory school
attendance law and that careful inquiries indicate the habitual absence
from school of some twenty per cent of all children between the ages of
eight and fourteen. It must be evident to all who consider the problems
of neglected child life, or the benefits of compulsory education in
other cities, that one of the most urgent needs of the National Capital
is a law requiring the school attendance of all children, this law to
be enforced by attendance agents directed by the Board of Education.

Public playgrounds are necessary means for the development of wholesome
citizenship in modern cities. It is important that the work inaugurated
here through voluntary efforts should be taken up and extended through
Congressional appropriation of funds sufficient to equip and maintain
numerous convenient small playgrounds upon land which can be secured
without purchase or rental. It is also desirable that small vacant
places be purchased and reserved as small-park playgrounds in densely
settled sections of the city which now have no public open spaces and
are destined soon to be built up solidly. All these needs should be met
immediately. To meet them would entail expenses; but a corresponding
saving could be made by stopping the building of streets and leveling
of ground for purposes largely speculative in outlying parts of the
city.

There are certain offenders, whose criminality takes the shape of
brutality and cruelty toward the weak, who need a special type of
punishment. The wife-beater, for example, is inadequately punished by
imprisonment; for imprisonment may often mean nothing to him, while it
may cause hunger and want to the wife and children who have been the
victims of his brutality. Probably some form of corporal punishment
would be the most adequate way of meeting this kind of crime.

The Department of Agriculture has grown into an educational institution
with a faculty of two thousand specialists making research into all
the sciences of production. The Congress appropriates, directly and
indirectly, six millions of dollars annually to carry on this work.
It reaches every State and Territory in the Union and the islands of
the sea lately come under our flag. Co-operation is had with the State
experiment stations, and with many other institutions and individuals.
The world is carefully searched for new varieties of grains, fruits,
grasses, vegetables, trees, and shrubs, suitable to various localities
in our country; and marked benefit to our producers has resulted.

The activities of our age in lines of research have reached the tillers
of the soil and inspired them with ambition to know more of the
principles that govern the forces of nature with which they have to
deal. Nearly half of the people of this country devote their energies
to growing things from the soil. Until a recent date little has been
done to prepare these millions for their life work. In most lines of
human activity college-trained men are the leaders. The farmer had no
opportunity for special training until the Congress made provision
for it forty years ago. During these years progress has been made
and teachers have been prepared. Over five thousand students are in
attendance at our State agricultural colleges. The Federal Government
expends ten millions of dollars annually toward this education and for
research in Washington and in the several States and Territories.
The Department of Agriculture has given facilities for post-graduate
work to five hundred young men during the last seven years, preparing
them for advanced lines of work in the Department and in the State
institutions.

The facts concerning meteorology and its relations to plant and animal
life are being systematically inquired into. Temperature and moisture
are controlling factors in all agricultural operations. The seasons of
the cyclones of the Caribbean Sea and their paths are being forecasted
with increasing accuracy. The cold winds that come from the north are
anticipated and their times and intensity told to farmers, gardeners,
and fruiterers in all southern localities.

We sell two hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of animals and
animal products to foreign countries every year, in addition to
supplying our own people more cheaply and abundantly than any other
nation is able to provide for its people. Successful manufacturing
depends primarily on cheap food, which accounts to a considerable
extent for our growth in this direction. The Department of Agriculture,
by careful inspection of meats, guards the health of our people and
gives clean bills of health to deserving exports; it is prepared to
deal promptly with imported diseases of animals, and maintain the
excellence of our flocks and herds in this respect. There should be an
annual census of the live stock of the nation.

We sell abroad about six hundred million dollars’ worth of plants and
their products every year. Strenuous efforts are being made to import
from foreign countries such grains as are suitable to our varying
localities. Seven years ago we bought three-fourths of our rice;
by helping the rice growers on the Gulf Coast to secure seeds from
the Orient suited to their conditions, and by giving them adequate
protection, they now supply home demand and export to the islands
of the Caribbean Sea and to other rice-growing countries. Wheat and
other grains have been imported from light-rainfall countries to our
lands in the West and Southwest that have not grown crops because
of light precipitation, resulting in an extensive addition to our
cropping area and our home-making territory that can not be irrigated.
Ten million bushels of first-class macaroni wheat were grown from
these experimental importations last year. Fruits suitable to our
soils and climates are being imported from all the countries of the
Old World—the fig from Turkey, the almond from Spain, the date from
Algeria, the mango from India. We are helping our fruit growers to
get their crops into European markets by studying their methods of
preservation through refrigeration, packing, and handling, which have
been quite successful. We are helping our hop growers by importing
varieties that ripen earlier and later than the kinds they have been
raising, thereby lengthening the harvesting season. The cotton crop of
the country is threatened with root rot, the bollworm, and the boll
weevil. Our pathologists will find immune varieties that will resist
the root disease, and the bollworm can be dealt with, but the boll
weevil is a serious menace to the cotton crop. It is a Central American
insect that has become acclimated in Texas and has done great damage. A
scientist of the Department of Agriculture has found the weevil at home
in Guatemala being kept in check by an ant, which has been brought to
our cotton fields for observation. It is hoped that it may serve a good
purpose.

The soils of the country are getting attention from the farmer’s
standpoint, and interesting results are following. We have duplicates
of the soils that grow the wrapper tobacco in Sumatra and the filler
tobacco in Cuba. It will be only a question of time when the large
amounts paid to these countries will be paid to our own people. The
reclamation of alkali lands is progressing, to give object lessons to
our people in methods by which worthless lands may be made productive.

The insect friends and enemies of the farmer are getting attention. The
enemy of the San Jose scale was found near the Great Wall of China,
and is now cleaning up all our orchards. The fig-fertilizing insect
imported from Turkey has helped to establish an industry in California
that amounts to from fifty to one hundred tons of dried figs annually,
and is extending over the Pacific Coast. A parasitic fly from South
Africa is keeping in subjection the black scale, the worst pest of the
orange and lemon industry in California.

Careful preliminary work is being done toward producing our own silk.
The mulberry is being distributed in large numbers, eggs are being
imported and distributed, improved reels were imported from Europe last
year, and two expert reelers were brought to Washington to reel the
crop of cocoons and teach the art to our own people.

The crop-reporting system of the Department of Agriculture is being
brought closer to accuracy every year. It has two hundred and fifty
thousand reporters selected from people in eight vocations in life.
It has arrangements with most European countries for interchange of
estimates, so that our people may know as nearly as possible with what
they must compete.

       *       *       *       *       *

During the two and a half years that have elapsed since the passage
of the reclamation act, rapid progress has been made in the surveys
and examinations of the opportunities for reclamation in the thirteen
States and three Territories of the arid West. Construction has
already been begun on the largest and most important of the irrigation
works, and plans are being completed for works which will utilize
the funds now available. The operations are being carried on by the
Reclamation Service, a corps of engineers selected through competitive
civil-service examinations. This corps includes experienced consulting
and constructing engineers, as well as various experts in mechanical
and legal matters, and is composed largely of men who have spent
most of their lives in practical affairs connected with irrigation.
The larger problems have been solved, and it now remains to execute
with care, economy, and thoroughness the work which has been laid
out. All important details are being carefully considered by boards
of consulting engineers, selected for their thorough knowledge and
practical experience. Each project is taken up on the ground by
competent men and viewed from the standpoint of the creation of
prosperous homes and of promptly refunding to the Treasury the cost
of construction. The reclamation act has been found to be remarkably
complete and effective, and so broad in its provisions that a wide
range of undertakings has been possible under it. At the same time,
economy is guaranteed by the fact that the funds must ultimately be
returned to be used over again.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is the cardinal principle of the forest-reserve policy of this
Administration that the reserves are for use. Whatever interferes
with the use of their resources is to be avoided by every possible
means. But these resources must be used in such a way as to make them
permanent.

The forest policy of the Government is just now a subject of vivid
public interest throughout the West and to the people of the United
States in general. The forest reserves themselves are of extreme value
to the present as well as to the future welfare of all the Western
public-land States. They powerfully affect the use and disposal of the
public lands. They are of special importance because they preserve
the water supply and the supply of timber for domestic purposes, and
so promote settlement under the reclamation act. Indeed, they are
essential to the welfare of every one of the great interests of the
West.

Forest reserves are created for two principal purposes. The first is
to preserve the water supply. This is their most important use. The
principal users of the water thus preserved are irrigation ranchers
and settlers, cities and towns to whom their municipal water supplies
are of the very first importance, users and furnishers of water power,
and the users of water for domestic, manufacturing, mining, and other
purposes. All these are directly dependent upon the forest reserves.

The second reason for which forest reserves are created is to preserve
the timber supply for various classes of wood users. Among the more
important of these are settlers under the reclamation act and other
acts, for whom a cheap and accessible supply of timber for domestic
uses is absolutely necessary; miners and prospectors, who are in
serious danger of losing their timber supply by fire or through export
by lumber companies when timber lands adjacent to their mines pass into
private ownership; lumbermen, transportation companies, builders, and
commercial interests in general.

Although the wisdom of creating forest reserves is nearly everywhere
heartily recognized, yet in a few localities there has been
misunderstanding and complaint. The following statement is therefore
desirable:

The forest-reserve policy can be successful only when it has the full
support of the people of the West. It can not safely, and should not
in any case, be imposed upon them against their will. But neither can
we accept the views of those whose only interest in the forest is
temporary; who are anxious to reap what they have not sown and then
move away, leaving desolation behind them. On the contrary, it is
everywhere and always the interest of the permanent settler and the
permanent business man, the man with a stake in the country, which must
be considered and which must decide.

The making of forest reserves within railroad and wagon-road land-grant
limits will hereafter, as for the past three years, be so managed as to
prevent the issue, under the act of June 4, 1897, of base for exchange
or lieu selection (usually called scrip). In all cases where forest
reserves within areas covered by land grants appear to be essential
to the prosperity of settlers, miners, or others, the Government
lands within such proposed forest reserves will, as in the recent
past, be withdrawn from sale or entry pending the completion of such
negotiations with the owners of the land grants as will prevent the
creation of so-called scrip.

It was formerly the custom to make forest reserves without first
getting definite and detailed information as to the character of
land and timber within their boundaries. This method of action often
resulted in badly chosen boundaries and consequent injustice to
settlers and others. Therefore this Administration adopted the present
method of first withdrawing the land from disposal, followed by careful
examination on the ground and the preparation of detailed maps and
descriptions, before any forest-reserve is created.

I have repeatedly called attention to the confusion which exists
in Government forest matters because the work is scattered among
three independent organizations. The United States is the only one
of the great nations in which the forest work of the Government
is not concentrated under one department, in consonance with the
plainest dictates of good administration and common-sense. The
present arrangement is bad from every point of view. Merely to
mention it is to prove that it should be terminated at once. As I
have repeatedly recommended, all the forest work of the Government
should be concentrated in the Department of Agriculture, where the
larger part of that work is already done, where practically all of
the trained foresters of the Government are employed, where chiefly
in Washington there is comprehensive firsthand knowledge of the
problems of the reserves acquired on the ground, where all problems
relating to growth from the soil are already gathered, and where
all the sciences auxiliary to forestry are at hand for prompt and
effective co-operation. These reasons are decisive in themselves, but
it should be added that the great organizations of citizens whose
interests are affected by the forest reserves, such as the National
Live Stock Association, the National Wool Growers’ Association, the
American Mining Congress, the National Irrigation Congress, and the
National Board of Trade, have uniformly, emphatically, and most of them
repeatedly, expressed themselves in favor of placing all Government
forest work in the Department of Agriculture because of the peculiar
adaptation of that Department for it. It is true, also, that the
forest services of nearly all the great nations of the world are under
the respective departments of agriculture, while in but two of the
smaller nations and in one colony are they under the department of the
interior. This is the result of long and varied experience, and it
agrees fully with the requirements of good administration in our own
case.

The creation of a forest service in the Department of Agriculture will
have for its important results:

First. A better handling of all forest work, because it will be under
a single head, and because the vast and indispensable experience of
the Department in all matters pertaining to the forest reserves, to
forestry in general, and to other forms of production from the soil,
will be easily and rapidly accessible.

Second. The reserves themselves, being handled from the point of view
of the man in the field, instead of the man in the office, will be more
easily and more widely useful to the people of the West than has been
the case hitherto.

Third. Within a comparatively short time the reserves will become
self-supporting. This is important, because continually and rapidly
increasing appropriations will be necessary for the proper care of
this exceedingly important interest of the Nation, and they can and
should be offset by returns from the National forests. Under similar
circumstances the forest possessions of other great nations form an
important source of revenue to their Governments.

Every administrative officer concerned is convinced of the necessity
for the proposed consolidation of forest work in the Department of
Agriculture, and I myself have urged it more than once in former
messages. Again I commend it to the early and favorable consideration
of the Congress. The interests of the Nation at large and of the West
in particular have suffered greatly because of the delay.

       *       *       *       *       *

I call the attention of the Congress again to the report and
recommendation of the Commission on the Public Lands forwarded by me
to the second session of the present Congress. The Commission has
prosecuted its investigations actively during the past season, and a
second report is now in an advanced stage of preparation.

       *       *       *       *       *

In connection with the work of the forest reserves I desire again to
urge upon the Congress the importance of authorizing the President to
set aside certain portions of these reserves or other public lands as
game refuges for the preservation of the bison, the wapiti, and other
large beasts once so abundant in our woods and mountains and on our
great plains, and now tending toward extinction. Every support should
be given to the authorities of the Yellowstone Park in their successful
efforts at preserving the large creatures therein; and at very little
expense portions of the public domain in other regions which are wholly
unsuited to agricultural settlement could be similarly utilized. We
owe it to future generations to keep alive the noble and beautiful
creatures which by their presence add such distinctive character to
the American wilderness. The limits of the Yellowstone Park should
be extended southward. The Canyon of the Colorado should be made a
national park; and the national park system should include the Yosemite
and as many as possible of the groves of giant trees in California.

       *       *       *       *       *

The veterans of the Civil War have a claim upon the Nation such as no
other body of our citizens possess. The Pension Bureau has never in
its history been managed in a more satisfactory manner than is now the
case.

       *       *       *       *       *

The progress of the Indians toward civilization, though not rapid,
is perhaps all that could be hoped for in view of the circumstances.
Within the past year many tribes have shown, in a degree greater than
ever before, an appreciation of the necessity of work. This changed
attitude is in part due to the policy recently pursued of reducing the
amount of subsistence to the Indians, and thus forcing them, through
sheer necessity, to work for a livelihood. The policy, though severe,
is a useful one, but it is to be exercised only with judgment and with
a full understanding of the conditions which exist in each community
for which it is intended. On or near the Indian reservations there is
usually very little demand for labor, and if the Indians are to earn
their living and when work can not be furnished from outside (which
is always preferable), then it must be furnished by the Government.
Practical instruction of this kind would in a few years result in the
forming of habits of regular industry, which would render the Indian
a producer, and would effect a great reduction in the cost of his
maintenance.

It is commonly declared that the slow advance of the Indians is due to
the unsatisfactory character of the men appointed to take immediate
charge of them, and to some extent this is true. While the standard of
the employees in the Indian Service shows great improvement over that
of bygone years, and while actual corruption or flagrant dishonesty
is now the rare exception, it is, nevertheless, the fact that the
salaries paid Indian agents are not large enough to attract the best
men to that field of work. To achieve satisfactory results the official
in charge of an Indian tribe should possess the high qualifications
which are required in the manager of a large business, but only in
exceptional cases is it possible to secure men of such a type for
these positions. Much better service, however, might be obtained from
those now holding the places were it practicable to get out of them
the best that is in them, and this should be done by bringing them
constantly into closer touch with their superior officers. An agent
who has been content to draw his salary, giving in return the least
possible equivalent in effort and service, may, by proper treatment, by
suggestion and encouragement, or persistent urging, be stimulated to
greater effort and induced to take a more active personal interest in
his work.

Under existing conditions an Indian agent in the distant West may be
wholly out of touch with the office of the Indian Bureau. He may very
well feel that no one takes a personal interest in him or his efforts.
Certain routine duties in the way of reports and accounts are required
of him, but there is no one with whom he may intelligently consult on
matters vital to his work, except after long delay. Such a man would be
greatly encouraged and aided by personal contact with some one whose
interest in Indian affairs and whose authority in the Indian Bureau
were greater than his own, and such contact would be certain to arouse
and constantly increase the interest he takes in his work.

The distance which separates the agents—the workers in the field—from
the Indian Office in Washington is a chief obstacle to Indian progress.
Whatever shall more closely unite these two branches of the Indian
Service, and shall enable them to co-operate more heartily and more
effectively, will be for the increased efficiency of the work and the
betterment of the race for whose improvement the Indian Bureau was
established. The appointment of a field assistant to the Commissioner
of Indian Affairs would be certain to ensure this good end. Such an
official, if possessed of the requisite energy and deep interest in
the work, would be a most efficient factor in bringing into closer
relationship and a more direct union of effort the Bureau in Washington
and its agents in the field; and with the co-operation of its branches
thus secured the Indian Bureau would, in measure fuller than ever
before, lift up the savage toward that self-help and self-reliance
which constitute the man.

       *       *       *       *       *

In 1907 there will be held at Hampton Roads the tricentennial
celebration of the settlement at Jamestown, Va., with which the history
of what has now become the United States really begins. I commend this
to your favorable consideration. It is an event of prime historic
significance, in which all the people of the United States should feel,
and should show, great and general interest.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the Post Office Department the service has increased in efficiency,
and conditions as to revenue and expenditure continue satisfactory.
The increase of revenue during the year was $9,358,181.10, or 6.9
per cent, the total receipts amounting to $143,382,624.34. The
expenditures were $152,362,116.70, an increase of about 9 per cent over
the previous year, being thus $8,979,492.36 in excess of the current
revenue. Included in these expenditures was a total appropriation
of $12,956,637.35 for the continuation and extension of the rural
free-delivery service, which was an increase of $4,902,237.35 over
the amount expended for this purpose in the preceding fiscal year.
Large as this expenditure has been, the beneficent results attained
in extending the free distribution of mails to the residents of rural
districts have justified the wisdom of the outlay. Statistics brought
down to the 1st of October, 1904, show that on that date there were
27,138 rural routes established, serving approximately 12,000,000 of
people in rural districts remote from post offices, and that there were
pending at that time 3,859 petitions for the establishment of new rural
routes. Unquestionably some part of the general increase in receipts
is due to the increased postal facilities which the rural service has
afforded. The revenues have also been aided greatly by amendments in
the classification of mail matter, and the curtailment of abuses of the
second-class mailing privilege. The average increase in the volume of
mail matter for the period beginning with 1902 and ending June, 1905
(that portion for 1905 being estimated), is 40.47 per cent, as compared
with 25.46 per cent for the period immediately preceding, and 15.92 for
the four-year period immediately preceding that.

       *       *       *       *       *

Our consular system needs improvement. Salaries should be substituted
for fees, and the proper classification, grading, and transfer of
consular officers should be provided. I am not prepared to say that a
competitive system of examinations for appointment would work well; but
by law it should be provided that consuls should be familiar, according
to places for which they apply, with the French, German, or Spanish
languages, and should possess acquaintance with the resources of the
United States.

       *       *       *       *       *

The collection of objects of art contemplated in Section 5586 of the
Revised Statutes should be designated and established as a National
Gallery of Art; and the Smithsonian Institution should be authorized to
accept any additions to said collection that may be received by gift,
bequest, or devise.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is desirable to enact a proper National quarantine law. It is
most undesirable that a State should on its own initiative enforce
quarantine regulations which are in effect a restriction upon
interstate and international commerce. The question should properly
be assumed by the Government alone. The Surgeon-General of the
National Public Health and Marine-Hospital Service has repeatedly and
convincingly set forth the need for such legislation.

       *       *       *       *       *

I call your attention to the great extravagance in printing and binding
Government publications, and especially to the fact that altogether too
many of these publications are printed. There is a constant tendency to
increase their number and their volume. It is an understatement to say
that no appreciable harm would be caused by, and substantial benefit
would accrue from, decreasing the amount of printing now done by at
least one-half. Probably the great majority of the Government reports
and the like now printed are never read at all, and furthermore the
printing of much of the material contained in many of the remaining
ones serves no useful purpose whatever.

       *       *       *       *       *

The attention of the Congress should be especially given to the
currency question, and that the standing committees on the matter in
the two Houses charged with the duty take up the matter of our currency
and see whether it is not possible to secure an agreement in the
business world for bettering the system; the committees should consider
the question of the retirement of the greenbacks and the problem of
securing in our currency such elasticity as is consistent with safety.
Every silver dollar should be made by law redeemable in gold at the
option of the holder.

       *       *       *       *       *

I especially commend to your immediate attention the encouragement of
our merchant marine by appropriate legislation.

       *       *       *       *       *

The growing importance of the Orient as a field for American exports
drew from my predecessor, President McKinley, an urgent request for its
special consideration by the Congress. In his message of 1898 he stated:

“In this relation, as showing the peculiar volume and value of our
trade with China and the peculiarly favorable conditions which exist
for their expansion in the normal course of trade, I refer to the
communication addressed to the Speaker of the House of Representatives
by the Secretary of the Treasury on the 14th of last June, with
its accompanying letter of the Secretary of State, recommending an
appropriation for a commission to study the industrial and commercial
conditions in the Chinese Empire and to report as to the opportunities
for and the obstacles to the enlargement of markets in China for the
raw products and manufactures of the United States. Action was not
taken thereon during the last session. I cordially urge that the
recommendation receive at your hands the consideration which its
importance and timeliness merit.”

In his annual message of 1899 he again called attention to this
recommendation, quoting it, and stated further:

“I now renew this recommendation, as the importance of the subject has
steadily grown since it was first submitted to you, and no time should
be lost in studying for ourselves the resources of this great field for
American trade and enterprise.”

The importance of securing proper information and data with a view to
the enlargement of our trade with Asia is undiminished. Our consular
representatives in China have strongly urged a place for permanent
display of American products in some prominent trade centre of that
Empire, under Government control and management, as an effective means
of advancing our export trade therein. I call the attention of the
Congress to the desirability of carrying out these suggestions.

       *       *       *       *       *

In dealing with the questions of immigration and naturalization it is
indispensable to keep certain facts ever before the minds of those
who share in enacting the laws. First and foremost, let us remember
that the question of being a good American has nothing whatever to do
with a man’s birthplace any more than it has to do with his creed.
In every generation from the time this Government was founded men of
foreign birth have stood in the very foremost rank of good citizenship,
and that not merely in one, but in every field of American activity;
while to try to draw a distinction between the man whose parents
came to this country and the man whose ancestors came to it several
generations back is a mere absurdity. Good Americanism is a matter of
heart, of conscience, of lofty aspiration, of sound common-sense, but
not of birthplace or of creed. The medal of honor, the highest prize
to be won by those who serve in the Army and the Navy of the United
States, decorates men born here, and it also decorates men born in
Great Britain and Ireland, in Germany, in Scandinavia, in France, and
doubtless in other countries also. In the field of statesmanship, in
the field of business, in the field of philanthropic endeavor, it is
equally true that among the men of whom we are most proud as Americans
no distinction whatever can be drawn between those who themselves
or whose parents came over in sailing ship or steamer from across
the water and those whose ancestors stepped ashore into the wooded
wilderness at Plymouth or at the mouth of the Hudson, the Delaware,
or the James nearly three centuries ago. No fellow-citizen of ours is
entitled to any peculiar regard because of the way in which he worships
his Maker, or because of the birthplace of himself or his parents, nor
should he be in any way discriminated against therefor. Each must stand
on his worth as a man and each is entitled to be judged solely thereby.

There is no danger of having too many immigrants of the right kind. It
makes no difference from what country they come. If they are sound in
body and in mind, and, above all, if they are of good character, so
that we can rest assured that their children and grandchildren will
be worthy fellow-citizens of our children and grandchildren, then we
should welcome them with cordial hospitality.

But the citizenship of this country should not be debased. It is
vital that we should keep high the standard of well-being among our
wage-workers, and therefore we should not admit masses of men whose
standards of living and whose personal customs and habits are such that
they tend to lower the level of the American wage-worker; and above all
we should not admit any man of an unworthy type, any man concerning
whom we can say that he will himself be a bad citizen, or that his
children and grandchildren will detract from instead of adding to the
sum of the good citizenship of the country. Similarly we should take
the greatest care about naturalization. Fraudulent naturalization, the
naturalization of improper persons, is a curse to our Government; and
it is the affair of every honest voter, wherever born, to see that
no fraudulent voting is allowed, that no fraud in connection with
naturalization is permitted.

In the past year the cases of false, fraudulent, and improper
naturalization of aliens coming to the attention of the executive
branches of the Government have increased to an alarming degree.
Extensive sales of forged certificates of naturalization have been
discovered, as well as many cases of naturalization secured by perjury
and fraud; and in addition, instances have accumulated showing that
many courts issue certificates of naturalization carelessly and upon
insufficient evidence.

Under the Constitution it is in the power of the Congress “to establish
a uniform rule of naturalization,” and numerous laws have from time
to time been enacted for that purpose, which have been supplemented
in a few States by State laws having special application. The Federal
statutes permit naturalization by any court of record in the United
States having common-law jurisdiction and a seal and clerk, except the
police court of the District of Columbia, and nearly all these courts
exercise this improper function. It results that where so many courts
of such varying grades have jurisdiction, there is lack of uniformity
in the rules applied in conferring naturalization. Some courts
are strict and others lax. An alien who may secure naturalization
in one place might be denied it in another, and the intent of the
constitutional provision is in fact defeated. Furthermore, the
certificates of naturalization issued by the courts differ widely in
wording and appearance, and when they are brought into use in foreign
countries are frequently subject to suspicion.

       *       *       *       *       *

There should be a comprehensive revision of the naturalization laws.
The courts having power to naturalize should be definitely named by
national authority; the testimony upon which naturalization may be
conferred should be definitely prescribed; publication of impending
naturalization applications should be required in advance of their
hearing in court; the form and wording of all certificates issued
should be uniform throughout the country, and the courts should be
required to make returns to the Secretary of State at stated periods
of all naturalizations conferred.

       *       *       *       *       *

Not only are the laws relating to naturalization now defective, but
those relating to citizenship of the United States ought also to
be made the subject of scientific inquiry with a view to probable
further legislation. By what acts expatriation may be assumed to have
been accomplished, how long an American citizen may reside abroad
and receive the protection of our passport, whether any degree of
protection should be extended to one who has made the declaration of
intention to become a citizen of the United States, but has not secured
naturalization, are questions of serious import, involving personal
rights and often producing friction between this Government and
foreign Governments. Yet upon these questions our laws are silent. I
recommend that an examination be made into the subjects of citizenship,
expatriation, and protection of Americans abroad, with a view to
appropriate legislation.

       *       *       *       *       *

The power of the Government to protect the integrity of the elections
of its own officials is inherent and has been recognized and affirmed
by repeated declarations of the Supreme Court. There is no enemy of
free government more dangerous and none so insidious as the corruption
of the electorate. No one defends or excuses corruption, and it would
seem to follow that none would oppose vigorous measures to eradicate
it. I recommend the enactment of a law directed against bribery and
corruption in Federal elections. The details of such a law may be
safely left to the wise discretion of the Congress, but it should go
as far as under the Constitution it is possible to go, and should
include severe penalties against him who gives or receives a bribe
intended to influence his act or opinion as an elector; and provisions
for the publication not only of the expenditures for nominations and
elections of all candidates, but also of all contributions received and
expenditures made by political committees.

       *       *       *       *       *

No subject is better worthy the attention of the Congress than that
portion of the report of the Attorney-General dealing with the long
delays and the great obstruction to justice experienced in the cases
of Beavers, Green and Gaynor, and Benson. Were these isolated and
special cases, I should not call your attention to them; but the
difficulties encountered as regards these men who have been indicted
for criminal practices are not exceptional; they are precisely similar
in kind to what occurs again and again in the case of criminals who
have sufficient means to enable them to take advantage of a system of
procedure which has grown up in the Federal courts and which amounts in
effect to making the law easy of enforcement against the man who has
no money, and difficult of enforcement, even to the point of sometimes
securing immunity, as regards the man who has money. In criminal cases
the writ of the United States should run throughout its borders. The
wheels of justice should not be clogged, as they have been clogged in
the case above-mentioned, where it has proved absolutely impossible to
bring the accused to the place appointed by the Constitution for his
trial. Of recent years there has been grave and increasing complaint
of the difficulty of bringing to justice those criminals whose
criminality, instead of being against one person in the Republic, is
against all persons in the Republic, because it is against the Republic
itself. Under any circumstances and from the very nature of the case it
is often exceedingly difficult to secure proper punishment of those who
have been guilty of wrongdoing against the Government. By the time the
offender can be brought into court the popular wrath against him has
generally subsided; and there is in most instances very slight danger
indeed of any prejudice existing in the minds of the jury against him.
At present the interests of the innocent man are amply safeguarded;
but the interests of the Government, that is, the interests of honest
administration, that is the interests of the people, are not recognized
as they should be. No subject better warrants the attention of the
Congress. Indeed, no subject better warrants the attention of the bench
and the bar throughout the United States.

