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THE FOURTH OF MARCH, 1901

A photograph taken on the day when Theodore Roosevelt was sworn in as Vice-President of the United States

Homeward Bound Edition

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES
AND STATE PAPERS
December 3, 1901, to January 4, 1904

BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT

[INDEX FIRST ADMINISTRATION]
PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE
AUTHOR THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
VOLUME II

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
DECEMBER 3, 1901
TO
JANUARY 4, 1904

PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS

AT DEDICATION OF NAVY MEMORIAL MONUMENT, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 14, 1903

Mr. Mayor; My Fellow-Citizens:

The ground for this monument was first turned by President McKinley, and I am glad to have the chance of saying a few words in dedication of the completed monument. There is no branch of our government in which all our people are so deeply interested as the Navy of the United States. It is not merely San Francisco, not merely New York, or Boston, or Charleston, or New Orleans, not merely the seacoast cities of the Nation; every individual in the Nation who is proud of America and jealous of her good name must feel a thrill of generous emotion at the erection of a monument to the navy, a monument to the fleet which was victorious under Admiral Dewey on the first of May five years ago, a fleet which then added a new page to the long honor roll of American achievement. It is eminently fitting that there should be here in this great city on the Pacific Ocean a monument to commemorate the deed which showed once for all that America had taken her position on the Pacific. I want you all to draw a practical lesson from this commemoration. We to-day dedicate this monument because those who went before us had the wisdom to make ready for the victory. If we wish our children to have the chance of dedicating monuments of this kind in the event of war we must see that the navy is made ready in advance. To dedicate the monument would be an empty and foolish thing if we accompanied it by an abandonment of our national policy of building up the navy. And good though it is to erect this monument, it is better still to go on with the building up of the navy which gave the monument to us, and which, if we ever give it a fair chance, can be relied upon to rise level to our needs.

Remember that after the war has begun it is too late to improvise a navy. A naval war is two-thirds settled in advance, at least two-thirds, because it is mainly settled by the preparation which has gone on for years preceding its outbreak. We won at Manila because the shipbuilders of the country, including those here at San Francisco, under the wise provisions of Congress, had for fifteen years before been preparing the navy. In 1882 our navy was a shame and a disgrace to the country in point of material. The personnel contained as fine material as there was to be found in the world but the ships and the guns were antiquated, and it would have been a wicked absurdity to have sent them against the ships of any good power. Then we began to build up the navy. Every ship that fought under Dewey had been built between 1883 and 1896.

We come here as patriots remembering that our party lines stop at the water’s edge. That fleet was successful in 1898 because under the previous administrations of both political parties, under the previous Congresses controlled by both political parties, for the previous fifteen years there had been a resolute effort to build adequate ships. The ships that went in under Dewey had been constructed under different successive Secretaries of the Navy and had been provided for by different successive Congresses of the United States. Not one of them had been built less than two years, some of them fourteen years. We could not have begun to fight that battle if we had not been for so many years making ready the navy.

The last Congress has taken greater strides than any previous Congress in making ready the navy, but it will be two or three years before the effects are seen. In no branch of the government are foresight and the carrying out of a steady and continuous policy so necessary as in the navy; and you, citizens of San Francisco, of California, and all our citizens should make it a matter of prime duty to see that there is no halt in that work, that the next Congress, and the Congress after that, and the Congress after that, go right on providing formidable warcraft, providing officers, providing men, and providing the means of training them in peace to be effective in war. The best ships and the best guns do not count unless they are handled aright and aimed aright, and the best men can not thus handle the one nor aim the other if they do not have ample practice. Our people must be trained in handling our ships in squadrons on the high seas. Our people on the ships must be trained by actual practice to do their duty in conning tower, in the engine-rooms, in the gun-turrets. The shots that count in battle are the shots that hit.

We have reason to be satisfied with the rapid increase in accuracy in marksmanship of the navy in recent years, and I congratulate Admiral Glass and those under him and all our naval officers who are taking their part so well in perfecting that work, and I congratulate the enlisted men of the navy upon the extraordinary improvement in marksmanship shown by the gun pointers.

Applaud the navy and what it has done. That is first-class. But make your applause count by seeing that the good work goes on. Besides applauding now see to it that the navy is so built up that the men of the next generation will have something to applaud also.

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY, CAL., MAY 14, 1903

President Wheeler; Fellow-Members of the University:

Last night, in speaking to one of my new friends in California, he told me that he thought enough had been said to me about the fruits and flowers; that enough had been said to me about California being an Eden, and that he wished I would pay some attention to Adam as well. Much though I have been interested in the wonderful physical beauty of this wonderful State, I have been infinitely more interested in its citizenship, and perhaps most in its citizenship in the making.

When I come to the University of California and am greeted by its President I am greeted by an old and valued friend, a friend whom I have not merely known socially but upon whom, while I was Governor of New York, I leaned often for advice and assistance in the problems with which I had to deal. When he accepted your offer I grudged him to you. And it was not until I came here, not until I have seen you, that I have been fully reconciled to the loss. But now I am, for I can conceive of no happier life for any man to lead to whom life means what it should mean, than the life of the President of this great University.

This same friend last night suggested to me a thought that I intend to work out in speaking to you to-day. We were talking over the University of California, and from that we spoke of the general educational system of our country. Facts tend to become commonplace, and we tend to lose sight of their importance when once they are ingrained into the life of the Nation. Although we talk a good deal about what the widespread education of this country means, I question if many of us deeply consider its meaning. From the lowest grade of the public school to the highest form of university training, education in this country is at the disposal of every man, every woman, who chooses to work for and obtain it. The State has done much, very much; witness this university. Private benefaction has done very much; witness also this university. And each one of us who has obtained an education has obtained something for which he or she has not personally paid. No matter what the school, what the university, every American who has a school training, a university training, has obtained something given to him outright by the State, or given to him by those dead or those living who were able to make provision for that training because of the protection of the State, because of existence within its borders. Each one of us then who has an education, school or college, has obtained something from the community at large for which he or she has not paid, and no self-respecting man or woman is content to rest permanently under such an obligation. Where the State has bestowed education the man who accepts it must be content to accept it merely as a charity unless he returns it to the State in full, in the shape of good citizenship. I do not ask of you, men and women here to-day, good citizenship as a favor to the State. I demand it of you as a right, and hold you recreant to your duty if you fail to give it.

Here you are in this university, in this State with its wonderful climate, which is permitting people of a northern stock for the first time in the history of that northern stock to gain education in physical surroundings somewhat akin to those which surrounded the early Greeks. Here you have all those advantages and you are not to be excused if you do not show in tangible fashion your appreciation of them and your power to give practical effect to that appreciation. From all our citizens we have a right to expect good citizenship; but most of all from those who have received most; most of all from those who have had the training of body, of mind, of soul, which comes from association in and with a great university. From those to whom much has been given we have Biblical authority to expect and demand much in return; and the most that can be given to any man is education. I expect and demand in the name of the Nation much more from you who have had training of the mind than from those of mere wealth. To the man of means much has been given, too, and much will be expected from him, and ought to be, but not as much as from you, because your possession is more valuable than his. If you envy him I think poorly of you. Envy is merely the meanest form of admiration, and a man who envies another admits thereby his own inferiority. We have a right to expect from the college bred man, the college bred woman, a proper sense of proportion, a proper sense of perspective, which will enable him or her to see things in their right relation one to another, and when thus seen while wealth will have a proper place, a just place, as an instrument for achieving happiness and power, for conferring happiness and power, it will not stand as high as much else in our national life. I ask you to take that not as a conventional statement from the university platform, but to test it by thinking of the men whom you admire in our past history and seeing what are the qualities which have made you admire them, what are the services they have rendered. For as President Wheeler said to-day, it is true now as it ever has been true that the greatest good fortune, the greatest honor, that can befall any man is that he shall serve, that he shall serve the Nation, serve his people, serve mankind; and looking back in history the names that come up before us, the names to which we turn, the names of the men of our own people which stand as shining honor marks in our annals, the names of those men typifying qualities which rightly we should hold in reverence, are the names of the statesmen, of the soldiers, of the poets—and after them, not abreast of them, the names of the architects of our material prosperity also.

Of recent years I have been thrown in contact with a number of college graduates doing good service to the country, and as I wish to make it perfectly evident what I mean by the kind of service which I should hope to have from you and which it seems to me worth while to render, I want to say just a word about two college graduates who have during the last five years rendered and are now rendering such services: Governor Taft in the Philippines, and Brigadier-General Leonard Wood, lately Governor of Cuba. When we acquired the Philippines and took possession for the time being of Cuba to train its people in citizenship, we assumed heavy responsibilities; so heavy that some very excellent persons thought we ought to shirk them. I hold that a great and masterful people forfeits its title to greatness if it shirks any work because that work is difficult and responsible. The difficulty and responsibility impose upon us the high duty of doing the work well, but they in no way excuse us for refusing to do it. We had to do the work and the question came of the choice of instruments in doing it. The most important and most difficult task after the establishment of order by the army in the Philippines was the establishment of civil government therein; and second only in importance to that came the administration of Cuba, during the three years and over that elapsed before we were able to turn its government over to its own people and start it as a free Republic. When tasks are all-important the most important factor in doing them right is the choice of the agents; and among the many debts of gratitude which this Nation owes to President McKinley, no debt is greater than the debt we owe him for the choice of his instruments, such a choice as that of Taft, such a choice as that of Wood. We sent Taft to the Philippines; we sent Wood to Cuba; both of them as tested by the standard of our commercial life, poor men; each man with little more than his salary to keep himself and his family; each man to handle millions upon millions of dollars, to have the power by mere conniving at what was improper to acquire untold wealth—and sent them knowing that we did not ever have to consider whether such opportunities would be temptations toward them; sent them knowing that they had the ideals of the true American and that, therefore, we did not have to consider the chance of such a temptation appealing to them.

Taft went to the Philippines to stay there; not only forfeiting thereby the certainty of brilliant rise in his profession on the bench or at the bar here if he had stayed, but at imminent risk to his own health; because he felt that his duty as an American made him go; that, as President McKinley told me of him, he had been drafted into the service of the country and he could not honorably refuse. We have seen in consequence the Philippine Islands administered by the American official who is at the head of the government and by his colleagues in the interest primarily of their people, and seeking to obtain for the United States, for the dominant race, that spent its blood and its treasure in making firm and stable the government of those islands, the reward that comes from the consciousness of duty well done. Under Taft, by and through his efforts, not only have peace and material well-being come to those islands to a degree never before known in their recorded history, and to a degree infinitely greater than had ever been dreamed possible by those who knew them best, but more than that, a greater measure of self-government has been given to them than is now given to any other Asiatic people under alien rule, than to any other Asiatic people under their own rulers, save Japan alone. That is an achievement of the past five years which I hold to be absolutely unparalleled in history; and when the debit and credit side of our national life is finally made up a long stroke shall be put to the credit side for what has been done in the Philippines under Taft and his associates.

In the same way Leonard Wood worked in Cuba. Put down there to do an absolutely new task, to take a people of a different race, a different speech, a different creed, a people just emerging from the hideous welter of a war, cruel and sanguinary beyond what we in this fortunate country can readily conceive, to take a people down in the depths of poverty and misery, just recovering from suffering which makes one shudder to think of, a people untrained utterly and absolutely in self-government, and fit them for it; and he did it. For three years he worked. He established a school system as good as the best that we have in any of our States. He cleaned cities which had never been cleaned in their existence before. He secured absolute safety for life and property. He did the kind of governmental work which should be the undying honor of our people forever. And he came home to what? He came home to be thanked by a few, to be attacked by others—not to their credit—and to have as his real reward the sense that though his work had been done at pecuniary sacrifice to him, that though the demands upon him had been such as to eat into his private means, yet he had worthily and well done his duty as an American citizen and reflected fresh honor upon the uniform of the United States Army.

I have chosen Taft and Wood simply as instances of what other men by the hundred have done, Americans who have graduated from no college, Americans who have graduated from our different colleges, and especially by practically all those Americans who have graduated from the two great typical American institutions of learning—West Point and Annapolis. Taft and Wood and their fellows are spending or have spent the best years of their prime in doing a work which means to them pecuniary loss, at the best a bare livelihood while they are doing it, and are doing it gladly because they realize the truth that the highest privilege that can be given to any American is the privilege of serving his country, his fellow-Americans. As I am speaking to an audience with proper ideals, when I say that Taft and Wood have done all this service to their pecuniary loss I am holding them up not for pity but for admiration. Every man, every woman here should feel it incumbent upon him or her to welcome with joy the chance to render service to the country, service to our people at large, and to accept the rendering of the service as in itself ample repayment therefor. Do not misunderstand me. The average man, the average woman must earn his or her living in one way or another, and I most emphatically do not advise any one to decline to do the humdrum, every-day duties because there may come a chance for the display of heroism. I ask of you the straightforward, earnest, performance of duty in all the little things that come up day by day in business, in domestic life, in every way, and then when the opportunity comes, if you have thus done your duty in the lesser things, I know you will rise level to the heroic needs.

AT BANQUET OF THE UNION LEAGUE CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 14, 1903

Mr. Toastmaster, and you, my Fellow-Members of the Union League Club:

No one can too strongly insist upon the elementary fact that you can not build the superstructure of public virtue save on private virtue. The sum of the parts is the whole, and if we wish to make that whole, the State, the representative and exponent and symbol of decency, it must be so made through the decency, public and private, of the average citizen.

It is absolutely essential if we are to have the proper standard of public life that promise shall be square with performance. A lie is no more to be excused in politics than out of politics. A promise is as binding on the stump as off the stump; and there are two facets to that crystal. In the first place, the man who makes a promise which he does not intend to keep and does not try to keep should rightly be adjudged to have forfeited in some degree what should be every man’s most precious possession—his honor. On the other hand, the public that exacts a promise which ought not to be kept, or which can not be kept, is by just so much forfeiting its right to self-government. There is no surer way of destroying the capacity for self-government in a people than to accustom that people to demanding the impossible or the improper from its public men. No man fit to be a public man will promise either the impossible or the improper; and if the demand is made that he shall do so it means putting a premium upon the unfit in public life. There is the same sound reason for distrusting the man who promises too much in public that there is for distrusting the man who promises too much in private business.

The one indispensable thing for us to keep is a high standard of character for the average American citizen.

AT CARSON CITY, NEVADA, MAY 19, 1903

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

It has been a great pleasure to be introduced in the more than kind words the Governor has used, because the Governor has been a genuine pioneer.

Here in this great Western country, the country which is what it is purely because the pioneers who came here had iron in their veins, because they were able to conquer plain and mountain, and to make the wilderness blossom, we are not to be excused if we do not see to it that the generation that comes after us is trained to have the sum of the fundamental qualities which enabled their fathers to succeed.

I want to say one special word to-day here in Carson City on a subject in which all of our people from the Atlantic to the Pacific take an interest, but which affects in especial the people of the States of the great plains and mountains and affects no State more than it does Nevada—the question of irrigation. Now, as I say, I do not regard that as in any way merely a question of the Rocky Mountain States, of the great plains States, because anything which tends for the well-being of any portion of the Union is therefore for the well-being of all of it, and it was for that reason that I felt warranted in appealing to the people of the seaboard States on the Atlantic, to the people of the States of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley, to say that it was their duty to help in bringing about a scheme of national irrigation, because the interest of any part of this country is the interest of all of it; and no man is a really good American who fails to grasp that fact.

The National Government is still, as you all well know, but as many Easterners do not know, the greatest land owner in the Western States, and among all those States Nevada holds the great proportion of vacant public land, and the need of Nevada for Federal assistance was one of the strongest arguments used in the discussion which preceded the reclamation act of June, 1902, the irrigation act of a year ago. The great extent of the vacant public lands in the State, the fact that its water supply came chiefly from streams rising in the adjoining State of California, and the overwhelming difficulties which for these and other reasons prevented the people of Nevada from efficiently acting in their own interest, made, in my judgment, and, as it proved, in the judgment of the Congress, Federal interference absolutely imperative. It is a matter for the strongest congratulation, not only for the West, but for the whole Nation, that the policy went into effect. It is a matter of special congratulation to Nevada that the Secretary of the Interior, guided in his choice wholly by actual conditions on the ground, has been led to undertake one of the five sets of works which have been first undertaken, here in Nevada, particularly near Reno on the Truckee River, as one of the national projects for the starting and working of the methods of the law. Extensive surveys have already been made, and the projects for water storage and water distribution are at a point which warrants our belief that immediate action is in sight. There are vast tracts of excellent land still in the ownership of the general government here in Nevada and elsewhere to which the reclamation act will bring the flood waters that now annually go to waste. For Nevada most of these waters originate in the high mountains lying in sight of Reno, largely just across the State line in California. Some of these mountains have been included in the forest reserves, and your interests and the interests of the irrigators in California imperatively demand the extension of the forest reserve system so that the source of supply for the great reservoirs and irrigation works may be safe from fire, from over-grazing, and from destructive lumbering. I ask you to pay attention to what I say when I use the word destructive lumbering; no one can desire to prevent, or do anything but help, practical and conservative lumbering. In other words, my fellow-citizens, we have reached a condition in which it must be the object of the Nation and the State to favor the development of the home-maker, of the man who takes up the land intending to keep it for himself and for his children, so that it shall be even of better use to them than to him.

The opportunities for the development of Nevada are very great. Until recently Nevada was only thought of as a mineral and stock-raising State. Much can be done yet as regards both the mineral exploitation and the raising of stock within the State; but now under the stimulus of irrigation it is probable that irrigated agriculture will come to the front, and when it does the population will increase with a rapidity and permanence never before known. The State of Nevada has led the way not only in the strength of its plea for national aid in irrigation, but also in its willingness to assist in the work. I wish to lay emphasis on the fact that in Nevada the authorities have been anxious in every way to help in working out the problem of irrigation; and to pay all acknowledgment to them now. The recent Legislature passed laws which in many respects should serve as models for the legislation of other States. The union of land and water under the national law has been recognized, and so has the fundamental proposition which necessarily underlies the prosperity of all communities in which irrigated agriculture is the chief industry, namely, that the water belongs to the people and can not be made a monopoly. The public appreciation of this fundamental truth that the water belongs to the people to be taken and put to beneficial use will wipe out many controversies which are at present so harmful to the development of the West. And the example of Nevada will be of material aid in bringing about this fortunate result.

As I said of the forests so it is even more true of the water supply. It should be our constant policy by national and by State legislation to see that the water is used for the benefit of the occupants of the soil, of those who till and use the soil, that it is not exploited by any one man or set of men in his or their interests as against the interests of those on the land who are to use it. It is a fundamental truth that the prosperity of any people is simply another term for the prosperity of the home-makers among that people. Our entire policy in irrigation, in forestry, in handling the public lands, should be in recognition of that truth, to favor in every way the man who wishes to take up a given area of soil and thereon to build a home in which he will rear his children as useful citizens of the State.

