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[SUPPLEMENTAL)
Pºuls . . . . . t
A COMPILATION
\
• -> *
A
OF THE
MESSAGES AND SPEECHES
OF
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
I 90 I – I 905
EDITED
BY
ALFRED HENRY LEWIS
AUTHOR OF “THE PRESIDENT,” “THE Boss,” ET.c.
PUBLISHED BY
BURE AU OF NATIONAL LITERATURE AND ART
I906
on 2 44 7 4-4-
There is no copyright on this work, as
President Roosevelt considers that his Mes-
sages and Speeches delivered while Presi-
dent have been dedicated to and are the
property of the public.
From stereograph, copyright 1902, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
“THE NEED IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LIFE IS COMMON SENSE, HONESTY,
DECENCY, COURAGE.” PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, WILLIMANTIC, CONN.
- (See Vol. I, page 61.) º
1722.30


From Stereograph, copyright 1903, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT SPEAKING TO THE CITIZENS OF THE GREAT
WEST – KEOKUK, IOW.A.
(See Vol. I, page 3oo.)

- § ---
- -
&
º - - --~~~~ --- - º º
From Stereograph, copyright 1995, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT TALKING TO THE ENGINEER AND FIREMAN AT
- EMERY GAP, NEW MEXICO.
-
(See Vol. I, page 140.)



º -
From Stereograph, copyright 1902, by Underwood & Underwood, New York
‘‘ GOOD GOVERNMENT IS PRACTICALLY APPLYING THE PRINCIPLES
WHICH MAKE A MAN A GOOD CITIZEN" — PRESIDENT
ROOSEVELT, WATERVILLE, ME.
(See Vol. I, page 94.)
-
--
-
:
-
:
-



From Stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT SHAKING HANDS WITH THE ENGINEER AT
EMERY GAP, NEW MEXICO.
- (See Vol. I, page 656.)

From Stereograph, copyright 1902, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
“WHETHER WE WILL OR NOT, WE AS A NATION FRONT A GREAT
DESTINY.” PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, LAWRENCE, MASS,
(See Vol. I, page 76.)
• *
- - * -
2. ** * * * *** * *
- - - • * * * * *
* - a * * * * * * *
* * * -




From Stereograph, copyright 1903, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
A SEA OF FACES-LINCOLN, NEB.
(See Vol. I, page 280.)

º º
From Stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT RETURNING FROM HIS FAMOUS BEAR HUNT TO GLENWOOD SPRINGS, COL.
(See Vol. I, page 612.)


PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ADDRESSING THE CROWDS AT SAN
ANTONIO, TEXAS.
(See Vol. I, page Gol.)

ON THE GREAT BEAR HUNT – PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AFTER LEAVING
NEWCASTLE FOR THE MOUNTAINS – COLOR ADO.
(See Vol. I, page 612.)

-
-
º
S-
|
From Stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
TEXLINE, TEX PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT SHAKING HANDS AND TALKING
TO A WORKMAN.
-
(See Vol. I, page 61 i.)

From stereºgraph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
GLAD GREETING TO HIS LITTLE COLORADO FRIEND. PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT RETURNING
FROM THE HUNT.
(See Vol. I, page 613.)

º º NºM
, Z - "N
º L'IſºSº … "
nderwood, New York.
From Stereograph, copyright 1903, by Underwood & U
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT IN SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA, THE COUNTRY's
- “GARDEN SPOT * – REDLANDS.
(See Vol. I, page 330.)




-- -
From Stereograph, copyright 1904, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AND JOHN MUIR ON GLACIER POINT, YOSEMITE.
(See Vol. I, pages 273 and 274.)

|-
- - - - -
(See Vol. I, page 588.)
-
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT SPEAKING FROM THE CAR AT ATOKA, I. T.
From Stereograph, copyright 1905, by Underwood & Underwood, New York.

- -
From stereograph, copyright roos, by Underwood Underwood. Nº. York. -
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT ADDRESSING THE POPULACE OF RALEIGH,
N. C., AT THE STATE FAIR.
(See Vol. I, page 676.)


