TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE

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:

COPYRIGHT—UNDERWOOD & UNDERWOOD, N. Y.

A CALIFORNIA SPEECH

Some of President Roosevelt’s addresses on public questions called him across the continent. However, he always transacted an enormous amount of public business en route

Homeward Bound Edition

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES
AND STATE PAPERS
February 19, 1902, to May 13, 1903

BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE
AUTHOR THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
VOLUME I

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
FEBRUARY 19, 1902
TO
MAY 13, 1903

INTRODUCTION

By ALBERT SHAW

The materials contained in the Addresses and State Papers of Theodore Roosevelt, while President of the United States, possess far more than a transitory interest and value. It is obvious indeed that for the future student of American politics and history their preservation in convenient and authentic form is not merely an important service, but an indispensable one; for it would have been impossible to collate them in any accurate or complete way from the scattered files of newspapers, especially since many of the addresses were delivered at points remote from news centers, and some of these were very inadequately reported by the press. This observation, it is needless to say, does not apply to the formal State Papers—chiefly messages to Congress—for such official deliverances are duly preserved and published by the Government itself. It is, however, suitable as well as convenient to include these State Papers in a collection of the recent utterances of President Roosevelt, for reasons so obvious as to need little comment.

The palpable fact is that President Roosevelt’s messages to Congress and a large number of his speeches, delivered in various parts of the country in his capacity as President, pertain to the same topics and serve a like public purpose. The messages must, of course, deal with matters affecting the welfare of the nation, and with various questions of public business or policy, in those aspects that bear upon the work of Congress. It is the President’s Constitutional right and duty to present information upon such topics, or to expound them from the standpoint of the Administration. In the long series of Presidential messages one may, indeed, read the history of this country for more than a hundred years. To that official narrative these messages by Mr. Roosevelt add some of the most fascinating chapters.

The speeches here collected, on the other hand, have a much wider range. Nevertheless, a great number of the addresses and speeches do in fact deal with precisely the same topics as those presented in the messages to Congress, and were intended not merely for a particular audience but for the whole country through the medium of the press. And for Mr. Roosevelt’s full disclosure of his views and policies touching some questions of large public concern, it is necessary to read his speeches in connection with his general or special messages to Congress. Since a number of his speeches here printed, like his general messages, deal with a variety of matters, the reader who wishes to compare and collate his utterances upon a given subject—as, for example, the regulation of the trusts, the reorganization of the army, the relations of the United States to Cuba, or our methods and policies of administration in the Philippines—will find it desirable to consult the index, which is intended to make these volumes available for ready reference.

Quite apart from their obvious value for reference purposes to the student of our contemporary history and politics, or to the campaign speaker of one party or another—who may wish to know authoritatively what Mr. Roosevelt said about various public issues—this collection of addresses has several distinct merits and advantages that must give it a place among works relating to the national life and character. Mr. Roosevelt, as an exponent of the aims and ideals of a great portion of his own generation of men and women in the United States, stands unquestionably first. In two volumes of his previously collected essays and papers, one entitled American Ideals and the other The Strenuous Life, both of which are included in the present edition of his works, Mr. Roosevelt has expressed with remarkable vigor,—as well as with an unwavering conviction and a wholesome philosophy of work and courage,—those views of politics, citizenship, and organized social and economic life to which the best conscience and intelligence of his fellow-countrymen have made sympathetic response. These essays, it is true, set forth no abstract scheme of political or social philosophy. Yet out of them there might be evolved a systematic body of doctrine relating to the duties of citizenship in a democracy, and to the ethics of administration and government. The explanation is that the doctrines and principles have come to be embodied in the character and convictions of the man himself; and thus the essays and addresses have not been the mere intellectual products of a man addicted to the use of the pen or to the phrasing of sentences, but rather the direct and wellnigh spontaneous expression of Mr. Roosevelt in relation to topics rendered timely by events and occasions.

In like manner and in an even higher sense, these later speeches, made under the sobering sense of responsibility that must come with the holding of so great an office as the Presidency, express Mr. Roosevelt’s convictions respecting our American life and citizenship in such manner as to form a sort of record for the study of the psychology of the nation at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Furthermore, these addresses and public papers, while to some extent homely, unstudied and unconventional in their phraseology, have the quality of permanent literature in a much higher measure than the utterances of almost any other American public man of our time. The traditional American political oratory is highly stilted and artificial—overloaded with rhetoric and figures of speech, lacking vernacular force and directness. While the orotund and rhetorical method of the past has largely disappeared, there has followed it another method almost equally artificial, in which the stately periods of the old-fashioned orator have been succeeded by the illustrative amusing anecdote, the highly burnished witticism, and the pointed phrase or apothegm.

Mr. Roosevelt’s method is wholly different from either of these. Except for being at times a trifle more earnest and hortatory, it is the method of some of the best contemporary English speakers. They do not posture, and do not attempt to be either orators or mere platform entertainers. Rather, they prefer to state in a direct, conversational manner certain things that they wish to say. Their language is that which naturally, and without conscious effort, clothes their thoughts as men of culture and mature intellectual life. Mr. Roosevelt being a man of trained mind, strong conviction, historical knowledge, and wide public experience, combined with great practical energy and executive force, and buoyant physical health, has both his own opinions and his own ready and forcible way of expressing them.

Thus many of the speeches contained in this collection are as nearly extemporaneous utterances as any which have ever been put into similarly permanent form. Here are addresses made in almost every State and Territory of the Union; and they were prepared and delivered within a very short range of time, during which a far greater number of briefer and more casual speeches have been made, thousands of letters written, and innumerable statements upon matters of a public character addressed to the Cabinet (collectively and individually), to Senators and members of Congress, to various executive officials, to public men and citizens from every part of every State of the Union, to committees and deputations representing all classes and interests, and to representatives and visitors from all countries—whether a royal prince from Germany or a defeated Boer general from South Africa. And when one considers all these demands upon a President’s time, and knows something of the prodigious industry with which the Chief Executive must devote himself to the almost innumerable duties that present themselves daily in connection with his executive work, it becomes plain that these speeches and addresses have been in the main the spontaneous utterances of a richly stored mind inspired by firm conviction and resolute will, and supported by extraordinary physical strength and vigor.

Yet Mr. Roosevelt’s speeches have not been carelessly prepared. Nor have they ever been left—as some speakers profess to leave theirs—to the “inspiration of the moment.” Mr. Roosevelt has unusual powers of concentration; and his achievement of so much work is due to his ability to turn promptly from one thing to another and to give each successive task his whole undivided attention. With an excellent memory and a disciplined mind, he is able to summon to his aid at a given moment all his past resources of reading, study, and thought upon a given topic. Thus, before going on several of the long trips in connection with which a great number of addresses in these volumes were made, the more important of the speeches for which dates had been fixed were dictated one after another to his stenographers late in the evening when the day’s work was cleared away, social or official guests had departed, and an hour or two of uninterrupted time was at his disposal.

This, indeed, is the same method by which a number of the essays and addresses which have become familiar in the collected volumes entitled American Ideals, and The Strenuous Life, had been prepared at former periods when Mr. Roosevelt was under stress of much occupation. There has been no attempt to polish sentences or to make fine phrases, yet there is the orderly and the deliberate expression that results from orderly processes of thinking. And there is the assured and confident tone that reveals a steadfast mind seldom tormented by doubts or misgivings.

Again, it is to be noted that these addresses are patriotic rather than partisan, and that where they deal with matters of controversy they show a spirit as little contentious or polemic as possible. While believing in the utility of the party system, Mr. Roosevelt spoke as President of the whole country and not merely as the chief of a party. His speeches, in short, are the utterances of a man who embodies the national spirit more broadly and fully than almost any other man of his day. He expresses himself upon a wide range of topics with a larger fund of experience and direct knowledge than is possessed by any other conspicuous public man of either party.

It is only through some understanding of the career that led up to his assumption of the Presidency that the richness, the fulness, and the authoritative quality of his observations on many varied themes can be appreciated. Mr. Roosevelt’s life has, amid much variety, possessed great unity. While still in college at Harvard, his mind became centered upon the study of American life, American history, and American government and policy. Whatever he undertook after leaving college added steadily to his understanding of the people of his own country and their institutions. Almost at once he threw himself into the politics of the great State of New York, served several terms in the Legislature, and made himself known throughout the country by the vigor and courage with which he applied himself to current problems of State and municipal reform. At a time when the so-called “spoils system” was powerfully rooted in the practical government of nation, State, and city, he became a civil service reformer.

Everything that was worth while was of interest to him and everything that he undertook to do was done whole-heartedly and thus made its contribution to his own development. He was an officer in the militia, and learned lessons which became, years afterward, valuable to him as a colonel in the Spanish-American war and later as commander-in-chief of the army by virtue of the Presidential office.

Meanwhile his first literary undertaking was the history of the naval war of 1812, which appeared in 1882, and which will always remain a vital and standard account of our last war with Great Britain, especially from the standpoint of naval strategy and actual operations. Whether taking part himself in the current life of his country and in the making of its history, or whether studying or writing about the part that others have taken in the development of the nation, there has been on Mr. Roosevelt’s part always a singleness of purpose and a harmony of effort. Thus, when he wrote about the War of 1812, as when in later years he wrote the graphic yet accurate and well-poised studies of those Western movements, military and civil, that created the Mississippi Valley (comprised in the series of volumes entitled The Winning of the West), there was on his part just as much a sense of dealing with realities as when in 1899 he wrote out the story of the part played by his regiment of Rough Riders in the Spanish-American war of the year before. This single work, on The Winning of the West, in the opinion of the authorities, justified the honorary degree conferred upon Colonel Roosevelt by the University of Norway on May 6, 1910.

The circumstances which took him to the West in 1884 to become for some years a cattle ranchman, a resident of the great plains, and an exponent of hunting and frontier life, involved in no manner an interruption of the career upon which he had made so propitious an entrance. On the contrary, this was the best possible step that could have been taken for the rounding out and development of the career of a man destined, either in letters or in action, to spend his life in dealing with American affairs from a broad standpoint.

Many of the most marked traits of the American people have been evolved through the process of pioneering. For three centuries our people have been engaged in subduing a continent that they had found a pathless wilderness. No man who has lacked contact with some concrete phases of our pioneering life can ever wholly enter into the spirit of the nation’s historical development, or perfectly understand the inherited qualities of our present day citizenship. Mr. Roosevelt’s Western life supplied that needful element of understanding, while it gave him physical hardihood and a continental breadth of view. It gave him, furthermore, that traditional American readiness with a horse and a gun, and that adaptability to the free life of field and of woods which is the heritage of the average young American, and which made the greater part of the Northern and Southern armies in the Civil War so unequaled, for effectiveness, in all military history.

Through these years of practical life in the West Mr. Roosevelt never lost the studious and literary habit, nor did he lose any of his zest for the public affairs of the country. In due time he returned to the East, took an active part in New York politics again, and was nominated for Mayor. Then he went to Washington, where for a number of years he served as Chairman of the Board of Civil Service Commissioners and became an expert in the field of national administration. After that came his two years as President of the Police Commissioners of New York City—a truly strenuous period that tested every quality of his mind and character. The navy had been at low ebb when Mr. Roosevelt in 1882 wrote his Naval War of 1812, and that book fairly contributed toward the revival of interest which soon set on foot the movement for the creation of our modern fleet. The author of that book had ever afterward been regarded both at home and abroad as an expert student of naval history and of sea power, and he had retained an enthusiastic interest in the whole subject. He was well fitted, therefore, for the post of Assistant Secretary of the Navy, to which President McKinley appointed him at the very time when, more clearly than most others, he foresaw the probability of a war with Spain.

He threw his whole intense energy into the work of fitting our navy for such a test, devoting himself especially to the questions of readiness and efficiency in practical detail. And then came the outbreak of war. With the feeling that he was no longer needed in the naval department, and that it was his duty to respond to the call for volunteer soldiers, he entered the army. The history of that service he has himself told in a fascinating way in the volume entitled The Rough Riders, included in this edition of his works.

The war being ended, he returned to his own State of New York at a moment when his party was casting about for a candidate for Governor. The outlook was not propitious; but Mr. Roosevelt’s recent career had given him a great personal popularity, and he was accordingly nominated and elected. Great questions of administration are always pending in the State of New York, and there are few governmental offices in any country better adapted to train the incumbent for the tasks of practical statesmanship. Mr. Roosevelt took up the work of the Governorship with characteristic industry, and with results that were successful and valuable in many directions. So well had he satisfied the expectations of his party and of the State that his renomination as Governor was assured; and the whole country had its attention fixed upon him as the probable nominee of his party for the Presidency in the year 1904.

A variety of circumstances, however, most of them unexpected and some of them dramatic, led to an overwhelming demand by the Republican National Convention at Philadelphia in 1900 that he forego his prospect of a second term as Governor of New York in order to take the nomination for the Vice-Presidency on the ticket with Mr. McKinley. He was put forward by his party in that summer of 1900 as its most effective campaigner. But it has not been thought by him desirable that any of the speeches made in a hotly contested Presidential electoral campaign should be included in a collection of his public addresses. The tragic death of President McKinley, in September, 1901, occurred only six months after his entrance upon a second term, and thus it happened that Mr. Roosevelt had only a short time to serve in the office of Vice-President.

So remarkable and so rapid a succession of valuable public experiences, all of a kind to give training for the duties of the Presidency, is probably unparalleled in our history, unless in the case of his successor, President Taft. Mr. Roosevelt had been the chief Civil Service Commissioner of this great nation, the head of the police administration of our metropolis, the active official of the naval department, the most energetic volunteer officer in the Spanish-American war, the Governor of New York, and the Vice-President of the United States. The man who had succeeded brilliantly in all these positions, and who had treated every one of them in turn as if it furnished the one great opportunity for rendering public service, could but bring to the Presidency an accumulated knowledge and experience that must make itself felt in every part of the work of that supreme office.

It is this wide range of experience and knowledge that has given Mr. Roosevelt the easy mastery of many subjects exhibited in the addresses and public papers that make up these volumes. Further, it is these speeches and messages, far more than anything else contained in his writings, that show him in his capacity as a practical statesman. They afford the unconscious but inevitable expression of the man in his relation to public affairs.

To sum up and to conclude: These addresses reveal the unity and consistency of Mr. Roosevelt’s character and career. He is indeed a many-sided and versatile man, but there is nothing mutually contradictory about the different phases of his nature or of his past undertakings. His vital Americanism is shown equally in his historical studies of the pioneer movement that built up our great West and in his accounts of ranching life and his studies of the big game of America.

In his varied literary work, as in his other efforts and activities, there is little or nothing of an incidental or dilettante nature; all of it is the frank expression of the man himself. The book on the War of 1812 was written when he was still very young. It might well have proved to be the merely boyish effort of a young man who had said to himself, “Lo, I will go to work and write a book!” But, on the contrary, it was in fact the outgrowth of vital interest and of strong conviction regarding his subject; and so the book lives and will continue to live. Thus all of his work, whether literary in its character or active and official, has been done in the same direct, straightforward way as simply pertaining to the task in hand; and the task, whether great or small, has always been deemed worthy of the whole vital energy of the man.

The great assemblage of public papers and addresses which we are presenting in the eight volumes that follow, herewith, belong for the most part to the period of Mr. Roosevelt’s Presidential service, which ended March 4, 1909. Upon his reelection to the Presidency in 1904, Mr. Roosevelt had declared that he would not be a candidate in 1908 for another term. Although great pressure was brought to bear upon him in 1907 and in the first half of 1908 to permit the party to place his name again at the head of the Presidential ticket, he remained firm in the view that no President should serve for more than two consecutive terms. One of the last, as it is also one of the best, addresses of his memorable Presidential period is the one delivered at the celebration of the one hundredth anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, on February 12, 1909, and contained in the last of these volumes. For a period of more than a year there is no speech or paper of Mr. Roosevelt that finds record in this collection. Almost at once after retiring from the White House, Mr. Roosevelt, in pursuance of a long-cherished plan, accompanied by his son Kermit and several scientific experts, departed for Africa. He had been commissioned by the Smithsonian Institution to obtain a collection of African fauna, particularly the larger animals, for the Government’s museum at Washington. Mr. Roosevelt’s carrying out of this great project was with all his familiar vitality and enthusiasm, and with results as successful as could have been desired. His return by way of Egypt, and his experiences as traveler and lecturer in Europe, preliminary to his return to America in June, 1910, were matters of interest everywhere. Mr. Roosevelt, throughout Europe as well as in his own country, had been fully recognized for those qualities which these introductory pages have tried to set forth. His European travels, as originally planned, were to have been those of a private citizen seeking no honors or publicity. But wherever he went governments and rulers, as well as the masses of plain people, accorded him so great a welcome that it can fairly be said that few men have ever received such ovations at any time in history. The death of King Edward led to the appointment of Mr. Roosevelt as special ambassador to represent the American government in the formalities of the funeral. The diplomatic character thus given to his presence in England added a final touch to the varied experiences of this remarkable foreign journey. Our concluding volume contains the chief addresses delivered by him in Europe, notably those at the Sorbonne in Paris, the University of Berlin, and the University of Oxford.

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

THE PRESIDENCY

Editor’s Note.—Although this volume is devoted almost entirely to addresses made after Mr. Roosevelt became President, it is believed that this essay on the office of the President, which has not elsewhere appeared in book form, has a fitting place as introductory to the materials which follow herewith. The article was written by Mr. Roosevelt in 1900, while he was Governor of New York, and previous to the Republican National Convention, which nominated him for Vice-President. The views expressed in the article are, therefore, those of an outside observer, and are not to be regarded as those of an incumbent of the office. It will be clear to all readers that the writer of the article could not at the time of its publication have foreseen the place he was destined to occupy.

This article was written expressly for “The Youth’s Companion,” and is reprinted by courtesy of that publication. Copyright, 1902, by Perry Mason Company.

The President of the United States occupies a position of peculiar importance. In the whole world there is probably no other ruler, certainly no other ruler under free institutions, whose power compares with his. Of course a despotic king has even more, but no constitutional monarch has as much.

In the republics of France and Switzerland the President is not a very important officer, at least, compared with the President of the United States. In England the sovereign has much less control in shaping the policy of the nation, the Prime Minister occupying a position more nearly analogous to that of our President. The Prime Minister, however, can at any time be thrown out of office by an adverse vote, while the President can only be removed before his term is out for some extraordinary crime or misdemeanor against the nation.

Of course, in the case of each there is the enormous personal factor of the incumbent himself to be considered, entirely apart from the power of the office itself. The power wielded by Andrew Jackson was out of all proportion to that wielded by Buchanan, although in theory each was alike. So a strong President may exert infinitely more influence than a weak Prime Minister, or vice versâ. But this is merely another way of stating that in any office the personal equation is always of vital consequence.

It is customary to speak of the framers of our Constitution as having separated the judicial, the legislative and the executive functions of the government. The separation, however, is not in all respects sharply defined. The President has certainly most important legislative functions, and the upper branch of the national legislature shares with the President one of the most important of his executive functions; that is, the President can either sign or veto the bills passed by Congress, while, on the other hand, the Senate confirms or rejects his nominations. Of course the President can not initiate legislation, although he can recommend it. But unless two-thirds of Congress in both branches are hostile to him, he can stop any measure from becoming a law. This power is varyingly used by different Presidents, but it always exists, and must always be reckoned with by Congress.

While Congress is in session, if the President neither signs nor vetoes the bill which is passed, the bill becomes a law without his signature. The effect is precisely the same as if he had signed it. Presidents who disapproved of details in a bill, but felt that on the whole it was advisable it should become a law, have at times used this method to emphasize the fact that they were not satisfied with the measure which they were yet unwilling to veto. A notable instance was afforded in President Cleveland’s second term, when he thus treated the Wilson-Gorman tariff bill.

The immense federal service, including all the postal employees, all the customs employees, all the Indian agents, marshals, district attorneys, navy-yard employees, and so forth, is under the President. It would of course be a physical impossibility for him to appoint all the individuals in the service. His direct power lies over the heads of the departments, bureaus and more important offices. But he does not appoint these by himself. His is only the nominating power. It rests with the Senate to confirm or reject the nominations.

The Senators are the constitutional advisers of the President, for it must be remembered that his Cabinet is not in the least like the Cabinet of which the Prime Minister is head in the English Parliament. Under our government the Secretaries who form the Cabinet are in the strictest sense the President’s own ministerial appointees; the men, chosen out of all the nation, to whom he thinks he can best depute the most important and laborious of his executive duties. Of course they all advise him on matters of general policy when he so desires it, and in practice each Cabinet officer has a very free hand in managing his own department, and must have it if he is to do good work. But all this advice and consultation is at the will of the President. With the Senate, on the other hand, the advice and consultation are obligatory under the Constitution.

The President and Congress are mutually necessary to one another in matters of legislation, and the President and the Senate are mutually necessary in matters of appointment. Every now and then men who understand our Constitution but imperfectly raise an outcry against the President for consulting the Senators in matters of appointment, and even talk about the Senators “usurping” his functions. These men labor under a misapprehension. The Senate has no right to dictate to the President who shall be appointed, but they have an entire right to say who shall not be appointed, for under the Constitution this has been made their duty.