FROM ADDRESS AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNERSTONE OF THE LEWIS AND CLARK MEMORIAL, PORTLAND, ORE., MAY 21, 1903

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

We come here to-day to lay a cornerstone of a monument that is to call to mind the greatest single pioneering feat on this continent, the voyage across the continent by Lewis and Clark, which rounded out the ripe statesmanship of Jefferson and his fellows by giving to the United States all of the domain between the Mississippi and the Pacific. Following their advent came the reign of the fur trade; and then some sixty years ago those entered in whose children and children’s children were to possess the land. Across the continent in the early 40’s came the ox-drawn white-topped wagons bearing the pioneers, the stalwart, sturdy, sunburned men, with their wives and their little ones, who entered into this country to possess it. You have built up here this wonderful commonwealth, a commonwealth great in its past, and infinitely greater in its future.

It was a pleasure to me to-day to have as part of my escort the men of the Second Oregon, who carried on the expansion of our people beyond the Pacific as your fathers had carried it on to the Pacific. Speaking to you here I do not have to ask you to face the future high of heart and confident of soul. You could not assume any other attitude and be true to your blood, true to the position in which you find yourselves on this continent. I speak to the men of the Pacific Slope, to the men whose predecessors gave us this region because they were not afraid, because they did not seek the life of ease and safety, because their life training was not to shrink from obstacles but to meet and overcome them; and now I ask that this Nation go forward as it has gone forward in the past; I ask that it shape its life in accordance with the highest ideals; I ask that our name be a synonym for truthful and fair dealing with all the nations of the world; and I ask two things in connection with our foreign policy—that we never wrong the weak and that we never flinch from the strong. Base is the man who inflicts a wrong, and base is the man who suffers a wrong to be done him.

We have met to commemorate a mighty pioneer feat, a feat of the old days, when men needed to call upon every ounce of courage and hardihood and manliness they possessed in order to make good our claim to this continent. Let us in our turn with equal courage, equal hardihood and manliness, carry on the task that our forefathers have intrusted to our hands; and let us resolve that we shall leave to our children and our children’s children an even mightier heritage than we received in our turn.

REMARKS IN ACCEPTING SOUVENIR PRESENTED BY THE WORKMEN OF THE NAVY YARD, BREMERTON, WASH., MAY 23, 1903

I want to thank you and through you your fellow workmen for this token. I also wish to repeat what I have said before, that the victories of Manila and Santiago reflect credit not merely upon those who fought, but upon every man who did his work in preparing the ships for battle. There is not a workman in any of our yards who did his duty in connection with the guns, the armor plate, the turrets, the hulls, or anything, who has not his full right to a share in the credit of those victories. You all did your part in winning them just as much as the men who actually fought. Nothing could have pleased me more than to have received this gift from the men of the yard, and I appreciate it.

TO THE ARCTIC BROTHERHOOD, SEATTLE, WASH., MAY 23, 1903

Mr. Chairman, and you, Men and Women of Alaska:

Let me thank you and the members of the Arctic Brotherhood for their greeting. I am happy to say that during the last year or two the National Legislature has begun to realize its responsibilities in reference to Alaska; and that even those of our people who do not live on the Pacific Slope are beginning to understand that in the not distant future Alaska will be not merely a regularly organized Territory, but a great and populous State.

Very few European races have exercised a more profound influence upon Europe, and none has had a more heroic history, than the race occupying the Scandinavian peninsula of the Old World. And Alaska lies in the same latitude as, and can and will in the lifetime of those I am addressing support as great a population as, the Scandinavian peninsula. It is curious how our fate as a Nation has often driven us forward toward greatness in spite of the protests of many of those esteeming themselves in point of training and culture best fitted to shape the Nation’s destiny. In 1803, when we acquired the territory stretching from the Mississippi to the Pacific, there were plenty of wise men who announced that we were acquiring a mere desert, that it was a violation of the Constitution to acquire it, and that the acquisition was fraught with the seeds of the dissolution of the Republic. And think how absolutely the event has falsified the predictions of those men. So when in the late 60’s we by treaty acquired Alaska, this great territory with its infinite possibilities was taken by this Republic in spite of the bitter opposition of many men who were patriots according to their lights and who esteemed themselves far-sighted. And but five years ago there were excellent men who bemoaned the fact that we were obliged during the war with Spain to take possession of the Philippines and to show that we were hereafter to be one of the dominant powers of the Pacific. In every instance how the after events of history have falsified the predictions of the men of little faith! There are critics so feeble and so timid that they shrink back when this Nation asserts that it comes in the category of the nations who dare to be great, and they want to know, forsooth, the cost of greatness and what it means. We do not know the cost, but we know it will be more than repaid ten times over by the result; and what it may ultimately mean we do not know, but we know what the present holds, what the present need demands, and we take the present and hold ourselves ready to abide the result of whatever the future may bring.

When I speak to you of the Pacific Slope, to you of the new Northwest, whose cities are seated here by the Sound, I speak to people abounding in their youth and their virile manhood, who do not fear to grasp opportunity as the opportunity comes, and who weigh slight risk but lightly in the balance when on the other side of the scale comes the greatness of triumph, the greatness of acquisition. We took Alaska thirty-five years ago, and at last we have begun to wake up to the heritage that thereby we have handed over to our children. I speak to you, citizens of Alaska, people who have dwelt therein, to say how much all our people owe to you. During the last year many wise laws have been put upon the statute book in reference to Alaska; not as many as should have been put, but a good many. I earnestly hope that Congress will speedily provide for a delegate from Alaska, so that the people of the Territory may have some recognized exponent whose duty it shall be to place its needs before the National Legislature. Meanwhile, with the assistance of the Senators and Representatives in Congress from this section of the country, I shall do all that in me lies to see that the proper kinds of legislation are enacted for the Territory.

The immediate cause of the great development of Alaska of course is to be found in its mines; but most of the people of this country are wholly in error when they think of the mines as being the sole or even the chief permanent cause of Alaska’s future greatness. Alaska has great possibilities of agricultural and pastoral development. Not only her mines, her fisheries, her forests, but her agriculture and her stock-raising will combine to make Alaska one of the great wealth-producing portions of our Republic. I am anxious that our laws should be framed in the interest of those who intend to go there and stay there and bring up their children there and make it in very fact as well as in name an integral part of this Republic. I ask your help and pledge you my help in the effort to secure such legislation. In the case of the mine you get the metal out of the earth, you can not leave any metal in there to produce other metal; but in the case of the salmon fishery, if you are wise you will insist upon its being carried on under conditions which will make the salmon fishery as valuable in that river thirty years hence as now. Do not take all the salmon out and go away and leave the empty river for your children and children’s children; take it out under conditions—the conditions are ready to be created for you by the National Fish Commission, which has been so singularly successful in its work—which will secure the preservation of that river as a salmon river, which will secure the perpetuation of salmon canneries along its banks, so that it will be not an industry carried on only by Orientals in the employ of three or four alien capitalists, but carried on in such a way as to be a perpetual source of income to the actual settlers resident in the locality. Just in the same way I want to have you see that the lumber industry is exploited in a way which, while giving a great return to those engaged in it at the moment, shall also secure the preservation of the forests for the settlers and the settlers’ children that are to come in and inherit the land. I wish to see such land laws enacted and to see them so administered as to be in the interest of the actual settler who goes to Alaska to live, who desires there to produce crops, to raise stock, to make a home for himself; subject to that condition I desire to see legislation shaped in the spirit of the broadest liberality that will secure the quickest possible development of the resources of Alaska; and with that aim in view to have all the encouragement possible given to those seeking to establish by steamship line and by railway quick and efficient transportation facilities in the Territory.

Few things have been more typical of our people and have been more full of promise for the future than the way in which the resources have been developed; and when one sees what has been done here during the last few years I think we have cause to feel abundantly justified in our belief that the qualities of the old-time pioneers who first penetrated the woody wilderness between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, who then steered their way across vast seas of grass from the Mississippi to the Rockies, who penetrated the passes of the great barren mountains until they came to this, the greatest of all the oceans, still survive in their grandsons and successors. Nor must we forget in speaking of Alaska the immense importance that the Territory has from the standpoint of the needs of the Nation as a whole, as a dominant power in the Pacific. Exactly as with the building of the Isthmian Canal we shall make our Atlantic and our Pacific coasts in effect continuous, so the possession and peopling of the Alaskan seacoast puts us in a position of dominance as regards the Pacific which no other nations share or can share.

FROM ADDRESS AT EVERETT, WASH., MAY 23, 1903

There are few problems which so especially concern Washington, Oregon, and California as the problem of forestry. Nothing has been of better augury for the welfare and prosperity of these great States as well as for the other forest States than the way in which those actively engaged in the lumbering business have come of recent years to work hand in hand with those who have made forestry a study in the effort to preserve the forests. The whole question is a business, an economic question; an economic question for the Nation, a business question for the individual. East of your great mountain chains the question of water supply becomes vital and becomes inseparable from that of forestry. Here that question does not enter in. The lumbering interest is the fourth great business interest in point of importance in the United States. There is engaged in it a capital of over six hundred millions of dollars, and every year the wage-workers in that industry receive one hundred millions of dollars. Such an industry so vitally connected with many others in the country can not with wisdom be neglected, the interests depending upon it are too vast. I do not have to say here in Washington that fire is a great enemy of the forests. Here in Washington it is probable that fire has destroyed more than the axe during the decade in which the axe has been at work.

Our aim should be to get the fullest use from the forest to-day, and yet to get that benefit in ways which will keep the forests for our children in the generations to come; so that, for instance, the country adjoining Puget Sound shall have the lumbering industry as a permanent industry. Recently the trade journals of that industry have been dwelling upon the fact that its very existence is actually at stake, and nowhere in the whole country can the question of forestry be handled better than in this region, because nowhere else is it so easy to produce a second crop. You are fortunate in having such climatic conditions, such conditions of soil, that here more than anywhere else the forest renews itself quickly, so as in a comparatively short number of years to be again a great mercantile and industrial asset. The preservation of our forests depends chiefly upon the wisdom with which the practical lumberman, the practical expert in dealing with the lumber industry, works with the men who have studied forestry under all conditions. I am glad indeed that such co-operation is more and more being accepted as a matter of course by both sides.

FROM ADDRESS AT SEATTLE, WASH., MAY 23, 1903

There is no other body of water in the world which confers upon the commonwealth possessing it quite the natural advantages that Puget Sound confers upon your State. There is no other State in the Union, and I include all of them, which has greater natural advantages and a more assured future of greatness than this State of Washington. Phenomenal though your growth has been, it has barely begun; and your growth in the half century now opening will dwarf absolutely even your growth in the immediate past.

I am speaking in the gateway to Alaska. All our people, even those from the locality whence I come, are beginning to appreciate a little of Alaska’s future. The men of my own age whom I am addressing will not be old men before we see Alaska one of the rich and strong States of the Union. I thank fortune that the National Legislature has begun to wake up to the fact that Alaska has interests of vital importance not merely to her but to the entire Union. Alaska contains a territory which will within this century support as large a population as the combined Scandinavian countries of Europe; those countries from which has sprung as wonderful a race as ever imprinted its characteristics upon the history of civilization. Exactly as the Scandinavian peoples have left their mark upon the entire history of Europe, so we shall see Alaska with its mines, its lumber, its fisheries, with its possibilities in agriculture and stock-raising, with its possibilities of commercial command, with the tremendous development that is going on within it even now, produce as hardy and vigorous a people as any portion of North America.

AT SPOKANE, WASH., MAY 26, 1903

Senator Turner, and you, my Fellow-Americans:

I am in a city at the eastern gateway of this State with the great railroad systems of the State running through it. On the western edge of this State in Puget Sound I have seen the homing places of the great steamship lines, which, in connection with these great railroads, are doing so much to develop the Oriental trade of this country and this State. Washington will owe no small part of its future greatness, and that greatness will be great indeed, to the fact that it is thus doing its share in acquiring for the United States the dominance of the Pacific. Those railroads, the men and the corporations that have built them, have rendered a very great service to the community. The men who are building, the corporations which are building the great steamship lines have likewise rendered a very great service to the community. Every man who has made wealth or used it in developing great legitimate business enterprises has been of benefit and not harm to the country at large. This city has grown by leaps and bounds only when the railroads came to it, when the railroads came to the State; and if the State were now cut off from its connection by rail and by steamship with the rest of the world its position would of course diminish incalculably. Great good has come from the development of our railroad system; great good has been done by the individuals and corporations that have made that development possible; and in return good is done to them, and not harm, when they are required to obey the law. Ours is a government of liberty by, through and under the law. No man is above it and no man is below it. The crime of cunning, the crime of greed, the crime of violence, are all equally crimes, and against them all alike the law must set its face. This is not and never shall be a government either of a plutocracy or of a mob. It is, it has been, and it will be, a government of the people; including alike the people of great wealth and of moderate wealth, the people who employ others, the people who are employed, the wage-worker, the lawyer, the mechanic, the banker, the farmer; including them all, protecting each and every one if he acts decently and squarely, and discriminating against any one of them, no matter from what class he comes, if he does not act squarely and fairly, if he does not obey the law. While all people are foolish if they violate or rail against the law—wicked as well as foolish, but all foolish—yet the most foolish man in this Republic is the man of wealth who complains because the law is administered with impartial justice against or for him. His folly is greater than the folly of any other man who so complains; for he lives and moves and has his being because the law does in fact protect him and his property.

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

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

FROM ADDRESS AT COLUMBIA GARDENS, BUTTE, MONT., MAY 27, 1903

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

It would have been a great pleasure to come to Butte in any event; it is a double pleasure to come here at the invitation of the representatives of the wage-workers of Butte. I do not say merely workingmen, because I hold that every good American who does his duty must be a workingman. There are many different kinds of work to do; but so long as the work is honorable, is necessary, and is well done the man who does it well is entitled to the respect of his fellows.

I have come here to this meeting especially as the invited guest of the wage-workers, and I am happy to be able to say that the kind of speech I will make to you, I would make just in exactly the same language to any group of employers or any set of our citizens in any corner of this Republic. I do not think so far as I know that I have ever promised beforehand anything I did not make a strong effort to make good afterward. It is sometimes very attractive and very pleasant to make any kind of a promise without thinking whether or not you can fulfil it; but in the after event it is always unpleasant when the time for fulfilling comes; for in the long run the most disagreeable truth is a safer companion than the most pleasant falsehood.

To-night I have come hither looking on either hand at the results of the enterprises which have made Butte so great. The man who by the use of his capital develops a great mine, the man who by the use of his capital builds a great railroad, the man who by the use of his capital either individually or joined with others like him does any great legitimate business enterprise, confers a benefit, not a harm, upon the community, and is entitled to be so regarded. He is entitled to the protection of the law, and in return he is to be required himself to obey the law. The law is no respecter of persons. The law is to be administered neither for the rich man as such, nor for the poor man as such. It is to be administered for every man, rich or poor, if he is an honest and law-abiding citizen; and it is to be invoked against any man, rich or poor, who violates it, without regard to which end of the social scale he may stand at, without regard to whether his offence takes the form of greed and cunning, or the form of physical violence; in either case if he violates the law, the law is to be invoked against him; and in so invoking it I have the right to challenge the support of all good citizens and to demand the acquiescence of every good man. I hope I will have it; but once for all I wish it understood that even if I do not have it I shall enforce the law.

The soldiers who fought in the great Civil War fought for liberty under, by, and through the law; and they fought to put a stop once for all to any effort to sunder this country on the lines of sectional hatred; therefore their memory shall be forever precious to our people. We need to keep ever in mind that he is the worst enemy of this country who would strive to separate its people along the lines of section against section, of creed against creed, or of class against class. There are two sides to that. It is a base and an infamous thing for the man of means to act in a spirit of arrogant and brutal disregard of right toward his fellow who has less means; and it is no less infamous, no less base, to act in a spirit of rancor, envy, and hatred against the man of greater means, merely because of his greater means. If we are to preserve this Republic as it was founded, as it was handed down to us by the men of ’61 to ’65, and as it is and will be, we must draw the line never between section and section, never between creed and creed, thrice never between class and class; but along the line of conduct, the line that separates the good citizen wherever he may be found from the bad citizen wherever he may be found. This is not and never shall be a government of a plutocracy; it is not and never shall be a government by a mob. It is as it has been and as it will be, a government in which every honest man, every decent man, be he employer or employed, wage-worker, mechanic, banker, lawyer, farmer, be he who he may, if he acts squarely and fairly, if he does his duty by his neighbor and the State, receives the full protection of the law and is given the amplest chance to exercise the ability that there is within him, alone or in combination with his fellows as he desires. My friends, it is sometimes easier to preach a doctrine under which the millennium will be promised off-hand if you have a particular kind of law, or follow a particular kind of conduct—it is easier, but it is not better. The millennium is not here; it is some thousand years off yet. Meanwhile there must be a good deal of work and struggle, a good deal of injustice; we shall often see the tower of Siloam fall on the just as well as the unjust. We are bound in honor to try to remedy injustice, but if we are wise we will seek to remedy it in practical ways. Above all, remember this: that the most unsafe adviser to follow is the man who would advise us to do wrong in order that we may benefit by it. That man is never a safe man to follow; he is always the most dangerous of guides. The man who seeks to persuade any of us that our advantage comes in wronging or oppressing others can be depended upon, if the opportunity comes, to do wrong to us in his own interest, just as he has endeavored to make us in our supposed interest do wrong to others.

AT THE TABERNACLE, SALT LAKE CITY, UTAH, MAY 29, 1903

Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, Senator Kearns, and you, my Fellow-Americans:

I am particularly glad to have the chance to speak to you here in this city, in Utah, this morning, because you have exemplified a doctrine which it seems to me all-essential for our people ever to keep fresh in their minds—the fact that though natural resources can do a good deal, though the law can do a good deal, the fundamental requisite in building up prosperity and civilization is the requisite of individual character in the individual man or woman. Here in this State the pioneers and those who came after them took not the land that would ordinarily be chosen as land that would yield return with little effort. You took territory which at the outset was called after the desert, and you literally—not figuratively—you literally made the wilderness blossom as the rose. The fundamental element in building up Utah has been the work of the citizens of Utah. And you did it because your people entered in to possess the land and to leave it after them to their children and their children’s children. You here whom I am addressing and your predecessors did not come in to exploit the land and then go somewhere else. You came in, as the Governor has said, as home-makers, to make homes for yourselves and those who should come after you; and that is the only way in which a State can be built up, in which the Nation can be built up. You have built up this great community because you came here with the purpose of making this your abiding home, and of leaving to your children not an impoverished, but an enriched heritage; and I ask that all our people from one ocean to the other, but especially the people of the arid and the semi-arid regions, the people of the great plains, the people of the mountains, approach the problem of taking care of the physical resources of the country in the spirit which has made Utah what it is. You have developed your metal wealth wonderfully; and your growth is not a boom growth—it is a thoroughly healthy, normal growth. During the past decade the population has doubled and the wealth quadrupled; and labor is employed at as high a compensation as is paid elsewhere in the world. Although you are not essentially a mining State, in the last year you marketed thirty millions’ worth of ore; and again you showed your good sense in the way you handled it; for you paid five millions in dividends and you invested the balance in labor and surplus. The effort to make a big showing in dividends is not always healthy for the future. Here you have shown your wonderful capacity to develop the earth so as to make both irrigated agriculture and stock-raising in all its forms two great industries. When you deal with a mine you take the ore out of the earth and take it away, and in the end exhaust the mine. The time may be very long in coming before it is exhausted, or it may be a short time; but in any event, mining means the exhaustion of the mine. But that is exactly what agriculture does not and must not mean.