INTRODUCTION
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
BY ALFRED HENRY LEWIS.
“On the particular subject of oratory I have not a
word to say. I have never been an orator and never
studied oratory. When I have spoken, my aim has
been simply to say nothing in which I did not believe,
to say what I did say as strongly, as accurately, as
concisely as possible, and then sit down.”—President
Roosevelt on Oratory.
I.
This shall be but the roughest round-up of my thought, and I
promise nothing for its fineness or its polish.
• Whenever I sit down to write, and particularly of politics and those
who play at it, I feel the uneasy burden of my task. Humanity, even
in its wisest expression, is so marked of a plentiful lack of knowledge,
so much the slave of circumscription, so warped of an interest, so crip-
pled of a pinching environment, that for the best and broadest—and
I am neither—to offer himself guide to his fellows, appears prepos-
terously an instance of the blind seeking to lead. The mere act smells
of egotism, infers conceit, points to a self-sufficient vanity as its root,
and, if it does not provoke anger, seems one more likely to be rewarded
with laughter rather than with anything of value or of honor.
The White House is the hub of National concern. In a day of other
Presidents one might have abode within a block of the White House
and, for all the noise made by the occupant, forgotten its existence
weeks upon end. This is not now the case. There come and go few
hours when the sun is up, that Mr. Roosevelt does not, with word or
deed or both, invoke attention. And this, from the standpoint of the
common fortunes, is a good thing. A President is the better for being
looked at and listened to. Also, that a President boldly courts the
general consideration shows stoutly for both his courage and his
honesty.
There are two kinds who seek a Presidency. One aims at eminence,
ii Introduction
the other hungers for fame. With one the White House is an object;
with the other a method. The first, if made President, sits calmly
down; he has had his victory and the White House is his. With him
of the fame-hunger, it is the other way about. Given the White House,
his great work begins. He does not think to write his name with the
immortals by simply signing himself “President.” He can only achieve
the purpose that has called him to the field, by labors of lasting good
to the whole people. Of our entire line of Presidents no more than
six were of the latter. Six there were who sought and found their
wreaths. The others will live in history whenever and wherever Presi-
dents are enumerated; not one by his record, however, bequeathed
himself to fame.
It shines out as a best hope of the hour that Mr. Roosevelt is heart
and soul a fame-hunter. The nobility of one's actions is determined by
the nobility of one's aspirations. Mr. Roosevelt will not rest content
with being merely a President. He must go down the aisles of coming
time a great President, or in his own conscience he will have failed.
To that end, he sets before himself the examples of those mighty ones
of time past. The Washingtons, the Jeffersons, the Jacksons, the
Lincolns and the Grants are his exemplars. With such to be as guides
to him—and because he is true and bold and wise, and no man owns
him—it will not be strange should he conquer entrance to Valhalla.
Moreover, it is good for the public to know and say these things.
If there be any worth-while thing in mere experience, if reading and
travel and the study of men be of good avail, Mr. Roosevelt should
make a great President. Before he went to the White House he was
taught how State laws were made as a member of the assembly at
Albany, and subsequently took lessons in executing those laws as
Governor. He was shown the inner workings of a great city as a
Commissioner of Police. As Chief of Civil Service, Assistant Secre-
tary of the Navy, Soldier in the field, and Vice President it was given
him to look into every nook and corner of national government. Even
as a Deputy Sheriff in the utter West it may safety be assumed that he
was learning. Also, his travels have been wide, and he knows from
practical touch and observation not only Europe, but every phase of
American existence. He has wandered East and West and North and
South, and ate and drank and talked and slept with the peoples of those
regions. He knows what they feel and think and desire; he can gauge
their needs, anticipate their drift of sentiment.
This mixing with the many is a good thing. It develops the cap-
tain in a man. Besides, it morally and mentally and—so to phrase
it—humanly rounds a man out. There is nothing so apt to warp or
dwarf as isolation. By himself a man comes to be but little. What
there is of wit or sparkle or epigram about him he gets always from
Introduction iii
others. Mentally he is like a match; to burn he must strike himself
against Somebody else. No match burns of itself, while possessing
every latent power for conflagration.
Mr. Roosevelt has been fortunate, and his acquaintance is as the
sands of the sea. This much meeting of men has perfected him in
the art of leadership, the first requisite of which is to be sure you are
followed. One may be right, and still be much alone. But Mr. Roose-
velt has discovered that one may be just as right, and have the people
all about him. He has learned that he who would lead, must listen
to the questions which the people ask. The common error of men is to
insist upon answering questions which they put themselves. One day
the people may put the very questions which they are asking and
answering; but they cannot interest or hold or lead the people in
advance of that time. It is as bad to be too far ahead of as too far
behind one's day. In either instance it is the reverse of leadership.
Mr. Roosevelt never asks a question too soon, never answers one too
late. Thus he is a finished captain of men. Also he commands his
people; they do not lead themselves and carry him along.
You have seen folk with talents wholly for the self-conscious and
who wore themselves constantly on the back of their regard. They
lived and slept before a mirror. They made a cult of Number One,
bore themselves in mind, and, crowning selfishness, were neither brave
nor good nor true when it told against them.
Mr. Roosevelt has himself in mind; but not in the same sense of
selfishness. He has his egotisms; but they are not looking-glass ego-
tisms. He is for deeds, not looks, and believes in action, never in
appearance. His prides are wide-flung; but they are the natural prides
of a natural man, and he never transacts them at another's expense.
There goes, too, a generosity with the Roosevelt pride, and a nobleness,
as though a prince were vain. There is no atmosphere of littleness, no
thought of sham. The metal of it rings true and defies the acid.
Nemo mortalium omnibus horis sapit, no man is at all times wise, and
the very vigor and many-sided sort of his ambitions now and then
betray him into trouble. But he bears himself gallantly, whatever the
odds, and never fails to regain by his courage that admiration which
was the threatened sacrifice of some particular act. No one can hate
a brave man or despise One thoroughly true; and even his enemies
believe in, applaud and admire Mr. Roosevelt.
Finding himself in the world, Mr. Roosevelt makes himself of the
world. Also, he is practical, and holds that he who is plunged in the
ocean might better think on water. Being wholly practical, Mr. Roose-
velt is wholly the honest man, and his honesty is downright and smash-
ing—a sort of Thor's hammer. It goes to the nail, and no self-interest
iv Introduction
can deflect or turn it aside. It is week-a-day, is that honesty, and
deals with men and things as they are.
There live honest men who might be described as having their
honesty under control. Theirs is a kind of honesty that is neither head-
long nor inveterate. It is tame, tractable; it will not carry them to
expensive extremes. As they say of a well-broken horse, it will stand
without hitching. The Roosevelt honesty is the unbroken opposite of
these. In all things it is final. It is militant, wears a sword, and rises
stubbornly loyal to each occasion.
There be folk pliant to occasion; they are secretive before they are
brave, and have a genius for merger. The jackrabbit, when threatened,
can so accommodate himself with a condition as to seem to sink into
the bare, brown earth; the tree-toad will turn the color of whatever he
rests upon. This is for their safety. There be men who can bow
instantly to events. Feeling the helm of some sudden new exigency,
they will turn at full speed in half their length. Machiavelli speaks
highly of this ability to ignobly match the hour one lives in, and
preaches from it as from the very text of political success. Still that
gift of convenience is the mark of the politician aiming at self-interest,
rather than of the statesman who considers the broad advantage of a
world. It belongs with one who strives to match his day. Mr. Roose-
velt strives to make his day match him, and his integrities are never
supple nor convenient.
II.
Somebody once said that to become a great man one must be a great
boy. Mr. Roosevelt was a great boy.
Likewise, and like Caesar, he was ambitious.
“Twenty-two years old,” mused Caesar, “and nothing done for im-
mortality l’”
Whether he said something of this sort or no, the boy Roosevelt
nursed ambitions as deathless as were those of the young Roman.
Those ambitions had form in an instinct of supremacy. He entered the
lists with other boys in what games of skill and strength stir boyish
breasts. He owned a will, and tremendous power of concentration.
Also, it soon came to him, that if he would win in what life-struggles
lay before him and upon which he lusted to enter, he must win by vigor,
by steam. He was incapable of the sinuous, the stealthy, the indirect;
there was a deal of the Cromwell, and nothing of the Richelieu, in his
composition. He could no more disguise a sentiment or play the hypo-
crite, than a grizzly bear can disguise a sentiment or play the hypocrite;
he could fight but he couldn't lie, die but not deceive.
With these noon-day defects of frankness and no stealth, it behooved
young Roosevelt to cultivate the physical to fullest flower. And since
Introduction V
he was as prone to exercise the moral and the mental as he was the
physical, all things that were best in him came on apace and abreast.
To-day he owns the force of a pile-driver with the hair-line accuracy
of a watch. His industry gained stimulation with the rest, and he is
now so much the husband of time that he might be described as pos-
sessing a split-second attachment.
Coming from Harvard, Mr. Roosevelt plunged into politics as
naturally as ever dog of Newfoundland plunged into the sea. It might
be a thought too romantic to say that he at that time had his eyes on a
White House. And yet, as he began to climb the political steeps, it
must have stood whitely out before him, as some snow-capped peak
stands whitely out before one toiling among the foothills.
Mr. Roosevelt, going into politics, gave the enterprise a wealth of
thought. He evolved the aphorism:
“Better faithful than famous.”
Shoving forth on a sea of politics, Mr. Roosevelt was not wanting in
advantages. There be none so loved by the commons as an aristocrat;
and he was of the aristocrats. But he, himself, believed only in the
aristocracy of achievement.
Mr. Roosevelt began fighting his way out from among his silken
fellows. They argued against politics as something muddy and vulgar.
He retorted that he chose to be of the class governing rather than the
class governed. He explained to those silken ones that the politicians,
whom they denounced as rude, muddy, vulgar, were still their rulers.
Those muddy ones controlled the town, the state; if they were corrupt,
vicious, then the good silken ones should rescue the town and redeem
the state. To sit at ease was cowardly; idleness was the holiday of
fools. Those silken ones, by present showing, were the inferior of the
muddy folk who dominated them. More, they were traitors to their
trust as citizens; no one might call himself an honest member of society
unless he pulled at least his weight for the common weal.
The silken ones would not budge, but stuck by their easy chairs, and
Mr. Roosevelt went into the fray alone.
Caesar has been adverted to, and carrying forward the thought there
is much in the story of the Roman to find its parallel in that of Mr.
Roosevelt. Caesar, like Mr. Roosevelt, was a born boss-killer. And
like Mr. Roosevelt, Caesar was the despair of party, the bane of the
machine. Caesar, like Mr. Roosevelt, was of the patrician class. Caesar
wore the purple among the plebeians; also he wore it carelessly, as
holding it in light esteem.
Sulla, a great party man in his day, was moved to warn his brother
managers:
“Beware the ill-girt boy!” he cried. “He will be your ruin. In this
one Caesar you shall find many a Marius.”
vi Introduction
George William Curtis, in his hour a kind of party Sulla, said more
than a score of years ago of Mr. Roosevelt:
“You’ll know more—a deal more, of him later | He will be a figure,
not a figurehead l’’
There is scarce room between the narrow frontiers of this article to
set forth those wars that have been carried on by Mr. Roosevelt, against
party bosses and the fell powers of the machine. He has been ever an
American before he was a party man. and would rather be right than
“regular.”
“I do not number party loyalty among the ten commandments.” said
he, and his troubles with the bosses began.
Mr. Roosevelt decided to go to the Legislature. For that nomina-
tion he fought the district boss; and beat him.
No one could succeed at the polls, they said, without the favor of the
grog-shops. Mr. Roosevelt defied the grog-shops, promising high-
license. Against bossism and grog-shops, he won his seat.
In the Legislature Mr. Roosevelt challenged the State machine. Con-
trary to its express command, he moved the impeachment of a venal
judge. The battle raged eight days. The first day the entire assembly
voted against Mr. Roosevelt. The machine laughed at his poor and
lonesome figure.
Mr. Roosevelt was a profound student of General Jackson. When
Napoleon went down, Jackson, watching the trend of events, said:
“It was by his own error he fell; it wasn't the English but Paris that
defeated him. Napoleon ought to have burned Paris, and thrown him-
self upon the country. That's what I should have done, and the
country would have sustained me.”
Mr. Roosevelt, facing the machine, remembered Jackson. The ma-
chine was his Paris; he would set fire to it with publicity, and throw
himself upon the people.
Day after day he returned to the impeachment of that venal judge.
The papers printed the story; his war became known, and the people
took up the battle. On the first day he had stood alone, while the
machine grinned the grin of patronizing malice. On the eighth day,
he defeated the machine—no longer grinning—by a vote of one hun-
dred and four to six. Already, he had become a figure and not a
figurehead.
Mr. Roosevelt, in legislature and convention, fought and defeated
the machine until, to be rid of him and his pernicious integrities, it
caused him to be called to the Civil Service Commission.
There Mr. Roosevelt fought Congress and Congressmen; and de-
feated them. The spoilsmen at the Capitol breathed more free when
he was drafted home to become Commissioner of Police.
The crushing weight of the system arrayed against Mr. Roosevelt
Introduction vii
when he went into Mulberry Street, may be guessed at from the words
of Chief Byrnes:
“It will break him,” cried Byrnes. “He will have to yield in time;
he is only human.”
Mr. Roosevelt did not yield; the system yielded.
Mr. Roosevelt began by vetoing the annual parade of the police: It
was thus he threw down the glove.
“We will parade,” said he, “only when we have nothing to be
ashanned of.”
Time flowed on, and police troubles gathered for the bosses. Again
the machine besought a President to rid it of this berserk, whom no
chicane could conquer, no force of politics control.
Mr. Roosevelt was re-called to Washington as Assistant Secretary
of the Navy. Once there, and instantly he went to a clash with the
must and dust of that department, and fought a duel with Red Tape.
He was victor; just as he was ever victor. He sent Admiral Dewey to
the Asia station, and stores and ammunition to Hong Kong. When
the fools sought to weaken Dewey, and ordered home the flagship, he
would not have it so. He fought the fools, and beat them.
“Keep the Olympia,” he cabled Dewey, “and keep her full of coal.”
In war the sword supplants the reaping hook, and the first duty of the
citizen is to shed blood. The Spanish war came; and Mr. Roosevelt
went with his Rough Riders against ſever and mausers at Santiago and
San Juan.
In the old Viking days, the Norse warriors, on a platform of their
locked shields, lifted high above their heads that one who had been
forward in the fray, and with shout, and with clang of axe and sword,
proclaimed him chief. When Mr. Roosevelt returned from the Spanish
war, the people, treading down the bosses and trampling on the machine,
bore him aloft on their ballots to the Governor's seat at Albany.
In Albany, as Governor, Mr. Roosevelt assailed the corporations, and
conquered from the Legislature a Franchise Tax. Long before, he
had minted the phrase, “The Wealthy Criminal Class,” as descriptive
of those black ones with whom he was engaged. The war between
them, after twenty years, still raged; he was still the Nemesis of that
“Wealthy Criminal Class,” and those bosses and machines that gave
it comfort.
To punish him for the Franchise Tax, and remove his perilous
activities out of Albany, the machine sentenced him to the exile of the
Senate gavel. Now he is President, a National, not a State peril to
private corporations.
viii Introduction
III.
There is a touch of the Spartan in Mr. Roosevelt, and he would
sooner displease than deceive. Lycurgus would have joyed in him.
When he was Police Commissioner he enforced the excise law in the
teeth of the town's thirst.
“The Police Board,” said he, “is not a legislative body. If does not
make, it does not repeal, it enforces law l’ And with that he turned a
Sunday key on the saloon.
Later, Mr. Roosevelt had a chance to show his ready fertility and
his steadiness under fire. The party bosses promoted a parade of those
who demanded an “open town.” With that—being original and a
genius—he took humor for his buckler, courage for a sword.
Thousands, red-nosed and angry, held the middle of the street to
march in that parade. There was a reviewing stand; somewhat to
the horror, certainly to the wonder, of the parade promoters, Mr.
Roosevelt was early in his occupation of a seat therein.
The word was given; those wrathful, thirsty thousands commenced
sweeping down the street. In the forefront, rolled a round, militant
German, furious for the loss of Sunday beer.
As the heated German arrived cpposite the reviewing stand, he
tossed a proud hand rearward towards his followers.
“Nun, wo ist der Roosevelt?” (Now where is Roosevelt?) he shouted.
To his astonishment, a square bull-dog face looked down from the
stand, eyes kindly, jaw iron. Then came :
“Hier bin ich 1 Was willst du, kamerad?” (Here I am | What will
you, comrade?)
The angry marching German stopped as though planet-struck.
Then, off came his hat, and : &
“Hurrah for der Roosevelt!”
The column took up the cry. Detachment following detachment,
section on the heels of section, cheered. What had been intended as
a rebuke was turned into an endorsement, and the parade meant for
Mr. Roosevelt’s confusion became a procession in his honor.
Off the same tree came the following. There descended upon
America from Berlin a pestiferous Dr. Ahlwardt. His mission was to
slander the Jews for money. He visited Mr. Roosevelt, then in
Mulberry street, and demanded police protection for his lecture. He
would be severe, bitter, denunciatory, he said; the Jews threatened to
attack him. A
Mr. Roosevelt promised protection. Dr. Ahlwardt should deliver
that lecture; not a voice, not a hand, should be raised against him.
The pestiferous Dr. Ahlwardt thanked Mr. Roosevelt, and went his
way. On mounting the platform, he ſound thirty policemen, hooked
of nose, dark of cheek present by order of Mr. Roosevelt to keep him
Introduction ix
safe. The thirty blue-coat Jews, calm, steady, vigilant, stood silent
guard while he held forth. The audience was as silently, calmly
steady. There were no violences, no interruptions. But the lecture
dragged. The presence of those hooked-nose constables, and the
protection they rendered, gave the lie to all that was said, and the Jew-
baiting Dr. Ahlwardt found himself defeated before he began.
Mr. Roosevelt has given proofs of a courage higher and beyond the
common; he has written books. To write a book is the most recklessly
daring deed to which man may lay his hand. There is ho slightest
chance of fraud or imposition; all, in the nature of things, must needs
be open, stark, fenceless.
Should you ask a lawyer a question for which his ignorance knows
no reply, he has but to cough, look grave, mention the business as
something difficult and deep, and say he must consult the books. You
respect him the more; your reverence goes clambering. Does a doctor
find himself confronted by a malady beyond his skill, and for which he
has no name, no remedy ? Why then, a puckered brow, a sapient
shake of the head, silence and a bread pill will save his reputation.
But a writer has no cover; there lies his work in helpless black and
white beneath the lens of criticism. He who would pull it to pieces
may take his time, and send for the required instruments. It cannot
get away; it must remain and await his pleasure. A writer, in all he
does, is as much in the open field as a horse running a race. He may
be sure, too, of a score of envious stop-watches about the track, to
snap the quarters, and show how he has fallen off from previous
performances, or failed in competition with some rival.
Wherefore, it may be said again, that Mr. Roosevelt evinces both
courage and sincerity in this that he has written books. More, the
books are good books, worthy the shelves of the centuries, able for their
own defense. They may be trusted for phrase and substance to turn
what shafts of criticism are shot against them. These books tell the
story of their author. They are remarkable for lucidity, and the even
temperature of tone and style. They speak of Scholarship and man-
hood, of an equal and distributed force.
IV.
What is the lesson of Mr. Roosevelt? What is the message of his
career P Folk should remember their Chesterfield, and look into men
as well as at them.
Mr. Roosevelt is perfect as an expression of concrete Americanism.
He could occur only as the result of an equation of Democracy, happen
nowhere but here. An Artist of the Actual, he was born for his share
in government. He instructs himself by the past; but he does not
wholly lean upon it, and is equal to the making of a precedent. In
X Introduction
politics he is your natural pathfinder, and pushes towards his purpose
by new passes through the hills. When in doubt, he goes ahead; and
his war-word is :
“Be ready 1"
Neither does he lose battles by over-estimating a foe.
Likewise he realizes that triumph is the best refuge, success the best
safety:-knowing, with Mirabeau, how short is the distance between
Greatness and Destruction, the Capitol and the Tarpeian Rock.
Mr. Roosevelt, in all he says and all he is, gives one an impression
of courage and patriotism. No one will look upon him, and think
Bunker Hill a failure or Yorktown a mistake. He justifies a republic
and the wisdom of one. Beyond all, he furnishes the feeling of force.
It is as though one considered a Corliss engine. Nor—to slip into the
phrase of steamboatmen—is he over-engined for his beam. He is in
proportion and balance, with machinery to sit solidly upon bedplates
equal to its support. *
Mr. Roosevelt employs no pedestals. He surrounds himself with
no pomps and supports himself by no circumstances. He talks with
one, not to one, and is as democratic as a Sioux. Withal, he is as frank
as a cataract, and pours forth feeling and thought and plan, holding
nothing back.
There are men born with a liking for secrets, and should you ask
one of them the time of day he makes a mystery of the hour.
Mr. Roosevelt is not of these. #
There are men so fond of the furtive that, discovering a thicket, they
will crouch therein for a no better reason than the mere sensation of
being concealed.
Mr. Roosevelt is not of these. His bent is open, free, confident; and
he is combative, as one deep and practical must be.
There are men whose notion of war would be to poison brook and
lake and drinking place, and fall back into the hills. There are men
of silken cord and Malay creese, who kill as the assassin kills. There
are men who creep at midnight to surprise a foe.
Mr. Roosevelt belongs with none of these. He is warlike, as Richard
of England was warlike; he comes at noon, he blows a bugle, he wields
a battle axe. Had he been a gladiator, he would have fought with
sword and buckler, not with net and trident.
In the woods of our worldly existence roam folk of two sorts—
the hunter and the trapper. The latter sets gins and snares and dead-
falls, and takes his prey by indirection. The hunter, on the intrepid
other hand, goes openly on the track of his game, and relies on
personal strength and steadiness and weapon-skill to bring it down.
Mr. Roosevelt is of the hunter class.
The ear-mark of innate greatness is the immutable. Whether the
Introduction xi
man go up or down, mount or descend, if he be great he does not
change.
General Grant, from obscurity, rose in five years to be a foremost
soldier of the world, and rode with a million of men at his horse's
tail. From first to last he was the same; no one found a change.
And General Grant was great.
Aaron Burr went from high to low. From a place where he tied
Jefferson for a Presidency he descended to walk the New York streets,
bankrupt of fortune and influence and friends. The earth had slipped
from beneath his feet; the stars above were shifted.
But there came no change in Aaron Burr. His head was as proudly
high, and his dangerous gray eyes gleamed, as on that day when he
stepped from his place as Vice-President to shoot his enemy at
Weehawken. Aaron Burr like General Grant was changeless.
And Aaron Burr was great.
Mr. Roosevelt was State Assemblyman, he was Chief of Civil Service,
he was Police Commissioner, he was Naval Aide to Secretary Long,
he was Colonel in the field, he was Governor, he was Vice-President.
Now he is President, with all the vast power of the place, and well
knowing that power. The Roosevelt of the Assembly, the Roosevelt
of the Civil Service, the Roosevelt of the Police, the Roosevelt of the
Navy, who laid aside ease and high position to take up the labors and
the bullet-risks of war, the Roosevelt of Albany, and of the Senate
gavel, are one and all the Roosevelt of the White House. There has
been nothing added, nothing lost; he comes before one the same clear,
plain, direct, strong, understandable American he ever was.
V.
Should one go to Washington and feel slyly about, one will find how
there lurks in the official long grass, a certain—even if hesitating and
timid—opposition to Mr. Roosevelt. For that matter there is always
opposition to every official, be he president or path-master. The word
“lurks” is used advisedly. The giant Washington per cent. of those
described lie extremely dumb and low. They consider their own
interests, and, whatever policy or project is afoot, silently pause to
note which way the cat will hop. They are guarded in what they say.
Their enmity is never bitter, never goes to the point denunciatory, never
carries them and their fortunes beyond recall.
Before I began to write this memoir, I was purposely in converse
with divers Senators and Representatives. I picked upon ones
unfavorable to Mr. Roosevelt. It was of him I wanted them to talk.
In each case, I sought to learn specifically what complaint they would
lodge against him. The experience was a water haul. I could get
nothing from any of them but a roster of adjectives.
xii Introduction
Now I place no wide reliance upon adjectives. To say a man is brave
or timid or honest or false or good or bad or strong or weak or stable or
flighty is but to offer one's conclusion on that point. With every hat-