In practice, under our party system, it has come to be recognized that each Senator has a special right to be consulted about the appointments in his own State, if he is of the President’s political party. Often the opponents of the Senator in his State do not agree with him in the matter of appointments, and sometimes the President, in the exercise of his judgment, finds it right and desirable to disregard the Senator. But the President and the Senators must work together, if they desire to secure the best results.

But although many men must share with the President the responsibility for different individual actions, and although Congress must of course also very largely condition his usefulness, yet the fact remains that in his hands is infinitely more power than in the hands of any other man in our country during the time that he holds the office; that there is upon him always a heavy burden of responsibility; and that in certain crises this burden may become so great as to bear down any but the strongest and bravest man.

It is easy enough to give a bad administration; but to give a good administration demands the most anxious thought, the most wearing endeavor, no less than very unusual powers of mind. The chances for error are limitless, and in minor matters, where from the nature of the case it is absolutely inevitable that the President should rely upon the judgment of others, it is certain that under the best Presidents some errors will be committed. The severest critics of a President’s policy are apt to be, not those who know most about what is to be done and of the limitations under which it must be done, but those who know least.

In the aggregate, quite as much wrong is committed by improper denunciation of public servants who do well as by failure to attack those who do ill. There is every reason why the President, whoever he may be and to whatever party he may belong, should be held to a sharp accountability alike for what he does and for what he leaves undone. But we injure ourselves and the nation if we fail to treat with proper respect the man, whether he is politically opposed to us or not, who in the highest office in our land is striving to do his duty according to the strength that is in him.

We have had Presidents who have acted very weakly or unwisely in particular crises. We have had Presidents the sum of whose work has not been to the advantage of the Republic. But we have never had one concerning whose personal integrity there was so much as a shadow of a suspicion, or who has not been animated by an earnest desire to do the best possible work that he could for the people at large. Of course infirmity of purpose or wrong-headedness may mar this integrity and sincerity of intention; but the integrity and the good intentions have always existed. We have never had in the Presidential chair any man who did not sincerely desire to benefit the people and whose own personal ambitions were not entirely honorable, although as much can not be said for certain aspirants for the place, such as Aaron Burr.

Corruption, in the gross sense in which the word is used in ordinary conversation, has been absolutely unknown among our Presidents, and it has been exceedingly rare in our President’s Cabinets. Inefficiency, whether due to lack of will-power, sheer deficiency in wisdom, or improper yielding either to the pressure of politicians or to the other kinds of pressure which must often be found even in a free democracy, has been far less uncommon. Of deliberate moral obliquity there has been but very little indeed.

In the easiest, quietest, most peaceful times the President is sure to have great tasks before him. The simple question of revenue and expenditure is as important to the nation as it is to the average household, and the President is the man to whom the nation looks and whom it holds accountable in the matter both of expenditure and of revenue. It is an entirely mistaken belief that the expenditure of money is simply due to a taste for recklessness and extravagance on the part of the people’s representatives.

The representatives in the long run are sure to try to do what the people effectively want. The trouble is that although each group has, and all the groups taken together still more strongly have, an interest in keeping the expenditures down, each group has also a direct interest in keeping some particular expenditure up. This expenditure is usually entirely proper and desirable, save only that the aggregate of all such expenditures may be so great as to make it impossible for the nation to go into them.

It is a good deal the same thing in the nation as it is in a State. The demand may be for a consumptive hospital, or for pensions to veterans, or for a public building, or for an armory, or for cleaning out a harbor, or for starting irrigation. In each case the demand may be in itself entirely proper, and those interested in it, from whatever motives, may be both sincere and strenuous in their advocacy. But the President has to do on a large scale what every Governor of a State has to do on a small scale, that is, balance the demands on the Treasury with the capacities of the Treasury.

Whichever way he decides, some people are sure to think that he has tipped the scale the wrong way, and from their point of view they may conscientiously think it; whereas from his point of view he may know with equal conscientiousness that he has done his best to strike an average which would on the one hand not be niggardly toward worthy objects, and on the other would not lay too heavy a burden of taxation upon the people.

Inasmuch as these particular questions have to be met every year in connection with every session of Congress and with the work of every department, it may readily be seen that even the President’s every-day responsibilities are of no light order. So it is with his appointments. Entirely apart from the fact that there is a great pressure for place, it is also the fact that in all the higher and more important appointments there are usually conflicting interests which must somehow be reconciled to the best of the President’s capacity.

Here again it must be remembered that the matter is not always by any means one of merely what we call politics. Where there is a really serious conflict in reference to an appointment, while it may be merely a factional fight, it is more apt to be because two groups of the President’s supporters differ radically and honestly on some question of policy; so that whatever the President’s decision may be, he can not help arousing dissatisfaction.

One thing to be remembered is that appointments and policies which are normally routine and unimportant may suddenly become of absolutely vital consequence. For instance, the War Department was utterly neglected for over thirty years after the Civil War. This neglect was due less to the successive Presidents than to Congress, and in Congress it was due to the fact that the people themselves did not take an interest in the army. Neither the regular officer nor the regular soldier takes any part in politics as a rule, so that the demagogue and the bread-and-butter politician have no fear of his vote; and to both of them, and also to the cheap sensational newspaper, the army offers a favorite subject for attack. So it often happens that some amiable people really get a little afraid of the army, and have some idea that it may be used some time or other against our liberties.

The army never has been and, I am sure, it never will be or can be a menace to anybody save America’s foes, or aught but a source of pride to every good and far-sighted American. But it is only in time of actual danger that such facts are brought home vividly to the minds of our people, and so the army is apt to receive far less than its proper share of attention. But when an emergency like that caused by the Spanish War arises, then the Secretary of War becomes the most important officer in the Cabinet, and the army steps into the place of foremost interest in all the country.

It is only once in a generation that such a crisis as the Spanish War or the Mexican War or the War of 1812 has to be confronted, but in almost every administration lesser crises do arise. They may be in connection with foreign affairs, as was the case with the Chilean trouble under President Harrison’s administration, the Venezuelan matter in President Cleveland’s second term, or the Boxer uprising in China last year. Much more often they relate to domestic affairs, as in the case of a disastrous panic, which produces terrible social and industrial convulsions. Whatever the problem may be, the President has got to meet it and to work out some kind of a solution. In midwinter or midsummer, with Congress sitting or absent, the President has always to be ready to devote every waking hour to some anxious, worrying, harassing matter, most difficult to decide, and yet which it is imperative immediately to decide.

An immense addition to the President’s burden is caused by the entirely well-meaning people who ask him to do what he can not possibly do. For the first few weeks after the inauguration a new President may receive on an average fifteen hundred letters a day. His mail is so enormous that often he can not read one letter in a hundred, and rarely can he read one letter in ten. Even his private secretary can read only a small fraction of the mail. Often there are letters which the President would really be glad to see, but which are swamped in the great mass of demands for office, demands for pensions, notes of warning or advice, demands for charity, and requests of every conceivable character, not to speak of the letters from “cranks,” which are always numerous in the President’s mail.

One President, who was very anxious to help people whenever he could, made the statement that the requests for pecuniary aid received in a single fortnight would, if complied with, have eaten up considerably more than his entire year’s salary. The requests themselves are frequently such as the President would like to comply with if there was any way of making a discrimination; but there is none.

One rather sad feature of the life of a President is the difficulty of making friends, because almost inevitably after a while the friend thinks there is some office he would like, applies for it, and when the President is obliged to refuse, feels that he has been injured. Those who were closest to Abraham Lincoln have said that this was one of the things which concerned him most in connection with his administration. It is hardly necessary to allude to the well-known fact that no President can gratify a hundredth part of the requests and demands made upon him for office, often by men who have rendered him real services and who are fit to fill the position they seek, but not so fit as somebody else. Of course the man does not realize that his successful rival was appointed because he really was more fit, and he goes away sour and embittered because of what he feels to be the President’s ingratitude.

Perhaps the two most striking things in the Presidency are the immense power of the President, in the first place; and in the second place, the fact that as soon as he has ceased being President he goes right back into the body of the people and becomes just like any other American citizen. While he is in office he is one of the half-dozen persons throughout the whole world who have most power to affect the destinies of the world.

He can set fleets and armies in motion; he can do more than any save one or two absolute sovereigns to affect the domestic welfare and happiness of scores of millions of people. Then when he goes out of office he takes up his regular round of duties like any other citizen, or if he is of advanced age retires from active life to rest, like any other man who has worked hard to earn his rest.

One President, John Quincy Adams, after leaving the Presidency, again entered public life as a Congressman, and achieved conspicuous successes in the Lower House. This, however, is a unique case. Many Presidents have followed the examples of Jefferson and Jackson, and retired, as these two men retired to Monticello and The Hermitage. Others have gone into more or less active work, as practicing lawyers or as lecturers on law, or in business, or in some form of philanthropy.

During the President’s actual incumbency of his office the tendency is perhaps to exaggerate not only his virtues but his faults. When he goes out he is simply one of the ordinary citizens, and perhaps for a time the importance of the rôle he has played is not recognized. True perspective is rarely gained until years have gone by.

Altogether, there are few harder tasks than that of filling well and ably the office of President of the United States. The labor is immense, the ceaseless worry and harassing anxiety are beyond description. But if the man at the close of his term is able to feel that he has done his duty well; that he has solved after the best fashion of which they were capable the great problems with which he was confronted, and has kept clean and in good running order the governmental machinery of the mighty Republic, he has the satisfaction of feeling that he has performed one of the great world-tasks, and that the mere performance is in itself the greatest of all possible rewards.

ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

SPEECH OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT THE REUNION OF THE DEPARTMENT OF THE POTOMAC, G. A. R., AT THE NEW WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D.⁠ C., FEB. 19, 1902

Mr. Chairman, Commander-in-Chief, and you, my Comrades:

I can say that there is nothing else of which I am quite so proud as having won, in a sense, the right to claim comradeship with you. And, gentlemen, I recollect speaking with a friend at the time of the Spanish War as to why we went, and it was agreed that it was simply because we could not stay away. We had taken to heart the great object-lesson that you gave. I am very glad to have the chance of seeing you this evening and of being with you. I would be but a poor American if I did not appreciate to the full the debt under which America rests to you, not alone for the lesson in war that you have given, but for what that lesson teaches as to peace. I meet you here and I see the general and the man from the ranks honor one another by the highest title either knows—comrade. I see you applying the great lesson of brotherhood—the lesson that must be applied in civil life no less than in military life if we are to work out, as we shall work out, aright the problems that face the Republic. The war in which I was engaged was a small affair; but it gave us an understanding of what you had done and of what you had been through. I know pretty well what kind of memories you have. I know what you did, what you risked, what you sacrificed. I know what it meant to you, and I know why you did it. There are two or three lessons that you taught that I hope this country will not only never forget, but will never cease applying. In the first place the motive—the tissue of motives that spurred you on—the love for liberty, love for union, and the love for the stable and ordered freedom of a great people. You braved nights in the freezing mud of the trenches in winter, and the marches under scorching midsummer suns; fever cots, wounds, insufficient food, exhausting fatigue of a type that those that have not tried it can not even understand. You did it without one thought of the trivial monetary reward at the moment; you did it because your souls spurred you on. And that is the reason why to this day, when any man speaks to a body of veterans he speaks to a body of men who are instant to respond to any call for adherence to a lofty ideal. In other words, you practiced, and by practicing preached, in the strongest manner, the ideal of doing your duty, of doing duty when duty calls, without thought of what the reward might be. In the days when the sad, kindly, patient Lincoln—mighty Lincoln—stood in the White House like a high priest of the people, between the horns of the altar, and poured out the blood of the bravest and best, it was because only by that sacrifice could the flag that had been rent in sunder once again be made without a seam. You taught the ideal of duty—duty, a word that stands above glory, or any other word. Glory is a good word, too, but duty is a better one.

You taught, in addition to that, brotherhood. In the ranks, as you stood there shoulder to shoulder, little any one of you cared what the man next to you was as regarded wealth, trade, or education, if he was in very truth a man. And, friends, short would have been our shrift if in our army as a whole there had been any failure to exercise just that type of judgment—to exercise the judgment on the man as a man; short would have been our shrift if we had failed to do justice to the bricklayer on the one hand, or to the banker on the other; if we had shown either contempt of the one, or the no less mean emotion of envy for the other. If we are to go on, as we shall and must go on in our national career, we must apply in the civic life of our nation exactly the principles which obtained in the Grand Army of the Republic. There are plenty of foes to fight and we can not afford to have honest men betrayed into hostility toward one another; betrayed into acting toward one another in a way that will permanently deteriorate the standard of our national character. We can afford to disagree on questions of proper political difference. There are plenty such. But we can not afford, if we are to remain true to the ideals of the past, to differ about those ideals. We can not afford to do less than justice to any man. We can not afford to shrink from seeing that the right obtains; nor, on the other hand, to rebuke any effort to stir up those dark and evil forces which lurk in each man’s breast, and which need to be kept down, not excited.

The Commander-in-Chief spoke of the great and good President—of President McKinley—who died for the people exactly as Abraham Lincoln died. You who wore the blue in the early sixties warred against that spirit of disunion which, if successful, would have meant widespread governmental anarchy throughout this land. You warred for orderly liberty. So now it behooves each of us so to conduct his civil life, so to do his duty as a citizen, that we shall in the most effective way war against the spirit of anarchy in all its forms. You did mighty deeds, and you leave us more than mighty deeds, for you leave us the memory of how you did them. You leave us not only the victory, but the spirit that lay behind it and shone through it. You leave us not only the triumph, but the memory of the patient resolution, of the suffering, of the dogged endurance and heroic daring through which that triumph came to pass. You in your youth and early manhood took up the greatest task which fell to the lot of any generation of our people to perform. You did it well. We have lesser tasks, and yet tasks of great and vital importance. Woe to us if we do not show ourselves worthy to be your successors, by doing our lesser tasks with the same firm determination for right that you displayed when you fought to a finish the great Civil War, when you upheld the arms of Abraham Lincoln, and followed to victory the flag of Ulysses S. Grant.

AT THE CHARLESTON EXPOSITION, WEDNESDAY, APRIL 9, 1902

Mr. President, Mr. Mayor, and you, the Men and Women of the Palmetto State, Men and Women of the South; my Fellow-citizens of the Union:

It is indeed to me a peculiar pleasure to have the chance of coming here to this Exposition held in your old, your beautiful, your historic city.

My mother’s people were from Georgia; but before they came to Georgia, before the Revolution, in the days of Colonial rule, they dwelt for nearly a century in South Carolina; and therefore I can claim your State as mine by inheritance no less than by the stronger and nobler right which makes each foot of American soil in a sense the property of all Americans.

Charleston is not only a typical Southern city; it is also a city whose history teems with events which link themselves to American history as a whole. In the early Colonial days Charleston was the outpost of our people against the Spaniard in the South. In the days of the Revolution there occurred here some of the events which vitally affected the outcome of the struggle for Independence, and which impressed themselves most deeply upon the popular mind. It was here that the tremendous, terrible drama of the Civil War opened.

With delicate and thoughtful courtesy you originally asked me to come to this Exposition on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. The invitation not only showed a fine generosity and manliness in you, my hosts, but it also emphasized as hardly anything else could have emphasized how completely we are now a united people. The wounds left by the great Civil War, incomparably the greatest war of modern times, have healed; and its memories are now priceless heritages of honor alike to the North and to the South. The devotion, the self-sacrifice, the steadfast resolution and lofty daring, the high devotion to the right as each man saw it, whether Northerner or Southerner—all these qualities of the men and women of the early sixties now shine luminous and brilliant before our eyes, while the mists of anger and hatred that once dimmed them have passed away forever.

All of us, North and South, can glory alike in the valor of the men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray. Those were iron times, and only iron men could fight to its terrible finish the giant struggle between the hosts of Grant and Lee, the struggle that came to an end thirty-seven years ago this very day. To us of the present day, and to our children and children’s children, the valiant deeds, the high endeavor, and abnegation of self shown in that struggle by those who took part therein will remain for evermore to mark the level to which we in our turn must rise whenever the hour of the Nation’s need may come.

When four years ago this Nation was compelled to face a foreign foe, the completeness of the reunion became instantly and strikingly evident. The war was not one which called for the exercise of more than an insignificant fraction of our strength, and the strain put upon us was slight indeed compared with the results. But it was a satisfactory thing to see the way in which the sons of the soldier of the Union and the soldier of the Confederacy leaped eagerly forward, emulous to show in brotherly rivalry the qualities which had won renown for their fathers, the men of the great war. It was my good fortune to serve under an ex-Confederate general, gallant old Joe Wheeler, who commanded the cavalry division at Santiago.

In my regiment there were certainly as many men whose fathers had served in the Southern, as there were men whose fathers had served in the Northern, army. Among the captains there was opportunity to promote but one to field rank. The man who was singled out for this promotion because of conspicuous gallantry in the field was the son of a Confederate general and was himself a citizen of this, the Palmetto State; and no American officer could wish to march to battle beside a more loyal, gallant, and absolutely fearless comrade than my former captain and major, your fellow-citizen, Micah Jenkins.

A few months ago, owing to the enforced absence of the Governor of the Philippines, it became necessary to nominate a Vice-Governor to take his place—one of the most important places in our Government at this time. I nominated as Vice-Governor an ex-Confederate, General Luke Wright, of Tennessee. It is therefore an ex-Confederate who now stands as the exponent of this Government and this people in that great group of islands in the eastern seas over which the American flag floats. General Wright has taken a leading part in the work of steadily bringing order and peace out of the bloody chaos in which we found the islands. He is now taking a leading part not merely in upholding the honor of the flag by making it respected as the symbol of our power, but still more in upholding its honor by unwearied labor for the establishment of ordered liberty—of law-creating, law-abiding civil government—under its folds.

The progress which has been made under General Wright and those like him has been indeed marvelous. In fact, a letter of the General’s the other day seemed to show that he considered there was far more warfare about the Philippines in this country than there was warfare in the Philippines themselves! It is an added proof of the completeness of the reunion of our country that one of the foremost men who have been instrumental in driving forward the great work for civilization and humanity in the Philippines has been a man who in the Civil War fought with distinction in a uniform of Confederate gray.

If ever the need comes in the future the past has made abundantly evident the fact that from this time on Northerner and Southerner will in war know only the generous desire to strive how each can do the more effective service for the flag of our common country. The same thing is true in the endless work of peace, the never-ending work of building and keeping the marvelous fabric of our industrial prosperity. The upbuilding of any part of our country is a benefit to the whole, and every such effort as this to stimulate the resources and industry of a particular section is entitled to the heartiest support from every quarter of the Union. Thoroughly good national work can be done only if each of us works hard for himself, and at the same time keeps constantly in mind that he must work in conjunction with others.

You have made a particular effort in your Exhibition to get into touch with the West Indies. This is wise. The events of the last four years have shown us that the West Indies and the Isthmus must in the future occupy a far larger place in our national policy than in the past. This is proved by the negotiations for the purchase of the Danish Islands, the acquisition of Porto Rico, the preparation for building an Isthmian canal, and, finally, by the changed relations which these years have produced between us and Cuba. As a Nation we have especial right to take honest pride in what we have done for Cuba. Our critics abroad and at home have insisted that we never intended to leave the island. But on the 20th of next month Cuba becomes a free republic, and we turn over to the islanders the control of their own government. It would be very difficult to find a parallel in the conduct of any other great State that has occupied such a position as ours. We have kept our word and done our duty, just as an honest individual in private life keeps his word and does his duty.

Be it remembered, moreover, that after our four years’ occupation of the island we turn it over to the Cubans in a better condition than it ever has been in all the centuries of Spanish rule. This has a direct bearing upon our own welfare. Cuba is so near to us that we can never be indifferent to misgovernment and disaster within its limits. The mere fact that our administration in the island has minimized the danger from the dreadful scourge of yellow fever, alike to Cuba and to ourselves, is sufficient to emphasize the community of interest between us. But there are other interests which bind us together. Cuba’s position makes it necessary that her political relations with us should differ from her political relations with other powers. This fact has been formulated by us and accepted by the Cubans in the Platt amendments. It follows as a corollary that where the Cubans have thus assumed a position of peculiar relationship to our political system they must similarly stand in a peculiar relationship to our economic system.

We have rightfully insisted upon Cuba adopting toward us an attitude differing politically from that she adopts toward any other power; and in return, as a matter of right, we must give to Cuba a different—that is, a better—position economically in her relations with us than we give to other powers. This is the course dictated by sound policy, by a wise and far-sighted view of our own interest, and by the position we have taken during the past four years. We are a wealthy and powerful country, dealing with a much weaker one; and the contrast in wealth and strength makes it all the more our duty to deal with Cuba, as we have already dealt with her, in a spirit of large generosity.

This Exposition is rendered possible because of the period of industrial prosperity through which we are passing. While material well-being is never all-sufficient to the life of a nation, yet it is the merest truism to say that its absence means ruin. We need to build a higher life upon it as a foundation; but we can build little indeed unless this foundation of prosperity is deep and broad. The well-being which we are now enjoying can be secured only through general business prosperity, and such prosperity is conditioned upon the energy and hard work, the sanity and the mutual respect, of all classes of capitalists, large and small, of wage-workers of every degree. As is inevitable in a time of business prosperity, some men succeed more than others, and it is unfortunately also inevitable that when this is the case some unwise people are sure to try to appeal to the envy and jealousy of those who succeed least. It is a good thing when these appeals are made to remember that while it is difficult to increase prosperity by law, it is easy enough to ruin it, and that there is small satisfaction to the less prosperous if they succeed in overthrowing both the more prosperous and themselves in the crash of a common disaster.