       *       *       *       *       *

Alaska, like all our Territorial acquisitions, has proved resourceful
beyond the expectations of those who made the purchase. It has become
the home of many hardy, industrious, and thrifty American citizens.
Towns of a permanent character have been built. The extent of its
wealth in minerals, timber, fisheries, and agriculture, while great,
is probably not comprehended yet in any just measure by our people. We
do know, however, that from a very small beginning its products have
grown until they are a steady and material contribution to the wealth
of the Nation. Owing to the immensity of Alaska and its location in the
far north, it is a difficult matter to provide many things essential to
its growth and to the happiness and comfort of its people by private
enterprise alone. It should, therefore, receive reasonable aid from the
Government. The Government has already done excellent work for Alaska
in laying cables and building telegraph lines. This work has been done
in the most economical and efficient way by the Signal Corps of the
Army.

In some respects it has outgrown its present laws, while in others
those laws have been found to be inadequate. In order to obtain
information upon which I could rely I caused an official of the
Department of Justice, in whose judgment I have confidence, to visit
Alaska during the past summer for the purpose of ascertaining how
government is administered there and what legislation is actually
needed at present. A statement of the conditions found to exist,
together with some recommendations and the reasons therefor, in
which I strongly concur, will be found in the annual report of the
Attorney-General. In some instances I feel that the legislation
suggested is so imperatively needed that I am moved briefly to
emphasize the Attorney-General’s proposals.

Under the Code of Alaska as it now stands many purely administrative
powers and duties, including by far the most important, devolve upon
the district judges or upon the clerks of the district court acting
under the direction of the judges, while the Governor, upon whom these
powers and duties should logically fall, has nothing specific to do
except to make annual reports, issue Thanksgiving Day proclamations,
and appoint Indian policemen and notaries public. I believe it
essential to good government in Alaska, and therefore recommend that
the Congress divest the district judges and the clerks of their courts
of the administrative or executive functions that they now exercise and
cast them upon the Governor. This would not be an innovation; it would
simply conform the government of Alaska to fundamental principles,
making the Governorship a real instead of a merely nominal office,
and leaving the judges free to give their entire attention to their
judicial duties and at the same time removing them from a great deal of
the strife that now embarrasses the judicial office in Alaska.

I also recommend that the salaries of the district judges and district
attorneys in Alaska be increased so as to make them equal to those
received by corresponding officers in the United States after
deducting the difference in the cost of living; that the district
attorneys should be prohibited from engaging in private practice;
that United States commissioners be appointed by the Governor of the
Territory instead of by the district judges, and that a fixed salary be
provided for them to take the place of the discredited “fee system,”
which should be abolished in all offices; that a mounted constabulary
be created to police the territory outside the limits of incorporated
towns—a vast section now wholly without police protection; and that
some provision be made to at least lessen the oppressive delays and
costs that now attend the prosecution of appeals from the district
court of Alaska. There should be a division of the existing judicial
districts, and an increase in the number of judges.

Alaska should have a Delegate in the Congress. Where possible, the
Congress should aid in the construction of needed wagon roads.
Additional lighthouses should be provided. In my judgment, it is
especially important to aid in such manner as seems just and feasible
in the construction of a trunk line of railway to connect the Gulf of
Alaska with the Yukon River through American territory. This would be
most beneficial to the development of the resources of the Territory,
and to the comfort and welfare of its people.

Salmon hatcheries should be established in many different streams,
so as to secure the preservation of this valuable food fish. Salmon
fisheries and canneries should be prohibited on certain of the rivers
where the mass of those Indians dwell who live almost exclusively on
fish.

The Alaskan natives are kindly, intelligent, anxious to learn,
and willing to work. Those who have come under the influence of
civilization, even for a limited period, have proved their capability
of becoming self-supporting, self-respecting citizens, and ask only
for the just enforcement of law and intelligent instruction and
supervision. Others, living in more remote regions, primitive, simple
hunters and fisher folk, who know only the life of the woods and the
waters, are daily being confronted with twentieth-century civilization
with all of its complexities. Their country is being overrun by
strangers, the game slaughtered and driven away, the streams depleted
of fish, and hitherto unknown and fatal diseases brought to them, all
of which combine to produce a state of abject poverty and want which
must result in their extinction. Action in their interest is demanded
by every consideration of justice and humanity.

The needs of these people are:

The abolition of the present fee system, whereby the native is
degraded, imposed upon, and taught the injustice of law.

The establishment of hospitals at central points, so that contagious
diseases that are brought to them continually by incoming whites may
be localized and not allowed to become epidemic, to spread death and
destitution over great areas.

The development of the educational system in the form of practical
training in such industries as will assure the Indians self-support
under the changed conditions in which they will have to live.

The duties of the office of the Governor should be extended to include
the supervision of Indian affairs, with necessary assistants in
different districts. He should be provided with the means and the power
to protect and advise the native people, to furnish medical treatment
in time of epidemics, and to extend material relief in periods of
famine and extreme destitution.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Alaskan natives should be given the right to acquire, hold,
and dispose of property upon the same conditions as given other
inhabitants; and the privilege of citizenship should be given to
such as may be able to meet certain definite requirements. In Hawaii
Congress should give the Governor power to remove all the officials
appointed under him. The harbor of Honolulu should be dredged. The
Marine-Hospital Service should be empowered to study leprosy in the
islands. I ask special consideration for the report and recommendations
of the Governor of Porto Rico.

       *       *       *       *       *

In treating of our foreign policy and of the attitude that this great
Nation should assume in the world at large, it is absolutely necessary
to consider the Army and the Navy, and the Congress, through which the
thought of the Nation finds its expression, should keep ever vividly
in mind the fundamental fact that it is impossible to treat our foreign
policy, whether this policy takes shape in the effort to secure justice
for others or justice for ourselves, save as conditioned upon the
attitude we are willing to take toward our Army, and especially toward
our Navy. It is not merely unwise, it is contemptible, for a nation,
as for an individual, to use high-sounding language to proclaim its
purposes, or to take positions which are ridiculous if unsupported by
potential force, and then to refuse to provide this force. If there is
no intention of providing and of keeping the force necessary to back up
a strong attitude, then it is far better not to assume such an attitude.

The steady aim of this Nation, as of all enlightened nations, should
be to strive to bring ever nearer the day when there shall prevail
throughout the world the peace of justice. There are kinds of peace
which are highly undesirable, which are in the long run as destructive
as any war. Tyrants and oppressors have many times made a wilderness
and called it peace. Many times peoples who were slothful or timid or
shortsighted, who had been enervated by ease or by luxury, or misled by
false teachings, have shrunk in unmanly fashion from doing duty that
was stern and that needed self-sacrifice, and have sought to hide from
their own minds their shortcomings, their ignoble motives, by calling
them love of peace. The peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven
weakness, the peace of injustice, all these should be shunned as we
shun unrighteous war. The goal to set before us as a Nation, the goal
which should be set before all mankind, is the attainment of the peace
of justice, of the peace which comes when each nation is not merely
safeguarded in its own rights, but scrupulously recognizes and performs
its duty toward others. Generally peace tells for righteousness; but if
there is conflict between the two, then our fealty is due first to the
cause of righteousness. Unrighteous wars are common, and unrighteous
peace is rare; but both should be shunned. The right of freedom and the
responsibility for the exercise of that right can not be divorced. One
of our great poets has well and finely said that freedom is not a gift
that tarries long in the hands of cowards. Neither does it tarry long
in the hands of those too slothful, too dishonest, or too unintelligent
to exercise it. The eternal vigilance which is the price of liberty
must be exercised, sometimes to guard against outside foes; although of
course far more often to guard against our own selfish or thoughtless
shortcomings.

If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are
so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign
policy in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that
a nation has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong
or weak, than an individual has to do injustice to another individual;
that the same moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we
must also remember that it is as much the duty of the Nation to
guard its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the
individual so to do. Within the Nation the individual has now delegated
this right to the State, that is, to the representative of all the
individuals, and it is a maxim of the law that for every wrong there is
a remedy. But in international law we have not advanced by any means as
far as we have advanced in municipal law. There is as yet no judicial
way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs
another, or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the
wrong-doer can be brought. Either it is necessary supinely to acquiesce
in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality and aggression,
or else it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly to stand
up for its rights. Until some method is devised by which there shall
be a degree of international control over offending nations, it would
be a wicked thing for the most civilized powers, for those with most
sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous
appreciation of the difference between right and wrong, to disarm.
If the great civilized nations of the present day should completely
disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism
in one form or another. Under any circumstances a sufficient armament
would have to be kept up to serve the purposes of international police;
and until international cohesion and the sense of international duties
and rights are far more advanced than at present, a nation desirous
both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others must
have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it
as its part of the general world duty. Therefore it follows that a
self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand
endeavor by every means to aid in the development of the various
movements which tend to provide substitutes for war, which tend to
render nations in their actions toward one another, and indeed toward
their own peoples, more responsive to the general sentiment of humane
and civilized mankind; and on the other hand it should keep prepared,
while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself, to repel any wrong, and
in exceptional cases to take action which in a more advanced stage of
international relations would come under the head of the exercise of
the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and to
all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil.

       *       *       *       *       *

We are in every way endeavoring to help on, with cordial goodwill,
every movement which will tend to bring us into more friendly relations
with the rest of mankind. In pursuance of this policy I shall shortly
lay before the Senate treaties of arbitration with all powers which
are willing to enter into these treaties with us. It is not possible
at this period of the world’s development to agree to arbitrate all
matters, but there are many matters of possible difference between us
and other nations which can be thus arbitrated. Furthermore, at the
request of the Interparliamentary Union, an eminent body composed of
practical statesmen from all countries, I have asked the Powers to join
with this Government in a second Hague conference, at which it is hoped
that the work already so happily begun at The Hague may be carried some
steps further toward completion. This carries out the desire expressed
by the first Hague conference itself.

       *       *       *       *       *

It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or
entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western
Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country
desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and
prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count
upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to
act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political
matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear
no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an
impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized
society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention
by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence
of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United
States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or
impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every
country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable
and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt amendment Cuba
has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the
republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing,
all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would
be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are
in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within
their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure
to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized
society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a
spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them
only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that
their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad
had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign
aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.
It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or
anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence,
must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be
separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.

In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have
taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to
circumscribe the theatre of war in the Far East, and to secure the
open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in
the interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which,
while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made
to our sympathies. Ordinarily it is very much wiser and more useful for
us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material
betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better
the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our
own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for
the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to
put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race
prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions about wrongdoing
elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed on so
vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether it
is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval
of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The
cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There
must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we
refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action
may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must
depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree
of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which
we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop
to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it
is not to be expected that a people like ours, which in spite of
certain very obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows by
its consistent practice its belief in the principles of civil and
religious liberty and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even the
worst crime, like the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic,
so that individuals and not classes are molested in their fundamental
rights—it is inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to
give expression to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre
of the Jews in Kishineff, or when it witnesses such systematic and
long-extended cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of
which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them
the indignant pity of the civilized world.

       *       *       *       *       *

Even where it is not possible to secure in other nations the observance
of the principles which we accept as axiomatic, it is necessary for us
firmly to insist upon the rights of our own citizens without regard
to their creed or race; without regard to whether they were born here
or born abroad. It has proved very difficult to secure from Russia
the right for our Jewish fellow-citizens to receive passports and
travel through Russian territory. Such conduct is not only unjust
and irritating toward us, but it is difficult to see its wisdom from
Russia’s standpoint. No conceivable good is accomplished by it. If
an American Jew or an American Christian misbehaves himself in Russia
he can at once be driven out; but the ordinary American Jew, like the
ordinary American Christian, would behave just about as he behaves
here, that is, behave as any good citizen ought to behave; and where
this is the case it is a wrong against which we are entitled to protest
to refuse him his passport without regard to his conduct and character,
merely on racial and religious grounds. In Turkey our difficulties
arise less from the way in which our citizens are sometimes treated
than from the indignation inevitably excited in seeing such fearful
misrule as has been witnessed both in Armenia and Macedonia.

       *       *       *       *       *

The strong arm of the Government in enforcing respect for its just
rights in international matters is the Navy of the United States.
I most earnestly recommend that there be no halt in the work of
upbuilding the American Navy. There is no more patriotic duty before
us as a people than to keep the Navy adequate to the needs of this
country’s position. We have undertaken to build the Isthmian Canal. We
have undertaken to secure for ourselves our just share in the trade of
the Orient. We have undertaken to protect our citizens from improper
treatment in foreign lands. We continue steadily to insist on the
application of the Monroe Doctrine to the Western Hemisphere. Unless
our attitude in these and all similar matters is to be a mere boastful
sham we can not afford to abandon our naval programme. Our voice is now
potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war.
But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor
deserve the slightest attention if we were impotent to make them good.

The war which now unfortunately rages in the Far East has emphasized
in striking fashion the new possibilities of naval warfare. The
lessons taught are both strategic and tactical, and are political as
well as military. The experiences of the war have shown in conclusive
fashion that while sea-going and sea-keeping torpedo destroyers are
indispensable, and fast lightly armed and armored cruisers very useful,
yet that the main reliance, the main standby, in any navy worthy the
name must be the great battleships, heavily armored and heavily gunned.
Not a Russian or Japanese battleship has been sunk by a torpedo boat,
or by gunfire, while among the less protected ships, cruiser after
cruiser has been destroyed whenever the hostile squadrons have gotten
within range of one another’s weapons. There will always be a large
field of usefulness for cruisers, especially of the more formidable
type. We need to increase the number of torpedo-boat destroyers, paying
less heed to their having a knot or two extra speed than to their
capacity to keep the seas for weeks and, if necessary, for months at a
time. It is wise to build submarine torpedo boats, as under certain
circumstances they might be very useful. But most of all we need to
continue building our fleet of battleships, or ships so powerfully
armed that they can inflict the maximum of damage upon our opponents,
and so well protected that they can suffer a severe hammering in return
without fatal impairment of their ability to fight and manœuvre. Of
course ample means must be provided for enabling the personnel of
the Navy to be brought to the highest point of efficiency. Our great
fighting ships and torpedo boats must be ceaselessly trained and
manœuvred in squadrons. The officers and men can only learn their trade
thoroughly by ceaseless practice on the high seas. In the event of war
it would be far better to have no ships at all than to have ships of
a poor and ineffective type, or ships which, however good, were yet
manned by untrained and unskilful crews. The best officers and men in
a poor ship could do nothing against fairly good opponents; and, on
the other hand, a modern warship is useless unless the officers and
men aboard her have become adepts in their duties. The marksmanship in
our Navy has improved in an extraordinary degree during the last three
years, and on the whole the types of our battleships are improving; but
much remains to be done. Sooner or later we shall have to provide for
some method by which there will be promotions for merit as well as for
seniority, or else retirement of all those who after a certain age have
not advanced beyond a certain grade; while no effort must be spared to
make the service attractive to the enlisted men in order that they may
be kept as long as possible in it. Reservation public schools should be
provided wherever there are navy-yards.

       *       *       *       *       *

Within the last three years the United States has set an example in
disarmament where disarmament was proper. By law our Army is fixed at
a maximum of one hundred thousand and a minimum of sixty thousand men.
When there was insurrection in the Philippines we kept the Army at
the maximum. Peace came in the Philippines, and now our Army has been
reduced to the minimum at which it is possible to keep it with due
regard to its efficiency. The guns now mounted require twenty-eight
thousand men, if the coast fortifications are to be adequately manned.
Relatively to the Nation, it is not now so large as the police force
of New York or Chicago, relatively to the population of either city.
We need more officers; there are not enough to perform the regular
army work. It is very important that the officers of the Army should
be accustomed to handle their men in masses, as it is also important
that the National Guard of the several States should be accustomed to
actual field manœuvring, especially in connection with the regulars.
For this reason we are to be congratulated upon the success of the
field manœuvres at Manassas last fall, manœuvres in which a larger
number of Regulars and National Guard took part than was ever before
assembled together in time of peace. No other civilized nation has,
relatively to its population, such a diminutive Army as ours; and while
the Army is so small we are not to be excused if we fail to keep it at
a very high grade of proficiency. It must be incessantly practiced;
the standard for the enlisted men should be kept very high, while at
the same time the service should be made as attractive as possible;
and the standard for the officers should be kept even higher—which, as
regards the upper ranks, can best be done by introducing some system of
selection and rejection into the promotions. We should be able, in the
event of some sudden emergency, to put into the field one first-class
army corps, which should be, as a whole, at least the equal of any body
of troops of like number belonging to any other nation.

Great progress has been made in protecting our coasts by adequate
fortifications with sufficient guns. We should, however, pay much more
heed than at present to the development of an extensive system of
floating mines for use in all our more important harbors. These mines
have been proved to be a most formidable safeguard against hostile
fleets.

       *       *       *       *       *

I earnestly call the attention of the Congress to the need of amending
the existing law relating to the award of Congressional medals of honor
in the Navy so as to provide that they may be awarded to commissioned
officers and warrant officers as well as to enlisted men. These justly
prized medals are given in the Army alike to the officers and the
enlisted men, and it is most unjust that the commissioned officers and
warrant officers of the Navy should not in this respect have the same
rights as their brethren in the Army and as the enlisted men of the
Navy.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the Philippine Islands there has been during the past year a
continuation of the steady progress which has obtained ever since our
troops definitely got the upper hand of the insurgents. The Philippine
people, or, to speak more accurately, the many tribes, and even races,
sundered from one another more or less sharply, who go to make up the
people of the Philippine Islands, contain many elements of good, and
some elements which we have a right to hope stand for progress. At
present they are utterly incapable of existing in independence at all
or of building up a civilization of their own. I firmly believe that we
can help them to rise higher and higher in the scale of civilization
and of capacity for self-government, and I most earnestly hope that in
the end they will be able to stand, if not entirely alone, yet in some
such relation to the United States as Cuba now stands. This end is not
yet in sight, and it may be indefinitely postponed if our people are
foolish enough to turn the attention of the Filipinos away from the
problems of achieving moral and material prosperity, of working for a
stable, orderly, and just government, and toward foolish and dangerous
intrigues for a complete independence for which they are as yet
totally unfit.

On the other hand, our people must keep steadily before their minds
the fact that the justification for our stay in the Philippines must
ultimately rest chiefly upon the good we are able to do in the islands.
I do not overlook the fact that in the development of our interests in
the Pacific Ocean and along its coasts, the Philippines have played
and will play an important part, and that our interests have been
served in more than one way by the possession of the islands. But our
chief reason for continuing to hold them must be that we ought in good
faith to try to do our share of the world’s work, and this particular
piece of work has been imposed upon us by the results of the war with
Spain. The problem presented to us in the Philippine Islands is akin
to, but not exactly like, the problems presented to the other great
civilized powers which have possessions in the Orient. There are points
of resemblance in our work to the work which is being done by the
British in India and Egypt, by the French in Algiers, by the Dutch in
Java, by the Russians in Turkestan, by the Japanese in Formosa; but
more distinctly than any of these Powers we are endeavoring to develop
the natives themselves so that they shall take an ever-increasing
share in their own government, and as far as prudent we are already
admitting their representatives to a governmental equality with our
own. There are commissioners, judges, and governors in the islands who
are Filipinos and who have exactly the same share in the government
of the islands as have their colleagues who are Americans, while in
the lower ranks, of course, the great majority of the public servants
are Filipinos. Within two years we shall be trying the experiment of
an elective lower house in the Philippine legislature. It may be that
the Filipinos will misuse this legislature, and they certainly will
misuse it if they are misled by foolish persons here at home into
starting an agitation for their own independence or into any factious
or improper action. In such case they will do themselves no good, and
will stop for the time being all further effort to advance them and
give them a greater share in their own government. But if they act
with wisdom and self-restraint, if they show that they are capable
of electing a legislature which in its turn is capable of taking a
sane and efficient part in the actual work of government, they can
rest assured that a full and increasing measure of recognition will
be given them. Above all they should remember that their prime needs
are moral and industrial, not political. It is a good thing to try the
experiment of giving them a legislature; but it is a far better thing
to give them schools, good roads, railroads which will enable them to
get their products to market, honest courts, an honest and efficient
constabulary, and all that tends to produce order, peace, fair dealing
as between man and man, and habits of intelligent industry and thrift.
If they are safeguarded against oppression, and if their wants,
material and spiritual, are studied intelligently and in a spirit of
friendly sympathy, much more good will be done them than by any effort
to give them political power, though this effort may in its own proper
time and place be proper enough.

Meanwhile our own people should remember that there is need for the
highest standard of conduct among the Americans sent to the Philippine
Islands, not only among the public servants, but among the private
individuals who go to them. It is because I feel this so deeply that in
the administration of these islands I have positively refused to permit
any discrimination whatsoever for political reasons, and have insisted
that in choosing the public servants consideration should be paid
solely to the worth of the men chosen and to the needs of the islands.
There is no higher body of men in our public service than we have
in the Philippine Islands under Governor Wright and his associates.
So far as possible these men should be given a free hand, and their
suggestions should receive the hearty backing both of the Executive and
of the Congress. There is need of a vigilant and disinterested support
of our public servants in the Philippines by good citizens here in the
United States. Unfortunately hitherto those of our people here at home
who have specially claimed to be the champions of the Filipinos have in
reality been their worst enemies. This will continue to be the case
as long as they strive to make the Filipinos independent, and stop all
industrial development of the islands by crying out against the laws
which would bring it on the ground that capitalists must not “exploit”
the islands. Such proceedings are not only unwise, but are most harmful
to the Filipinos, who do not need independence at all, but who do need
good laws, good public servants, and the industrial development that
can only come if the investment of American and foreign capital in the
islands is favored in all legitimate ways.

Every measure taken concerning the islands should be taken primarily
with a view to their advantage. We should certainly give them lower
tariff rates on their exports to the United States; if this is not done
it will be a wrong to extend our shipping laws to them. I earnestly
hope for the immediate enactment into law of the legislation now
pending to encourage American capital to seek investment in the islands
in railroads, in factories, in plantations, and in lumbering and mining.

                                                     THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

  WHITE HOUSE,
  _December 6, 1904_.




ADDRESS TO THE FOREST CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 5, 1905


_Mr. Secretary, Gentlemen and Ladies_:

It is a pleasure to greet all of you here this afternoon, but of course
especially the members of the American Forest Congress. You have made,
by your coming, a meeting which is without parallel in the history of
forestry. And, Mr. Secretary, I must take this opportunity of saying
to you what you so amply deserve, that no man in this country has done
so much as you have done in the last eight years to make it possible
to take a business view from the standpoint of all the country of just
such questions as this. It is not many years since such a meeting as
this would have been regarded as chimerical; the thought of it would
have been regarded as absolutely chimerical. In the old pioneer days
the American had but one thought about a tree, and that was to cut it
down; and the mental attitude of the Nation toward the forests was
largely conditioned upon the fact that the life work of the earlier
generations of our people had been of necessity to hew down the
forests, for they had to make clearings on which to live; and it was
not until half a century of our national life had passed that any
considerable body of American citizens began to live under conditions
where the tree ceased to be something to be cleared off the earth.
It always takes time to get the mind of a people accustomed to any
change in conditions, and it took a long time to get the mind of our
people, as a whole, accustomed to the fact that they had to alter their
attitude toward the forests. For the first time the great business
and the forest interests of the Nation have joined together, through
delegates altogether worthy of the organizations they represent, to
consider their individual and their common interests in the forest.
This congress may well be called a meeting of forest users, for that
the users of the forest come together to consider how best to combine
use with preservation is the significant fact of the meeting, the fact
full of powerful promise for the forests of the future.

The producers, the manufacturers, and the great common carriers of the
Nation had long failed to realize their true and vital relation to the
great forests of the United States, and the forests and industries both
suffered from that failure. The suffering of the industries in such
case comes after the destruction of the forests, but it is just as
inevitable as that destruction. If the forest is destroyed it is only
a question of a relatively short time before the business interests
suffer in consequence. All of you know that there is opportunity in any
new country for the development of the type of temporary inhabitant
whose idea is to skin the country and go somewhere else. You all know,
and especially those of you from the West, the individual whose idea
of developing the country is to cut every stick of timber off of it
and then leave a barren desert for the homemaker who comes in after
him. That man is a curse and not a blessing to the country. The prop
of the country must be the business man who intends so to run his
business that it will be profitable for his children after him. That
is the type of business that it is worth while to develop. The time
of indifference and misunderstanding has gone by. Your coming is a
very great step toward the solution of the forest problem—a problem
which can not be settled until it is settled right. And it can not
be settled right until the forces which bring that settlement about
come, not from the Government, not even from the newspapers and from
public sentiment in general, but from the active, intelligent, and
effective interest of the men to whom the forest is important from the
business point of view, because they use it and its product and whose
interest is therefore concrete instead of general and diffuse. I do
not in the least underrate the power of an awakened public opinion;
but in the final test it will be the attitude of the industries of the
country which more than anything else will determine whether or not
our forests are to be preserved. It is because of their recognition
of that prime material fact that so much has been accomplished, Mr.
Wilson, by those interested under you and in the other departments
of the Government in the preservation of the forests. We want the
active and zealous help of every man farsighted enough to realize the
importance from the standpoint of the Nation’s welfare in the future
of preserving the forests; but that help by itself will not avail. It
will not even be the main factor in bringing about the result toward
which we are striving; the main factor must come from the intelligence
of the business interests concerned, so that the manufacturer, the
railway man, the miner, the lumberman, the dealer in lumber, shall
appreciate that it is of direct interest to them to preserve through
use instead of waste, the great resources upon which they depend for
the successful development of their business. This is true because by
far the greater part of all our forests must pass into the hands of
forest users, whether directly or through the Government, which will
continue to hold some of them, but only as trustee. The forest is for
use, and its users will decide its future. It was only a few years
ago that the practical lumberman felt that the forest expert was a
man who wished to see the forests preserved as bric-a-brac, and the
American business man was not prepared to do much from the bric-a-brac
standpoint. Now, I think, we have got a working agreement between the
forester and the business man whose business is the use of the forest.
We have got them to come together with the understanding that they must
work for a common end, work to see the forest preserved for use. The
great significance of this congress comes from the fact that henceforth
the movement for the conservative use of the forest is to come mainly
from within, not from without; from the men who are actively interested
in the use of the forest in one way or another, even more than from
those whose interest is philanthropic and general. The difference
means, as the difference in such a case always does mean, to a large
extent the difference between mere agitation and actual execution,
between the hope of accomplishment and the thing done. We believe that
at last forces have been set in motion which will convert the once
distant prospect of the conservation of the forest by wise use into the
practical accomplishment of that great end; and of this most hopeful
and significant fact the coming together of this congress is the
sufficient proof.

I shall not pretend this afternoon to even describe to you the place
of the forest in the life of any nation, and especially of its
place in the United States. The great industries of agriculture,
transportation, mining, grazing, and, of course, lumbering, are each
one of them vitally and immediately dependent upon wood, water, or
grass from the forest. The manufacturing industries, whether or not
wood enters directly into their finished product, are scarcely, if at
all, less dependent upon the forest than those whose connection with it
is obvious and direct. Wood is an indispensable part of the material
structure upon which civilization rests; and it is to be remembered
always that the immense increase of the use of iron and substitutes
for wood in many structures, while it has meant a relative decrease in
the amount of wood used, has been accompanied by an absolute increase
in the amount of wood used. More wood is used than ever before in our
history. Thus, the consumption of wood in shipbuilding is far larger
than it was before the discovery of the art of building iron ships,
because vastly more ships are built. Larger supplies of building lumber
are required, directly or indirectly, for use in the construction
of the brick and stone structures of great modern cities than were
consumed by the comparatively few and comparatively small wooden
buildings in the earlier stages of these same cities. It is as sure as
anything can be that we will see in the future a steadily increasing
demand for wood in our manufacturing industries. There is one point I
want to speak about in addition to the uses of the forest to which I
have already alluded. Those of us who have lived on the great plains,
who are acquainted with the conditions in parts of Oklahoma, Nebraska,
Kansas, and the Dakotas, know that wood forms an immensely portentous
element in helping the farmer on these plains battle against his
worst enemy—wind. The use of forests as windbreaks out on the plains,
where the tree does not grow unless men help it, is of enormous
importance, and, Mr. Wilson, among the many services performed by the
public-spirited statesman who once occupied the position that you now
hold, none was greater than what the late Secretary of Agriculture, Mr.
Morton, did in teaching, by actual example as well as by precept, the
people of the treeless regions the immense advantage of the cultivation
of trees. When wood, dead or alive, is demanded in so many ways, and
when this demand will undoubtedly increase, it is a fair question,
then, whether the vast demands of the future upon our forests are
likely to be met. You are mighty poor Americans if your care for the
well-being of this country is limited to hoping that that well-being
will last out your own generation. No man, here or elsewhere, is
entitled to call himself a decent citizen if he does not try to do
his part toward seeing that our national policies are shaped for the
advantage of our children and our children’s children. Our country, we
have faith to believe, is only at the beginning of its growth. Unless
the forests of the United States can be made ready to meet the vast
demands which this growth will inevitably bring, commercial disaster,
that means disaster to the whole country, is inevitable. The railroads
must have ties, and the general opinion is that no efficient substitute
for wood for this purpose has been devised. The miner must have timber
or he can not operate his mine, and in very many cases the profit
which mining yields is directly proportionate to the cost of timber
supply. The farmer, East and West, must have timber for numberless
uses on his farm, and he must be protected, by forest cover upon the
headwaters of the streams he uses, against floods in the East, and
the lack of water for irrigation in the West. The stockman must have
fence posts, and very often he must have summer range for his stock in
the national forest reserves. In a word, both the production of the
great staples upon which our prosperity depends and their movement in
commerce throughout the United States are inseparably dependent upon
the existence of permanent and suitable supplies from the forest at a
reasonable cost.