lifting deference for another's, even a Senator's, wisdom, I prefer to
form my own conclusions rather than accept those of folk about me,
however broad or wise. My friend of that adjective may have his
personal axe to grind. Or, wanting such interests, he may be mentally
lame or blind, or lack what basis of information is required whereon
to build. Instead of an adjective, I would sooner hear of those deeds
which gave it birth. Instead of telling me that a man is brave, tell me
what actions of stark heroism furnishes the epithet.
In the business of a slanderer or a sycophant, your adjective is a
splendid thing. But for the work of the world at large it has ever been
a clog. Adjectives are the parents of error, of misinformation; our
day would have been enhanced, and the race set forward by centuries,
if in the beginning an adjective had been made a capital offense.
And yet I concede, at the heel of this harangue, that I, as much as
any, have been guilty of the crime of adjectives.
One gray man of the Senate said, speaking of Mr. Roosevelt and
quoting Kipling: º,
“There is too much ego in his cosmos,” and cited the Panama Canal.
When Alexander cut the Gordian knot, had that frosted Senator
been standing by, and particularly if he represented a railway interest
threatened by that knot-cutting, he would have said the same of
Alexander. And he would have gone as far astray. It was statecraft
that prompted the Macedonian when he drew his sword; it was not the
ego in his cosmos. Mr. Roosevelt will cut the knot of Panama; not
for egotism, but for the good and safety of American men.
Another of the Senate, who was so good as to give me his opinions,
described Mr. Roosevelt’s Panama position as the offspring of vanity.
If this were true—which it is not—what then 2 The public, the
present American public, is not concerned with motives, but with acts.
Three centuries away, when some Macaulay of the alcoves bestirs his
pen to a consideration of to-day, a motive may become important.
He will pull and haul at present history in the hope of uncovering its
reasons. We, however, when brought to face our times, will find our
first interest in what a man does rather than the argument by which he
does it. His motive may be black or white or grave or gay; that is for
him. The common interest deals but with the deed.
Mr. Roosevelt's policies of Panama are no more the fruit of vanity
than was the Declaration of Independence born of the vanity of
Jefferson and Franklin and Adams and Hancock and Jay and what
others of that prodigious convention set pen to its execution. But if
that great document were wholly come of the vanity of those gentry of
Introduction xiii
powdered hair and silver buckles, a vanity as arrant as any peacock's
tail, would it the less pronounce our Independence? Besides, given
the proper sort, there is no harm and much good in vanity. The right
vanity is a virtue; it should be fostered, not frowned upon. Vanity
comes often to be as the sail to the ship, and gives motion to the hull
beneath that would make no voyage without. Wanting vanity,
Columbus would have found no America, Caesar would have crossed
no Rubicon, Napoleon would have begun, not ended, with Waterloo.
Those togačd carpers told of “ego” and “vanity,” and the very
meagerness of their criticism showed the spirit to be personal. Those
poor Senate folk were merely shaken and uncertain concerning Mr.
Roosevelt in his attitude towards themselves. They could not call
upon him and ask for patronage, undisturbed of apprehension. He
was capable of saying the thing they did not like to hear. Other
Presidents had been more conventional if not convenient. To visit one
of them on a mission of patronage-gathering, was as though the
questing Senator visited an apple tree. If he got no apples, at least he
might sit in the shade. At the worst he could but fall from some bough
not over high, and scratch his face and hands. To press in upon Mr.
Roosevelt for this post-office or that marshalship came to be widely
another affair. He resembled a dynamo rather than an apple tree.
Their resentment, as I say, was the simple harvest of their alarm.
They could not foresee when or how they would receive a shock. But
for you and for me, why then, excellent is that executive whom a
place-hunting Senator shudders to approach !
VI.
Mr. Roosevelt has another characteristic that makes for the terror
of your conventional statesmen. Most of these are creatures of moon-
light politics, and avoid sunshine and the open paths. They like
stratagem, and plot, and combination, and intrigue. Peculiarly are
they startled by any measure of the bold and bluff.
That noble incapacity for secrets which belongs with Mr. Roosevelt,
sets the hearts of such to a trot. He has too much courage, too little
chicane. He speaks out, and they are frightened. He is Bismarckian;
he is Norse. And so they fear him, and hide from him, wringing their
hands over the unwonted strangeness of things. His independence is
an offense with these. Some folk want cat's-paws, not Presidents in
the White House.
Still another reason of snobbish anxiety concerning Mr. Roosevelt
abides in his want of peculiar reverence for folk of wealth and station.
The element of a money awe is absent from his makeup. He sees no
breath-stealing difference between capitalist and laborer. The two
stand equal before him; he receives both, gives justice to both, refuses
xiv. Introduction
to be bullied by both. He cares nothing for caste. Mr. Morgan, the
banker, is on a plane with Mr. Masterson, the scout. Both meet the
same reception, and come and go by the same door. Mr. Baer of the
coal mines is not preferred to Mr. Mitchell of the miners; nor is the
latter given precedence over Mr. Baer.
There be folk, American folk, who hold that the most dangerous man
in a democracy is a democrat. Particularly in those temples where
Mammon is served, does democracy provoke a groan. The money-
priests bewail it, and beat their bosoms. They evince a deal of readiness
to forget that this Roosveltian genius for equality matches the Consti-
tution. And it marks the heinous difference between the abstract and
the concrete. It is one thing to talk equality, another to practice it.
A little Americanism in the White House, a little leveling of rich
and poor, puckers many a free mouth. Our Tories see nothing to
come from it but the downfall of society. That Rooseveltian familiarity
which teaches its owner to hail his unfamed callers as “Jack” and
“Bill” and “Ben,” and then have them in to lunch, is by these much
frowned upon as destructive of that sour dignity which, to their king-
loving instincts, should ever form the pedestal of a presidency. To
these, a President should be as a King. Or at the stony least a statue,
cold and white and hard and speechless—a thing of marble. They in
no wise understand One who walks and talks and laughs and grasps
hands with men of obscure clay, as though his blood were as warm
and as red as their own. Thus does Mr. Roosevelt occur as a shock
to our stilted gentry. They mourn him because he will not preserve a
CaSte.
These stilted ones should recall their history. Mr. Roosevelt is not
without a purple precedent. Frederick the Great banters jests with
his soldiery about their camp fires, while Gustavus Adolphus, when the
paymaster does not appear, squares accounts and makes himself the
army's toast by taking it in to dinner.
Mr. Roosevelt intends the Panama Canal to be the great work of
his regime. With all the power in his hands—and no one has measured
the power of a President—he will push the Panama business to its
conclusion. By this or that, he means to split the Isthmus with that
Canal. American ships are to translate themselves from One Ocean to
the other without troubling Cape Horn; upon that marine miracle he
stands resolved. And it is likewise current that, as demanded by a
long-ago Secretary of State, now dead and under the grass-roots, he
is determined that both banks of the Canal shall be part of the coast
line of this country. Such decision is native to and in keeping with
the Roosevelt character, which is American ; and its carrying out by
no means inconsistent with Roosevelt tastes, which never fail to favor
boldness.
Introduction XV
The propriety of the Canal, no one American—save the trans-Conti-
nental railways—was ever heard to deny. But, to the last crowned
head of them, every European ruler, and even the elected one of France,
has been and is opposed. They believe with Sir Walter Raleigh that
he who holds the Isthmus of Darien holds the keys to the world, and
are solicitous that no such lockopener shall hang at the girdle of
America. Since ever the earliest proposal on the American part was
made to dig the Canal, Germany, France, England and many another
of Europe have intrigued and wrought against it. Especially did they
bribe Isthmian officials to invent delay, where they might not stubbornly
refuse.
And Europe still stands ready with her bribes to keep America from
that ditch digging. Also, you are to remember that much may be
done with bribery in the Tropics, where the very heat, making honest
labor all but impossible, would seem to sap the integrity of men.
Equatorial venality has been a proverb since time was, and the
temperate paid bribes to the torrid zone in every age.
Mr. Roosevelt is wholly aware how American interest and American
right have been withstood in the Panama instance, by European intrigue
slyly working with money in the dark. Being a Scipio more than he
is a Fabius, he may yet oppose finesse with force, and dig the Canal in
the face of Europe.
It will be well for the world while Mr. Roosevelt abides in Wash-
ington. He will not be duped abroad or deluded at home. The
government will be neither a plutocracy nor a mobOcracy, but a
democracy, while he prevails. He will be the friend of Capital, the
friend of Labor, the fool and tool of neither. It was he who said that
during his stay the door of the White House should yield as easily
to the touch of Labor as to the touch of Capital, but no easier.
During those years of on-coming towards a Presidency, Mr. Roose-
velt was not morally or mentally going backward or standing still. He
ripened and rounded, and grew in wisdom as he grew in politics. With
experience his prudence increased, while his courage was not
diminished. Over all and beyond all, towered his indomitable honesty.
He is a big man—big for the country, big for mankind. Whole peoples
respect him, kings are jealous of his fame. To-day, to that Fate which
waits ever at the elbow of Time, the nation may say:
“Bring on the Hour; here stands the Man!”
Theodore Roosevelt
SPEECH OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT THE REUNION OF THE
DEPARTMENT OF THE POTOMAC, G. A. R., AT THE NEW
WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., F.E.B. 19, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, Commander-in-Chief, and you, my comrades:
I can say that there is nothing else of which I am quite so proud as
having won, in a sense, the right to claim comradeship with you. And,
gentlemen, I recollect speaking with a friend at the time of the Spanish
War as to why we went, and it was agreed that it was simply because we
could not stay away. We had taken to heart the great object lesson that
you gave. I am very glad to have the chance of seeing you this
evening and of being with you. I would be but a poor American if I
did not appreciate to the full the debt under which America rests to
you, not alone for the lesson in war that you have given, but for what
that lesson teaches as to peace. I meet you here and I see the general
and the man from the ranks honor one another by the highest title
either knows—comrade. I see you applying the great lesson of brother-
hood—the lesson that must be applied in civil life no less than in mili-
tary life if we are to work out, as we shall work out, aright the problems
that face the Republic. The war in which I was engaged was a small
affair; but it gave us an understanding of what you had done and of
what you had been through. I know pretty well what kind of mem-
ories you have. I know what you did, what you risked, what you sacri-
ficed. I know what it meant to you, and I know why you did it. There
are two or three lessons that you taught that I hope this country will
not only never forget, but will never cease applying. In the first place
the motive—the tissue of motives that spurred you on—the love for
liberty, love for union, and the love for the stable and ordered freedom
of a great people. You braved nights in the freezing mud of the
trenches in winter, and the marches under scorching midsummer suns;
fever cots, wounds, insufficient food, exhausting fatigue of a type that
those that have not tried it can not even understand. You did it without
One thought of the trivial monetary reward at the moment; you did it
because your souls spurred you on. And that is the reason why to this
I
2 Messages and Speeches
day, when any man speaks to a body of veterans he speaks to a body
of men who are instant to respond to any call for adherence to a lofty
ideal. In other words, you practiced, and by practicing preached, in
the strongest manner, the ideal of doing your duty, of doing duty when
duty calls, without thought of what the reward might be. In the days
when the sad, kindly, patient Lincoln—mighty Lincoln—stood in the
White House like a high priest of the people, between the horns of the
altar, and poured out the blood of the bravest and best, it was because
only by that sacrifice could the flag that had been rent in sunder once
again be made without a seam. You taught the ideal of duty—duty,
a word that stands above glory, or any other word. Glory is a good
word, too, but duty is a better one.
You taught, in addition to that, brotherhood. In the ranks, as you
stood there shoulder to shoulder, little any one of you cared what the
man next to you was as regarded wealth, trade, or education, if he
was in very truth a man. And, friends, short would have been Our
shrift if in our army as a whole there had been any failure to exercise
just that type of judgment—to exercise the judgment on the man as
a man; short would have been our shrift if we had failed to do justice
to the bricklayer on the one hand, or to the banker on the other; if
we had shown either contempt of the one, or the no less mean emotion
of envy for the other. If we are to go on, as we shall and must go on
in our national career, we must apply in the civic life of our nation
exactly the principles which obtained in the Grand Army of the Re-
public. There are plenty of foes to fight and we can not afford to have
honest men betrayed into hostility toward one another; betrayed into
acting toward one another in a way that will permanently deteriorate
the standard of our national character. We can afford to disagree on
questions of proper political difference. There are plenty such. But
we can not afford, if we are to remain true to the ideals of the past, to
differ about those ideals. We can not afford to do less than justice to
any man. We can not afford to shrink from seeing that the right ob-
tains; nor, on the other hand, to rebuke any effort to stir up those dark
and evil forces which lurk in each man’s breast, and which need to be
kept down, not excited.
The Commander-in-Chief spoke of the great and good President—
of President McKinley—who died for the people exactly as Abraham
Lincoln died. You who wore the blue in the early sixties warred against
that spirit of disunion which, if successful, would have meant wide-
spread governmental anarchy throughout this land. You warred for
orderly liberty. So now it behoves each of us so to conduct his civil
life, so to do his duty as a citizen, that we shall in the most effective way
war against the spirit of anarchy in all its forms. You did mighty
deeds, and you leave us more than mighty deeds, for you leave us
Theodore Roosevelt 3
the memory of how you did them. You leave us not only the victory,
but the spirit that lay behind it and shone through it. You leave us
not only the triumph, but the memory of the patient resolution, of the
suffering, of the dogged endurance and heroic daring through which
that triumph came to pass. You in your youth and early manhood
took up the greatest task which fell to the lot of any generation of our
people to perform. You did it well. We have lesser tasks, and yet
tasks of great and vital importance. Woe to us if we do not show our-
selves worthy to be your successors, by doing our lesser tasks with
the same firm determination for right that you displayed when you
fought to a finish the great Civil War, when you upheld the arms of
Abraham Lincoln, and followed to victory the flag of Ulysses S. Grant.
AT CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA, APRIL 7, 1902.
I had two of your University graduates in my regiment—One, John
Greenway, used to be on your football eleven. I want to say how glad
I am to see you, and what an interesting thing it must be to every
American to come through this historic land. As we passed by the
vista in the woods we saw the home of the Madisons. Your great
University here is associated with the early Presidents of our country.
I see before me men who were in the Spanish war. We are here
on the land fought over by those who wore the gray and those who
wore the blue, and those men and their descendants now stand shoulder
to shoulder as good citizens, interested in all that concerns the welfare
of our common nation. It is a great pleasure to catch this glimpse of
you and I thank you for your kindly reception.
[The News and Courier, Charleston, S. C., April 8, 1902.]
AT A BANQUET AT CHARLESTON, S. C., APRIL 8, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my hosts and my fellow American citizens:
I should indeed be but a poor American myself if I were not deeply
touched and gratified by the way you have greeted me to-day in this
your beautiful city; and, of course, I feel at home here. I think that
an American who is worth his salt has the right to feel at home in
every part of the United States.
Around this table I see many men who took part in the great wars.
The war in which the younger among us here took part was a very
little one because it didn’t have to be any bigger. But it had one thor-
oughly good effect; it put the cap on the structure that had been building
while we were almost unconscious of it, and it taught us how thoroughly
at one we were. When we got through that war it did not make a
bit of difference to us. whether it was an admiral who came from Ver-
mont or a lieutenant who came from Alabama, if the man had done his
4 Messages and Speeches
duty in such shape as to make us each feel an even more generous thrill
of pride in our common nationality. The debt that we owed him had
little to do with the section from which he came.
And now a special word to you of Charleston and of South Carolina.
Just twelve years ago, when I first went to Washington to take part
in governmental work, I was immediately thrown into singularly close
contact and intimacy with a South Carolinian. It was my good fortune
to work with him for three years and for the nine years since, and for
as long as I shall continue to be in public life, it will be to me ever a
spur to try to do decent duty for the Republic, because I have been
thrown intimately in contact with as fearless and as high minded a
public servant as this country has ever had, my old friend, your former
Governor, Hugh Thompson.
And from what I have known of you and of your representatives it
was in no sense a surprise, but it was a keen pleasure to be greeted
with the hearty and generous hospitality, the more than hearty and
generous hospitality, which you have shown me to-day.
The welfare of any part of this country is, in a certain sense, an
index of the welfare of all, and I think, gentlemen, that, on the average,
as we all tend to go up, it seems to be a little better to go up uniformly
rather than at a sharper gait for the time being and then down and
then up again and then down. South Carolina seems during the last
two decades to have definitely entered upon the path of steady progress
in things material as well as in other things. I was much struck in
looking over some figures of the census quite recently published to
see the astonishing progress that has been made here in your State.
I was prepared to see that the values of your farm products had risen
as they have, a little over 25 per cent. I was prepared to see that your
farms themselves had increased in a still larger proportion; that the
value of your lands and buildings had grown up, but I did not realize
the way in which your manufacturing enterprises had increased, both
as shown in the fact that your manufacturing products had gone up
over 230 per cent; that, for instance, the number of spindles had about
quadrupled, from less than half a million to more than two million, in
the State. I did not realize that the wages paid out had increased 75
per cent. Gentlemen, you talk of the progress of the far West, but I
think South Carolina can give points to some of the States. I think
that with such a record for the previous decade you were well war-
ranted upon insisting on holding your Exposition here.
And, gentlemen, I was very glad that in arranging for your Expo-
sition you not only took in the Southern States, but that you specifically
included the islands lying south of the United States, those islands
with which events of the last few years have made it evident that we
are bound in the future to have closer relations, closer relations for
Theodore Roosevelt 5
our advantage also. And about all that I have said applies to the
greatest and richest of those islands, the island with which we have
been brought into the most peculiar intimacy and relationship—the
island of Cuba. And I ask that in our trade relations with Cuba we
give her a marked and substantial advantage, not merely, not mainly,
because it will redound to our interest to do so, although that also is
true, but I ask it especially because events have so shaped themselves
that it is Our duty as a great and mighty nation to help Cuba, and
I hope to see us do our duty. I shall not try to make you any speech
to-night, because, for your sins, you will have to listen to one to-morrow.
I shall merely thank you again with all my heart and say to you that
I want you to appreciate that I mean every word I say, and mean it
deeply, when I tell you I have been touched, more than pleased, touched
and stirred by the warmth and heartiness with which you have made
me feel to-day that I am one of you.
[The News and Courier, Charleston, S. C., April 9, 1902.]
AT THE CHARLESTON EXPOSITION, APRIL 9, 1902.
Mr. President, Mr. Mayor, and you the men and women of the Pal-
metto State, men and women of the South, my fellow citizens of the
Union:
It is indeed to me a peculiar pleasure to have the chance of coming
here to this Exposition held in your old, your beautiful, your historic
city. My mother's people were from Georgia; but before they came to
Georgia, before the Revolution, in the days of Colonial rule, they dwelt
for nearly a century in South Carolina; and therefore I can claim your
State as mine by inheritance no less than by the stronger and nobler
right which makes each foot of American soil in a sense the property of
all Americans. <
Charleston is not only a typical Southern city; it is also a city whose
history teems with events which link themselves to American history
as a whole. In the early Colonial days Charleston was the outpost
of our people against the Spaniard in the South. In the days of the
Revolution there occurred here some of the events which vitally af-
fected the outcome of the struggle for Independence, and which im-
pressed themselves most deeply upon the popular mind. It was here
that the tremendous terrible drama of the Civil War opened.
With delicate and thoughtful courtesy you originally asked me to
come to this Exposition on the birthday of Abraham Lincoln. The
invitation not only showed a fine generosity and manliness in you, my
hosts, but it also emphasized as hardly anything else could have em-
phasized how completely we are now a united people. The wounds
left by the great Civil War, incomparably the greatest war of modern
6 Messages and Speeches
times, have healed; and its memories are now priceless heritages of
honor alike to the North and to the South. The devotion, the self-
sacrifice, the steadfast resolution and lofty daring, the high devotion
to the right as each man saw it, whether Northerner or Southerner—
all these qualities of the men and women of the early sixties now shine
luminous and brilliant before our eyes, while the mists of anger and
hatred that once dimmed them have passed away forever.
All of us, North and South, can glory alike in the valor of the men
who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray. Those were
iron times, and only iron men could fight to its terrible finish the giant
struggle between the hosts of Grant and Lee, the struggle that came
to an end thirty-seven years ago this very day. To us of the present
day, and to our children and children’s children, the valiant deeds, the
high endeavor, and abnegation of self shown in that struggle by those
who took part therein will remain for evermore to mark the level to
which we in our turn must rise whenever the hour of the Nation’s need
may come.
When four years ago this Nation was compelled to face a foreign
foe, the completeness of the reunion became instantly and strikingly
evident. The war was not one which called for the exercise of more
than an insignificant fraction of our strength, and the strain put upon
us was slight indeed compared with the results. But it was a satis-
factory thing to see the way in which the sons of the soldier of the
Union and the soldier of the Confederacy leaped eagerly forward,
emulous to show in brotherly rivalry the qualities which had won re-
nown for their fathers, the men of the great war. It was my good
fortune to serve under an ex-Confederate general, gallant old Joe
Wheeler, who commanded the cavalry division at Santiago.
In my regiment there were certainly as many men whose fathers had
served in the Southern, as there were men whose fathers had served
in the Northern, army. Among the captains there was opportunity to
promote but one to field rank. The man who was singled out for this
promotion because of conspicuous gallantry in the field was the son
of a Confederate general and was himself a citizen of this, the Palmetto
State; and no American officer could wish to march to battle beside a
more loyal, gallant, and absolutely fearless comrade than my former
captain and major, your fellow-citizen, Micah Jenkins.
A few months ago, owing to the enforced absence of the Governor
of the Philippines, it became necessary to nominate a Vice-Governor
to take his place—One of the most important places in our Government
at this time. I nominated as Vice-Governor an ex-Confederate, General
Luke Wright, of Tennessee. It is therefore an ex-Confederate who
now stands as the exponent of this Government and this people in that
great group of islands in the eastern seas over which the American
Theodore Roosevelt 7
flag floats. General Wright has taken a leading part in the work of
steadily bringing order and peace out of the bloody chaos in which we
found the islands. He is now taking a leading part not merely in up-
holding the honor of the flag by making it respected as the symbol of
our power, but still more in upholding its honor by unwearied labor
for the establishment of ordered liberty—of law-creating, law-abiding
civil government—under its folds.
The progress which has been made under General Wright and those
like him has been indeed marvelous. In fact, a letter of the General’s
the other day seemed to show that he considered there was far more
warfare about the Philippines in this country than there was warfare
in the Philippines themselves | It is an added proof of the complete-
ness of the reunion of our country that one of the foremost men who
have been instrumental in driving forward the great work for civiliza-
tion and humanity in the Philippines has been a man who in the Civil
War fought with distinction in a uniform of Confederate gray.
If ever the need comes in the future the past has made abundantly
evident the fact that from this time on Northerner and Southerner will
in war know only the generous desire to strive how each can do the
more effective service for the flag of our common country. The same