Every industrial exposition of this type necessarily calls up the thought of the complex social and economic questions which are involved in our present industrial system. Our astounding material prosperity, the sweep and rush rather than the mere march of our progressive material development, have brought grave troubles in their train. We can not afford to blink these troubles, any more than because of them we can afford to accept as true the gloomy forebodings of the prophets of evil. There are great problems before us. They are not insoluble, but they can be solved only if we approach them in a spirit of resolute fearlessness, of common-sense, and of honest intention to do fair and equal justice to all men alike. We are certain to fail if we adopt the policy of the demagogue who raves against the wealth which is simply the form of embodied thrift, foresight, and intelligence; who would shut the door of opportunity against those whose energy we should especially foster, by penalizing the qualities which tell for success. Just as little can we afford to follow those who fear to recognize injustice and to endeavor to cut it out because the task is difficult or even—if performed by unskilful hands—dangerous.

This is an era of great combinations both of labor and of capital. In many ways these combinations have worked for good; but they must work under the law, and the laws concerning them must be just and wise, or they will inevitably do evil; and this applies as much to the richest corporation as to the most powerful labor union. Our laws must be wise, sane, healthy, conceived in the spirit of those who scorn the mere agitator, the mere inciter of class or sectional hatred; who wish justice for all men; who recognize the need of adhering so far as possible to the old American doctrine of giving the widest possible scope for the free exercise of individual initiative, and yet who recognize also that after combinations have reached a certain stage it is indispensable to the general welfare that the Nation should exercise over them, cautiously and with self-restraint, but firmly, the power of supervision and regulation.

Above all, the administration of the government, the enforcement of the laws, must be fair and honest. The laws are not to be administered either in the interest of the poor man or the interest of the rich man. They are simply to be administered justly; in the interest of justice to each man be he rich or be he poor—giving immunity to no violator, whatever form the violation may assume. Such is the obligation which every public servant takes, and to it he must be true under penalty of forfeiting the respect both of himself and of his fellows.

And now, my fellow-countrymen, in closing I am going to paraphrase something said by Governor Aycock last night. I have dwelt to-day upon the fact that we are indeed a reunited people; that we are indeed and forever one people. The time was when one could not have made that statement with truth; now it can be truthfully said. There was a time when it was necessary to keep saying it, because it was already true, and because the assertion made it more true; but the time is at hand, I think the time has come, when it is not necessary to say it again. Proud of the South? Of course we are proud of the South; not only Southerners, but Northerners are proud of the South. Proud of your great deeds? Of course I am proud of your great deeds, for you are my people. I thank you from my heart for the welcome you have given me, and I assure you that few experiences in my life have been more pleasant than the experiences of these two days that I have spent among you.

AT NEW YORK AT THE BANQUET AT SHERRY’S IN HONOR OF DR. NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, PRESIDENT OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, APRIL 19, 1902

Mr. Chairman, and you, my hosts, and my Fellow-Guests:

What I am going to say to-night will be based upon the altogether admirable address made this afternoon by my old and valued friend, the new president of your great university, in the course of which he spoke of what the university can contribute to the state as being scholarship and service. There are only a limited number of men of any university who can add to what has been so well called by Professor Munsterberg “productive scholarship.” Of course each university should bend its energies toward developing the few men who are thus able to add to the sum of the nation’s work in scholarly achievement. To those men the all-important doctrine to preach is that one piece of first-rate work is worth a thousand pieces of second-rate work; and that after a generation has passed each university will be remembered by what its sons have produced, not in the line of a mass of pretty good work, but in the way of the few masterpieces. I do not intend, however, to dwell upon this side of the university’s work, the work of scholarship, the work of the intellect trained to its highest point of productiveness. I want to speak of the other side, the side that produces service to the public, service to the nation. Not one in a hundred of us is fit to be in the highest sense a productive scholar, but all of us are entirely fit to do decent service if we care to take the pains. If we think we can render it without taking the pains, if we think we can render it by feeling how nice it would be to render it—why, the value of that service will be but little.

Fortunately to-day those who addressed you had a right to appeal not merely to what they had spoken, but to what they had done. When we are inclined to be pessimistic over affairs, and especially public affairs here in the United States, it is a pleasant thing to be able to look back to the last twenty years of the life of Columbia’s late President, Mayor Low. And now, for a moment, look at things in their pure historic perspective. Think what it means in the way of an object-lesson to have a man who, after serving two terms as Mayor of what is now one of the great boroughs of this great city, then became for twelve years the President of one of the foremost institutions of learning in the entire land, and then again became the chief officer of the city. That was not merely creditable to Mr. Low; it was creditable to us. It spoke well for the city. It is a big mark on the credit side. We have plenty of marks on the debit side; but we feel that this goes a long way toward making the balance even.

As for the Dean—why, I sat at the feet of that Gamaliel when I first went into politics. He and I took part in the affairs of the old Twenty-first Assembly District in the days when I was just out of college. My very first experiences in practical politics were gained in connection with the Dean. And, gentlemen, as I gradually passed out of the sphere of the Dean, I passed into the sphere of your present President, and he has been my close friend, my valued adviser, ever since.

When it comes to rendering service, that which counts chiefly with a college graduate, as with any other American citizen, is not intellect so much as what stands above mere power of body, or mere power of mind, but must in a sense include them, and that is character. It is a good thing to have a sound body, and a better thing to have a sound mind; and better still to have that aggregate of virile and decent qualities which we group together under the name of character. I said both decent and virile qualities—it is not enough to have one or the other alone. If a man is strong in mind and body and misuses his strength then he becomes simply a foe to the body politic, to be hunted down by all decent men; and if, on the other hand, he has thoroughly decent impulses but lacks strength he is a nice man, but does not count. You can do but little with him.

In the unending strife for civic betterment, small is the use of these people who mean well, but who mean well feebly. The man who counts is the man who is decent and who makes himself felt as a force for decency, for cleanliness, for civic righteousness. He must have several qualities; first and foremost, of course, he must be honest, he must have the root of right thinking in him. That is not enough. In the next place he must have courage; the timid good man counts but little in the rough business of trying to do well the world’s work. And finally, in addition to being honest and brave he must have common-sense. If he does not have it, no matter what other qualities he may have he will find himself at the mercy of those who, without possessing his desire to do right, know only too well how to make the wrong effective.

To you, the men of Columbia here, the men of this great city, and the men who, when they graduate, go to other parts of the country, we have the right to look in an especial degree for service to the public. To you much has been given, and woe and shame to you if we can not rightfully expect much from you in return.

We can pardon the man who has no chance in life if he does but little for the State, and we can count it greatly to his credit if he does much for the State. But upon you who have had so much rests a heavy burden to show that you are worthy of what you have received. A double responsibility is upon you to use aright, not merely the talents that have been given to you, but the chances you have to make much of these talents. We have a right to expect service to the State from you in many different lines: In the line of what, for lack of a better word, we will call philanthropy; in all lines of effort for public decency.

Remember always that the man who does a thing so that it is worth doing is always a man who does his work for the work’s sake. Somewhere in Ruskin there is a sentence to the effect that the man who does a piece of work for the fee, normally does it in a second-rate way, and that the only first-rate work is the work done by the man who does it for the sake of doing it well, who counts the deed as itself his reward. In no kind of work done for the public do you ever find the really best, except where you find the man who takes hold of it because he is irresistibly impelled to do it, because he wishes to do it for the sake of doing it well, not for the sake of any reward that comes afterward or in connection with it. Of course, gentlemen, that is true of almost every other walk of life, just exactly as true as it is in politics. A clergyman is not worth his salt if he finds himself bound to be a clergyman for the material reward of that profession. Every doctor who has ever succeeded has been a man incapable of thinking of his fee when he did a noteworthy surgical operation. A scientific man, a writer, a historian, an artist, can only be a good man of science, a first-class artist, a first-class writer, if he does his work for the sake of doing it well; and this is exactly as true in political life, exactly as true in every form of social effort, in every kind of work done for the public at large. The man who does work worth doing is the man who does it because he can not refrain from doing it, the man who feels it borne in on him to try that particular job and see if he can not do it well. And so it is with a general in the field. The man in the Civil War who thought of any material reward for what he did was not among the men whose names you read now on the honor roll of American history.

So the work that our colleges can do is to fit their graduates to do service—to fit the bulk of them, the men who can not go in for the highest type of scholarship, to do the ordinary citizen’s service for the country; and they can fit them to do this service only by training them in character. To train them in character means to train them not only to possess, as they must possess, the softer and gentler virtues, but also the virile powers of a race of vigorous men, the virtues of courage, of honesty—not merely the honesty that refrains from doing wrong, but the honesty that wars aggressively for the right—the virtues of courage, honesty, and, finally, hard common-sense.

TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, NAVAL ACADEMY, ANNAPOLIS, MD., MAY 2, 1902

Gentlemen of the Graduating Class:

In receiving these diplomas you become men who above almost any others of the entire Union are to carry henceforth ever-present with you the sense of responsibility which must come if you are worthy of wearing the uniform; which must come with the knowledge that on some tremendous day it may depend upon your courage, your preparedness, your skill in your profession, whether or not the nation is again to write her name on the world’s roll of honor or is to know the black shame of defeat. We all of us earnestly hope that the occasion for war may not arise, but if it has to come then this nation must win; and as Dr. Winston has pointed out, in winning the prime factor must of necessity be the United States Navy. If the navy fails us then we are doomed to defeat. It should therefore be an object of prime importance for every patriotic American to see that the navy is built up; and that it is kept to the highest point of efficiency both in personnel and material. Above all, it can not be too often repeated to those representatives of the nation in whose hands the practical application of the principle lies, that in modern naval war the chief factor in achieving triumph is what has been done in the way of thorough preparation and training before the beginning of the war. It is what has been done before the outbreak of war that counts most. After the outbreak, all that can be done is to use to best advantage the great war engines, and the seamanship, marksmanship, and general practical efficiency which have already been provided by the forethought of the national legislature and by the administrative ability, through a course of years, of the Navy Department. A battleship can not be improvised. It takes years to build. And we must learn that it is exactly as true that the skill of the officers and men in handling a battleship aright can likewise never be improvised; that it must spring from use and actual sea service, and from the most careful, zealous, and systematic training. You to whom I am about to give these diplomas now join the ranks of the officers of the United States Navy. You enter a glorious service, proud of its memories of renown. You must keep ever in your minds the thought of the supreme hour which may come when what you do will forever add to or detract from that renown. Some of you will have to do your part in helping construct the ships and the guns which you use. You need to bend every energy toward making these ships and guns in all their details the most perfect of their kind throughout the world. The ship must be seaworthy, the armament fitted for best protection to the guns and men, the guns in all their mechanism fit to do the greatest possible execution in the shortest possible time. Every detail, whether of protection to the gun-crews, of rapidity and sureness in handling the ammunition and working the elevating and revolving gear, or of quickness and accuracy in sighting, must be thought out far in advance, and the thought carefully executed in the actual work. But after that has been done it remains true that the best ships and guns, the most costly mechanism, are utterly valueless if the men have not been trained to use them to the best possible advantage. From now on throughout your lives there can be no slackness in the performance of duty on your part. Much has been given you, and much will be expected from you. Your duty must be ever present with you, waking and sleeping. You must train yourselves, and you must train those under you, in the actual work of seamanship, in the actual work of gunnery. If the day for battle comes you will need all that you possess of boldness, skill, determination, ability to bear punishment, and instant readiness in an emergency. Without these qualities you can do nothing, yet even with them you can do but little if you have not had the forethought and set purpose to train yourselves and the enlisted men under you aright. Officers and men alike must have the sea habit; officers and men alike must realize that in battle the only shots that count are the shots that hit, and that normally the victory will lie with the side whose shots hit oftenest. Of course you must have the ability to stand up to the hammering; the courage, the daring, the resolution to endure; but I take it for granted you will have those qualities. It is less to be thought to your credit to have them than it would be eternally to your discredit to lack them. I take it for granted you will have the courage we have a right to expect to go with American seamanship; that you will have the daring and the resolution. And I ask that you make it from now on your object to see that if ever the day should arise, your courage, your readiness, your eager desire to win fresh renown for the flag be made good by the training you have given yourselves and those under you in the practical work of your profession in seamanship and gunnery.

AT THE BANQUET OF THE SOCIETY OF THE SONS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION, WASHINGTON, D.⁠ C., MAY 2, 1902

Mr. Toastmaster; Mr. President; Compatriots; and Fellow-Americans:

It is a pleasure to take part in greeting you this evening. Societies that cultivate patriotism in the present by keeping alive the memory of what we owe to the patriotism of the past, fill an indispensable function in this Republic. You come here to-night from every quarter—from every State of the Republic and from the islands of the Eastern Seas. The Republic has put up its flag in those islands, and the flag will stay there.

I am glad to meet you here to-night—you, the descendants of the statesmen and soldiers who fought to establish this country in 1776, some of the older among whom, and the fathers of the others, fought with no less valor wearing the blue or the gray in the Civil War. May we now show our fealty to the great men who did the great deeds of the past, not alone by word but by deed! May we prove ourselves true to them, not merely by paying homage to their memory, but by so shaping the policy of this great Republic as to make it evident that we are not unworthy of our sires. They did justice, and we will do justice. They did justice as strong men, not as weaklings; and we will show ourselves strong men and not weaklings.

Before me I see men who lived in iron times, men who did great deeds. I see here a delegate from Kentucky who served under Farragut in the great days of the Civil War. I see a descendant of a man from Connecticut who was called Brother Jonathan. All around these tables are gathered men the names of whose ancestors stand not only for righteousness but also for strength—for both qualities, gentlemen. Righteousness finds weakness but a poor yoke-fellow. With righteousness must go strength to make that righteousness of avail. And in the names of the mighty men of the past I ask each man here to do his part in seeing that this nation remains true in deed as well as in word to the ideals of the past; to remember that we can no more afford to show weakness than we can afford to do wrong. Where wrong has been done by any one the wrongdoer shall be punished; but we shall not halt in our great work because some man has happened to do wrong. Honor to the statesmen of the past, and may the statesmen of the present strive to live up to the example they set! Honor to the army and navy of the past! And honor to those gallant Americans wearing the uniform of the American Republic who in the army and the navy of the present day uphold gloriously the most glorious traditions of the past!

Another thing, compatriots of the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution: We are Americans, and that means that we treat Americanism primarily as a matter of spirit and purpose, and in the broadest sense we regard every man as a good American, whatever his creed, whatever his birthplace, if he is true to the ideals of this Republic.

To-day I have been down to Annapolis to see the graduating class of the Naval Academy; and it would have done your hearts good to have seen those fine, manly, upstanding young fellows who looked every man straight in the face without flinching. We may be sure that the honor of the Republic is safe in their hands.

I was glad to meet those young fellows to-day. I am glad to meet representatives of the navy like you, Admiral Watson, and of the army like you, General Breckenridge. I am glad that we as Americans have cause to be proud of the army and the navy of the United States—of the men who in the past have upheld the honor of the flag, and of their successors, the soldiers and sailors of the present day, who during the last three years have done such splendid work in the inconceivably dangerous and harassing warfare of the eastern tropics.

AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNERSTONE OF THE McKINLEY MEMORIAL OHIO COLLEGE OF GOVERNMENT OF THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON, D.⁠ C., MAY 14, 1902

Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am to say but one word. Nothing more need be said than has been said already by those who have addressed you this afternoon—the statesmen who worked with McKinley and the pastor under whose ministrations he sat.

It is indeed appropriate that the Methodists of America—the men belonging to that religious organization which furnished the pioneers in carving out of the West what is now the heart of the great American Republic—should found this great university in the city of Washington and should build the college that is to teach the science of government in the name of the great exponent of good and strong government who died last fall, who died as truly for this country as Abraham Lincoln himself.

I thank you for having given me the opportunity this afternoon to come before you and to lay the cornerstone of this building.

AT THE EXERCISES OF THE SOCIETY OF THE ARMY OF THE CUMBERLAND, ATTENDING THE REBURIAL OF MAJOR-GENERAL WILLIAM STARK ROSECRANS, ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY, WASHINGTON, D.⁠ C., MAY 17, 1902

Speaker Henderson; and you, the Comrades of the Great Chief whose reburial in the National Cemetery here at Arlington we have met together to commemorate:

Speaker Henderson in his address has well said that the builder rather than the destroyer is the man most entitled to honor among us; that the man who builds up is greater than he who tears down; and that our homage should be for the fighting man who not only fought worthily but fought in a worthy cause. Therefore for all time, not merely the people of this great reunited country but the nations of mankind who see the hope for ordered liberty in what this country has done, will hold you, the men of the great Civil War, and the leaders like him whose mortal remains are to be put to-day in their final resting place, in peculiar honor because you were soldiers who fought to build; you were upbuilders; you were the men to whose lot it fell to save, to perpetuate, to make stronger the great national fabric, the foundations of which had been laid by the men who fought under him whose home at Mount Vernon stands as an equally prized memorial of the past with Arlington. It is no chance that has made Mount Vernon and Arlington, here in the neighborhood of Washington, the two great memorials of the nation’s past. One commemorates the founding and the other the saving of the nation. If it were not for what Arlington symbolizes, Mount Vernon would mean little or nothing. If it were not for what was done by Rosecrans and his fellows, the work of Washington would have crumbled into bloody chaos and the deeds of the founders of this Republic be remembered only because they had begun another of the many failures to make practical the spirit of liberty in this world. Without the work that you did the work of the men who fought the Revolution to a successful close would have meant nothing. To you it was given to do the one great work which if left undone would have meant that all else done by our people would have counted for nothing. And you left us a reunited country, and therefore the right of brotherhood with and of pride in the gallantry and self-devotion of those who wore the gray, who were pitted against you in the great struggle. The very fact that we appreciate more and more as the years go on the all-importance to this country and to mankind of your victory, makes it more and more possible for us to recognize in the heartiest and frankest manner the sincerity, the self-devotion, the fealty to the right as it was given to them to see the right, of our fellow Americans against whom you fought—and now the reunion is so complete that it is useless to allude to the fact that it is complete. And you left us another lesson in brotherhood. To-day you come here, comrades of the Army of the Cumberland—the man who had a commission and the man who fought in the ranks—brothers, because each did what there was in him to do for the right. Each did what he could and all alike shared equally in the glory of the deed that was done. Officer and enlisted man stand at the bar of history to be judged not by the difference of rank, but by whether they did their duties in their respective ranks. And oh, of how little count, looking back, the difference of rank compared with the doing of the duty! What was true then is true now. Doing the duty well is what counts. In any audience of this kind one sees in the highest official and social position men who fought as enlisted men in the armies of the Union or in the armies of the Confederacy. All we ask is, did they do their duty? If they did, honor to them! Little we care what particular position they held, save insofar as the holding of exalted position gave the men a chance to do great and peculiar service.

I shall not try to eulogize the dead General in the presence of his comrades, in the presence of his countrymen who have come to honor the memory of the man against whom they were pitted in the past—who come here because they now, like us, are Americans and nothing else, devoted to the Union and to one flag. I shall not try to speak of his services in the presence of those who fought through the Civil War, who risked the loss of life, who endured the loss of limb, who fought as enlisted men or came out boys not yet ready to enter college but able to bear commissions in the army of the United States, as the result of three or four years of service with the colors. There are those of each class of whom I have spoken who have addressed or will address you to-day. They are entitled to speak as comrades of the great dead. But the younger among us are only entitled to pay to the great dead the homage of those to whom ordered liberty has been handed down as a heritage because of the blood, and of the sweat, and of the toil of the men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. Great were the lessons you taught us in war. Great have been the lessons you have taught us in peace since the war. Sincerely and humbly the men who came after you hasten to acknowledge the debt that is owing to you. You were the men of the mighty days who showed yourselves equal to the days. We have to-day lesser tasks; and shame to us if we flinch from doing or fail to do well these lesser tasks, when you carried to triumphant victory a task as difficult as that which was set you! Here in the presence of one of the illustrious dead whose names will remain forever on the honor roll of the greatest Republic upon which the sun has ever shone, it behooves all of us, young and old, solemnly and reverently to pledge ourselves to continue undimmed the traditions you have left us; to do the work, whatever that work may be, necessary to make good the work that you did; to acknowledge the inspiration of your careers in war and in peace; and to remind ourselves once for all that lip loyalty is not the loyalty that counts. The loyalty that counts is the loyalty which shows itself in deeds rather than in words; and therefore we pledge ourselves to make good by our lives what you risked your lives to gain and keep for the nation as a whole.

AT THE CENTENNIAL MEETING OF THE BOARD OF HOME MISSIONS OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., ON THE EVENING OF MAY 20, 1902

Mr. Chairman; and you, my friends—for if this meeting means anything, it means a commemoration of the embodied spirit of friendship and righteousness working through the Church through generations—

I am glad to have the chance of greeting you to-night. I belong to a closely allied Church—the Dutch Reformed. I want to tell you a curious incident which was mentioned to me by one of the two gentlemen who, on your behalf, met me this evening and brought me up here. Mr. Ogden mentioned to me that two hundred and sixty or seventy years ago, the first church of my denomination here in this city was put up under contract by his ancestors, who then dwelt in Connecticut. It is, I think, in a sense symbolical of how much the Church has counted in the life of our people that the descendants of those who worshiped in that church and of those who under contract put it up, should be meeting here this evening. I have another bond with you. There are not very many Dutch Reformed churches in this city; not quite as many as there should be; and during a considerable portion of my life I have had to go to a Presbyterian church, because there was not a Reformed church to attend. All of my early years I went to the Madison Square Presbyterian Church, which then had as its pastor Dr. Adams. Those of you who remember him will agree with me that he was one of the very few men concerning whom it was not inappropriate to use the adjective by which I shall describe him, for he was in very truth a saintly man.