So far from agriculture properly exhausting the land, it is always the sign of a vicious system of agriculture if the land is rendered poorer by it. The direct contrary should be the fact. After the farmer has had the farm for his life he should be able to hand it to his children as a better farm than it was when he had it.

In these regions, in the Rocky Mountain regions, it is especially incumbent upon us to treat the question of the natural pasturage, the question of the forests, and the question of the use of the waters, all from the one standpoint—the standpoint of the far-seeing statesman, of the far-seeing citizen, who wishes to preserve and not to exhaust the resources of the country, who wishes to see those resources come into the hands not of a few men of great wealth, least of all into the hands of a few men who will speculate in them; but be distributed among many men, each of whom intends to make his home in the land.

This whole so-called arid and semi-arid region is by nature the stock range of the Nation. One of the questions which are rising to confront us is how this range may be made to produce the greatest number and best quality of horses, cattle, and sheep, not only this year, not only next year, but for this generation and the next generation. The old system of grazing the ranges so closely as to injure the whole crop of grass was a serious detriment to the development of the West, a serious detriment to the development of our people. The ranges must be treated as a great invested capital; and that old system tended to dissipate and partially to destroy that capital. That is something that we can not as a Nation of home-makers permit. The wise man, the wise industry, the wise nation, maintains such capital unimpaired and tries to increase it; and more and more the range lands will be used in conjunction with the small irrigable areas which they include; so that the industry can take on a more stable character than ever before. It is impossible permanently, although it may be advisable for the time being, to move stock in a body from summer to winter ranges across country which can be made into homesteads, because when the country can itself be taken by actual settlers, in the long run it will only be possible to move the stock through hundreds of miles of dusty lanes where they can not graze, where they can not live. Our aim must be steadily to help develop the settler, the man who lives in the land and in growing up with it and raising his children to own it after him. More and more hereafter the stock owners will have the necessity forced upon them of providing green summer pasturage within the limits of their own ranges; and so the question of irrigation is wellnigh as important to the stockmen as to the agriculturist proper.

In the same way our mountain forests must be preserved from the harm done by over-grazing. Let all the grazing be done in them that can be done without injury to them, but do not let the mountain forests be despoiled by the man who will over-graze them and destroy them for the sake of three years’ use, and then go somewhere else, and leave by so much diminished the heritage of those who remain permanently in the land. I believe that already the movement has begun which will make in the long run the stock-raisers,—of whom I have been one myself, whose business I know, and with whom I feel the heartiest sympathy,—through the enlightenment of their own self-interest, become the heartiest defenders and the chief beneficiaries of the wise and moderate use of forest ranges, both within and without the forest reserves. It is and it must be the definite policy of this government to consider the good of all its citizens—stockmen, lumbermen, irrigators, and all others—in dealing with the forest reserves; and for that reason I most earnestly desire in every way to bring about the heartiest co-operation between the men who are doing the actual business of stock-raising, the actual business of irrigated agriculture, the actual business of lumbering,—the closest and most intimate relations, the heartiest co-operation between them and the government at Washington through the Department of Agriculture. Of course I do not have to say to any audience of intelligent people that nothing is such an enemy to the stock industry as persistent over-grazing. We shall have not far hence to raise the problem of the best method of making use of the public range. Our people have not as yet settled in their own minds what is that best method. In some way there will have to be formed such regulation as shall without undue restriction prevent the needless over-grazing, while keeping the public lands open to settlement through homestead entry. Such a policy would, of course, be of the most far-reaching benefit to the whole range industry. It is the same in dealing with our forest reserves. Almost every industry depends in some more or less vital way upon the preservation of the forests; and while citizens die, the government and the nation do not die, and we are bound in dealing with the forests to exercise the foresight necessary to use them now, but to use them in such a way as will also keep them for those who are to come after us.

The first great object of the forest reserves is, of course, the first great object of the whole land policy of the United States,—the creation of homes, the favoring of the home-maker. That is why we wish to provide for the home-makers of the present and the future the steady and continuous supply of timber, grass, and above all, of water. That is the object of the forest reserves, and that is why I bespeak your cordial co-operation in their preservation. Remember you must realize, what I thoroughly realize, that however wise a policy may be it can be enforced only if the people of the States believe in it. We can enforce the provisions of the forest reserve law or of any other law only so far as the best sentiment of the community or the State will permit that enforcement. Therefore it lies primarily not with the people at Washington, but with you, yourselves, to see that such policies are supported as will redound to the benefit of the home makers and therefore the sure and steady building up of the State as a whole.

One word as to the greatest question with which our people as a whole have to deal in the matter of internal development to-day—the question of irrigation. Not of recent years has any more important law been put upon the statute books of the Federal Government than the law a year ago providing for the first time that the National Government should interest itself in aiding and building up a system of irrigated agriculture in the Rocky Mountains and plains States. Here the government had to a large degree to sit at the feet of Gamaliel in the person of Utah; for what you had done and learned was of literally incalculable benefit to those engaged in framing and getting through the national irrigation law. Irrigation was first practiced on a large scale in this State. The necessity of the pioneers here led to the development of irrigation to a degree absolutely unknown before on this continent. In no respect is the wisdom of the early pioneers made more evident than in the sedulous care they took to provide for small farms, carefully tilled by those who lived on and benefited from them; and hence it comes about that the average amount of land required to support a family in Utah is smaller than in any other part of the United States. We all know that when you once get irrigation applied rain is a very poor substitute for it. The Federal Government must co-operate with Utah and Utah people for a further extension of the irrigated area. Many of the simpler problems of obtaining and applying water have already been solved and so well solved that, as I have said, some of the most important provisions of the Federal act, such as the control of the irrigating works by the communities they serve, such as making the water appurtenant to the land and not a source of speculation apart from the land, were based upon the experience of Utah. Of course the control of the larger streams which flow through more than one State must come under the Federal Government. Many of the great tracts which will ultimately so enlarge the cultivated area of Utah, which will ultimately so increase its population and wealth, are surrounded with intricate complications because of the high development which irrigation has already reached in this State. Necessarily the Federal officers charged with the execution of the law must proceed with great caution so as not to disturb present vested rights; but subject to that, they will go forward as fast as they can. They realize, and all men who have actually done irrigating here will realize, that no man is more timid than the practical irrigator regarding any change in the water distribution. He wants to look well before he leaps. He has learned from bitter experience what damage can come from well meant changes hastily made. The government can do a good deal; the government will do a good deal; but your experience here in Utah has shown that the greatest results which are accomplishing most spring directly from the sturdy courage, the self-denial, the willingness with iron resolution to endure the risk and the suffering, of the pioneers; for they were the men who sought and found a livelihood in what was once a desert, and they must be protected in the legitimate fruits of their toil.

One of the tasks that the government must do here in Utah is to build reservoirs for the storage of the flood waters, to undertake works too great to be undertaken by private capital. Great as the task is, and great as its benefits will become, the government must do still more. Besides the storage of the water there must be protection of the watersheds; and that is why I ask you to help the National Government protect the watersheds by protecting the forests upon them.

AT FREEPORT, ILL., JUNE 3, 1903

Congressman Hitt, and you, my Fellow-Countrymen:

Here where we meet to-day there occurred one of those memorable scenes in accordance with which the whole future history of nations is molded. Here were spoken winged words that flew through immediate time and that will fly through that portion of eternity recorded in the history of our race. Here was sounded the keynote of the struggle which after convulsing the Nation, made it in fact what it had only been in name,—at once united and free. It is eminently fitting that this monument, given by the women of this city in commemoration of the great debate that here took place, should be dedicated by the men whose deeds made good the words of Abraham Lincoln—the soldiers of the Civil War. The word was mighty. Had it not been for the word the deeds could not have taken place; but without the deeds the word would have been the idlest breath. It is forever to the honor of our nation that we brought forth the statesman who, with far-sighted vision, could pierce the clouds that obscured the sight of the keenest of his fellows, could see what the future inevitably held; and moreover that we had back of the statesman and behind him the men to whom it was given to fight in the greatest war ever waged for the good of mankind, for the betterment of the world.

I have literally but a moment here. I could not resist the chance that was offered me to stop and dedicate this monument, for great though we now regard Abraham Lincoln, my countrymen, the future will put him on an even higher pinnacle than we have put him. In all history I do not believe that there is to be found an orator whose speeches will last as enduringly as certain of the speeches of Lincoln; and in all history, with the sole exception of the man who founded this Republic, I do not think there will be found another statesman at once so great and so single-hearted in his devotion to the weal of his people. We can not too highly honor him; and the highest way in which we can honor him is to see that our homage is not only homage of words; that to lip loyalty we join the loyalty of the heart; that we pay honor to the memory of Abraham Lincoln by so conducting ourselves, by so carrying ourselves as citizens of this Republic, that we shall hand on undiminished to our children and our children’s children the heritage we received from the men who upheld the statesmanship of Lincoln in the council, who made good the soldiership of Grant in the field.

AT THE LINCOLN MONUMENT, SPRINGFIELD, ILL., JUNE 4, 1903

It is a good thing that the guard around the tomb of Lincoln should be composed of colored soldiers. It was my own good fortune at Santiago to serve beside colored troops. A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterward. More than that no man is entitled to, and less than that no man shall have.

AT THE CONSECRATION OF GRACE MEMORIAL REFORMED CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 7, 1903

I shall ask your attention to three lines of the Dedication Canticle: “Serve the Lord with gladness: enter into His gates with thanksgiving, and into His courts with praise. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul with vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.”

Better lines could surely not be brought into any dedication service of a church; and it is a happy thing that we should have repeated them this morning. This church is consecrated to the service of the Lord; and we can serve Him by the way we serve our fellow-men. This church is consecrated to service and duty. It was written of old that “by their fruits ye shall know them”; and we can show the faith that is in us, we can show the sincerity of our devotion, by the fruits we bring forth. The man who is not a tender and considerate husband, a loving and wise father, is not serving the Lord when he goes to church; so with the woman; so with all who come here. Our being in this church, our communion here with one another, our sitting under the pastor and hearing from him the word of God, must, if we are sincere, show their effects in our lives outside.

We of the Dutch and German Reformed Churches, like our brethren of the Lutheran Church, have a peculiar duty to perform in this great country of ours, a country still in the making, for we have the duty peculiarly incumbent upon us to take care of our brethren who come each year from over seas to our shores. The man going to a new country is torn by the roots from all his old associations, and there is great danger to him in the time before he gets his roots down into the new country, before he brings himself into touch with his fellows in the new land. For that reason I always take a peculiar interest in the attitude of our churches toward the immigrants who come to these shores. I feel that we should be peculiarly watchful over them, because of our own history, because we or our fathers came here under like conditions. Now that we have established ourselves let us see to it that we stretch out the hand of help, the hand of brotherhood, toward the new-comers, and help them as speedily as possible to get into such relations that it will be easy for them to walk well in the new life. We are not to be excused if we selfishly sit down and enjoy gifts that have been given to us and do not try to share them with our poorer fellows coming from every part of the world, who many of them stand in such need of the helping hand; who often not only meet too many people anxious to associate with them for their detriment, but often too few anxious to associate with them for their good.

I trust that with the consecration of each new church of the Reformed creed in this our country there will be established a fresh centre of effort to get at and to help for their good the people that yearly come from over seas to us. No more important work can be done by our people; important to the cause of Christianity, important to the cause of true national life and greatness here in our own land.

Another thing: let us so far as strength is given us make it evident to those who look on and who are not of us that our faith is not one of words merely; that it finds expression in deeds. One sad, one lamentable phase of human history is that the very loftiest words, implying the loftiest ideas, have often been used as cloaks for the commission of dreadful deeds of iniquity. No more hideous crimes have ever been committed by men than those that have been committed in the name of liberty, of order, of brotherhood, of religion. People have butchered one another under circumstances of dreadful atrocity, claiming all the time to be serving the object of the brotherhood of man or of the fatherhood of God. We must in our lives, in our efforts, endeavor to further the cause of brotherhood in the human family; and we must do it in such a way that the men anxious to find subject for complaint or derision in the churches of the United States, in our church, may not be able to find it by pointing out any contrast between our professions and our lives.

This church is consecrated to-day to duty and to service, to the worship of the Creator, and to an earnest effort on our part so to shape our lives among ourselves and in relation to the outside world that we may feel that we have done our part in bringing a little nearer the day when there shall be on this earth a genuine brotherhood of man.

AT THE SAENGERFEST, BALTIMORE, MD., JUNE 15, 1903

My Fellow-Citizens:

Let me in the first place congratulate the city of Baltimore upon what she has done and upon the way she has done it; and then let me welcome the members of the Saengerfest Association and all the guests of Baltimore this evening. Since the beginning of our country’s history many different race strains have entered to make up the composite American. Out of and from each we have gained something for our national character; to each we owe something special for what it has contributed to us as a people.

It is almost exactly two hundred and twenty years ago that the first marked immigration from Germany to what were then the colonies in this Western Hemisphere began. As is inevitable with any pioneers those pioneers of the German race on this side of the ocean had to encounter bitter privation, had to struggle against want in many forms; had to meet and overcome hardship; for the people that go forth to seek their well-being in strange lands must inevitably be ready to pay as the price of success the expenditure of all that there is in them to overcome the obstacles in their way. It was some fifty years later that the great tide of German immigration in colonial times began to flow hither; one of the leaders in it being Muhlenburg, the founder of a family which has contributed to military and civil life some of the worthiest figures in American history. The first of the famous speakers of the House of Representatives was Muhlenburg, of German ancestry.

Baltimore is a centre in that region of our land where from the earliest days there was that intermingling of ethnic strains which finally went to the making of the Americans who in ’76 made this country a nation. Within the boundaries of this State was founded that colony which first of all on this western continent saw a government modeled upon these principles of religious freedom and toleration which we now regard as the birthrights of American citizens.

Throughout our career of development the German immigration to this country went steadily onward, and they who came here, and their sons and grandsons, played an ever-increasing part in the history of our people—a part that culminated in the Civil War; for every lover of the Union must ever bear in mind what was done in this commonwealth as in the commonwealth of Missouri, by the folk of German birth or origin who served so loyally the flag that was theirs by inheritance or adoption.

And here in this city I would be unwilling to let an occasion like this pass without recalling the part of incalculable importance played by the members of the Turn Verein of Baltimore in saving Baltimore to the Union. In congratulating every man here to whom it was given to fight in the great Civil War, in congratulating the men of Baltimore who in these dark days followed the lead of Sigel, Rapp, and Blumenberg in playing well and nobly their part in upholding the hands of Abraham Lincoln, I congratulate them thrice over because it was given to them to fight in a contest where the victors and the vanquished alike have bequeathed to us as a heritage the memory of the valor and the loyalty to the right as to each it was given to see the right, shown alike by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray, in the great days of the Civil War. Terrible though that contest was, in which with blood and tears and sweat, with the suffering of men and the sorrow of women, the generation of Lincoln and Grant purchased for us peace and union, it paid for itself over and over again by what it left to us—not merely a reunited land, not merely a land in which freedom was a fact instead of only a boast, but above all the right as Americans to feel within us the lift toward lofty things which must come to those who know that their fathers and forefathers have in the supreme crisis entirely shown themselves fit to rank among the men of all time.

I want to say just one thing more. I feel that the men of this Association and of kindred associations are not only adding to the common fund of pleasure, but are doing genuine missionary work of a needed kind when they hold such a festival as this. I wish that everywhere in our country we could see clubs and associations including all our citizens, similar in character to that Society which has furnished the reason for the assembling of this great audience to-night. No greater contribution to American social life could possibly be made than by instilling into it the capacity for Gemüthlichkeit. No greater good can come to our people than to encourage in them a capacity for enjoyment which shall discriminate sharply between what is vicious and what is pleasant. Nothing can add more to our capacity for healthy social enjoyment than, by force of example no less than by precept, to encourage the formation of societies which by their cultivation of music, vocal and instrumental, give great lift to the artistic side, the æsthetic side of our nature; and especially is that true when we remember that no man is going to go very far wrong if he belongs to a society where he can take his wife with him to enjoy it.

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA, CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA., JUNE 16, 1903

Mr. Chairman; my Fellow-Americans:

It is to me to-day a double pleasure to be with you; in the first place, because the University of Virginia is one among that limited number of institutions of learning to which because of its historic association every American proud of his country and his country’s history must turn; and in the next place, because I have just finished a trip to and fro across this continent, which at almost every step has reminded me of some great deed done by a Virginian or a descendant of a Virginian, in that wonderful formative period which has occupied more than half of this Republic’s life; going across the Alleghanies in the path over the mountains which men of Virginia first crossed to found the commonwealth of Kentucky; beyond the Ohio, which was crossed by a military force carrying the American flag for the first time when a son of Virginia, George Rogers Clark, led his little band of backwoods riflemen to conquer what is now the heart of this Republic, and that in the middle of the Revolutionary War. Then I crossed the Mississippi and went through that great region of prairie, plain, and mountain, now dotted with cities, each filled with the fruits of our material civilization, cities placed upon spots which were unknown to any map maker but a century ago; thence to the Pacific Ocean, I went through the regions which mark the two greatest territorial expansions of this Nation; the greatest of which, by the fact of its acquisition, is in itself a tribute most to that man who founded this University—President Thomas Jefferson—and which was explored by two Virginians born not far from this neighborhood—Lewis and Clark. When I got south of the limits of the old Louisiana Purchase I came into that region acquired as the result of the Mexican War—the region in territorial extent next to the Louisiana Purchase; and in that war the two foremost figures were men likewise born in Virginia—Zachary Taylor and Winfield Scott.

Virginia has always rightly prided herself upon the character of the men whom she has sent into public life. No more wonderful example of governmental ability, ability in statecraft and public administration, has ever been given than by the history of Virginia’s sons in public life. I feel that this University, which so peculiarly embodies the ideal of Virginia, is in no small degree accountable for the happy keeping up of the spirit which sends into public life men of whom their constituents exact that they shall possess both courage and courtesy; and that is the reason why—as I am glad to say here in the presence of the two United States Senators from Virginia, both of them graduates of this University—whether one agrees or differs with them it is so genuine a pleasure to be brought into contact with them in handling public affairs.

In the very able address to which we have had the honor of listening it is pointed out that in mere years the history of this University is not long. Years count differently at different places and at different times. Fifty years of Europe are very much longer than a cycle of Cathay; and the period grows longer still when you take it across into the Western Hemisphere. To us of this Nation there must always be the charm of old historic associations inseparably connected with this institution, the birth of which will always recall the names of three of our greatest Presidents, and from which one can wellnigh see the former abodes of all three of those Presidents—Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe.