thing is true in the endless work of peace, the never-ending work of
building and keeping the marvelous fabric of our industrial prosperity.
The upbuilding of any part of our country is a benefit to the whole,
and every such effort as this to stimulate the resources and industry of
a particular section is entitled to the heartiest support from every
quarter of the Union. Thoroughly good national work can be done
only if each of us works hard for himself, and at the same time keeps
constantly in mind that he must work in conjunction with others.
You have made a particular effort in your Exhibition to get into
touch with the West Indies. This is wise. The events of the last four
years have shown us that the West Indies and the Isthmus must in the
future occupy a far larger place in our national policy than in the past.
This is proved by the negotiations for the purchase of the Danish Is-
lands, the acquisition of Porto Rico, the preparation for building an
Isthmian canal, and, finally, by the changed relations which these years
have produced between us and Cuba. As a Nation we have especial
right to take honest pride in what we have done for Cuba. Our critics
abroad and at home have insisted that we never intended to leave the
island. But on the 20th of next month Cuba becomes a free republic,
and we turn over to the islanders the control of their own government.
It would be very difficult to find a parallel in the conduct of any other
great State that has occupied such a position as ours. We have kept
our word and done our duty, just as an honest individual in private life
keeps his word and does his duty.
8 Messages and Speeches
Be it remembered, moreover, that after our four years' occupation
of the island we turn it over to the Cubans in a better condition than
it ever has been in all the centuries of Spanish rule. This has a direct
bearing upon our own warfare. Cuba is so near to us that we can never
be indifferent to misgovernment and disaster within its limits. The
mere fact that our administration in the island has minimized the danger
from the dreadful scourge of yellow fever, alike to Cuba and to our-
selves, is sufficient to emphasize the community of interest between us.
But there are other interests which bind us together. Cuba's position
makes it necessary that her political relations with us should differ from
her political relations with other powers. This fact has been formu-
lated by us and accepted by the Cubans in the Platt amendments. It
follows as a corollary that where the Cubans have thus assumed a
position of peculiar relationship to our political system they must sim-
ilarly stand in a peculiar relationship to our economic system.
We have rightfully insisted upon Cuba adopting toward us an attitude
differing politically from that she adopts toward any other power; and
in return, as a matter of right, we must give to Cuba a different—that
is, a better—position economically in her relations with us than we
give to other powers. This is the course dictated by sound policy, by a
wise and far-sighted view of our own interest, and by the position we
have taken during the past four years. We are a wealthy and powerful
country, dealing with a much weaker one; and the contrast in wealth
and strength makes it all the more our duty to deal with Cuba, as we
have already dealt with her, in a spirit of large generosity.
This Exposition is rendered possible because of the period of in-
dustrial prosperity through which we are passing. While material
well-being is never all-sufficient to the life of a nation, yet it is the
merest truism to say that its absence means ruin. We need to build a
higher life upon it as a foundation; but we can build little indeed unless
this foundation of prosperity is deep and broad. The well-being which
we are now enjoying can be secured only through general business pros-
perity, and such prosperity is conditioned upon the energy and hard
work, the sanity and the mutual respect, of all classes of capitalists,
large and small, of wage workers of every degree. As is inevitable in
a time of business prosperity, some men succeed more than others, and
it is unfortunately also inevitable that when this is the case some un-
wise people are sure to try to appeal to the envy and jealousy of those
who succeed least. It is a good thing when these appeals are made to
remember that while it is difficult to increase prosperity by law, it is
easy enough to ruin it, and that there is small satisfaction to the less
prosperous if they succeed in overthrowing both the more prosperous
and themselves in the crash of a common disaster.
Every industrial exposition of this type necessarily calls up the
Theodore Roosevelt 9
thought of the complex social and economic questions which are in-
volved in our present industrial system. Our astounding material pros-
perity, the sweep and rush rather than the mere march of our progres-
sive material development, have brought grave troubles in their train.
We can not afford to blink these troubles, any more than because of
them we can afford to accept as true the gloomy forebodings of the
prophets of evil. There are great problems before us. They are not
insoluble, but they can be solved only if we approach them in a spirit of
resolute fearlessness, of common-sense, and of honest intention to do
fair and equal justice to all men alike. We are certain to fail if we
adopt the policy of the demagogue who raves against the wealth which
is simply the form of embodied thrift, foresight, and intelligence; who
would shut the door of opportunity against those whose energy we
should especially foster, by penalizing the qualities which tell for suc-
cess. Just as little can we afford to follow those who fear to recognize
injustice and to endeavor to cut it out because the task is difficult or
even—if performed by unskilful hands—dangerous.
This is an era of great combinations both of labor and of capital.
In many ways these combinations have worked for good; but they
must work under the law, and the laws concerning them must be just
and wise, or they will inevitably do evil; and this applies as much to
the richest corporation as to the most powerful labor union.* Our laws
must be wise, sane, healthy, conceived in the spirit of those who scorn
the mere agitator, the mere inciter of class or sectional hatred; who
wish justice for all men; who recognize the need of adhering so far
as possible to the old American doctrine of giving the widest possible
scope for the free exercise of individual initiative, and yet who recog-
nize also that after combinations have reached a certain stage it is in-
dispensable to the general welfare that the Nation should exercise over
them, cautiously and with self-restraint, but firmly, the power of super-
vision and regulation.
Above all, the administration of the government, the enforcement of
the laws, must be fair and honest. The laws are not to be administered
either in the interest of the poor man or the interest of the rich man.
They are simply to be administered justly; in the interest of justice to
each man be he rich or be he poor—giving immunity to no violator,
whatever form the violation may assume. Such is the obligation which
every public servant takes, and to it he must be true under penalty of
forfeiting the respect both of himself and of his fellows.
And now, my fellow-countrymen, in closing I am going to paraphrase
*This attitude of justice for both capital and labor and no unjust preference for either
has ever been the unswerving policy of President Roosevelt. He once said to a delegation of
labor people what he had already said to a delegation of capitalists: “Understand me, gentle-
men, while I am President the door of the White House shall swing to the touch of Labor
as easily as to the touch of Capital, but no more easily.”—A. H. L.
IO Messages and Speeches
something said by Governor Aycock last night. I have dwelt to-day
upon the fact that we are indeed a reunited people; that we are indeed
and forever one people. The time was when one could not have made
that statement with truth; now it can be truthfully said. There was
a time when it was necessary to keep saying it, because it was already
true, and because the assertion made it more true; but the time is at
hand, I think the time has come, when it is not necessary to say it
again. Proud of the South P Of course we are proud of the South;
not only Southerners, but Northerners are proud of the South. Proud
of your great deeds P Of course I am proud of your great deeds, for
you are my people. I thank you from my heart for the welcome you
have given me, and I assure you that few experiences in my life have
been more pleasant than the experiences of these two days that I have
spent among you. *
AT COLUMBIA, S. C., APRIL Io, Igo2.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I thank you must heartily for your courtesy in coming forward to
greet me this afternoon and it is only one of the expressions of the
invariable courtesy with which I have enjoyed every moment of the
three days I have been down here. I think I was a pretty good Amer-
ican when I came down, and I am a better American as I leave your
borders, and let me in closing ask of you now to support to the best of
your ability the Exposition in Charleston, and I ask that not only of
you, but of all the people in the Union. It is a great tribute to the
energy, the forethought, the business enterprise of the people of
Charleston that they should have planned and have built so really
beautiful an Exposition, and they deserve all the help they can possibly
have for it, and I wish them well, and I wish you well, and I thank
you for the way you have treated me.
[The News and Courier, Charleston, S. C., April 11, 1902.]
AT CHARLOTTE, N. C., APRIL 11, 1902.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I am very glad to have the chance of greeting you to-night, to say
how much I appreciate your having come.
Someone in the audience has spoken of the Mecklenburg Declaration.
That was the first declaration of independence in any of, what are now,
the United States. To my good fortune I have studied much of the
early history of North Carolina. I know the part you played in the
Revolution, the part you played even during the Revolution, in win-
ning the great West for the Republic. I feel that you deserve to be
Theodore Roosevelt II
called in a peculiar sense Americans of Americans, and no higher praise
than that can be given in our country. I have appreciated greatly the
greetings I have received, not merely in South Carolina, but from the
representatives of your State who were there also. It has been to me
a privilege to meet you. Yesterday I reviewed your National Guard
at the Charleston Exposition. It was a pleasure to be able to see
them. I have served with some of your men, for some men born in
this State were in my regiment. On one occasion I had to choose
twenty sharpshooters and two of them were North Carolinians.
I thank you and wish you all good luck.
[The News and Courier, Charleston, S. C., April 11, 1902.]
AT NEW YORK AT THE BANQUET AT SHERRY'S IN HONOR OF
DR. NICHOLAS MURRAY BUTLER, PRESIDENT OF
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, APRIL 19, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my hosts, and my fellow guests:
What I am going to say to-night will be based upon the altogether
admirable address made this afternoon by my old and valued friend, the
new President of your great university, in the course of which he
spoke of what the university can contribute to the state as being scholar-
ship and service. There are only a limited number of men of any
university who can add to what has been so well called by Professor
Munsterberg “productive scholarship.” Of course each university
should bend its energies toward developing the few men who are thus
able to add to the sum of the nation’s work in scholarly achievement.
To those men the all-important doctrine to preach is that one piece of
first-rate work is worth a thousand pieces of second-rate work; and
that after a generation has passed each university will be remembered
by what its sons have produced, not in the line of a mass of pretty good
work, but in the way of the few masterpieces. I do not intend, how-
ever, to dwell upon this side of the university's work, the work of
scholarship, the work of the intellect trained to its highest point of pro-
ductiveness. I want to speak of the other side, the side that produces
service to the public, service to the nation. Not one in a hundred of
us is fit to be in the highest sense a productive scholar, but all of us
are entirely fit to do decent service if we care to take the pains. If we
think we can render it without taking the pains, if we think we can
render it by feeling how nice it would be to render it—why, the value
of that service will be but little. -
Fortunately to-day those who addressed you had a right to appeal
not merely to what they had spoken, but to what they had done. When
we are inclined to be pessimistic over affairs, and especially public
affairs here in the United States, it is a pleasant thing to be able to
I 2 Messages and Speeches
look back to the last twenty years of the life of Columbia's late Presi-
dent, Mayor Low. And now, for a moment, look at things in their
pure historic perspective. Think what it means in the way of an object-
lesson to have a man who, after serving two terms as Mayor of what
is now one of the great boroughs of this great city, then became for
twelve years the President of one of the foremost institutions of learn-
ing in the entire land, and then again became the chief officer of the
city. That was not merely creditable to Mr. Low; it was creditable to
us. It spoke well for the city. It is a big mark on the credit side. We
have plenty of marks on the debit side; but we feel that this goes a
long way toward making the balance even.
As for the Dean—why, I sat at the feet of that Gamaliel when I
first went into politics. He and I took part in the affairs of the old
Twenty-first Assembly District in the days when I was just out of
college. My very first experiences in practical politics were gained
in connection with the Dean. And, gentlemen, as I gradually passed
out of the sphere of the Dean, I passed into the sphere of your present
President, and he has been my close friend, my valued adviser, ever
since.
When it comes to rendering service, that which counts chiefly with
a college graduate, as with any other American citizen, is not in-
tellect so much as what stands above mere power of body, or mere
power of mind, but must in a sense include them, and that is character.
It is a good thing to have a sound body, and a better thing to have a
sound mind; and better still to have that aggregate of virile and decent
qualities which we group together under the name of character. I
said both decent and virile qualities—it is not enough to have one or
the other alone. If a man is strong in mind and body and misuses his
strength then he becomes simply a foe to the body politic, to be hunted
down by all decent men; and if, on the other hand, he has thoroughly
decent impulses but lacks strength he is a nice man, but does not count.
You can do but little with him. -
In the unending strife for civic betterment, small is the use of these
people who mean well, but who mean well feebly. The man who counts
is the man who is decent and who makes himself felt as a force for
decency, for cleanliness, for civic righteousness. He must have several
qualities; first and foremost, of course, he must be honest, he must
have the root of right thinking in him. That is not enough. In the
next place he must have courage; the timid good man counts but little
in the rough business of trying to do well the world's work.” And
finally, in addition to being honest and brave he must have common-
*President Roosevelt is the apostle of Courage and makes a cult of Force. He holds that
a man without courage, without force, is an engine without steam, something perhaps to look
at but nothing to believe in or rely upon in transacting the destinies of the race.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt I3
sense. If he does not have it, no matter what other qualities he may
have, he will find himself at the mercy of those who, without possessing
his desire to do right, know only too well how to make the wrong ef-
fective. o
To you, the men of Columbia here, the men of this great city, and
the men who, when they graduate, go to other parts of the country,
we have the right to look in an especial degree for service to the public.
To you much has been given, and woe and shame to you if we can not
rightfully expect much from you in return.
We can pardon the man who has no chance in life if he does but
little for the State, and we can count it greatly to his credit if he does
much for the State. But upon you who have had so much rests a
heavy burden to show that you are worthy of what you have received.*
A double responsibility is upon you to use aright, not merely the
talents that have been given to you, but the chances you have to make
much of these talents. We have a right to expect service to the State
from you in many different lines: In the line of what, for lack of a
better word, we will call philanthropy; in all lines of effort for public
decency.
Remember always that the man who does a thing so that it is worth
doing is always a man who does his work for the work's sake. Some-
where in Ruskin there is a sentence to the effect that the man who
does a piece of work for the fee, normally does it in a second-rate way,
and that the only first-rate work is the work done by the man who
does it for the sake of doing it well, who counts the deed itself as his
reward. In no kind of work done for the public do you ever find the
really best, except where you find the man who takes hold of it because
he is irresistibly impelled to do it, because he wishes to do it for the
sake of doing it well, not for the sake of any reward that comes after-
ward or in connection with it. Of course, gentlemen, that is true of
almost every other walk of life, just exactly as true as it is in politics.
A clergyman is not worth his salt if he finds himself bound to be a
clergyman for the material reward of that profession. Every doctor
who has ever succeeded has been a man incapable of thinking of his fee
when he did a noteworthy surgical operation. A scientific man, a writer,
a historian, an artist, can only be a good man of science, a first-class
artist, a first-class writer, if he does his work for the sake of doing it
well; and this is exactly as true in political life, exactly as true in every
form of social effort, in every kind of work done for the public at
*President Roosevelt, although he attaches much importance to a college training, is
unprejudiced in this as in other matters, as is shown for instance by his tribute to the ability
of Paul Morton. The story of the world’s work in its doing does not show any peculiar
potentialities in favor of the college man. Franklin was not a college man; Washington,
Jackson, Lincoln were not college men. Shakespeare never saw a college and had “little
Latin and less Greek.” Diogenes couldn’t even read and write. It’s the Man and not the
College—always the Man.-A. H. L.
I4 Messages and Speeches
large. The man who does work worth doing is the man who does
it because he can not refrain from doing it; the man who feels it borne
in on him to try that particular job and see if he can not do it well.
And so it is with a general in the field. The man in the Civil War
who thought of any material reward for what he did was not among
the men whose names you read now on the honor roll of American
history.
So the work that our colleges can do is to fit their graduates to do
service—to fit the bulk of them, the men who can not go in for the
highest type of scholarship, to do the ordinary citizen's service for the
country; and they can fit them to do this service only by training them
in character. To train them in character means to train them not only
to possess, as they must possess, the softer and gentler virtues, but also
the virile powers of a race of vigorous men, the virtues of courage, of
honesty—not merely the honesty that refrains from doing wrong, but
the honesty that wars aggressively for the right—the virtues of courage,
honesty, and, finally, hard common-sense.
TO THE GRADUATING CLASS, NAVAL ACADEMY, ANNAPOLIS,
M.D., MAY 2, 1902. gº
Gentlemen of the graduating class:
In receiving these diplomas you become men who above almost any
others of the entire Union are to carry henceforth ever-present with
you the sense of responsibility which must come if you are worthy of
wearing the uniform; which must come with the knowledge that on
some tremendous day it may depend upon your courage, your pre-
paredness, your skill in your profession, whether or not the nation is
again to write her name on the world's roll of honor or is to know the
black shame of defeat. We all of us earnestly hope that the occasion
for war may not arise, but if it has to come then this nation must win;
and as Dr. Winston has pointed out, in winning the prime factor must
of necessity be the United States Navy. If the navy fails us then we
are doomed to defeat. It should therefore be an object of prime im-
portance for every patriotic American to see that the navy is built up;
and that it is kept to the highest point of efficiency both in personnel
and material. Above all, it can not be too often repeated to those rep-
resentatives of the nation in whose hands the practical application of
the principle lies, that in modern naval war the chief factor in achieve-
ing triumph is what has been done in the way of thorough preparation
and training before the beginning of the war. It is what has been done
before the outbreak of war that counts most. After the outbreak, all
that can be done is to use to best advantage the great war engines, and
the seamanship, marksmanship, and general practical efficiency which
Theodore Roosevelt * I5
have already been provided by the forethought of the national legis-
lature and, through a course of years, by the administrative ability of
the Navy Department. A battleship can not be improvised. It takes
years to build. And we must learn that it is exactly as true that the
skill of the officers and men in handling a battleship aright can likewise
never be improvised; that it must spring from use and actual Sea Service,
and from the most careful, zealous, and systematic training. You to
whom I am about to give these diplomas now join the ranks of the
officers of the United States Navy. You enter a glorious service, proud
of its memories of renown. You must keep ever in your minds the
thought of the supreme hour which may come when what you do will
forever add to or detract from that renown. Some of you will have to
do your part in helping construct the ships and the guns which you use.
You need to bend every energy toward making these ships and guns
in all their details the most perfect of their kind throughout the world.
The ship must be seaworthy, the armament fitted for best protection
to the guns and men, the guns in all their mechanism fit to do the
greatest possible execution in the shortest possible time. Every detail,
whether of protection to the gun-crews, of rapidity and Sureness in
handling the ammunition and working the elevating and revolving gear,
or of quickness and accuracy in sighting, must be thought out far in
advance, and the thought carefully executed in the actual work. But
after that has been done it remains true that the best ships and guns,
the most costly mechanism, are utterly valueless if the men have not
been trained to use them to the best possible advantage. From now
on throughout your lives there can be no slackness in the performance
of duty on your part. Much has been given you, and much will be
expected from you. Your duty must be ever present with you, waking
and sleeping. You must train yourselves, and you must train those
under you, in the actual work of seamanship, in the actual work of
gunnery. If the day for battle comes you will need all that you possess
of boldness, skill, determination, ability to bear punishment, and instant
readiness in an emergency. Without these qualities you can do nothing,
yet even with them you can do but little if you have not had the fore-
thought and set purpose to train yourselves and the enlisted men under
you aright. Officers and men alike must have the sea habit; officers and
men alike must realize that in battle the only shots that count are the
shots that hit, and that normally the victory will lie with the side whose
shots hit oftenest. Of course you must have the ability to stand up to
the hammering; the courage, the daring, the resolution to endure; but
I take it for granted you will have those qualities. It is less to be
thought to your credit to have them than it would be eternally to your
discredit to lack them. I take it for granted you will have the courage
we have a right to expect to go with American seamanship; that you
I6 - Messages and Speeches
will have the daring and the resolution. And I ask that you make it
from now on your object to see that if ever the day should arise, your
courage, your readiness, your eager desire to win fresh renown for the
flag be made good by the training you have given yourselves and those
under you in the practical work of your profession in Seamanship and
gunnery. -
AT THE BANQUET OF THE SOCIETY OF THE SONS OF THE
AMERICAN REVOLUTION, WASHINGTON,
D. C., MAY 2, 1902.
Mr. Toastmaster, Mr. President, compatriots, and fellow Americans:
It is a pleasure to take part in greeting you this evening. Societies
that cultivate patriotism in the present by keeping alive the memory of
what we owe to the patriotism of the past, fill an indispensable function
in this Republic. You come here to-night from every quarter—from
every State of the Republic and from the islands of the Eastern Seas.
The Republic has put up its flag in those islands, and the flag will
stay there.
I am glad to meet you here to-night—you, the descendants of the
statesmen and soldiers who fought to establish this country in 1776,
some of the older among whom, and the fathers of the others, fought
with no less valor wearing the blue or the gray in the Civil War. May
we now show our fealty to the great men who did the great deeds of
the past, not alone by word but by deed! May we prove ourselves
true to them, not merely by paying homage to their memory, but by
so shaping the policy of this great Republic as to make it evident that
we are not unworthy of our sires. They did justice, and we will do
justice. They did justice as strong men, not as weaklings; and we
will show ourselves strong men and not weaklings.
Before me I see men who lived in iron times, men who did great
deeds. I see here a delegate from Kentucky who served under Farragut
in the great days of the Civil War. I see a descendant of a man from
Connecticut who was called Brother Jonathan. All around these tables
are gathered men the names of whose ancestors stand not only for
righteousness but also for strength—for both qualities, gentlemen.
Righteousness finds weakness but a poor yoke-fellow. With righteous-
ness must go strength to make that righteousness of avail. And in
the names of the mighty men of the past I ask each man here to do his.
part in seeing that this nation remains true in deed as well as in word
to the ideals of the past; to remember that we can no more afford to
show weakness than we can afford to do wrong. Where wrong has
been done by any one the wrong-doer shall be punished; but we shall
not halt in our great work because some man has happened to do wrong.
Theodore Roosevelt 17
Honor to the statesmen of the past, and may the statesmen of the present
strive to live up to the example they set! Honor to the army and navy
of the past! And honor to those gallant Americans wearing the uni-
form of the American Republic who in the army and the navy of the
present day uphold gloriously the most glorious traditions of the past!
Another thing, compatriots of the Society of the Sons of the Amer-
ican Revolution: We are Americans, and that means that we treat
Americanism primarily as a matter of spirit and purpose, and in the
broadest sense we regard every man as a good American, whatever his
creed, whatever his birthplace, if he is true to the ideals of this Re-
public.
To-day I have been down to Annapolis to see the graduating class