It is a pleasure on behalf of the people of the United States to greet you and bid you welcome on this hundredth anniversary of the beginning of organized home missionary work by the Presbyterian Church. In one sense of course all earnest and fervent church work is a part of home missionary work. Every earnest and zealous believer, every man or woman who is a doer of the word and not a hearer only, is a lifelong missionary in his or her field of labor—a missionary by precept, and, by what counts a thousandfold more than precept, by practice. Every such believer exerts influence on those within reach, somewhat by word and infinitely more through the ceaseless, wellnigh unfelt pressure—all the stronger where its exercise is unconscious—the pressure of example, broad charity, and neighborly kindness.

But to-night we celebrate one hundred years of missionary work done not incidentally, but with set purpose; a hundred years of effort to spread abroad the Gospel and lay the moral foundation upon which all true national greatness must rest. The century that has closed has seen the conquest of this continent by our people. To conquer a continent is rough work. All really great work is rough in the doing, though it seems smooth enough to those who look back upon it, or to the contemporaries who overlook it from afar. We need display but scant patience with those who, sitting at ease in their own homes, delight to exercise a querulous and censorious spirit of judgment upon their brethren who, whatever their shortcomings, are doing strong men’s work as they bring the light of civilization into the world’s dark places. The criticism of those who live softly, remote from the strife, is of little value; but it would be difficult to overestimate the value of the missionary work of those who go out to share the hardship, and, while sharing it, not to talk, but to wage war against the myriad forms of brutality. It is such missionary work that prevents the pioneers from sinking perilously near the level of the savage race against which they war. Without it the conquest of this continent would have had little but an animal side. Without it the pioneers’ fierce and rude virtues and sombre faults would have remained unlit by the flame of pure and loving aspiration. Without it the life of this country would have been a life of inconceivably hard and barren materialism. Because of it, because of the spirit that lay under those missionaries’ work, deep beneath and through the national character runs that power of firm adherence to a lofty ideal upon which the safety of the nation will ultimately depend.

Honor, thrice honor to those who for three generations, during the period of this people’s great expansion, have seen that the force of the living truth expanded as the nation expanded! They bore the burden and heat of the day, they toiled obscurely and died unknown, that we might come into a glorious heritage. Let us prove the sincerity of our homage to their faith and their works by the way in which we manfully carry toward completion the work they so well began.

Friends, I made up my mind coming up here that I would speak to you of something that has taken place to-day and of something else that has taken place within the last ten days. First of the action of this nation which has culminated on this Tuesday, the twentieth of May, nineteen hundred and two, in starting a free Republic on its course. That represented four years’ work. There were blunders and shortcomings in the work, of course; and there were men of little faith who could only see the blunders and shortcomings. But it represents work triumphantly done. And I think that we as citizens of this Republic have a right to feel proud that we kept our pledge to the letter, and that we have established a new international precedent. I do not remember (and I have thought a good deal about it, ladies and gentlemen) another case in modern times where, as a result of such a war, the victorious nation has contented itself with setting a new nation free and fitting it as well as could be done to start well in the difficult path of self-government. Mere anarchy and ruin would have fallen upon the island if we had contented ourselves with simple victory in the war and then had turned the island loose to shift for itself. For over three years the harder work of peace has supplemented the hard work of war; for over three years our representatives in the island (representatives largely of the army, remember—I sometimes hear the army attacked; gentlemen, I have even heard missionaries attacked. But it is well for us that when there comes a great work in peace or in war we have the army as an instrument for it), our representatives in Cuba have steadily worked to build up a school system, to see to sanitation, to preserve order and secure the chance for the starting of industries; to do everything in our power so that the new government might begin with the chances in its favor. And now as a nation we bid it Godspeed. We intend to see that it has all the aid we can give it, and I trust and believe that our people will, through their national legislature, see to it very shortly that Cuba has the advantage of entering into peculiarly close relations with us in our economic system.

That is the deed that was consummated to-day; now for the other.

Ten days or a fortnight ago an appalling calamity befell another portion of the West Indies; befell islands not in any way under our flag—islands owning allegiance to two European powers. But their need was great and our people met that need as speedily as possible. Congress at once appropriated a large sum of money and through private gifts great additions were made to that appropriation; and I found, as usual, the army and navy the instruments through which the work could be done. I wanted to get men whom I could call on instantly to drop whatever their work was and go down, with the certainty that neither pestilence nor the danger from volcanoes or anything else would make them swerve a half inch—men upon whose absolute integrity and capacity I could count, as well as on their courage. When I wanted these men and wanted them at once I turned to the army and the navy. I am sure that we all feel proud that ships bearing the American flag should have been the first to carry relief to those who had been stricken down by so appalling a disaster.

It seems to me that while there is much evil against which we need to war with all the strength there is in us, and while there are many tendencies in the complex forces about us which are fraught with peril to the future welfare of the Republic and of mankind, yet it is a fine thing to see at the opening of this century such omens of international brotherhood, of a future when the sense of duty to one’s neighbor will extend beyond national lines. They are good omens for the future, these actions: that action which culminated to-day in establishing the free Republic of Cuba; that action which made our country the first to reach out a generous and helping hand to those upon whom calamity had fallen, without regard to what the flag was to which they paid allegiance.

AT THE OVERFLOW MEETING OF THE CENTENNIAL OF PRESBYTERIAN HOME MISSIONS, CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, NEW YORK, N. Y., MAY 20, 1902

Mr. Chairman; Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you this evening, and I know you will pardon me if it is but a word, for I did not anticipate that there would be another meeting at which to speak.

Of course, the very first thing that any nation has to do is to keep in order the affairs of its own household; to do that which is best for its own life. And as has been so well and truthfully said, Dr. Van Dyke, by you this evening, the vital thing to a nation is the spiritual, not the material. Napoleon said that in war the moral was to the material as ten to one; and it is just exactly as true in civil and social life. I do not mean for one moment to undervalue the material. We must have thrift, business energy, business enterprise and all that spring from them, as the foundation upon which we are to build the great national superstructure. But it is a pretty poor building if you have nothing but the basement. It is an admirable thing to have material development, great material riches, if we do not misestimate the position that that material well-being should occupy in the nation. It is an admirable thing to have wealth if we use it aright and understand its relative value compared to the things of the spirit. Now that sounds like preaching. But it is only an expression of a political truism if you look at it in the right way. We have spread during the last century over this whole continent. One hundred years ago the home missionary work was begun. Do you realize that at that time any one who went west of the Mississippi went into a foreign land? He did; and as late as 1846 any one who went, in this latitude, to the Pacific Coast, went into a foreign land. But as we expanded nationally, so it was our good fortune that there should go hand in hand with such expansion the expansion of the church work, and of all that goes with church work. I do not think we can realize the all-importance of the way in which the vital need was met by the men who went out as missionaries, and pastors, and workers in the little raw, struggling communities whose people were laying deep the foundations of the great States that to-day fill the valley of the Mississippi and stud the Pacific Coast. The men who went out have by their efforts given to what would otherwise have been the merely material development of our people the spiritual lift that was vital to it—the spiritual lift that made in the end a great nation instead of merely a nation of well-to-do people. We want well-to-do people, but if they are only well-to-do people, they have come far short of what we have a right to demand. A giant work looms up before the churches in this country, and it is work which the churches must do. Our civilization has progressed in many ways for the right; in some ways it has gone wrong. The tremendous sweep of our industrial development has already brought us face to face on this continent with many a problem which has puzzled for generations the wisest people of the old world. With that growth in the complexity of our civilization, of our industrialism, has grown an increase in the effective power alike of the forces that tell for good and of the forces that tell for evil. The forces for evil, as our great cities grow, become more concentrated, more menacing to the community, and if the community is to go forward and not back they must be met and overcome by forces for good that have grown in corresponding degree. More and more in the future our churches must realize that we have a right to expect that they shall take the lead in shaping those forces for good.

I am not going to verge on the domain of theology, and still less of dogma. I do not think that at the present time there will be any dissent from the proposition that after all in this work-a-day world we must largely judge men by their fruits; that we can not accept a long succession of thistle crops as indicating fig trees; and that we have a right to look to the churches for setting the highest possible standard of conduct and of service, public and private, for the whole land; that the church must make itself felt by finding its expression through the life work of its members; not merely on Sunday, but on week days; not merely within these walls, but at home and in business. We have a right to expect that you will show your faith by your works; that the people who have the inestimable advantages of the church-life and the home-life should be made to remember that as much has been given them, much will be expected of them; that they must lead upright lives themselves and be living forces in the war for decency among their surroundings; that we have a right to expect of you and those like you that you shall not merely speak for righteousness, but do righteousness in your own homes and in the world at large.

ON THE OCCASION OF THE UNVEILING OF THE SOLDIERS’ AND SAILORS’ MONUMENT AT ARLINGTON, UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF THE COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA, MAY 21, 1902

Mrs. President, and members of the Society, and you, my comrades, and, finally, officers and men of the Regular Army, whom we took as our models in the war four years ago:

It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon to accept in the name of the nation the monument put up by your society to the memory of those who fell in the war with Spain; a short war; a war that called for the exertion of only the merest fraction of the giant strength of this nation; but a war, the effects of which will be felt through the centuries to come, because of the changes it wrought. It is eminently appropriate that the monument should be unveiled to-day, the day succeeding that on which the free republic of Cuba took its place among the nations of the world as a sequel to what was done by those men who fell and by their comrades in ’98.

And here, where we meet to honor the memory of those who drew the great prize of death in battle, a word in reference to the survivors: I think that one lesson every one who was capable of learning anything learned from his experience in that war was the old, old lesson that we need to apply in peace quite as much—the lesson that the man who does not care to do any act until the time for heroic action comes, does not do the heroic act when the time does come. You all of you remember, comrades, some man—it is barely possible some of you remember being the man—who, when you enlisted, had a theory that there was nothing but splendor and fighting and bloodshed in the war, and then had the experience of learning that the first thing you had to do was to perform commonplace duties, and perform them well. The work of any man in the campaign depended upon the resolution and effective intelligence with which he started about doing each duty as it arose; not waiting until he could choose the duty that he thought sufficiently spectacular to do, but doing the duty that came to hand. That is exactly the lesson that all of us need to learn in times of peace. It is not merely a great thing, but an indispensable thing that the nation’s citizens should be ready and willing to die for it in time of need; and the presence of no other quality could atone for the lack of such readiness to lay down life if the nation calls. But in addition to dying for the nation you must be willing and anxious to live for the nation, or the nation will be badly off. If you want to do your duty only when the time comes for you to die, the nation will be deprived of valuable services during your lives.

I never see a gathering of this kind; I never see a gathering under the auspices of any of the societies which are organized to commemorate the valor and patriotism of the founders of this nation; I never see a gathering composed of the men who fought in the great Civil War or in any of the lesser contests in which this country has been engaged, without feeling the anxiety to make such a gathering feel, each in his or her heart, the all-importance of doing the ordinary, humdrum, commonplace duties of each day as those duties arise. A large part of the success on the day of battle is always due to the aggregate of the individual performance of duty during the long months that have preceded the day of battle. The way in which a nation arises to a great crisis is largely conditioned upon the way in which its citizens have habituated themselves to act in the ordinary affairs of the national life. You can not expect that much will be done in the supreme hour of peril by soldiers who have not fitted themselves to meet the need when the need comes, and you can not expect the highest type of citizenship in the periods when it is needed if that citizenship has not been trained by the faithful performance of ordinary duty. What we need most in this Republic is not special genius, not unusual brilliancy, but the honest and upright adherence on the part of the mass of the citizens and of their representatives to the fundamental laws of private and public morality—which are now what they have been during recorded history. We shall succeed or fail in making this Republic what it should be made—I will go a little further than that—what it shall and must be made, accordingly as we do or do not seriously and resolutely set ourselves to do the tasks of citizenship—and good citizenship consists in doing the many small duties, private and public, which in the aggregate make it up.

AT ARLINGTON, MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 30, 1902

Mr. Commander; Comrades; and you, the men and women of the United States who owe your being here to what was done by the men of the great Civil War:

I greet you, and thank you for the honor done me in asking me to be present this day. It is a good custom for our country to have certain solemn holidays in commemoration of our greatest men and of the greatest crises in our history. There should be but few such holidays. To increase their number is to cheapen them. Washington and Lincoln—the man who did most to found the Union, and the man who did most to preserve it—stand head and shoulders above all our other public men, and have by common consent won the right to this preëminence. Among the holidays which commemorate the turning points in American history, Thanksgiving has a significance peculiarly its own. On July 4 we celebrate the birth of the nation; on this day, the 30th of May, we call to mind the deaths of those who died that the nation might live, who wagered all that life holds dear for the great prize of death in battle, who poured out their blood like water in order that the mighty national structure raised by the far-seeing genius of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Hamilton, and the other great leaders of the Revolution, great framers of the Constitution, should not crumble into meaningless ruins.

You whom I address to-day and your comrades who wore the blue beside you in the perilous years during which strong, sad, patient Lincoln bore the crushing load of national leadership, performed the one feat the failure to perform which would have meant destruction to everything which makes the name America a symbol of hope among the nations of mankind. You did the greatest and most necessary task which has ever fallen to the lot of any men on this Western Hemisphere. Nearly three centuries have passed since the waters of our coasts were first furrowed by the keels of those whose children’s children were to inherit this fair land. Over a century and a half of colonial growth followed the settlement; and now for over a century and a quarter we have been a nation.

During our four generations of national life we have had to do many tasks, and some of them of far-reaching importance; but the only really vital task was the one you did, the task of saving the Union. There were other crises in which to have gone wrong would have meant disaster; but this was the one crisis in which to have gone wrong would have meant not merely disaster but annihilation. For failure at any other point atonement could have been made; but had you failed in the iron days the loss would have been irreparable, the defeat irretrievable. Upon your success depended all the future of the people on this continent, and much of the future of mankind as a whole.

You left us a reunited country. You left us the right of brotherhood with the men in gray, who with such courage, and such devotion for what they deemed the right, fought against you. But you left us much more even than your achievement, for you left us the memory of how it was achieved. You, who made good by your valor and patriotism the statesmanship of Lincoln and the soldiership of Grant, have set as the standards for our efforts in the future both the way you did your work in war and the way in which, when the war was over, you turned again to the work of peace. In war and in peace alike your example will stand as the wisest of lessons to us and our children and our children’s children.

Just at this moment the Army of the United States, led by men who served among you in the great war, is carrying to completion a small but peculiarly trying and difficult war in which is involved not only the honor of the flag but the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism. The task has not been as difficult or as important as yours, but, oh, my comrades, the men in the uniform of the United States, who have for the last three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Philippine Islands, are your younger brothers, your sons. They have shown themselves not unworthy of you, and they are entitled to the support of all men who are proud of what you did.

These younger comrades of yours have fought under terrible difficulties and have received terrible provocation from a very cruel and very treacherous enemy. Under the strain of these provocations I deeply deplore to say that some among them have so far forgotten themselves as to counsel and commit, in retaliation, acts of cruelty. The fact that for every guilty act committed by one of our troops a hundred acts of far greater atrocity have been committed by the hostile natives upon our troops, or upon the peaceable and law-abiding natives who are friendly to us, can not be held to excuse any wrongdoers on our side. Determined and unswerving effort must be made, and has been and is being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.

Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From time to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman cruelty and barbarity—cruelty infinitely worse than any that has ever been committed by our troops in the Philippines; worse to the victims, and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it. The men who fail to condemn these lynchings, and yet clamor about what has been done in the Philippines, are indeed guilty of neglecting the beam in their own eye while taunting their brother about the mote in his. Understand me. These lynchings afford us no excuse for failure to stop cruelty in the Philippines. But keep in mind that these cruelties in the Philippines have been wholly exceptional, and have been shamelessly exaggerated. We deeply and bitterly regret that they should have been committed, no matter how rarely, no matter under what provocation, by American troops. But they afford far less ground for a general condemnation of our army than these lynchings afford for the condemnation of the communities in which they occur. In each case it is well to condemn the deed, and it is well also to refrain from including both guilty and innocent in the same sweeping condemnation.

In every community there are people who commit acts of wellnigh inconceivable horror and baseness. If we fix our eyes only upon these individuals and upon their acts, and if we forget the far more numerous citizens of upright and honest life and blind ourselves to their countless deeds of wisdom and justice and philanthropy, it is easy enough to condemn the community. There is not a city in this land which we could not thus condemn if we fixed our eyes solely upon its police record and refused to look at what it had accomplished for decency and justice and charity. Yet this is exactly the attitude which has been taken by too many men with reference to our army in the Philippines; and it is an attitude iniquitous in its absurdity and its injustice.

The rules of warfare which have been promulgated by the War Department and accepted as the basis of conduct by our troops in the field are the rules laid down by Abraham Lincoln when you, my hearers, were fighting for the Union. These rules provide, of course, for the just severity necessary in war. The most destructive of all forms of cruelty would be to show weakness where sternness is demanded by iron need. But all cruelty is forbidden, and all harshness beyond what is called for by need. Our enemies in the Philippines have not merely violated every rule of war, but have made of these violations their only method of carrying on the war. Think over that! It is not a rhetorical statement—it is a bald statement of contemporary history. They have been able to prolong the war at all only by recourse to acts each one of which put them beyond the pale of civilized warfare. We would have been justified by Abraham Lincoln’s rules of war in infinitely greater severity than has been shown.

The fact really is that our warfare in the Philippines has been carried on with singular humanity. For every act of cruelty by our men there have been innumerable acts of forbearance, magnanimity, and generous kindness. These are the qualities which have characterized the war as a whole. The cruelties on our part have been wholly exceptional.

The guilty are to be punished; but in punishing them, let those who sit at ease at home, who walk delicately and live in the soft places of the earth, remember also to do them common justice. Let not the effortless and the untempted rail overmuch at strong men who with blood and sweat face years of toil and days of agony, and at need lay down their lives in remote tropic jungles to bring the light of civilization into the world’s dark places. The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity. Yet from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.

It behooves us to keep a vigilant watch to prevent these abuses and to punish those who commit them; but if because of them we flinch from finishing the task on which we have entered, we show ourselves cravens and weaklings, unworthy of the sires from whose loins we sprang. Oh, my comrades, how the men of the present tend to forget not merely what was done but what was spoken in the past! There were abuses and to spare in the Civil War; and slander enough, too, by each side against the other. Your false friends then called Grant a “butcher” and spoke of you who are listening to me as mercenaries, as “Lincoln’s hirelings.” Your open foes—as in the resolution passed by the Confederate Congress in October, 1862—accused you, at great length, and with much particularity, of “contemptuous disregard of the usages of civilized war;” of subjecting women and children to “banishment, imprisonment, and death;” of “murder,” of “rapine,” of “outrages on women,” of “lawless cruelty,” of “perpetrating atrocities which would be disgraceful in savages;” and Abraham Lincoln was singled out for especial attack because of his “spirit of barbarous ferocity.” Verily, these men who thus foully slandered you have their heirs to-day in those who traduce our armies in the Philippines, who fix their eyes on individual deeds of wrong so keenly that at last they become blind to the great work of peace and freedom that has already been accomplished.

Peace and freedom—are there two better objects for which a soldier can fight? Well, these are precisely the objects for which our soldiers are fighting in the Philippines. When there is talk of the cruelties committed in the Philippines, remember always that by far the greater proportion of these cruelties have been committed by the insurgents against their own people—as well as against our soldiers—and that not only the surest but the only effectual way of stopping them is by the progress of the American arms. The victories of the American Army have been the really effective means of putting a stop to cruelty in the Philippines. Wherever these victories have been complete—and such is now the case throughout the greater part of the islands—all cruelties have ceased, and the native is secure in his life, his liberty, and his pursuit of happiness. Where the insurrection still smoulders there is always a chance for cruelty to show itself.

Our soldiers conquer; and what is the object for which they conquer? To establish a military government? No. The laws we are now endeavoring to enact for the government of the Philippines are to increase the power and domain of the civil at the expense of the military authorities, and to render even more difficult than in the past the chance of oppression. The military power is used to secure peace, in order that it may itself be supplanted by the civil power. The progress of the American arms means the abolition of cruelty, the bringing of peace, and the rule of law and order under the civil government. Other nations have conquered to create irresponsible military rule. We conquer to bring just and responsible civil government to the conquered.

But our armies do more than bring peace, do more than bring order. They bring freedom. Remember always that the independence of a tribe or a community may, and often does, have nothing whatever to do with the freedom of the individual in that tribe or community. There are now in Asia and Africa scores of despotic monarchies, each of which is independent, and in no one of which is there the slightest vestige of freedom for the individual man. Scant indeed is the gain to mankind from the “independence” of a blood-stained tyrant who rules over abject and brutalized slaves. But great is the gain to humanity which follows the steady though slow introduction of the orderly liberty, the law-abiding freedom of the individual, which is the only sure foundation upon which national independence can be built. Wherever in the Philippines the insurrection has been definitely and finally put down, there the individual Filipino already enjoys such freedom, such personal liberty under our rule, as he could never even have dreamed of under the rule of an “independent” Aguinaldian oligarchy.