If the present rate of forest destruction is allowed to continue, with
nothing to offset it, a timber famine in the future is inevitable.
Fire, wasteful and destructive forms of lumbering, and the legitimate
use, taken together, are destroying our forest resources far more
rapidly than they are being replaced. It is difficult to imagine what
such a timber famine would mean to our resources. And the period of
recovery from the injuries which a timber famine would entail would
be measured by the slow growth of the trees themselves. Remember that
you can prevent such a timber famine occurring by wise action taken in
time, but once the famine occurs there is no possible way of hurrying
the growth of the trees necessary to relieve it. You have got to act
in time or else the Nation would have to submit to prolonged suffering
after it had become too late for forethought to avail. Fortunately,
the remedy is a simple one, and your presence here to-day is a most
encouraging sign that there will be such forethought. It is the great
merit of the Department of Agriculture in the forest work that its
efforts have been directed to enlist the sympathy and co-operation of
the users of wood, water, and grass, and to show that forestry will
and does pay, rather than to exhaust itself in the futile attempt
to introduce conservative methods by any other means. I believe
most emphatically in sentiment, but I want the sentiment to be put
into co-operation with the business interests, and that is what is
being done. The policy is one of helpfulness throughout, and never
of hostility or coercion toward any legitimate interest whatsoever.
In the very nature of things it can make little progress apart from
you. Whatever it may be possible for the Government to accomplish,
its work must ultimately fail unless your interest and support give
it permanence and power. It is only as the producing and commercial
interests of the country come to realize that they need to have trees
growing up in the forest not less than they need the product of the
trees cut down that we may hope to see the permanent prosperity of both
safely secured.

This statement is true not only as to forests in private ownership,
but as to the national forests as well. Unless the men from the
West believe in forest preservation the Western forests can not be
preserved. We here at the headquarters of the National Government
recognize that absolutely. We believe, we know, that it is essential
for the well-being of the people of the States of the great plains,
the States of the Rockies, the States of the Pacific Slope, that the
forests shall be preserved, and we know also that our belief will
count for nothing unless the people of those States themselves wish to
preserve the forests. If they do we can help materially; we can direct
their efforts, but we can not save the forests unless they wish them to
be saved.

I ask, with all the intensity that I am capable, that the men of the
West will remember the sharp distinction I have just drawn between
the man who skins the land and the man who develops the country. I am
going to work with, and only with, the man who develops the country.
I am against the land skinner every time. Our policy is consistent
to give to every portion of the public domain its highest possible
amount of use, and of course that can be given only through the hearty
co-operation of the Western people. I would like to add one word as
to the creation of a national forest service which I have recommended
repeatedly in messages to Congress, and especially in my last. I wish
to see all the forest work of the Government concentrated in the
Department of Agriculture. It is folly to scatter such work, as I have
said over and over again, and the policy which this Administration is
trying to carry out through the creation of such a service is that
of making the national forests more actively and more permanently
useful to the people of the West, and I am heartily glad to know
that the Western sentiment supports more and more vigorously the
policy of setting aside national forests, the creation of a national
forest service, and especially the policy of increasing the permanent
usefulness of these forest lands to all who come in contact with them.
With what is rapidly getting to be a practically unbroken sentiment
in the West behind such a forest policy, with what is rapidly getting
to be a practically unbroken support by the great stable interests
behind the general policy of the conservative use of the forests,
we have a right to feel that we have entered on an era of great and
lasting progress. Only entered upon it; much, very much, remains to be
done; and as in every other department of human activity our debt of
gratitude will be due, not to the amiable but shortsighted optimist
who thinks you have made a good beginning and the end may take care
of itself; still less to the man who sits at one side and says how
poorly the work is being done by those who are doing it; but to the
men who try, each in his own place, practically to forward this great
work. That is the type of man who is going to do the work, and it is
because I believe that we have enlisted the active, practical sympathy
of just that kind of man in this work that I believe the future of
this policy to be bright and the permanence of our timber supplies
more nearly assured than at any previous time in our history. To the
men represented in this congress this great result is primarily due.
In closing, I wish to thank you who are here, not merely for what you
are doing in this particular movement, but for the fact that you are
illustrating what I hope I may call the typically American method of
meeting questions of great and vital importance to the Nation—the
method of seeing whether the individuals particularly concerned can not
by getting together and co-operating with the Government do infinitely
more for themselves than it would be possible for any Government under
the sun to do for them. I believe in the future of this movement,
because I think you have the right combination of qualities—the quality
of individual initiative, the quality of individual resourcefulness,
combined with the quality that enables you to come together for mutual
help, and having so come, to work with the Government; and I pledge you
in the fullest measure the support of the Government in what you are
doing.




SPEECH AT THE DINNER OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS, AT THE
ARLINGTON HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 11, 1905


_Mr. President, Your Eminence, Gentlemen_:

It is a great pleasure to have the chance of coming here this evening
and saying a word of greeting to a body of men who are engaged in
doing work for this Republic which is to count, not merely in the
present generation, but during the lifetimes of many generations to
come. We hear a great deal said about true Americanism. Now the real
American, the American whom it is worth while to call such, is the man
whose belief in and work for America are not merely for the America of
to-day, but for the America of the future.

It is a comparatively easy thing to do work when the reward is to
come in the present; but every great nation that has ever existed on
this globe has been great because its sons had in them the capacity
to work for the well-being of generations yet unborn. Such a spirit
is peculiarly necessary when the work that we desire to have done
is essentially work of a non-remunerative type, non-remunerative in
more than one way; non-remunerative in money, and it may be in fame.
We do not know the names of the architects and builders of the great
cathedrals whose magnificent beauty is an heirloom to civilization.
We do not know the names of the builders of the great majority of the
works to which every man with an aspiration after beauty naturally
turns when he thinks of the past. We owe that beauty, we owe the
elevation of thought, of mind and soul, that come with association and
belief in it, to the fact that there were a sufficient number of men
who worked in the spirit that Ruskin prayed for—the spirit of doing
work not for the sake of the fee, but for the sake of the work itself.

There are things in a nation’s life more important than beauty; but
beauty is very important. And in this Nation of ours, while there is
very much in which we have succeeded marvelously, I do not think that
if we look dispassionately at what we have done we will say that beauty
has been exactly the strong point of the Nation. It rests largely
with gatherings such as this, with the note that is set by men such
as those I am addressing to-night, to determine whether or not this
shall be true of the future. A very large percentage of the durable
work, the work which is lasting, and therefore the beauty of which,
if it exists, is also lasting, must be done by the Government. Many
great buildings and beautiful buildings will be created by private
effort; but many of the greatest buildings must necessarily be erected
by the Government, national, State, or municipal. Those in control of
any branch of that Government necessarily have but an ephemeral lease
of power. Administration succeeds administration; Congress succeeds
Congress; Legislature succeeds Legislature; and even if all of the
administrations, all of the Congresses, are actuated (a not necessarily
probable supposition) by an artistic spirit, it would still remain true
that there could not be coherence in their work if they had to rely
on themselves alone. The best thing that any administration, that any
executive department of the Government, can do—and if I may venture
to make any suggestion to the co-ordinate branch, Senator Cockrell, I
would say that the best thing that any elective legislative body could
do—is in these matters to surrender itself, within reasonable limits,
to the guidance of those who really do know what they are talking
about. The only way in which we can hope to have worthy artistic work
done for the Nation or for a State or for a municipality, is by having
such a growth of popular sentiment as will render it incumbent upon
successive administrations, successive legislative bodies, to carry out
steadily a plan chosen for them, worked out for them by such a body
of men as that gathered here this evening. What I have said does not
mean that we shall here in Washington, for instance, go into immediate
and extravagant expenditures on public buildings. All that it means is
that, whenever hereafter a public building is provided for and erected,
it should be erected in accordance with a carefully thought out plan
adopted long before; and that it should be not only beautiful in
itself, but fitting in its relations to the whole scheme of the public
buildings, the parks, the drives of the District.

Working through municipal commissions, very great progress has already
been made in rendering more beautiful our cities, from New York to San
Francisco. An incredible amount remains to be done. But a beginning
has been made, and now I most earnestly hope that in the National
Capital a better beginning will be made than anywhere else, and that
can be made only by utilizing to the fullest degree the thought and the
disinterested effort of the architects, the artists, the men of art,
who stand foremost in their professions here in the United States, and
who ask no other reward than the reward of feeling that they have done
their full part to make as beautiful as it should be the capital city
of the great Republic.




ADDRESS AT LUTHER PLACE MEMORIAL CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 29,
1905


DR. BUTLER:

It is a great pleasure to meet with you this morning and say a word of
greeting on the occasion of the rededication of this church, coming as
it does almost simultaneously with the entry of your pastor into his
eightieth year.

From the standpoint from which I am obliged so continually to look
at matters, there is a peculiar function to be played by the great
Lutheran Church in the United States of America. This is a Church which
had its rise to power in, and, until it emigrated to this side of the
water, had always had its fullest development in the two great races of
Northern and Northern Middle Europe—the German and the Scandinavian.
The Lutheran Church came to the territory which is now the United
States very shortly after the first permanent settlements were made
within our limits; for when the earliest settlers came to dwell around
the mouth of the Delaware they brought the Lutheran worship with them,
and so with the earliest German settlers who came to Pennsylvania and
afterward to New York and the mountainous region in the western part of
Virginia and the States south of it. From that day to this the history
of the growth in population of this Nation has consisted largely, in
some respects mainly, of the arrival of successive waves of newcomers
to our shores; and the prime duty of those already in the land is
to see that their own progress and development are shared by these
newcomers. It is a serious and dangerous thing for any man to tear
loose from the soil, from the religion in which he and his forbears
have taken root, and to be transplanted into a new land. He should
receive all possible aid in the new land; and the aid can be tendered
him most effectively by those who can appeal to him on the ground of
spiritual kinship. Therefore the Lutheran Church can do most in helping
upward and onward so many of the newcomers to our shores; and it seems
to me that it should be, I am tempted to say, wellnigh the prime duty
of this Church to see that the immigrant, especially the immigrant of
Lutheran faith from the Old World, whether he comes from Scandinavia
or Germany, or whether he belonged to one of the Lutheran countries of
Finland, or Hungary, or Austria, may be not suffered to drift off with
no friendly hand extended to him out of all the church communion, away
from all the influences that tend toward safeguarding and uplifting
him, and that he find ready at hand in this country those eager to
bring him into fellowship with the existing bodies. The Lutheran
Church in this country is of very great power now numerically, and
through the intelligence and thrift of its members, but it will grow
steadily to even greater power. It is destined to be one of the two
or three greatest and most important national churches in the United
States; one of the two or three churches most distinctively American,
most distinctively among the forces that are to tell for making this
great country even greater in the future. Therefore a peculiar load
of responsibility rests upon the members of this Church. It is an
important thing for the people of this Nation to remember their rights,
but it is an even more important thing for them to remember their
duties. In the last analysis the work of statesmen and soldiers, the
work of the public men, shall go for nothing if it is not based upon
the spirit of Christianity working in the millions of homes throughout
this country, so that there may be that social, that spiritual, that
moral foundation without which no country can ever rise to permanent
greatness. For material well-being, material prosperity, success in
arts, in letters, great industrial triumphs, all of them and all of the
structures raised thereon will be as evanescent as a dream if they do
not rest on “the righteousness that exalteth a nation.”

Let me congratulate you and congratulate all of us that we live in a
land and at a time when we accept it as natural that there should be
an interdenominational service of thanksgiving, such a ceremony as is
to take place this afternoon, in which the pastors of other churches
join to congratulate themselves and you upon the rebuilding of this
church. One of the constant problems of life is to try to cultivate
breadth without shallowness, just as we want to try to cultivate depth
without narrowness. It seems to me that thanksgiving with the combined
earnestness, the liberty, of the great body of the pastors who, for
our good fortune, are in the various churches of this country can be
accepted as in a peculiar measure typifying the American spirit in
religious thought; that for our good fortune those men have been able
to combine fervor in doing the Lord’s work with charity toward their
brethren who do it with certain differences in the non-essentials.
The forces of evil are strong and mighty in this century and in this
country as they are in other countries, as they have been in all the
past centuries; and the people who sincerely wish to do the Lord’s work
will find ample opportunity for all their labor in fighting the common
enemy and in assuming toward their fellows of a different confession an
attitude of generous rivalry in the effort to see how the most good can
be done to our people as a whole.

I thank you for having given me the chance to speak to you this
morning, to say a word of greeting to you and to wish you Godspeed with
all my heart.




ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATING CLASS OF THE NAVAL ACADEMY AT ANNAPOLIS,
MARYLAND, JAN. 30, 1905


  _Captain Brownson, Members of the Graduating Class, Governor
  Warfield, and to the other Midshipmen and their friends and kinsmen
  here gathered together_:

I fail to see how any good American can be other than a better American
when he comes here to Annapolis and sees the Academy as it is and as
it soon will be, thanks to the wise munificence of Congress; and I
am not surprised that you who graduate from this institution should
make the kind of men that as a rule you do make afterward; should
show the qualities of courage, of lofty fidelity to duty, of devotion
to the flag, and of farsighted preparedness to meet possible future
emergencies; should show the traits which I think, Captain Brownson, I
can say without flattery, characterize the service to which you belong.
I am not surprised that you should show those traits, for I should be
heartily ashamed of you if you did not. More than any other people in
this country, with the sole exception of those in the sister service
who have had your advantages, you owe a peculiar fealty to the Nation
which has trained you, which has given you a career in after life, a
career in which, if you do your duty, you are sure to lead honorable
lives, and to deserve well of the Republic; and a career in which
there is always the chance that you may spring into one of those few
places to be occupied by the men of the Nation who win deathless fame
for themselves by the way in which they serve the Nation in the hour
of the Nation’s need. On the one hand we have the right to expect a
peculiar measure of self-sacrificing service from you. On the other
hand we have the right to expect from the representatives of the people
a peculiar care for your interests. It is well that every public man
should feel under a particular obligation to see to the welfare of the
Army and the Navy. Governor Warfield, if you will pardon the personal
allusion, I want to thank you for the way in which you have made
evident your feeling toward this institution, for the reception you
gave just the other night to these very men about to graduate. It is
well that they should understand that because of the position they hold
the Governor of the great State in which the institution is situated
recognizes their possibilities of usefulness to the country, the
obligations due them, and the obligations we have a right to feel that
they will recognize to the whole Nation in return.

There are a good many baseless alarms which some worthy people feel
from time to time in this country, and which other less worthy people
affect to feel, but of all foolish crimes, of all baseless figments
of a disturbed imagination, the cry of militarism in this country is
the most foolish and the most baseless. Not only there does not exist
now, but there never has existed in recent times, any nation so wholly
free as this is from any danger of excessive militarism, so wholly
free from any danger of an undue growth of the military spirit. The
danger is now, will be, and always has been, the exact reverse; the
danger is lest we do not take sufficient thought in preparing the men
and material which will make our attitude in claiming to be a great
nation respectable. I would be sorry to see us content to assume the
position of a nation unwilling and unable to play a great part in the
world, unable to hold its own in the shock of arms, should it be ever
necessary, which I most earnestly hope that in the lifetime of no man
here present it will be necessary. Should it ever be necessary, and I
hope it will not be, to appeal to arms, I should be sorry to see us
take the position of avowed weakness, take the position that we did not
intend to rank ourselves among the great powers of the earth. I should
be sorry to see that; but I would a great deal rather see that than see
us insist upon taking such a position and refuse to provide the means
which would make such a position other than a sham. If this country
believes in the Monroe Doctrine; if this country intends to hold the
Philippines; if it intends, besides building, to police the Isthmian
Canal; if it intends to do its duty on the side of civilization, on the
side of law and order, and that duty can be done only by the just man
armed; if this country intends to do that, then it must see to it that
it is able to make good, if the necessity arises to make good. It is
idle to talk of our faith in the Monroe Doctrine if we are not able
to make that faith evident. It is foolish to remain permanently in the
Philippines unless we provide a base of military action for our fleets
and army should it be necessary to defend the Philippines in time of
war. It is foolish to assert our position as entitled to the respect of
other great nations unless we are willing to build the ships, to build
the guns, and to train the men who are to man the ships and handle
the guns if the need arises. I should be ashamed to see this Nation
play the part of a weakling. But I would rather see it play that part
frankly than see it boast what it was and then so handle itself that
if any one questioned the boast we should have to retreat from the
position we assumed because we lacked the power to make our words good.

I earnestly hope that our foreign policy shall be continued absolutely
without regard to change of Administration, to change of party, along
the lines of treating every foreign nation with all possible respect,
of avoiding all provocation for war, for trouble of any kind, of taking
every step possible to minimize the chance of trouble occurring; and at
the same time of taking every step possible to see to it that if by any
chance trouble does occur we do not come out second best.

Just at this moment, to illustrate what I mean, we have negotiated
certain arbitration treaties with the great foreign Powers. I most
earnestly hope that those arbitration treaties will become part of the
supreme law of the land. Every friend of peace will join heartily in
seeing that those arbitration treaties do become part of the supreme
law of the land. By adopting them we will have taken a step, not a
very long step, but undoubtedly a step in the direction of minimizing
the chance for any trouble that might result in war; we will have in
measurable degree provided for a method of substituting international
disputes other than that of war as regards certain subjects, and as
regards the particular nations with whom those treaties are negotiated.
We can test the sincerity of those people devoted to peace largely
by seeing whether this people does in effective fashion desire to
have those treaties ratified, to have those treaties adopted. I have
proceeded upon the assumption that this Nation was sincere when it said
that it desired peace, that all proper steps to provide against the
likelihood of war ought to be taken; and these arbitration treaties
represent precisely those steps. But the adoption of those treaties by
themselves would not bring peace. We are a good many years short of
the millennium yet; and for the present and the immediate future we
can rest assured that the word of the man who is suspected of desiring
peace because he is afraid of war will count for but little. What we
desire is to have it evident that this Nation seeks peace, not because
it is afraid, but because it believes in the eternal and immutable
laws of justice and of right living. Therefore, hand in hand with the
negotiation of treaties of that character, hand in hand with the effort
to put our foreign relations with every nation on a better footing,
must go the steady upbuilding of the Army and the Navy; above all the
Navy, so that our national honor may be sure of an adequate safeguard
should our national honor ever be actively menaced.

I want to say a word to you boys here in particular. I am about to have
the good fortune to present a sword to the best gunner and certain
medals also for gunnery. The sword is given by the class of ’71,
given annually, so as to put a premium upon markmanship; and, Captain
Brownson, I would like through you to thank the members of that class
for the patriotic service they have done in making such a gift.

The one thing that you graduates here, and all of the others in this
school, must remember, is that you ought to bend your entire energies
to fitting yourselves as you can only be fitted by the most careful
training in advance for the possible supreme day when upon your success
or your failure will depend not only whether your own lives will be
crowned with triumph or blasted with ruin, but whether the Nation will
or will not write a page of glory or a page of shame on her history.
There is not one of you who is not derelict in his duty to the whole
Nation if he fails to prepare himself with all the strength that in him
lies to do his duty should the occasion arise; and one of your great
duties is to see that shots hit. The result is going to largely depend
upon whether you or your adversary hits. I expect you to be brave. I
rather take that for granted. It is not that you are to be commended
much for bravery. You would be condemned forever if you lacked it. If
you lacked it in the highest form, courage physical and moral, the
courage that will assume responsibility, no less than the courage that
without a thought will face death, that we have a right to expect
from every one of you, and I say that you are less to be commended
for having it than to be condemned for failure to have it. But, in
addition, you have got to prepare yourselves in advance. Every naval
action that has taken place within the last twenty years in which our
own ships have been engaged or in which any foreign ships have been
engaged has shown, as a rule, that the defeated party has suffered not
from lack of courage, but because it could not make the best use of
its weapons, or had not been given the right weapons. Occasionally, of
course, if the victor happened to be matched against people who did not
show courage, the courage counted. But I want every one here to proceed
upon the assumption that any foe he may meet will have the courage. Of
course, you have got to show the highest degree of courage yourself or
you will be beaten anyhow, and you will deserve to be; but in addition
to that you must prepare yourselves by careful training so that you may
make the best possible use of the delicate and formidable mechanism of
a modern warship. The reason that you are trained here, the reason that
you are put through this academy, the reason that your training goes
on in the service is because without that training no man can hope to
do the work that is set before you to do. It is equally true that the
training can not be given you only from without unless you actively and
earnestly seek to get the best possible benefit from it yourselves;
that the best teachers, the best superiors can not supply wholly or
more than in very small part the lack of that which is within you. No
other body of men of your age in our country owes so much to the United
States, to the flag that symbolizes this Nation, as you do. No other
body of young men has on the average as great a chance as each of you
has to lead a life of honor to himself and of benefit to the country
at large. Deep will be your shame if you fail to rise level to your
opportunities and duties, and great will be the honor that I know you
will win, because I know that, judging you by those who have gone
before you in the service, you will rise level to your opportunities
and keep untarnished the proud fame of the American officer.




ADDRESS AT THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB, PHILADELPHIA, PA., JAN. 30, 1905


  _Mr. President; and Gentlemen of the Union League_:

This club was founded to uphold the hands of Abraham Lincoln when
he stood as the great leader in the struggle for union and liberty.
We have a right, therefore, to appeal to this club for aid in every
governmental or social effort made along the lines marked out by
Lincoln. The great President taught many lessons which we who come
after him should learn. Among the most important of these was the
lesson that for weal or woe we are indissolubly bound together, in
whatever part of the country we live, whatever our social standing,
whatever our wealth or our poverty, whatever form of mental or physical
activity our life work may assume. Lincoln, who was, more emphatically
than any other President we have ever had, the President of the plain
people, was yet as far removed as Washington himself from the slightest
taint of demagogy. With his usual farsighted clearness of vision he
saw that in a republic such as ours permanent prosperity of any part
of our people was conditioned upon the prosperity of all; and that on
the other hand any effort to raise the general level of happiness by
striking at the well-being of a portion of the people could not be but
in the end disastrous to all.

The principles which Lincoln applied to the solution of the problems
of his day are those which we must apply if we expect successfully
to solve the different problems of our own day—problems which are so
largely industrial. Exactly as it is impossible to develop a high
morality unless we have as a foundation those qualities which give at
least a certain minimum of material prosperity, so it is impossible
permanently to keep material prosperity unless there is back of it a
basis of right living and right thinking. In the last analysis, of
course, the dominant factor in obtaining this good conduct must be
the individual character of the average citizen. If there is not this
condition of individual character in the average citizenship of the
country, all effort to supply its place by the wisest legislation and
administration will in the end prove futile. But given this average of
individual character, then wise laws and the honest administration of
the laws can do much to supplement it. If either the business world or
the world of labor loses its head, then it has lost something which can
not be made good by any governmental effort. Our faith in the future of
the Republic is firm, because we believe that on the whole and in the
long run our people think clearly and act rightly.

Unquestionably, however, the great development of industrialism means
that there must be an increase in the supervision exercised by the
Government over business enterprises. This supervision should not
take the form of violent and ill-advised interference; and assuredly
there is danger lest it take such form if the business leaders of the
business community confine themselves to trying to thwart the effort
at regulation instead of guiding it aright. Such men as the members of
this club should lead in the effort to secure proper supervision and
regulation of corporate activity by the Government, not only because it
is for the interest of the community as a whole that there should be
this supervision and regulation, but because in the long run it will be
in the interest above all of the very people who often betray alarm and
anger when the proposition is first made.

Neither this people nor any other free people will permanently tolerate
the use of the vast power conferred by vast wealth, and especially
by wealth in its corporate form, without lodging somewhere in the
Government the still higher power of seeing that this power, in
addition to being used in the interest of the individual or individuals
possessing it, is also used for and not against the interests of the
people as a whole. Our peculiar form of government, a Government in
which the Nation is supreme throughout the Union in certain respects,
while each of nearly half a hundred States is supreme in its part of
the Union in certain other respects, renders the task of dealing with
these conditions especially difficult. No finally satisfactory result
can be expected from merely State action. The action must come through
the Federal Government. The business of the country is now carried
on in a way of which the founders of our Constitution could by no
possibility have had any idea.

All great business concerns are engaged in interstate commerce, and it
was beyond question the intention of the founders of our Government
that interstate commerce in all its branches and aspects should be
under national and not State control. If the courts decide that this
intention was not carried out and made effective in the Constitution
as it now stands, then in the end the Constitution, if not construed
differently, will have to be amended so that the original undoubted
intention may be made effective. But, of course, a constitutional
amendment is only to be used as a last resort, if every effort of
legislation and administration shall have been proved inadequate.

Meanwhile the men in public life and the men who direct the great
business interests of the country should work not in antagonism but in
harmony toward this given end. In entering a field where the progress
must of necessity be so largely experimental it is essential that the
effort to make progress should be tentative and cautious. We must grow
by evolution, not by revolution. There must be no hurry, but there must
also be no halt; and those who are anxious that there should be no
sudden and violent changes must remember that precisely these sudden
and violent changes will be rendered likely if we refuse to make the
needed changes in cautious and moderate manner.

At the present moment the greatest need is for an increase in the
power of the National Government to keep the great highways of commerce
open alike to all on reasonable and equitable terms. Less than a
century ago these highways were still, as they had been since the dawn
of history, either waterways, natural or artificial, or else ordinary
roads for wheel vehicles drawn by animal power. The railroad, which
was utterly unknown when our Government was formed and when the great
principles of our jurisprudence were laid down, has now become almost
everywhere the most important, and, in many large regions, the only
form of highway for commerce. The man who controls its use can not be
permitted to control it in his own interest alone.

It is not only just, but it is in the interest of the public, that
this man should receive the amplest payment for the masterful business
capacity which enables him to benefit himself while benefiting the
public; but in return he must himself recognize his duty to the public.
He will not and can not do this if our laws are so defective that in
the sharp competition of the business world the conscientious man is
put at a disadvantage by his less scrupulous fellows. It is in the
interest of the conscientious and public-spirited railway man that
there should be such governmental supervision of the railway traffic
of the country as to require from his less scrupulous competitors,
and from unscrupulous big shippers as well, that heed to the public
welfare which he himself would willingly give, and which is of vital
consequence to the small shipper. Every important railroad is engaged
in interstate commerce. Therefore, this control over the railroads must
come through the National Government.

The control must be exercised by some governmental tribunal, and
it must be real and effective. Doubtless there will be risk that
occasionally, if an unfit President is elected, this control will
be abused; but this is only another way of saying that any adequate
governmental power, from the power of taxation down, can and will be
abused if the wrong men get control of it.

The details must rest with the lawmakers of the two Houses of Congress;
but about the principle there can be no doubt. Hasty or vindictive
action would merely work damage; but in temperate, resolute fashion,
there must be lodged in some tribunal the power over rates, and
especially over rebates—whether secured by means of private cars, of
private tracks, in the form of damages, or commissions, or in any other
manner—which will protect alike the railroad and the shipper, and put
the big shipper and the little shipper on an equal footing. Doubtless
no law would accomplish all that enthusiasts hope; there is always
disappointment over results of such a law among the oversanguine;
but very real and marked good has come from the legislation and
administration of the last few years; and now, as part of a coherent
plan, it is entirely possible, and, indeed, necessary to enact an
additional law which will mean further progress along the same lines
of definite achievement in the direction of securing fair dealing as
between man and man.

In some such body as the Interstate Commerce Commission there must
be lodged in effective shape the power to see that every shipper who
uses the railroads and every man who owns or manages a railroad shall
on the one hand be given justice and on the other hand be required to
do justice. Justice—so far as it is humanly possible to give and to
get justice—is the foundation of our Government. We are not trying to
strike down the rich man; on the contrary, we will not tolerate any
attack upon his rights. We are not trying to give an improper advantage
to the poor man because he is poor, to the man of small means because
he has not larger means; but we are striving to see that the man of
small means has exactly as good a chance, so far as we can obtain it
for him, as the man of larger means; that there shall be equality of
opportunity for the one as for the other.

We do not intend that this Republic shall ever fail as those republics
of olden times failed, in which there finally came to be a government
by classes, which resulted either in the poor plundering the rich or
in the rich exploiting and in one form or another enslaving the poor;
for either event means the destruction of free institutions and of
individual liberty. Ours is not a Government which recognizes classes.
It is based on the recognition of the individual. We are not for the
poor man as such, nor for the rich man as such. We are for every man,
rich or poor, provided he acts justly and fairly by his fellows, and if
he so acts the Government must do all it can to see that inasmuch as he
does no wrong, so he shall suffer no wrong.




ADDRESS AT THE LINCOLN DINNER OF THE REPUBLICAN CLUB OF THE CITY OF NEW
YORK, WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL, FEB. 13, 1905


  _Mr. President, and you, my Fellow-Members of the Republican Club,
  and you, my Fellow-Guests of the Republican Club_:

In his second inaugural, in a speech which will be read as long as the
memory of this Nation endures, Abraham Lincoln closed by saying:

  “With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
  right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish
  the work we are in; ... to do all which may achieve and cherish a
  just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”

Immediately after his re-election he had already spoken thus:

  “The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied
  to the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case must ever
  recur in similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future
  great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have
  as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good.
  Let us, therefore, study the incidents of this as philosophy to
  learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged....
  May not all having a common interest reunite in a common effort to
  (serve) our common country? For my own part, I have striven and shall
  strive to avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have
  been here I have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom.
  While I am deeply sensible to the high compliment of a re-election,
  and duly grateful, as I trust, to Almighty God for having directed
  my countrymen to a right conclusion, as I think, for their own
  good, it adds nothing to my satisfaction that any other man may be
  disappointed or pained by the result.