of the Naval Academy; and it would have done your hearts good to
have seen those fine, manly, upstanding young fellows who looked every
man straight in the face without flinching. We may be sure that the
honor of the Republic is safe in their hands.
I was glad to meet those young fellows to-day. I am glad to meet
representatives of the navy like you, Admiral Watson, and of the army
like you, General Breckenridge. I am glad that we, as Americans, have
cause to be proud of the army and the navy of the United States—of
the men who in the past have upheld the honor of the flag, and of their
successors, the soldiers and sailors of the present day, who during the
last three years have done such splendid work in the inconceivably dan-
gerous and harassing warfare of the eastern tropics.
AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNER-STONE OF THE McKINLEY
MEMORIAL OHIO COLLEGE OF GOVERNMENT OF
THE AMERICAN UNIVERSITY, WASHINGTON,
D. C., MAY I4, 1902.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I am to say but one word. Nothing more need be said than has
been said already by those who have addressed you this afternoon—
the statesmen who worked with McKinley and the pastor under whose
ministrations he sat.
It is indeed appropriate that the Methodists of America—the men
belonging to that religious organization which furnished the pioneers
in carving out of the West what is now the heart of the great Amer-
ican Republic—should found this great university in the city of Wash-
ington and should build the college that is to teach the science of gov-
ernment in the name of the great exponent of good and strong govern-
ment who died last fall, who died as truly for this country as Abraham
Lincoln himself.
18 Messages and Speeches
I thank you for having given me the opportunity this afternoon to
come before you and to lay the corner-stone of this building.
AT THE EXERCISES OF THE SOCIETY OF THE ARMY OF THE
CUMBERLAND, ATTENDING THE REBURIAL OF MAJOR-
GENERAL WILLIAM STARK ROSECRANS, ARLING-
TON NATIONAL CEMETERY, ARLINGTON,
VIRGINIA, MAY I'7, 1902.
Speaker Henderson, and you, the comrades of the Great Chief whose
reburial in the National Cemetery here at Arlington we have met to-
gether to commemorate:
Speaker Henderson in his address has well said that the builder
rather than the destroyer is the man most entitled to honor among us;
that the man who builds up is greater than he who tears down; and
that our homage should be for the fighting man who not only fought
worthily but fought in a worthy cause. Therefore for all time, not
merely the people of this great reunited country but the nations of
mankind who see the hope for ordered liberty in what this country has
done, will hold you, the men of the great Civil War, and the leaders
like him whose mortal remains are to be put to-day in their final resting
place, in peculiar honor because you were soldiers who fought to build;
you were upbuilders; you were the men to whose lot it fell to save, to
perpetuate, to make stronger the great national fabric, the foundations
of which had been laid by the men who fought under him whose home
at Mount Vernon stands as an equally prized memorial of the past with
Arlington. It is no chance that has made Mount Vernon and Arlington,
here in the neighborhood of Washington, the two great memorials of
the nation's past. One commemorates the founding and the other the
saving of the nation. If it were not for what Arlington symbolizes,
Mount Vernon would mean little or nothing. If it were not for what
was done by Rosecrans and his fellows, the work of Washington would
have crumbled into bloody chaos and the deeds of the founders of this
Republic be remembered only because they had begun another of the
many failures to make practical the spirit of liberty in this world. With-
out the work that you did the work of the men who fought the Revo-
lution to a successful close would have meant nothing. To you it was
given to do the one great work which if left undone would have meant
that all else done by our people would have counted for nothing. And
you left us a reunited country, and therefore the right of brotherhood
with and of pride in the gallantry and self-devotion of those who wore
the gray, who were pitted against you in the great struggle. The very
fact that we appreciate more and more as the years go on the all-im-
portance to this country and to mankind of your victory, makes it
Theodore Roosevelt I9
more and more possible for us to recognize in the heartiest and frankest
manner the sincerity, the self-devotion, the fealty to the right as it was
given to them to see the right, of our fellow Americans against whom
you fought—and now the reunion is so complete that it is useless to
allude to the fact that it is complete. And you left us another lesson
in brotherhood. To-day you come here, comrades of the Army of the
Cumberland—the man who had a commission and the man who fought
in the ranks—brothers, because each did what there was in him to do
for the right. Each did what he could and all alike shared equally in
the glory of the deed that was done. Officer and enlisted man stand at
the bar of history to be judged not by the difference of rank, but by
whether they did their duties in their respective ranks. And oh, of
how little count, looking back, the difference of rank compared with
the doing of the duty What was true then is true now. Doing the
duty well is what counts. In any audience of this kind one sees in
the highest official and social position men who fought as enlisted men
in the armies of the Union or in the armies of the Confederacy. All
we ask is, did they do their duty 2 If they did, honor to them Little
we care what particular position they held, save in so far as the holding
of exalted position gave the men a chance to do great and peculiar
service. - z
I shall not try to eulogize the dead General in the presence of his
comrades, in the presence of his countrymen who have come to honor
the memory of the man against whom they were pitted in the past—
who come here because they now, like us, are Americans and nothing
else, devoted to the Union and to one flag. I shall not try to speak of
his services in the presence of those who fought through the Civil War,
who risked the loss of life, who endured the loss of limb, who fought
as enlisted men or came out boys not yet ready to enter college but able
to bear commissions in the army of the United States, as the result of
three or four years of service with the colors. There are those of each
class of whom I have spoken who have addressed or will address you
to-day. They are entitled to speak as comrades of the great dead. But
the younger among us are only entitled to pay to the great dead the
homage of those to whom ordered liberty has been handed down as a
heritage because of the blood, and of the sweat, and of the toil of the
men who fought to a finish the great Civil War. Great were the lessons
you taught us in war. Great have been the lessons you have taught us
in peace since the war. Sincerely and humbly the men who came after
you hasten to acknowledge the debt that is owing to you. You were
the men of the mighty days who showed yourselves equal to the days.
We have to-day lesser tasks; and shame to us if we flinch from doing
or fail to do well these lesser tasks, when you carried to triumphant
victory a task as difficult as that which was set you! Here in the pres-
2O Messages and Speeches
ence of one of the illustrious dead whose names will remain forever on
the honor roll of the greatest Republic upon which the sun has ever.
shone, it behoves all of us, young and old, solemnly and reverently to
pledge ourselves to continue undimmed the traditions you have left
us; to do the work, whatever that work may be, necessary to make
good the work that you did; to acknowledge the inspiration of your
careers in war and in peace; and to remind ourselves Once for all that
lip loyalty is not the loyalty that counts. The loyalty that counts is
the loyalty which shows itself in deeds rather than in words; and there-
fore we pledge ourselves to make good by our lives what you risked
your lives to gain and keep for the nation as a whole.
AT THE CENTENNIAL MEETING OF THE BOARD OF HOME
MISSIONS OF THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH,
CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., ON
THE EVENING OF MAY 20, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my friends—for if this meeting means any-
thing, it means a commemoration of the embodied spirit of friendship
and righteousness working through the Church through genera-
tions:
I am glad to have the chance of greeting you to-night. I belong to
a closely allied Church—the Dutch Reformed. I want to tell you a
curious incident which was mentioned to me by one of the two gentle-
men who, on your behalf, met me this evening and brought me up here.
Mr. Ogden mentioned to me that two hundred and sixty or seventy
years ago, the first church of my denomination here in this city was put
up under contract by his ancestors, who then dwelt in Connecticut. It
is, I think, in a sense symbolical of how much the Church has counted
in the life of our people that the descendants of those who worshiped in
that church and of those who under contract put it up, should be meet-
ing here this evening. I have another bond with you. There are not
very many Dutch Reformed churches in this city; not quite as many as
there should be; and during a considerable portion of my life I have
had to go to a Presbyterian church, because there was not a Reformed
church to attend. All of my early years I went to the Madison Square
Presbyterian Church, which then had as its pastor Dr. Adams. Those
of you who remember him will agree with me that he was one of the
very few men concerning whom it was not inappropriate to use the
adjective by which I shall describe him, for he was in very truth a
Saintly man. g - - &
It is a pleasure on behalf of the people of the United States to greet
you and bid you welcome on this hundredth anniversary of the be-
ginning of organized home missionary work by the Presbyterian
Theodore Roosevelt 2 I
Church. In one sense of course all earnest and fervent church work
is a part of home missionary work. Every earnest and zealous believer,
every man or woman who is a doer of the word and not a hearer only,
is a lifelong missionary in his or her field of labor—a missionary by
precept, and, by what counts a thousandfold more than precept, by prac-
tice. Every such believer exerts influence on those within reach, some-
what by word and infinitely more through the ceaseless, well-nigh unfelt
pressure—all the stronger where its exercise is unconscious—the pres-
sure of example, broad charity, and neighborly kindness.
But to-night we celebrate one hundred years of missionary work done
not incidentally, but with set purpose; a hundred years of effort to
spread abroad the Gospel and lay the moral foundation upon which all
true national greatness must rest. The century that has closed has
seen the conquest of this continent by our people. To conquer a
continent is rough work. All really great work is rough in the doing,
though it seems smooth enough to those who look back upon it, or to
the contemporaries who overlook it from afar. We need display but
scant patience with those who, sitting at ease in their own homes, delight
to exercise a querulous and censorious spirit of judgment upon their
brethren who, whatever their shortcomings, are doing strong men's
work as they bring the light of civilization into the world's dark places.
The criticism of those who live softly, remote from the strife, is of little
value; but it would be difficult to overestimate the value of the mis-
sionary work of those who go out to share the hardship, and, while
sharing it, not to talk, but to wage war against the myriad forms of
brutality. It is such missionary work that prevents the pioneers from
sinking perilously near the level of the savage race against which they
war. Without it the conquest of this continent would have had little
but an animal side. Without it the pioneers’ fierce and rude virtues
and sombre faults would have remained unlit by the flame of pure and
loving aspiration. Without it the life of this country would have been
a life of inconceivably hard and barren materialism. Because of it, be-
cause of the spirit that lay under those missionaries' work, deep be-
neath and through the national character runs that power of firm
adherence to a lofty ideal upon which the safety of the nation will ulti-
mately depend. * t
Honor, thrice honor to those who for three generations, during the
period of this people's great expansion, have seen that the force of
the living truth expanded as the nation expanded ! They bore the
burden and heat of the day, they toiled obscurely and died unknown,
that we might come into a glorious heritage. Let us prove the sin-
cerity of our homage to their faith and their works by the way in which
we manfully carry toward completion the work they so well began.
Friends, I made up my mind coming up here that I would speak to
22 Messages and Speeches
you of something that has taken place to-day and of something else
that has taken place within the last ten days. First of the action of
this nation which has culminated on this Tuesday, the twentieth of
May, nineteen hundred and two, in starting a free Republic on its
course. That represented four years' work. There were blunders and
shortcomings in the work, of course; and there were men of little faith
who could only see the blunders and shortcomings. But it represents
work triumphantly done. And I think that we as citizens of this Re-
public have a right to feel proud that we kept our pledge to the letter,
and that we have established a new international precedent. I do
not remember (and I have thought a good deal about it, ladies and
gentlemen) another case in modern times where, as a result of such
a war, the victorious nation has contented itself with setting a new
nation free and fitting it as well as could be done to start well in the
difficult path of self-government. Mere anarchy and ruin would have
fallen upon the island if we had contented ourselves with simple victory
in the war and then had turned the island loose to shift for itself. For
over three years the harder work of peace has supplemented the hard
work of war; for over three years our representatives in the island
(representatives largely of the army, remember—I sometimes hear the
army attacked ; gentlemen, I have even heard missionaries attacked. But
it is well for us that when there comes a great work in peace or in war
we have the army as an instrument for it), our representatives in Cuba
have steadily worked to build up a school system, to see to sanitation, to
preserve order and secure the chance for the starting of industries; to
do everything in our power so that the new government might begin
with the chances in its favor. And now as a nation we bid it godspeed.
We intend to see that it has all the aid we can give it, and I trust and
believe that our people will, through their national legislature, see to
it very shortly that Cuba has the advantage of entering into peculiarly
close relations with us in our economic system.
That is the deed that was consummated to-day; now for the other.
Ten days or a fortnight ago an appalling calamity befell another
portion of the West Indies; befell islands not in any way under our
flag—islands owning allegiance to two European powers. But their
need was great and Our people met that need as speedily as possible.
Congress at once appropriated a large sum of money and through
private gifts great additions were made to that appropriation; and I
found, as usual, the army and navy the instruments through which
the work could be done. I wanted to get men whom I could call on
instantly to drop whatever their work was and go down, with the
certainty that neither pestilence nor the danger from volcanoes or any-
thing else would make them Swerve a half inch—men upon whose
absolute integrity and capacity I could count, as well as on their
Theodore Roosevelt 23
courage. When I wanted these men and wanted them at once I turned
to the army and the navy. I am sure that we all feel proud that ships
bearing the American flag should have been the first to carry relief
to those who had been stricken down by so appalling a disaster.
It seems to me that while there is much evil against which we need
to war with all the strength there is in us, and while there are many
tendencies in the complex forces about us which are fraught with peril
to the future welfare of the Republic and of mankind, yet it is a fine
thing to see at the opening of this century such omens of international
brotherhood, of a future when the sense of duty to one's neighbor will
extend beyond national lines. They are good omens for the future,
these actions; that action which culminated to-day in establishing the
free Republic of Cuba; that action which made our country the first
to reach out a generous helping hand to those upon whom calamity
had fallen, without regard to what the flag was to which they paid
allegiance. -
AT THE OVERFLOW MEETING OF THE CENTENARY OF PRES-
BYTERIAN HOME MISSIONS, CENTRAL PRESBYTERIAN
CHURCH, NEW YORK, N. Y., MAY 20, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you this evening,
and I know you will pardon me if it is but a word, for I did not antici-
pate that there would be another meeting at which to speak.
Of course, the very first thing that any nation has to do is to keep
in order the affairs of its own household ; to do that which is best for
its own life. And as has been so well and truthfully said, Dr. Van
Dyke, by you this evening, the vital thing to a nation is the spiritual,
not the material. Napoleon said that in war the moral was to the ma-
terial as ten to one; and it is just exactly as true in civil and social life.
I do not mean for one moment to undervalue the material. We must
have thrift, business energy, business enterprise and all that spring
from them, as the foundation upon which we are to build the great
national superstructure. But it is a pretty poor building if you have
nothing but the basement. It is an admirable thing to have material
development, great material riches, if we do not misestimate the posi-
tion that that material well-being should occupy in the nation. It is an
admirable thing to have wealth if we use it aright and understand its
relative value compared to the things of the spirit. Now that sounds
like preaching. But it is only an expression of a political truism if
you look at it in the right way. We have spread during the last century
over this whole continent. One hundred years ago the home missionary
work was begun. Do you realize that at that time any one who went
24 Messages and Speeches
west of the Mississippi went into a foreign land? He did; and as late
as 1846 any one who went, in this latitude, to the Pacific Coast, went
into a foreign land. But as we expanded nationally, so it was our
good fortune that there should go hand in hand with such expansion
the expansion of the church work, and of all that goes with church
work. I do not think we can realize the all-importance of the way in
which the vital need was met by the men who went out as missionaries,
and pastors, and workers in the little raw, struggling communities
whose people were laying deep the foundations of the great States
that to-day fill the valley of the Mississippi and stud the Pacific Coast.
The men who went out have by their efforts given to what would other-
wise have been the merely material development of our people the spirit-
ual lift that was vital to it—the spiritual lift that made in the end a great
nation instead of merely a nation of well-to-do people. We want well-
to-do people, but if they are only well-to-do people, they have come
far short of what we have a right to demand. A giant work looms up
before the churches in this country, and it is work which the churches
must do. Our civilization has progressed in many ways for the right;
in some ways it has gone wrong. The tremendous sweep of our in-
dustrial development has already brought us face to face on this
continent with many a problem which has puzzled for generations
the wisest people of the old world. With that growth in the com-
plexity of our civilization, of our industrialism, has grown an increase
in the effective power alike of the forces that tell for good and
of the forces that tell for evil. The forces for evil, as our great
cities grow, become more concentrated, more menacing to the com-
munity, and if the community is to go forward and not back they must
be met and overcome by forces for good that have grown in corre-
sponding degree. More and more in the future our churches must
realize that we have a right to expect that they shall take the lead in
shaping those forces for good. -1 -
I am not going to verge on the domain of theology, and still less of
dogma. I do not think that at the present time there will be any dissent
from the proposition that after all in this work-a-day world we must
largely judge men by their fruits;* that we can not accept a long suc-
cession of thistle crops as indicating fig trees; and that we have a
right to look to the churches for setting the highest possible standard
of conduct and of service, public and private, for the whole land;
that the church must make itself felt by finding its expression through
the life work of its members; not merely on Sunday, but on week days;
not merely within these walls, but at home and in business. We have a
right to expect that you will show your faith by your works; that the
*President Roosevelt believes with Dr. Franklin, who caid that you can’t tell inuch about
a man by the way he looks on Sunday,+A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 25
people who have the inestimable advantages of the church-life and the
home-life should be made to remember that as much has been given
them, much will be expected of them; that they must lead upright lives
themselves and be living forces in the war for decency among their sur-
roundings; that we have a right to expect of you and those like you
that you shall not merely speak for righteousness, but do righteousness
in your own homes and in the world at large.
ON THE OCCASION OF THE UNVEILING OF THE SOLDIERS’ AND
SAILORS’ MONUMENT AT ARLINGTON, UNDER THE
AUSPICES OF THE NATIONAL SOCIETY OF THE
COLONIAL DAMES OF AMERICA, MAY 21, 1902.
Mrs. President, and members of the Society, and you, my comrades,
and finally, officers and men of the Regular Army, whom we took
as our models in the war four years ago:
It is a pleasure to be here this afternoon to accept in the name of
the nation the monument put up by your society to the memory of
those who fell in the war with Spain; a short war; a war that called
for the exertion of only the merest fraction of the giant strength of
this nation; but a war, the effects of which will be felt through the
centuries to come, because of the changes it wrought. It is eminently
appropriate that the monument should be unveiled to-day, the day
succeeding that on which the free republic of Cuba took its place among
the nations of the world as a sequel to what was done by those men
who fell and by their comrades in '98.
And here, where we meet to honor the memory of those who drew
the great prize of death in battle, a word in reference to the survivors:
I think that one lesson every one who was capable of learning any-
thing learned from his experience in that war was the old, old lesson
that we need to apply in peace quite as much—the lesson that the man
who does not care to do any act until the time for heroic action comes,
does not do the heroic act when the time does come. You all of you
remember, comrades, some man—it is barely possible some of you
remember being the man—who, when you enlisted, had a theory that
there was nothing but splendor and fighting and bloodshed in the war,
and then had the experience of learning that the first thing you had to
do was to perform commonplace duties, and perform them well. The
work of any man in the campaign depended upon the resolution and
effective intelligence with which he started about doing each duty as
it arose; not waiting until he could choose the duty that he thought
sufficiently spectacular to do, but doing the duty that came to hand.
That is exactly the lesson that all of us need to learn in times of peace.
It is not merely a great thing, but an indispensable thing that the
nation's citizens should be ready and willing to die for it in time of
26 Messages and Speeches
need; and the presence of no other quality could atone for the lack
of such readiness to lay down life if the nation calls. But in addition
to dying for the nation you must be willing and anxious to live for
the nation, or the nation will be badly off. If you want to do your
duty only when the time comes for you to die, the nation will be
deprived of valuable services during your lives.
I never see a gathering of this kind; I never see a gathering under
the auspices of any of the societies which are organized to commem-
orate the valor and patriotism of the founders of this nation; I never
see a gathering composed of the men who fought in the great Civil
War or in any of the lesser contests in which this country has been
engaged, without feeling the anxiety to make such a gathering feel,
each in his or her heart, the all-importance of doing the Ordinary,
humdrum, commonplace duties of each day as those duties arise. A
large part of the success on the day of battle is always due to the aggre-
gate of the individual performance of duty during the long months
that have preceded the day of battle. The way in which a nation arises
to a great crisis is largely conditioned upon the way in which its citizens
have habituated themselves to act in the ordinary affairs of the national
life. You can not expect that much will be done in the supreme hour
of peril by soldiers who have not fitted themselves to meet the need
when the need comes, and you can not expect the highest type of citi-
zenship in the periods when it is needed if that citizenship has not been
trained by the faithful performance of ordinary duty. What we need
most in this Republic is not special genius, not unusual brilliancy, but
the honest and upright adherence on the part of the mass of the citizens
and of their representatives to the fundamental laws of private and
public morality—which are now what they have been during recorded
history. We shall succeed or fail in making this Republic what it
should be made—I will go a little further than that—what it shall and
must be made, accordingly as we do or do not seriously and resolutely
set ourselves to do the tasks of citizenship—and good citizenship con-
sists in doing the many small duties, private and public, which in the
aggregate make it up.
AT A LUNCHEON GIVEN ON BOARD THE FRENCH BATTLESHIP
GAULOIS, AT ANNAPOLIS, MD., IN HONOR OF
PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT, MAY 23, 1902.
Mr. Ambassador:
We appreciate what France has done in sending to our shores
on this occasion such a magnificent warship, and we appreciate the
choice of those who were sent here; and, Mr. Cambon, we thank
you for your happy good judgment in selecting such an illustrious
commander of the army and navy to send to us on the auspicious
Theodore Roosevelt 27
occasion of the unveiling of the Rochambeau statue. One hun-
' dred and twenty years ago the valor of the soldiers and sailors of
France exerted, according to the judgment of historians, the deter-
mining influence in making this country free and independent.
Mr. Ambassador, I thank you personally for the courtesy which has
been extended to me. It has been a source of valued information to
be permitted to see and inspect this splendid French vessel, and I have
been duly impressed by its superior mechanism and by the superior
physique and discipline of your men. I am sure I speak for the
American navy when I say it has been a source of pleasure that such
a splendid specimen of French naval architecture as the Gaulois has
visited our shores on such a friendly mission, and in its name I thank
you. Let me, on behalf of all the people of the United States, and
with the certain conviction that I have expressed their sentiments,
drink to the health of President Loubet and to the continued pros-
perity of the mighty nation of which he is President. 3
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE ROCHAMBEAU STATUE, AT WASH-