The slowly-learned and difficult art of self-government, an art which our people have taught themselves by the labor of a thousand years, can not be grasped in a day by a people only just emerging from conditions of life which our ancestors left behind them in the dim years before history dawned. We believe that we can rapidly teach the people of the Philippine Islands not only how to enjoy but how to make good use of their freedom; and with their growing knowledge their growth in self-government shall keep steady pace. When they have thus shown their capacity for real freedom by their power of self-government, then, and not till then, will it be possible to decide whether they are to exist independently of us or be knit to us by ties of common friendship and interest. When that day will come it is not in human wisdom now to foretell. All that we can say with certainty is that it would be put back an immeasurable distance if we should yield to the counsels of unmanly weakness and turn loose the islands, to see our victorious foes butcher with revolting cruelty our betrayed friends, and shed the blood of the most humane, the most enlightened, the most peaceful, the wisest and the best of their own number—for these are the classes who have already learned to welcome our rule.

Nor, while fully acknowledging our duties to others, need we wholly forget our duty to ourselves. The Pacific seaboard is as much to us as the Atlantic; as we grow in power and prosperity so our interests will grow in that furthest west which is the immemorial east. The shadow of our destiny has already reached to the shores of Asia. The might of our people already looms large against the world-horizon; and it will loom ever larger as the years go by. No statesman has a right to neglect the interests of our people in the Pacific; interests which are important to all our people, but of most importance to those of our people who have built populous and thriving States to the west of the great watershed of this continent.

This should no more be a party question than the war for the Union should have been a party question. At this moment the man in highest office in the Philippine Islands is the Vice-Governor, General Luke Wright, of Tennessee, who gallantly wore the gray in the Civil War and who is now working hand in hand with the head of our army in the Philippines, Adna Chaffee, who in the Civil War gallantly wore the blue. Those two, and the men under them, from the North and from the South, in civil life and in military life, as teachers, as administrators, as soldiers, are laboring mightily for us who live at home. Here and there black sheep are to be found among them; but taken as a whole they represent as high a standard of public service as this country has ever seen. They are doing a great work for civilization, a great work for the honor and the interest of this nation, and above all for the welfare of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. All honor to them; and shame, thrice shame, to us if we fail to uphold their hands!

AT THE OPENING SESSION OF THE MILITARY SURGEONS’ ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D.⁠ C., JUNE 5, 1902

Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen:

I am glad to have the opportunity to bid welcome to the members of this Association and their friends to-day. The men of your Association combine two professions each of which is rightfully held in high honor by all capable of appreciating the real work of men—the profession of the soldier and the profession of the doctor. Conditions in modern civilization tend more and more to make the average life of the community one of great ease, compared to what has been the case in the past. Together with what advantages have come from this softening of life and rendering it more easy there are certain attendant disadvantages. It is a very necessary thing that there should be some professions, some trades, where the same demands are made now as ever in the past upon the heroic qualities. Those demands are made alike upon the soldier and upon the doctor; and more upon those who are both soldiers and doctors, upon the men who have continually to face all the responsibility, all the risk, faced by their brothers in the civilian branch of the profession, and who also, in time of war, must face much the same risks, often exactly the same risks, that are faced by their brothers in arms whose trade is to kill and not to cure! It has been my good fortune, gentlemen, to see some of your body at work in the field, to see them carrying the wounded and the dying from the firing-line, themselves as much exposed to danger as those they were rescuing, and to see them working day and night in the field hospital afterward when even the intensity of the strain could hardly keep them awake, so fagged out were they by having each to do the work of ten.

I welcome you here, and I am glad to have the chance of seeing you, and I wish to say a word of congratulation to you upon this Association. In all our modern life we have found it absolutely indispensable to supplement the work of the individual by the work of the individuals gathered into an association. Without this work of the association you can not give the highest expression to individual endeavor, and it would be a great misfortune if the military members of the surgical and medical profession did not take every advantage of their opportunities in the same way that is taken by the members of the medical and the surgical professions who are not in the army or the navy or the marine hospital service—who are in civilian life outside. I am glad to see you gathered in this association. Just one word of warning: Pay all possible heed to the scientific side of your work; perfect yourselves as scientific men able to work with the best and most delicate apparatus; and never for one moment forget—especially the higher officers among you—that in time of need you will have to do your work with the scantiest possible apparatus! and that then your usefulness will be conditioned not upon the adequacy of the complaint that you did not have apparatus enough, but upon what you have done with the insufficient apparatus you had. Remember that and remember also—and this especially applies to the higher officers—that you must supplement in your calling the work of the surgeon with the work of the administrator. You must be doctors and military men and able administrators.

AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY, WEST POINT, JUNE 11, 1902

Colonel Mills, graduates of West Point, and you, the Men and Women who are drawn to them by ties of kinship, or by the simple fact that you are Americans, and therefore of necessity drawn to them:

I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you to-day. There is little need for me to say how well your performance has squared with the prophetic promise made on your behalf by the greatest of Americans, Washington. This institution has completed its first hundred years of life. During that century no other educational institution in the land has contributed as many names as West Point to the honor roll of the nation’s greatest citizens.

Colonel Mills, I claim to be a historian, and I speak simply in the spirit of one, simply as a reciter of facts, when I say what I have said. And more than that; not merely has West Point contributed a greater number of the men who stand highest on the nation’s honor roll, but I think beyond question that, taken as a whole, the average graduate of West Point, during this hundred years, has given a greater sum of service to the country through his life than has the average graduate of any other institution in this broad land. Now, gentlemen, that is not surprising. It is what we had a right to expect from this Military University, founded by the nation. It is what we had a right to expect, but I am glad that the expectation has been made good. And of all the institutions in this country, none is more absolutely American, none, in the proper sense of the word, more absolutely democratic than this.

Here we care nothing for the boy’s birthplace, nor his creed, nor his social standing; here we care nothing save for his worth as he is able to show it. Here you represent with almost mathematical exactness all the country geographically. You are drawn from every walk of life by a method of choice made to ensure, and which in the great majority of cases does ensure, that heed shall be paid to nothing save the boy’s aptitude for the profession into which he seeks entrance. Here you come together as representatives of America in a higher and more peculiar sense than can possibly be true of any other institution in the land, save your sister college that makes similar preparation for the service of the country on the seas.

This morning I have shaken hands with many of you; and I have met the men who stand as representatives of every great struggle, every great forward movement this nation has made for the last fifty-five or sixty years. There are some still left who took part in the Mexican War, a struggle which added to this country a territory vaster than has changed hands in Europe as the result of all the wars of the last two centuries. I meet, when I see any of the older men among you, men who took part in the great Civil War, when this nation was tried as in a furnace; the men who were called upon to do the one deed which had to be done under penalty of making the memory of Washington himself of little account, because if you had failed, then failure would also have been written across the record of his work. Finally, I see the younger men as well as the older ones, the men whom I myself have seen taking part in a little war—a war that was the merest skirmish compared with the struggle in which you fought from ’61 to ’65, and yet a war that has had most far-reaching effects, not merely upon the destiny of this nation, but, therefore, upon the destiny of the world—the war with Spain.

It was my good fortune to see in the campaign in Cuba how the graduates of West Point handled themselves; to see and to endeavor to profit by their example. It is a peculiar pleasure to come here to-day, because I was at that time intimately associated with many of these, your graduates, who are here. On the day before the San Juan fight, when we were marched up into position, the officers with whom I was, lost connection with the baggage and food, and I, for supper that night, had what Colonel Mills gave me. And the next morning Colonel Mills was with another West Pointer, gallant Shipp, of North Carolina. The next morning we breakfasted together. I remember well congratulating myself that my regiment, a raw volunteer regiment, could have, to set it an example, men like Mills and Shipp, whose very presence made the men cool, made them feel collected and at ease. Mills and Shipp went with our regiment into action. Shortly after it began Shipp was killed and Colonel Mills received a wound from which no one of us at the time dreamed that he would recover. I had at that time in my regiment, as acting second lieutenant, a cadet from West Point. He was having his holiday; he took his holiday coming down with us, and just before the assault he was shot, the bullet going, I think, into the stomach, and coming out the other side. He fell, and as we came up I leaned over him, and he said, “All right, Colonel, I am going to get well.” I did not think he was, but I said, “All right, I am sure you will,” and he did; he is all right now. There was never a moment during that time, by day or by night, that I was not an eyewitness to some performance of duty, some bit of duty well done, by a West Pointer, and I never saw a West Pointer failing in his duty. I want to be perfectly frank, gentlemen; I heard of two or three instances; you can not get in any body of men absolute uniformity of good conduct; but I am happy to say that I never was an eyewitness to such misconduct. It was my good fortune to see what is the rule, what is the rule with only the rarest exception; the rule of duty done in a way that makes a man proud to be an American, the fellow-citizen of such Americans.

Your duty here at West Point has been to fit men to do well in war. But it is a noteworthy fact that you also have fitted them to do singularly well in peace. The highest positions in the land have been held, not exceptionally, but again and again by West Pointers. West Pointers have risen to the first rank in all the occupations of civil life. Colonel Mills, I make the answer that a man who answers the question must make when I say that, while we had a right to expect that West Point would do well, we could not have expected that she would do so well as she has done.

I want to say one word to those who are graduating here, and to the undergraduates as well. I was greatly impressed the other day by an article of one of your instructors, himself a West Pointer, in which he dwelt upon the changed conditions of warfare, and the absolute need that the man who was to be a good officer should meet those changed conditions. I think it is going to be a great deal harder to be a first-class officer in the future than it has been in the past. In addition to the courage and steadfastness that have always been the prime requirements in a soldier, you have got to show far greater fertility of resource and far greater power of individual initiative than has ever been necessary before if you are to come up to the highest level of officer-like performance of duty.

As has been well said, the developments of warfare during the last few years have shown that in the future the unit will not be the regiment nor the company nor troop; the unit will be the individual man. The army is to a very great extent going to do well or ill according to the average of that individual man. If he does not know how to shoot, how to shift for himself, how both to obey orders and to accept responsibility when the emergency comes where he will not have any orders to obey, if he is not able to do all of that, and if in addition he has not got the fighting edge, you had better have him out of the army; he will be a damage in it.

In a battle hereafter each man is going to be to a considerable extent alone. The formation will be so open that the youngest officer will have to take much of the responsibility that in former wars fell on his seniors; and many of the enlisted men will have to do most of their work without supervision from any officer whatsoever. The man will have to act largely alone, and if he shows a tendency to huddle up to somebody else his usefulness will be pretty near at an end. He must draw on his own courage and resourcefulness to meet the emergencies as they come up. It will be more difficult in the future than ever before to know your profession, and more essential also; and you officers, and you who are about to become officers, if you are going to do well, have got to learn how to perform the duty which, while become more essential, has become harder to perform.

You want to face the fact and realize more than ever before that the honor or the shame of the country may depend upon the high average of character and capacity of the officers and enlisted men, and that a high average of character and capacity in the enlisted men can to a large degree be obtained only through you, the officers; that you must devote your time in peace to bringing up the standard of fighting efficiency of the men under you, not merely in doing your duty so that you can not be called to account for failure to perform it, but doing it in a way that will make any man under you abler to perform his.

I noticed throughout the time that we were in Cuba that the orders given and executed were of the simplest kind, and that there was very little manœuvring, practically none of the manœuvring of the parade-ground. Now, I want you to weigh what I say, for if you take only half of it, you will invert it. I found out very soon in my regiment that the best man was the man who had been in the Regular Army in actual service, out in the West, campaigning on the plains; if he had been a good man in the Regular Army in actual service on the plains he was the best man that I could get hold of. On the other hand, if he had merely served in time of peace a couple of years in an Eastern garrison, where he did practically nothing outside of parade grounds and barracks, or if he had been in an ordinary National Guard regiment, then one of two things was true; if he understood that he had only learned five per cent of war, he was five per cent better than any one who had learned none of it, and that was a big advance; but if he thought he had also learned the other ninety-five per cent he was worse than any one else. I recollect perfectly one man who had been a corporal in the Regular Army; this young fellow joined us sure that he knew everything, confident that war consisted in nice parade-ground manœuvres. It was almost impossible to turn his attention from trying the very difficult task of making my cowpunchers keep in a straight line, to the easier task of training them so that they could do the most efficient fighting when the occasion arose. He confused the essentials and the non-essentials. The non-essentials are so pretty and so easy that it is a great temptation to think that your duty lies in perfecting yourself and the men under you in them. You have got to do that, too; but if you only do that you will not be worth your salt when the day of trial comes.

Gentlemen, I do not intend to try here to preach to you upon the performance of your duties. It has been your special business to learn to do that. I do ask you to remember the difference there is in the military profession now from what it has been in past time; to remember that the final test of soldiership is not excellence in parade-ground formation, but efficiency in actual service in the field, and that the usefulness, the real and great usefulness in the parade-ground and barracks work comes from its being used not as an end, but as one of the means to an end. I ask you to remember that. I do not have to ask you to remember what you can not forget—the lessons of loyalty, of courage, of steadfast adherence to the highest standards of honor and uprightness which all men draw in when they breathe the atmosphere of this great institution.

AT THE HARVARD COMMENCEMENT DINNER, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., JUNE 25, 1902

Mr. President; President Eliot; and you, my Fellow Harvard Men:

I am speaking for all of you I am sure—I speak for all Americans to-day, when I say that we watch with the deepest concern the sick-bed of the English king, and that all Americans in tendering their hearty sympathy to the people of Great Britain remember keenly the outburst of genuine grief with which England last fall greeted the calamity that befell us in the death of President McKinley.

President Eliot spoke of the service due and performed by the college graduate to the State. It was my great good fortune five years ago to serve under your President, the then Secretary of the Navy, ex-Governor Long, and by a strange turn of the wheel of fate he served in my Cabinet as long as he would consent to serve, and then I had to replace him by another Harvard man!

I have been fortunate in being associated with Senator Hoar, and I should indeed think ill of myself if I had not learned something from association with a man who possesses that fine and noble belief in mankind, the lack of which forbids healthy effort to do good in a democracy like ours. I shall not speak of his associate, the junior senator, another Harvard man—Cabot Lodge—because it would be difficult for me to discuss in public one who is my closest, stanchest, and most loyal personal friend. I have another fellow Harvard man to speak of to-day, and it is necessary to paraphrase an old saying in order to state the bald truth, that it is indeed a liberal education in high-minded statesmanship to sit at the same council table with John Hay.

In addressing you this afternoon, I want to speak of three other college graduates, because of the service they have done the public. If a college education means anything, it means fitting a man to do better service than he could do without it; if it does not mean that it means nothing, and if a man does not get that out of it, he gets less than nothing out of it. No man has a right to arrogate to himself one particle of superiority or consideration because he has had a college education, but he is bound, if he is in truth a man, to feel that the fact of his having had a college education imposes upon him a heavier burden of responsibility, that it makes it doubly incumbent upon him to do well and nobly in his life, private and public. I wish to speak of three men, who, during the past three or four years have met these requirements—of a graduate of Hamilton College, Elihu Root, of a graduate of Yale, Governor Taft, and of a fellow Harvard man, Leonard Wood—men who did things; did not merely say how they ought to be done, but did them themselves; men who have met that greatest of our national needs, the need for service that can not be bought, the need for service that can only be rendered by the man willing to forego material advantages because it has to be given at the man’s own material cost.

When in England they get a man to do what Lord Cromer did in Egypt, when a man returns as Lord Kitchener will return from South Africa, they give him a peerage, and he receives large and tangible reward. But our Cromers, our men of that stamp, come back to this country, and if they are fortunate, they go back to private life with the privilege of taking up as best they can the strings left loose when they severed their old connections; and if fortune does not favor them they are accused of maladversion in office—not an accusation that hurts them, but an accusation that brands with infamy every man who makes it, and that reflects but ill on the country in which it is made.

Leonard Wood four years ago went down to Cuba, has served there ever since, has rendered her literally invaluable service; a man who through those four years thought of nothing else, did nothing else, save to try to bring up the standard of political and social life in that island, to clean it physically and morally, to make justice even and fair in it, to found a school system which should be akin to our own, to teach the people after four centuries of misrule that there were such things as governmental righteousness and honesty and fair play for all men on their merits as men. He did all this. He is a man of slender means. He did this on his pay as an army officer. As Governor of the island sixty millions of dollars passed through his hands, and he came out having been obliged to draw on his slender capital in order that he might come out even when he left the island. Credit to him? Yes, in a way. In another, no particular credit, because he was built so that he could do nothing else. He devoted himself as disinterestedly to the good of the Cuban people in all their relations as man could. He has come back here, and has been attacked, forsooth, by people who are not merely unworthy of having their names coupled with his but who are incapable of understanding the motives that have spurred him on to bring honor to this republic.

And Taft, Judge Taft, Governor Taft, who has been the head of the Philippine Commission, and who has gone back there—Taft, the most brilliant graduate of his year at Yale, the youngest Yale man upon whom Yale ever conferred a degree of LL.D., a man who, having won high position at the bar, and then served as Solicitor-General at Washington, was appointed to the United States bench. He was then asked to sacrifice himself, to give up his position in order to go to the other side of the world to take up an infinitely difficult, an infinitely dangerous problem, and do his best to solve it. He has done his best. He came back here the other day. The man has always had the honorable ambition to get upon the Supreme Court, and he knew that I had always hoped that he would be put on the Supreme Court, and when he was back here a few months ago, and there was a question of a vacancy arising, I said to him: “Governor, I think I ought to tell you that if a vacancy comes in the Supreme Court” (which I knew would put him for life in a position which he would especially like to have), “I do not see how I could possibly give it to you, for I need you where you are.” He said to me: “Mr. President, it has always been my ambition to be on the Supreme Court, but if you should offer me a justiceship now, and at the same time Congress should take away entirely my salary as Governor, I should go straight back to the Philippines, nevertheless, for those people need me, and expect me back, and believe I will not desert them.” He has gone back, gone back as a strong friend among weaker friends to help that people upward along the difficult path of self-government. He has gone to do his part—and a great part—in making the American name a symbol of honor and good faith in the Philippine Islands; to govern with justice, and with that firmness, that absence of weakness, which is only another side of justice. He has gone back to do all of that because it is his duty as he sees it. We are to be congratulated, we Americans, that we have a fellow-American like Taft.

And now Elihu Root, who, unlike myself, Mr. President Eliot, but like most of you present, comes of the old New England stock, whose great-grandfather stood beside Leonard Wood’s great-grandfather among the “embattled farmers” at Concord Bridge; Elihu Root, who had worked his way up from being a poor and unknown country boy in New York, to the leadership of the bar of the great city—he gave it up, made the very great pecuniary sacrifice implied in giving it up, and accepted the position of Secretary of War, a position which, for the last three years and at present amounts to being not only the Secretary of War, but the Secretary for the islands, the Secretary for the colonies at the same time. He has done the most exhausting and the most responsible work of any man in the administration, more exhausting and more responsible work than the work of the President, because circumstances have been such that with a man of Root’s wonderful ability, wonderful industry and wonderful conscientiousness, the President could not help but devolve upon him work that made his task one under which almost any other man would have staggered. He has done all this absolutely, disinterestedly. Nothing can come to Root in the way of reward save the reward that is implied in the knowledge that he has done something of incalculable importance which hardly another man in the Union—no other man that I know of—could have done as well as he has done it. He has before him continually questions of the utmost intricacy to decide, questions upon which life and death hang, questions the decision of which will affect our whole future world policy, questions which affect the welfare of the millions of people with whom we have been brought into such intimate contact by the events of the Spanish War, whose welfare must be a prime consideration from now on with every American public man worthy to serve his country. Root has done this work with the certainty of attack, with the certainty of misunderstanding, with the certainty of being hampered by ignorance (and worse than ignorance). And yet he has created, not for himself but for the nation also, a wonderful triumph from all these adverse forces.

Those three men have rendered inestimable service to the American people. I can do nothing for them. I can show my appreciation of them in no way save the wholly insufficient one of standing up for them, and for their work; and that I will do as long as I have tongue to speak!

AT THE COLISEUM, HARTFORD, CONN., AUGUST 22, 1902

Mr. Chairman, and you, my Fellow-Americans, men and women of Hartford:

I thank you, Senator Platt; through you I thank the State of Connecticut; Mayor Sullivan, through you I thank the city of Hartford for the greeting extended to me.