Let me acknowledge a piece of personal indebtedness to this institution. When last year we sought at Washington to restore the White House, which ought to be always kept as the historic building of the Nation, to what it was planned to be by the founders of the Republic, we came here to study the building which represented in its existence the realization of the ideas of certain of those founders of the Republic, and gained from our study of a portion of this University an idea of the plan along which the restoration of the White House was to proceed.

The University is not old in years as years are counted in an older world, but there are very few institutions of learning in Europe which, however old, have such an honor roll of service to the State, in the council chambers of the State, and of service on the tented field, which have such an honor roll of statesmen and soldiers, as the roll that can be furnished by reading the list of the graduates of this University of Virginia. The University has been prolific of men who have gone into public life; but it is not only in public life that the record made by the University is imperishable. The strangest, in some ways the most brilliant name to be found in American letters, the name of the man who contributed something purely individual in poetry and in prose, not merely to the literature of this country, not merely to the literature of our tongue, but to the literature of mankind—the name of Edgar Allan Poe, is to be found upon your rolls. It is a pleasure to one who earnestly hopes to see the literary habit in American life kept up and who hopes to see a keeping up of productive scholarship and literature, to be able to number among his friends one of those younger literary men of whom it can be safely asserted that they have added something permanent to letters, in the person of one of your graduates—my friend, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page.

I owe you for other things. When I wished to choose the Surgeon-General of the Navy I had to go to Virginia and to the University of Virginia to find the man whom I esteem, not only because of his ability as a public servant, but because of those qualities which will render him ever one for whom I and mine feel the warmest and liveliest personal affection. Finally, when I had to choose an Ambassador to represent us at the court of Russia, I had to take another graduate of your University—Mr. McCormick. You will pardon me one personal allusion; I shall never forget as long as I live certain of your graduates who served in my regiment during the Cuban War.

The University of Virginia has stood for much in our national life. It is something to stand merely for such beauty as your buildings and campus represent here. It is a good thing for any nation to have as beautiful an institution of learning as is this University. It is a good thing for the taste of a nation to have such an example of good taste ever before it. You stand for the production of scholarship; for the production of men who are to do well for the State if ever the need of calling upon them for their services may arise; but above all, as has been so well said in the address to which we have listened to-day, the University of Virginia stands for the production of men; of men who are to do each a man’s duty in the world. A good American never owes anything that he does not seek to repay. The man who is content to go through life owing his alma mater for an education for which he has made no adequate return is not true to the ideals of American citizenship. He is in honor bound to make such return. He can make it in but one way; he can return what he owes to his alma mater only by making his alma mater proud of what he does in service rendered to his fellow-men. That is the type of return we have the right to expect of the University men in this country.

TO THE HOLY NAME SOCIETY AT OYSTER BAY, N. Y., AUGUST 16, 1903

Very Reverend Dean, Reverend Clergy, and you of the Holy Name Society:

I count myself fortunate in having the chance to say a word to you to-day; and at the outset let me, Father Power, on behalf of my neighbors, your congregation, welcome all your guests here to Oyster Bay. I have a partial right to join in that welcome myself, for it was my good fortune in the days of Father Power’s predecessor, Father Belford, to be the first man to put down a small contribution for the erection of your church here. I am particularly glad to see such a society as this flourishing as your society has flourished, because the future welfare of our Nation depends upon the way in which we can combine in our men—in our young men—decency and strength. Just this morning when attending service on the great battleship Kearsarge I listened to a sermon addressed to the officers and enlisted men of the navy, in which the central thought was that each American must be a good man or he could not be a good citizen. And one of the things dwelt upon in that sermon was the fact that a man must be clean of mouth as well as clean of life—must show by his words as well as by his actions his fealty to the Almighty if he was to be what we have a right to expect from men wearing the national uniform. We have good Scriptural authority for the statement that it is not what comes into a man’s mouth but what goes out of it that counts. I am not addressing weaklings, or I should not take the trouble to come here. I am addressing strong, vigorous men, who are engaged in the active hard work of life; and life to be worth living must be a life of activity and hard work. I am speaking to men engaged in the hard, active work of life, and therefore to men who will count for good or for evil. It is peculiarly incumbent upon you who have strength to set a right example to others. I ask you to remember that you can not retain your self-respect if you are loose and foul of tongue, that a man who is to lead a clean and honorable life must inevitably suffer if his speech likewise is not clean and honorable. Every man here knows the temptations that beset all of us in this world. At times any man will slip. I do not expect perfection, but I do expect genuine and sincere effort toward being decent and cleanly in thought, in word, and in deed. As I said at the outset, I hail the work of this society as typifying one of those forces which tend to the betterment and uplifting of our social system. Our whole effort should be toward securing a combination of the strong qualities with those qualities which we term virtues. I expect you to be strong. I would not respect you if you were not. I do not want to see Christianity professed only by weaklings; I want to see it a moving spirit among men of strength. I do not expect you to lose one particle of your strength or courage by being decent. On the contrary, I should hope to see each man who is a member of this society, from his membership in it become all the fitter to do the rough work of the world; all the fitter to work in time of peace; and if, which may Heaven forfend, war should come, all the fitter to fight in time of war. I desire to see in this country the decent men strong and the strong men decent, and until we get that combination in pretty good shape we are not going to be by any means as successful as we should be. There is always a tendency among very young men and among boys who are not quite young men as yet to think that to be wicked is rather smart; to think it shows that they are men. Oh, how often you see some young fellow who boasts that he is going to “see life,” meaning by that that he is going to see that part of life which it is a thousandfold better should remain unseen! I ask that every man here constitute himself his brother’s keeper by setting an example to that younger brother which will prevent him from getting such a false estimate of life. Example is the most potent of all things. If any one of you in the presence of younger boys, and especially the younger people of your own family, misbehave yourself, if you use coarse and blasphemous language before them, you can be sure that these younger people will follow your example and not your precept. It is no use to preach to them if you do not act decently yourself. You must feel that the most effective way in which you can preach is by your practice.

As I was driving up here a friend who was with us said that in his experience the boy who went out into life with a foul tongue was apt so to go because his kinsfolk, at least his intimate associates, themselves had foul tongues. The father, the elder brothers, the friends, can do much toward seeing that the boys as they become men become clean and honorable men.

I have told you that I wanted you not only to be decent, but to be strong. These boys will not admire virtue of a merely anæmic type. They believe in courage, in manliness. They admire those who have the quality of being brave, the quality of facing life as life should be faced, the quality that must stand at the root of good citizenship in peace or in war. If you are to be effective as good Christians you must possess strength and courage, or your example will count for little with the young, who admire strength and courage. I want to see you, the men of the Holy Name Society, you who embody the qualities which the younger people admire, by your example give those young people the tendency, the trend, in the right direction; and remember that this example counts in many other ways besides cleanliness of speech. I want to see every man able to hold his own with the strong, and also ashamed to oppress the weak. I want to see each young fellow able to do a man’s work in the world, and of a type which will not permit imposition to be practiced upon him. I want to see him too strong of spirit to submit to wrong, and, on the other hand, ashamed to do wrong to others. I want to see each man able to hold his own in the rough work of actual life outside, and also, when he is at home, a good man, unselfish in dealing with wife, or mother, or children. Remember that the preaching does not count if it is not backed up by practice. There is no good in your preaching to your boys to be brave, if you run away. There is no good in your preaching to them to tell the truth if you do not. There is no good in your preaching to them to be unselfish if they see you selfish with your wife, disregardful of others. We have a right to expect that you will come together in meetings like this; that you will march in processions; that you will join in building up such a great and useful association as this; and, even more, we have a right to expect that in your own homes and among your own associates you will prove by your deeds that yours is not a lip loyalty merely; that you show in actual practice the faith that is in you.

ON BOARD THE KEARSARGE, DURING THE REVIEW OF THE FLEET, AUGUST 17, 1903

Officers and Enlisted Men:

I wish to say a word of thanks to you on behalf of the people of the United States. There are many public servants whom I hold in high esteem, but there are no others whom as a class I hold in quite the esteem I do the officers and enlisted men of the navy and the army of the United States.

In doing your work here it should all be done with an eye toward the day when upon every man, from the admiral to the lowest in rank, may rest the responsibility as to whether or not a new page of honor in American history shall be turned. As I passed the Olympia I remembered her victory of May 1, 1898, which made her name forever one of renown in our history. But all aboard her had been equipped for the work by days and months, usually by years, of what must have often been irksome duty. In speaking to all of you I want a chance to say a word of special recognition to the gun pointers. The shots that hit are the shots that tell. They are what make the navy prove itself equal to any need. I am happy to say that the American seamen have never been found deficient in the fighting edge—the first requisite of the fighting man. I do not praise you for being brave; that is expected. The coward is to be condemned rather than the brave man to be praised. I expect every one to show a perfect willingness to die rather than to see the slightest stain put upon the American flag. But in addition you must know how to use to the utmost advantage the gear and the weapons. You must know how to fight as well as know how to die; only thus can you become the most efficient fighting force in the world. I again thank you for what you are. A peculiar responsibility attaches to each and every one of you. It has been a pleasure to see the ship and the guns, but, above all, the men behind the guns.

ON BOARD THE OLYMPIA DURING THE REVIEW OF THE FLEET, AUGUST 17, 1903

As President of the United States, I wish, on behalf of the entire country, to greet you as representatives of the officers and enlisted men of the United States Navy. Every man aboard the Olympia must feel that on him rests a double duty, to see to it that the ship’s name shall be for evermore a symbol of victory and of glory to all the people of our country. Nothing pleases me more than to see to-day for myself how high is the standard of the enlisted men of the United States Navy. I do not believe that our navy has ever been at a higher point of efficiency. Month by month the already high standard is being raised even higher. All alike share in the duty, and share in the honor which comes if the duty is well done. Whether the service is rendered in the conning tower, or in the gun-turrets, or in the engine-room, it matters not, so long as the service itself is of the highest possible kind. This ship commemorates forever the name of Admiral Dewey, as the Hartford commemorates that of Admiral Farragut. And I ask you all, as Americans proud of your country, from the admiral down to the last enlisted landsman, or the youngest apprentice, to appreciate alike the high honor and heavy responsibility of your positions.

AT THE STATE FAIR, SYRACUSE, N. Y., SEPTEMBER 7, 1903

Governor Higgins; my Fellow-Citizens:

In speaking on Labor Day at the annual fair of the New York State Agricultural Association, it is natural to keep especially in mind the two bodies who compose the majority of our people and upon whose welfare depends the welfare of the entire State. If circumstances are such that thrift, energy, industry, and forethought enable the farmer, the tiller of the soil, on the one hand, and the wage-worker, on the other, to keep themselves, their wives, and their children in reasonable comfort, then the State is well off, and we can be assured that the other classes in the community will likewise prosper. On the other hand, if there is in the long run a lack of prosperity among the two classes named, then all other prosperity is sure to be more seeming than real. It has been our profound good fortune as a Nation that hitherto, disregarding exceptional periods of depression and the normal and inevitable fluctuations, there has been on the whole from the beginning of our government to the present day a progressive betterment alike in the condition of the tiller of the soil and in the condition of the man who, by his manual skill and labor, supports himself and his family, and endeavors to bring up his children so that they may be at least as well off as, and if possible better off than, he himself has been. There are, of course, exceptions, but as a whole the standard of living among the farmers of our country has risen from generation to generation, and the wealth represented on the farms has steadily increased, while the wages of labor have likewise risen, both as regards the actual money paid and as regards the purchasing power which that money represents.

Side by side with this increase in the prosperity of the wage-worker and the tiller of the soil has gone on a great increase in prosperity among the business men and among certain classes of professional men; and the prosperity of these men has been partly the cause and partly the consequence of the prosperity of farmer and wage-worker. It can not be too often repeated that in this country, in the long run, we all of us tend to go up or go down together. If the average of well-being is high, it means that the average wage-worker, the average farmer, and the average business man are all alike well off. If the average shrinks, there is not one of these classes which will not feel the shrinkage. Of course there are always some men who are not affected by good times, just as there are some men who are not affected by bad times. But speaking broadly, it is true that if prosperity comes all of us tend to share more or less therein, and that if adversity comes each of us, to a greater or less extent, feels the tension. Unfortunately, in this world the innocent frequently find themselves obliged to pay some of the penalty for the misdeeds of the guilty; and so if hard times come, whether they be due to our own fault or to our misfortune, whether they be due to some burst of speculative frenzy that has caused a portion of the business world to lose its head—a loss which no legislation can possibly supply—or whether they be due to any lack of wisdom in a portion of the world of labor—in each case the trouble once started is felt more or less in every walk of life.

It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national life that we should recognize this community of interest among our people. The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is, not to represent any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests, but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all classes and to work for their interests by working for our common country.

We can keep our government on a sane and healthy basis, we can make and keep our social system what it should be, only on condition of judging each man, not as a member of a class, but on his worth as a man. It is an infamous thing in our American life, and fundamentally treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any man any test save that of his personal worth, or to draw between two sets of men any distinction save the distinction of conduct, the distinction that marks off those who do well and wisely from those who do ill and foolishly. There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward great public and social questions should be determined, not by the accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set principles which represent the innermost souls of men.

The failure in public and in private life thus to treat each man on his own merits, the recognition of this government as being either for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove fatal to our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have always proved fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy republican government must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as it becomes government by a class or by a section it departs from the old American ideal.

It is, of course, the merest truism to say that free institutions are of avail only to people who possess the high and peculiar characteristics needed to take advantage of such institutions. The century that has just closed has witnessed many and lamentable instances in which people have seized a government free in form, or have had it bestowed upon them, and yet have permitted it under the forms of liberty to become some species of despotism or anarchy, because they did not have in them the power to make this seeming liberty one of deed instead of one merely of word. Under such circumstances the seeming liberty may be supplanted by a tyranny or despotism in the first place, or it may reach the road of despotism by the path of license and anarchy. It matters but little which road is taken. In either case the same goal is reached. People show themselves just as unfit for liberty whether they submit to anarchy or to tyranny; and class government, whether it be the government of a plutocracy or the government of a mob, is equally incompatible with the principles established in the days of Washington and perpetuated in the days of Lincoln.

Many qualities are needed by a people which would preserve the power of self-government in fact as well as in name. Among these qualities are forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint, the courage which refuses to abandon one’s own rights, and the disinterested and kindly good sense which enables one to do justice to the rights of others. Lack of strength and lack of courage unfit men for self-government on the one hand; and on the other, brutal arrogance, envy, in short, any manifestation of the spirit of selfish disregard, whether of one’s own duties or of the rights of others, are equally fatal.

In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a government for the benefit of the people as a whole.

Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in those of mediæval Italy and mediæval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and wherever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably proved fatal to the state. In the final result it mattered not one whit whether the movement was in favor of one class or of another. The outcome was equally fatal, whether the country fell into the hands of a wealthy oligarchy which exploited the poor or whether it fell under the domination of a turbulent mob which plundered the rich. In both cases there resulted violent alternations between tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty to all citizens—destruction in the end overtaking the class which had for the moment been victorious as well as that which had momentarily been defeated. The death knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of others.

The reason why our future is assured lies in the fact that our people are genuinely skilled in and fitted for self-government and therefore will spurn the leadership of those who seek to excite this ferocious and foolish class antagonism. The average American knows not only that he himself intends to do about what is right, but that his average fellow-countryman has the same intention and the same power to make his intention effective. He knows, whether he be business man, professional man, farmer, mechanic, employer, or wage-worker, that the welfare of each of these men is bound up with the welfare of all the others; that each is neighbor to the other, is actuated by the same hopes and fears, has fundamentally the same ideals, and that all alike have much the same virtues and the same faults. Our average fellow-citizen is a sane and healthy man, who believes in decency and has a wholesome mind. He therefore feels an equal scorn alike for the man of wealth guilty of the mean and base spirit of arrogance toward those who are less well off, and for the man of small means who in his turn either feels, or seeks to excite in others the feeling of mean and base envy for those who are better off. The two feelings, envy and arrogance, are but opposite sides of the same shield, but different developments of the same spirit. Fundamentally, the unscrupulous rich man who seeks to exploit and oppress those who are less well off is in spirit not opposed to, but identical with, the unscrupulous poor man who desires to plunder and oppress those who are better off. The courtier and the demagogue are but developments of the same type under different conditions, each manifesting the same servile spirit, the same desire to rise by pandering to base passions; though one panders to power in the shape of a single man and the other to power in the shape of a multitude. So likewise the man who wishes to rise by wronging others must by right be contrasted, not with the man who likewise wishes to do wrong, though to a different set of people, but with the man who wishes to do justice to all people and to wrong none.

The line of cleavage between good and bad citizenship lies, not between the man of wealth who acts squarely by his fellows and the man who seeks each day’s wage by that day’s work, wronging no one and doing his duty by his neighbor; nor yet does this line of cleavage divide the unscrupulous wealthy man who exploits others in his own interest, from the demagogue, or from the sullen and envious being who wishes to attack all men of property, whether they do well or ill. On the contrary, the line of cleavage between good citizenship and bad citizenship separates the rich man who does well from the rich man who does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the poor man of bad conduct. This line of cleavage lies at right angles to any such arbitrary line of division as that separating one class from another, one locality from another, or men with a certain degree of property from those of a less degree of property.

The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty, strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to his family, to his neighbor, to the State; who is incapable of the baseness which manifests itself either in arrogance or in envy, but who while demanding justice for himself is no less scrupulous to do justice to others. It is because the average American citizen, rich or poor, is of just this type that we have cause for our profound faith in the future of the Republic.

Ours is a government of liberty, by, through, and under the law. Lawlessness and connivance at law-breaking—whether the law-breaking take the form of a crime of greed and cunning or of a crime of violence—are destructive not only of order, but of the true liberties which can only come through order. If alive to their true interests rich and poor alike will set their faces like flint against the spirit which seeks personal advantage by overriding the laws, without regard to whether this spirit shows itself in the form of bodily violence by one set of men or in the form of vulpine cunning by another set of men.

Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of honesty, decency, fair dealing and common-sense. The qualities denoted by these words are essential to all of us, as we deal with the complex industrial problems of to-day, the problems affecting not merely the accumulation but even more the wise distribution of wealth. We ask no man’s permission when we require him to obey the law; neither the permission of the poor man nor yet of the rich man. Least of all can the man of great wealth afford to break the law, even for his own financial advantage; for the law is his prop and support, and it is both foolish and profoundly unpatriotic for him to fail in giving hearty support to those who show that there is in very fact one law, and one law only, alike for the rich and the poor, for the great and the small.

Men sincerely interested in the due protection of property, and men sincerely interested in seeing that the just rights of labor are guaranteed, should alike remember not only that in the long run neither the capitalist nor the wage-worker can be helped in healthy fashion save by helping the other; but also that to require either side to obey the law and do its full duty toward the community is emphatically to that side’s real interest.