INGTON, D. C., MAY 24, 1902.
Mr. Ambassador, and you, the Representatives of the Mighty Republic
of France:
I extend to you on behalf of the people of the United States, the
warmest and most cordial greeting. We appreciate to the full all that
is implied in this embassy, composed of such men as those who have
been sent over here by President Loubet, to commemorate the unveiling
of the statue of the great marshal, who with the soldiers and sailors
of France, struck the decisive blow in the war which started this country
on the path of independence among the nations of the earth. I am
sure that I give utterance to the sentiments of every citizen of the
United States, of every American to whom the honor and glory of
Our Republic in the past, as in the present, are dear, when I say that
we prize this fresh proof of the friendship of the French people, not
only because it is necessarily pleasing to us to have the friendship of a
nation so mighty in war, and so mighty in peace, as France has ever
shown herself to be, but because it is peculiarly pleasant to feel that,
after a century and a quarter of independent existence as a nation, the
French Republic should feel that in that century and a quarter we
have justified the sacrifice France made in our behalf.
I am sure, my fellow citizens, that you welcome the chance which
brings it about that this embassy of the French people should come
to our shores at the very time when we, in our turn, have done our
part in starting on the path of independence a sister republic—the
Republic of Cuba,
28 Messages and Speeches
Mr. Ambassador, the American people, peculiarly because they are
the American people and because the history of the United States has
been so interwoven with what France has done for us, also because
they are part of the whole world, which acknowledged, and must ever
acknowledge, in a peculiar degree, the headship of France along so
many lines in the march of progress and civilization—the American
people, through me, extend their thanks to you, and in their name I
beg to express my acknowledgments to the embassy that has come
here, and to President Loubet, and all of the French nation, both for
the deed, and for the magnanimous spirit that lay behind the doing
of the deed, and I thank you.
AT ARLINGTON, MEMORIAL DAY, MAY 30, 1902.
Mr. Commander, comrades, and you, the men and women of the
United States who owe your being here to what was done by the
men of the great Civil War:
I greet you, and thank you for the honor done me in asking me to
be present this day. It is a good custom for our country to have cer-
tain solemn holidays in commemoration of our greatest men and of
the greatest crises in our history. There should be but few such holi-
days. To increase their number is to cheapen them. Washington
and Lincoln—the man who did most to found the Union, and the man
who did most to preserve it—stand head and shoulders above all our
other public men, and have by common consent won the right to this
preeminence. Among the holidays which commemorate the turning
points in American history, Thanksgiving has a significance peculiarly
its own. On July 4 we celebrate the birth of the nation; on this day,
the 30th of May, we call to mind the deaths of those who died that
the nation might live, who wagered all that life holds dear for the
great prize of death in battle, who poured out their blood like water
in order that the mighty national structure raised by the far-seeing
genius of Washington, Franklin, Marshall, Hamilton, and the other
great leaders of the Revolution, great framers of the Constitution,
should not crumble into meaningless ruins.
You whom I address to-day and your comrades who wore the blue
beside you in the perilous years during which strong, sad, patient
Lincoln bore the crushing load of national leadership, performed the
one feat the failure to perform which would have meant destruction
to everything which makes the name America a symbol of hope among
the nations of mankind. You did the greatest and most necessary task
which has ever fallen to the lot of any men on this Western Hemis-
phere. Nearly three centuries have passed since the waters of our
coasts were first furrowed by the keels of those whose children's children
Theodore Roosevelt - 29
were to inherit this fair land. Over a century and a half of colonial
growth followed the settlement; and now for over a century and a
quarter we have been a nation. *
During our four generations of national life we have had to do
many tasks, and some of them of far-reaching importance; but the
only really vital task was the one you did, the task of saving the Union.
There were other crises in which to have gone wrong would have
meant disaster; but this was the one crisis in which to have gone
wrong would have meant not merely disaster but annihilation. For
failure at any other point atonement could have been made; but had
you failed in the iron days the loss would have been irreparable, the
defeat irretrievable. Upon your success depended all the future of
the people on this continent, and much of the future of mankind as
a whole.
You left us a reunited country. You left us the right of brother-
hood with the men in gray, who with such courage, and such devotion
for what they deemed the right, fought against you. But you left us
much more even than your achievement, for you left us the memory
of how it was achieved. You, who made good by your valor and
patriotism the statesmanship of Lincoln and the soldiership of Grant,
have set as the standards for our efforts in the future both the way you
did your work in war and the way in which, when the war was over,
you turned again to the work of peace. In war and in peace alike
your example will stand as the wisest of lessons to us and our children
and our children's children.
Just at this moment the Army of the United States, led by men
who served among you in the great war, is carrying to completion a
small but peculiarly trying and difficult war in which is involved not
only the honor of the flag but the triumph of civilization over forces
which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism. The task
has not been as difficult or as important as yours, but, oh, my comrades,
the men in the uniform of the United States, who have for the last
three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American
cause in the Philippine Islands, are your younger brothers, your sons.
They have shown themselves not unworthy of you, and they are en-
titled to the support of all men who are proud of what you did. -
These younger comrades of yours have fought under terrible diffi-
culties and have received terrible provocation from a very cruel and
very treacherous enemy. Under the strain of these provocations I
deeply deplore to say that some among them have so far forgotten
themselves as to counsel and commit, in retaliation, acts of cruelty.
The fact that for every guilty act committed by one of our troops a
hundred acts of far greater atrocity have been committed by the hostile
natives upon our troops, or upon the peaceable and law-abiding natives
3O Messages and Speeches
who are friendly to us, can not be held to excuse any wrongdoers On
our side. Determined and unswerving effort must be made, and has
been and is being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the
part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible,
even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or
prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.
Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes
commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From
time to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame
of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman
cruelty and barbarity—cruelty infinitely worse than any that has ever
been committed by our troops in the Philippines; worse to the victims,
and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it. The men who fail to
condemn these lynchings, and yet clamor about what has been done in
the Philippines, are indeed guilty of neglecting the beam in their own
eye while taunting their brother about the mote in his. Understand
me. These lynchings afford us no excuse for failure to stop cruelty
in the Philippines. But keep in mind that these cruelties in the Philip-
pines have been wholly exceptional, and have been shamelessly exag-
gerated. We deeply and bitterly regret that they should have been
committed, no matter how rarely, no matter under what provocation,
by American troops. But they afford far less ground for a general
condemnation of our army than these lynchings afford for the con-
demnation of the communities in which they occur. In each case it is
well to condemn the deed, and it is well also to refrain from including
both guilty and innocent in the same sweeping condemnation.
In every community there are people who commit acts of well-nigh
inconceivable horror and baseness. If we fix our eyes only upon these
individuals and upon their acts, and if we forget the far more numerous
citizens of upright and honest life and blind ourselves to their countless
deeds of wisdom and justice and philanthropy, it is easy enough to
condemn the community. There is not a city in this land which we
could not thus condemn if we fixed our eyes solely upon its police
record and refused to look at what it had accomplished for decency
and justice and charity. Yet this is exactly the attitude which has been
taken by too many men with reference to our army in the Philippines;
and it is an attitude iniquitous in its absurdity and its injustice.
The rules of warfare which have been promulgated by the War
Department and accepted as the basis of conduct by our troops in the
field are the rules laid down by Abraham Lincoln when you, my
hearers, were fighting for the Union. These rules provide, of course,
for the just severity necessary in war. The most destructive of all
forms of cruelty would be to show weakness where sternness is de-
manded by iron need. But all cruelty is forbidden, and all harshness
Theodore Roosevelt 3I
beyond what is called for by need. Our enemies in the Philippines
have not merely violated every rule of war, but have made of these
violations their only method of carrying on the war. Think over that!
It is not a rhetorical statement—it is a bald statement of contemporary
history. They have been able to prolong the war at all only by recourse
to acts each one of which put them beyond the pale of civilized war-
fare. We would have been justified by Abraham Lincoln's rules of
war in infinitely greater severity than has been shown.
The fact really is that our warfare in the Philippines has been
carried on with singular humanity. For every act of cruelty by our
men there have been innumerable acts of forbearance, magnanimity,
and generous kindness. These are the qualities which have charac-
terized the war as a whole. The cruelties on our part have been wholly
exceptional. *
The guilty are to be punished; but in punishing them, let those who
sit at ease at home, who walk delicately and live in the soft places of
the earth, remember also to do them common justice. Let not the
effortless and the untempted rail overmuch at strong men who with
blood and sweat face years of toil and days of agony, and at need lay
down their lives in remote tropic jungles to bring the light of civiliza-
tion into the world's dark places. The warfare that has extended the
boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery
has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress
of humanity. Yet from its very nature it has always and everywhere
been liable to dark abuses. -
It behoves us to keep a vigilant watch to prevent these abuses and
to punish those who commit them; but if because of them we flinch
from finishing the task on which we have entered, we show ourselves
cravens and weaklings, unworthy of the sires from whose loins we
sprang. Oh, my comrades, how the men of the present tend to forget
not merely what was done but what was spoken in the past! There
were abuses and to spare in the Civil War; and slender enough, too,
by each side against the other. Your false friends then called Grant
a “butcher” and spoke of you who are listening to me as mercenaries,
as “Lincoln's hirelings.” Your open foes—as in the resolution passed
by the Confederate Congress in October, 1862—accused you, at great
length, and with much particularity, of “contemptuous disregard of
the usages of civilized war;” of subjecting women and children to
“banishment, imprisonment, and death;” of “murder,” of “rapine,” of
“outrages on women,” of “lawless cruelty,” of “perpetrating atrocities
which would be disgraceful in savages;” and Abraham Lincoln was
singled out for especial attack because of his “spirit of barbarous
ferocity.” Verily, these men who thus foully slandered you have their
heirs to-day in those who traduce our armies in the Philippines, who
3.
32 Messages and Speeches
fix their eyes on individual deeds of wrong so keenly that at last they
become blind to the great work of peace and freedom that has already
been accomplished.
Peace and freedom—are there two better objects for which a soldier
can fight? Well, these are precisely the objects for which our soldiers
are fighting in the Philippines. When there is talk of the cruelties
committed in the Philippines, remember always that by far the greater
proportion of these cruelties have been committed by the insurgents
against their own people—as well as against our soldiers—and that
not only the surest but the only effectual way of stopping them is by
the progress of the American arms. The victories of the American
Army have been the really effective means of putting a stop to cruelty
in the Philippines. Wherever these victories have been complete—
and such is now the case throughout the greater part of the islands—
all cruelties have ceased, and the native is secure in his life, his liberty,
and his pursuit of happiness. Where the insurrection still Smoulders
there is always a chance for cruelty to show itself. -
Our soldiers conquer; and what is the object for which they conquer?
To establish a military government? No. The laws we are now
endeavoring to enact for the government of the Philippines are to
increase the power and domain of the civil at the expense of the mili-
tary authorities, and to render even more difficult than in the past the
chance of oppression. The military power is used to secure peace, in
order that it may itself be supplanted by the civil power. The progress
of the American arms means the abolition of cruelty, the bringing of
peace, and the rule of law and order under the civil government. Other
nations have conquered to create irresponsible military rule. We con-
quer to bring just and responsible civil government to the conquered.
But our armies do more than bring peace, do more than bring order.
They bring freedom. Remember always that the independence of a
tribe or a community may, and often does, have nothing whatever to
do with the freedom of the individual in that tribe or community.
There are now in Asia and Africa scores of despotic monarchies, each
of which is independent, and in no one of which is there the slightest
vestige of freedom for the individual man. Scant indeed is the gain
to mankind from the “independence” of a blood-stained tyrant who
rules over abject and brutalized slaves. But great is the gain to hu-
manity which follows the steady though slow introduction of the
orderly liberty, the law-abiding freedom of the individual, which is
the only sure foundation upon which national independence can be
built. Wherever in the Philippines the insurrection has been definitely
and finally put down, there the individual Filipino already enjoys such
freedom, such personal liberty under our rule, as he could never even
Theodore Roosevelt 33
have dreamed of under the rule of an “independent” Aguinaldian
oligarchy.
The slowly-learned and difficult art of self-government, an art which
Our people have taught themselves by the labor of a thousand years,”
can not be grasped in a day by a people only just emerging from con-
ditions of life which our ancestors left behind them in the dim years
before history dawned. We believe that we can rapidly teach the
people of the Philippine Islands not only how to enjoy but how to
make good use of their freedom; and with their growing knowledge
their growth in self-government shall keep steady pace. When they
have thus shown their capacity for real freedom by their power of
self-government, then, and not till then, will it be possible to decide
whether they are to exist independently of us or be knit to us by ties
of common friendship and interest. When that day will come it is not
in human wisdom now to foretell. All that we can say with certainty
is that it would be put back an immeasurable distance if we should
yield to the counsels of unmanly weakness and turn loose the islands,
to see our victorious foes butcher with revolting cruelty our betrayed
friends, and shed the blood of the most humane, the most enlightened,
the most peaceful, the wisest and the best of their own number—for
these are the classes who have already learned to welcome our rule.
Nor, while fully acknowledging our duties to others, need we wholly
forget our duty to ourselves. The Pacific seaboard is as much to us
as the Atlantic; as we grow in power and prosperity so our interests
will grow in that furthest west which is the immemorial east. The
shadow of our destiny has already reached to the shores of Asia. The
might of our people already looms large against the world-horizon;
and it will loom ever larger as the years go by. No statesman has a
right to neglect the interests of our people in the Pacific; interests
which are important to all our people, but of most importance to those
of our people who have built populous and thriving States to the west
of the great watershed of this continent.
This should no more be a party question than the war for the Union
should have been a party question. At this moment the man in highest
office in the Philippine Islands is the Vice-Governor, General Luke
Wright, of Tennessee, who gallantly wore the gray in the Civil War
and who is now working hand in hand with the head of our army in
*Government is inborn rather than acquired or learned—it is an instinct rather than an
art. Government in its sort is the expression of a people as the flower is the expression of
the plant. Also there’s nothing in a name. There be governments called monarchies, which
are in fact republics, and governments called republics, which are nothing of the kind.
Mexico, called a republic, is in fact a dictatorship, England, Norway, called monarchies, are
practically republics. There is but one strip of humanity from the membership of which
republics may be successfully constructed—the Scandinavian, the Dane, the Saxon, the Norse
strip. In selecting the raw material for a republic, stick to the blue-eyed and gray-eyed
people. . The black-eyed tribes will fail you.-A. H. L.
34 Messages and Speeches
the Philippines, Adna Chaffee, who in the Civil War gallantly wore
the blue. Those two, and the men under them, from the North and
from the South, in civil life and in military life, as teachers, as ad-
ministrators, as soldiers, are laboring mightily for us who live at home.
Here and there black sheep are to be found among them; but taken
as a whole they represent as high a standard of public service as this
country has ever seen. They are doing a great work for civilization,
a great work for the honor and the interest of this nation, and above
all for the welfare of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. All
honor to them; and shame, thrice shame, to us if we fail to uphold
their hands !
AT THE OPENING SESSION OF THE MILITARY surgeoNS
ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 5, 1902.
Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the opportunity to bid welcome to the members
of this Association and their friends to-day. The men of your Asso-
ciation combine two professions, each of which is rightfully held in
high honor by all capable of appreciating the real work of men—the
profession of the soldier and the profession of the doctor. Conditions
in modern civilization tend more and more to make the average life of
the community one of great ease, compared to what has been the case
in the past. Together with what advantages have come from this
softening of life and rendering it more easy there are certain attendant
disadvantages. It is a very necessary thing that there should be some
professions, some trades, where the same demands are made now as
ever in the past upon the heroic qualities. Those demands are made
alike upon the soldier and upon the doctor; and more upon those who
are both soldiers and doctors, upon the men who have continually to
face all the responsibility, all the risk, faced by their brothers in the
civilian branch of the profession, and who also, in time of war, must
face much the same risks, often exactly the same risks, that are faced
by their brothers in arms whose trade is to kill and not to cure! It
has been my good fortune, gentlemen, to see some of your body at
work in the field, to see them carrying the wounded and the dying
from the firing-line, themselves as much exposed to danger as those
they were rescuing, and to see them working day and night in the
field hospital afterward when even the intensity of the strain could
hardly keep them awake, so fagged out were they by having each to
do the work of ten.
I welcome you here, and I am glad to have the chance of seeing
you, and I wish to say a word of congratulation to you upon this
Association. In all our modern life we have found it absolutely in-
Theodore Roosevelt 35
dispensable to supplement the work of the individual by the work of
the individuals gathered into an association. Without this work of
the association you can not give the highest expression to individual
endeavor, and it would be a great misfortune if the military members
of the surgical and medical profession did not take every advantage of
their opportunities in the same way that is taken by the members of
the medical and the surgical professions who are not in the army or
the navy or the marine hospital service—who are in civilian life out-
side. I am glad to see you gathered in this association. Just one
word of warning: Pay all possible heed to the scientific side of your
work; perfect yourselves as scientific men able to work with the best
and most delicate apparatus; and never for One moment forget—espe-
cially the higher officers among you—that in time of need you will have
to do your work with the scantiest possible apparatus! and that then
your usefulness will be conditioned not upon the adequacy of the com-
plaint that you did not have apparatus enough, but upon what you have
done with the insufficient apparatus you had. Remember that and re-
member also—and this especially applies to the higher Officers—that you
must supplement in your calling the work of the surgeon with the work
of the administrator. You must be doctors and military men and able
administrators.
AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT
OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY,
WEST POINT, JUNE 11, 1902.
Colonel Mills, graduates of West Point, and you, the men and women
who are drawn to them by ties of kinship, or by the simple fact that
you are Americans, and therefore of necessity drawn to them:
I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you to-day. There
is little need for me to say how well your performance has squared with
the prophetic promise made on your behalf by the greatest of Amer-
icans, Washington. This institution has completed its first hundred
years of life. During that century no other educational institution in
the land has contributed as many names as West Point to the honor roll
of the nation's greatest citizens.
Colonel Mills, I claim to be a historian, and I speak simply in the
spirit of one, simply as a reciter of facts, when I say what I have said.
And more than that; not merely has West Point contributed a greater
number of the men who stand highest on the nation's honor roll, but
I think beyond question that, taken as a whole, the average graduate
of West Point, during this hundred years, has given a greater sum of
service to the country through his life than has the average graduate of
any other institution in this broad land. Now, gentlemen, that is not
36 Messages and Speeches
surprising. It is what we had a right to expect from this Military
University, founded by the nation. It is what we had a right to expect,
but I am glad that the expectation has been made good. And of all
the institutions in this country, none is more absolutely American, none,
in the proper sense of the word, more absolutely democratic than this.
Here we care nothing for the boy's birthplace, nor his creed, nor his
social standing ; here we care nothing save for his worth as he is able
to show it. Here you represent with almost mathematical exactness
all the country geographically. You are drawn from every walk of
life by a method of choice made to ensure, and which in the great ma-
jority of cases does ensure, that heed shall be paid to nothing save the
boy's aptitude for the profession into which he seeks entrance. Here
you come together as representatives of America in a higher and more
peculiar sense than can possibly be true of any other institution in the
land, save your sister college that makes similar preparation for the
service of the country on the seas.
This morning I have shaken hands with many of you; and I have
met the men who stand as representatives of every great struggle, every
great forward movement this nation has made for the last fifty-five or
sixty years. There are some still left who took part in the Mexican
War, a struggle which added to this country a territory vaster than has
changed hands in Europe as the result of all the wars of the last two
centuries. I meet, when I see any of the older men among you, men
who took part in the great Civil War, when this nation was tried as in
a furnace; the men who were called upon to do the one deed which
had to be done under penalty of making the memory of Washington'
himself of little account, because if you had failed, then failure would
also have been written across the record of his work. Finally, I see
the younger men as well as the older ones, the men whom I myself
have seen taking part in a little war—a war that was the merest skir-
mish compared with the struggle in which you fought from '61 to '65,
and yet a war that has had most far-reaching effects, not merely upon
the destiny of this nation, but, therefore, upon the destiny of the world
—the war with Spain.
It was my good fortune to see in the campaign in Cuba how the
graduates of West Point handled themselves; to see and to endeavor
to profit by their example. It is a peculiar pleasure to come here to-day,
because I was at that time intimately associated with many of these,
your graduates, who are here. On the day before the San Juan fight,
when we were marched up into position, the officers with whom I was,
lost connection with the baggage and food, and I, for supper that night,
had what Colonel Mills gave me. And the next morning Colonel Mills
was with another West Pointer, gallant Shipp, of North Carolina.
The next morning we breakfasted together. I remember well congrat-
Theodore Roosevelt 37
ulating myself that my regiment, a raw volunteer regiment, could have,
to set it an example, men like Mills and Shipp, whose very presence
made the men cool, made them feel collected and at ease. Mills and
Shipp went with our regiment into action. Shortly after it began Shipp
was killed and Colonel Mills received a wound from which no one of us
at the time dreamed that he would recover. I had at that time in my
regiment, as acting second lieutenant, a cadet from West Point. He
was having his holiday; he took his holiday coming down with us, and
just before the assault he was shot, the bullet going, I think, into the
stomach, and coming out the other side. He fell, and as we came up
I leaned over him, and he said, “All right, Colonel, I am going to get
well.” I did not think he was, but I said, “All right, I am sure you will,”
and he did; he is all right now. There was never a moment during that
time, by day or by night, that I was not an eyewitness to some per-
formance of duty, some bit of duty well done, by a West Pointer, and