Before beginning the speech that I had intended, and still intend, to make to you to-night, I wish to allude to an incident that happened this afternoon. In being driven around your beautiful city, I was taken through Pope Park, and stopped at a platform where I was presented with a great horseshoe of flowers, the gift of the workingmen of Hartford to the President of the United States. In Father Sullivan’s speech he laid primary stress upon the fact that it was a gift of welcome from the wage-workers, upon whom ultimately this government depends. And he coupled the words of giving with certain sentences in which he expressed his belief that I would do all that I could to show myself a good representative of the wage-workers. I should be utterly unfit for the position that I occupy if I failed to do all that in me lies to act, as light is given me to act, so as to represent the best thought and purpose of the wage-worker of the United States. At the outset of the twentieth century we are facing difficult and complex problems—problems social and economic—which will tax the best energies of all of us to solve aright, and which we can only solve at all if we approach them in a spirit not merely of common-sense, but of generous desire to act each for all and all for each. While there are occasions when through legislative or administrative action the governmental representatives of the people can do especial service to one set of our citizens, yet I think you will agree with me that in the long run the best way in which to serve any one set of our citizens is to try to serve all alike well, to try to act in a spirit of fairness and justice to all—to give to each man his rights—to safeguard each man in his rights; and so far as in me lies, while I hold my present position I will be true to that conception of my duty.

I want to speak to you to-night, not on our internal problems as a nation, but on some of the external problems which we have had to face during the last four years. The internal problems are the most important. Keeping our own household straight is our first duty; but we have other duties. Just exactly as each man who is worth his salt must first of all be a good husband, a good father, a good bread winner, a good man of business, and yet must in addition to that be a good citizen for the State at large—so a nation must first take care to do well its duties within its own borders, but must not make of that fact an excuse for failing to do those of its duties the performance of which lies without its own borders.

The events of the last few years have forced the American Republic to take a larger position in the world than ever before, and therefore more than ever to concern itself with questions of policy coming without its own borders. As a people we have new duties and new opportunities both in the tropical seas and islands south of us and in the furthest Orient. Much depends upon the way in which we meet those duties, the way in which we take advantage of those opportunities. And remember this, you never can meet any duty, and after you have met it say that your action only affected that duty. If you meet it well you face the next duty a stronger man, and if you meet it ill you face your next duty a weaker man.

From the days of Monroe, Clay and the younger Adams, we as a people have always looked with peculiar interest upon the West Indies and the isthmus connecting North and South America, feeling that whatever happened there was of particular moment to this nation; and there is better reason for that feeling now than ever before. The outcome of the Spanish War put us in possession of Porto Rico, and brought us into peculiarly close touch with Cuba; while the successful negotiation of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, and the legislation following it, at last cleared the way for the construction of the Isthmian Canal. Porto Rico, it is a pleasure to say, may now serve as an example of the best methods of administering our insular possessions. Sometimes we have to learn by experience what to avoid. It is much pleasanter when one can turn to an experience for the purpose of learning what to follow; and the last is true of our experience in Porto Rico. So excellent has been the administration of the island, so excellent the effect of the legislation concerning it, that their very excellence has caused most of us to forget all about it. There is no opportunity for headlines about Porto Rico. You don’t need to use large letters in order to say that Porto Rico continues quiet and prosperous. There is hardly a ripple of failure upon the stream of our success there; and as we don’t have to think of remedies, we follow our usual custom in these matters, and don’t think of it at all.

How have we brought that about? First and foremost, in Porto Rico we have consistently striven to get the very best men to administer the affairs of the island. It is desirable throughout our public service to secure a high standard of efficiency and integrity. But after all, here at home we ourselves always have in our own hands the remedy whereby to supply any deficiency in integrity or capacity among those that govern us. That is a fact that seems to have been forgotten, but it is a fact. In a far-off island things are different. There wrongdoing is more easy and those that suffer from it are more helpless; while there is less efficient check in the way of that public opinion to which public men are sensitive. In consequence, the administration of those islands is beyond all other kinds of administration under our government the one in which the highest standard must be demanded. In making appointments to the insular service, the appointing power must feel all the time that he is acting for the country as a whole, in the interest of the good name of our people as a whole, and any question of mere party expediency must be wholly swept aside, and the matter looked at solely from the standpoint of the honor of our own nation and the welfare of the islands. We have gotten along so well in Porto Rico because we have acted up to that theory in choosing our men down there—governor, treasurer, attorney-general, judges, superintendent of education—every one. You will find among those men all the shades of different political opinion that we have here at home; but you will find them knit together by the purpose of administering the affairs of that island on the highest plane of decency and efficiency.

Besides acting in good faith, we have acted with good sense, and that is also important. We have not been frightened or misled into giving to the people of the island a form of government unsuitable to them. While providing that the people should govern themselves as far as possible, we have not hesitated in their own interests to keep the power of shaping their destiny.

In Cuba the problem was larger, more complicated, more difficult. Here again we kept our promise absolutely. After having delivered the island from its oppressors, we refused to turn it loose offhand, with the certainty that it would sink back into chaos and savagery. For over three years we administered it on a plane higher than it had ever reached before during the four hundred years that had elapsed since the Spaniards first landed upon its shores. We brought moral and physical cleanliness into the government. We cleaned the cities for the first time in their existence. We stamped out yellow fever—an inestimable boon not merely to Cuba, but to the people of the Southern States as well. We established a school system. We made life and property secure, so that industry could again begin to thrive. Then when we had laid deep and broad the foundations upon which civil liberty and national independence must rest, we turned the island over to the hands of those whom its people had chosen as the founders of the new republic. It is a republic with which our own great Republic must ever be closely knit by the ties of common interests and common inspirations. Cuba must always be peculiarly related to us in international politics. She must in international affairs be to a degree a part of our political system. In return she must have peculiar relations with us economically. She must be in a sense part of our economic system. We expect her to accept a political attitude toward us which we think wisest both for her and for us. In return we must be prepared to put her in an economic position as regards our tariff system which will give her some measure of the prosperity which we enjoy. We can not, in my judgment, avoid taking this attitude if we are to persevere in the course which we have outlined for ourselves as a nation during the past four years; and therefore I believe that it is only a matter of time—and I trust only a matter of a very short time—before we enter into reciprocal trade relations with Cuba.

The Isthmian Canal is to be one of the greatest, probably the greatest, engineering feat of the 20th century; and I am glad it is to be done by America. We must take care that it is done under the best conditions and by the best Americans. There are certain preliminary matters to settle. When this has been done, the first question will come upon choosing the commission which is to supervise the building of the canal. And but one thought here is permissible—how to get the very best men of the highest engineering and business and administrative skill, who will consent to undertake the work. If possible, I wish to see those men represent different sections and different political parties. But those questions are secondary. The primary aim must be to get men who, though able to control much greater salaries than the nation is able to pay, nevertheless possess the patriotism and the healthy ambition which will make them put their talents at the government’s service.

So much for what has been done in the Occident. In the Orient the labor was more difficult.

It is rare indeed that a great work, a work supremely worth doing, can be done save at the cost not only of labor and toil, but of much puzzling worry during the time of the performance. Normally, the nation that achieves greatness, like the individual who achieves greatness, can do so only at the cost of anxiety and bewilderment and heart-wearing effort. Timid people, people scant of faith and hope, and good people who are not accustomed to the roughness of the life of effort—are almost sure to be disheartened and dismayed by the work and the worry, and overmuch cast down by the shortcomings, actual or seeming, which in real life always accompany the first stages even of what eventually turn out to be the most brilliant victories.

All this is true of what has happened during the last four years in the Philippine Islands. The Spanish War itself was an easy task, but it left us certain other tasks which were much more difficult. One of these tasks was that of dealing with the Philippines. The easy thing to do—the thing which appealed not only to lazy and selfish men, but to very many good men whose thought did not drive down to the root of things—was to leave the islands. Had we done this, a period of wild chaos would have supervened, and then some stronger power would have stepped in and seized the islands and have taken up the task which we in such a case would have flinched from performing. A less easy, but infinitely more absurd course, would have been to leave the islands ourselves, and at the same time to assert that we would not permit any one else to interfere with them. This particular course would have combined all the possible disadvantages of every other course which was advocated. It would have placed us in a humiliating position, because when the actual test came it would have been quite out of the question for us, after some striking deed of savagery had occurred in the islands, to stand by and prevent the re-entry of civilization into them. While the mere fact of our having threatened thus to guarantee the local tyrants and wrongdoers against outside interference by ourselves or others, would have put a premium upon every species of tyranny and anarchy within the islands.

Finally, there was the course which we adopted—not an easy course, and one fraught with danger and difficulty, as is generally the case in this world when some great feat is to be accomplished as an incident to working out national destiny. We made up our minds to stay in the islands—to put down violence—to establish peace and order—and then to introduce a just and wise civil rule accompanied by a measure of self-government which should increase as rapidly as the islanders showed themselves fit for it. It was certainly a formidable task; but think of the marvelously successful way in which it has been accomplished! The first and vitally important feat was the establishment of the supremacy of the American flag; and this had to be done by the effort of these gallant fellow-Americans of ours to whom so great a debt is due—the officers and enlisted men of the United States regular and volunteer forces. In a succession of campaigns, carried on in unknown tropic jungles against an elusive and treacherous foe vastly outnumbering them, under the most adverse conditions of climate, weather, and country, our troops completely broke the power of the insurgents, smashed their armies, and harried the broken robber bands into submission. In its last stages, the war against our rule sank into mere brigandage; and what our troops had to do was to hunt down the parties of ladrones. It was not an easy task which it was humanly possible to accomplish in a month or a year; and therefore after the first month and the first year had elapsed, some excellent people said that it couldn’t be done; but it was done. Month by month, year by year, with unwearied and patient resolution, our army in the Philippines did the task which it found ready at hand until the last vestige of organized insurrection was stamped out. I do not refer to the Moros, with whom we have exercised the utmost forbearance, but who may force us to chastise them if they persist in attacking our troops. We will do everything possible to avoid having trouble with them, but if they insist upon it it will come. Among the Filipinos proper, however, peace has come. Doubtless here and there sporadic outbreaks of brigandage will occur from time to time, but organized warfare against the American flag has ceased, and there is no reason to apprehend its recurrence. Our army in the islands has been reduced until it is not a fourth of what it was at the time the outbreak was at its height.

Step by step as the army conquered, the rule of the military was supplanted by the rule of the civil authorities—the soldier was succeeded by the civilian magistrate. The utmost care has been exercised in choosing the best type of Americans for the high civil positions, and the actual work of administration has been done, so far as possible, by native Filipino officials serving under these Americans. The success of the effort has been wonderful. Never has this country had a more upright or an abler body of public representatives than Governor Taft, Vice-Governor Wright, and their associates and subordinates in the Philippine Islands. It is a very difficult matter, practically, to apply the principles of an orderly free government to an Oriental people struggling upward out of barbarism and subjection. It is a task requiring infinite firmness, patience, tact, broadmindedness. All these qualities, and the countless others necessary, have been found in the civil and military officials who have been sent over to administer the islands. It was, of course, inevitable that there should be occasional failures; but it is astonishing how few these have been. Here and there the civil government which had been established in a given district had to be temporarily withdrawn because of some outbreak. Let me give you an idea of some of the difficulties. We have been trying to put into effect the principle of a popular choice of representative. In one district it proved to be wholly impossible to make the people understand how to vote. Finally they took a little hill, and put two candidates, one on one side and one on the other, and made the people walk up and stand by the candidate they wanted.

But at last, on the July 4th that has just passed—on the 126th anniversary of our independence—it was possible at the same time to declare amnesty throughout the islands and definitely to establish civil rule over all of them, excepting the country of the Mohammedan Moros, where the conditions were wholly different. Each inhabitant of the Philippines is now guaranteed his civil and religious rights, his rights to life, personal liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, subject only to not infringing the rights of others. It is worth noting that during these three or four years under us the Philippine people have attained to a greater degree of self-government, that they now have more to say as to how they shall be governed, than is the case with any people in the Orient which is under European rule. Nor is this all. Congress has, with far-seeing wisdom, heartily supported all that has been done by the Executive. Wise laws for the government of the Philippine Islands have been placed upon the statute books, and under those laws provision is made for the introduction into the Philippines of representative government, with only the delay absolutely necessary to allow for the establishment of definite peace, for the taking of a census, and the settling down of the country. In short, we are governing the Filipinos primarily in their interest, and for their very great benefit. And we have acted in practical fashion—not trying to lay down rules as to what should be done in the remote and uncertain future, but turning our attention to the instant need of things and meeting that need in the fullest and amplest way. It would be hard to say whether we owe most to our military or our civil representatives in the Philippines. The soldiers have shown splendid gallantry in the field; and they have done no less admirable work in preparing the provinces for civil government. The civil authorities have shown the utmost wisdom in doing a very difficult and important work, of vast extent. It would be hard to find in modern times a better example of successful constructive statesmanship than the American representatives have given to the Philippine Islands.

In the Philippines, as in Cuba, the instances of wrongdoing among either our civil or military representatives have been astonishingly few; and punishment has been meted with even-handed justice to all offenders.

Nor should it be forgotten that while we have thus acted in the interest of the islanders themselves, we have also helped our own people. Our interests are as great in the Pacific as in the Atlantic. The welfare of California, Oregon, and Washington is as vital to the nation as the welfare of New England, New York, and the South Atlantic States. The awakening of the Orient means very much to all the nations of Christendom, commercially no less than politically; and it would be short-sighted statesmanship on our part to refuse to take the necessary steps for securing a proper share to our people of this commercial future. The possession of the Philippines has helped us, as the securing of the open door in China has helped us. Already the government has taken the necessary steps to provide for the laying of a Pacific cable under conditions which safeguard absolutely the interests of the American public. Our commerce with the East is growing rapidly. Events have abundantly justified, alike from the moral and material standpoint, all that we have done in the Far East as a sequel to our war with Spain.

AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., AUGUST 23, 1902

Mr. Governor, and you, my Fellow-citizens:

We are passing through a period of great commercial prosperity, and such a period is as sure as adversity itself to bring mutterings of discontent. At a time when most men prosper somewhat some men always prosper greatly; and it is as true now as when the tower of Siloam fell upon all alike, that good fortune does not come solely to the just, nor bad fortune solely to the unjust. When the weather is good for crops it is good for weeds. Moreover, not only do the wicked flourish when the times are such that most men flourish, but, what is worse, the spirit of envy and jealousy springs up in the breasts of those who, though they may be doing fairly well themselves, see others no more deserving who do better.

Wise laws and fearless and upright administration of the laws can give the opportunity for such prosperity as we see about us. But that is all that they can do. When the conditions have been created which make prosperity possible, then each individual man must achieve it for himself by his own energy and thrift and business intelligence. If when people wax fat they kick, as they have kicked since the days of Jeshurun, they will speedily destroy their own prosperity. If they go into wild speculation and lose their heads they have lost that which no laws can supply. If in a spirit of sullen envy they insist upon pulling down those who have profited most in the years of fatness, they will bury themselves in the crash of the common disaster. It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best laws, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.

The upshot of all this is that it is peculiarly incumbent upon us in a time of such material well-being, both collectively as a nation and individually as citizens, to show, each on his own account, that we possess the qualities of prudence, self-knowledge, and self-restraint. In our government we need above all things stability, fixity of economic policy; while remembering that this fixity must not be fossilization, that there must not be inability to shift our laws so as to meet our shifting national needs. There are real and great evils in our social and economic life, and these evils stand out in all their ugly baldness in time of prosperity; for the wicked who prosper are never a pleasant sight. There is every need of striving in all possible ways, individually and collectively, by combinations among ourselves and through the recognized governmental agencies, to cut out those evils. All I ask is to be sure that we do not use the knife with an ignorant zeal which would make it more dangerous to the patient than to the disease.

One of the features of the tremendous industrial development of the last generation has been the very great increase in private, and especially in corporate, fortunes. We may like this or not, just as we choose, but it is a fact nevertheless; and as far as we can see it is an inevitable result of the working of the various causes, prominent among them steam and electricity. Urban population has grown in this country, as in all civilized countries, much faster than the population as a whole during the last century. If it were not for that Rhode Island could not to-day be the State she is. Rhode Island has flourished as she has flourished because of the conditions which have brought about the great increase in urban life. There is evil in these conditions, but you can’t destroy it unless you destroy the civilization they have brought about. Where men are gathered together in great masses it inevitably results that they must work far more largely through combinations than where they live scattered and remote from one another. Many of us prefer the old conditions of life, under which the average man lived more to himself and by himself, where the average community was more self-dependent, and where even though the standard of comfort was lower on the average, yet there was less of the glaring inequality in worldly conditions which we now see about us in our great cities. It is not true that the poor have grown poorer; but some of the rich have grown so very much richer that, where multitudes of men are herded together in a limited space, the contrast strikes the onlooker as more violent than formerly. On the whole, our people earn more and live better than ever before, and the progress of which we are so proud could not have taken place had it not been for the upbuilding of industrial centres, such as this in which I am speaking.

But together with the good there has come a measure of evil. Life is not so simple as it was; and surely, both for the individual and the community, the simple life is normally the healthy life. There is not in the great cities the feeling of brotherhood which there is still in country localities; and the lines of social cleavage are far more deeply marked.

For some of the evils which have attended upon the good of the changed conditions we can at present see no complete remedy. For others the remedy must come by the action of men themselves in their private capacity, whether merely as individuals or by combination. For yet others some remedy can be found in legislative and executive action—national, State, or municipal. Much of the complaint against combinations is entirely unwarranted. Under present day conditions it is as necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is to have organizations, unions, among wage-workers. We have a right to ask in each case only this: that good, and not harm, shall follow. Exactly as labor organizations, when managed intelligently and in a spirit of justice and fair play, are of very great service not only to the wage-workers, but to the whole community, as has been shown again and again in the history of many such organizations; so wealth, not merely individual, but corporate, when used aright is not merely beneficial to the community as a whole, but is absolutely essential to the upbuilding of such a series of communities as those whose citizens I am now addressing. This is so obvious that it ought to be too trite to mention, and yet it is necessary to mention it when we see some of the attacks made upon wealth, as such.

Of course a great fortune if used wrongly is a menace to the community. A man of great wealth who does not use that wealth decently is, in a peculiar sense, a menace to the community, and so is the man who does not use his intellect aright. Each talent—the talent for making money, the talent for showing intellect at the bar, or in any other way—if unaccompanied by character, makes the possessor a menace to the community. But such a fact no more warrants us in attacking wealth than it does in attacking intellect. Every man of power, by the very fact of that power, is capable of doing damage to his neighbors; but we can not afford to discourage the development of such men merely because it is possible they may use their power for wrong ends. If we did so we should leave our history a blank, for we should have no great statesmen, soldiers, merchants, no great men of arts, of letters, of science. Doubtless on the average the most useful citizen to the community as a whole is the man to whom has been granted what the Psalmist asked for—neither poverty nor riches. But the great captain of industry, the man of wealth, who, alone or in combination with his fellows, drives through our great business enterprises, is a factor without whom the civilization that we see round about us here could not have been built up. Good, not harm, normally comes from the upbuilding of such wealth. Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.

But there is other harm; and it is evident that we should try to do away with that. The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown. There is clearly need of supervision—need to possess the power of regulation of these great corporations through the representatives of the public—wherever, as in our own country at the present time, business corporations become so very powerful alike for beneficent work and for work that is not always beneficent. It is idle to say that there is no need for such supervision. There is, and a sufficient warrant for it is to be found in any one of the admitted evils appertaining to them.

We meet a peculiar difficulty under our system of government, because of the division of governmental power between the Nation and the States. When the industrial conditions were simple, very little control was needed, and the difficulties of exercising such control under our Constitution were not evident. Now the conditions are complicated and we find it hard to frame national legislation which shall be adequate; while as a matter of practical experience it has been shown that the States either can not or will not exercise a sufficient control to meet the needs of the case. Some of our States have excellent laws—laws which it would be well indeed to have enacted by the National Legislature. But the widespread differences in these laws, even between adjacent States, and the uncertainty of the power of enforcement, result practically in altogether insufficient control. I believe that the nation must assume this power of control by legislation; if necessary by constitutional amendment. The immediate necessity in dealing with trusts is to place them under the real, not the nominal, control of some sovereign to which, as its creatures, the trusts shall owe allegiance, and in whose courts the sovereign’s orders may be enforced.

This is not the case with the ordinary so-called “trust” to-day; for the trust nowadays is a large State corporation, which generally does business in other States, often with a tendency toward monopoly. Such a trust is an artificial creature not wholly responsible to or controllable by any legislation, either by State or nation, and not subject to the jurisdiction of any one court. Some governmental sovereign must be given full power over these artificial, and very powerful, corporate beings. In my judgment this sovereign must be the national government. When it has been given full power, then this full power can be used to control any evil influence, exactly as the government is now using the power conferred upon it by the Sherman anti-trust law.

Even when the power has been granted it would be most unwise to exercise it too much, to begin by too stringent legislation. The mechanism of modern business is as delicate and complicated as it is vast, and nothing would be more productive of evil to all of us, and especially to those least well off in this world’s goods, than ignorant meddling with this mechanism—above all, meddling in a spirit of class legislation or hatred or rancor. It is eminently necessary that the power should be had, but it is just as necessary that it should be exercised with wisdom and self-restraint. The first exercise of that power should be the securing of publicity among all great corporations doing an interstate business. The publicity, though non-inquisitorial, should be real and thorough as to all important facts with which the public has concern. Daylight is a powerful discourager of evil. Such publicity would by itself tend to cure the evils of which there is just complaint; it would show us if evils existed, and where the evils are imaginary, and it would show us what next ought to be done.