There is no worse enemy of the wage-worker than the man who condones mob violence in any shape or who preaches class hatred; and surely the slightest acquaintance with our industrial history should teach even the most shortsighted that the times of most suffering for our people as a whole, the times when business is stagnant, and capital suffers from shrinkage and gets no return from its investments, are exactly the times of hardship, and want, and grim disaster among the poor. If all the existing instrumentalities of wealth could be abolished, the first and severest suffering would come among those of us who are least well off at present. The wage-worker is well off only when the rest of the country is well off; and he can best contribute to this general well-being by showing sanity and a firm purpose to do justice to others.

In his turn the capitalist who is really a conservative, the man who has forethought as well as patriotism, should heartily welcome every effort, legislative or otherwise, which has for its object to secure fair dealing by capital, corporate or individual, toward the public and toward the employee. Such laws as the franchise tax law in this State, which the Court of Appeals recently unanimously decided constitutional—such a law as that passed in Congress last year for the purpose of establishing a Department of Commerce and Labor, under which there should be a bureau to oversee and secure publicity from the great corporations which do an interstate business—such a law as that passed at the same time for the regulation of the great highways of commerce so as to keep these roads clear on fair terms to all producers in getting their goods to market—these laws are in the interest not merely of the people as a whole, but of the propertied classes. For in no way is the stability of property better assured than by making it patent to our people that property bears its proper share of the burdens of the State; that property is handled not only in the interest of the owner, but in the interest of the whole community.

In other words, legislation to be permanently good for any class must also be good for the Nation as a whole, and legislation which does injustice to any class is certain to work harm to the Nation. Take our currency system for example. This Nation is on a gold basis. The treasury of the public is in excellent condition. Never before has the per capita of circulation been as large as it is this day; and this circulation, moreover, is of money every dollar of which is at par with gold. Now, our having this sound currency system is of benefit to banks, of course, but it is of infinitely more benefit to the people as a whole, because of the healthy effect on business conditions.

In the same way, whatever is advisable in the way of remedial or corrective currency legislation—and nothing revolutionary is advisable under present conditions—must be undertaken only from the standpoint of the business community as a whole, that is, of the American body politic as a whole. Whatever is done, we can not afford to take any step backward or to cast any doubt upon the certain redemption in standard coin of every circulating note.

Among ourselves we differ in many qualities of body, head and heart; we are unequally developed, mentally as well as physically. But each of us has the right to ask that he shall be protected from wrongdoing as he does his work and carries his burden through life. No man needs sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard at work worth doing; and this is a prize open to every man, for there can be no work better worth doing than that done to keep in health and comfort and with reasonable advantages those immediately dependent upon the husband, the father, or the son.

There is no room in our healthy American life for the mere idler, for the man or the woman whose object it is throughout life to shirk the duties which life ought to bring. Life can mean nothing worth meaning, unless its prime aim is the doing of duty, the achievement of results worth achieving. A recent writer has finely said: “After all, the saddest thing that can happen to a man is to carry no burdens. To be bent under too great a load is bad; to be crushed by it is lamentable; but even in that there are possibilities that are glorious. But to carry no load at all—there is nothing in that. No one seems to arrive at any goal really worth reaching in this world who does not come to it heavy laden.”

Surely from our own experience each one of us knows that this is true. From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked life’s burdens. The men whom we most delight to honor in all this land are those who, in the iron years from ’61 to ’65, bore on their shoulders the burden of saving the Union. They did not choose the easy task. They did not shirk the difficult duty. Deliberately and of their own free will they strove for an ideal, upward and onward across the stony slopes of greatness. They did the hardest work that was then to be done; they bore the heaviest burden that any generation of Americans ever had to bear; and because they did this they have won such proud joy as it has fallen to the lot of no other men to win, and have written their names for evermore on the golden honor roll of the Nation. As it is with the soldier, so it is with the civilian. To win success in the business world, to become a first-class mechanic, a successful farmer, an able lawyer or doctor, means that the man has devoted his best energy and power through long years to the achievement of his ends. So it is in the life of the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the Nation rests. The man or woman who as bread-winner and home-maker, or as wife and mother, has done all that he or she can do, patiently and uncomplainingly, is to be honored; and is to be envied by all those who have never had the good fortune to feel the need and duty of doing such work. The woman who has borne, and who has reared as they should be reared, a family of children, has in the most emphatic manner deserved well of the Republic. Her burden has been heavy, and she has been able to bear it worthily only by the possession of resolution, of good sense, of conscience, and of unselfishness. But if she has borne it well, then to her shall come the supreme blessing, for in the words of the oldest and greatest of books, “Her children shall rise up and call her blessed;” and among the benefactors of the land her place must be with those who have done the best and the hardest work, whether as law-givers or as soldiers, whether in public or private life.

This is not a soft and easy creed to preach. It is a creed willingly learned only by men and women who, together with the softer virtues, possess also the stronger; who can do, and dare, and die at need, but who while life lasts will never flinch from their allotted task. You farmers, and wage-workers, and business men of this great State, of this mighty and wonderful Nation, are gathered together to-day, proud of your State and still prouder of your Nation, because your forefathers and predecessors have lived up to just this creed. You have received from their hands a great inheritance, and you will leave an even greater inheritance to your children, and your children’s children, provided only that you practice alike in your private and your public lives the strong virtues that have given us as a people greatness in the past. It is not enough to be well-meaning and kindly, but weak; neither is it enough to be strong, unless morality and decency go hand in hand with strength. We must possess the qualities which make us do our duty in our homes and among our neighbors, and in addition we must possess the qualities which are indispensable to the make-up of every great and masterful nation—the qualities of courage and hardihood, of individual initiative and yet of power to combine for a common end, and above all, the resolute determination to permit no man and no set of men to sunder us one from the other by lines of caste or creed or section. We must act upon the motto of all for each and each for all. There must be ever present in our minds the fundamental truth that in a republic such as ours the only safety is to stand neither for nor against any man because he is rich or because he is poor, because he is engaged in one occupation or another, because he works with his brains or because he works with his hands. We must treat each man on his worth and merits as a man. We must see that each is given a square deal, because he is entitled to no more and should receive no less. Finally we must keep ever in mind that a republic such as ours can exist only by virtue of the orderly liberty which comes through the equal domination of the law over all men alike, and through its administration in such resolute and fearless fashion as shall teach all that no man is above it and no man below it.

AT RICHMOND HILL, N. Y., SEPTEMBER 8, 1903

Dr. Kimball, and you, Men, Women, and Children of Richmond Hill:

I wish I could talk better to all of you; but I will ask you to have a little patience for one moment while I thank you for having come out to greet me, I am glad to see all of you, and allow me to say that I am most glad to see those who carry small folks in their arms.

You know I am very fond of Mr. Riis; and the reason why is because when I preach about decent citizenship I can turn to him and think he has practiced just what I have been preaching. The worth of any sermon lies in the way in which that sermon can be and is applied in practice. Of course I am glad to have the chance of being with a man who shows by his life that he knows how practically to apply the spirit of decency unaccompanied by mournfulness or false pretences of any kind, or by weakness. I want to see men decent; I want to see them act squarely; I want to see them work. That does not mean that I want to see them have sour faces. I want to see all enjoy themselves, men, women, and children. I believe in play; I believe in happiness, and in the joy of living; and I do not believe in the life that is nothing but play. I believe that you have a thousandfold more enjoyment if work comes first; but get time to play also. I believe in cheerfulness as well as in decency and honesty. Finally, I believe in always combining strength with the sweetness. I want to say how deeply touched I am at your coming out to greet me, and I want you to understand that you give me strength of heart when you come in this way. I greet you all; I am glad to see the grown up people of Richmond Hill, and I am even more glad to see the children.

AT ANTIETAM, MD., SEPTEMBER 17, 1903

Governor Murphy, Veterans of New Jersey, Men of the Grand Army:

I thank you of New Jersey for the monument to the troops of New Jersey who fought at Antietam, and on behalf of the Nation I accept the gift. We meet to-day upon one of the great battle-fields of the Civil War. No other battle of the Civil War lasting but one day shows as great a percentage of loss as that which occurred here upon the day on which Antietam was fought. Moreover, in its ultimate effects this battle was of momentous and even decisive importance, for when it had ended and Lee had retreated south of the Potomac, Lincoln forthwith published that immortal paper, the preliminary declaration of emancipation; the paper which decided that the Civil War, besides being a war for the preservation of the Union, should be a war for the emancipation of the slave, so that from that time onward the cause of Union and of Freedom, of national greatness and individual liberty, were one and the same.

Men of New Jersey, I congratulate your State because she has the right to claim her full share in the honor and glory of that memorable day; and I congratulate you, Governor Murphy, because on that day you had the high good fortune to serve as a lad with credit and honor in one of the five regiments which your State sent to the battle. Four of those regiments, by the way, served in the division commanded by that gallant soldier, Henry W. Slocum, whom we of New York can claim as our own. The other regiment, that in which Governor Murphy served, although practically an entirely new regiment, did work as good as that of any veteran organization upon the field, and suffered a proportional loss. This regiment was at one time ordered to the support of a division commanded by another New York soldier, the gallant General Greene, whose son himself served as a major-general in the war with Spain and is now, as Police Commissioner of New York, rendering as signal service in civil life as he had already rendered in military life.

If the issue of Antietam had been other than it was, it is probable that at least two great European powers would have recognized the independence of the Confederacy; so that you who fought here forty-one years ago have the profound satisfaction of feeling that you played well your part in one of those crises big with the fate of all mankind. You men of the Grand Army by your victory not only rendered all Americans your debtors for evermore, but you rendered all humanity your debtors. If the Union had been dissolved, if the great edifice built with blood and sweat and tears by mighty Washington and his compeers had gone down in wreck and ruin, the result would have been an incalculable calamity, not only for our people—and most of all for those who, in such event would have seemingly triumphed—but for all mankind. The great American Republic would have become a memory of derision; and the failure of the experiment of self-government by a great people on a great scale would have delighted the heart of every foe of republican institutions. Our country, now so great and so wonderful, would have been split into little jangling rival nationalities, each with a history both bloody and contemptible. It was because you, the men who wear the button of the Grand Army, triumphed in those dark years, that every American now holds his head high, proud in the knowledge that he belongs to a Nation whose glorious past and great present will be succeeded by an even mightier future; whereas had you failed we would all of us, North and South, East and West, be now treated by other nations at the best with contemptuous tolerance; at the worst with overbearing insolence.

Moreover, every friend of liberty, every believer in self-government, every idealist who wished to see his ideals take practical shape, wherever he might be in the world, knew that the success of all in which he most believed was bound up with the success of the Union armies in this great struggle. I confidently predict that when the final judgment of history is recorded it will be said that in no other war of which we have written record was it more vitally essential for the welfare of mankind that victory should rest where it finally rested. There have been other wars for individual freedom. There have been other wars for national greatness. But there has never been another war in which the issues at stake were so large, looked at from either standpoint. We take just pride in the great deeds of the men of 1776, but we must keep in mind that the Revolutionary War would have been shorn of wellnigh all its results had the side of union and liberty been defeated in the Civil War. In such case we should merely have added another to the lamentably long list of cases in which peoples have shown that after winning their liberty they are wholly unable to make good use of it.

It now rests with us in civil life to make good by our deeds the deeds which you who wore the blue did in the great years from ’61 to ’65. The patriotism, the courage, the unflinching resolution and steadfast endurance of the soldiers whose triumph was crowned at Appomattox must be supplemented on our part by civic courage, civic honesty, cool sanity, and steadfast adherence to the immutable laws of righteousness. You left us a reunited country; reunited in fact as well as in name. You left us the right of brotherhood with your gallant foes who wore the gray; the right to feel pride in their courage and their high fealty to an ideal, even though they warred against the stars in their courses. You left us also the most splendid example of what brotherhood really means; for in your careers you showed in practical fashion that the only safety in our American life lies in spurning the accidental distinctions which sunder one man from another, and in paying homage to each man only because of what he essentially is; in stripping off the husks of occupation, of position, of accident, until the soul stands forth revealed, and we know the man only because of his worth as a man.

There was no patent device for securing victory by force of arms forty years ago; and there is no patent device for securing victory for the forces of righteousness in civil life now. In each case the all-important factor was and is the character of the individual man. Good laws in the State, like a good organization in an army, are the expressions of national character. Leaders will be developed in military and in civil life alike; and weapons and tactics change from generation to generation, as methods of achieving good government change in civic affairs; but the fundamental qualities which make for good citizenship do not change any more than the fundamental qualities which make good soldiers. In the long run in the Civil War the thing that counted for more than aught else was the fact that the average American had the fighting edge; had within him the spirit which spurred him on through toil and danger, fatigue and hardship, to the goal of the splendid ultimate triumph. So in achieving good government the fundamental factor must be the character of the average citizen; that average citizen’s power of hatred for what is mean and base and unlovely; his fearless scorn of cowardice and his determination to war unyieldingly against the dark and sordid forces of evil.

The Continental troops who followed Washington were clad in blue and buff, and were armed with clumsy, flintlock muskets. You, who followed Grant, wore the famous old blue uniform, and your weapons had changed as had your uniform; and now the men of the American Army who uphold the honor of the flag in the far tropic lands are yet differently armed and differently clad and differently trained; but the spirit that has driven you all to victory has remained forever unchanged. So it is in civil life. As you did not win in a month or a year, but only after long years of hard and dangerous work, so the fight for governmental honesty and efficiency can be won only by the display of similar patience and similar resolution and power of endurance. We need the same type of character now that was needed by the men who with Washington first inaugurated the system of free popular government, the system of combined liberty and order here on this Continent; that was needed by the men who under Lincoln perpetuated the government which had thus been inaugurated in the days of Washington. The qualities essential to good citizenship and to good public service now are in all their essentials exactly the same as in the days when the first Congresses met to provide for the establishment of the Union; as in the days seventy years later, when the Congresses met which had to provide for its salvation.

There are many qualities which we need alike in private citizen and in public man, but three above all—three for the lack of which no brilliancy and no genius can atone—and those three are courage, honesty, and common-sense.

AT THE UNVEILING OF THE SHERMAN STATUE, WASHINGTON, D. C., OCTOBER 15, 1903

General Dodge, Veterans of the Four Great Armies, and you, my Fellow-Citizens:

To-day we meet together to do honor to the memory of one of the great men whom, in the hour of her agony, our Nation brought forth for her preservation. The Civil War was not only in the importance of the issues at stake and of the outcome the greatest of modern times, but it was also, taking into account its duration, the severity of the fighting, and the size of the armies engaged, the greatest since the close of the Napoleonic struggles. Among the generals who rose to high position as leaders of the various armies in the field are many who will be remembered in our history as long as this history itself is remembered. Sheridan, the incarnation of fiery energy and prowess; Thomas, far-sighted, cool-headed, whose steadfast courage burned ever highest in the supreme moment of the crisis; McClellan, with his extraordinary gift for organization; Meade, victor in one of the decisive battles of all time; Hancock, type of the true fighting man among the regulars; Logan, type of the true fighting man among the volunteers—the names of these and of many others will endure so long as our people hold sacred the memory of the fight for union and for liberty. High among these chiefs rise the figures of Grant and of Grant’s great lieutenant, Sherman, whose statue here in the national capital is to-day to be unveiled. It is not necessary here to go over the long roll of Sherman’s mighty feats. They are written large throughout the history of the Civil War. Our memories would be poor indeed if we did not recall them now, as we look along Pennsylvania Avenue and think of the great triumphal march which surged down its length when at the close of the war the victorious armies of the East and of the West met here in the capital of the Nation they had saved.

There is a peculiar fitness in commemorating the great deeds of the soldiers who preserved this Nation, by suitable monuments at the National Capital. I trust we shall soon have a proper statue of Abraham Lincoln, to whom more than to any other one man this Nation owes its salvation. Meanwhile, on behalf of the people of the Nation, I wish to congratulate all of you who have been instrumental in securing the erection of this statue to General Sherman.

The living can best show their respect for the memory of the great dead by the way in which they take to heart and act upon the lessons taught by the lives which made these dead men great. Our homage to-day to the memory of Sherman comes from the depths of our being. We would be unworthy citizens did we not feel profound gratitude toward him, and those like him and under him, who, when the country called in her dire need, sprang forward with such gallant eagerness to answer that call. Their blood and their toil, their endurance and patriotism, have made us and all who come after us forever their debtors. They left us not merely a reunited country, but a country incalculably greater because of its rich heritage in the deeds which thus left it reunited. As a Nation we are the greater, not only for the valor and devotion to duty displayed by the men in blue, who won in the great struggle for the Union, but also for the valor and the loyalty toward what they regarded as right of the men in gray; for this war, thrice fortunate above all other recent wars in its outcome, left to all of us the right of brotherhood alike with valiant victor and valiant vanquished.

Moreover, our homage must not only find expression on our lips; it must also show itself forth in our deeds. It is a great and glorious thing for a nation to be stirred to present triumph by the splendid memories of triumphs in the past. But it is a shameful thing for a nation, if these memories stir it only to empty boastings, to a pride that does not shrink from present abasement, to that self-satisfaction which accepts the high resolve and unbending effort of the father as an excuse for effortless ease or wrongly directed effort in the son. We of the present, if we are true to the past, must show by our lives that we have learned aright the lessons taught by the men who did the mighty deeds of the past. We must have in us the spirit which made the men of the Civil War what they were; the spirit which produced leaders such as Sherman; the spirit which gave to the average soldier the grim tenacity and resourcefulness that made the armies of Grant and Sherman as formidable fighting machines as this world has ever seen. We need their ruggedness of body, their keen and vigorous minds, and above all their dominant quality of forceful character. Their lives teach us in our own lives to strive after, not the thing which is merely pleasant, but the thing which it is our duty to do. The life of duty, not the life of mere ease or mere pleasure—that is the kind of life which makes the great man as it makes the great nation.

We can not afford to lose the virtues which made the men of ’61 to ’65 great in war. No man is warranted in feeling pride in the deeds of the Army and Navy of the past if he does not back up the Army and the Navy of the present. If we are far-sighted in our patriotism, there will be no let-up in the work of building, and of keeping at the highest point of efficiency, a navy suited to the part the United States must hereafter play in the world, and of making and keeping our small Regular Army, which in the event of a great war can never be anything but the nucleus around which our volunteer armies must form themselves, the best army of its size to be found among the nations.