I never saw a West Pointer failing in his duty. I want to be perfectly
frank, gentlemen; I heard of two or three instances; you can not get
in any body of men absolute uniformity of good conduct; but I am
happy to say that I never was an eyewitness to such misconduct. It
was my good fortune to see what is the rule, with only the rarest
exception, the rule of duty done in a way that makes a man proud to
be an American, and the fellow-citizen of such Americans.
Your duty here at West Point has been to fit men to do well in war.
But it is a noteworthy fact that you also have fitted them to do singularly
well in peace. The highest positions in the land have been held, not
exceptionally, but again and again by West Pointers. West Pointers
have risen to the first rank in all the occupations of civil life. Colonel
Mills, I make the answer that a man who answers the question must
make, when I say that, while we had a right to expect that West Point
would do well, we could not have expected that she would do so well
as she has done. ->
I want to say one word to those who are graduating here, and to the
undergraduates as well. I was greatly impressed the other day by an
article of one of your instructors, himself a West Pointer, in which he
dwelt upon the changed conditions of warfare, and the absolute need
that the man who was to be a good officer should meet those changed
conditions. I think it is going to be a great deal harder to be a first-
class officer in the future than it has been in the past. In addition to
the courage and steadfastness that have always been the prime require-
ments in a soldier, you have got to show far greater fertility of resource
and far greater power of individual initiative than has ever been neces-
sary, before if you are to come up to the highest level of officer-like per-
formance of duty.
As has been well said, the developments of warfare during the last
38 Messages and Speeches
few years have shown that in the future the unit will not be the regiment
nor the company nor troop; the unit will be the individual man. The
army is to a very great extent going to do well or ill according to the
average of that individual man. If he does not know how to shoot,
how to shift for himself, how both to obey orders and to accept respon-
sibility when the emergency comes where he will not have any orders
to obey, if he is not able to do all of that, and if in addition he has not
got the fighting edge, you had better have him out of the army; he will
be a damage in it.
In a battle hereafter each man is going to be to a considerable extent
alone. The formation will be so open that the youngest officer will have
to take much of the responsibility that in former wars fell on his seniors;
and many of the enlisted men will have to do most of their work without
supervision from any officer whatsoever. The man will have to act
largely alone, and if he shows a tendency to huddle up to somebody else
his usefulness will be pretty near at an end. He must draw on his own
courage and resourcefulness to meet the emergencies as they come up. It
will be more difficult in the future than ever before to know your pro-
fession, and more essential also ; and you officers, and you who are about
to become officers, if you are going to do well, have got to learn how to
perform the duty which, while becoming more essential, has become
harder to perform.
You want to face the fact and realize more than ever before that the
honor or the shame of the country may depend upon the high aver-
age of character and capacity of the Officers and enlisted men, and
that a high average of character and capacity in the enlisted men
can to a large degree be obtained only through you, the officers; that
you must devote your time in peace to bringing up the standard of
fighting efficiency of the men under you, not merely in doing your duty
so that you can not be called to account for failure to perform it, but
doing it in a wav that will make any man under you abler to perform
his.
I noticed throughout the time that we were in Cuba that the orders
given and executed were of the simplest kind, and that there was very
little manoeuvring, practically none of the manoeuvring of the parade
ground. Now, I want you to weigh what I say, for if you take only
half of it, you will invert it. I found out very soon in my regiment that
the best man was the man who had been in the Regular Army in actual
Service, Out in the West, campaigning on the plains; if he had been a
good man in the Regular Army in actual service on the plains he was
the best man that I could get hold of. On the other hand, if he had
merely served in time of peace a couple of years in an Eastern garri-
son, where he did practically nothing outside of parade grounds and
barracks, or if he had been in an ordinary National Guard regiment,
Theodore Roosevelt 39
then one of two things was true; if he understood that he had only
learned five per cent of war, he was five per cent better than any One
who had learned none of it, and that was a big advance; but if he
thought he had also learned the other ninety-five per cent he was worse
than any one else. I recollect perfectly one man who had been a cor-
poral in the Regular Army; this young fellow joined us sure that he
knew everything, confident that war consisted in nice parade-ground
manoeuvres. It was almost impossible to turn his attention from try-
ing the very difficult task of making my cowpunchers keep in a straight
line, to the easier task of training them so that they could do the most
efficient fighting when the occasion arose. He confused the essentials
and the non-essentials. The non-essentials are so pretty and so easy
that it is a great temptation to think that your duty lies in perfecting
yourself and the men under you in them. You have got to do that, too;
but if you only do that you will not be worth your salt when the day
of trial comes.
Gentlemen, I do not intend to try here to preach to you upon the per-
formance of your duties. It has been your special business to learn to
do that. I do ask you to remember the difference there is in the military
profession now from what it has been in past time; to remember that
the final test of soldiership is not excellence in parade-ground forma-
tion, but efficiency in actual service in the field, and that the usefulness,
the real and great usefulness in the parade-ground and barracks work
comes from its being used not as an end, but as one of the means to an
end. I ask you to remember that. I do not have to ask you to remember
what you can not forget—the lessons of loyalty, of courage, of stead-
fast adherence to the highest standards of honor and uprightness which
all men draw in when they breathe the atmosphere of this great in-
stitution.
AT THE HARVARD COMMENCEMENT DINNER, CAMBRIDGE, MASS,
JUNE 25, 1902.
Mr. President, President Eliot, and you, my fellow Harvard men:
I am speaking for all of you I am sure—I speak for all Americans to-
day, when I say that we watch with the deepest concern the sick-bed
of the English king, and that all Americans in tendering their hearty
sympathy to the people of Great Britain remember keenly the outburst
of genuine grief with which England last fall greeted the calamity that
befell us in the death of President McKinley.
President Eliot spoke of the service due and performed by the
college graduate to the State. It was my great good fortune five years
ago to serve under your President, the then Secretary of the Navy, ex-
Governor Long, and by a strange turn of the wheel of fate he served
4O Messages and Speeches
in my Cabinet as long as he would consent to serve, and then I had to
replace him by another Harvard man! *
I have been fortunate in being associated with Senator Hoar, and I
should indeed think ill of myself if I had not learned something from
association with a man who possesses that fine and noble belief in man-
kind, the lack of which forbids healthy effort to do good in a democracy
like ours. I shall not speak of his associate, the junior senator, another
Harvard man—Cabot Lodge—because it would be difficult for me to
discuss in public one who is my closest, stanchest, and most loyal per-
sonal friend. I have another fellow Harvard man to speak of to-day,
and it is necessary to paraphrase an old saying in order to state the
bald truth, that it is indeed a liberal education in high-minded states-
manship to sit at the same council table with John Hay.
In addressing you this afternoon, I want to speak of three other col-
lege graduates, because of the service they have done the public. If a
college education means anything, it means fitting a man to do better
service than he could do without it; if it does not mean that it means
nothing, and if a man does not get that out of it, he gets less than
nothing out of it. No man has a right to arrogate to himself one par-
ticle of superiority or consideration because he has had a college educa-
tion, but he is bound, if he is in truth a man, to feel that the fact of his
having had a college education imposes upon him a heavier burden of
responsibility, that it makes it doubly incumbent upon him to do well
and nobly in his life, private and public. I wish to speak of three men,
who, during the past three or four years have met these requirements—
of a graduate of Hamilton College, Elihu Root, of a graduate of Yale,
Governor Taft, and of a fellow Harvard man, Leonard Wood—men
who did things; did not merely say how they ought to be done, but did
them themselves; men who have met that greatest of our national needs,
the need for service that cannot be bought, the need for service that
can only be rendered by the man willing to forego material advantages
because it has to be given at the man's own material cost.
When in England they get a man to do what Lord Cromer did in
Egypt, when a man returns as Lord Kitchener will return from South
Africa, they give him a peerage, and he receives large and tangible re-
ward. But our Cromers, our men of that stamp, come back to this
country, and if they are fortunate, they go back to private life with the
privilege of taking up as best they can the strings left loose when they
severed their old connections; and if fortune does not favor them they
are accused of maladversion in office—not an accusation that hurts
them, but an accusation that brands with infamy every man, who makes
it, and that reflects but ill on the country in which it is made.
Leonard Wood four years ago went down to Cuba, has served there
ever since, has rendered her literally invaluable service; a man who
M
Theodore Roosevelt 4I
through those four years thought of nothing else, did nothing else, save
to try to bring up the standard of political and social life in that island,
to clean it physically and morally, to make justice even and fair in it,
to found a school system which should be akin to our own, to teach the
people after four centuries of misrule that there were such things as
governmental righteousness and honesty and fair play for all men on
their merits as men. He did all this. He is a man of slender means.
He did this on his pay as an army officer. As Governor of the island
sixty millions of dollars passed through his hands, and he came out
having been obliged to draw on his slender capital in order that he might
come out even when he left the island. Credit to him 2 Yes, in a way.
In another, no particular credit, because he was built so that he could do
nothing else. He devoted himself as disinterestedly to the good of the
Cuban people in all their relations as man could. He has come back
here, and has been attacked, forsooth, by people who are not merely un-
worthy of having their names coupled with his but who are incapable
of understanding the motives that have spurred him on to bring honor
to this republic. -
And Taft, Judge Taft, Governor Taft, who has been the head of the
Philippine Commission, and who has gone back there—Taft, the most
brilliant graduate of his year at Yale, the youngest Yale man upon
whom Yale ever conferred a degree of LL.D., a man who, having won
high position at the bar, and then served as Solicitor-General at Wash-
ington, was appointed to the United States bench. He was then asked
to sacrifice himself, to give up his position in order to go to the other
side of the world to take up an infinitely difficult, an infinitely danger-
ous problem, and do his best to solve it. He has done his best. He came
back here the other day. The man has always had the honorable am-
bition to get upon the Supreme Court, and he knew that I had always
hoped that he would be put on the Supreme Court, and when he was
back here a few months ago, and there was a question of a vacancy aris-
ing, I said to him: “Governor, I think I ought to tell you that if a
vacancy comes in the Supreme Court” (which I knew would put him
for life in a position which he would especially like to have), “I do not
see how I could possibly give it to you, for I need you where you are.”
He said to me: “Mr. President, it has always been my ambition to be
on the Supreme Court, but if you should offer me a justiceship now,
and at the same time Congress should take away entirely my salary as
Governor, I should go straight back to the Philippines, nevertheless,
for those people need me, and expect me back, and believe I will not
desert them.” He has gone back, gone back as a strong friend among
weaker friends to help that people upward along the difficult path of
self-government. He has gone to do his part—and a great part—in
making the American name a symbol of honor and good faith in the
42 Messages and Speeches
Philippine Islands; to govern with justice, and with that firmness, that
absence of weakness, which is only another side of justice. He has
gone back to do all of that because it is his duty as he sees it. We are
to be congratulated, we Americans, that we have a fellow-American like
Taft.
And now Elihu Root, who, unlike myself, Mr. President Eliot, but
like most of you present, comes of the old New England stock, whose
great-grandfather stood beside Leonard Wood's great-grandfather
among the “embattled farmers” at Concord Bridge; Elihu Root, who
had worked his way up from being a poor and unknown country boy
in New York, to the leadership of the bar of the great city—he gave it
up, made the very great pecuniary sacrifice implied in giving it up, and
accepted the position of Secretary of War, a position which, for the last
three years and at present amounts to being not only the Secretary of
War, but the Secretary for the islands, the Secretary for the Colonies at
the same time. He has done the most exhausting and the most respon-
sible work of any man in the administration, more exhausting and more
responsible work than the work of the President, because circumstances
have been such that with a man of Root's wonderful ability, wonderful
industry and wonderful conscientiousness, the President could not help
but devolve upon him work that made his task one under which
almost any other man would have staggered. He has done all this ab–
solutely disinterestedly. Nothing can come to Root in the way of
reward save the reward that is implied in the knowledge that he has
done something of incalculable importance which hardly another man
in the Union—no other man that I know of could have done as well
as he has done it. He has before him continually questions of the ut-
most intricacy to decide, questions upon which life and death hang,
questions the decision of which will affect our whole future world policy,
questions which affect the welfare of the millions of people with whom
we have been brought into such intimate contact by the events of the
Spanish War, whose welfare must be a prime consideration from now
on with every American public man worthy to serve his country. Root
has done this work with the certainty of attack, with the certainty of
misunderstanding, with the certainty of being hampered by ignorance
(and worse than ignorance). And yet he has created, not for himself
but for the nation also, a wonderful triumph from all these adverse
forces.
Those three men have rendered inestimable service to the American
people. I can do nothing for them. I can show my appreciation of them
in no way Save the wholly insufficient one of standing up for them, and
for their work; and that I will do as long as I have tongue to speak!
Theodore Roosevelt 43
AT THE CONVENTION OF THE INTERNATIONAL LEAGUE OF
PRESS CLUBS, AT BOSTON, JUNE 25, 1902.
Gen. Taylor and ladies and gentlemen:
I was taken a little by surprise when I came in to the dinner and saw
that it was not composed merely of men, and so I needed to be set at
ease by such an introduction. I should have been very glad to have
spoken merely to a Boston or Massachusetts audience of representatives
of the press. I am even more pleased to speak to an audience drawn
from all sections of our country. I think, General, it is easy enough
to be a Southerner or Northerner, or Easterner, or Westerner, provided
One is a straight American all the time. -
Every system of government, no matter how good, has the advantage
of its virtues, and the quality of the representative depends upon the
character of his constituency. He has got to think about them. He has
got to think more about the way they will look at his success or his non-
success in getting that public building than what his votes are on the
subject of irrigation or whatever else. All that being so, every tend-
ency should be encouraged which will make our representatives think
nationally, that will make our representatives proceed with legislation
in the very best way, to represent no district, but to represent the nation
as a whole.
Now, another thing, I have said that in all the different sections we
are alike. And I think we are. I think I have a certain right to speak,
because I feel very much at home in New England, yet I haven’t got
any New England blood and I haven’t got any English blood in me.
Some one once introduced me as a typical specimen of the Anglo-Saxon.
I was glad for once to find what Anglo-Saxon was, because I was half
Dutch and half Irish. And I come to Massachusetts. It was in Massa-
chusetts that I was educated, and in Massachusetts that I have found
so much of my inspiration. It was the history of the soldiers, statesmen
and patriots of Massachusetts that not only I, but all other Americans,
must study over, a very large part of the history of the past of which
we are so proud, and it does not make the slightest difference as to what
part of the country we come from if only we have got the feelings of
Sound Americanism in us.
In any profession in this country, I don't care what it is, no man will
win if he doesn’t show industry, knowledge, intelligence. No man will
win without these qualities, and his winning with them will be a detri-
ment instead of a benefit to the community as a whole unless, in addi-
tion to merely preaching, he practices adherence to the laws of common
decency and morality. It must seem to most of us that what is most
needed is the steady practice of the fundamental virtues; of the ones
44 Messages and Speeches
which we all in our hearts wish to keep, but which we do not always
keep in mind.
BEFORE THE SPANISH WAR VETERANS, AT BOSTON, JUNE 25, 1902.
Mr. Toastmaster, Mr. Chairman and comrades:
Let me first, before addressing you, as I intend to, thank most heartily
the men in command of the drum corps. They are the real thing. Col.
Pew, they have done as well as I have been told, by regulars, your regi-
ment always does.
I have a special right to comradeship with the men of the 2d and the
9th who were down at Santiago, where I served also. It has been my
good fortune to see them in a campaign bearing themselves well and
honorably, as we have been taught by the past history of the Union con-
fidently to expect Massachusetts soldiers always so to bear themselves.
Some of you who are members here tonight fought in the great war
where there was quite enough to go around. You of course saw the real
fight—the days that tried men's souls.
And really this is not exactly the audience to which I would like to
say one or two of the things I am going to say, because I am sure I have
you with me. Now, there has been a good deal of criticism, and some
of it of an exceedingly intemperate kind, about the action of the army
over in the Philippines. That army is composed of exactly such men as
those I see here tonight. Some of you went to Cuba, some to Porto
Rico, some to the Philippines, and the regulars whom I join in greeting
here tonight with the pride in their vast achievements and their pres-
ent standard which all good Americans feel—the regulars have served
simply wherever they happened to be sent. It is exactly the same army
that went to Santiago, that went to Porto Rico, that stayed in Chicka-
mauga because it was its duty, and for praise or for blame it must stand
as our representative, and we share the praise or blame with it.
In the last fortnight there has been an appalling outrage committed
in the Philippine islands. Four men were captured and after being kept
for a little while were put to death by torture. You have heard very lit-
tle of it; have seen little comment on it, and the reason you have heard
little of it is because those four men wore the United States uniform.
For that deed, if it is possible to exact punishment, punishment will be
exacted. Do not misunderstand me—but I do not have to say that I am
speaking to soldiers. You know that any infringements of the laws of
war in exacting such punishments will not be tolerated for a minute,
and that any man wearing our uniform who discredits that uniform by
torture shall not be saved from punishment by any record of excellence
in the past. You know that, and so to you it is unnecessary to say it,
but let the other side of the medal be kept in view also. Let it be re-
Theodore Roosevelt 45
membered that of all forms of cruelty the worst because the most pro-
vocative cruelty is the weakness that hesitates to use just and proper
severity when just and proper severity is needed.
Peace is coming. Peace is almost here in the Philippines. We have
trouble with the Moros and the uncivilized Mohammedan tribes in the
archipelago, but, outside of that, part peace has almost come and it has
come because the army of the United States, the officers and enlisted men
wearing the national uniform persevered quietly and uncomplainingly
with the iron resolution proper to that splendid service.
The army has gone about its duty, heeding the foe in front as little as
it has heeded the defamation of those behind who should have known
better—and steadily insisted that peace should come not by falling back
from armed resistance but by overcoming it; steadily insisting that
order should be obtained, it has gone forward until now, throughout
the Philippine islands, there is a condition of greater peace than had
obtained in them from the time when the keels of the Spanish ships first
furrowed the waters of Manila bay until the present moment.
And more than that, remember that the army has conquered not to
bring military rule. The army has conquered in order that the sphere
of civil government should be constantly extended at the expense of
military rule. So that to use the language of the Declaration of Inde-
pendence, owing to what the army has done in the Philippines the
average Filipino has more chances now for life, liberty and the pursuit
of happiness than he ever dreamed of having, or his fathers before him,
until he came under our flag.
It is unnecessary to say that no soldier can be worth his salt if he has
not got the fighting desire. A good soldier must not only be willing to
fight, but he must be anxious to fight. I do not want to have anything
to do with him if he is not. And while that is absolutely necessary, it
is very far from being enough. The soldier has got to have the fighting
edge—the power and will that will make him bear himself well on the
battlefield. But that edge will be of little consequence if he has not also
the power of faithful performance of duty in the infinite multitude of
small things that will have to be done before he can go into the battle,
or else when he goes there he will be of no use.
AT A BANQUET GIVEN BY ATTORNEY-GENERAL KNOX, AT
PITTSBURG, PA., JULY 4, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, my fellow Americans, men and
women of Western Pennsylvania:
You have just listened to the reading of the great document which
signaled our entry into the field of nations 126 years ago. That entry
was but the promise which had to be made good by the performance
46 Messages and Speeches
of those men and their children and their children's children. Words
are good if they are backed up by deeds, and only so.
The Declaration continues to be read with pride by us year after year,
and stands as a symbol of hope for the people of all the world because
its promise was made good, because its words were supplemented by
deeds, because after the men who signed it and upheld it had done their
work, the men who came again after them generation by generation,
did their work in turn. The Declaration of Independence has to be
supplemented in the first place by that great instrument of constructive
and administrative statesmanship—the constitution under which we
now live. The document, promulgated in 1788, under which Washing-
ton became our first President, supplemented the Declaration of 1776. .
We showed in the Revolution that we had a right to be free; we showed
when we constructed the more perfect union of the old Confederacy that
we knew how to use that right as it needed to be used.
And then seventy years and more passed, and then there came again
upon the nation the days of iron need. There came again the days that
demanded all that was best—the life itself of the bravest and the truest
of the nation's sons—and with Sumter's guns awakened our people, and
America, until then the incarnate Genius of Peace, sprang to her feet,
with sword and with shield, a helmeted queen among nations. When
the thunder of the guns called the nation’s children they sprang forward
to do the mighty deeds which if left undone would have meant that the
words to which we have listened to-day would have rung as meaning-
less platitudes.
Those were the two great epochs in the nation's history, the epoch
of the founding of the Union and the epoch of its preservation; the
epoch of Washington and the epoch of Abraham Lincoln. These two
generations had the greatest tasks to do, but each generation has its
tasks, and woe to the generation which regards the deeds of the
mighty men of the past as an excuse for failing to do in its turn the
work that it finds ready to hand. The great deeds of those that have
gone before us must ever serve not as a reason for inaction on our part,
but as the keenest of spurs to drive us forward on the path of national
greatness and justice. We have had our tasks to do in the last four
years, or, rather, we have had, as every generation must have, many
tasks to do, tasks affecting us abroad; and one of those tasks, being
done as it has been done, has signaled our entry to a larger world.
And it is most appropriate on this Fourth of July, this anniversary of
the birth of the nation, it should be our good fortune to have promul-
gated the declaration establishing peace in the Philippines and the
acknowledgment to the army of the praise so richly due our fellow
Americans, who wear the uniform of the United States, for all that they
have done in tropic islands during the last four years.
Theodore Roosevelt 47
We said Cuba should become a free republic, and we have kept our
word. To have turned Cuba over to the hands of its own people imme-
diately after the withdrawal of the Spanish flag would have meant ruin
and chaos. We established a government in the islands; we established
peace and order; we began to provide for the payment of the Cuban
troops who had fought against the misrule of their oppressors; we in-
stituted a public school system, modeled upon that which has been so
potent a factor in our own national progress. We cleaned the cities in
Cuba, for the first time in their history. We changed them from being
the most unhealthy to being among the healthiest cities of the civilized
world. We introduced a system of orderly justice to succeed one of
irresponsible and arbitrative depotism, so that any man, rich or poor,
weak or strong, could appeal to courts and know that he would receive
his rights. And then, when in the fullness of time we felt they could