  “May I ask those who have not differed with me to join with me in
  this same spirit toward those who have?”

This is the spirit in which mighty Lincoln sought to bind up the
Nation’s wounds when its soul was yet seething with fierce hatreds,
with wrath, with rancor, with all the evil and dreadful passions
provoked by civil war. Surely this is the spirit which all Americans
should show now, when there is so little excuse for malice or rancor or
hatred, when there is so little of vital consequence to divide brother
from brother.

Lincoln, himself a man of Southern birth, did not hesitate to appeal
to the sword when he became satisfied that in no other way could the
Union be saved, for high though he put peace he put righteousness
still higher. He warred for the Union; he warred to free the slave;
and when he warred he warred in earnest, for it is a sign of weakness
to be half-hearted when blows must be struck. But he felt only love, a
love as deep as the tenderness of his great and sad heart, for all his
countrymen alike in the North and in the South, and he longed above
everything for the day when they should once more be knit together in
the unbreakable bonds of eternal friendship.

We of to-day, in dealing with all our fellow-citizens, white or
colored, North or South, should strive to show just the qualities that
Lincoln showed: His steadfastness in striving after the right, and
his infinite patience and forbearance with those who saw that right
less clearly than he did; his earnest endeavor to do what was best,
and yet his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the
ideal best was unattainable; his unceasing effort to cure what was
evil, coupled with his refusal to make a bad situation worse by any
ill-judged or ill-timed effort to make it better.

The great Civil War in which Lincoln towered as the loftiest figure
left us not only a reunited country, but a country which has the proud
right to claim as its own glory won alike by those who wore the blue
and by those who wore the gray, by those who followed Grant and by
those who followed Lee; for both fought with equal bravery and with
equal sincerity of conviction, each striving for the light as it was
given him to see the light; though it is now clear to all that the
triumph of the cause of freedom and of the Union was essential to the
welfare of mankind. We are now one people, a people with failings which
we must not blink, but a people with great qualities in which we have
the right to feel just pride.

All good Americans who dwell in the North must, because they are good
Americans, feel the most earnest friendship for their fellow-countrymen
who dwell in the South, a friendship all the greater because it is
in the South that we find in its most acute phase one of the gravest
problems before our people: the problem of so dealing with the man of
one color as to secure him the rights that no one would grudge him
if he were of another color. To solve this problem it is, of course,
necessary to educate him to perform the duties a failure to perform
which will render him a curse to himself and to all around him.

Most certainly all clear-sighted and generous men in the North
appreciate the difficulty and perplexity of this problem, sympathize
with the South in the embarrassment of conditions for which she is
not alone responsible, feel an honest wish to help her where help is
practicable, and have the heartiest respect for those brave and earnest
men of the South who, in the face of fearful difficulties, are doing
all that men can do for the betterment alike of white and of black.
The attitude of the North toward the negro is far from what it should
be and there is need that the North also should act in good faith upon
the principle of giving to each man what is justly due him, of treating
him on his worth as a man, granting him no special favors, but denying
him no proper opportunity for labor and the reward of labor. But the
peculiar circumstances of the South render the problem there far
greater and far more acute.

Neither I nor any other man can say that any given way of approaching
that problem will present in our time even an approximately perfect
solution, but we can safely say that there can never be such solution
at all unless we approach it with the effort to do fair and equal
justice among all men; and to demand from them in return just and fair
treatment for others. Our effort should be to secure to each man,
whatever his color, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment
before the law. As a people striving to shape our actions in accordance
with the great law of righteousness we can not afford to take part
in or be indifferent to the oppression or maltreatment of any man
who, against crushing disadvantages, has by his own industry, energy,
self-respect, and perseverance struggled upward to a position which
would entitle him to the respect of his fellows, if only his skin were
of a different hue.

Every generous impulse in us revolts at the thought of thrusting down
instead of helping up such a man. To deny any man the fair treatment
granted to others no better than he is to commit a wrong upon him—a
wrong sure to react in the long run upon those guilty of such denial.
The only safe principle upon which Americans can act is that of “all
men up,” not that of “some men down.” If in any community the level of
intelligence, morality, and thrift among the colored men can be raised,
it is, humanly speaking, sure that the same level among the whites will
be raised to an even higher degree; and it is no less sure that the
debasement of the blacks will in the end carry with it an attendant
debasement of the whites.

The problem is so to adjust the relations between two races of
different ethnic type that the rights of neither be abridged nor
jeoparded; that the backward race be trained so that it may enter into
the possession of true freedom, while the forward race is enabled to
preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.
The working out of this problem must necessarily be slow; it is not
possible in offhand fashion to obtain or to confer the priceless boons
of freedom, industrial efficiency, political capacity, and domestic
morality. Nor is it only necessary to train the colored man; it is
quite as necessary to train the white man, for on his shoulders rests
a wellnigh unparalleled sociological responsibility. It is a problem
demanding the best thought, the utmost patience, the most earnest
effort, the broadest charity, of the statesman, the student, the
philanthropist; of the leaders of thought in every department of our
national life. The Church can be a most important factor in solving
it aright. But above all else we need for its successful solution the
sober, kindly, steadfast, unselfish performance of duty by the average
plain citizen in his everyday dealings with his fellows.

The ideal of elemental justice meted out to every man is the ideal we
should keep ever before us. It will be many a long day before we attain
to it, and unless we show not only devotion to it, but also wisdom and
self-restraint in the exhibition of that devotion, we shall defer the
time for its realization still further. In striving to attain to so
much of it as concerns dealing with men of different colors, we must
remember two things.

In the first place, it is true of the colored man, as it is true of the
white man, that in the long run his fate must depend far more upon his
own effort than upon the efforts of any outside friend. Every vicious,
venal, or ignorant colored man is an even greater foe to his own race
than to the community as a whole. The colored man’s self-respect
entitles him to do that share in the political work of the country
which is warranted by his individual ability and integrity and the
position he has won for himself. But the prime requisite of the race is
moral and industrial uplifting.

Laziness and shiftlessness, these, and above all, vice and criminality
of every kind, are evils more potent for harm to the black race than
all acts of oppression of white men put together. The colored man who
fails to condemn crime in another colored man, who fails to co-operate
in all lawful ways in bringing colored criminals to justice, is the
worst enemy of his own people, as well as an enemy to all the people.
Law-abiding black men should, for the sake of their race, be foremost
in relentless and unceasing warfare against law-breaking black men.
If the standards of private morality and industrial efficiency can
be raised high enough among the black race, then its future on this
continent is secure. The stability and purity of the home is vital to
the welfare of the black race, as it is to the welfare of every race.

In the next place the white man who, if only he is willing, can help
the colored man more than all other white men put together, is the
white man who is his neighbor, North or South. Each of us must do his
whole duty without flinching, and if that duty is national it must
be done in accordance with the principles above laid down. But in
endeavoring each to be his brother’s keeper it is wise to remember
that each can normally do most for the brother who is his immediate
neighbor. If we are sincere friends of the negro let us each in his own
locality show it by his action therein, and let us each show it also
by upholding the hands of the white man, in whatever locality, who is
striving to do justice to the poor and the helpless, to be a shield to
those whose need for such a shield is great.

The heartiest acknowledgments are due to the ministers, the judges and
law officers, the grand juries, the public men, and the great daily
newspapers in the South, who have recently done such effective work in
leading the crusade against lynching in the South; and I am glad to say
that during the last three months the returns, as far as they can be
gathered, show a smaller number of lynchings than for any other three
months during the last twenty years. Let us uphold in every way the
hands of the men who have led in this work, who are striving to do all
their work in this spirit. I am about to quote from the address of the
Right Reverend Robert Strange, Bishop Coadjutor of North Carolina, as
given in the “Southern Churchman” of October 8, 1904.

The bishop first enters an emphatic plea against any social
intermingling of the races; a question which must, of course, be left
to the people of each community to settle for themselves, as in such
a matter no one community—and indeed no one individual—can dictate to
any other; always provided that in each locality men keep in mind the
fact that there must be no confusing of civil privileges with social
intercourse. Civil law can not regulate social practices. Society, as
such, is a law unto itself, and will always regulate its own practices
and habits. Full recognition of the fundamental fact that all men
should stand on an equal footing, as regards civil privileges, in no
way interferes with recognition of the further fact that all reflecting
men of both races are united in feeling that race purity must be
maintained. The bishop continues:

  “What should the white men of the South do for the negro? They
  must give him a free hand, a fair field, and a cordial Godspeed,
  the two races working together for their mutual benefit and for
  the development of our common country. He must have liberty, equal
  opportunity to make his living, to earn his bread, to build his home.
  He must have justice, equal rights, and protection before the law. He
  must have the same political privileges; the suffrage should be based
  on character and intelligence for white and black alike. He must
  have the same public advantages of education; the public schools are
  for all the people, whatever their color or condition. The white men
  of the South should give hearty and respectful consideration to the
  exceptional men of the negro race, to those who have the character,
  the ability and the desire to be lawyers, physicians, teachers,
  preachers, leaders of thought and conduct among their own men and
  women. We should give them cheer and opportunity to gratify every
  laudable ambition, and to seek every innocent satisfaction among
  their own people. Finally, the best white men of the South should
  have frequent conferences with the best colored men, where, in frank,
  earnest, and sympathetic discussion they might understand each other
  better, smooth difficulties, and so guide and encourage the weaker
  race.”

Surely we can all of us join in expressing our substantial agreement
with the principles thus laid down by this North Carolina bishop, this
representative of the Christian thought of the South.

I am speaking on the occasion of the celebration of the birthday of
Abraham Lincoln, and to men who count it their peculiar privilege
that they have the right to hold Lincoln’s memory dear, and the duty
to strive to work along the lines that he laid down. We can pay most
fitting homage to his memory by doing the tasks allotted to us in the
spirit in which he did infinitely greater and more terrible tasks
allotted to him.

Let us be steadfast for the right; but let us err on the side of
generosity rather than on the side of vindictiveness toward those who
differ from us as to the method of attaining the right. Let us never
forget our duty to help in uplifting the lowly, to shield from wrong
the humble; and let us likewise act in a spirit of the broadest and
frankest generosity toward all our brothers, all our fellow-countrymen;
in a spirit proceeding not from weakness but from strength, a spirit
which takes no more account of locality than it does of class or of
creed; a spirit which is resolutely bent on seeing that the Union which
Washington founded and which Lincoln saved from destruction shall grow
nobler and greater throughout the ages.

I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I believe that
our people will in the end rise level to every need, will in the end
triumph over every difficulty that rises before them. I could not have
such confident faith in the destiny of this mighty people if I had
it merely as regards one portion of that people. Throughout our land
things on the whole have grown better and not worse, and this is as
true of one part of the country as it is of another. I believe in the
Southerner as I believe in the Northerner. I claim the right to feel
pride in his great qualities and in his great deeds exactly as I feel
pride in the great qualities and deeds of every other American. For
weal or for woe we are knit together, and we shall go up or go down
together; and I believe that we shall go up and not down, that we shall
go forward instead of halting and falling back, because I have an
abiding faith in the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the
common-sense of all my countrymen.

The Southern States face difficult problems; and so do the Northern
States. Some of the problems are the same for the entire country.
Others exist in greater intensity in one section; and yet others exist
in greater intensity in another section. But in the end they will all
be solved; for fundamentally our people are the same throughout this
land; the same in the qualities of heart and brain and hand which have
made this Republic what it is in the great to-day; which will make it
what it is to be in the infinitely greater to-morrow. I admire and
respect and believe in and have faith in the men and women of the
South as I admire and respect and believe in and have faith in the men
and women of the North. All of us alike, Northerners and Southerners,
Easterners and Westerners, can best prove our fealty to the Nation’s
past by the way in which we do the Nation’s work in the present; for
only thus can we be sure that our children’s children shall inherit
Abraham Lincoln’s single-hearted devotion to the great unchanging creed
that “righteousness exalteth a nation.”




ADDRESS AT THE HUNGARIAN CLUB DINNER, NEW YORK CITY, FEB. 14, 1905


_Mr. President, and you, my Fellow-Americans_:

It is a peculiar pleasure to me to be with you this evening; and in
greeting my hosts of the Hungarian Republican Club, I give utterance
to the thought of my fellow-guest, Congressman Sulzer, when I say that
whatever our differences before election, when once the election has
taken place, all of us in public life or in private life, President,
Congressmen, judges, legislators, alike are American citizens and
nothing else.

It is nearly ten years ago that I first took dinner here in the
immediate neighborhood of where I am dining now, and at that time, I
remember perfectly, when I was first brought up here, it was by Mr.
Jacob Riis and Mr. Jim Reynolds, and I was told that I would get a
very good dinner and hear some very good music, and both prophecies
proved true. It was about that time that I grew to be acquainted with
so many of my hosts and fellow-guests of this evening. Others I had
known before. With one of my fellow-guests, General Grant, I was then
working, and at different times I spoke at meetings presided over
or held in the clubhouses of various of the gentlemen here present,
sometimes on political subjects, much more often on matters of good
citizenship affecting us all as good citizens.

I grew in those years, gentlemen, to have a very close feeling of
sympathy and affection and regard for the men and women of the great
East Side of this city. I needed no urging when I was invited to come
and be a guest at a club of the East Side this evening. President Braun
has described how the preliminary invitation took place. It was six
years ago that this club gave me a dinner after I had been elected
Governor, and they then said that they “intended to elect me President
and that I must then come and take dinner with them again.” I told them
that if they would carry out their part of the contract I would carry
out my part. I am not perfectly certain that they anticipated that
their offer would be closed with so soon, but you see, gentlemen, I
have closed with it.

To-night I wish to greet you most warmly and to say that I doubt if
we could find a more typically American gathering than this, for
Americanism is not a matter of birthplace, of ancestry, of creed, of
occupation. Americanism is a matter of the spirit that is within, of a
man’s soul. From the time when we first became an independent Nation
to the present moment there has never been a generation in which some
of our most distinguished and most useful men were not born on the
other side of the Atlantic. It is peculiarly appropriate, and to me
peculiarly pleasant that, in addressing this club of the men upon whose
efforts so much of the future welfare of this city, of this State, of
this Nation, depends, I should be addressing men who show by their
actions that they know no difference between Jew and Gentile, Catholic
and Protestant, native-born and foreign-born, provided only that the
man, whatever his creed, whatever his birthplace, strives to live so as
to do his full duty by his neighbor and by the community as a whole.

We can not keep too clearly before our minds the fact that for the
success of our civilization what is needed is, not so much brilliant
ability, not so much unusual genius, as the possession by the average
man of the plain homely workaday virtues that make that man a good
father, a good husband, a good friend and neighbor, a decent man
with whom to deal in all relations of life. We need good laws. We
need honest administration of the laws. And we can not afford to be
contented with less. But more than all else we need that the average
man shall have in him the root of righteous living; that the average
man shall have in him the feeling that will make him ashamed to do
wrong or to submit to wrong, and that will make him feel his bounden
duty to help those that are weaker, to help those especially that are
in any way dependent upon him, and while not in any way losing his
power of individual initiative, to cultivate the further power of
acting in combination with his fellows for the common end of social
uplifting and good government.

I shall not keep you very long this evening. I have come here not to
make you a set speech, but if you will allow me to say so to speak as
an old friend among his old friends. I have seen a good deal of your
lives. I know the effort, the toil, the sorrow, the happiness, and the
success. I have endeavored when I have been brought in contact with the
East Side in the course of any work in which I have been engaged so to
handle myself that the East Side might be a little better for it. I do
not know whether I succeeded or not, but I do know that I have always
been better myself for contact with it.

In closing I want to say one word upon success in life, upon the
success that each of us should strive for. It is a great mistake, oh,
such a great mistake, to measure success merely by that which glitters
from without, or to speak of it in terms which will mislead those about
us, and especially the younger people about us, as to what success
really is. There must, of course, be for success a certain material
basis. I should think ill of any man here who did not wish to leave his
children a little better off and not a little worse off materially than
he was. I should not feel that he was doing his duty by them; and if he
can not do his duty by his own children he is not going to do his duty
by any one else. But after that certain amount of material prosperity
has been gained then the things that really count most are the things
of the soul rather than the things of the body, and I am sure that
each of you here, if he will really think of what it is that has made
him most happy, of what it is that has made him most respect his
neighbors, will agree with me. Look back in your own lives; see what
the things are that you are proudest of as you look back, and you will
in almost every case find that those memories of pride are associated
not with days of ease but with days of effort, with the day when you
had to do all that was in you for some worthy end, and the worthiest of
all worthy ends is to make those that are closest and nearest to you,
your wife and children and those near you, happy and not sorry that
you are alive; and after that has been done to be able so to handle
yourself that you can feel when the end comes that on the whole your
country, your fellow-men are a little better off and not a little worse
off because you have lived. This kind of success is open to every one
of us. The great prizes come more or less by accident, and no human
being knows that better than the man who has won any of them. The great
prizes come more or less by accident, but to each man there comes
normally the chance so to lead his life that at the end of his days his
children, his wife, those that are dear to him, shall rise up and call
him blessed, and so that his neighbors and those brought into intimate
association with him may feel that he has done his part as a man in a
world which sadly needs that each man should play his part well.

Now, gentlemen, I have to say good-night. This has been such a
delightful dinner that I already find I am staying pretty nearly as
late as I can stay and catch the train that is to take me back to
my regular work at Washington. I thank you for your greeting, and I
assure you that not one meeting which I have attended since I have been
President has given me greater pleasure to attend than this dinner.




MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES, TRANSMITTING A
PROTOCOL OF AN AGREEMENT BETWEEN THE UNITED STATES AND THE DOMINICAN
REPUBLIC, PROVIDING FOR THE COLLECTION AND DISBURSEMENT BY THE UNITED
STATES OF THE CUSTOMS REVENUES OF THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, SIGNED ON
FEBRUARY 4, 1905


_To the Senate_:

I submit herewith a protocol concluded between the Dominican Republic
and the United States.

The conditions in the Republic of Santo Domingo have been growing
steadily worse for many years. There have been many disturbances and
revolutions, and debts have been contracted beyond the power of the
Republic to pay. Some of these debts were properly contracted and are
held by those who have a legitimate right to their money. Others are
without question improper or exorbitant, constituting claims which
should never be paid in full and perhaps only to the extent of a very
small portion of their nominal value.

Certain foreign countries have long felt themselves aggrieved
because of the non-payment of debts due their citizens. The only
way by which foreign creditors could ever obtain from the Republic
itself any guaranty of payment would be either by the acquisition of
territory outright or temporarily, or else by taking possession of the
custom-houses, which would of course in itself, in effect, be taking
possession of a certain amount of territory.

It has for some time been obvious that those who profit by the Monroe
Doctrine must accept certain responsibilities along with the rights
which it confers; and that the same statement applies to those who
uphold the doctrine. It can not be too often and too emphatically
asserted that the United States has not the slightest desire for
territorial aggrandizement at the expense of any of its southern
neighbors, and will not treat the Monroe Doctrine as an excuse for
such aggrandizement on its part. We do not propose to take any part
of Santo Domingo, or exercise any other control over the island save
what is necessary to its financial rehabilitation in connection with
the collection of revenue, part of which will be turned over to the
Government to meet the necessary expense of running it, and part of
which will be distributed pro rata among the creditors of the Republic
upon a basis of absolute equity. The justification for the United
States taking this burden and incurring this responsibility is to be
found in the fact that it is incompatible with international equity
for the United States to refuse to allow other powers to take the only
means at their disposal of satisfying the claims of their creditors
and yet to refuse, itself, to take any such steps.

An aggrieved nation can without interfering with the Monroe Doctrine
take what action it sees fit in the adjustment of its disputes with
American States, provided that action does not take the shape of
interference with their form of government or of the despoilment of
their territory under any disguise. But, short of this, when the
question is one of a money claim, the only way which remains, finally,
to collect it is a blockade, or bombardment, or the seizure of the
custom-houses, and this means, as has been said above, what is in
effect a possession, even though only a temporary possession, of
territory. The United States then becomes a party in interest, because
under the Monroe Doctrine it can not see any European power seize and
permanently occupy the territory of one of these Republics; and yet
such seizure of territory, disguised or undisguised, may eventually
offer the only way in which the power in question can collect any
debts, unless there is interference on the part of the United States.

One of the difficult and increasingly complicated problems, which often
arise in Santo Domingo, grows out of the violations of contracts and
concessions, sometimes improvidently granted, with valuable privileges
and exemptions stipulated for upon grossly inadequate considerations
which were burdensome to the State, and which are not infrequently
disregarded and violated by the governing authorities. Citizens of the
United States and of other Governments holding these concessions and
contracts appeal to their respective Governments for active protection
and intervention. Except for arbitrary wrong, done or sanctioned by
superior authority, to persons or to vested property rights, the United
States Government, following its traditional usage in such cases, aims
to go no further than the mere use of its good offices, a measure
which frequently proves ineffective. On the other hand, there are
Governments which do sometimes take energetic action for the protection
of their subjects in the enforcement of merely contractual claims, and
thereupon American concessionaries, supported by powerful influences,
make loud appeal to the United States Government in similar cases for
similar action. They complain that in the actual posture of affairs
their valuable properties are practically confiscated, that American
enterprise is paralyzed, and that unless they are fully protected even
by the enforcement of their merely contractual rights, it means the
abandonment to the subjects of other Governments of the interests of
American trade and commerce through the sacrifice of their investments
by excessive taxes imposed in violation of contract, and by other
devices, and the sacrifice of the output of their mines and other
industries, and even of their railway and shipping interests, which
they have established in connection with the exploitation of their
concessions. Thus the attempted solution of the complex problem by
the ordinary methods of diplomacy reacts injuriously upon the United
States Government itself, and in a measure paralyzes the action of the
Executive in the direction of a sound and consistent policy. The United
States Government is embarrassed in its efforts to foster American
enterprise and the growth of our commerce through the cultivation of
friendly relations with Santo Domingo, by the irritating effects on
those relations, and the consequent injurious influence upon that
commerce, of frequent interventions. As a method of solution of the
complicated problem arbitration has become nugatory, inasmuch as,
in the condition of its finances, an award against the Republic is
worthless unless its payment is secured by the pledge of at least some
portion of the customs revenues. This pledge is ineffectual without
actual delivery over of the custom-houses to secure the appropriation
of the pledged revenues to the payment of the award. This situation
again reacts injuriously upon the relations of the United States with
other nations. For when an award and such security are thus obtained,
as in the case of the Santo Domingo Improvement Company, some foreign
Government complains that the award conflicts with its rights, as a
creditor, to some portion of these revenues under an alleged prior
pledge; and still other Governments complain that an award in any
considerable sum, secured by pledges of the customs revenues, is
prejudicial to the payment of their equally meritorious claims out of
the ordinary revenues; and thus controversies are begotten between
the United States and other creditor nations because of the apparent
sacrifice of some of their claims, which may be just or may be grossly
exaggerated, but which the United States Government can not inquire
into without giving grounds of offence to other friendly creditor
nations. Still further illustrations might easily be furnished of
the hopelessness of the present situation growing out of the social
disorders and the bankrupt finances of the Dominican Republic, where
for considerable periods during recent years the bonds of civil society
have been practically dissolved.

Under the accepted law of nations foreign Governments are within
their right, if they choose to exercise it, when they actively
intervene in support of the contractual claims of their subjects.
They sometimes exercise this power, and on account of commercial
rivalries there is a growing tendency on the part of other Governments
more and more to aid diplomatically in the enforcement of the claims
of their subjects. In view of the dilemma in which the Government
of the United States is thus placed, it must either adhere to its
usual attitude of non-intervention in such cases—an attitude proper
under normal conditions, but one which in this particular kind of
case results to the disadvantage of its citizens in comparison with
those of other States—or else it must, in order to be consistent
in its policy, actively intervene to protect the contracts and con
cessions of its citizens engaged in agriculture, commerce, and
transportation in competition with the subjects and citizens of other
States. This course would render the United States the insurer of all
the speculative risks of its citizens in the public securities and
franchises of Santo Domingo.

Under the plan in the protocol herewith submitted to the Senate,
ensuring a faithful collection and application of the revenues to the
specified objects, we are well assured that this difficult task can be
accomplished with the friendly co-operation and goodwill of all the
parties concerned, and to the great relief of the Dominican Republic.

The conditions in the Dominican Republic not only constitute a menace
to our relations with other foreign nations, but they also concern
the prosperity of the people of the island, as well as the security
of American interests, and they are intimately associated with the
interests of the South Atlantic and Gulf States, the normal expansion
of whose commerce lies in that direction. At one time, and that only a
year ago, three revolutions were in progress in the island at the same
time.

It is impossible to state with anything like approximate accuracy the
present population of the Dominican Republic. In the report of the
Commission appointed by President Grant in 1871, the population was
estimated at not over 150,000 souls, but according to the Statesman’s
Yearbook for 1904, the estimated population in 1888 is given as
610,000. The Bureau of the American Republics considers this the
best estimate of the present population of the Republic. As shown by
the unanimous report of the Grant Commission the public debt of the
Dominican Republic, including claims, was $1,565,831.59¼. The total
revenues were $772,684.75¼. The public indebtedness of the Dominican
Republic, not including all claims, was on September 12 last, as the
Department of State is advised, $32,280,000; the estimated revenues
under Dominican management of custom-houses were $1,850,000; the
proposed budget for current administration was $1,300,000, leaving
only $550,000 to pay foreign and liquidated obligations, and payments
on these latter will amount during the ensuing year to $1,700,000,
besides $900,000 of arrearages of payments overdue, amounting in all to
$2,600,000. It is therefore impossible under existing conditions, which
are chronic, and with the estimated yearly revenues of the Republic,
which during the last decade have averaged approximately $1,600,000,
to defray the ordinary expenses of the Government and to meet its
obligations.

The Dominican debt owed to European creditors is about $22,000,000, and
of this sum over $18,000,000 is more or less formally recognized. The
representatives of European Governments have several times approached
the Secretary of State setting forth the wrongs and intolerable delays
to which they have been subjected at the hands of the successive
Governments of Santo Domingo in the collection of their just claims,
and intimating that unless the Dominican Government should receive
some assistance from the United States in the way of regulating its
finances, the creditor Governments in Europe would be forced to resort
to more effective measures of compulsion to secure the satisfaction of
their claims.

If the United States Government declines to take action and other
foreign Governments resort to action to secure payment of their claims,
the latter would be entitled, according to the decision of The Hague
tribunal in the Venezuelan cases, to the preferential payment of
their claims; and this would absorb all the Dominican revenues and
would be a virtual sacrifice of American claims and interests in the
island. If moreover, any such action should be taken by them, the only
method to enable them to secure the payment of their claims would be
to take possession of the custom-houses, and considering the state of
the Dominican finances this would mean a definite and very possibly
permanent occupation of Dominican territory, for no period could be
set to the time which would be necessarily required for the payment of
their obligations and unliquidated claims. The United States Government
could not interfere to prevent such seizure and occupation of Dominican
territory without either itself proposing some feasible alternative in
the way of action, or else virtually saying to European Governments
that they would not be allowed to collect their claims. This would be
an unfortunate attitude for the Government of the United States to be
forced to maintain at present. It can not with propriety say that it
will protect its own citizens and interests, on the one hand, and yet
on the other hand refuse to allow other Governments to protect their
citizens and interests.

The actual situation in the Dominican Republic can not, perhaps, be
more forcibly stated than by giving a brief account of the case of the
Santo Domingo Improvement Company.

From 1869 to 1897 the Dominican Government issued successive series of
bonds, the majority of which were in the hands of European holders.
Successive issues bore interest at rates ranging from 2¾ to 6 per cent,
and what with commissions and other deductions and the heavy discount
in the market the Government probably did not receive over 50 to 75 per
cent of their nominal value. Other portions of the debt were created by
loans, for which the Government received only one-half of the amount
it was nominally to repay, and these obligations bore interest at the
rate of 1 to 2 per cent a month on their face, some of them compounded
monthly.

The improvidence of the Government in its financial management was due
to its weakness, to its impaired credit, and to its pecuniary needs
occasioned by frequent insurrections and revolutionary changes, and by
its inability to collect its revenues.

In 1888 the Government, in order to secure the payment of an issue
of bonds, placed the custom-houses and the collection of its customs
duties, which are substantially the only revenues of the Republic, in
the hands of the Westendorps, bankers of Amsterdam, Holland. But the
national debt continued to grow and the Government finally intrusted
the collection of its revenues to an American corporation, the Santo
Domingo Improvement Company, which was to take over the bonds of the
Westendorps. The Dominican Government finally became dissatisfied
with this arrangement, and, in 1901, ousted the Improvement Company
from its custom-houses and took into its own hands the collection of
its revenues. The company thereupon appealed to the United States
Government to maintain them in their position, but their request was
refused. The Dominican Government then sent its minister of foreign
affairs to Washington to negotiate a settlement. He admitted that the
Improvement Company had equities which ought not to be disregarded,
and the Department of State suggested that the Dominican Government
and the Improvement Company should effect, by private negotiation, a
satisfactory settlement between them. They accordingly entered into an
arrangement for a settlement, which was mutually satisfactory to the
parties. A similar arrangement was likewise made between the Dominican
Government and the European bondholders. The latter arrangement was
carried into execution by the Dominican Government and payments made
toward the liquidation of the bonds held by the European holders. The
Dominican Congress refused to ratify the similar arrangement made with
the Improvement Company, and the Government refused to provide for the
payment of the American claimants. In this state of the case it was
evident that a continuance of this treatment of the American creditors,
and its repetition in other cases, would, if allowed to run its course,
result in handing over the island to European creditors, and in time
would ripen into serious controversies between the United States and
other Governments, unless the United States should deliberately and
finally abandon its interests in the island.