So much for our duties in keeping unstained the honor roll our fathers made in war. It is of even more instant need that we should show their spirit of patriotism in the affairs of peace. The duties of peace are with us always; those of war are but occasional; and with a nation as with a man, the worthiness of life depends upon the way in which the every-day duties are done. The home duties are the vital duties. The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within its border; and if the average man is not hard-working, just, and fearless in his dealings with those about him, then our average of public life will in the end be low; for the stream can rise no higher than its source. But in addition we need to remember that a peculiar responsibility rests upon the man in public life. We meet in the capital of the Nation, in the city which owes its existence to the fact that it is the seat of the National Government. It is well for us in this place, and at this time, to remember that exactly as there are certain homely qualities the lack of which will prevent the most brilliant man alive from being a useful soldier to his country, so there are certain homely qualities for the lack of which in the public servant no shrewdness or ability can atone. The greatest leaders, whether in war or in peace, must of course show a peculiar quality of genius; but the most redoubtable armies that have ever existed have been redoubtable because the average soldier, the average officer, possessed to a high degree such comparatively simple qualities as loyalty, courage, and hardihood. And so the most successful governments are those in which the average public servant possesses that variant of loyalty which we call patriotism, together with common-sense and honesty. We can as little afford to tolerate
a dishonest man in the public service as a coward in the army. The murderer takes a single life; the corruptionist in public life, whether he be bribe giver or bribe taker, strikes at the heart of the commonwealth. In every public service, as in every army, there will be wrongdoers, there will occur misdeeds. This can not be avoided; but vigilant watch must be kept, and as soon as discovered the wrongdoing must be stopped and the wrongdoers punished. Remember that in popular government we must rely on the people themselves, alike for the punishment and the reformation. Those upon whom our institutions cast the initial duty of bringing malefactors to the bar of justice must be diligent in its discharge; yet in the last resort the success of their efforts to purge the public service of corruption must depend upon the attitude of the courts and of the juries drawn from the people. Leadership is of avail only so far as there is wise and resolute public sentiment behind it.

In the long run, then, it depends upon us ourselves, upon us the people as a whole, whether this Government is or is not to stand in the future as it has stood in the past; and my faith that it will show no falling off is based upon my faith in the character of our average citizenship. The one supreme duty is to try to keep this average high. To this end it is well to keep alive the memory of those men who are fit to serve as examples of what is loftiest and best in American citizenship. Such a man was General Sherman. To very few in any generation is it given to render such services as he rendered; but each of us in his degree can try to show something of those qualities of character upon which, in their sum, the high worth of Sherman rested—his courage, his kindliness, his clean and simple living, his sturdy good sense, his manliness and tenderness in the intimate relations of life, and finally, his inflexible rectitude of soul and his loyalty to all that in this free Republic is hallowed and symbolized by the national flag.

AT THE PAN-AMERICAN MISSIONARY SERVICE, CATHEDRAL OF ST. PETER AND ST. PAUL, MOUNT ST. ALBAN, WASHINGTON, D. C., OCTOBER 25, 1903

Bishop Satterlee; and to you representatives of the Church both at home and abroad; and to all of you, my friends and fellow-citizens:

I extend greeting, and in your name I especially welcome those who are in a sense the guests of the nation to-day. In what I am about to say to you, I wish to dwell upon certain thoughts suggested by three different quotations: In the first place, “Thou shalt serve the Lord with all thy heart, with all thy soul, and with all thy mind;” the next, “Be ye therefore wise as serpents and harmless as doves;” and finally, in the Collect which you, Bishop Doane, just read, that “we being ready both in body and soul may cheerfully accomplish those things which thou commandest.”

To an audience such as this I do not have to say anything as to serving the cause of decency with heart and with soul. I want to dwell, however, upon the fact that we have the right to claim from you not merely that you shall have heart in your work, not merely that you shall put your souls into it, but that you shall give the best that your minds have to it also. In the eternal, the unending warfare for righteousness and against evil, the friends of what is good need to remember that in addition to being decent they must be efficient; that good intentions, high purposes, can not be in themselves effective, that they are in no sense a substitute for power to make those purposes, those intentions felt in action. Of course we must first have the purpose and the intention. If our powers are not guided aright it is better that we should not have them at all; but we must have the power itself before we can guide it aright.

In the second text we are told not merely to be harmless as doves, but also to be wise as serpents. One of our American humorists who veils under jocular phrases much deep wisdom—one of those men has remarked that it is much easier to be a harmless dove than a wise serpent. Now, we are not to be excused if we do not show both qualities. It is not very much praise to give a man to say that he is harmless. We have a right to ask that in addition to the fact that he does no harm to any one he shall possess the wisdom and the strength to do good to his neighbor; that together with innocence, together with purity of motive, shall be joined the wisdom and strength to make that purity effective, that motive translated into substantial result.

Finally, in the quotation from the Collect, we ask that we may be made ready both in body and in soul, that we may cheerfully accomplish those things that we are commanded to do. Ready both in body and in soul; that means that we must fit ourselves physically and mentally, fit ourselves to work with the weapons necessary for dealing with this life no less than with the higher, spiritual weapons; fit ourselves thus to do the work commanded; and moreover, to do it cheerfully. Small is our use for the man who individually helps any of us and shows that he does it grudgingly. We had rather not be helped than be helped in such fashion. A favor extended in a manner which shows that the man is sorry that he has to grant it is robbed, sometimes of all, and sometimes of more than all, its benefit. So, in serving the Lord, if we serve him, if we serve the cause of decency, the cause of righteousness, in a way that impresses others with the fact that we are sad in doing it, our service is robbed of an immense proportion of its efficacy. We have a right to ask a cheerful heart, a right to ask a buoyant and cheerful spirit among those to whom is granted the inestimable privilege of doing the Lord’s work in this world. The chance to do work, the duty to do work is not a penalty; it is a privilege. Let me quote a sentence that I have quoted once before: “In this life the man who wins to any goal worth winning almost always comes to that goal with a burden bound on his shoulders.” The man who does best in this world, the woman who does best, almost inevitably does it because he or she carries some burden. Life is so constituted that the man or the woman who has not some responsibility is thereby deprived of the deepest happiness that can come to mankind, because each and every one of us, if he or she is fit to live in the world must be conscious that responsibility always rests on him or on her—the responsibility of duty toward those dependent upon us; the responsibility of duty toward our families, toward our friends, toward our fellow-citizens; the responsibility of duty to wife and child, to the state, to the church. Not only can no man shirk some or all of those responsibilities, but no man worth his salt will wish to shirk them. On the contrary, he will welcome thrice over the fortune that puts them upon him.

In closing, I want to call your attention to something that is especially my business for the time being, and that is measurably your business all the time, or else you are unfit to be citizens of this Republic. In the seventh hymn which we sung, in the last line, you all joined in singing “God save the State!” Do you intend merely to sing that, or to try to do it? If you intend merely to sing it, your part in doing it will be but small. The State will be saved, if the Lord puts it into the heart of the average man so to shape his life that the State shall be worth saving, and only on those terms. We need civic righteousness. The best constitution that the wit of man has ever devised, the best institutions that the ablest statesmen in the world have ever reduced to practice by law or by custom, all these shall be of no avail if they are not vivified by the spirit which makes a State great by making its citizens honest, just, and brave. I do not ask you as practical believers in applied Christianity to take part one way or the other in matters that are merely partisan. There are plenty of questions about which honest men can and do differ very greatly and very intensely, but as to which the triumph of either side may be compatible with the welfare of the State—a lesser degree of welfare or a greater degree of welfare—but compatible with the welfare of the State. But there are certain great principles, such as those which Cromwell would have called “fundamentals,” concerning which no man has a right to have more than one opinion. Such a question is honesty. If you have not honesty in the average private citizen, in the average public servant, then all else goes for nothing. The abler a man is, the more dexterous, the shrewder, the bolder, why the more dangerous he is if he has not the root of right living and right thinking in him—and that in private life, and even more in public life. Exactly as in time of war, although you need in each fighting man far more than courage, yet all else counts for nothing if there is not that courage upon which to base it, so in our civil life, although we need that the average man in private life, that the average public servant, shall have far more than honesty, yet all other qualities go for nothing or for worse than nothing unless honesty underlies them—honesty in public life and honesty in private life; not only the honesty that keeps its skirts technically clear, but the honesty that is such according to the spirit as well as the letter of the law; the honesty that is aggressive, the honesty that not merely deplores corruption—it is easy enough to deplore corruption—but that wars against it and tramples it under foot. I ask for that type of honesty, I ask for militant honesty, for the honesty of the kind that makes those who have it discontented with themselves as long as they have failed to do everything that in them lies to stamp out dishonesty wherever it can be found, in high place or in low. And let us not flatter ourselves, we who live in countries where the people rule that it is ultimately possible for the people to cast upon any but themselves the responsibilities for the shape the government and the social and political life of the community assumes. I ask then that our people feel quickened within them burning indignation against wrong in every shape, and condemnation of that wrong, whether found in private or in public life. We have a right to demand courage of every man who wears the uniform; it is not so much a credit to him to have it as it is shame unutterable to him if he lacks it. So when we demand honesty, we demand it not as entitling the possessor to praise, but as warranting the heartiest condemnation possible if he lacks it. Surely in every movement for the betterment of our life, our life social in the truest and deepest sense, our life political, we have a special right to ask not merely support but leadership from those of the Church. We ask that you here to whom much has been given will remember that from you rightly much will be expected in return. For all of us here the lines have been cast in pleasant places. Each of us has been given one talent, or five, or ten talents, and each of us is in honor bound to use that talent or those talents aright, and to show at the end that he is entitled to the praise of having done well as a faithful servant.

I greet you this afternoon, and am glad to see you here, and I trust and believe that after this service every one of us will go home feeling that he or she has been warranted in coming here by the way in which he or she, after going home, takes up with fresh heart, with fresh courage, and with fresh and higher purpose the burden of life as that burden has been given to him or to her to carry.

AT THE CENTENNIAL EXERCISES IN THE N. Y. AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., NOV. 16, 1903

Mr. Justice:

Let me first express the appreciation that all of us feel to Professor McMaster for his exceedingly interesting address; and the address showed why he can justly claim to be the historian of the people of the United States, for what he has told us was what the people did, not merely what the outward forms and observances were, but what the life of the people was a century ago. And, Mr. Justice, I think that the recital has left in the minds of all of us the feeling that while we revere our ancestors, we are not wholly discontented that we live in the present day.

To each generation comes its allotted task; and no generation is to be excused for failure to perform that task. No generation can claim as an excuse for such failure the fact that it is not guilty of the sins of the preceding generation. It was a surprise to me, I suppose it was a surprise to many of us, to realize that a hundred years ago, in the days of the fathers, the lot of the poor debtor was so hard. It seems incredible to us now that there should have been such callousness to the undeserved human suffering then. I hope sincerely that a century hence it will seem equally incredible to the American of that generation that there should be corruption and venality in public life. We can divide, and must divide, on party lines as regards certain questions; as regards the deepest, as regards the vital questions, we can not afford to divide, and I have the right to challenge the best effort of every American worthy of the name to putting down by every means in his power corruption in private life, and above all corruption in public life. And, remember, you, the people of this government by the people, that while the public servant, the legislator, the executive officer, the judge, are not to be excused if they fall short of their duty, yet that their doing their duty can not avail unless you do yours. In the last resort we have to depend upon the jury drawn from the people to convict the scoundrel who has tainted our public life; and unless that jury does its duty, unless it is backed by the public sentiment of the people, all the work of legislator, of executive officer, of judicial officer, are for naught.

Mr. Justice, a man would be a poor citizen of this country if he could sit in Abraham Lincoln’s pew and not feel the solemn sense of the associations borne in upon him; and I wish to thank the people of this church for that reverence for the historic past, for the sense of historic continuity, which has made them keep this pew unchanged. I hope it will remain unchanged in this church as long as our country endures. We have not too many monuments of the past; let us keep every little bit of association with that which is highest and best of the past as a reminder to us, equally of what we owe to those who have gone before and of how we should show our appreciation. This evening I sit in this pew of Abraham Lincoln’s, together with Abraham Lincoln’s private secretary, who, for my good fortune, now serves as Secretary of State in my Cabinet.

If ever there lived a President who during his term of service needed all of the consolation and of the strength that he could draw from the unseen powers above him, it was Abraham Lincoln, who worked and suffered for the people, and when he had lived for them to good end gave his life at the end. If ever there was a man who practically applied what was taught in our churches, it was Abraham Lincoln. The other day I was rereading—on the suggestion of Mr. Hay—a little speech not often quoted of his, yet which seems to me one of the most remarkable that he ever made; delivered right after his re-election, I think, to a body of serenaders who had come, if my memory is correct, from Maryland, and called for an address from him from the White House. It is extraordinary to read that speech, and to realize that the man who made it had just come successfully through a great political contest in which he felt that so much was at stake for the Nation that he had no time to think whether or not anything was at stake for himself. The speech is devoid of the least shade of bitterness. There is not a word of unseemly triumph over those who have been defeated. There is not a word of glorification of himself, or in any improper sense of his party. There is an earnest appeal, now that the election is over, now that the civic strife has been completed, for all decent men who love the country to join together in service to the country; and in the speech he uses a thoroughly Lincoln-like phrase when he says “I have not willingly planted a thorn in the breast of any man,” thus trying to make clear that he has nothing to say against any opponent, no bitterness toward any opponent; that all he wishes is that those who opposed him should join with those who favored him in working toward a common end. In reading his works and addresses, one is struck by the fact that as he went higher and higher all personal bitterness seemed to die out of him. In the Lincoln-Douglas debates one can still catch now and then a note of personal antagonism; the man was in the arena, and as the blows were given and taken you can see that now and then he had a feeling against his antagonist. When he became President and faced the crisis that he had to face, from that time on I do not think that you can find an expression, a speech, a word of Lincoln’s, written or spoken, in which bitterness is shown to any man. His devotion to the cause was so great that he neither could nor would have feeling against any individual.

In closing, Mr. Justice, in thanking you of this church, the church so closely kindred to my own Dutch Reformed Church, in thanking you for asking me here, let me say how peculiarly glad I am that in the chair sits one man, a Justice of the Supreme Court, and that I could be escorted here by another man, who has just severed his connection with one of the highest places in the United States Army, both of whom—you, Justice Harlan, you, General Breckinridge—had enjoyed the wonderful privilege of proving by their deeds the faith that was in them in the days that tried men’s souls; both of whom did their part in holding up the hands of mighty Lincoln, and both of whom were born in the State of Lincoln’s birth.

REMARKS TO THE DELEGATES OF THE GERMAN SOCIETIES RECEIVED AT THE WHITE HOUSE, THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1903

Mr. Voelckner, and Gentlemen:

It gives me peculiar pleasure to greet you to-day; and it is a matter of real regret to me that I can not attend formally your celebration.

You are quite right, Mr. Chairman, when you speak of the stand that the German element in our citizenship has always taken in all crises of our national life. In the first place, from the beginning of our colonial history to this day, the German strain has been constantly increasing in importance among the many strains that go to make up our composite national character. I do not have to repeat to you the story of the early German immigration to this country—the German immigration that began in a mass toward the end of the seventeenth century, but before that time had been represented among the very first settlers. Allow me to give you one bit of ancestral experience of mine. The first head of the New York City Government who was of German birth was Leisler, about the year 1680. He was the representative of the popular faction in the New York colony of that day, and among the Leislerian aldermen was a forbear of mine named Roosevelt. You are entirely familiar, of course, with the German immigration that went to the formation of Pennsylvania from the beginning. That element was equally strong in the Mohawk Valley in New York; it was equally strong in Middle and Western Maryland. For instance, in the Revolutionary War, one of the distinguished figures contributed by New York to the cause of independence was that of the German Herkimer, whose fight in the Mohawk Valley represented one of the turning points in the struggle for independence; and one of the New York counties is now named after him. The other day I went out to the battlefield of Antietam, here in Maryland. There the Memorial Church is the German Lutheran Church, which was founded in 1768, the settlement in the neighborhood of Antietam being originally exclusively a German settlement. There is a list of its pastors, and curiously enough a series of memorial windows of men with German names—men who belonged to the Maryland regiment recruited largely from that region for the Civil War, which Maryland regiment was mainly composed of men of German extraction. In the Civil War it would be difficult to paint in too strong colors what I may wellnigh call the all-importance of the attitude of the American citizens of German birth and extraction toward the cause of Union and Liberty, especially in what were then known as the border States. It would have been out of the question to have kept Missouri loyal had it not been for the German element therein. It was the German portion of the city of St. Louis which formed the core of the Union cause in Missouri. And but little less important was the part played by the Germans in Maryland, and also in Louisville and other portions of Kentucky.

Each body of immigrants, each element that has thus been added to our national strain, has contributed something of value to the national character; and to no element do we owe more than we owe to that element represented by those whom I have the honor this day of addressing.

White House, Washington,
October 18, 1902

My dear Mrs. Van Vorst:

I must write you a line to say how much I have appreciated your article, “The Woman who Toils.” But to me there is a most melancholy side to it, when you touch upon what is fundamentally infinitely more important than any other question in this country—that is, the question of race suicide, complete or partial.

An easy, good-natured kindliness, and a desire to be “independent,” that is, to live one’s life purely according to one’s own desires, are in no sense substitutes for the fundamental virtues, for the practice of the strong racial qualities without which there can be no strong races—the qualities of courage and resolution in both men and women, of scorn of what is mean, base, and selfish, of eager desire to work or fight or suffer as the case may be, provided the end to be gained is great enough, and the contemptuous putting aside of mere ease, mere vapid pleasure, mere avoidance of toil and worry. I do not know whether I most pity or despise the foolish and selfish man or woman who does not understand that the only things really worth having in life are those the acquirement of which normally means cost and effort. If a man or woman, through no fault of his or hers, goes throughout life denied those highest of all joys which spring only from home life, from the having and bringing up of many healthy children, I feel for them deep and respectful sympathy; the sympathy one extends to the gallant fellow killed at the beginning of a campaign, or the man who toils hard and is brought to ruin by the fault of others. But the man or woman who deliberately avoids marriage and has a heart so cold as to know no passion and a brain so shallow and selfish as to dislike having children, is in effect a criminal against the race and should be an object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people.

Of course no one quality makes a good citizen, and no one quality will save a nation. But there are certain great qualities for the lack of which no amount of intellectual brilliancy or of material prosperity or of easiness of life can atone, and which show decadence and corruption in the nation, just as much if they are produced by selfishness and coldness and ease-loving laziness among comparatively poor people as if they are produced by vicious or frivolous luxury in the rich. If the men of the nation are not anxious to work in many different ways, with all their might and strength, and ready and able to fight at need, and anxious to be fathers of families, and if the women do not recognize that the greatest thing for any woman is to be a good wife and mother, why, that nation has cause to be alarmed about its future.

There is no physical trouble among us Americans. The trouble with the situation you set forth is one of character, and therefore we can conquer it if we only will.

Very sincerely yours,
Theodore Roosevelt

Mrs. Bessie Van Vorst,
Philadelphia, Pa.

Personal.

White House, Washington,
November 26, 1902

My dear Sir:

I am in receipt of your letter of November 10 and of one from Mr. —— under date of November 11, in reference to the appointment of Dr. Crum as collector of the Port of Charleston.