Above all, let us remember that our success in accomplishing anything depends very much upon our not trying to accomplish everything. Distrust whoever pretends to offer you a patent cure-all for every ill of the body politic, just as you would a man who offers a medicine which would cure every evil of your individual body. A medicine that is recommended to cure both asthma and a broken leg is not good for either. Mankind has moved slowly upward through the ages, sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but rarely indeed by leaps and bounds. At times a great crisis comes in which a great people, perchance led by a great man, can at white heat strike some mighty blow for the right—make a long stride in advance along the path of justice and of orderly liberty. But normally we must be content if each of us can do something—not all that we wish, but something—for the advancement of those principles of righteousness which underlie all real national greatness, all true civilization and freedom. I see no promise of any immediate and complete solution of all the problems we group together when we speak of the trust question. But we can make a beginning in solving these problems, and a good beginning, if only we approach the subject with a sufficiency of resolution, of honesty, and of that hard common-sense which is one of the most valuable, and not always one of the most common, assets in any nation’s greatness. The existing laws will be fully enforced as they stand on the statute books without regard to persons, and I think good has already come from their enforcement. I think, furthermore, that additional legislation should be had and can be had, which will enable us to accomplish much more along the same lines. No man can promise a perfect solution, at least in the immediate future. But something has already been done, and much more can be done if our people temperately and determinedly will that it shall be done.

In conclusion let me add one word. While we are not to be excused if we fail to do whatever is possible through the agency of government, we must keep ever in mind that no action of the government, no action by combination among ourselves, can take the place of the individual qualities to which in the long run every man must owe the success he can make of life. There never has been devised, and there never will be devised, any law which will enable a man to succeed save by the exercise of those qualities which have always been the prerequisites of success—the qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of unflinching will. Such action can supplement those qualities but it can not take their place. No action by the State can do more than supplement the initiative of the individual; and ordinarily the action of the State can do no more than to secure to each individual the chance to show under as favorable conditions as possible the stuff that there is in him.

AT SYMPHONY HALL, BOSTON, AUGUST 25, 1902

Governor Crane, Mayor Collins, men and women of Boston:

I want to take up this evening the general question of our economic and social relations, with specific reference to that problem with which I think our people are now greatly concerning themselves—the problem of our complex social condition as intensified by the existence of the great corporations which we rather loosely designate as trusts. I have not come here to say that I have discovered a patent cure-all for any evils. When people’s minds are greatly agitated on any subject, and especially when they feel deeply but rather vaguely that conditions are not right, it is far pleasanter in addressing them to be indifferent as to what you promise; but it is much less pleasant afterward when you come to try to carry out what has been promised. Of course the worth of a promise consists purely in the way in which the performance squares with it. That has two sides. In the first place, if a man is an honest man he will try just as hard to keep a promise made on the stump as one made off the stump. In the second place, if the people keep their heads they won’t wish promises to be made which are impossible of performance. You see, one side of that question represents my duty, and the other side yours.

Mankind goes ahead but slowly, and it goes ahead mainly through each of us trying to do the best that is in him and to do it in the sanest way. We have founded our Republic upon the theory that the average man will as a rule do the right thing, that in the long run the majority will decide for what is sane and wholesome. If our fathers were mistaken in that theory, if ever the times become such—not occasionally but persistently—that the mass of the people do what is unwholesome, what is wrong, then the Republic can not stand, I care not how good its laws, I care not what marvelous mechanism its Constitution may embody. Back of the laws, back of the administration, back of the system of government lies the man, lies the average manhood of our people, and in the long run we are going to go up or go down accordingly as the average standard of our citizenship does or does not wax in growth and grace.

The first requisite of good citizenship is that the man shall do the homely, every-day, humdrum duties well. A man is not a good citizen, I do not care how lofty his thoughts are about citizenship in the abstract, if in the concrete his actions do not bear them out; and it does not make much difference how high his aspirations for mankind at large may be, if he does not behave well in his own family those aspirations do not bear visible fruit. He must be a good bread-winner, he must take care of his wife and his children, he must be a neighbor whom his neighbors can trust, he must act squarely in his business relations,—he must do all those every-day ordinary duties first, or he is not a good citizen. But he must do more. In this country of ours the average citizen must devote a good deal of thought and time to the affairs of the State as a whole or those affairs will go backward; and he must devote that thought and that time steadily and intelligently. If there is any one quality that is not admirable, whether in a nation or in an individual, it is hysterics, either in religion or in anything else. The man or woman who makes up for ten days’ indifference to duty by an eleventh-day morbid repentance about that duty is of scant use in the world. Now in the same way it is of no possible use to decline to go through all the ordinary duties of citizenship for a long space of time and then suddenly to get up and feel very angry about something or somebody, not clearly defined, and demand reform, as if it were a concrete substance to be handed out forthwith.

This is preliminary to what I want to say to you about the whole question of great corporations as affecting the public. There are very many and very difficult problems with which we are faced as the results of the forces which have been in play for more than the lifetime of a generation. It is worse than useless for any of us to rail at or regret the great growth of our industrial civilization during the last half century. Speaking academically, we can, according to our several temperaments, regret that the old days with the old life have vanished, or not, just as we choose; but we are here to-night only because of the play of those great forces. There is but little use in regretting that things have been shaping themselves differently from what we might have preferred. The practical thing to do is to face the conditions as they are and see if we can not get the best there is in them out of them. Now we shall not get a complete or perfect solution for all of the evils attendant upon the development of the trusts by any single action on our part. A good many actions in a good many different ways will be required before we get many of those evils even partially remedied. We must first of all think clearly; we must probably experiment somewhat; we must above all show by our actions that our interest is permanent and not spasmodic; and we must see that all proper steps are taken toward the solution. Now of course all this is perfectly trite. Every one who thinks knows that the only way in which any problem of great importance was ever successfully solved was by consistent and persistent effort toward a given end—effort that did not cease with any one election or with any one year, but was continued steadily, temperately, but resolutely, toward a given end. It is a little difficult to set clearly before us all of the evils attendant upon the working of some of our great corporations, but I think that those gentlemen, and especially those gentlemen of large means, who deny that the evils exist are acting with great folly. So far from being against property when I ask that the question of the trusts be taken up, I am acting in the most conservative sense in property’s interest. When a great corporation is sued for violating the anti-trust law, it is not a move against property, it is a move in favor of property, because when we make it evident that all men, great and small alike, have to obey the law, we put the safeguard of the law around all men. When we make it evident that no man shall be excused for violating the law, we make it evident that every man will be protected from violations of the law.

Now one of the great troubles—I am inclined to think much the greatest trouble—in any immediate handling of the question of the trusts comes from our system of government. Under this system it is difficult to say where the power is lodged to deal with these evils. Remember that I am not saying that even if we had all the power we could completely solve the trust question. If what we read in the papers is true, international trusts are now being planned. It is going to be very difficult for any set of laws on our part to deal completely with a problem which becomes international in its bearings. But a great deal can be done in various ways even now—a great deal is being done—and a great deal more can be done, if we see that the power is lodged somewhere to do it. On the whole, our system of government has worked marvelously well—the system of divided functions of government, of a scheme under which Maine, Louisiana, Oregon, Idaho, New York, Illinois, South Carolina, can all come together for certain purposes, and yet each be allowed to work out its salvation as it desires along certain other lines. On the whole, this has worked well; but in some respects it has worked ill. While I most firmly believe in fixity of policy, I do not believe that that policy should be fossilized, and when conditions change we must change our governmental methods to meet them. I believe with all my heart in the New England town meeting, but you can’t work the New England town meeting in Boston—it is too big. You must devise something else. If you look back in the history of Boston you will find that Boston was very reluctant to admit this particular truth for some time in the first decades of the nineteenth century. When this government was founded there were no great individual or corporate fortunes, and commerce and industry were being carried on very much as they had been carried on in the days when Nineveh and Babylon stood in the Mesopotamian Valley. Sails, oars, wheels—these were the instruments of commerce. The pack train, the wagon train, the rowboat, the sailing craft—these were the methods of commerce. Everything has been revolutionized in the business world since then, and the progress of civilization from being a dribble has become a torrent. There was no particular need at that time of bothering as to whether the nation or the State had control of corporations. They were easy to control. Now, however, the exact reverse is the case. And remember when I say corporations I do not mean merely trusts technically so-called, merely combinations of corporations, or corporations under certain peculiar conditions. For instance, some time ago the Attorney-General took action against a certain trust. There was considerable discussion as to whether the trust aimed at would not seek to get out from under the law by becoming a single corporation. Now, I want laws that will enable us to deal with any evil no matter what shape it takes. I want to see the government able to get at it definitely, so that the action of the government can not be evaded by any turning within or without Federal or State statutes. At present we have really no efficient control over a big corporation which does business in more than one State. Frequently the corporation has nothing whatever to do with the State in which it is incorporated except to get incorporated; and all its business may be done in entirely different communities—communities which may object very much to the methods of incorporation in the State named. I do not believe that you can get any action by any State, I do not believe it practicable to get action by all the States that will give us satisfactory control of the trusts, of big corporations; and the result is at present that we have a great, powerful, artificial creation which has no creator to which it is responsible. The creator creates it and then it goes and operates somewhere else; and there is no interest on the part of the creator to deal with it. It does not do anything where the creator has power; it operates entirely outside of the creator’s jurisdiction.

It is of course a mere truism to say that the corporation is the creature of the State, that the State is sovereign. There should be a real and not a nominal sovereign, some one sovereign to which the corporation shall be really and not nominally responsible. At present if we pass laws nobody can tell whether they will amount to anything. That has two bad effects. In the first place, the corporation becomes indifferent to the law-making body; and in the next place, the law-making body gets into that most pernicious custom of passing a law not with reference to what will be done under it, but with reference to its effects upon the opinions of the voters. That is a bad thing. When any body of law-makers passes a law, not simply with reference to whether that law will do good or ill, but with the knowledge that not much will come of it, and yet that perhaps the people as a whole will like to see it on the statute books—it does not speak well for the law-makers, and it does not speak well for the people, either. What I hope to see is power given to the National Legislature which shall make the control real. It would be an excellent thing if you could have all the States act on somewhat similar lines so that you would make it unnecessary for the national government to act; but all of you know perfectly well that the States will not act on similar lines. No advance whatever has been made in the direction of intelligent dealing by the States as a collective body with these great corporations. Here in Massachusetts you have what I regard as, on the whole, excellent corporation laws. Most of our difficulties would be in a fair way of solution if we had the power to put upon the national statute books, and did put upon them, laws for the nation much like those you have here on the subject of corporations in Massachusetts. So you can see, gentlemen, I am not advocating anything very revolutionary. I am advocating action to prevent anything revolutionary. Now, if we can get adequate control by the nation of these great corporations, then we can pass legislation which will give us the power of regulation and supervision over them. If the nation had that power, mind you, I should advocate as strenuously as I know how that the power should be exercised with extreme caution and self-restraint. No good will come from plunging in without having looked carefully ahead. The first thing we want is publicity; and I do not mean publicity as a favor by some corporations—I mean it as a right from all corporations affected by the law. I want publicity as to the essential facts in which the public has an interest. I want the knowledge given to the accredited representatives of the people of facts upon which those representatives can if they see fit base their actions later. The publicity itself would cure many evils. The light of day is a great deterrer of wrongdoing. The mere fact of being able to put out nakedly, and with the certainty that the statements were true, a given condition of things that was wrong, would go a long distance toward curing that wrong; and, even where it did not cure it, would make the path evident by which to cure it. We would not be leaping in the dark; we would not be striving blindly to see what was good and what bad. We would know what the facts were and be able to shape our course accordingly.

A good deal can be done now, a good deal is being done now. As far as the anti-trust laws go they will be enforced. No suit will be undertaken for the sake of seeming to undertake it. Every suit that is undertaken will be begun because the great lawyer and upright man whom we are fortunate enough to have as Attorney-General, Mr. Knox, believes that there is a violation of the law which we can get at; and when the suit is undertaken it will not be compromised except upon the basis that the government wins. Of course, gentleman, no laws amount to anything unless they are administered honestly and fearlessly. We must have such administration or the law will amount to nothing. I believe that it is possible to frame national legislation which shall give us far more power than we now have, at any rate over corporations doing an interstate business. I can not guarantee that, because in the past it has more than once happened that we have put laws on the statute books which those who made them intended to mean one thing, and when they came up for decision by the courts, it was found that the intention had not been successfully put into effect. But I believe that additional legislation can be had. If my belief is wrong, if it proves evident that we can not, under the Constitution as it is, give the national administration sufficient power to deal with these great corporations, then no matter what our reverence for the past, our duty to the present and the future will force us to see that some power is conferred upon the national government. And when that power has been conferred, then it will rest with the national government to exercise it.

AT HAVERHILL, MASS., AUGUST 26, 1902

My Fellow-Citizens:

Naturally at the home of Secretary Moody I should like to say a word or two about the navy. I think that whenever we touch on the navy we are sure of a hearty response from any American audience; we are just as sure of such a response in the mountains and great plains of the West as upon the Atlantic or Pacific seaboards. The entire country is vitally interested in the navy, because an efficient navy of adequate size is not only the best guarantee of peace, but is also the surest means for seeing that if war does come the result shall be honorable to our good name and favorable to our national interests.

Any really great nation must be peculiarly sensitive to two things: Stain on the national honor at home, and disgrace to the national arms abroad. Our honor at home, our honor in domestic and internal affairs, is at all times in our own keeping, and depends simply upon the possession of an awakened public conscience. But the only way to make safe our honor, as affected not by our own deeds but by the deeds of others, is by readiness in advance. In three great crises in our history during the nineteenth century—in the War of 1812, in the Civil War, and again in the Spanish War—the navy rendered to the nation services of literally incalculable worth. In the Civil War we had to meet antagonists even more unprepared at sea than we were. On both the other occasions we encountered foreign foes, and the fighting was done entirely by ships built long in advance, and by officers and crews who had been trained during years of sea service for the supreme day when their qualities were put to the final test. The ships which won at Manila and Santiago under the Administration of President McKinley had been built years before under Presidents Arthur, Cleveland, and Harrison. The officers in those ships had been trained from their earliest youth to their profession, and the enlisted men, in addition to their natural aptitude, their intelligence, and their courage, had been drilled as marksmen with the great guns and as machinists in the engine rooms, and perfected in all the details of their work during years of cruising on the high seas and of incessant target practice. It was this preparedness which was the true secret of the enormous difference in efficiency between our navy and the Spanish navy. There was no lack of courage and self-devotion among the Spaniards, but on our side, in addition to the courage and devotion, for the lack of which no training could atone, there was also that training—the training which comes only as the result of years of thorough and painstaking practice.

Annapolis is, with the sole exception of its sister academy at West Point, the most typically democratic and American school of learning and preparation that there is in the entire country. Men go there from every State, from every walk of life, professing every creed—the chance of entry being open to all who perfect themselves in the necessary studies and who possess the necessary moral and physical qualities. There each man enters on his merits, stands on his merits, and graduates into a service where only his merit will enable him to be of value.

The enlisted men are of fine type, as they needs must be to do their work well, whether in the gun turret or in the engine room; and out of the fine material thus provided the finished man-of-war’s man is evolved by years of sea service.

It is impossible after the outbreak of war to improvise either the ships or the men of a navy. A war vessel is a bit of mechanism as delicate and complicated as it is formidable. You might just as well expect to turn an unskilled laborer offhand into a skilled machinist or into the engineer of a flyer on one of our big railroad systems as to put men aboard a battleship with the expectation that they will do anything but discredit themselves until they have had months and years in which thoroughly to learn their duties. Our shipbuilders and gunmakers must keep ever on the alert so that no rivals pass them by; and the officers and enlisted men on board the ships must in their turn, by the exercise of unflagging and intelligent zeal, keep themselves fit to get the best use out of the weapons of war intrusted to their care. The instrument is always important, but the man who uses it is more important still. We must constantly endeavor to perfect our navy in all its duties in time of peace, and above all in manœuvring in a seaway and in marksmanship with the great guns. In battle the only shots that count are those that hit, and marksmanship is a matter of long practice and of intelligent reasoning. A navy’s efficiency in a war depends mainly upon its preparedness at the outset of that war. We are not to be excused as a nation if there is not such preparedness of our navy. This is especially so in view of what we have done during the last four years. No nation has a right to undertake a big task unless it is prepared to do it in masterful and effective style. It would be an intolerable humiliation for us to embark on such a course of action as followed from our declaration of war with Spain, and not make good our words by deeds—not be ready to prove our truth by our endeavor whenever the need calls. The good work of building up the navy must go on without ceasing. The modern warship can not with advantage be allowed to rust in disuse. It must be used up in active service even in time of peace. This means that there must be a constant replacement of the ineffective by the effective. The work of building up and keeping up our navy is therefore one which needs our constant and unflagging vigilance. Our navy is now efficient; but we must be content with no ordinary degree of efficiency. Every effort must be made to bring it ever nearer to perfection. In making such effort the prime factor is to have at the head of the navy such an official as your fellow-townsman, Mr. Moody; and the next is to bring home to our people as a whole the need of thorough and ample preparation in advance; this preparation to take the form not only of continually building ships, but of keeping these ships in commission under conditions which will develop the highest degree of efficiency in the officers and enlisted men aboard them.

AT PORTLAND, MAINE, AUGUST 26, 1902

Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow-citizens, men and women of Maine:

I wish to say a word to you in recognition of great service rendered not only to all our country but to the entire principle of democratic government throughout the world, by one of your citizens. The best institutions are of no good if they won’t work. I do not care how beautiful a theory is, if it won’t fit in with the facts it is of no good. If you built the handsomest engine that ever had been built and it did not go, its usefulness would be limited. Well, that was just about the condition that Congress had reached at the time when Thomas B. Reed was elected Speaker. We had all the machinery, but it didn’t work,—that was the trouble,—and you had to find some one powerful man who would disregard the storm of obloquy sure to be raised by what he did in order to get it to work. Such a man was found when Reed was made Speaker. We may differ among ourselves as to policy. We may differ among ourselves as to what course government should follow; but if we possess any intelligence we must be a unit that it shall be able to follow some course. If government can not go on it is not government. If the legislative body can not enact laws, then there is no use of misnaming it a legislative body; and if the majority is to rule some method by which it can rule must be provided. Government by the majority in Congress had practically come to a stop when Mr. Reed became Speaker. Mr. Reed, at the cost of infinite labor, at the cost of the fiercest attacks, succeeded in restoring that old principle; and now through Congress we can do well or ill, accordingly as the people demand, but at any rate, we can do something—and we owe it more than to any other one man to your fellow-citizen, Mr. Reed. It is a great thing for any man to be able to feel that in some one crisis he left his mark deeply scored for good in the history of his country, and Tom Reed has the right to that feeling.

AT AUGUSTA, MAINE, AUGUST 26, 1902

Governor Burleigh, my fellow-citizens, men and women of Maine:

It would be difficult for any man speaking to this audience and from in front of the house in which Blaine once lived to fail to feel whatever of Americanism there was in him stirred to the depths. For my good fortune I knew Mr. Blaine quite well when he was Secretary of State, and I have thought again and again during the past few years how pleased he would have been to see so many of the principles for which he had stood approach fruition.

One secret, perhaps I might say the chief secret, of Mr. Blaine’s extraordinary hold upon the affections of his countrymen was his entirely genuine and unaffected Americanism. When I speak of Americanism I do not for a minute mean to say, gentlemen, that all the things we do are all right. I think there are plenty of evils to correct and that often a man shows himself all the more a good American because he wants to cut out any evil of the body politic which may interfere with our approaching the ideal of true Americanism. But not only admitting but also emphasizing this, it yet remains true that throughout our history no one has been able to render really great service to the country if he did not believe in the country. Mr. Blaine possessed to an eminent degree the confident hope in the nation’s future which made him feel that she must ever strive to fit herself for a great destiny. He felt that this Republic must in every way take the lead in the Western Hemisphere. He felt that this Republic must play a great part among the nations of the earth. The last four years have shown how true that feeling of his was.

He had always hoped that we would have a peculiarly intimate relation with the countries south of us. He could hardly have anticipated—no one could have—the Spanish War and its effects. In consequence of that war America’s interest in the tropic islands to our south and the seas and coasts surrounding those islands is far greater than ever before. Our interest in the Monroe Doctrine is more complicated than ever before. The Monroe Doctrine is simply a statement of our very firm belief that on this continent the nations now existing here must be left to work out their own destinies among themselves and that the continent is not longer to be regarded as colonizing ground for any European power. The one power on the continent that can make that doctrine effective is, of course, ourselves; for in the world as it is, gentlemen, the nation which advances a given doctrine likely to interfere in any way with other nations must possess power to back it up if she wishes the doctrine to be respected. We stand firmly on the Monroe Doctrine.

The events of the last nine months have rendered it evident that we shall soon embark on the work of excavating the Isthmian Canal to connect the two great oceans—a work destined to be, probably, the greatest engineering feat of the twentieth century, certainly a greater engineering feat than has ever yet been successfully attempted among the nations of mankind; and as it is the biggest thing of its kind to be done I am glad it is the United States that is to do it. Whenever a nation undertakes to carry out a great destiny it must make up its mind that there will be work and worry, labor and risk, in doing the work. It is with a nation as it is with an individual; if you are content to attempt but little in private life you may be able to escape a good deal of worry, but you won’t achieve very much. The man who attempts much must make up his mind that there will now and then come days and nights of worry; there will come even moments of seeming defeat. But out of the difficulties we wrest success. So it is with the nation. It is not the easy task that is necessarily the best.