The Improvement Company and its allied companies held, besides bonds,
certain banking and railway interests in the island. The Dominican
Government, desirous to own and possess these properties, agreed
with the companies that the value of their bonds and properties was
$4,500,000, and they submitted to arbitration the question as to the
instalments in which this sum should be paid and the security that
should be given. The Hon. George Gray, judge of the United States
Circuit Court of Appeals, and the Hon. Manuel de J. Galvan, both named
by the Dominican Republic, and the Hon. John G. Carlisle, named by
the United States, were the arbitrators, and rendered their award
on July 14, 1904. By its terms the Dominican Government was to pay
the above-mentioned sum of $4,500,000, with 4 per cent interest per
annum, in monthly instalments of $37,500 each during two years and
of $41,666.66 each month thereafter, beginning with the month of
September, 1904, said award to be secured by the customs revenues and
port dues of all the ports on the northern coast of Santo Domingo.
The award further provides for the appointment of a financial agent
of the United States, who was authorized, in case of failure during
any month to receive the sum then due, to enter into possession of
the custom-house at Puerto Plata in the first instance and assume
charge of the collection of customs duties and port dues, and to fix
and determine these duties and dues and secure their payment; in case
the sums collected at Puerto Plata should at any time be insufficient
for the payment of the amounts due under the award, or in case of any
other manifest necessity, or in case the Dominican Government should
so request, the financial agent of the United States was authorized to
have and exercise at any and all of the other ports above described
all the rights and powers vested in him by the award in respect of
Puerto Plata. Under the award the financial agent could only apply
the revenues collected toward its payment after he had first paid the
expenses of collection and certain other obligations styled “aparods,”
which constituted prior charges on the revenues assigned. These prior
charges are specified in the award. The Dominican Government defaulted
in their payments; and in virtue of the award and the authority
conferred by the Dominican Government, and at its request, possession
was delivered of the custom-house of Puerto Plata to the fiscal agent
appointed by the United States to collect the revenues assigned by the
arbitrators for the payment of the award; and in virtue of the same
authority possession of the custom-house of Monte Cristi has also
been handed over. I submit herewith a report of Mr. John B. Moore,
agent of the United States in this case, and a copy of the award of the
arbitrators.

During the past two years the European claimants except the English,
whose interests were embraced in those of the American companies, have,
with the support of their respective Governments, been growing more and
more importunate in pressing their unsatisfied demands. The French and
the Belgians, in 1901, had entered into a contract with the Dominican
Government, but, after a few payments were made on account, it fell
into neglect. Other Governments also obliged the Dominican Government
to enter into arrangements of various kinds by which the revenues of
the Republic were in large part sequestrated, and under one of the
agreements, which was concluded with Italy in 1903, the minister of
that Government was empowered directly to collect from the importers
and exporters that portion of the customs revenues assigned to him as
security. As the result of chronic disorders attended with a constant
increase of debt, the state of things in Santo Domingo has become
hopeless, unless the United States or some other strong Government
shall interpose to bring order out of the chaos. The custom-houses,
with the exception of the two in the possession of the financial
agent appointed by the United States, have become unproductive for
the discharge of indebtedness, except as to persons making emergency
loans to the Government or to its enemies for the purpose of carrying
on political contests by force. They have, in fact, become the nuclei
of the various revolutions. The first effort of revolutionists is to
take possession of a custom-house so as to obtain funds, which are then
disposed of at the absolute discretion of those who are collecting
them. The chronic disorders prevailing in Santo Domingo have, moreover,
become exceedingly dangerous to the interests of Americans holding
property in that country. Constant complaints have been received of
the injuries and inconveniences to which they have been subjected. As
an evidence of the increasing aggravation of conditions, the fact may
be mentioned that about a year ago the American railway, which had
previously been exempt from such attacks, was seized, its tracks torn
up, and a station destroyed by revolutionary bands.

The ordinary resources of diplomacy and international arbitration are
absolutely impotent to deal wisely and effectively with the situation
in the Dominican Republic, which can only be met by organizing its
finances on a sound basis and by placing the custom-houses beyond the
temptation of insurgent chieftains. Either we must abandon our duty
under our traditional policy toward the Dominican people, who aspire to
a republican form of government while they are actually drifting into a
condition of permanent anarchy, in which case we must permit some other
Government to adopt its own measures in order to safeguard its own
interests, or else we must ourselves take seasonable and appropriate
action.

Again and again has the Dominican Government invoked on its own behalf
the aid of the United States. It has repeatedly done so of recent
years. In 1899 it sought to enter into treaty relations by which it
would be placed under the protection of the United States Government.
The request was refused. Again in January, 1904, its minister of
foreign affairs visited Washington and besought the help of the United
States Government to enable it to escape from its financial and social
disorders. Compliance with this request was again declined, for this
Government has been most reluctant to interfere in any way, and has
finally concluded to take action only because it has become evident
that failure to do so may result in a situation fraught with grave
danger to the cause of international peace.

In 1903 a representative of a foreign Government proposed to the
United States the joint fiscal control of the Dominican Republic by
certain creditor nations, and that the latter should take charge of
the custom-houses and revenues and give to the Dominican Government
a certain percentage and apply the residue to the payment ratably of
claims of foreign creditors. The United States Government declined to
approve or to enter into such an arrangement. But it has now become
evident that decided action of some kind can not be much longer
delayed. In view of our past experience and our knowledge of the
actual situation of the Dominican Republic, a definite refusal of the
United States Government to take any effective action looking to the
relief of the Dominican Republic and to the discharge of its own duty
under the Monroe Doctrine can only be considered as an acquiescence in
some such action by another Government.

That most wise measure of international statesmanship, the Platt
amendment, has provided a method for preventing such difficulties from
arising in the new Republic of Cuba. In accordance with the terms of
this amendment the Republic of Cuba can not issue any bonds which can
be collected from Cuba save as a matter of grace, unless with the
consent of the United States, which is at liberty at all times to take
measures to prevent the violation of the letter and spirit of the Platt
amendment. If a similar plan could now be entered upon by the Dominican
Republic, it would undoubtedly be of great advantage to them and to all
other peoples, for under such an arrangement no larger debt would be
incurred than could be honestly paid, and those who took debts not thus
authorized would, by the mere fact of taking them, put themselves in
the category of speculators or gamblers, who deserved no consideration
and who would be permitted to receive none; so that the honest creditor
would on the one hand be safe, while on the other hand the Republic
would be safeguarded against molestation in the interest of mere
speculators.

But no such plan at present exists; and under existing circumstances,
when the condition of affairs becomes such as it has become in Santo
Domingo, either we must submit to the likelihood of infringement of the
Monroe Doctrine or we must ourselves agree to some such arrangement
as that herewith submitted to the Senate. In this case, fortunately,
the prudent and far-seeing statesmanship of the Dominican Government
has relieved us of all trouble. At their request we have entered into
the agreement herewith submitted. Under it the custom-houses will be
administered peacefully, honestly, and economically, 45 per cent of
the proceeds being turned over to the Dominican Government and the
remainder being used by the United States to pay what proportion of the
debts it is possible to pay on an equitable basis. The Republic will
be secured against over-seas aggression. This in reality entails no
new obligation upon us, for the Monroe Doctrine means precisely such a
guarantee on our part.

It is perhaps unnecessary to state that no step of any kind has been
taken by the Administration under the terms of the protocol which is
herewith submitted.

The Republic of Santo Domingo has by this protocol wisely and
patriotically accepted the responsibilities as well as the privileges
of liberty, and is showing with evident good faith its purpose to pay
all that its resources will permit of its obligations. More than this
it can not do, and when it has done this we should not permit it to be
molested. We on our part are simply performing in peaceful manner,
not only with the cordial acquiescence, but in accordance with the
earnest request of the Government concerned, part of that international
duty which is necessarily involved in the assertion of the Monroe
Doctrine. We are bound to show that we perform this duty in good faith
and without any intention of aggrandizing ourselves at the expense of
our weaker neighbors or of conducting ourselves otherwise than so as
to benefit both these weaker neighbors and those European Powers which
may be brought into contact with them. It is in the highest degree
necessary that we should prove by our action that the world may trust
in our good faith and may understand that this international duty will
be performed by us within our own sphere, in the interest not merely
of ourselves, but of all other nations, and with strict justice toward
all. If this is done a general acceptance of the Monroe Doctrine
will in the end surely follow; and this will mean an increase of the
sphere in which peaceful measures for the settlement of international
difficulties gradually displace those of a warlike character.

We can point with just pride to what we have done in Cuba as a guaranty
of our good faith. We stayed in Cuba only so long as to start her
aright on the road to self-government, which she has since trod with
such marked and distinguished success; and upon leaving the island
we exacted no conditions save such as would prevent her from ever
becoming the prey of the stranger. Our purpose in Santo Domingo is as
beneficent. The good that this country got from its action in Cuba was
indirect rather than direct. So it is as regards Santo Domingo. The
chief material advantage that will come from the action proposed to be
taken will be to Santo Domingo itself and to Santo Domingo’s creditors.
The advantages that will come to the United States will be indirect,
but nevertheless great, for it is supremely to our interest that all
the communities immediately south of us should be or become prosperous
and stable, and therefore not merely in name but in fact independent
and self-governing.

I call attention to the urgent need of prompt action on this matter.
We now have a great opportunity to secure peace and stability in the
island, without friction or bloodshed, by acting in accordance with
the cordial invitation of the governmental authorities themselves.
It will be unfortunate from every standpoint if we fail to grasp
this opportunity; for such failure will probably mean increasing
revolutionary violence in Santo Domingo, and very possibly embarrassing
foreign complications in addition. This protocol affords a practical
test of the efficiency of the United States Government in maintaining
the Monroe Doctrine.

                                                    THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
WHITE HOUSE,
_February 15, 1905_.




ADDRESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA, PA., FEB. 22,
1905


  _Mr. Provost, Members of the University, and my Fellow-Citizens_:

As a Nation we have had our full share of great men, but the two men
of pre-eminent greatness who, as the centuries go on, will surely loom
above all others are Washington and Lincoln; and it is peculiarly
fitting that their birthdays should be celebrated every year and the
meaning of their lives brought home close to us.

No other city in the country is so closely identified with Washington’s
career as Philadelphia. He served here in 1775 in the Continental
Congress. He was here as commander of the Army at the time of the
battles of Brandywine and Germantown; and it was near here that with
that army he faced the desolate winter at Valley Forge, the winter
which marked the turning point of the Revolutionary War. Here he came
again as President of the Convention which framed the Constitution,
and then as President of the United States, and finally as
Lieutenant-General of the Army after he had retired from the Presidency.

One hundred and eight years ago, just before he left the Presidency, he
issued his farewell address, and in it he laid down certain principles
which he believed should guide the citizens of this Republic for all
time to come, his own words being “which appear to me all-important to
the permanency of your felicity as a people.”

Washington, though in some ways an even greater man than Lincoln, did
not have Lincoln’s wonderful gift of expression—that gift which makes
certain speeches of the rail-splitter from Illinois read like the
inspired utterances of the great Hebrew seers and prophets. But he had
all of Lincoln’s sound common-sense, farsightedness, and devotion to a
lofty ideal. Like Lincoln he sought after the noblest objects, and like
Lincoln he sought after them by thoroughly practical methods. These two
greatest Americans can fairly be called the best among the great men of
the world, and greatest among the good men of the world. Each showed in
actual practice his capacity to secure under our system the priceless
union of individual liberty with governmental strength. Each was as
free from the vices of the tyrant as from the vices of the demagogue.
To each the empty futility of the mere doctrinaire was as alien as the
baseness of the merely self-seeking politician. Each was incapable
alike of the wickedness which seeks by force of arms to wrong others
and of the no less criminal weakness which fails to provide effectively
against being wronged by others.

Among Washington’s maxims which he bequeathed to his countrymen were
the two following: “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations,”
and “To be prepared for war is the most effective means to promote
peace.” These two principles taken together should form the basis of
our whole foreign policy. Neither is sufficient taken by itself. It is
not merely an idle dream, but a most mischievous dream, to believe that
mere refraining from wrongdoing will ensure us against being wronged.
Yet, on the other hand, a nation prepared for war is a menace to
mankind unless the national purpose is to treat other nations with good
faith and justice. In any community it is neither the conscientious man
who is a craven at heart, nor yet the bold and strong man without the
moral sense, who is of real use to the community; it is the man who to
strength and courage adds a realizing sense of the moral obligation
resting upon him, the man who has not only the desire but the power to
do his full duty by his neighbor and by the State. So, in the world at
large, the nation which is of use in the progress of mankind is that
nation which combines strength of character, force of character, and
insistence upon its own rights, with a full acknowledgment of its own
duties toward others. Just at present the best way in which we can
show that our loyalty to the teachings of Washington is a loyalty of
the heart and not of the lips only is to see to it that the work of
building up our Navy goes steadily on, and that at the same time our
stand for international righteousness is clear and emphatic.

Never since the beginning of our country’s history has the Navy
been used in an unjust war. Never has it failed to render great and
sometimes vital service to the Republic. It has not been too strong
for our good, though often not strong enough to do all the good it
should have done. Our possession of the Philippines, our interest
in the trade of the Orient, our building the Isthmian Canal, our
insistence upon the Monroe Doctrine, all demand that our Navy shall
be of adequate size and for its size of unsurpassed efficiency. If it
is strong enough I believe it will minimize the chance of our being
drawn into foreign war. If we let it run down it is as certain as the
day that sooner or later we shall have to choose between a probably
disastrous foreign war or a peace kept on terms that imply national
humiliation. Our Navy is the surest guaranty of peace and the cheapest
insurance against war, and those who, in whatever capacity, have helped
to build it up during the past twenty years have been in good faith
observing and living up to one of the most important of the principles
which Washington laid down for the guidance of his countrymen. Nor was
Washington the only one of our great Presidents who showed farsighted
patriotism by support of the Navy. When Andrew Jackson was in Congress
he voted for the first warships we ever built as part of our regular
Navy; and he voted against the grant of money to pay our humiliating
tribute to the pirates of the Barbary States. Old Hickory was a patriot
through and through, and there was not an ounce of timidity in his
nature, and of course he felt only indignant contempt for a policy
which purchased an ignoble peace by cowardice instead of exacting
a just peace by showing we were as little willing to submit to as
to inflict aggression. Had a majority of Jackson’s colleagues and
successors felt as he did about the Navy, had it been built up instead
of being brought to a standstill, it would probably never have been
necessary to fight the War of 1812.

Again Washington said: “Give to mankind the example of a people always
guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.” This feeling can be
shown alike by our dealings within and without our own borders. Taft
and Wright in the Philippines and Wood in Cuba have shown us exactly
how to practice this justice and benevolence in dealing with other
peoples—a justice and benevolence which can be shown, not by shirking
our duty and abandoning to self-destruction those unfit to govern
themselves, but by doing our duty by staying with them and teaching
them how to govern themselves, by uplifting them spiritually and
materially. Here at home we are obeying this maxim of Washington’s
just so far as we help in every movement, whether undertaken by the
Government, or as is, and should be, more often the case, by voluntary
action among private citizens, for the betterment of our own people.
Observe that Washington speaks both of justice and benevolence, and
that he puts justice first. We must be generous, we must help our
poorer brother, but above all, we must remember to be just; and the
first step toward securing justice is to treat every man on his worth
as a man, showing him no special favor, but so far as may be holding
open for him the door of opportunity so that reward may wait upon
honest and intelligent endeavor.

Again Washington said: “Cherish public credit.” Just at the moment
there is no attack on public credit, but if ever the temptation arises
again let our people at the outset remember that the worst because the
most insidious form of the appeal that would make a man a dishonest
debtor is that which would persuade him that it is anything but
dishonest for him to repudiate his debts.

Finally, it is peculiarly appropriate, when I have come to this city
as the guest of the University of Pennsylvania, to quote another of
Washington’s maxims: “Promote, as an object of primary importance,
institutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as
the structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is
essential that public opinion should be enlightened.” Education may
not make a man a good citizen, but most certainly ignorance tends to
prevent his being a good citizen. Washington was far too much of a
patriot, had far too much love for his fellow-citizens, to try to teach
them that they could govern themselves unless they could develop a
sound and enlightened public opinion. No nation can permanently retain
free government unless it can retain a high average of citizenship;
and there can be no such high average of citizenship without a high
average of education, using the word in its broadest and truest
sense to include the things of the soul as well as the things of
the mind. School education can never supplant or take the place of
self-education, still less can it in any way take the place of those
rugged and manly qualities which we group together under the name
of character; but it can be of enormous use in supplementing both.
It is a source of just pride to every American that our people have
so consistently acted in accordance with Washington’s principle of
promoting institutions for the diffusion of knowledge. There is nothing
dearer to our hearts than our public school system, by which free
primary education is provided for every one within our borders. The
higher education, such as is provided by the University of Pennsylvania
and kindred bodies, not only confers great benefits to those able to
take advantage of it, but entails upon them corresponding duties.

The men who founded this Nation had to deal with theories of government
and the fundamental principles of free institutions. We are now
concerned with a different set of questions, for the Republic has
been firmly established, its principles thoroughly tested and fully
approved. To merely political issues have succeeded those of grave
social and economic importance, the solution of which demands the best
efforts of the best men. We have a right to expect that a wise and
leading part in the effort to attain this solution will be taken by
those who have been exceptionally blessed in the matter of obtaining an
education. That college graduate is but a poor creature who does not
feel when he has left college that he has received something for which
he owes a return. What he thus owes he can, as a rule, only pay by the
way he bears himself throughout life. It is but occasionally that a
college graduate can do much outright for his alma mater; he can best
repay her by living a life that will reflect credit upon her, by so
carrying himself as a citizen that men shall see that the years spent
in training him have not been wasted. The educated man is entitled
to no special privilege, save the inestimable privilege of trying to
show that his education enables him to take the lead in striving to
guide his fellows aright in the difficult task which is set to us of
the twentieth century. The problems before us to-day are very complex,
and are widely different from those which the men of Washington’s
generation had to face; but we can overcome them surely, and we can
overcome them only, if we approach them in the spirit which Washington
and Washington’s great supporters brought to bear upon the problems
of their day—the spirit of sanity and of courage, the spirit which
combines hard common-sense with the loftiest idealism.




INAUGURAL ADDRESS, MARCH 4, 1905


_My Fellow-Citizens:_

No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this
is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength,
but with gratitude to the Giver of Good, who has blessed us with the
conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of
well-being and of happiness. To us as a people it has been granted to
lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent. We are
the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties
which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone
civilization. We have not been obliged to fight for our existence
against any alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and
effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under
such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed; and the success
which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently believe
the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of vainglory, but
rather a deep and abiding realization of all which life has offered us;
a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours, and a fixed
determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can
thrive best, alike as regards the things of the body and the things of
the soul.

Much has been given to us, and much will rightfully be expected from
us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk
neither. We have become a great Nation, forced by the fact of its
greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth; and we
must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all
other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and
sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words but in our deeds
that we are earnestly desirous of securing their goodwill by acting
toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their
rights. But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual,
count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever
careful to refrain from wronging others, we must be no less insistent
that we are not wronged ourselves. We wish peace; but we wish the peace
of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think
it is right and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts
manfully and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong
power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent
aggression.

Our relations with the other Powers of the world are important; but
still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in
wealth, in population, and in power as this Nation has seen during the
century and a quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied
by a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation
that rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility
and danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have
outgrown. We now face other perils the very existence of which it
was impossible that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex
and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary
industrial development of the last half century are felt in every
fibre of our social and political being. Never before have men tried
so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the
affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic republic. The
conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being,
which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance,
and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety
inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial
centres. Upon the success of our experiment much depends; not only as
regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If
we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will
rock to its foundations; and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to
ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet
unborn. There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but
there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding
from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to
approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to
solve them aright.

Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set
before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded
and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must
be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well
done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is
difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character
as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the
freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith
that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty
past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now
enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be
able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and
our children’s children. To do so we must show, not merely in great
crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical
intelligence, of courage, of hardihood and endurance, and above all
the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who
founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the
men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.




                                                 WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON
                                                 _March 6, 1905_


_To the Senate:_

I wish to call the attention of the Senate at this executive session
to the treaty with Santo Domingo. I feel that I ought to state to the
Senate that the condition of affairs in Santo Domingo is such that
it is very much for the interest of that Republic that action on the
treaty should be had at as early a moment as the Senate, after giving
the matter full consideration, may find practicable.

I call attention to the following facts:

1. This treaty was entered into at the earnest request of Santo Domingo
itself, and is designed to afford Santo Domingo relief and assistance.
Its primary benefit will be to Santo Domingo. It offers the method most
likely to secure peace and to prevent war in the island.

2. The benefit to the United States will consist chiefly in the
tendency under the treaty to secure stability, order, and prosperity in
Santo Domingo, and the removal of the apprehension lest foreign powers
make aggressions on Santo Domingo in the course of collecting claims
due their citizens; for it is greatly to our interest that all the
islands in the Caribbean Sea should enjoy peace and prosperity and feel
goodwill toward this country. The benefit to honest creditors will come
from the fact that for the first time under this treaty a practicable
method of attempting to settle the debts due them will be inaugurated.

3. Many of the debts alleged to be due from Santo Domingo to outside
creditors unquestionably on their face represent far more money than
ever was actually given Santo Domingo. The proposed treaty provides
for a process by which impartial experts will determine what debts are
valid and what are in whole or in part invalid, and will apportion
accordingly the surplus revenue available for the payment of the debts.
This treaty offers the only method for preventing the collection of
fraudulent debts, whether owed to Americans or to citizens of other
nations.

4. This treaty affords the most practicable means of obtaining payment
for the just claims of American citizens.

5. If the treaty is ratified creditors belonging to other nations
will have exactly as good treatment as creditors who are citizens
of the United States, and at the same time Santo Domingo will be
protected against unjust and exorbitant claims. If it is not ratified
the chances are that American creditors will fare ill as compared
with those of other nations; for foreign nations, being denied the
opportunity to get what is rightfully due their citizens under the
proposed arrangement, will be left to collect debts due their citizens
as they see fit, provided, of course, there is not permanent occupancy
of Dominican territory. As in such case the United States will have
nothing to say as to what debts should or should not be collected, and
as Santo Domingo will be left without aid, assistance, or protection,
it is impossible to state that the sums collected from it will not
be improper in amount. In such event, whatever is collected by means
of forcible intervention will be applied to the creditors of foreign
nations in preference to creditors who are citizens of the United
States.

6. The correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Minister
of Haiti, submitted to the Senate several days ago, shows that our
position is explicitly and unreservedly that under no circumstances
do we intend to acquire territory in or possession of either Haiti or
Santo Domingo; it being stated in these letters that even if the two
republics desired to become a part of the United States the United
States would certainly refuse its assent.

7. Santo Domingo grievously needs the aid of a powerful and friendly
nation. This aid we are able, and I trust that we are willing, to
bestow. She has asked for this aid, and the expressions of friendship
repeatedly sanctioned by the people and the Government of the United
States warrant her in believing that it will not be withheld in the
hour of her need.

                                                     THEODORE ROOSEVELT.




ADDRESS AT THE MEETING OF THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, AT GRACE REFORMED
CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., MARCH 12, 1905


  _Mr. Justice, Dr. Schick, and you, my Fellow-Members of this
  Congregation, and our Guests who are with us to-day_:

I am glad, on behalf of this church, to say amen to the appeal that has
been made by Dr. Swift on behalf of the great society to the account of
whose work you have been listening. Mr. Justice, you quoted the advice
of a poet “to be doers rather than dreamers.” In the Book of all books
there is a sentence to the same effect, “Be ye doers of the word and
not hearers only.” Let us show ourselves to-day doers of the word,
upholders in fact of what has been preached to us by Dr. Swift.

He has set forth the needs of the society, and he has set forth the
great field over which it works. I wish to touch only on a small
portion of that field, but, after all, the portion that most concerns
us—the need here at home, here in this country, of furthering in every
way the work of the society, the work of all kindred societies, both
among the native-born and among the thousands who come to these shores
from abroad. And there is a peculiar propriety in such an appeal being
made to this church, for, as I have said here before, this church more
than most others should ever keep before it as part of its duty, as
one of the chief parts of its duty, that of caring in all ways, but
especially in spiritual ways, for the people who come to us from abroad.

The United States Government does endeavor to do its duty by the
immigrants who come to these shores; and I was glad, Dr. Swift, to
listen to what you said as to the work that is being done on Ellis
Island, for it is a just tribute to that work. But unless people have
had some experience with the dangers and difficulties surrounding the
newly arrived immigrant they can hardly realize how great they are.
The immigrant comes here almost unprotected; he does not, as a rule,
know our language; he is wholly unfamiliar with our institutions, our
customs, our habits of life and ways of thought; and there are, I am
sorry to say, great numbers of evil and wicked people who hope to
make their livelihood by preying on him. He is exposed to innumerable
temptations, innumerable petty oppressions, on almost every hand; and
unless some one is on hand to help him he literally has no idea where
to turn. No greater work can be done by a philanthropic or religious
society than to stretch out the helping hand to the man and the woman
who come here to this country to become citizens and the parents of
citizens, and therefore to do their part in making up for weal or for
woe the future of our land. If we do not take care of them, if we do
not try to uplift them, then as sure as fate our own children will pay
the penalty. If we do not see that the immigrant and the children of
the immigrant are raised up, most assuredly the result will be that
our own children and children’s children are pulled down. Either they
will rise or we shall sink. The level of well-being in this country
will be a level for all of us. We can not keep that level down for
a part and not have it sink more or less for the whole. If we raise
it for a part we shall raise it to a certain extent for the whole.
Therefore, it means much, not merely to the immigrants, but to every
good American, that there should be at Ellis Island the colporteurs
of this society, and the representatives of other religious and
philanthropic societies to try to care for the immigrant’s body, and
above all to try to care for the immigrant’s soul.

It is, of course, unnecessary to say that the things of the body must
be cared for; that the first duty of any man, especially of the man who
has others dependent upon him, is to take care of them, and to take
care of himself. Nobody can help others if he begins by being a burden
upon others. Each man must be able to pull his own weight, to carry his
own weight; and, therefore, each man must show the capacity to earn for
himself and his family enough to secure a certain amount of material
well-being. That must be the foundation. But on that foundation he must
build as a superstructure the spiritual life.

One of the best things done by this society, and by kindred religious
and benevolent societies, is supplying in our American life of to-day
the proper ideals. It is a good thing to have had the extraordinary
material prosperity which has followed so largely on the extraordinary
scientific discoveries alluded to by Justice Brewer, if we use this
material prosperity aright. It is not a good thing, it is a bad thing,
if we treat it as the be-all and end-all of our life. If we make it the
only ideal before this Nation, if we permit the people of this Republic
to get before their minds the view that material well-being carried
to an ever higher degree is the one and only thing to be striven
for, we are laying up for ourselves not merely trouble but ruin. I,
too, feel the faith and hope that have been expressed here to-day by
the vice-president and the secretary of the society; but I so feel
because I believe that we shall not permit mere material well-being
to become the only ideal in this Nation, because I believe that more
and more we shall accustom ourselves to looking at the great fortunes
accumulated by certain men as being nothing in themselves, either to
admire, to envy or to deplore, save as they are used well or ill. If
the great fortune is used well, if the man who has accumulated it has
the strength necessary to resist the temptations either to use it
wrongfully, or what is nearly as bad, not to use it aright—for negation
may be almost as harmful as positive wrongdoing—then he is entitled to
the praise due to whoever employs great powers for the common good. If
the man who accumulates that great fortune uses it ill or does not use
it well, then so far from being an object of envy, still less an object
of admiration, he should take his place among those whom we condemn
and pity—for usually, if we have the root of the matter in us, we will
pity those we condemn.

Wonderful changes have come in the last half century. It may well
be as Mr. Justice Brewer has said, that we tremble on the verge of
still greater changes in the future. The railway, the telegraph, the
telephone, steam, electricity, all the marvelous mechanical inventions
of these last five decades, have changed much in the superficial aspect
of the world, and have, therefore, produced certain great changes in
the world itself. But after all, in glorying over and wondering at
this extraordinary development, I think that we sometimes forget that
compared to the deeper things it is indeed only superficial in its
effect. The qualities that count most in man and woman now are the
qualities that counted most two thousand years ago; and as a Nation
we shall achieve success or merit failure accordingly as we do or do
not display those qualities. Among the members of this congregation
is a man who, in his prime, served as the fleet engineer of Farragut
when Farragut went into Mobile Bay. That was forty-one years ago. The
ships and the guns with which Farragut did that mighty feat are now
almost as obsolete as the galleys that fought for the mastery of the
Ægean Sea when Athens waged war on Sparta. They could no more stand
against a modern ship than could the ships that fought against the
Invincible Armada in 1588. But if the need ever comes for this Nation
to call on its sons to face a foreign foe, the call will or will not be
made in vain just exactly according to whether we do or do not still
retain the spirit which drove Farragut and the men under him onward to
victory. The gun changes, the ship changes; but the qualities needed in
the man behind the gun, in the man who handles the ship, are just the
same as they ever were. So it is in our whole material civilization of
to-day. The railroad, the telegraph, all these wonderful inventions,
produce new problems, confer new benefits, and bring about new
dangers. Cities are built up to enormous size, and, of course, with
the upbuilding of the cities comes the growth of the terrible problems
which confront all of us who have to do with city life. Outward
circumstances change. New dangers spring up and old dangers vanish. But
the spirit necessary to meet the new dangers, the spirit necessary to
ensure the triumph that we must and shall win, is the same now that it
has always been. This is the spirit which lies behind this society, and
all kindred societies; and we owe to this society all the help we can
afford to give; for it is itself giving to our people a service beyond
price, a service of love, a service which no money could buy.




ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL CONGRESS OF MOTHERS, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
MARCH 13, 1905


_Mrs. President_:

In our modern industrial civilization there are many and grave dangers
to counterbalance the splendors and the triumphs. It is not a good
thing to see cities grow at disproportionate speed relatively to the
country; for the small landowners, the men who own their little homes,
and therefore to a very large extent the men who till farms, the men of
the soil, have hitherto made the foundation of lasting national life
in every State; and, if the foundation becomes either too weak or too
narrow, the superstructure, no matter how attractive, is in imminent
danger of falling.

But far more important than the question of the occupation of our
citizens is the question of how their family life is conducted. No
matter what that occupation may be, as long as there is a real home and
as long as those who make up that home do their duty to one another, to
their neighbors and to the state, it is of minor consequence whether
the man’s trade is plied in the country or the city, whether it calls
for the work of the hands or for the work of the head.

But the Nation is in a bad way if there is no real home, if the family
is not of the right kind; if the man is not a good husband and father,
if he is brutal or cowardly or selfish, if the woman has lost her
sense of duty, if she is sunk in vapid self-indulgence or has let her
nature be twisted so that she prefers a sterile pseudo-intellectuality
to that great and beautiful development of character which comes only
to those whose lives know the fulness of duty done, of effort made and
self-sacrifice undergone.

In the last analysis the welfare of the state depends absolutely upon
whether or not the average family, the average man and woman and their
children, represent the kind of citizenship fit for the foundation of a
great nation; and if we fail to appreciate this we fail to appreciate
the root morality upon which all healthy civilization is based.

No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of
artistic development, will permanently avail any people unless its home
life is healthy, unless the average man possesses honesty, courage,
common-sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at need
to fight hard; and unless the average woman is a good wife, a good
mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of
womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to bring up as they should be
brought up, healthy children, sound in body, mind, and character, and
numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease.

There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world
endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is the
truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the homemaker,
the breadwinner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty
of the woman is to be the helpmeet, the housewife, and mother. The
woman should have ample educational advantages; but save in exceptional
cases the man must be, and she need not be, and generally ought not
to be, trained for a lifelong career as the family breadwinner; and,
therefore, after a certain point the training of the two must normally
be different because the duties of the two are normally different. This
does not mean inequality of function, but it does mean that normally
there must be dissimilarity of function. On the whole, I think the
duty of the woman the more important, the more difficult, and the more
honorable of the two; on the whole I respect the woman who does her
duty even more than I respect the man who does his.

No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible as
the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children; for
upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour of the
day but often every hour of the night. She may have to get up night
after night to take care of a sick child, and yet must by day continue
to do all her household duties as well; and if the family means are
scant she must usually enjoy even her rare holidays taking her whole
brood of children with her. The birth pangs make all men the debtors of
all women. Above all, our sympathy and regard are due to the struggling
wives among those whom Abraham Lincoln called the plain people, and
whom he so loved and trusted; for the lives of these women are often
led on the lonely heights of quiet, self-sacrificing heroism.

Just as the happiest and most honorable and most useful task that
can be set any man is to earn enough for the support of his wife and
family, for the bringing up and starting in life of his children, so
the most important, the most honorable and desirable task which can
be set any woman is to be a good and wise mother in a home marked by
self-respect and mutual forbearance, by willingness to perform duty,
and by refusal to sink into self-indulgence or avoid that which entails
effort and self-sacrifice. Of course, there are exceptional men and
exceptional women who can do and ought to do much more than this,
who can lead and ought to lead great careers of outside usefulness
in addition to—not as substitute for—their home work; but I am not
speaking of exceptions; I am speaking of the primary duties, I am
speaking of the average citizens, the average men and women who make up
the Nation.

Inasmuch as I am speaking to an assemblage of mothers I shall have
nothing whatever to say in praise of an easy life. Yours is the work
which is never ended. No mother has an easy time, and most mothers have
very hard times; and yet what true mother would barter her experience
of joy and sorrow in exchange for a life of cold selfishness, which
insists upon perpetual amusement and the avoidance of care, and which
often finds its fit dwelling-place in some flat designed to furnish
with the least possible expenditure of effort the maximum of comfort
and of luxury, but in which there is literally no place for children?

The woman who is a good wife, a good mother, is entitled to our respect
as is no one else; but she is entitled to it only because, and so long
as, she is worthy of it. Effort and self-sacrifice are the law of
worthy life for the man as for the woman; though neither the effort
nor the self-sacrifice may be the same for the one as for the other. I
do not in the least believe in the patient Griselda type of woman, in
the woman who submits to gross and long-continued ill-treatment, any
more than I believe in a man who tamely submits to wrongful aggression.
No wrongdoing is so abhorrent as wrongdoing by a man toward the wife
and the children who should arouse every tender feeling in his nature.
Selfishness toward them, lack of tenderness toward them, lack of
consideration for them, above all, brutality in any form toward them,
should arouse the heartiest scorn and indignation in every upright soul.

I believe in the woman’s keeping her self-respect just as I believe in
the man’s doing so. I believe in her rights just as much as I believe
in the man’s, and indeed a little more; and I regard marriage as a
partnership in which each partner is in honor bound to think of the
rights of the other as well as of his or her own. But I think that the
duties are even more important than the rights; and in the long run I
think that the reward is ampler and greater for duty well done than for
the insistence upon individual rights, necessary though this, too, must
often be. Your duty is hard, your responsibility great; but greatest of
all is your reward. I do not pity you in the least. On the contrary, I
feel respect and admiration for you.

Into the woman’s keeping is committed the destiny of the generations to
come after us. In bringing up your children you mothers must remember
that while it is essential to be loving and tender it is no less
essential to be wise and firm. Foolishness and affection must not be
treated as interchangeable terms; and besides training your sons and
daughters in the softer and milder virtues you must seek to give them
those stern and hardy qualities which in after life they will surely
need. Some children will go wrong in spite of the best training; and
some will go right even when their surroundings are most unfortunate;
nevertheless an immense amount depends upon the family training. If
you mothers through weakness bring up your sons to be selfish and to
think only of themselves, you will be responsible for much sadness
among the women who are to be their wives in the future. If you let
your daughters grow up idle, perhaps under the mistaken impression
that as you yourselves have had to work hard they shall know only
enjoyment, you are preparing them to be useless to others and burdens
to themselves. Teach boys and girls alike that they are not to look
forward to lives spent in avoiding difficulties but to lives spent in
overcoming difficulties. Teach them that work, for themselves and also
for others, is not a curse but a blessing; seek to make them happy, to
make them enjoy life, but seek also to make them face life with the
steadfast resolution to wrest success from labor and adversity, and
to do their whole duty before God and to man. Surely she who can thus
train her sons and her daughters is thrice fortunate among women.

There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of
children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always
due to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any
of the other great blessings of life. But the man or woman who
deliberately foregoes these blessings, whether from viciousness,
coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to
appreciate aright the difference between the all-important and the
unimportant—why, such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any
visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who
refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who
though able-bodied is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which
others provide.

The existence of women of this type forms one of the most unpleasant
and unwholesome features of modern life. If any one is so dim of
vision as to fail to see what a thoroughly unlovely creature such a
woman is I wish they would read Judge Robert Grant’s novel “Unleavened
Bread,” ponder seriously the character of Selma, and think of the fate
that would surely overcome any nation which developed its average
and typical woman along such lines. Unfortunately it would be untrue
to say that this type exists only in American novels. That it also
exists in American life is made unpleasantly evident by the statistics
as to the dwindling families in some localities. It is made evident
in equally sinister fashion by the census statistics as to divorce,
which are fairly appalling; for easy divorce is now, as it ever has
been, a bane to any nation, a curse to society, a menace to the home,
an incitement to married unhappiness and to immorality, an evil thing
for men and a still more hideous evil for women. These unpleasant
tendencies in our American life are made evident by articles such as
those which I actually read not long ago in the “Independent,” where
a clergyman was quoted, seemingly with approval, as expressing the
general American attitude when he said that the ambition of any save a
very rich man should be to rear two children only, so as to give his
children an opportunity “to taste a few of the good things of life.”
This man, whose profession and calling should have made him a moral
teacher, writing in what is professedly a religious paper, actually set
before others the ideal, not of training children to do their duty,
not of sending them forth with stout hearts and ready minds to win
triumphs for themselves and their country, not of allowing them the
opportunity and giving them the privilege of making their own place in
the world, but, forsooth, of keeping the number of children so limited
that they might “taste a few good things!” The way to give a child a
fair chance in life is not to bring it up in luxury, but to see that
it has the kind of training that will give it strength of character.
Even apart from the vital question of national life, and regarding
only the individual interest of the children themselves, happiness in
the true sense is a hundredfold more apt to come to any given member
of a healthy family of healthy-minded children, well brought up, well
educated, but taught that they must shift for themselves, must win
their own way, and by their own exertions make their own positions of
usefulness, than it is apt to come to those whose parents themselves
have acted on and have trained their children to act on, the selfish
and sordid theory that the whole end of life is “to taste a few good
things.”

The intelligence of the remark is on a par with its morality, for the
most rudimentary mental process would have shown the speaker that
if the average family in which there are children contained but two
children the Nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly
that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the
point of extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and
selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with braver and more
robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any way regrettable; for a
race that practiced such doctrine—that is, a race that practiced race
suicide—would thereby conclusively show that it was unfit to exist,
and that it had better give place to people who had not forgotten the
primary laws of their being.

To sum up, then, the whole matter is simple enough. If either a race
or an individual prefers the pleasures of mere effortless ease, of
self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the infinitely higher
pleasures that come to those who know the toil and the weariness, but
also the joy, of hard duty well done, why, that race or that individual
must inevitably in the end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid
and ignoble. No man and no woman really worthy of the name can care for
the life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and trouble
and labor. Save in exceptional cases the prizes worth having in life
must be paid for, and the life worth living must be a life of work for
a worthy end, and ordinarily of work more for others than for one’s
self.

The man is but a poor creature whose effort is not rather for the
betterment of his wife and children than for himself; and as for
the mother, her very name stands for loving unselfishness and
self-abnegation, and, in any society fit to exist, is fraught with
associations which render it holy.

The woman’s task is not easy—no task worth doing is easy—but in doing
it, and when she has done it, there shall come to her the highest and
holiest joy known to mankind; and having done it, she shall have the
reward prophesied in Scripture; for her husband and her children, yes,
and all people who realize that her work lies at the foundation of all
national happiness and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed.




ADDRESS AT THE DINNER OF THE SOCIETY OF FRIENDLY SONS OF ST. PATRICK,
DELMONICO’S, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 17, 1905


It is, of course, a matter of peculiar pleasure to me to come to my
own city and to meet so many men with whom I have been associated for
the last quarter of a century—for it was nearly that time ago, Judge,
that you and I first met when we were both in the New York Legislature
together—and to be greeted by you as you have greeted me to-night. I
wish to express at the outset my special sense of obligation—and I
know that the rest of you will not grudge my expressing it—my special
sense of obligation to Colonel Duffy and the officers and men of the
Sixty-ninth, who were my escort to-day. I shall write to Colonel Duffy
later, to give him formal notice, and to ask him to give the regiment
formal notice, of my appreciation, but I wish to express it thus
publicly to-night.

And now, before I begin my speech proper, I wish to read a telegram
which has been handed to me as a sop to certain of my well-known
prejudices. It has been sent up to me by one of the members here
to-night, who when we came into the dining-room was only a father, but
who at this moment is a grandfather. This telegram runs as follows:

“Peter McDonnell, Friendly Sons’ Dinner, Delmonico’s. Patrick just
arrived. Tired after parade. Sends his regards to the President. He is
the first on record since the President attended the Friendly Sons’
dinner. He is a fine singer. No race suicide in this family. Weighs
eight pounds, looks like the whole family. The mother is doing well.
Robert McDonnell.”

And, gentlemen, I want you to join with me in drinking the health of
Patrick, Peter, Robert, and above all, of the best of the whole outfit,
Mrs. McDonnell, the mother.

Now we will pass from the present to the past. The Judge has spoken to
you of the formation of the Society of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick
in Philadelphia, in colonial days. It was natural that it should have
started in Philadelphia and at the time of which the Judge spoke. For
we must not forget, in dealing with our history as a Nation, that long
before the outbreak of the Revolution there had begun on the soil of
the colonies, which afterward became the United States, that mixture of
races which has been and still is one of the most important features in
our history as a people. At the time, early in the eighteenth century,
when the immigrants from Ireland first began to come in numbers to this
country, the race elements were still imperfectly fused, and for some
time the then new Irish strain was clearly distinguishable from the
others. And there was one peculiarity about these immigrants who came
from Ireland to the colonies in the eighteenth century which has never
been paralleled in the case of any other immigrants whatsoever. In all
other cases since the very first settlements, the pushing westward of
the frontier, the conquest of the Continent has been due primarily
to the men of native birth. But the immigrants from Ireland in the
eighteenth century, and those alone, pushed boldly through the settled
districts and planted themselves as the advance guard of the conquering
civilization on the borders of the Indian-haunted wilderness.

This was true in Northern Maine and New Hampshire, in Western
Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas alike. And, inasmuch as
Philadelphia was the largest city which was in touch with that extreme
Western frontier, it was most natural that the Society of the Friendly
Sons of St. Patrick should first be formed in that city. We had, I
wish to say, in New York, frequently during colonial days, dinners
of societies of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, but apparently the
society in New York did not take a permanent form; but we frequently
had dinners on March 17 of the Friendly Sons of St. Patrick here in New
York City even in colonial days.

By the time the Revolution had broken out, the men of different race
strains had begun to fuse together, and the Irish among those strains
furnished their full share of leadership in the struggle. Among their
number was Commodore John Barry, one of the two or three officers to
whom our infant Navy owed most. I had the honor in the last session of
Congress to recommend that a monument to Barry should be erected in
Washington. I heartily believe in economy, but I think we can afford to
let up enough to let that monument through.

On land, the men of this strain furnished generals like Montgomery, who
fell so gloriously at Quebec, and like Sullivan, the conqueror of the
Iroquois, who came of a New Hampshire family, which furnished governors
to three New England States. In her old age, the mother, Mrs. Sullivan,
used to say that she had known what it was to work hard in the fields
carrying in her arms the Governor of Massachusetts, with the Governors
of New Hampshire and Vermont tagging on at her skirts.

I have spoken of the generals. Now for the rank and file. The
Continental troops of the hardest fighter among Washington’s generals,
Mad Anthony Wayne, were recruited so largely from this stock that
Lighthorse Harry Lee of Virginia, the father of the great general,
Robert Lee, always referred to them as “The Line of Ireland.” Nor must
we forget that of this same stock there was a boy during the days of
the Revolution who afterward became the chief American general of his
time, and, as President, one of the public men who left his impress
most deeply upon our Nation, Andrew Jackson, the victor of New Orleans.

The Revolution was the first great crisis of our history. The Civil War
was the second. And in this second great crisis the part played by the
men of Irish birth or parentage was no less striking than it had been
in the Revolution. Among the three or four great generals who led the
Northern Army in the war, stood Phil Sheridan. Some of those whom I am
now addressing served in that immortal brigade which on the fatal day
of Fredericksburg left its dead closest to the stonewall which marked
the limit that could not be overpassed even by the highest valor.

And, gentlemen, it was my good fortune when it befell me to serve
as a regimental commander in a very small war—but all the war there
was—to have under me more than one of the sons of those who served in
Meagher’s brigade. Among them was one of my two best captains, both
of whom were killed, Allen Capron, and this man Bucky O’Neill. Bucky
O’Neill was killed at Santiago, showing the same absolute indifference
to life, the same courage, the same gallant readiness to sacrifice
everything on the altar of an ideal, that his father had shown when he
died in Meagher’s brigade in the Civil War.

The people who have come to this country from Ireland have contributed
to the stock of our common citizenship qualities which are essential
to the welfare of every great nation. They are a masterful race of
rugged character, a race the qualities of whose womanhood have become
proverbial, while its men have the elemental, the indispensable virtues
of working hard in time of peace and fighting hard in time of war.

And I want to say here, as I have said and shall say again elsewhere,
as I shall say again and again, that we must never forget that no
amount of material wealth, no amount of intellect, no artistic or
scientific growth can avail anything to the nation which loses the
elemental virtues. If the average man can not work and fight, the race
is in a poor way; and it will not have, because it will not deserve,
the respect of any one.

Let us avoid always, either as individuals or as a Nation, brawling,
speaking discourteously or acting offensively toward others, but let
us make it evident that we wish peace, not because we are weak, but
because we think it right; and that while we do not intend to wrong any
one, we are perfectly competent to hold our own if any one wrongs us.
There has never been a time in this country when it has not been true
of the average American of Irish birth or parentage, that he came up to
this standard, able to work and able to fight at need.

But the men of Irish birth or of Irish descent have been far more than
soldiers—I will not say more than, but much in addition to, soldiers.
In every walk in life in this country men of this blood have stood and
now stand pre-eminent, not only as soldiers but as statesmen, on the
bench, at the bar, and in business. They are doing their full share
toward the artistic and literary development of the country.

And right here let me make a special plea to you, to this society and
kindred societies: We Americans take a just pride in the development
of our great universities, and more and more we are seeking to provide
for creative and original work in these universities. I hope that an
earnest effort will be made to endow chairs in American universities
for the study of Celtic literature and for research in Celtic
antiquities. It is only of recent years that the extraordinary wealth
and beauty of the old Celtic Sagas have been fully appreciated, and we
of America, who have so large a Celtic strain in our blood, can not
afford to be behindhand in the work of adding to modern scholarship by
bringing within its ken the great Celtic literature of the past.

My fellow-countrymen, I have spoken to-night especially of what has
been done for this Nation of ours by men of Irish blood. But, after
all, in speaking to you, or, to any other body of my fellow-citizens,
no matter from what Old World country they themselves or their
forefathers may have come, the great thing is to remember that we are
all of us Americans. Let us keep our pride in the stocks from which
we have sprung, but let us show that pride, not by holding aloof from
one another, least of all by preserving the Old World jealousies and
bitternesses, but by joining in a spirit of generous rivalry to see
which can do most for our great common country.

Americanism is not a matter of creed or birthplace or descent. That man
is the best American who has in him the American spirit, the American
soul. Such a man fears not the strong and harms not the weak. He scorns
what is base or cruel or dishonest. He looks beyond the accidents of
occupation or social condition and hails each of his fellow-citizens
as his brother, asking nothing save that each shall treat the other on
his worth as a man, and that they shall all join together to do what in
them lies for the uplifting of this mighty and vigorous people. In our
veins runs the blood of many an Old World nation. We are kin to each of
these nations and yet identical with none.

Our policy should be one of cordial friendship for them all, and yet
we should keep ever before our eyes the fact that we are ourselves
a separate people with our own ideals and standards, and destined,
whether for better or for worse, to work out a wholly new national
type. The fate of the twentieth century will in no small degree—I ask
you to think of this from the standpoint of the world—the fate of the
twentieth century as it bears on the world will in no small degree
depend upon the type of citizenship developed on this Continent. Surely
such a thought must thrill us with the resolute purpose so to bear
ourselves that the name American shall stand as the symbol of just,
generous, and fearless treatment of all men and all nations. Let us be
true to ourselves, for we can not then be false to any man.




ADDRESS AT THE DINNER OF THE SONS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, HOTEL
ASTOR, NEW YORK CITY, MARCH 17, 1905


_Ladies and Gentlemen_:

I am glad to greet not merely the Sons but the Daughters of the
American Revolution, and it is indeed a pleasure to be with you and say
a few words, partly of greeting to you and partly in reference to what
I feel should be the work, the special work, of a society like this,
the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution. It ought to fulfil
more than one function. In the first place, it should, of course, keep
up our sense of historic continuity with the past. It is a good thing,
pre-eminently a good thing, for this Nation never to lose sight of what
has been done in the past by those who founded and those who preserved
the Republic. It is eminently fit that there should be associations
banded together for the special purpose of keeping fresh in the minds
of all of us the great memories of the men of the past and of what
these men did. But if we treat that merely as a relaxation, merely as a
pleasant mental exercise, I think we come lamentably short of what we
ought to do.

The way to pay effective homage to the men of the mighty past is to
live decently and efficiently in the present. We have a right to expect
that every society like this shall be a nucleus for patriotic endeavor
in the affairs of the day. Now, in studying the past I wish that
societies like this would pay heed not only to what is pleasant for us
to read about, but also to what is unpleasant. I do not think that a
diet of all praise is good for any one, and it is no better for us as a
body politic than for any one of us individually. Admiral Coghlan will
tell you that the first step necessary in bringing the Navy up to its
present standard of marksmanship was having the Navy understand that
its marksmanship was not what it ought to be. I think the facts will
bear me out.

The thing to do is to remember what Emerson says, that in the long
run an unpleasant truth is a very much safer companion than even the
pleasantest falsehood. Our pride in what was done in the past should
not permit us to be led away into blindness by failure to appreciate
whatever was wrong in the past. Read what Washington said about the
average militia regiment of the Revolutionary War, and you will not
find he used complimentary language. It was because our people declined
to accept Washington’s judgment on the militia, and persisted in
trying the experiment of fighting the War of 1812 with militia, that
the first two years of that war resulted not merely disastrously, but
shamefully, and among other things resulted in the burning of the city
of Washington. We did not begin to win on land until we had evolved
through mighty hard knocks a small army under Brown and Scott on the
northern frontier, which, when evolved, proved able to do what no
Continental army at that time could do, that is, meet to advantage
the best troops of Britain. We won at sea because we had a number of
frigates and sloops which had been built more than fifteen years before
and whose officers had been trained in the school of their profession
at sea and in action. We won these victories because we had the fleet;
and if the fleet had been bigger we would not have had to fight the war
at all.

Now, I ask that societies like this teach the truth; teach the truth
that helps, even if it hurts a little in the helping. Take our struggle
in building up our Navy to its present strength. We were hampered in
that struggle by the ignorant and unspeakably foolish belief that
somehow or other America was so big and smart a Nation that we did not
need a Navy, and could improvise one out of hand if the need ever arose.

Admiral Coghlan lived through the period which saw the United States
at the close of the Civil War, with Farragut and his fellows as our
admirals, loom up as one of the great naval Powers of the earth, which
then saw us about the year 1882 reduced to a condition of effective
sea-strength when it would have been flattery to call us a fifth-rate
Power, and which then saw the building up of our Navy until at present,
taking into account the ships built and authorized, and, above all,
taking into account the way those ships are handled, singly and in
squadrons—taking into the account the ships, the armor, the guns, and,
above all, the men in the conning towers, in the engine rooms and
behind the guns—we rank as one of the big naval Powers of the earth.
We rank as such, we occupy our present position and we are a power
potent for peace because we deliberately faced the fact that we did not
have a Navy worth anything in 1882.

I take immense interest in the Navy, because the Navy is the arm upon
which this country must most depend for holding its own and upholding
its honor so far as our international relations are concerned. We
had to educate our people slowly up to the need of a Navy. We began
by building some cruisers. We then built two or three fast vessels
called commerce destroyers. We had quite a time for several years in
persuading excellent people of good intentions, but not entirely clear
minds, that it was rather less immoral to destroy commerce than to take
life in battleships. Then we had to go through the stage of meeting and
by degrees overcoming the arguments of those other excellent people who
said we must have fighting ships, but only for defence; that we must
only have coast defence ships; that is, we must win the fight not by
hitting, but by parrying. If we had carried out that theory, Admiral
Coghlan and his fellow-captains under Dewey would have been cooped up
in coast defence vessels in San Francisco, while the hostile ships
rested unharmed in Manila. That is the theory of coast defence; and
in that case the war would never have had any end. We won because by
that time our people had at last awakened to the fact that in a navy
you want the very best type of ship; and that of all foolish things,
the most foolish is to hit soft. Do not hit at all if you can help it.
Avoid trouble of every kind. Do not hit at all if you can help it,
but never hit soft. When Dewey and the captains under him went into
Manila Bay they went in in ships that had been built, not that year nor
the year before. Some of them had been built as much as fifteen years
before, twelve years, eight years; and the legislators who authorized
the building of those ships, the men who built them, the captains who
first took them out, the captains who trained the men aboard them,
every man who did his part in bringing up the Navy to the standard of
efficiency which it had reached in 1898 is justly entitled to his share
of the credit in the victory won on that first day of May.

When you cheer for Dewey, when you think of Farragut, when you speak of
the founders of the American Navy in the days of the Revolution, do not
confine yourselves to cheers, do not confine yourselves to saying what
a great man Washington was and how he was backed up by generals and
statesmen of that day; but take example from what those men did, take
warning from what their less wise fellows did, and prepare for victory
in the only way in which victory can be prepared for, by preparing for
it in advance.

I spoke to you of the difficulties to be met with in getting the Navy
built up. Among these difficulties is the fact that there are some
very good people who, whenever you say that you want a good Navy, say
that “this is a lamentable illustration of the jingo spirit, and that
there is no reason why this country should ever have a war.” I know
one excellent gentleman in Congress who said he preferred arbitration
to battleships. So do I. But suppose the other man does not. I want to
have the battleships as a provocative for arbitration so far as the
other man is concerned.

We have now got our Navy up to a good point. We have built and are
building forty armored ships. For a year or two, or two or three
years, to come, what we need to do is to provide for the personnel of
those ships, and to secure the very highest standard of efficiency in
handling them, singly and in squadrons; above all, for handling the
great guns. So much for the Navy.

Now a word for the Army. I was very sorry that this year Congress did
not provide the means for having field manœuvres such as those General
Grant and General Bell took part in last year. Those manœuvres are
very useful. It is impossible to take National Guard regiments and put
them into such manœuvres without causing them great discomfort, and it
may be better to keep such manœuvres as were carried on last year for
the Regular Army. But it is a great mistake not to continue them for
the Regular Army. We have a small Regular Army. It is not advisable
or necessary that we should have a large one. It is advisable, it is
necessary, that the Army we have should be efficient as a whole as
well as efficient in its individual parts. I firmly believe that given
an equal chance, the officers and enlisted men of the American Army
offer material quite as good as any to be found in any army of the
world. Because I believe that I think it not merely an iniquity but a
crime not to give the officers and the enlisted men that equal chance.
We have an Army now short of seventy thousand men. Deducting the men
necessary for the manning of the coast defences, it would give us at
the very outside figure a possible Army of fifty thousand men—that is,
an Army about one-fourteenth the size of the forces that have been
contending in the mighty death wrestle around Mukden. Surely we owe
it to this Nation that we should have that Army of fifty thousand men
able to manœuvre as an Army of fifty thousand men and able to render as
good service as such as any army can render. We can never achieve that
ideal unless we are willing as a Nation to spend the money so that the
Army shall have the chance of being handled in time of peace in great
masses by the men who will handle it in masses in time of war. If when
war comes you set thirty thousand men, of whom no more than five or
six hundred have ever served together, under officers who have never
handled, any of them, more than five or six hundred men, you can not
expect anything but disaster; unless perchance you go against a foe
even more foolish than you are.

So I ask you of this society, the Sons of the American Revolution, to
study the war of the Revolution, to study the War of 1812, to study
the war with Mexico, and the Civil War, not only from the standpoint
of the victories, but from the standpoint of the defeats, and to try
to see to it that in our policy at the present time we carry out the
old policies that won the victories, and avoid the old policies that
brought about the defeats.

I speak in the interest of peace when I ask for an efficient Army
and Navy. This is a high-spirited people. This is a people that will
not abandon the Monroe Doctrine, will not stop building the Isthmian
Canal, will not surrender its hold upon the islands of the sea. Very
good; then take such steps as are necessary to make your hold on those
possessions, your backing of this doctrine, effective, and not empty
bluster.

So it is in civic affairs. Study not only what Washington and
Washington’s supporters did, but study what was done by those who
brought the Continental Congress to absolute impotence. Study what was
done by those who nearly undid the good work of Washington. Study what
has been done in the past by the men who have made errors no less than
by the men who have won triumphs, and profit alike by the study of the
triumphs and by the study of the errors.

Talking among ourselves, man to man, each of us will admit to the other
that there are things in our life that he does not like; but when one
of us gets on his feet to address the rest he often seems to feel as
if somehow he ought never to speak save in indiscriminate praise of
all. The same man who will take an unwarrantably pessimistic view of
all our governmental matters in private will feel obliged to speak
in unwarrantable praise of all these matters in public. We ought to
avoid ignorant praise as much as ignorant blame. It is only by making a
correct diagnosis that we can find out how to treat any given disease.
A good physician in making a diagnosis is not either an optimist or
a pessimist. He wants to find out the facts; for to take either too
dark or too rosy a view may be fatal to the patient. Just so in our
body politic. Try to find out what the facts really are, try to find
out what the good qualities, what the defects; what the good side is
in any portion of our Government, what the defect is in any portion of
our Government. State the truth; do not hysterically exaggerate what is
good; do not hysterically exaggerate what is evil. Find out the facts;
and then with your whole heart set to work to preserve and make better
the good and to cut out and do away with the evil.