In your letter you make certain specific charges against Dr. Crum, tending to show his unfitness in several respects for the office sought. These charges are entitled to the utmost consideration from me and I shall go over them carefully before taking any action. After making these charges you add, as a further reason for opposition to him, that he is a colored man, and after reciting the misdeeds that followed carpet-bag rule and negro domination in South Carolina, you say that “we have sworn never again to submit to the rule of the African, and such an appointment as that of Dr. Crum to any such office forces us to protest unanimously against this insult to the white blood”; and you add that you understood me to say that I would never force a negro on such a community as yours. Mr. —— puts the objection of color first, saying: “First, he is a colored man, and that of itself ought to bar him from the office.” In view of these last statements, I think I ought to make clear to you why I am concerned and pained by your making them and what my attitude is as regards all such appointments. How any one could have gained the idea that I had said I would not appoint reputable and upright colored men to office, when objection was made to them solely on account of their color, I confess I am wholly unable to understand. At the time of my visit to Charleston last spring, I had made, and since that time I have made, a number of such appointments from several States in which there is a considerable colored population. For example, I made one such appointment in Mississippi, and another in Alabama, shortly before my visit to Charleston. I had at that time appointed two colored men as judicial magistrates in the District of Columbia. I have recently announced another such appointment for New Orleans, and have just made one from Pennsylvania. The great majority of my appointments in every State have been of white men. North and South alike it has been my sedulous endeavor to appoint only men of high character and good capacity, whether white or black. But it has been my consistent policy in every State where their numbers warranted it to recognize colored men of good repute and standing in making appointments to office. These appointments of colored men have in no State made more than a small proportion of the total number of appointments. I am unable to see how I can legitimately be asked to make an exception for South Carolina. In South Carolina, to the four most important positions in the State I have appointed three men and continued in office a fourth, all of them white men—three of them originally Gold Democrats—two of them, as I am informed, the sons of Confederate soldiers. I have been informed by the citizens of Charleston whom I have met that these four men represent a high grade of public service.

I do not intend to appoint any unfit man to office. So far as I legitimately can I shall always endeavor to pay regard to the wishes and feelings of the people of each locality; but I can not consent to take the position that the door of hope—the door of opportunity—is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color. Such an attitude would, according to my convictions, be fundamentally wrong. If, as you hold, the great bulk of the colored people are not yet fit in point of character and influence to hold such positions, it seems to me that it is worth while putting a premium upon the effort among them to achieve the character and standing which will fit them.

The question of “negro domination” does not enter into the matter at all. It might as well be asserted that when I was Governor of New York I sought to bring about negro domination in that State because I appointed two colored men of good character and standing to responsible positions—one of them to a position paying a salary twice as large as that paid in the office now under consideration—one of them as a director of the Buffalo exposition. The question raised by you and Mr. —— in the statements to which I refer, is simply whether it is to be declared that under no circumstances shall any man of color, no matter how upright and honest, no matter how good a citizen, no matter how fair in his dealings with his fellows, be permitted to hold any office under our government. I certainly can not assume such an attitude, and you must permit me to say that in my view it is an attitude no man should assume, whether he looks at it from the standpoint of the true interest of the white men of the South or of the colored men of the South—not to speak of any other section of the Union. It seems to me that it is a good thing from every standpoint to let the colored man know that if he shows in marked degree the qualities of good citizenship—the qualities which in a white man we feel are entitled to reward—then he will not be cut off from all hope of similar reward.

Without any regard to what my decision may be on the merits of this particular applicant for this particular place, I feel that I ought to let you know clearly my attitude on the far broader question raised by you and Mr. ——; an attitude from which I have not varied during my term of office.

Faithfully yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.

Hon. ——
Charleston, S. C.

White House, Washington,
February 24, 1903

My dear Mr. Howell:

I have a high opinion of the gentleman you mention and if the opportunity occurs I shall be glad to do anything I can for him.

Now as to what you say concerning Federal appointments in the South. Frankly, it seems to me that my appointments speak for themselves and that my policy is self-explanatory. So far from feeling that they need the slightest apology or justification, my position is that on the strength of what I have done I have the right to claim the support of all good citizens who wish not only a high standard of Federal service but fair and equitable dealing to the South as well as to the North, and a policy of consistent justice and good-will toward all men. In making appointments I have sought to consider the feelings of the people of each locality so far as I could consistently do so without sacrificing principle. The prime tests I have applied have been those of character, fitness and ability, and when I have been dissatisfied with what has been offered within my own party lines I have without hesitation gone to the opposite party—and you are of course aware that I have repeatedly done this in your own State of Georgia. I certainly can not treat mere color as a permanent bar to holding office, any more than I could so treat creed or birthplace—always provided that in other respects the applicant or incumbent is a worthy and well-behaved American citizen. Just as little will I treat it as conferring a right to hold office. I have scant sympathy with the mere doctrinaire, with the man of mere theory who refuses to face facts; but do you not think that in the long run it is safer for everybody if we act on the motto “All men up,” rather than that of “Some men down”?

I ask you to judge not by what I say but by what during the last seventeen months I have actually done. In your own State of Georgia you are competent to judge from your own experience. In the great bulk of the cases I have reappointed President McKinley’s appointees. The changes I have made, such as that in the postmastership at Athens and in the surveyorship at Atlanta, were, as I think you will agree, changes for the better and not for the worse. It happens that in each of these offices I have appointed a white man to succeed a colored man. In South Carolina I have similarly appointed a white postmaster to succeed a colored postmaster. Again, in South Carolina I have nominated a colored man to fill a vacancy in the position of collector of the port of Charleston, just as in Georgia I have reappointed the colored man who is now serving as collector of the port of Savannah. Both are fit men. Why the appointment of one should cause any more excitement than the appointment of the other, I am wholly at a loss to imagine. As I am writing to a man of keen and trained intelligence I need hardly say that to connect either of these appointments, or any or all of my other appointments, or my actions in upholding the law at Indianola, with such questions as “social equality” and “negro domination” is as absurd as to connect them with the nebular hypothesis or the theory of atoms.

I have consulted freely with your own Senators and Congressmen as to the character and capacity of any appointee in Georgia concerning whom there was question. My party advisers in the State have been Major Hanson of Macon, Mr. Walter Johnson of Atlanta—both of them ex-Confederate soldiers—and Mr. Harry Stillwell Edwards, also of Macon. I believe you will agree with me that in no State would it be possible to find gentlemen abler and more upright or better qualified to fill the positions they have filled with reference to me. In every instance where these gentlemen have united in making a recommendation I have been able to follow their advice. Am I not right in saying that the Federal office-holders whom I have appointed throughout your State are, as a body, men and women of a high order of efficiency and integrity? If you know of any Federal office-holder in Georgia of whom this is not true pray let me know at once. I will welcome testimony from you or from any other reputable citizen which will tend to show that a given public officer is unworthy; and, most emphatically, short will be the shrift of any one whose lack of worth is proven. Incidentally I may mention that a large percentage of the incumbents of Federal offices in Georgia under me are, as I understand it, of your own political faith. But they are supported by me in every way as long as they continue to render good and faithful service to the public.

This is true of your own State; and by applying to Mr. Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia, to General Basil Duke of Kentucky, to Mr. George Crawford of Tennessee, to Mr. John McIlhenny of Louisiana, to Judge Jones of Alabama, and Mr. Edgar L. Wilson of Mississippi, all of them Democrats and all of them men of the highest standing in their respective communities, you will find that what I have done in Georgia stands not as the exception but as the rule for what I have done throughout the South. I have good reason to believe that my appointees in the different States mentioned—and as the sum of the parts is the whole, necessarily in the South at large—represent not merely an improvement upon those whose places they took, but upon the whole a higher standard of Federal service than has hitherto been attained in the communities in question. I may add that the proportion of colored men among these new appointees is only about one in a hundred.

In view of all these facts I have been surprised, and somewhat pained, at what seems to me the incomprehensible outcry in the South about my actions—an outcry apparently started in New York for reasons wholly unconnected with the question nominally at issue. I am concerned at the attitude thus taken by so many of the Southern people; but I am not in the least angry; and still less will this attitude have the effect of making me swerve one hair’s breadth, to one side or the other, from the course I have marked out—the course I have consistently followed in the past and shall consistently follow in the future.

With regard,
Sincerely yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.

Hon. Clark Howell
Editor, “The Constitution,”
Atlanta, Ga.

On May 18, 1903, William A. Miller was removed by the Public Printer from his position of Assistant Foreman at the Government Printing Office. Mr. Miller filed a complaint with the Civil Service Commission alleging that his removal had been made in violation of the civil service law and rules. After an investigation of the complaint, and upon July 6th, the Civil Service Commission advised the Public Printer of its decision as follows:

“Section 2 of Civil Service Rule XII, governing removals, provides that no person shall be removed from a competitive position except for such cause as will promote the efficiency of the public service. The Commission does not consider expulsion from a labor union, being the action of a body is no way connected with the public service nor having authority over public employees, to be such a cause as will promote the efficiency of the public service.

“As the only reason given by you for your removal of Mr. Miller is that he was expelled from Local Union No. 4, International Brotherhood of Bookbinders, you are advised that the Commission can not recognize his removal and must request that he be reassigned to duty in his position.”

Mr. Miller’s complaint had also been filed with the President, under whose direction it was being investigated by the Secretary of Commerce and Labor simultaneously with the investigation by the Civil Service Commission. As a result of such investigations, the following letters, under dates of July 13th and 14th, 1903, were written by the President:

Oyster Bay, N. Y.
July 13, 1903

My dear Secretary Cortelyou:

In accordance with the letter of the Civil Service Commission of July 6th, the Public Printer will reinstate Mr. W. A. Miller in his position. Meanwhile I will withhold my final decision of the whole case until I have received the report of the investigation on Miller’s second communication, which you notify me has been begun to-day, July 13th.

On the face of the papers presented, Miller would appear to have been removed in violation of law. There is no objection to the employees of the Government Printing Office constituting themselves into a union if they so desire; but no rules or resolutions of that union can be permitted to over-ride the laws of the United States, which it is my sworn duty to enforce.

Please communicate a copy of this letter to the Public Printer for his information and that of his subordinates.

Very truly yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.

Hon. George B. Cortelyou,
Secretary of Commerce and Labor.

Oyster Bay, N. Y.
July 14, 1903

My dear Mr. Cortelyou:

In connection with my letter of yesterday I call attention to this judgment and award by the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission in its report to me of March 18th last:

It is adjudged and awarded that no person shall be refused employment or in any way discriminated against on account of membership or non-membership in any labor organization, and that there shall be no discrimination against or interference with any employee who is not a member of any labor organization by members of such organization.

I heartily approve of this award and judgment by the commission appointed by me, which itself included a member of a labor union. This commission was dealing with labor organizations working for private employers. It is of course mere elementary decency to require that all the Government departments shall be handled in accordance with the principle thus clearly and fearlessly enunciated.

Please furnish a copy of this letter both to Mr. Palmer and to the Civil Service Commission for their guidance.

Sincerely yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.

Hon. Geo. B. Cortelyou,
Secretary of Commerce and Labor.

September 29, 1903

Pursuant to the request of Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, the President granted an interview this evening to the following members of the executive council of that body: Mr. Samuel Gompers, Mr. James Duncan, Mr. John Mitchell, Mr. James O’Connell and Mr. Frank Morrison, at which various subjects of legislation in the interest of labor, as well as executive action, were discussed. Concerning the case of William A. Miller the President made the following statement:

I thank you and your committee for your courtesy, and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you. It will always be a pleasure to see you or any representatives of your organizations or of your Federation as a whole.

As regards the Miller case, I have little to add to what I have already said. In dealing with it I ask you to remember that I am dealing purely with the relation of the Government to its employees. I must govern my action by the laws of the land, which I am sworn to administer, and which differentiate any case in which the Government of the United States is a party from all other cases whatsoever. These laws are enacted for the benefit of the whole people, and can not and must not be construed as permitting discrimination against some of the people. I am President of all the people of the United States, without regard to creed, color, birthplace, occupation, or social condition. My aim is to do equal and exact justice as among them all. In the employment and dismissal of men in the Government service I can no more recognize the fact that a man does or does not belong to a union as being for or against him than I can recognize the fact that he is a Protestant or a Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or against him.

In the communications sent me by various labor organizations protesting against the retention of Miller in the Government Printing Office, the grounds alleged are twofold: 1, that he is a non-union man; 2, that he is not personally fit. The question of his personal fitness is one to be settled in the routine of administrative detail, and can not be allowed to conflict with or to complicate the larger question of governmental discrimination for or against him or any other man because he is or is not a member of a union. This is the only question now before me for decision; and as to this my decision is final.

Oyster Bay, N. Y.
August 6, 1903

My dear Governor Durbin:

Permit me to thank you as an American citizen for the admirable way in which you have vindicated the majesty of the law by your recent action in reference to lynching. I feel, my dear sir, that you have made all men your debtors who believe, as all far-seeing men must, that the well-being, indeed the very existence, of the Republic depends upon that spirit of orderly liberty under the law which is as incompatible with mob violence as with any form of despotism. Of course mob violence is simply one form of anarchy; and anarchy is now, as it always has been, the handmaiden and forerunner of tyranny.

I feel that you have not only reflected honor upon the State which for its good fortune has you as its Chief Executive, but upon the whole nation. It is incumbent upon every man throughout this country not only to hold up your hands in the course you have been following, but to show his realization that the matter is one which is of vital concern to us all.

All thoughtful men must feel the gravest alarm over the growth of lynching in this country, and especially over the peculiarly hideous forms so often taken by mob violence when colored men are the victims—on which occasions the mob seems to lay most weight, not on the crime, but on the color of the criminal. In a certain proportion of these cases the man lynched has been guilty of a crime horrible beyond description; a crime so horrible that as far as he himself is concerned he has forfeited the right to any kind of sympathy whatsoever. The feeling of all good citizens that such a hideous crime shall not be hideously punished by mob violence is due not in the least to sympathy for the criminal, but to a very lively sense of the train of dreadful consequences which follows the course taken by the mob in exacting inhuman vengeance for an inhuman wrong. In such cases, moreover, it is well to remember that the criminal not merely sins against humanity in inexpiable and unpardonable fashion, but sins particularly against his own race, and does them a wrong far greater than any white man can possibly do them. Therefore, in such cases the colored people throughout the land should in every possible way show their belief that they, more than all others in the community, are horrified at the commission of such a crime and are peculiarly concerned in taking every possible measure to prevent its recurrence and to bring the criminal to immediate justice. The slightest lack of vigor either in denunciation of the crime or in bringing the criminal to justice is itself unpardonable.

Moreover, every effort should be made under the law to expedite the proceedings of justice in the case of such an awful crime. But it can not be necessary in order to accomplish this to deprive any citizen of those fundamental rights to be heard in his own defence which are so dear to us all and which lie at the root of our liberty. It certainly ought to be possible by the proper administration of the laws to secure swift vengeance upon the criminal; and the best and immediate efforts of all legislators, judges, and citizens should be addressed to securing such reforms in our legal procedure as to leave no vestige of excuse for those misguided men who undertake to reap vengeance through violent methods.

Men who have been guilty of a crime like rape or murder should be visited with swift and certain punishment, and the just effort made by the courts to protect them in their rights should under no circumstances be perverted into permitting any mere technicality to avert or delay their punishment. The substantial rights of the prisoner to a fair trial must of course be guaranteed, as you have so justly insisted that they should be; but, subject to this guarantee, the law must work swiftly and surely, and all the agents of the law should realize the wrong they do when they permit justice to be delayed or thwarted for technical or insufficient reasons. We must show that the law is adequate to deal with crime by freeing it from every vestige of technicality and delay.

But the fullest recognition of the horror of the crime and the most complete lack of sympathy with the criminal can not in the least diminish our horror at the way in which it has become customary to avenge these crimes and at the consequences that are already proceeding therefrom. It is of course inevitable that where vengeance is taken by a mob it should frequently light on innocent people; and the wrong done in such a case to the individual is one for which there is no remedy. But even where the real criminal is reached, the wrong done by the mob to the community itself is wellnigh as great. Especially is this true where the lynching is accompanied with torture. There are certain hideous sights which when once seen can never be wholly erased from the mental retina. The mere fact of having seen them implies degradation. This is a thousandfold stronger when instead of merely seeing the deed the man has participated in it. Whoever in any part of our country has ever taken part in lawlessly putting to death a criminal by the dreadful torture of fire must forever after have the awful spectacle of his own handiwork seared into his brain and soul. He can never again be the same man.

This matter of lynching would be a terrible thing even if it stopped with the lynching of men guilty of the inhuman and hideous crime of rape; but as a matter of fact, lawlessness of this type never does stop and never can stop in such fashion. Every violent man in the community is encouraged by every case of lynching in which the lynchers go unpunished to himself take the law into his own hands whenever it suits his own convenience. In the same way the use of torture by the mob in certain cases is sure to spread until it is applied more or less indiscriminately in other cases. The spirit of lawlessness grows with what it feeds on, and when mobs with impunity lynch criminals for one cause, they are certain to begin to lynch real or alleged criminals for other causes. In the recent cases of lynching, over three-fourths were not for rape at all, but for murder, attempted murder, and even less heinous offences. Moreover, the history of these recent cases shows the awful fact that when the minds of men are habituated to the use of torture by lawless bodies to avenge crimes of a peculiarly revolting description, other lawless bodies will use torture in order to punish crimes of an ordinary type. Surely no patriot can fail to see the fearful brutalization and debasement which the indulgence of such a spirit and such practices inevitably portends. Surely all public men, all writers for the daily press, all clergymen, all teachers, all who in any way have a right to address the public, should with every energy unite to denounce such crimes and to support those engaged in putting them down. As a people we claim the right to speak with peculiar emphasis for freedom and for fair treatment of all men without regard to differences of race, fortune, creed, or color. We forfeit the right so to speak when we commit or condone such crimes as these of which I speak.

The nation, like the individual, can not commit a crime with impunity. If we are guilty of lawlessness and brutal violence, whether our guilt consists in active participation therein or in mere connivance and encouragement, we shall assuredly suffer later on because of what we have done. The cornerstone of this Republic, as of all free government, is respect for and obedience to the law. Where we permit the law to be defied or evaded, whether by rich man or poor man, by black man or white, we are by just so much weakening the bonds of our civilization and increasing the chances of its overthrow, and of the substitution therefor of a system in which there shall be violent alternations of anarchy and tyranny.

Sincerely yours,
Theodore Roosevelt.

Hon. Winfield T. Durbin,
Governor of Indiana,
Indianapolis, Ind.

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

Message

To the Senate and House of Representatives:

The Congress assembles this year under the shadow of a great calamity. On the sixth of September, President McKinley was shot by an anarchist while attending the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo, and died in that city on the fourteenth of that month.

Of the last seven elected Presidents, he is the third who has been murdered, and the bare recital of this fact is sufficient to justify grave alarm among all loyal American citizens. Moreover, the circumstances of this, the third assassination of an American President, have a peculiarity sinister significance. Both President Lincoln and President Garfield were killed by assassins of types unfortunately not uncommon in history; President Lincoln falling a victim to the terrible passions aroused by four years of civil war, and President Garfield to the revengeful vanity of a disappointed office-seeker. President McKinley was killed by an utterly depraved criminal belonging to that body of criminals who object to all governments, good and bad alike, who are against any form of popular liberty if it is guaranteed by even the most just and liberal laws, and who are as hostile to the upright exponent of a free people’s sober will as to the tyrannical and irresponsible despot.