AT BANGOR, MAINE, AUGUST 27, 1902

My Fellow-Citizens:

I am glad to greet the farmers of Maine. During the century that has closed, the growth of industrialism has necessarily meant that cities and towns have increased in population more rapidly than the country districts. And yet, it remains true now as it always has been, that in the last resort the country districts are those in which we are surest to find the old American spirit, the old American habits of thought and ways of living. Conditions have changed in the country far less than they have changed in the cities, and in consequence there has been little breaking away from the methods of life which have produced the great majority of the leaders of the Republic in the past. Almost all of our great Presidents have been brought up in the country, and most of them worked hard on the farms in their youth and got their early mental training in the healthy democracy of farm life.

The forces which made these farm-bred boys leaders of men when they had come to their full manhood are still at work in our country districts. Self-help and individual initiative remain to a peculiar degree typical of life in the country, life on a farm, in the lumbering camp, on a ranch. Neither the farmers nor their hired hands can work through combinations as readily as the capitalists or wage-workers of cities can work.

It must not be understood from this that there has been no change in farming and farm life. The contrary is the case. There has been much change, much progress. The granges and similar organizations, the farmers’ institutes, and all the agencies which promote intelligent co-operation and give opportunity for social and intellectual intercourse among the farmers, have played a large part in raising the level of life and work in the country districts. In the domain of government, the Department of Agriculture since its foundation has accomplished results as striking as those obtained under any other branch of the national administration. By scientific study of all matters connected with the advancement of farm life; by experimental stations; by the use of trained agents, sent to the uttermost countries of the globe; by the practical application of anything which in theory has been demonstrated to be efficient; in these ways, and in many others, great good has been accomplished in raising the standard of productiveness in farm work throughout the country. We live in an era when the best results can only be achieved, if to individual self-help we add the mutual self-help which comes by combination, both of citizens in their individual capacity and of citizens working through the State as an instrument. The farmers of the country have grown more and more to realize this, and farming has tended more and more to take its place as an applied science—though, as with everything else, the theory must be tested in practical work, and can avail only when applied in practical fashion.

But after all this has been said, it remains true that the countryman—the man on the farm, more than any other of our citizens to-day, is called upon continually to exercise the qualities which we like to think of as typical of the United States throughout its history—the qualities of rugged independence, masterful resolution, and individual energy and resourcefulness. He works hard (for which no man is to be pitied), and often he lives hard (which may not be pleasant); but his life is passed in healthy surroundings, surroundings which tend to develop a fine type of citizenship. In the country, moreover, the conditions are fortunately such as to allow a closer touch between man and man, than, too often, we find to be the case in the city. Men feel more vividly the underlying sense of brotherhood, of community of interest. I do not mean by this that there are not plenty of problems connected with life in our rural districts. There are many problems; and great wisdom and earnest disinterestedness in effort are needed for their solution.

After all, we are one people, with the same fundamental characteristics, whether we live in the city or in the country, in the East or in the West, in the North or the South. Each of us, unless he is contented to be a cumberer of the earth’s surface, must strive to do his life-work with his whole heart. Each must remember that, while he will be noxious to every one unless he first do his duty by himself, he must also strive ever to do his duty by his fellow. The problem of how to do these duties is acute everywhere. It is most acute in great cities, but it exists in the country, too. A man, to be a good citizen, must first be a good bread-winner, a good husband, a good father—I hope the father of many healthy children; just as a woman’s first duty is to be a good housewife and mother. The business duties, the home duties, the duties to one’s family, come first. The couple who bring up plenty of healthy children, who leave behind them many sons and daughters fitted in their turn to be good citizens, emphatically deserve well of the State.

But duty to one’s self and one’s family does not exclude duty to one’s neighbor. Each of us, rich or poor, can help his neighbor at times; and to do this he must be brought into touch with him, into sympathy with him. Any effort is to be welcomed that brings people closer together, so as to secure a better understanding among those whose walks of life are in ordinary circumstances far apart. Probably the good done is almost equally great on both sides, no matter which one may seem to be helping the other. But it must be kept in mind that no good will be accomplished at all by any philanthropic or charitable work, unless it is done along certain definite lines. In the first place, if the work is done in a spirit of condescension, it would be better never to attempt it. It is almost as irritating to be patronized as to be wronged. The only safe way of working is to try to find out some scheme by which it is possible to make a common effort for the common good. Each of us needs at times to have a helping hand stretched out to him or her. Every one of us slips on some occasion, and shame to his fellow who then refuses to stretch out the hand that should always be ready to help the man who stumbles. It is our duty to lift him up; but it is also our duty to remember that there is no earthly use in trying to carry him. If a man will submit to being carried, that is sufficient to show that he is not worth carrying. In the long run, the only kind of help that really avails is the help which teaches a man to help himself. Such help every man who has been blessed in life should try to give to those who are less fortunate, and such help can be accepted with entire self-respect.

The aim to set before ourselves in trying to aid one another is to give that aid under conditions which will harm no man’s self-respect, and which will teach the less fortunate how to help themselves as their stronger brothers do. To give such aid it is necessary not only to possess the right kind of heart, but also the right kind of head. Hardness of heart is a dreadful quality, but it is doubtful whether, in the long run, it works more damage than softness of head. At any rate, both are undesirable. The prerequisite to doing good work in the field of philanthropy—in the field of social effort, undertaken with one’s fellows for the common good—is that it shall be undertaken in a spirit of broad sanity no less than of broad and loving charity.

The other day I picked up a little book called “The Simple Life,” written by an Alsatian, Charles Wagner, and he preaches such wholesome, sound doctrine that I wish it could be used as a tract throughout our country. To him the whole problem of our complex, somewhat feverish modern life can be solved only by getting men and women to lead better lives. He sees that the permanence of liberty and democracy depends upon a majority of the people being steadfast in morality and in that good plain sense which, as a national attribute, comes only as the result of the slow and painful labor of centuries, and which can be squandered in a generation by the thoughtless and vicious. He preaches the doctrine of the superiority of the moral to the material. He does not undervalue the material, but he insists, as we of this nation should always insist, upon the infinite superiority of the moral, and the sordid destruction which comes upon either the nation or the individual if it or he becomes absorbed only in the desire to get wealth. The true line of cleavage lies between good citizen and bad citizen; and the line of cleavage may, and often does, run at right angles to that which divides the rich and the poor. The sinews of virtue lie in man’s capacity to care for what is outside himself. The man who gives himself up to the service of his appetites, the man who the more goods he has the more wants, has surrendered himself to destruction. It makes little difference whether he achieves his purpose or not. If his point of view is all wrong, he is a bad citizen whether he be rich or poor. It is a small matter to the community whether in arrogance and insolence he has misused great wealth, or whether, though poor, he is possessed by the mean and fierce desire to seize a morsel, the biggest possible, of that prey which the fortunate of earth consume. The man who lives simply, and justly, and honorably, whether rich or poor, is a good citizen. Those who dream only of idleness and pleasure, who hate others, and fail to recognize the duty of each man to his brother, these, be they rich or poor, are the enemies of the State. The misuse of property is one manifestation of the same evil spirit which, under changed circumstances, denies the right of property because this right is in the hands of others. In a purely material civilization the bitterness of attack on another’s possession is only additional proof of the extraordinary importance attached to possession itself. When outward well-being, instead of being regarded as a valuable foundation on which happiness may with wisdom be built, is mistaken for happiness itself, so that material prosperity becomes the one standard, then, alike by those who enjoy such prosperity in slothful or criminal ease, and by those who in no less evil manner rail at, envy, and long for it, poverty is held to be shameful, and money, whether well or ill gotten, to stand for merit.

All this does not mean condemnation of progress. It is mere folly to try to dig up the dead past, and scant is the good that comes from asceticism and retirement from the world. But let us make sure that our progress is in the essentials as well as in the incidentals. Material prosperity without the moral lift toward righteousness means a diminished capacity for happiness and a debased character. The worth of a civilization is the worth of the man at its centre. When this man lacks moral rectitude, material progress only makes bad worse, and social problems still darker and more complex.

AT NORTHFIELD, MASS., SEPTEMBER 1, 1902

My Fellow-Citizens:

Here near the seat of the summer school for young men founded by Dwight L. Moody, I naturally speak on a subject suggested to me by the life of Mr. Moody and by the aims sought for through the establishment of the summer school.

In such a school—a school which is to equip young men to do good in the world—to show both the desire for the rule of righteousness and the practical power to give actual effect to that desire—it seems to me there are two texts specially worthy of emphasis: One is, “Be ye doers of the word and not hearers only”; and the other is, “Not slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” A republic of freemen is pre-eminently a community in which there is need for the actual exercise and practical application of both the milder and the stronger virtues. Every good quality—every virtue and every grace—has its place and is of use in the great scheme of creation; but it is of course a mere truism to say that at certain times and in certain places there is pre-eminent need for a given set of virtues. In our own country, with its many-sided, hurrying, practical life, the place for cloistered virtue is far smaller than is the place for that essential manliness which, without losing its fine and lofty side, can yet hold its own in the rough struggle with the forces of the world round about us. It would be a very bad thing for this country if it happened that the men of righteous living tended to lose the robust, virile qualities of heart, mind and body, and if, on the other hand, the men best fitted practically to achieve results lost the guidance of the moral law. No one-sided development can produce really good citizenship—as good citizenship is needed in the America of to-day. If a man has not in him the root of righteousness—if he does not believe in, and practice, honesty—if he is not truthful and upright, clean and high-minded, fair in his dealings both at home and abroad—then the stronger he is, the abler and more energetic he is, the more dangerous he is to the body politic. Wisdom untempered by devotion to an ideal usually means only that dangerous cunning which is far more fatal in its ultimate effects to the community than open violence itself. It is inexcusable in an honest people to deify mere success without regard to the qualities by which that success is achieved. Indeed there is a revolting injustice, intolerable to just minds, in punishing the weak scoundrel who fails, and bowing down to and making life easy for the far more dangerous scoundrel who succeeds. A wicked man who is wicked on a large scale, whether in business or in politics, of course does many times more evil to the community than the man who only ventures to be wicked furtively and in lesser ways. If possible, the success of such a man should be prevented by law, and in any event he ought to be made to feel that there is no condonation of his offences by the public. There is no more unpleasant manifestation of public feeling than the deification of mere “smartness,” as it is termed—of mere successful cunning unhampered by scruple or generosity or right feeling. If a man is not decent, is not square and honest, then the possession of ability only serves to render him more dangerous to the community; as a wild beast grows more dangerous the stronger and fiercer he is.

But virtue by itself is not enough, or anything like enough. Strength must be added to it, and the determination to use that strength. The good man who is ineffective is not able to make his goodness of much account to the people as a whole. No matter how much a man hears the word, small is the credit attached to him if he fails to be a doer also; and in serving the Lord he must remember that he needs to avoid sloth in his business as well as to cultivate fervency of spirit. All around us there are great evils to combat, and they are not to be combated with success by men who pride themselves on their superiority in taste and in virtue, and draw aside from the world’s life. It matters not whether they thus draw aside because they fear their fellows or because they despise them. Each feeling—the fear no less than the contempt—is shameful and unworthy. A man to be a good American must be straight, and he must also be strong. He must have in him the conscience which will teach him to see the right, and he must also have the vigor, the courage, and the practical, hard-headed common-sense which will enable him to make his seeing right result in some benefit to his fellows.

AT FITCHBURG, MASS., SEPTEMBER 2, 1902

Mr. Mayor, and you, my Fellow-Citizens:

There are two or three things that I should like to say to this audience, but before beginning what I have to say on some of the problems of the day, I wish to thank for their greeting, not only all of you, my fellow-citizens here, but particularly the men of the great war, and second only to them my comrades of a lesser war, where, I hope, we showed that we were anxious to do our duty, as you had done yours, only the need did not come to us.

We have great problems before us as a nation. I will not try to discuss them at length with you to-day, but I can speak a word as to the manner in which they must be met if they are to be met successfully. All great works, though they differ in the method of doing them, must be solved by substantially the same qualities. You who upheld the arms of Lincoln, who followed the sword of Grant, were able to do your duty not because you found some patent device for doing it, but by going down to the bedrock principles which had made good soldiers since the world began.

There was no method possible to devise which would have spared you from heart-breaking fatigue on the marches, from hardships at night, from danger in battle. The only way to overcome those difficulties and dangers was by drawing on every ounce of hardihood, of courage, of loyalty, and of iron resolution. That is how you had to win out. You had to win as the soldiers of Washington had won before you, as we of the younger generation must win if ever the call should be made upon us to face a serious foe. Arms change, tactics change, but the spirit that makes the real soldier does not change. The spirit that makes for victory does not change.

It is just so in civic life. The problems change, but fundamentally the qualities needed to face them in the average citizen are the same. Our new and highly complex industrial civilization has produced a new and complicated series of problems. We need to face those problems and not to run away from them. We need to exercise all our ingenuity in trying to devise some effective solution, but the only way in which that solution can be applied is the old way of bringing honesty, courage, and common-sense to bear upon it. One feature of honesty and common-sense combined is never to promise what you do not think you can perform, and then never fail to perform what you have promised. And that applies in public life just as much as in private life.

If some of those who have seen cause for wonder in what I have said this summer on the subject of the great corporations, which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as trusts, would take the trouble to read my messages when I was Governor, what I said on the stump two years ago, and what I put into my first message to Congress, I think they would have been less astonished. I said nothing on the stump that I did not think I could make good, and I shall not hesitate now to take the position which I then advocated.

I am even more anxious that you who hear what I say should think of it than that you should applaud it. I am not going to try to define with technical accuracy what ought to be meant when we speak of a trust. But if by trust we mean merely a big corporation, then I ask you to ponder the utter folly of the man who either in a spirit of rancor or in a spirit of folly says “destroy the trusts,” without giving you an idea of what he means really to do. I will go with him if he says destroy the evil in the trusts, gladly. I will try to find out that evil, I will seek to apply remedies, which I have already outlined in other speeches; but if his policy, from whatever motive, whether hatred, fear, panic or just sheer ignorance, is to destroy the trusts in a way that will destroy all our property—no. Those men who advocate wild and foolish remedies which would be worse than the disease are doing all in their power to perpetuate the evils against which they nominally war, because, if we are brought face to face with the naked issue of either keeping or totally destroying a prosperity in which the majority share, but in which some share improperly, why, as sensible men, we must decide that it is a great deal better that some people should prosper too much than that no one should prosper enough. So that the man who advocates destroying the trusts by measures which would paralyze the industries of the country is at least a quack, and at worst an enemy to the Republic.

In 1893 there was no trouble about anybody making too much money. The trusts were down, but the trouble was that we were all of us down. Nothing but harm to the whole body politic can come from ignorant agitation, carried on partially against real evils, partially against imaginary evils, but in a spirit which would substitute for the real evils evils just as real and infinitely greater. Those men, if they should succeed, could do nothing to bring about a solution of the great problems with which we are concerned. If they could destroy certain of the evils at the cost of overthrowing the well-being of the entire country, it would mean merely that there would come a reaction in which they and their remedies would be hopelessly discredited.

Now, it does not do anybody any good, and it will do most of us a great deal of harm, to take steps which will check any proper growth in a corporation. We wish not to penalize but to reward a great captain of industry or the men banded together in a corporation who have the business forethought and energy necessary to build up a great industrial enterprise. Keep that in mind. A big corporation may be doing excellent work for the whole country, and you want, above all things, when striving to get a plan which will prevent wrongdoing by a corporation which desires to do wrong, not at the same time to have a scheme which will interfere with a corporation doing well, if that corporation is handling itself honestly and squarely. What I am saying ought to be treated as simple, elementary truths. The only reason it is necessary to say them at all is that apparently some people forget them.

I believe something can be done by national legislation. When I state that I ask you to note my words. I say I believe. It is not in my power to say I know. When I talk to you of my own executive duties I can tell you definitely what will and what will not be done. When I speak of the actions of any one else I can only say that I believe something more can be done by national legislation. I believe it will be done. I think we can get laws which will increase the power of the Federal Government over corporations; if we can not, then there will have to be an amendment to the Constitution of the nation conferring additional power upon the Federal Government to deal with corporations. To get that will be a matter of difficulty, and a matter of time.

Let me interrupt here by way of illustration. You of the great war recollect that about six weeks after Sumter had been fired on there began to be loud clamor in the North among people who were not at the front that you should go to Richmond; and there were any number of people who told you how to go there. Then came Bull Run, and a lot of those same people who a fortnight before had been yelling “On to Richmond at once,” turned around and said the war was over. All the hysteric brotherhood said so. But you didn’t think so. The war was not over. It was not over for three years and nine months, and then it was over the other way. And you got it over by setting your faces steadily toward the goal, by not relying upon anything impossible, but by each doing everything possible that came in his line to do, by each man doing his duty. You did not win by any patent device; you won by the generalship of Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan, and, above all, by the soldiership of the men who carried the muskets and the sabres. It did not come as soon as you wanted, and the men who said it would come at once did not help you much either.

In dealing with any great problem in civil life, be it the trusts or anything else, you are going to get along in just about the same fashion. There is not any patent remedy for all the ills. All we can do is to make up our minds definitely that we intend to find some method by which we shall be able to tell, in the first place, what are the real evils and what of the alleged evils are imaginary; in the next place, what of those real evils it is possible to cure by legislation; and then to cure them by legislation and by an honest administration of the laws after they have been enacted. That statement of the problem will never be attractive to the man who thinks that somehow, by turning your hand, you are going to get a complete solution at once.

Grant’s plan of fighting it out on that line, if it took all summer, was not attractive to the men who wanted it done in a week. But it was the only plan that won. The only way we can ever work out even an approximately satisfactory solution of these great industrial problems, of which this so-called problem of the trusts is but one, is by approaching them in a spirit which shall combine equally sanity and self-restraint on the one hand and resolute purpose on the other.

It is not given to me or to any one else to promise a perfect solution. It is not given to me or to any one else to promise you even an approximately perfect solution in a short time. But I think that we can work out a very great improvement over the present conditions, and the steps taken must, I am sure, be along these lines—along the lines, in the first place, of getting power somewhere so that we shall be able to say, the nation has power, let it use that power—and not as it is at present, where it is out of the question to say exactly where the power is.

We must get power first, then use that power fearlessly, but with moderation. Let me say that again—with moderation, with sanity, with self-restraint. The mechanism of modern business is altogether too delicate and too complicated for us to sanction for one moment any intermeddling with it in a spirit of ignorance, above all in a spirit of rancor. Something can be done, something is being done now. Much more can be done if our people resolutely but temperately will that it shall be done. But the certain way of bringing great harm upon ourselves, without in any way furthering the solution of the problem, but, on the contrary, deferring indefinitely its proper solution, would be to act in a spirit of ignorance, of violence, of rancor, in a spirit which would make us tear down the temple of industry in which we live because we are not satisfied with some of the details of its management.

I want you to think of what I have said, because it represents all of the sincerity and earnestness that I have, and I say to you here, from this platform, nothing that I have not already stated in effect, and nothing I would not say at a private table with any of the biggest corporation managers in the land.

AT DALTON, MASS., SEPTEMBER 3, 1902

Governor Crane, and you, my Friends and Fellow-Citizens:

It seems to me that in a town like this we not only have but ought to have a better standard of citizenship and a more thorough appreciation of the rights and duties of the individual citizen and of the possibilities of government than in almost any other community. Here is a town where you have both farming and manufacturing, where you have on a small scale all the elements that go to make up the industrial life of the nation as a whole—the capitalist and wage-earner, the farmer and hired man, merchant, men of the professions, you have them all; you see the forces that have built up the nation and that are at work in the nation, in play round about you in the farms, in the factories, in the houses, right among your neighbors and friends. When men live in a big city they lose touch with one another; they tend to lose intimate touch with the government, and they get to speak of the state, of the government, as something entirely apart from them. Now the government is us, here, you and me, and that ought to make us understand on the one hand what we have a right to expect from the government, and on the other hand what it is foolish to expect from the government. We have a right to expect from it that it will secure us against injustice; that so far as is humanly possible it will secure for each man a fair chance; that it will do justice as between man and man, and that it will not respect persons; that in that division of the government dealing with justice each man shall stand absolutely on his merits, not being discriminated for or against because of his wealth or his poverty, because of anything but his own conduct.

The government can take hold of certain functions which are in the interest of the people as a whole. More than this the government can not do or else does at the risk of doing it badly. The government can not supply the lack in any man of the qualities which must determine in the last resort the man’s success or failure. Instead of “government” say “the town.” Now what can the town do for you? A good deal; but not nearly as much as you can do for it, not nearly as much as you must do for yourself. The government can not make a man a success in life. If we would remember that and remember that when we use the large terms of the government and nation, we only mean the town on a large scale, there would be much less danger in our thinking that perhaps by some queer patent device or some scheme, the state, the government, the town, can supply the lack of individual thrift, energy, enterprise, resolution. It can not supply such lack. Something can be done by government, that is, by all of us acting together to protect the rights of all, to accomplish certain things for all. Something can be accomplished by helping one another. He is a poor creature who does not give help generously when the chance comes. But finally in the last resort the man who wins now will be the man of the type who has won always, the man who can win for himself. Do not make the mistake of thinking that it is possible ever to call in any outside force to take the place of the man’s own individual initiative, the man’s individual capacity to do work worth doing.