ADDRESS TO THE GRADUATES OF THE UNITED STATES NAVAL MEDICAL SCHOOL,
WASHINGTON, D. C., MARCH 25, 1905


  _Ladies and Gentlemen; and especially the Members of the Graduating
  Class_:

I am glad to have the chance of saying a word of greeting to you this
morning. You represent two professions, for you are members of the
great medical body and you are also officers of the Navy of the United
States, and therefore you have a double standard of honor up to which
to live. I think that all of us laymen, men and women, have a peculiar
appreciation of what a doctor means; for I do not suppose there is one
of us who does not feel that the family doctor stands in a position
of close intimacy with each of us, in a position of obligation to him
under which one is happy to rest to an extent hardly possible with
any one else; and those of us, I think most of us, who are fortunate
enough to have a family doctor who is a beloved and intimate friend,
realize that there can be few closer ties of intimacy and affection in
the world. And while, of course, even the greatest and best doctors can
not assume that very intimate relation with more than a certain number
of people (though it is to be said that more than any other man, the
doctor does commonly assume such a relation to many people)—while it
is impossible this relation in its closest form shall obtain between
a doctor and more than a certain number of people, still with every
patient with whom the doctor is thrown at all intimately he has this
peculiar relation to a greater or less extent. The effect that the
doctor has upon the body of the patient is in very many cases no
greater than the effect that he has upon the patient’s mind. Each one
of you here has resting upon him not only a great responsibility for
the care of the body of the officer or enlisted man who will be under
his supervision, but a care—which ought not to be too consciously
shown, but which should be unconsciously felt—for the man’s spirit. The
morale of the entire ship’s company, of the entire body of men with
which you are to be thrown, will be sensibly affected by the way in
which each of you does his duty.

Just as the great doctor, the man who stands high in his profession
in any city, counts as one of the most valuable assets in that city’s
civic work, so in the Navy or the Army the effect of having thoroughly
well-trained men with a high and sensitive standard of professional
honor and professional duty is wellnigh incalculable upon the service
itself. I want you now, as you graduate, to feel that on your shoulders
rests a great weight of responsibility; that your position is one of
high honor, and that it is impossible to hold a position of high honor
and not hold it under penalty of incurring the severest reprobation if
you fail to live up to its requirements.

I am not competent to speak save in the most general terms of your
professional duties. I do want, however, to call your attention to one
or two features connected with them. In the first place: In connection
with the work you do for the service you have certain peculiar
advantages in doing work that will be felt for the whole profession.
For instance, it will fall to your lot to deal with certain types of
tropical diseases. You will have to deal with them as no ordinary
American doctor, no matter how great his experience, will have to deal
with them, and you should fit yourselves by most careful study and
preparation, so that you shall not only be able to grapple with the
cases as they come up, but in grappling with them to make and record
observations upon them that will be of permanent value to your fellows
in civil life. You can there do what no civilian doctor can possibly
do. There probably is not a branch of the profession into which, during
your career, you will not have to go; no type of disease that you will
not have to treat. But there are certain diseases you will have to
treat that the ordinary man who stays at home, of course, does not; and
it is of consequence to the entire medical profession that you should
so fit yourself by study, by preparation, that you shall not only be
able to deal with those cases, but to deal with them in a way that will
be of advantage to your stay-at-home brethren.

There is one other point. Every effort should, of course, be made
to provide you with ample means to do your work. Every effort ought
to be made to persuade the National Legislature to take that view
of the situation; to remember that in case of war it is out of the
question to improvise a great medical service for the Army and the
Navy. The need of the increase would be more keenly felt in the Army
than in the Navy, because it is always the Army that undergoes the
greatest expansion in time of war. But it is felt in both services.
And when, as is perfectly certain to be the case if ever a war comes,
and if we have made no greater preparation than at present, there is
fever in the camps, there is sickness among the volunteer forces, it
will be mere dishonest folly for the public men, and especially for
the public press, to shriek against the people who happen to be in
power at that time. Let them, if ever such occasion arises, solemnly
think over and repent of the fact that they have not made their
representatives provide adequately in advance for the medical system
in its personnel and its material, for the organization, and for the
physical instruments necessary to make that organization effective.
Only adequate preparation in advance will obviate the trouble which
otherwise is certain to come if we have a war. Let critics remember not
to blame the people in power when such a breakdown comes, but to blame
themselves, the people of the United States, because they have not had
the forethought to take the steps in advance which would prevent such
breakdown from occurring.

Means ought to be provided in advance. That is part of our duty. If we
fail in it then it is our responsibility, not yours. But now for your
duty. I want to impress, with all the strength that in me lies, upon
every medical man in either the Army or the Navy, to remember always
that in any time of crisis the chances are that you will have to work
with imperfect implements. And your conduct will then afford a pretty
good test of your worth. If you sit down and do nothing but say you
could have done excellently if only you had had the right implements
to work with, you will show your unfitness for your position. Your
business will be to do the very best you can do, if you have nothing in
the world but a jack-knife to do it with. Keep before your minds all
the time that when the crisis occurs it is almost sure to be the case
that you will have to do no small part of your work with make-shifts;
to do it, as I myself saw at Santiago the Army physicians do their
work, roughly and hastily, when worn out with fatigue and having but
one-fourth or one-fifth of the appliances that they would expect
normally to have. Make up your mind that while you will do all you can
to get the best material together in advance, you will not put forward
the lack of that material as an excuse for not doing the best work
possible with imperfect tools. Make it a matter of pride to do your
utmost, without regard to the inadequacy of your instruments.

I am sure that all of us outsiders here realize the weight of
responsibility resting upon those who now join the great and honorable
body of men who in the Navy and in the Army have by their actions
upheld not only the standard of honor of the medical profession, but
the standard of honor of the officers of the Army and the Navy of the
United States.

I greet you on your entrance into the service. I welcome you as
servants of the Nation, and I wish you every success in the great and
honorable calling which you have chosen as yours.




AT OUTDOOR MEETING AT DALLAS, TEX., APRIL 5, 1905


_Mr. Mayor; and you, My Fellow-Americans_:

It has been indeed a pleasure for me to come to-day within the limits
of your mighty and beautiful State. This afternoon I have been
traveling through a veritable garden of the Lord. It is only a few
weeks ago that I did my part in helping on the growth here when I
signed the bill under which the Trinity River will be improved, which
I was mighty glad to do. For I think that we Americans have learned
the lesson that whatever is good for some of us is good for all of
us. We are all going to go up, and not down, because we are going to
go together. I have been impressed even more than by the beauty and
fertility of your State by the character of its people. Surely no
President could be more touched by any greeting than by a greeting
such as this; and above all (I know the others of you will not mind my
saying) to be greeted by the men who, when the hour of trial came in
1861, sprang to arms, and whether they wore the blue, or whether they
wore the gray, proved the sincerity of their devotion by the valor
with which they risked their lives. Oh, my fellow-countrymen, think
what a blessed thing it is that now every man in this land can feel the
same pride in the valor and devotion of those who fought for one side
and of those who fought for the other! I can, in a sense, claim to be,
by blood at least, a typical President, for I am half Southern and half
Northern; I was born in the East and I have lived much in and learned
much from the West.

The Civil War has left us as a heritage of honor not merely the memory
of the mighty deeds done in it alike by the men of the North and the
men of the South; it has left us also as an inspiration and a memory
the way in which when the war was over those men turned to the works of
peace, and wrought out in peace success exactly as they had wrought it
out in war.

I come to Texas not for the first time. Seven years ago, again there
was a call to arms, a call to arms against a foreign foe. It then
fell to my lot to come here to help in raising a regiment, a regiment
in which I think over half of the men had fathers who served in the
Confederate army, and about one-third, perhaps somewhat more, fathers
who served in the Union army. We were the sons of the men who wore the
blue, the sons of the men who wore the gray, and our only desire was to
show ourselves not wholly unworthy of the mighty men of the years that
are past.

You of this State of Texas have behind you a history containing the
deeds of which not only you but all of the country must be forever
proud. My regiment was raised under the walls of that historic building
of which it was said that “Thermopylæ had its messengers of death, but
the Alamo had none.” You, the men of Texas, like the men of Oregon
and California, like the men of Kentucky and Tennessee in a previous
generation, did your part in changing this Nation from a string of
Atlantic seaboard commonwealths into a people bounded only by a
continent. No people more than the Texans have rendered it impossible
for this country to be anything but great. It is not open to us to
choose whether we shall play a small part or a great part. Your fathers
helped to make that choice impossible. Play a great part we must. All
that we can decide is whether we shall play it well or ill; and I know
too well, oh, my fellow-countrymen, not to know what your decision will
be.

The problems change. One generation faces different difficulties from
the difficulties faced by its predecessors. But the spirit in which
those problems must be faced is forever the same. You, the men of the
Civil War, who wrought deeds of deathless fame, who left memories
of honor that will last as long as this Nation endures, fought with
muzzle-loading, percussion-cap muskets and rifles, with cannon that
you could afford to put out in the open when you wanted to shoot
at the foe. You fought still in the shoulder-to-shoulder tactics.
Nowadays men must fight with different weapons; men must fight with
different tactics; but the spirit in which they must fight if they
are to win must be the spirit that sustained you alike in triumph and
defeat. The outward problem changes, the outward means of solving that
problem changes, but the heart of the man who is to solve it can not
be changed. We must show as a Nation now the same spirit that has been
shown by the mighty men of times past under penalty of failure; show it
in war if the need arises; and we must also show it in peace; show it
in the days that are with us all the time instead of waiting for the
heroic days that may never come.

Just as in time of war the man who does his duty in camp, on the march,
who does not throw away his blanket at noon because it is heavy, and
then wishes that he had two at midnight, is the type of man who makes
the best soldier in the long run; so it is true that in civil life the
man who does his duty as a citizen in the long run is the man who does
his ordinary work day by day, doing each day’s duty, great or small,
behaving as he should toward his wife, toward his children, toward his
neighbor, in his business, in his home; and if he does those duties
well the sum of the duties performed means that he is a good citizen.

I want you men of Texas, you men of my age, to see to it that exactly
as you lift your heads higher because of what your fathers have done,
so your children have the right to hold their heads higher because
of the way in which you handle yourselves. A glorious memory is the
best of all things for a nation if it spurs that nation on to try to
rise level with that memory. It is a poor thing for a nation if it
uses the memory of the past to excuse it for inaction or failure in
the present. Keep it before yourselves ever that the very fact that
you are proud of those who have gone before makes it incumbent upon
you to leave a heritage of honor to those who are to come after you,
and to train up those who are to come after you so that they can do
their work in the world. One of the things that has pleased me most in
passing through the part of your State that I have passed through this
afternoon was to see the care that you are giving to the education of
the children, to see the public schools and the private schools that
you have built and in which your boys and girls are being trained.
Do not forget that besides the training of the school must come the
training in the family. Take care the next generation is able to rise
level to its duty. You can not make it rise level if you do not give
it the proper training. Remember always that this life is certain
to contain much that is hard, much that is unpleasant. It is not a
kindness to the children, it is a curse, if you train them so that
they can not meet any need that arises. I do not believe that we ought
ever to try to delude ourselves with the thought that we can make life
easy, effortless, and yet keep it worth having. For a nation as for an
individual the life is the life of effort. You have made this great
State of Texas what it is because your forefathers had in them the
spirit which recognized in a difficulty something not to be flinched
from, but to be overcome.

I can not sufficiently thank you for the way you have greeted me
to-day. I am more touched than I can express by it. I come to the soil
of this State, hallowed by the great deeds of great men, I come knowing
your people already and believing in them with my heart and soul. A
couple of years ago I went from the Atlantic to the Pacific. I have
now come down to this mighty State, this wonderful commonwealth, which
borders on the Gulf, and I shall go away with the feeling that after
all, while there are small differences among us, the fundamental fact
is that wherever you find the average American, the average American
is a pretty good man. It is our unity, not our divergency, that is the
great fundamental fact of our national life. I shall go away a stronger
and better American for having been in this State of strong and good
Americans, this mighty commonwealth of Texas.




AT THE BANQUET AT DALLAS, TEX., APRIL 5, 1905


_Mr. Toastmaster, and you, My Hosts_:

Before I came to Texas I knew the generous hospitality which is one of
your chief characteristics, and I anticipated a good reception, but
neither I nor any one else could have anticipated such a reception, and
it has touched me and pleased me more than I can well say. I think I
was a middling good American before I came here, but I go away an even
better one.

Mr. Simpson spoke of the fact that nearly seven years ago I came to
this State to take part in raising a volunteer regiment. Many among you
who served on one side or the other in the Civil War will remember the
number of things that you did not know at the beginning. If you will
take that lack of knowledge and multiply it by two you will get a fair
estimate of what I and the regiment did not know when we started. That
we learned something I hope is true.

I want to say a word of serious thanks to you, and a word as to my
accountability as a steward to you. No man is fit to hold the position
of President of the United States at all unless as President he feels
that he represents no party but the people as a whole. So far as in me
lies I have tried and shall try so to handle myself that every decent
American citizen can feel that I have at least made the effort. Each
man has got to carry out his own principles in his own way. If he tries
to model himself on some one else he will make a poor show of it. My
own view has been that if I must choose between taking risks by not
doing a thing or by doing it, I will take the risks of doing it.

I have been a very close student of Texan history. The history of
your State has always held a peculiar fascination for me. I had begun
certain historic studies connected with the growth of our Western
people many years ago, before I took much of a part in public life.

However little some of you may now agree with me, when you come to
take into account what I have done in the Caribbean Sea, in future you
will find that I have been carrying out the doctrine of the Texans who
made Texas what it is. Especially as regards what was done in Panama, I
want to say that while I was most anxious to deserve the approval of my
countrymen, and while I was very glad to be elected President, I would
without one moment’s hesitation have given up the second term in the
Presidency rather than not to have begun the Panama Canal.

Now in the same way with our internal affairs; take what the
toastmaster was kind enough to say as to my standing for a square deal.
I want that understood literally. I do not want it exaggerated on one
side or the other. When I say I believe in a square deal I do not mean,
and nobody who speaks the truth can mean, that he believes it possible
to give every man the best hand. If the cards do not come to any man,
or if they do come, and he has not got the power to play them, that is
his affair. All I mean is that there shall not be any crookedness in
the dealing. In other words, it is not in the power of any human being
to devise legislation or administration by which each man shall achieve
success and have happiness; it not only is not in the power of any man
to do that, but if any man says that he can do it, distrust him as a
quack. If the hand of the Lord is heavy upon any man, if misfortune
comes upon him, he may be unable to win; or even if fortune favors him
and he lacks the courage, the nerve, the common-sense, the ability, to
do the best with the chance given him, then he will fail. All any of us
can pretend to do is to come as near as our imperfect abilities will
allow to securing through governmental agencies an equal opportunity
for each man to show the stuff that is in him; and that must be done
with no more intention of discrimination against the rich man than the
poor man, or against the poor man than the rich man; with the intention
of safeguarding each man, rich or poor, poor or rich, in his rights,
and giving him as nearly as may be a fair chance to do what his powers
permit him to do; always provided he does not wrong his neighbor.

This is not in the least a partisan question. It is one of those
questions that affect all our citizens, a question that goes to the
root of our citizenship; and when it comes to a question like that you
citizens of this country have the right to expect your representatives
in public life to join hands and work for the common good and without
regard to any mere party differences. As to the details of carrying out
those general principles we can not expect everybody to agree. My own
views are pretty definite, both about foreign and domestic policies.
In foreign policies, for instance, I have this strong belief, which I
am sure will appeal to every cow-man present—never draw, unless you
mean to shoot; and that implies, of course, that when you draw it shall
not be an empty gun. Do not speak impolitely, disrespectfully of other
nations. Always treat them with courtesy. Remember that nobody likes
to be insulted. One would rather be wronged than insulted; and this
is just as true internationally as among individuals. Always speak
courteously; be dead sure you are right before going into trouble;
being in, see it through.

As a corollary to that, if you need a weapon which you can not possibly
improvise, get it ready in advance. The individual who gets into
trouble and then thinks he will go and buy a six-shooter is left. He
does not want to get into trouble unless he has the six-shooter. It is
just so with us. We have built up and are building up a pretty good
navy. If we had not done that and were not doing it, I for one would
not have recommended going into the Panama business, and I would not
advocate the Monroe Doctrine, for I do not intend to go into anything
and make a bluff and then have the bluff called and not be able to make
good.

In the same way when you come to internal affairs; I have advocated
giving the Interstate Commerce Commission increased power; power that
will enable it to work effectively and quickly. I should not do that
for one moment if I believed that there would be injustice done to the
railroads by the Interstate Commerce Commission. I wish it understood
definitely that if I find any subordinate of mine doing an injustice
against a railroad, or doing an injustice for it, I will cinch him just
as quickly in one case as in the other. I shall expect him to do the
square thing, both by the railroad and by the public. If the railroad
wants more than it is entitled to have, then he must decide against it;
if the public ignorantly demands that the railroad shall do more than
it can with propriety do, then just as fearlessly he must antagonize
public sentiment, even if the public sentiment is unanimous.

These are the general principles. It is much easier to lay down general
principles than it is to work out those principles in detail. But
I have told you substantially what are, as I regard them, the main
features of the platform upon which I stand, and I think that you agree
with me that it is a pretty straight American platform.




TO THE LEGISLATURE OF TEXAS, AUSTIN, TEX., APRIL 6, 1905


  _Governor, Mr. Speaker, Mr. President pro tem., Senators, and Members
  of the House of Representatives, and all of you, men and women of
  Texas, those whom I am so proud to call my Fellow-Americans_:

No President of the United States, no good American proud of his
country, could enter this Capitol and stand in this hall without
feeling a certain thrill of pride in his citizenship, and in the
history of the country’s past. This building in which we are now is
not only one of the largest but one of the most beautiful of its kind
throughout the world. It is eminently fitting that so great a State
should have so fine a capitol building.

There are one or two things that I would like particularly to say in
this chamber, and to the members of the Texas Legislature. I received a
copy of the resolution passed by your body, introduced, I understand,
by ex-Minister Terrell, in reference to the passage of the Interstate
Commerce Act. I wish to thank you most heartily for what you did.
I think, Governor, Mr. Speaker, and gentlemen, that the longer our
experience in public office is, the more we realize that at least
ninety-five per cent, if not more, in importance, of the work done by
any public officer who is worth his salt has nothing whatever to do
with partisan politics. The things that concern us all as good citizens
are infinitely larger than the matters concerning which we are divided
one from the other along party lines. Fundamentally our attitude in
our foreign affairs and in reference to foreign nations must in the
long run, if we are to be successful as a people, be based upon certain
common-sense rules of conduct, the identical rules upon which every
self-respecting citizen must base his private actions.

This is equally true as regards all questions dealing with capital and
labor; and especially with those dealings with the great aggregates of
capital usually to be found in corporate form through which so much
of our business at the present day is conducted. It is essential, in
dealing thus by legislative action with corporate wealth, or indeed
with wealth in any form, that we remember and act upon certain rules
simple enough and commonplace enough to state, but not always easy to
act upon. Most emphatically we can not as good Americans bear hostility
to any rich man as such any more than to any poor man as such. My
experience has been that the man who talks over-loudly of his hostility
to corporate wealth can not be trusted even to antagonize corporate
wealth when it is wrong. Let us be moderate in our statements; but let
us make our deeds bear out absolutely our words.

With this preliminary I would like to say in brief just what my
position is as regards the particular question with which I had to deal
and as regards which the Texas Legislature took the action I so much
appreciate.

On the whole there have been few instruments in the economic
development of the country which have done more for the country than
the railroads. I do not wish in any shape or way to interfere with
the legitimate gain of any of the big men whose special industrial
capacity enables them to handle the railroads so as to be of profit to
themselves and of advantage to all of us. I should be most reluctant—I
will put it stronger than that—I should absolutely refuse to be a party
to any measure, to any proposition, that interfered with the proper
and legitimate prosperity of those men; and I should feel that such a
measure was aimed not only at them, but at all of us, for any attack
upon the legitimate prosperity of any of us is in the long run sure
to turn into an attack upon all. With that proviso (as to which I ask
you to remember that I mean literally every word) let me further add
that the public has the right (not a privilege, but in my view a duty)
to see that there is on its behalf exercised such supervisory and
regulatory power over the railroads as will ensure that while they get
fair treatment themselves, they give it in return. The proper exercise
of that power is conditioned upon the securing of proper legislation,
which will enable the representatives of the public to see to it that
any unjust or oppressive or discriminating rate is altered, so as to be
a just and fair rate, and is altered immediately.

I know well that when you give that power there is a chance of its
being occasionally abused. There is no power that can be given to the
representatives of the people which it is not possible to abuse. As
every one knows, the power of taxation, which must of course be given
to the representatives of the people, is the power of death, for it is
possible to kill any industry by excessive taxation. There must be a
certain trust placed in the common-sense and common honesty of those
who are to enforce the law. If it ever falls, and I think it will, to
my lot to nominate a board to carry out such a law, I shall nominate
men, as far as I am able, on whose ability, courage, and integrity
I can count, men who will not be swayed by any influence whatever,
direct or indirect, social, political, or any other, to show improper
favoritism to any railroad, and who, on the other hand, if a railroad
is unjustly attacked, no matter if that attack has behind it the
feeling of prejudice of ninety-nine per cent of the people, will stand
up against that attack. That is my interpretation of the doctrine of
the square deal.

I want to say just one word more on an entirely different subject. I
have always taken a very great interest in the National Guard in this
country. It is our pride that we have the smallest possible regular
army. There is not another first-class power, there is not a second
or third class power in the world that has not got relatively to its
population and wealth a very much larger regular army than we have.
We do not need anything but a small regular army. We need and must
and shall have the very best regular army of its size that is to
be found anywhere. We do not need a large regular army, because of
the possibilities of our people in raising volunteer troops. Those
possibilities are largely conditioned upon the excellence of the
National Guard. Since I have been in Texas, at almost every stopping
place there have been members of the National Guard, companies of the
National Guard out to do duty in connection with keeping the crowds
in order, in preventing any trouble of any kind, keeping the whole
proceedings orderly and proper. I have been immensely struck with their
soldier-like efficiency. It is only what I ought to expect. When I was
last in Texas I was engaged with certain others in raising a volunteer
regiment, and as I think I know a good thing when I see it, I got just
as many Texans as possible in that regiment.

Your whole history, from the days of Austin and Houston and Davy
Crockett, right to the present time, shows what fighting material
the average Texan makes. But I do not care how good the material, it
is not going to amount to much if it is not given a chance. It is a
most important thing for all of us, if we desire to keep the regular
army small, that we shall have the militia, the National Guard of the
several States, kept up to a proper point. Last year, I am happy to be
able to say, that, at the manœuvres of the regulars, your Texan troops
did admirably. I have been told again and again how well they did. I
want to congratulate you upon the excellent law for the administration
of the National Guard that has recently been passed by the Texas
Legislature. With that law backed up by a sufficient appropriation to
make it available, you can count upon having the Texas National Guard a
model for the National Guard of the country.

I feel very much at home here: I have been Governor, and I have served
in the Legislature, so I have a good deal of fellow-feeling with all of
you. I have had for a good many years to grapple with just about the
problems you are grappling with from time to time here; and I know, as
any man who has taken part in active work must know, how easy it is for
the outsider to say that everything should be managed perfectly, and
how difficult it is in practice to get even fairly good results. There
is a heap of difference between the critic, the onlooker on one side,
and on the other the doer, the man who does the job.




OUTSIDE OF CAPITOL BUILDING, AUSTIN, TEX., APRIL 6, 1905


_Mr. Governor; and you, My Fellow-Citizens_:

I have been particularly pleased to be greeted wherever I have gone
by the great masses of school children, the children from the public
schools and the children from the higher institutions of learning,
State and private. It is a mere truism to say that the prime work of
any State should be to keep up and raise ever higher its standard
of citizenship. Texas has a right to be proud of its industrial
development and of its wonderful natural resources, but I tell you the
best crop for any State to rear after all is the crop of men and women.
I believe in the future of Texas so heartily because I believe that you
are steadily taking measures for the uptraining of the children, for
the uptraining of the generations that in a very few years will take
our places and rule the destinies of the State.

No State can be great without paying the penalty of responsibility
that comes with greatness. That is true of the Nation; it is true
likewise of the States that go to make up the Nation. You have here in
Texas a commonwealth which in area and diversification of resources
already stands unequaled, which in population and wealth will soon be
one of the three or four first in the entire land. That means that
besides feeling exaltation about it you ought to have a very heavy
sense of responsibility entailed upon you thereby. No man can do any
work worth doing except at the cost of effort, of self-restraint, of
forcing himself to achieve things. No State can do anything except by
possessing just those qualities, because the State is of course simply
the aggregate of the individuals within it. If Texas fails in any way
the failure will be felt by the entire country, because its influence
and its power are so great. There is no royal road to good government;
and I think all those interested in managing your public affairs
will agree with me that what we need in our public officials is not
genius, not even brilliancy, so much as the exercise of the ordinary
rather commonplace qualities of honesty, courage, and common-sense—the
qualities that make a man a good husband, a good father, a good
neighbor; that make it advantageous to have dealings with him in
business, or make it worth while having him as a friend. These are the
qualities which are fundamental, which should be shown by the man who
has to do with public life; and do not forget that each one of you
here has to do his share in governing this commonwealth. It is not a
figure of speech, it is the literal fact that in the United States
every man is a sovereign. Remember that the fate of the sovereign who
does not do his duty is to get dethroned; and if the average man who is
sovereign does not do his duty he will get ousted from his sovereignty.
If a man can not govern himself he will find a boss or some one else
who can govern him, and then do not blame the boss, blame yourself for
not having the self-control, the resolution, the forethought, and
the sense of civic duty which would make you do your full part in the
work of governing this country. We will not lose our birthright of
citizenship unless by our own fault. If the average man keeps his head
and his wits, and if he takes a little pains, he will be governed just
about the way he desires to be governed. If he is not governed that
way do not let him sit down and blame the politicians, let him blame
himself, for it is in his power to get any government that he seriously
desires to have. My fellow-citizens, together with expressing the
exultation that we have a right to express about our country, we need
to have impressed upon us a sense of our own responsibility, and of the
shortcomings of which we are guilty if we do not rise level to that
responsibility. It is a very good thing that we should gather together
on state occasions, on the 4th of July, and at public festivals, and
hear speakers say how big a country we have. But it is a better thing
if we will go home and think over certain of the shortcomings that all
of us have and make up our minds to remedy them in the future. What I
ask of you and what I most firmly believe you will give is a patriotic
perseverance in doing each his average round of duties, in doing the
duties both of private life and as a citizen in public affairs each
day. Do not wait for some special time when heroism will be called for,
but do unweariedly the humdrum work that comes to every man. If we will
do that, we will find that the affairs of state will be settled as we
desire to have them settled. There is no use sitting at home finding
fault with the way in which public affairs are handled, and then every
four years, in a burst of animosity against some person, voting to
turn him out. What you need to do is, month in and month out, year in
and year out, to do your ordinary political duties as those political
duties come up, and only under such conditions can you get really good
public servants.

Let me say one more word of warning. In public life you will sometimes
encounter a man who will endeavor to lead you to do something which
down at bottom you doubt being right, which he tells you will be to
your advantage to do, usually something that looks like wronging some
one else. But the man who will wrong some one else for your advantage
will, when the chance comes, be sure to wrong you for his own advantage.

My fellow-citizens, my fellow-Americans, I address you here under the
shadow of your beautiful capitol of this great and wonderful State,
with its heroic memories of Austin, of Sam Houston, of Davy Crockett,
of all the men who in picture or in statue are commemorated on these
walls; and my strongest feeling is that, proud though you are of Texas,
you can not be prouder of it than I am. One of the great and splendid
features of our American life is that each American has a right to be
proud of the deeds of every other American, no matter from what part of
the country his fellow-American may come. Your honor, your glory, are
the honor and the glory of every man of our great country. All that is
necessary for our people is that they should get to know one another in
order to appreciate how slight are the divergencies and how vital and
fundamental is the union among them.




IN FRONT OF THE ALAMO, SAN ANTONIO, TEX., APRIL 7, 1905


  _Mr. Mayor; Mr. Kirkpatrick; and you, My Fellow-Americans of this
  mighty Commonwealth_:

I thank you for the way in which I have been greeted to-day. You can
hardly imagine how much it means to me to come back to San Antonio in
this way, and to be received as you have received me. I know that the
rest of you will not grudge my saying a special word of acknowledgment
to two sets among your citizens; first to the men of the great war,
to the men who wore the blue or wore the gray in the days that tried
men’s souls. My fellow-citizens, infinitely more important than any
President, infinitely more important even than the reception to any
President, is what is symbolized by seeing the men who fought in the
Union army and the men who fought in the Confederate army standing
mingled together, fellow-Americans, one in devotion and honor and
loyalty to the country, shoulder to shoulder as fellow-citizens of the
mightiest republic upon which the sun has ever shone. Indeed the man
would have a poor heart, a poor spirit, who would not be thrilled by
such a meeting as this, by such a sight as you accord me to-day, you
of the gray, you of the blue, all one under the flag of this reunited
country.