It is not too much to say that at the time of President McKinley’s death he was the most widely loved man in all the United States; while we have never had any public man of his position who has been so wholly free from the bitter animosities incident to public life. His political opponents were the first to bear the heartiest and most generous tribute to the broad kindliness of nature, the sweetness and gentleness of character which so endeared him to his close associates. To a standard of lofty integrity in public life he united the tender affections and home virtues which are all-important in the make-up of national character. A gallant soldier in the great war for the Union, he also shone as an example to all our people because of his conduct in the most sacred and intimate of home relations. There could be no personal hatred of him, for he never acted with aught but consideration for the welfare of others. No one could fail to respect him who knew him in public or private life. The defenders of those murderous criminals who seek to excuse their criminality by asserting that it is exercised for political ends, inveigh against wealth and irresponsible power. But for this assassination even this base apology can not be urged.

President McKinley was a man of moderate means, a man whose stock sprang from the sturdy tillers of the soil, who had himself belonged among the wage-workers, who had entered the Army as a private soldier. Wealth was not struck at when the President was assassinated, but the honest toil which is content with moderate gains after a lifetime of unremitting labor, largely in the service of the public. Still less was power struck at in the sense that power is irresponsible or centred in the hands of any one individual. The blow was not aimed at tyranny or wealth. It was aimed at one of the strongest champions the wage-worker has ever had; at one of the most faithful representatives of the system of public rights and representative government who has ever risen to public office. President McKinley filled that political office for which the entire people vote, and no President—not even Lincoln himself—was ever more earnestly anxious to represent the well thought out wishes of the people; his one anxiety in every crisis was to keep in closest touch with the people—to find out what they thought and to endeavor to give expression to their thought, after having endeavored to guide that thought aright. He had just been re-elected to the Presidency because the majority of our citizens, the majority of our farmers and wage-workers, believed that he had faithfully upheld their interests for four years. They felt themselves in close and intimate touch with him. They felt that he represented so well and so honorably all their ideals and aspirations that they wished him to continue for another four years to represent them.

And this was the man at whom the assassin struck! That there might be nothing lacking to complete the Judas-like infamy of his act, he took advantage of an occasion when the President was meeting the people generally; and advancing as if to take the hand outstretched to him in kindly and brotherly fellowship, he turned the noble and generous confidence of the victim into an opportunity to strike the fatal blow. There is no baser deed in all the annals of crime.

The shock, the grief of the country, are bitter in the minds of all who saw the dark days while the President yet hovered between life and death. At last the light was stilled in the kindly eyes and the breath went from the lips that even in mortal agony uttered no words save of forgiveness to his murderer, of love for his friends, and of unfaltering trust in the will of the Most High. Such a death, crowning the glory of such a life, leaves us with infinite sorrow, but with such pride in what he had accomplished and in his own personal character, that we feel the blow not as struck at him, but as struck at the nation. We mourn a good and great President who is dead; but while we mourn we are lifted up by the splendid achievements of his life and the grand heroism with which he met his death.

When we turn from the man to the nation, the harm done is so great as to excite our gravest apprehensions and to demand our wisest and most resolute action. This criminal was a professed anarchist, inflamed by the teachings of professed anarchists, and probably also by the reckless utterances of those who, on the stump and in the public press, appeal to the dark and evil spirits of malice and greed, envy and sullen hatred. The wind is sowed by the men who preach such doctrines, and they can not escape their share of responsibility for the whirlwind that is reaped. This applies alike to the deliberate demagogue, to the exploiter of sensationalism, and to the crude and foolish visionary who, for whatever reason, apologizes for crime or excites aimless discontent.

The blow was aimed not at this President, but at all Presidents; at every symbol of government. President McKinley was as emphatically the embodiment of the popular will of the nation expressed through the forms of law as a New England town meeting is in similar fashion the embodiment of the law-abiding purpose and practice of the people of the town. On no conceivable theory could the murder of the President be accepted as due to protest against “inequalities in the social order,” save as the murder of all the freemen engaged in a town meeting could be accepted as a protest against that social inequality which puts a malefactor in jail. Anarchy is no more an expression of “social discontent” than picking pockets or wife-beating.

The anarchist, and especially the anarchist in the United States, is merely one type of criminal, more dangerous than any other because he represents the same depravity in a greater degree. The man who advocates anarchy directly or indirectly, in any shape or fashion, or the man who apologizes for anarchists and their deeds, makes himself morally accessory to murder before the fact. The anarchist is a criminal whose perverted instincts lead him to prefer confusion and chaos to the most beneficent form of social order. His protest of concern for workingmen is outrageous in its impudent falsity; for if the political institutions of this country do not afford opportunity to every honest and intelligent son of toil, then the door of hope is forever closed against him. The anarchist is everywhere not merely the enemy of system and of progress, but the deadly foe of liberty. If ever anarchy is triumphant, its triumph will last for but one red moment, to be succeeded for ages by the gloomy night of despotism.

For the anarchist himself, whether he preaches or practices his doctrines, we need not have one particle more concern than for any ordinary murderer. He is not the victim of social or political injustice. There are no wrongs to remedy in his case. The cause of his criminality is to be found in his own evil passions and in the evil conduct of those who urge him on, not in any failure by others or by the State to do justice to him or his. He is a malefactor and nothing else. He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a “product of social conditions,” save as a highwayman is “produced” by the fact that an unarmed man happens to have a purse. It is a travesty upon the great and holy names of liberty and freedom to permit them to be invoked in such a cause. No man or body of men preaching anarchistic doctrines should be allowed at large any more than if preaching the murder of some specified private individual. Anarchistic speeches, writings, and meetings are essentially seditious and treasonable.

I earnestly recommend to the Congress that in the exercise of its wise discretion it should take into consideration the coming to this country of anarchists or persons professing principles hostile to all government and justifying the murder of those placed in authority. Such individuals as those who not long ago gathered in open meeting to glorify the murder of King Humbert of Italy perpetrate a crime, and the law should ensure their rigorous punishment. They and those like them should be kept out of this country; and if found here they should be promptly deported to the country whence they came; and far-reaching provisions should be made for the punishment of those who stay. No matter calls more urgently for the wisest thought of the Congress.

The Federal courts should be given jurisdiction over any man who kills or attempts to kill the President or any man who by the Constitution or by law is in line of succession for the Presidency, while the punishment for an unsuccessful attempt should be proportioned to the enormity of the offence against our institutions.

Anarchy is a crime against the whole human race; and all mankind should band against the anarchist. His crime should be made an offence against the law of nations, like piracy and that form of man-stealing known as the slave trade; for it is of far blacker infamy than either. It should be so declared by treaties among all civilized powers. Such treaties would give to the Federal Government the power of dealing with the crime.

A grim commentary upon the folly of the anarchist position was afforded by the attitude of the law toward this very criminal who had just taken the life of the President. The people would have torn him limb from limb if it had not been that the law he defied was at once invoked in his behalf. So far from his deed being committed on behalf of the people against the government, the government was obliged at once to exert its full police power to save him from instant death at the hands of the people. Moreover, his deed worked not the slightest dislocation in our governmental system, and the danger of a recurrence of such deeds, no matter how great it might grow, would work only in the direction of strengthening and giving harshness to the forces of order. No man will ever be restrained from becoming President by any fear as to his personal safety. If the risk to the President’s life became great, it would mean that the office would more and more come to be filled by men of a spirit which would make them resolute and merciless in dealing with every friend of disorder. This great country will not fall into anarchy, and if anarchists should ever become a serious menace to its institutions, they would not merely be stamped out, but would involve in their own ruin every active or passive sympathizer with their doctrines. The American people are slow to wrath, but when their wrath is once kindled it burns like a consuming flame.

During the last five years business confidence has been restored and the nation is to be congratulated because of its present abounding prosperity. Such prosperity can never be created by law alone, although it is easy enough to destroy it by mischievous laws. If the hand of the Lord is heavy upon any country, if flood or drought comes, human wisdom is powerless to avert the calamity. Moreover, no law can guard us against the consequences of our own folly. The men who are idle or credulous, the men who seek gains not by genuine work with head or hand but by gambling in any form, are always a source of menace not only to themselves but to others. If the business world loses its head, it loses what legislation can not supply. Fundamentally the welfare of each citizen, and therefore the welfare of the aggregate of citizens which makes the nation, must rest upon individual thrift and energy, resolution and intelligence. Nothing can take the place of this individual capacity; but wise legislation and honest and intelligent administration can give it the fullest scope, the largest opportunity to work to good effect.

The tremendous and highly complex industrial development which went on with ever accelerated rapidity during the latter half of the nineteenth century brings us face to face, at the beginning of the twentieth, with very serious social problems. The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient.

The growth of cities has gone on beyond comparison faster than the growth of the country, and the upbuilding of the great industrial centres has meant a startling increase, not merely in the aggregate of wealth, but in the number of very large individual, and especially of very large corporate, fortunes. The creation of these great corporate fortunes has not been due to the tariff nor to any other governmental action, but to natural causes in the business world, operating in other countries as they operate in our own.

The process has aroused much antagonism, a great part of which is wholly without warrant. It is not true that as the rich have grown richer the poor have grown poorer. On the contrary, never before has the average man, the wage-worker, the farmer, the small trader, been so well off as in this country and at the present time. There have been abuses connected with the accumulation of wealth; yet it remains true that a fortune accumulated in legitimate business can be accumulated by the person specially benefited only on condition of conferring immense incidental benefits upon others. Successful enterprise, of the type which benefits all mankind, can only exist if the conditions are such as to offer great prizes as the rewards of success.

The captains of industry who have driven the railway systems across this continent, who have built up our commerce, who have developed our manufactures, have on the whole done great good to our people. Without them the material development of which we are so justly proud could never have taken place. Moreover, we should recognize the immense importance to this material development of leaving as unhampered as is compatible with the public good the strong and forceful men upon whom the success of business operations inevitably rests. The slightest study of business conditions will satisfy any one capable of forming a judgment that the personal equation is the most important factor in a business operation; that the business ability of the man at the head of any business concern, big or little, is usually the factor which fixes the gulf between striking success and hopeless failure.

An additional reason for caution in dealing with corporations is to be found in the international commercial conditions of to-day. The same business conditions which have produced the great aggregations of corporate and individual wealth have made them very potent factors in international commercial competition. Business concerns which have the largest means at their disposal and are managed by the ablest men are naturally those which take the lead in the strife for commercial supremacy among the nations of the world. America has only just begun to assume that commanding position in the international business world which we believe will more and more be hers. It is of the utmost importance that this position be not jeoparded, especially at a time when the overflowing abundance of our own natural resources and the skill, business energy, and mechanical aptitude of our people make foreign markets essential. Under such conditions it would be most unwise to cramp or to fetter the youthful strength of our nation.

Moreover, it can not too often be pointed out that to strike with ignorant violence at the interests of one set of men almost inevitably endangers the interests of all. The fundamental rule in our national life—the rule which underlies all others—is that, on the whole, and in the long run, we shall go up or down together. There are exceptions; and in times of prosperity some will prosper far more, and in times of adversity some will suffer far more, than others; but speaking generally, a period of good times means that all share more or less in them, and in a period of hard times all feel the stress to a greater or less degree. It surely ought not to be necessary to enter into any proof of this statement; the memory of the lean years which began in 1893 is still vivid, and we can contrast them with the conditions in this very year which is now closing. Disaster to great business enterprises can never have its effects limited to the men at the top. It spreads throughout, and while it is bad for everybody, it is worst for those furthest down. The capitalist may be shorn of his luxuries; but the wage-worker may be deprived of even bare necessities.

The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance. Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as “trusts,” appeal especially to hatred and fear. These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with ignorance, which unfit men for the exercise of cool and steady judgment. In facing new industrial conditions, the whole history of the world shows that legislation will generally be both unwise and ineffective unless undertaken after calm inquiry and with sober self-restraint. Much of the legislation directed at the trusts would have been exceedingly mischievous had it not also been entirely ineffective. In accordance with a well-known sociological law, the ignorant or reckless agitator has been the really effective friend of the evils which he has been nominally opposing. In dealing with business interests, for the government to undertake by crude and ill-considered legislation to do what may turn out to be bad, would be to incur the risk of such far-reaching national disaster that it would be preferable to undertake nothing at all. The men who demand the impossible or the undesirable serve as the allies of the forces with which they are nominally at war, for they hamper those who would endeavor to find out in rational fashion what the wrongs really are and to what extent and in what manner it is practicable to apply remedies.

All this is true; and yet it is also true that there are real and grave evils, one of the chief being overcapitalization because of its many baleful consequences; and a resolute and practical effort must be made to correct these evils.

There is widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare. This springs from no spirit of envy or uncharitableness, nor lack of pride in the great industrial achievements that have placed this country at the head of the nations struggling for commercial supremacy. It does not rest upon a lack of intelligent appreciation of the necessity of meeting changing and changed conditions of trade with new methods, nor upon ignorance of the fact that combination of capital in the effort to accomplish great things is necessary when the world’s progress demands that great things be done. It is based upon sincere conviction that combination and concentration should be, not prohibited, but supervised and within reasonable limits controlled; and in my judgment this conviction is right.

It is no limitation upon property rights or freedom of contract to require that when men receive from government the privilege of doing business under corporate form, which frees them from individual responsibility, and enables them to call into their enterprises the capital of the public, they shall do so upon absolutely truthful representations as to the value of the property in which the capital is to be invested. Corporations engaged in interstate commerce should be regulated if they are found to exercise a license working to the public injury. It should be as much the aim of those who seek for social betterment to rid the business world of crimes of cunning as to rid the entire body politic of crimes of violence. Great corporations exist only because they are created and safeguarded by our institutions; and it is therefore our right and our duty to see that they work in harmony with these institutions.

The first essential in determining how to deal with the great industrial combinations is knowledge of the facts—publicity. In the interest of the public, the government should have the right to inspect and examine the workings of the great corporations engaged in interstate business. Publicity is the only sure remedy which we can now invoke. What further remedies are needed in the way of governmental regulation, or taxation, can only be determined after publicity has been obtained, by process of law, and in the course of administration. The first requisite is knowledge, full and complete—knowledge which may be made public to the world.

Artificial bodies, such as corporations and joint stock or other associations, depending upon any statutory law for their existence or privileges, should be subject to proper governmental supervision, and full and accurate information as to their operations should be made public regularly at reasonable intervals.

The large corporations, commonly called trusts, though organized in one State, always do business in many States, often doing very little business in the State where they are incorporated. There is utter lack of uniformity in the State laws about them; and as no State has any exclusive interest in or power over their acts, it has in practice proved impossible to get adequate regulation through State action. Therefore, in the interest of the whole people, the Nation should, without interfering with the power of the States in the matter itself, also assume power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an interstate business. This is especially true where the corporation derives a portion of its wealth from the existence of some monopolistic element or tendency in its business. There would be no hardship in such supervision; banks are subject to it, and in their case it is now accepted as a simple matter of course. Indeed, it is probable that supervision of corporations by the National Government need not go so far as is now the case with the supervision exercised over them by so conservative a State as Massachusetts, in order to produce excellent results.

When the Constitution was adopted, at the end of the eighteenth century, no human wisdom could foretell the sweeping changes, alike in industrial and political conditions, which were to take place by the beginning of the twentieth century. At that time it was accepted as a matter of course that the several States were the proper authorities to regulate, so far as was then necessary, the comparatively insignificant and strictly localized corporate bodies of the day. The conditions are now wholly different and wholly different action is called for. I believe that a law can be framed which will enable the National Government to exercise control along the lines above indicated, profiting by the experience gained through the passage and administration of the Interstate Commerce Act. If, however, the judgment of the Congress is that it lacks the constitutional power to pass such an act, then a constitutional amendment should be submitted to confer the power.

There should be created a Cabinet officer, to be known as Secretary of Commerce and Industries, as provided in the bill introduced at the last session of the Congress. It should be his province to deal with commerce in its broadest sense; including among many other things whatever concerns labor and all matters affecting the great business corporations and our merchant marine.

The course proposed is one phase of what should be a comprehensive and far-reaching scheme of constructive statesmanship for the purpose of broadening our markets, securing our business interests on a safe basis, and making firm our new position in the international industrial world, while scrupulously safeguarding the rights of wage-worker and capitalist, of investor and private citizen, so as to secure equity as between man and man in this Republic.

With the sole exception of the farming interest, no one matter is of such vital moment to our whole people as the welfare of the wage-workers. If the farmer and the wage-worker are well off, it is absolutely certain that all others will be well off too. It is therefore a matter for hearty congratulation that on the whole wages are higher to-day in the United States than ever before in our history, and far higher than in any other country. The standard of living is also higher than ever before. Every effort of legislator and administrator should be bent to secure the permanency of this condition of things and its improvement wherever possible. Not only must our labor be protected by the tariff, but it should also be protected so far as it is possible from the presence in this country of any laborers brought over by contract, or of those who, coming freely, yet represent a standard of living so depressed that they can undersell our men in the labor market and drag them to a lower level. I regard it as necessary, with this end in view, to re-enact immediately the law excluding Chinese laborers and to strengthen it wherever necessary in order to make its enforcement entirely effective.

The National Government should demand the highest quality of service from its employees; and in return it should be a good employer. If possible legislation should be passed, in connection with the Interstate Commerce Law, which will render effective the efforts of different States to do away with the competition of convict contract labor in the open labor market. So far as practicable under the conditions of government work, provision should be made to render the enforcement of the eight-hour law easy and certain. In all industries carried on directly or indirectly for the United States Government women and children should be protected from excessive hours of labor, from night work, and from work under unsanitary conditions. The government should provide in its contracts that all work should be done under “fair” conditions, and in addition to setting a high standard should uphold it by proper inspection, extending if necessary to the subcontractors. The government should forbid all night work for women and children, as well as excessive overtime. For the District of Columbia a good factory law should be passed; and, as a powerful indirect aid to such laws, provision should be made to turn the inhabited alleys, the existence of which is a reproach to our Capital City, into minor streets, where the inhabitants can live under conditions favorable to health and morals.

American wage-workers work with their heads as well as their hands. Moreover, they take a keen pride in what they are doing; so that, independent of the reward, they wish to turn out a perfect job. This is the great secret of our success in competition with the labor of foreign countries.

The most vital problem with which this country, and for that matter the whole civilized world, has to deal, is the problem which has for one side the betterment of social conditions, moral and physical, in large cities, and for another side the effort to deal with that tangle of far-reaching questions which we group together when we speak of “labor.” The chief factor in the success of each man—wage-worker, farmer, and capitalist alike—must ever be the sum total of his own individual qualities and abilities. Second only to this comes the power of acting in combination or association with others. Very great good has been and will be accomplished by associations or unions of wage-workers, when managed with forethought, and when they combine insistence upon their own rights with law-abiding respect for the rights of others. The display of these qualities in such bodies is a duty to the nation no less than to the associations themselves. Finally, there must also in many cases be action by the government in order to safeguard the rights and interests of all. Under our Constitution there is much more scope for such action by the State and the municipality than by the nation. But on points such as those touched on above the National Government can act.