I suppose you must know it, but I want to tell you that it was of
course the memory of the valor, the self-sacrifice, the endurance you
displayed in the great war, that made us of the younger generation
feel that when the lesser war came we wished to emulate your course.
The regiment which I had the honor to command, and which was raised
and organized in this city, took part in what were only skirmishes
compared with the campaigns in which you did your share; and all that
we claim is that while it was not given to us to have the chance to
do great deeds, yet we hope we made you feel that the old spirit was
not altogether lost. This regiment served under men who had themselves
fought in the Civil War, both under Grant and under Lee. The commander
of the cavalry division was that gallant ex-Confederate soldier,
Major-General Joseph Wheeler; and our immediate commander, our brigade
commander, was an ex-Union soldier, who entered the Union army as
a private, and to whom for my great good fortune it befell me to
sign the commission as Lieutenant-General of the army of the United
States—Lieutenant-General Young. Afterward at San Juan the cavalry
served under General Sumner, from whom I took my orders.

I can not say how much it meant to me to be able to take part in
raising that regiment under the shadow of the Alamo. My admiration for
Texas and Texans is no new thing. Since I have been a boy and first
studied the history of this country my veins have thrilled and tingled
as I read of the mighty deeds of Houston, of Bowie, of Crockett, of
Travis, of the men who were victorious at the fight at San Jacinto, of
the even more glorious men who fell in the fight of the Alamo, of which
it was said, “Thermopylæ had its messengers of death, but the Alamo had
none.”

I remember so well seven years ago when we were raising this regiment,
riding in here one day to see the Alamo, and going away feeling that
come what would I was going to try to handle myself so that there
should no disgrace come to the memory of the Americans who died there.
I want you to remember that ours was a volunteer regiment and a small
war, and that we do not claim any credit for what we did more than
falls to the lot of any number of other people. All we ask of you is to
believe that we tried to show the spirit which would have made us do
the kind of a job that you of the Civil War did, if the need had arisen.

I wish to express my acknowledgments for the greeting which I have
received here in San Antonio and which I have received throughout the
length and breadth of Texas. This is the third time I have visited
this beautiful city—and it is such a beautiful city. I wonder if you
yourselves, proud though you are of it, appreciate the charm it has
to an outsider coming here. It is fifteen years ago that I first
came here, simply passing through as any number of other travelers
pass through, and saw it. Seven years ago when I came here I was
here strictly on business. When we got back that year from Santiago
I said to the officers of the regiment, “Now we have got to have a
reunion of the regiment in San Antonio.” All kinds of things happened
in between. I have led a middling busy life myself since; and now at
last the chance has come to make good the promise and to have those of
the regiment who are able to come together here in the city where the
regiment was raised to greet one another and talk over the past. In
a sense we can claim that that regiment was a typical American body.
The men composing it were raised chiefly in the Southwest, but some
from the North, some from the East, so that we had the Northerner and
the Southerner, the Easterner and the Westerner in that regiment; we
had men in it who worshiped their Creator some according to one creed,
some according to another, for almost every religious body of any size
in the United States was represented within our ranks. We had men who
had been born abroad and men who were born here, whose ancestors came
to what is now the United States at the time of the landing of the
first colonists at the mouth of the James or at Plymouth. We had men of
inherited wealth and men who all their lives long had earned each day’s
bread by that day’s toil. We had men of every grade socially; men who
worked with their heads; men who worked with their hands; men of all
the types that our country produces; but each of them glad to get in on
his worth as a man only, and content to be judged purely by what he
could show himself to be.

It has always seemed to me that one of the greatest lessons taught by
the Civil War was the lesson of brotherhood. You, my friends, who wore
the blue; you, my friends, who wore the gray, what each of you when he
went forward to battle was concerned with about the man on his right
hand and the man on his left was not what that man’s ancestry was, not
as to how he worshiped his Maker, not as to what his profession was, or
his means; what you wanted to know was whether he would stay put. If he
did you were for him, and if he did not you were against him.

The same thing that was true in the great war is true in time of peace.
This Government is emphatically a government by the people, for the
people, of the people. Now, besides applauding that sentiment, let us
live up to it. It has two sides to it. In the first place, it applies
in a dozen different directions. It applies, for instance, in reference
to creed. We have a right to ask that our neighbor do his duty toward
God and man; but we have no business to dictate to him how he shall
worship his Maker, and no business to discriminate for or against him
because of the way in which he does it. In the same way, if a man is
a decent citizen, he is a decent citizen, whether rich or poor. To
judge from some of the talk you occasionally hear, a man can not be a
square man if he is rich. Remember always that you listen at your peril
to any man who would seek to inflame you against your fellow-citizen
because he is better off. Again, in the Civil War, come back to the
consideration about your bunkie. You did not care whether he was a
banker or bricklayer. If he was a banker he was all right if he was
a good fellow, if he did his duty in camp, if he did not straggle on
the march, if he did not drop his share of the joint provisions on
the march, and then expect you to share yours with him at the end of
the day. You wanted him to do his part, and if he did it you were
for him. Now, apply that in civil life. If the rich man does not his
duty, cinch him, and I will help you just as far as I can. But don’t
cinch him because he is a rich man. If you do you are a mighty mean
creature yourself; you are not a good American yourself. Give him a
perfectly fair show. If he is a poor man and does his duty, help him,
stand by him. If he whines about his poverty and says that he ought to
be carried, you may just as well make up your mind to drop him then
and there. Every man of us stumbles at times. Every man of us at times
needs a helping hand stretched out to him; and shame to any man who
will not stretch out that helping hand to his brother if that brother
needs it. But if the brother lies down, you can do mighty little in
carrying him. You can help him up; but once up he has got to walk
himself. The only way in which you can ever really help any man is to
help him to help himself.

That brings me to the second set of people here whom I have been most
especially glad to see and to greet—the children. In the first place,
I believe in them, as you know, and judging by the showing that San
Antonio has made to-day, San Antonio is all right as regards both
quality and quantity. As I like your stock I am glad that it does not
seem likely to die out. In passing through Texas I have been more
impressed than by anything else by the evident care you are giving to
education, the evident care given to training your children, the school
facilities, both for primary and higher education, and the way in which
those facilities are being taken advantage of. Of course it is a mere
truism to say that the care of the children is the most important task
of any generation. You have a wonderful empire here in Texas. It is
literally larger than most Old World empires. Your diversification
of soil and climate, the marvelous fertility of your soil, your
natural advantages, ensure you a phenomenal future agriculturally and
industrially, ensure this State a wonderful growth in population and
wealth. All that is essential. You must have the material basis upon
which to build as a foundation, but I need not say to you to remember
that it is only a foundation. The material counts for nothing if you do
not build upon it the spiritual, if you do not build upon it the things
of the soul, of the mind.

Let me again take an example from the war. We need arms and equipment,
but the best rifle ever made does not make a soldier if it has not got
the right man behind it. You may take the finest modern weapon, put it
in the hands of a weakling or a coward, and a good man will beat him
with a club. If the other man is a good man too, you want a mighty good
weapon, or you will get beaten. But the weapon does not in any shape or
way serve as a substitute for the spirit of the soldier. That is what
counts in the last resort. Tactics change, weapons change, but the soul
that drives a man forward to victory does not change as the ages go
by. The men of the Civil War, alike the men who wore the gray and the
men who wore the blue, made a record which remains forever a heritage
of honor and of glory for all this people. They did that because they
had in them the spirit which from time immemorial has made the soldiers
of whom the world is proud, the spirit for the lack of which no other
quality in man or in nation will atone. We of to-day, we who, if a
war should come, will have to fight under new conditions, with new
arms, will win (as assuredly I believe we shall win) only because our
men still have in them the spirit that made their forefathers do well
in battle. So you must train your children up so that in addition to
having what counts for material prosperity in a State, you must have
the things that tell most for greatness, the things that make for the
soul of the Nation.

Here in San Antonio what is the building you are proudest of?—the
Alamo. It is not exactly up to date. Other buildings are more
useful. But you are proud of it because it commemorates forever the
spirit of those who made its fame immortal. So in the State itself,
important though it is to provide for the industrial welfare of the
commonwealth, the thing that is most important is to take care of the
really vital crop—the crop of citizens. The thing which the State most
needs to care for is the welfare, not merely material, but moral and
intellectual as well, of the children who are going to make up the
State fifteen, twenty, or twenty-five years hence; and that is why I am
so glad to see the care which you of Texas are taking in the training
of the generation that is now coming up.

A thing that is distressing to me to see is when sometimes the man and
woman who have done well in life show a curious inability to train
their own children in the way that has resulted successfully for
themselves. I think that all of us know people who, because they have
worked hard and triumphed, feel that somehow or other they will spare
their children the acquisition of the very qualities which have made
the parents triumph. Too often you see the man, and I am sorry to say
the woman, who says, “I have had to work hard; my sons and my daughters
shall have an easy time.” Such a man or woman is preparing ruin for
the children about whom this is said. Of course, you want to give your
children all the love possible; but it is not right to mistake folly
for affection. When you spare the child that which alone will enable
it to conquer in after life, you are not giving it a blessing; you
are doing it the greatest wrong in your power. Bring up the boy and
girl alike with the understanding that life is not generally soft, is
not generally easy, that there will be plenty of rough times, and
that what they have to show is not the spirit that avoids difficulties
and flinches from them, but the spirit which overcomes them. Let each
of the older among you look back upon your lives. You men of the
Civil War; what are the times of which you are proudest? What are the
memories you are most glad to hand down to your children and your
children’s children? The times that were easy? No. You are proud to
remember and have them remember the days of toil, of peril, of effort,
the days when you had to risk life and endure every form of hardship
and of labor, when you had in you the spirit that made you endure it,
that made you rise level to the great need. Surely you must not rob
your sons of the right to feel in their turn the same pride that you
now feel in the power to overcome difficulty, the power to work, the
power of wresting triumph out of danger.

There is only one of my fellow-citizens to whom I will touch my hat
quicker than to the soldier; and that is the mother, because I think
she has a little harder time of it. The mother who has brought up as
they should be brought up a family of young children is entitled to
such respect as no other person in the community is entitled to. When
the end of her life comes she has endured any amount of hardship, the
sitting up by beds of sick children, the endless taking care of them,
for a mother is not allowed to know the difference between night and
day as far as the ending of the day’s task is concerned; but, after
all, when her life is done she can look back upon it with a prouder
sense of satisfaction than any one else, if she has done her duty, for
her children and her husband shall rise up and call her blessed. The
worthy life for the Nation, for the individual, for the man, for the
woman, is the life of effort for the things worth striving for; and
our whole aim should be not to teach those who are to come after us to
shirk difficulties, and to strive to have an easy time in life, but to
strive to do their duty, whether that duty is hard or not, and to feel
that no success is so great as the success of duty worth doing which is
well done.

Of course, that is my conception of the life for the Nation as well as
for the individual. I am not going to develop my theory about that;
in the first place, because I want to keep clear of anything that you
might think touched in the faintest degree upon politics, and in the
next place because I believe you know pretty well how I feel anyway. I
feel that this Nation, whether it wishes to or not, can not help being
a great Nation. You of Texas by what your forefathers did and what you
have done have helped in making this Nation so that it is impossible
not to be great. We can not decide whether we will be great or not. The
only thing we can decide is whether, being great, we will do well or do
ill. We have got our duty in the world. We must do our duty to others,
and we must do our duty to ourselves. We must so handle ourselves that
no weak power which is behaving itself shall have cause to fear us;
and no strong power of any kind shall be able to oppress or wrong us.
We all believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I have a little difficulty in
getting some of my friends to accept my interpretation of it; but they
will in time, because that interpretation has come to stay. We are
building the Panama Canal. While that will be a benefit to all the
country, it will be of most benefit to the Gulf States. We have duties
in connection with the great position we have taken. We can not shirk
these duties. We can do them well or do them ill, but do them we must
That is one reason why I want to see a good navy; and we have got a
good navy. I am going to use a simile that I used a couple of nights
ago at Dallas. In the old days in Texas I understand that there used to
be a proverb that while you would not generally want a gun at all, if
you did want it you wanted it quick and you wanted it awfully bad. That
is just the way I feel about the navy. I feel that if we have it the
chances are that we will not need it; but that if we do not have it, we
might find that our need for it was vital.




TO THE CONGREGATION ASSEMBLED AT THE BLUE SCHOOLHOUSE ON UPPER DIVIDE
CREEK, COLO., SUNDAY, APRIL 30, 1905


_Friends_:

It is hard for me not to call you neighbors, for during a number of
years my neighbors were just such men and women as those I now see
before me, and they were as good friends as I ever had. I do not
intend to say more than a few words to-day, but I do wish to tell you
how thoroughly at home I feel with you, how much I have enjoyed my stay
here, and how I have appreciated the kind and thoughtful hospitality
with which I have been treated.

Here, as elsewhere in almost every gathering in the West, I see men
wearing the button which shows that they served in the Grand Army of
the Republic, and carrying the flag which they more than any other men
in this Nation have the right to carry because it is owing to them
that this Nation has a flag at all. The few words which I have to say
are to be on success, and I wish to illustrate what I mean by taking
these veterans of the Civil War as examples; and what I am about to
say was suggested by a conversation I had with the Dominie here, when
he was with me the other day on a bear hunt. The Grand Army in its
organization is typically and fundamentally American, because in the
Grand Army every man from lieutenant-general to drummer boy is judged
not by his position, but by the way he discharges or discharged his
duty while in that position. In other words, to the Grand Army man
success, in the highest and truest acceptation of the word, means the
full performance of duty in whatever position Providence has assigned
the man to whom the duty comes. Success from the soldier’s standpoint,
if an army is to rank as one of the great armies of all time, must mean
that whether the man carries sword or musket, whether he looks after
the mules or the commissary, he does his duty up to the handle. If the
soldier feels that he has done that, then he has a right to feel that
his career has been honorable and successful, and that his children’s
children will be proud of him. Success had this meaning from 1861 to
1865.

So it is in civil life. Real success consists in doing one’s duty well
in the path where one’s life is led. Of course, you must remember
that to do your duty you must in the first place do it to yourself
and to those that are nearest you. There is no use whatever in having
lofty ambitions or great schemes for helping mankind if you are not
able in the first place to keep yourself and your own family decently
fed, clothed, and housed. You must pull your own weight first before
you can do more than be a passenger in the boat. You must do what is
right to your family and your neighbors before you can help the State.
If, however, you have the ordinary humdrum qualities, the workaday
qualities, you can win real success; for real success in civil life
means that the man is able to make a living for himself and his family,
to educate his children, to do his duty by his neighbors, and when the
end of his life comes, to be able to feel that the world has been a
little better and not a little worse off because he has lived.

When it comes to the great prizes of life there must always be more
or less accident in winning. No man who has made what the world at
large calls a great success can fail to recognize, if he is sincere
with himself, that there has been much of chance, of fortune, in his
triumph; and surely this should prevent arrogance on his part, and
should also prevent any feeling of mean envy toward him on the part of
others. Carry yourself so that if accident puts great opportunities in
your way you will be able to take advantage of them, and so that, at
any rate, even if the exceptional opportunities do not come, you can do
the things that count most for real happiness in life, the things that
in their sum mean the life that is successful, because they make up a
happy and healthy home. No amount of skill, perseverance, energy, or
genius can win either the great or the small prizes of life unless back
of them lie character and the courage of moral convictions. With this
character, whether the great opportunity comes or not, you can count
upon so bearing yourselves that your children will bless you for having
done all that was in your power to bring them up to an honored name.

So much for success in private life. Now for the success from the
national standpoint. In this country of ours the Government can no more
rise higher than those who make it than a stream can rise higher than
its source. No one leader, no set of leaders, can make the Government.
It will be made by the average citizen, and whether it stands high or
low will and must depend upon the character of the average citizenship.
Only this average citizen can make or unmake it. The right type of
leader can guide and help him—in short, can lead him; but he must
himself be trusted to see to it that his leadership is right, and if
he has not the right stuff in him, then no leadership will avail him or
any of us. In the Civil War, Grant and Sherman and Farragut rendered
incalculable service; but in the last analysis it was the average man
in the ranks who made the army. If that man had not had the right stuff
in him not all the generalship of the greatest leaders would have
availed to win victory. So it is now. The man who carries the hod or
the axe or the coupling-pin; the man who holds the plow or the hammer;
the average man who does the average work of the Nation, is the man
upon whom our whole political and social fabric rests. If he continues
to have the right stuff in him, then as a Nation we shall continue to
go up. If he surrenders himself to idleness and ignorance, to mean
envy and mean hate; if he is not thrifty, industrious, energetic and
intelligent; above all, if his moral fibre weakens—then the Republic
will be in a bad way. There is no secret about good citizenship. The
qualities that make a good citizen are those that the humblest man or
woman, girl or boy, can have; but they are the qualities upon which the
foundations of the State rest. Dishonesty, especially if accompanied by
that unpleasant type of ability without conscientiousness which some
people deify under the name of “smartness,” is a curse and a disgrace
to the individual and to the community. Honesty is the first quality
for the individual and for the Nation; and it must be backed up by
courage—the courage which does not wait before showing itself until
the heroic days which may never come, but which unflinchingly does
each day that day’s duty, be it easy or hard; and finally it must be
backed up by the common-sense without which courage and honesty are
of so little avail. The man who is a good husband; the woman who is a
good wife and mother; the son who so carries himself that the family
are glad to have him at home instead of earnestly wishing he were away;
the daughter who as she grows up is a help to her mother instead of
an added burden; the family in which tenderness and consideration are
shown for one another, together with the strong, fearless qualities
absolutely necessary both for man and for woman in this rough, workaday
world of ours—such men and women, such families, have won the success
that most counts, and in their aggregate make up the Nation that is
really successful.




AT THE BANQUET OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE AND BOARD OF TRADE, DENVER,
COLO., MAY 9, 1905


_Mr. President; Mr. Toastmaster; and you, Men of Denver; Men of
Colorado_:

I hope I need not say how glad I am to be your guest to-night. Let
me say just one word in reference to the work of this organization
of which I am not only the guest, but to which I owe my most sincere
thanks for having elected me to honorary membership. You have done a
great work for the material prosperity of this city, of this State.
I fully appreciate, as every sensible man must, the great, the vital
importance of that work. We must have a basis of material prosperity
before any community, whether State, municipality, or nation, can
develop itself, can rise in any degree. There must in the community as
in the individual be first as a basis the material prosperity; but woe
to the community, woe to the individual, that accepts such material
prosperity as the be-all and the end-all of its life. In the world at
large, and especially in this Nation, we have been passing through an
era of materialism. It has had its good side, and it has had its poor
side; and we of this country will never rise level to the standard
that should be set here until we not only understand but apply the
truth that material prosperity is only the foundation, and that its
worth depends entirely upon the kind of moral superstructure of good
citizenship that we build upon it. No wealth, no material well-being,
shall avail the Nation where class hatreds flourish, where man looks
upon his brother with envy and hatred or with arrogance and contempt,
according to his position, where the average man fails to understand
that the supreme good for any man is the granting him the opportunity
and training him to the power to do service to the community at large.
I believe in material well-being, of course; I should be a fool if
I did not. I believe in material well-being; I believe in those who
have built it up; but I believe also that it is a curse if it is not
accompanied by the lift toward higher things. We of this country;
we who have enjoyed the marvelous prosperity that this country has
possessed in a degree pre-eminent above all other nations of earth,
must in the future show our understanding of this doctrine, or we shall
fail to make of the Republic what it must and shall be made—an example
for all the nations of mankind.

But do not think that I fail to understand the importance of our
material well-being. I congratulate Denver with all my heart that it
is the centre of the great mining and livestock industries. It is of
enormous consequence to all our people that any section of this country
should do well. Do not forget that. So far from its being a hurt to
any one section to see another section prosper, we can on the contrary
count it as certain that if a part of this country prospers much the
rest of the country will as a whole feel some good effects from the
result of the prosperity. As Senator Patterson was just saying to me,
when three years ago we succeeded in getting through that law which I
am so very proud should have been enacted during my administration,
the law by which the Nation undertook to do its share in the great
work of reclamation of the arid lands of the West; when we got through
that law there were certain shortsighted people, representing as they
believed the interests of the non-arid Eastern lands, who objected
to its passage on the ground that it would help build up their
rivals; whereas, they ought to have seen that whatever built up the
inter-mountain States would add to the prosperity of all the United
States. There is just one safe motto for Americans to act on; that is,
the motto of all men up; not some men down.

In a very small way I am trying to build up an other industry for
the benefit of the whole country, which we are starting here in
Colorado. Through Secretary Wilson of the Department of Agriculture,
in connection with your Agricultural College, we are starting the
development of a breed of American horse which may be called the
general utility horse. If I have any influence with this Administration
I am going to have this work continued! Also, incidentally (if any of
you have come from Vermont you will appreciate this), I think that for
this end we should develop the old breed of Morgan horse, because we
have in the Morgan horse a type which is not surpassed in any country
for the purpose to be served by the breed of horse most important for
us to develop. I do not think that the perpetuation of that fine old
stock should be left to private breeders. I think the Government should
take part in it. The reason we have started this horse breeding by the
Government here in Colorado is that we find, for reasons that I am
not wholly able to explain, that the stoutest forelegs in horses are
developed here in Colorado; and so I hope the Senators from Colorado
will help me to develop the Morgan horse in Colorado.

Gentlemen, I want to say a word as to a governmental policy in which
I feel that this whole country ought to take a great interest and
which is itself but part of a general policy into which I think our
Government must go. I speak of the policy of extending the powers of
the Interstate Commerce Commission, of giving them the power to fix
rates and to have the rates that they fix go into effect practically
at once. As I say, that represents in my mind part of what should be
the general policy of this country, the policy of giving not to the
State but to the National Government an increased supervisory and
regulatory power over corporations. The first step and to my mind the
most important step in this general policy is to give the Nation in
effective form this power over the great transportation corporations
of this country. In the days of the fathers of the older among you the
highways of commerce for civilized nations were what they had always
been—waterways and roads. Therefore they were open to all who chose to
travel upon them. Within the last two generations we have seen a system
grow up under which the old methods were completely revolutionized,
and now the typical highway of commerce is the railroad. Compared to
the railroad the ordinary road for wheeled vehicles, and the waterway,
whether natural or artificial, have lost their importance. Here in
Colorado, for instance, it is the railroads which, of course, are the
only highways that you need take into account in dealing with the
question of commerce in the State or outside of the State. Therefore,
under this changed system, we see highways of commerce grow up each of
which is controlled by a single corporation or individual; sometimes
several of them being controlled in combination by corporations or a
few individuals. When such is the case, in my judgment it is absolutely
necessary that the Nation (for the separate States can not possibly do
it) should assume a supervisory and regulatory function over the great
corporations which practically control the highways of commerce.

Now fix clearly in your minds two facts at the outset. As with
everything else mundane, when you get that supervisory and regulatory
power on behalf of the Nation you will not have cured all the evils
that existed and you will not equal the expectations of the amiable but
ill-regulated enthusiast who thinks that you ought to have cured all
those evils. A measure of good will come, some good will be done, some
injustice will have been prevented; but we shall be a long way from the
millennium. Get that fact clear in your mind or you will be laying up
for your selves a store of incalculable disappointment in the future.
That is the first thing.

Now the second and even more important matter: When you give the Nation
that power, remember that harm and not good will come unless you give
it with the firm determination not only to get justice for yourselves,
but to do justice to others. You must be as jealous to do justice to
the railroads as to exact justice from them. We can not afford in any
shape or way in this country to encourage a feeling which would do
injustice to a man of property, any more than to submit to injustice
from a man of property. Whether the man owns the biggest railroad or
the greatest outside corporation in the land, or whether he makes each
day’s bread by the sweat of that day’s toil, he is entitled to justice
and fair dealing, to no more and to no less. A spirit of envy on the
part of those less well off against the better off is as bad as and no
worse than a spirit of arrogant disregard for the rights of the man of
small means on the part of the man of large means. The arrogance and
the envy are not two different qualities; they are the same quality
shown by men under different circumstances.

We must make up our minds that nothing but harm will come from
any scheme to exercise such supervision as that I advocate over
corporations, and especially over the common carriers, unless we
have it clearly fixed in our minds that the scheme is to be one of
substantial justice alike to the common carrier and to the public. If
I have the appointment or retention of any commission and power to
administer a law of such increased powers I shall neither appoint nor
retain the man who would fail to do justice to the railroads any more
than I would appoint or retain the man who would fail to exact justice
from the railroads. I want that understood as a preliminary. If I have
the appointment of any of those men, or their retention, they will give
a square deal all around or else their shrift will be short.

But with that statement as a preliminary I wish to urge with all
the earnestness I possess, not only upon the public, but upon those
interested in the great railway corporations, the absolute need of
acquiescence in the enactment of such law. As has been well set forth
by the Attorney-General, Mr. Moody, in his recent masterly argument
presented to the committee of the Senate which is investigating the
matter, the Legislators have the right and as I believe the duty to
confer these powers upon some executive body. It can not confer them
upon any court, nor can it take away the court’s power to interfere
if the law is administered in a way that amounts to confiscation of
property. Of course, it would be possible to come much short of such
confiscation and yet do great damage, perhaps irreparable damage, to
the great corporations engaged in interstate commerce. We must remember
always that most of the men who are responsible for the management of
these great corporations, and who have profited thereby, have made
their fortunes not as incidental to damaging, but to benefiting the
community as a whole. We must be careful that nothing is done that
would jeopardize their industries and that would therefore work harm of
the most far-reaching kind not only to all, from the humblest to the
highest, engaged in these industries, but to the business community
as a whole. We must be careful to see that the law is administered
with sanity and conservatism. But the power must exist, if justice
is to be done as between the public and the common carrier, in some
governmental executive tribunal, not only to fix rates and alter them,
when convinced that existing rates do injustice, but to see that the
rate thus fixed goes into effect practically at once.

I do not ascribe it to any moral culpability of the men engaged in
handling these great corporations that they can not see some of the bad
effects of certain things they do. It is most natural for a man who is
trying to carry on his business in competition with some other business
to think that whatever he does that would beat his competitor is a
pretty good thing for the community at large; and often I do not blame
him for what he does; but I intend to prevent his doing it when it is
against the public weal.

I can not attempt to speak in detail of all that should be put into the
law as I hope it will be enacted at the next session of the National
Congress. Not only should this power over rates go in, but in my belief
we should at the same time deal with the private car question, which,
as regards certain industries, offers an even greater menace than is
offered by the present system of fixing rates. I do not think that
the law will have to deal with many subjects, but I do feel that with
the two I have mentioned and with perhaps one or two others it should
deal effectively. There will be the argument made on the other side
(doubtless the argument being made in their own minds by certain of my
hearers) that such power is liable to abuse. Of course it is. The power
of taxation is liable to grave abuse, and yet it must exist in the
appropriate legislative body. You can not give any needed power to the
representatives of the people without exposing yourselves to the danger
of that power being abused. There must be the possibility of abuse or
there can not be the possibility of effective use.

In closing I wish to mention one governmental project which I have been
instrumental, I think, in having started which will have a certain
bearing upon this question, and that is the Panama Canal. It is perhaps
unnecessary for me to say that I am perfectly aware that many most
admirable gentlemen disagreed with me in my action toward the Panama
Canal. But I am in a wholly unrepentant frame of mind in reference
thereto. The ethical conception upon which I acted was that I did not
intend that Uncle Sam should be held up while he was doing a great work
for himself and all mankind. But without regard to that, when the canal
comes into operation I think it will have a very important regulatory
effect in connection with the transcontinental commerce of the great
railroads. I think when such is the case those great railroads will
have to revise their way of looking at the interests of certain inland
cities.

Let me repeat. I have told you my views as to what I regard to be the
most important matter of internal national legislation that in the
immediate future will be before this people. I wish to say again that,
important though that legislation is, it is nothing like as important
as the spirit in which we approach it. If we approach it in the spirit
of demagogy, if we permit ourselves as a people to be deluded into
the belief that permanent good will come to us as a mass, if we attack
unjustly the proper rights of others because they are wealthy, we shall
do ourselves just as much damage as if we permitted an attack upon
those who are poor because they are poor. In time past republic after
republic has existed in this world and has gone down to destruction,
sometimes because the republic was turned into a government of the
poor who plundered the rich, sometimes because it was turned into a
government of the rich who exploited the poor. It made no difference
whatever to the fate of the republic which form its fall took. That
fall was just as certain in one case as in the other. It was just as
certain to follow the triumph of a class which plundered another class,
whether the class thus given mastery was the class of the poor who
plundered the rich, or the class of the rich who exploited the poor.
The destruction was as inevitable in one instance as in the other.

We have the right to look forward with confident hope to the future of
this Republic because it will not and shall not become the Republic of
any class, either poor or rich, because it will and shall remain as its
founders intended it to be, and as its rescuers under Abraham Lincoln
intended it to be, a government where every man, rich or poor, so long
as he does his duty to his neighbor, is given his full rights, is
guaranteed justice and has justice exacted from him in return.


  TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

  Obvious typographical errors and punctuation errors have been
  corrected after careful comparison with other occurrences within the
  text and consultation of external sources.

  Some hyphens in words have been silently removed, some added, when a
  predominant preference was found in the original book.

  Except for those changes noted below, all misspellings in the text,
  and inconsistent or archaic usage, have been retained.

  Pg  47: “appoached” replaced with “approached”
  Pg  78: “maunfactories” replaced with “manufactories”
  Pg 148: “everwhere” replaced with “everywhere”
  Pg 195: Replaced “that” with “than” in
          “...none was greater than what the late Secretary...”
  Pg 216: Removed duplicate “be” in “Deep will be your shame...”
  Pg 246: “commerical” replaced with “commercial”
  Pg 250: Replaced “if” with “of” in
          “...interest at the rate of 1 to 2...”
  Pg 336: “Amercians” replaced with “Americans”
  Pg 341: “Civl” replaced with “Civil”



*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 74681 ***