walk alone, we turned over the government to them and now the beau-
tiful Queen of the Antilles has started on her course as a free republic
among the nations of the earth.
But there is one thing—our policy toward Cuba has not yet met with
its entire fruition. It will meet it. The course of the last few years has
made more evident than ever before that this nation must in time to
come have pecuniary interests on the isthmus connecting the two Amer-
icas and in the waters and among the islands adjacent thereto. Nation-
ally we cannot occupy the position toward these regions that we did
toward others where our interests are far less, and this is doubly true
now that Congress, with great wisdom, has provided for the building of
an inter-ocean canal. Cuba must occupy a peculiar relation to us in the
field of international politics. She must in the larger sense be a part of
the general political system in international affairs, of which this re-
public stands as the head. She has assented to that view, and in return
this nation is bound to give her special economic privileges not given
to other nations. *
I regret that a measure of reciprocity with Cuba is not already em-
bodied in statute or in treaty; but it will be as sure as fate.
And now a word as to the Philippines. There are yet troubles in the
Moro country, the country of the Mahometan tribes; but in the Phil-
ippines among the Filipinos, among the people who have been in insur-
rection, peace now reigns. It may be—I think unlikely, but it is pos-
sible—that here and there some seemingly dead coal of insurrection
may for the moment be fanned into a live piece of ember and burst into
a fitful flame. If so, that flame will be stamped out. But, speaking
broadly and generally, peace has come. Our army has received its
reward. And what was the reward of our army P. The reward of the
consciousness of duty well done. Our soldiers have fought, have
48 Messages and Speeches
toiled, have struggled, so that when victory came they might turn over
the government to the civil authorities.
Victory came. To-day the proclamation of peace and amnesty has
been promulgated, and at the same time our generals have been notified
that the civil government is supreme in the islands. Does not that
speak well, oh, my brethren, for our army, for our troops, that the
troops of this people should war, hoping for a triumph which is to
put the power into the hands of the civil authorities?
By law we are allowed an army at a maximum of one hundred thou-
sand men, at a minimum of sixty thousand men. While this war has
gone on we have steadily reduced that army until now by orders pro-
mulgated, its limit is sixty-six thousand; and as a matter of fact we
have two thousand or three thousand fewer actually under arms. That
speaks well for our institutions. It speaks well for the triumphs of the
policies with which as a nation we have been identified during the last
four years, and, men and women of the United States, it shows how
slight was the warrant for the fears expressed by those of little faith
as to what would follow authorizing even the small army that was
authorized. No body of our citizens deserves franker or more gen-
erous recognition at the hands of the country than the officers and
enlisted men who wear Uncle Sam's uniform. For there is no body
of our citizens which gives more disinterested service with less thought
of material reward proportionately in any way to them.
And, now, my fellow citizens, I spoke of the task which has con-
fronted those in Cuba and the Philippines as being one of the tasks
which this generation had to face. It is only one. We have great prob-
lems at home to face. I am speaking in One of the great industrial
centres not merely of America, but of the world. A million people
stand grouped in a small radius around the spot where we now are.
The growth of our cities within this radius has been one of the most
striking phenomena of this day, and here, therefore, you are brought
face to face with those problems which affected our entire civilization at
the opening of this new century. The tremendous rush of our industrial
department, which has brought in its train so much that is good and
also of necessity brought somewhat of evil, the very intensity of the
progress that has been made, has meant that new and infinitely difficult
problems have arisen, which we must strive to solve as best we may.
Under our form of government, with its great decentralization of
power, some of these problems must be solved through the work of
private individuals working by themselves; others, by the association
into organized bodies of groups of private citizens; and others yet,
through the various governmental agencies of municipality, State and
nation. Especially great, especially difficult are the problems caused by
the growth and concentration of great individual and above all great
Theodore Roosevelt 49
corporate fortunes. It is immensely for the interests of the country that
there should be such individual and corporate wealth, as long as it is
used right, and when not used right, then it becomes a serious menace
and danger.
The instruments and methods with which we are to meet these new
problems must in many cases themselves be new, but the purpose lying
behind the use of these methods, of those instruments, must, if we are
to succeed, be now, as in the past, simply in accord with the immutable
laws of order, of justice and right. We may need, and in my belief,
will need, new legislation, conceived in no radical or revolutionary
spirit, but in a spirit of common sense, common honesty and a resolute
desire to face facts as they are. We will need then new legislation,
but while laws are important it is infinitely more important that they
should be administered in accordance with the principles that have
marked honest administration from the beginning of recorded history.
In the last analysis the most important department of civilized govern-
ment is the department of justice. Think what it means !
The department of justice, justice which means that each man, rich
or poor, big or small, strong or weak, shall have his rights, and shall not
be allowed to do wrong to his fellows. And you here, of this city,
have a right to feel proud of your representative in the Cabinet, the
man under whom we can guarantee that the department of justice
will be such in fact as well as in name. When it comes to practical
work, the ounce of performance outweighs the ton of promise. And
under Mr. Knox there has been very much more than an ounce of
performance. } -
Oh, my fellow-countrymen, as we face these infinitely difficult prob-
lems, let us ever keep in mind that, though we need the highest qual-
ities of the intellect in order to work out practical schemes for their solu-
tion, yet we need a thousand times more what counts for many, many,
many times as much as intellect—we need character. Character, that
compound of honesty and courage and common sense, will avail us
more in the long run than any brilliancy on the stump or any advising
legislative means and methods. The brilliancy is good. We need the
intellect, we need the best intellect we can get, we need the best intelli-
gence, we need still more, character. We need common sense, common
honesty and resolute courage. We need what Mr. Knox has shown—
the character that will refuse to be hurried into any unwise or precipi-
tate movement by any clamor, whether hysterical or demagogic, and,
on the other hand, the character that will refuse to be frightened out
of the movement which he thinks it right to undertake by any pressure,
still less by any threat, express or implied.
Gentlemen, we have great problems. We can only solve them by de-
grees. We can only solve them by doing well each particular bit of
50 Messages and Speeches
work as it comes up for solution. Much can be done along the lines of
supervision and regulation of the great industrial combinations which
have become so marked a feature in our civilization, but if we recklessly
try, without thought, without proper caution, to do much, we shall do
nothing or else we shall work a ruin that will be felt most acutely among
those of our citizens who are most helpless. It is no easy task to deal
with great industrial tendencies. To deal with them in a spirit of pre-
sumptuous and rash folly, and above all to deal with them in a spirit
of envy and hatred and malice, would be to invite disaster, a disaster
which would be so widespread that this country would rock to its foun-
dations.
The Mississippi sometimes causes immense damage by floods. If
you cannot dam it and stop the floods, you can regulate and control it
by levees. You can regulate and control the current; you can eliminate
its destructive features; but you can do it only by studying what a cur-
rent is and what your own powers are. It is just exactly so in dealing
with great tendencies of our great industrial civilization. We cannot
turn back the wheels of progress. If we could it would mean the abso-
lute destruction of just such industrial centres as this. We will either
do nothing or we will do damage if we strive ignorantly to achieve the
impossible. But that fact does not excuse us for failure to strive to do
what is possible. Special legislation is needed. Some of that legislation
must come through municipalities, some through States, some through
the national government; but above and beyond all legislation we need
a fearless administration of those laws as they are on the statute books
—honest and fearless administration of those laws in the interest
neither of the rich man as such nor of the poor man as such but in
the interest of exact and equal justice to all alike.
Such administration you will surely have while Mr. Knox remains as
Attorney-General in the Cabinet at Washington.
And now, gentlemen, one word more and I have done.
I am glad to have the chance to thank you for the welcome I received
in Pittsburg to-day. I can imagine nothing more inspiring to a public
officer to better do his duty than to be treated as I have been here to-day.
I shall feel this way when I leave here. The experience I have had will
help me. - -
It has been said political differences cease at the water's line. In
great crises when fundamental issues are at stake party differences
cease. It is eminently proper that on great national holidays, and par-
ticularly July Fourth, we should come together, not as representatives
of one body, but as Americans, to represent all that makes America
what it is—a uniting on fundamental and great principles.
The average American is a pretty good fellow. But to know this
Theodore Roosevelt 5I
I should know the man. One failure we make is not to know each other.
This results in differences. Sometimes it causes differences among lo-
calities; sometimes it causes differences between employer and em-
ployed, between the men of the town and the men of the country, be-
tween the men of one occupation and the men of another Occupation.
The best solvent in all such questions is to bring the disagreeing to-
gether. To let them look at the question from the same viewpoint. I
do not say that it will always settle the difference, but it will minimize
the fault.
The most important thing of the meeting this morning was that of
getting the people together. It always seemed to me that the most valu-
able lesson to be learned from the Civil War as regards civil life
is the principle of brotherhood. What I mean by brotherhood is treating
a man as a man. There are men in this audience—in every audience—
who fought in the Civil War that know what reliance they put on the
man next to them. When a move was made they wanted to know if
the fellow next knew where he was going. They wanted to know if
he would “stay put.” If so, he was “for him.” That is what we want
in civil life. It isn’t the sphere in which duty is performed best, but
it is doing the duty that counts. I do not care what a man's station may
be. The good he does determines the citizen he makes. Now, gentle-
men, one word in regard to anything said. It can always be tested by
what is done afterward. It is a very good thing to meet together on
July 4 to remind ourselves of what our forefathers did.
I ask of every man here that he prove his truth by his endeavors.
Let him live after the Fourth as he talks on that day.
Now, gentlemen, begging your pardon for shamelessly requiting your
hospitality by preaching you a sermon, I bid you good night.
[The Pittsburg Dispatch, July 5, 1902.]
ON REVIEWING THE SECOND REGIMENT OF THE NATIONAL
GUARD OF NEW JERSEY, AT SEA GIRT, N. J., JULY 24, 1902.
Governor Murphy, and you, the officers and enlisted men of the Na-
tional Guard of New Jersey, and you, my fellow citizens, men and
women who have come here to see how your friends and kinsmen
ha;tale themselves in the National Guard:
I am glad to be with you today. I take, as every American must
take, a peculiar interest in the National Guard. I want, at the out-
set, most sincerely to compliment and congratulate the State of New
Jersey upon having men as workmanlike in the National Guard as
you seem to be. I want to congratulate you, on the other hand, be-
cause your state, New Jersey, has made such admirable provision
52 Messages and Speeches
for you here in the parade ground and at the butts in the target
practice. I was particularly glad to see you looking as if you meant
business, as if you were out for work as well as for play, as if
you meant to be learning what is temporarily your business. A man
is of use as a National Guardsman for just exactly the same reasons as
he is of use as a citizen, and that is if he sets to work with his whole
heart to do his duty for the time being, to make himself thoroughly pro-
ficient in the line of the business he has taken up.
A National Guardsman who joins only to have a good time pretty
generally does not have a good time, and certainly makes a poor hand at
being a guardsman. You have got to try at Once to come up to the
highest standard that you can set before yourselves of soldierly profi-
ciency. I like the way you have borne yourselves. I like the way you
marched by in review, and I do not think it necessary to tell you what
you surely will be told as long as you have a West Pointer, like Gen-
eral Gilmore, over you—a man who comes of a generation of fighters
for the United States flag, descended from an illustrious general of the
Civil War, and I am happy to say with a son to follow in the father's
footsteps at West Point. I am sure I do not have to tell you when you
have such a commander of this brigade that you will show your worth
by fitting yourselves now in time of peace, so that, if the need should
come, you will be able to show that you were not play soldiers only,
but that you could do your work. That is what counts—having learned
your duties so as to apply them whenever the necessity shall arise not
only in handling yourselves well on the parade ground and in the bar-
racks, but also in handling yourselves well in the march and in the tar-
get practice at the butts.
I earnestly hope and believe you never will get into battle, but if you
do, it is going to be mighty important to hit the other fellow ; and you
are going to be able to do it largely in consequence of the way you have
put in your time, knowing your rifle until it is just part of yourself, until
you can handle it, take care of it, and use it as it has been the pride of
the American Army in the past, that our troops always have used their
rifles—efficiently.* We have prided ourselves upon having an army of
marksmen. Our army has given us a just pride in it, because its con-
stant and zealous effort has been to take care of itself in the field and
in all that pertains to the duties of a soldier. I think, gentlemen, that
much help can be given to the National Guard of the States by the action
of the United States Government. I want to see the National Guard
with the best and most modern weapons. I want to see the infantry with
the Krag-Jorgensen, and I want to see the infantry with three-point-two
*President Roosevelt believes in the importance of the unit—of the individual. He has
not read the stories of Bunker Hill and New Orleans without discovering how much the rifle
accuracy of the individual soldier had to do with the outcome. He believes in making the
Americans a race of riflemen.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt & 53
guns of the regular army. I am happy to say that a bill has been passed
through the lower House which will enable the National Government
materially to aid the National Guard of the United States, in the differ-
ent States. At the next session, I firmly believe, we will get it through
the United States Senate, and then I can guarantee the signature of
the President. -
I think that our people have not always appreciated the debt that they
are under to the National Guard. A man who goes into the National
Guard and does his duty thoroughly puts the whole country under an
obligation to him. Always in our history, it has been the case, as it will
always be in the future, that if war should arise it is to be met mainly
by the citizen soldier—the volunteer soldier. We have in the regular .
army, officered as it is and filled with the type of enlisted men we have
in it, an army which I firmly believe, for its size, is unequaled in the
civilized world; and I am sure that I can challenge the most generous
support from the National Guard for the regular army of the United
States. But the army is, and of necessity must be, so small that in the
event of serious trouble in the future the great bulk of our troops must
come, as in the past they have come, from the ranks of the people them-
selves; and in forming these regiments the good done by the presence
in them of men who have served faithfully in the National Guard can-
not be overestimated. Those men are ready. They know what is ex-
pected of them. They train others to do the work that is needed. And
another thing, ladies and gentlemen, the same qualities that make a man
a success, that make him do his duty decently and honestly in the Na-
tional Guard regiment, are fundamentally the qualities that he needs to
make him a good citizen in private life.
Just as it is in the army, so it is in citizenship. If you are content to
go through life waiting for a chance to be a hero, you may wait and
the chance may not come. The way to be a good citizen is to do well
the ordinary, every-day, humdrum work that comes to citizenship.
Don't you think so? I am sure you do. The man who wants to wait
until a battle comes is not likely to be the good fighter, and the citizen
who waits for heroic times is likely to be a mighty bad one.
I plead with you to do your duty as National Guardsmen and as citi-
zens. Do your duty day by day—the common, ordinary duties which,
when done, make in their sum the citizenship of the nation. Ladies and
gentlemen, I thank you.
AT THE COLISEUM, HARTFORD, CONN, AUGUST 22, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow Americans, men and women of
Hartford:
I thank you, Senator Platt; through you I thank the State of Con-
A
54 * Messages and Speeches
necticut; Mayor Sullivan, through you I thank the city of Hartford for
the greeting extended to me.
Before beginning the speech that I had intended, and still intend, to
make to you to-night, I wish to allude to an incident that happened this
afternoon. In being driven around your beautiful city, I was taken
through Pope Park, and stopped at a platform where I was presented
with a great horseshoe of flowers, the gift of the workingmen of Hart-
ford to the President of the United States. In Father Sullivan's speech
he laid primary stress upon the fact that it was a gift of welcome from
the wage-workers, upon whom ultimately this government depends.
And he coupled the words of giving with certain sentences in which he
expressed his belief that I would do all that I could to show myself a
good representative of the wage-workers. I should be utterly unfit for
the position that I occupy if I failed to do all that in me lies to act,
as light is given me to act, so as to represent the best thought and pur-
pose of the wage-worker of the United States. At the outset of the
twentieth century we are facing difficult and complex problems—prob-
lems social and economic—which will tax the best energies of all of us
to solve aright, and which we can only solve at all if we approach them
in a spirit not merely of common sense, but of generous desire to act
each for all and all for each. While there are occasions when through
legislative or administrative action the governmental representatives of
the people can do especial service to one set of our citizens, yet I think
you will agree with me that in the long run the best way in which to
serve any one set of our citizens is to try to serve all alike well, to try
to act in a spirit of fairness and justice to all—to give to each man his
rights—to safeguard each man in his rights; and so far as in me lies,
while I hold my present position I will be true to that conception of my
duty.
I want to speak to you to-night, not on our internal problems as a na-
tion, but on some of the external problems which we have had to face
during the last four years. The internal problems are the most impor-
tant. Keeping our own household straight is our first duty; but we have
other duties. Just exactly as each man who is worth his salt must first
of all be a good husband, a good father, a good bread winner, a good
man of business, and yet must in addition to that be a good citizen for
the State at large—so a nation must first take care to do well its duties
within its own borders, but must not make of that fact an excuse for
failing to do those of its duties the performance of which lies without
its own borders.
The events of the last few years have forced the American Republic to
take a larger position in the world than ever before, and therefore more
than ever to concern itself with questions of policy coming without its
own borders. As a people we have new duties and new opportunities
Theodore Roosevelt - 55
both in the tropical seas and islands south of us and in the furthest
Orient. Much depends upon the way in which we meet those duties, the
way in which we take advantage of those opportunities. And remember
this, you never can meet any duty, and after you have met it say that
your action only affected that duty. If you meet it well you face the
next duty a stronger man, and if you meet it ill you face your next duty
a weaker man.
From the days of Monroe, Clay and the younger Adams, we as a peo-
ple have always looked with peculiar interest upon the West Indies and
the isthmus connecting North and South America, feeling that what-
ever happened there was of particular moment to this nation; and there
is better reason for that feeling now than ever before. The outcome of
the Spanish War put us in possession of Porto Rico, and brought us
into peculiarly close touch with Cuba; while the successful negotiation
of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, and the legislation following it, at last
cleared the way for the construction of the Isthmian Canal. Porto Rico,
it is a pleasure to say, may now serve as an example of the best methods
of administering our insular possessions. Sometimes we have to learn
by experience what to avoid. It is much pleasanter when one can turn
to an experience for the purpose of learning what to follow ; and the
last is true of our experience in Porto Rico. So excellent has been the
administration of the island, so excellent the effect of the legislation
concerning it, that their very excellence has caused most of us to forget
all about it. There is no opportunity for headlines about Porto Rico.
You don’t need to use large letters in order to say that Porto Rico con-
tinues quiet and prosperous. There is hardly a ripple of failure upon
the stream of our success there; and as we don't have to think of reme-
dies, we follow our usual custom in these matters, and don’t think of it
at all.
How have we brought that about? First and foremost, in Porto Rico
we have consistently striven to get the very best men to administer the
affairs of the island. It is desirable throughout our public service to
secure a high standard of efficiency and integrity. But after all, here at .
home we ourselves always have in our own hands the remedy whereby
to supply any deficiency in integrity or capacity among those that govern
us. That is a fact that seems to have been forgotten, but it is a fact. In
a far-off island things are different. There wrong-doing is more easy
and those that suffer from it are more helpless; while there is less effi-
cient check in the way of that public opinion to which public men are
sensitive. In consequence, the administration of those islands is beyond
all other kinds of administration under our government the one in which
the highest standard must be demanded. In making appointments to
the insular service, the appointing power must feel all the time that he
is acting for the country as a whole, in the interest of the good name of
56 Messages and Speeches
our people as a whole, and any question of mere party expediency must
be wholly swept aside, and the matter looked at solely from the stand-
point of the honor of our own nation and the welfare of the islands. We
have gotten along so well in Porto Rico because we have acted up to
that theory in choosing our men down there—governor, treasurer, at-
torney-general, judges, superintendent of education—every One. You
will find among those men all the shades of different political opinion
that we have here at home; but you will find them knit together by the
purpose of administering the affairs of that island on the highest plane
of decency and efficiency.
Besides acting in good faith, we have acted with good sense, and that
is also important. We have not been frightened or misled into giving
to the people of the island a form of government unsuitable to them.
While providing that the people should govern themselves as far as
possible, we have not hesitated in their own interests to keep the power
of shaping their destiny. t
In Cuba the problem was larger, more complicated, more difficult.
Here again we kept our promise absolutely. After having delivered the
island from its oppressors, we refused to turn it loose offhand, with the
certainty that it would sink back into chaos and savagery. For over
three years we administered it on a plane higher than it had ever reached
before during the four hundred years that had elapsed since the Span-
iards first landed upon its shores. We brought moral and physical
cleanliness into the government. We cleaned the cities for the first time
in their existence. We stamped out yellow fever—an inestimable boon
not merely to Cuba, but to the people of the Southern States as well.
We established a school system. We made life and property secure, so
that industry could again begin to thrive. Then when we had laid deep
and broad the foundations upon which civil liberty and national inde-
pendence must rest, we turned the island over to the hands of those
whom its people had chosen as the founders of the new republic. It is
a republic with which our own great Republic must ever be closely knit
by the ties of common interests and common inspirations. Cuba must
always be peculiarly related to us in international politics. She must
in international affairs be to a degree a part of our political system. In
return she must have peculiar relations with us economically. She
must be in a sense part of our economic system. We expect her to ac-
cept a political attitude toward us which we think wisest both for her
and for us. In return we must be prepared to put her in an economic
position as regards our tariff system which will give her some measure
of the prosperity which we enjoy. We can not, in my judgment, avoid
taking this attitude if we are to persevere in the course which we have
outlined for ourselves as a nation during the past four years and there-
fore I believe that it is only a matter of time—and I trust only a mat-
Theodore Roosevelt 57
ter of a very short time—before we enter into reciprocal trade rela-
tions with Cuba. i
The Isthmian Canal is to be one of the greatest, probably the greatest,
engineering feat of the 20th century; and I am glad it is to be done by
America. We must take care that it is done under the best conditions
and by the best Americans. There are certain preliminary matters to
settle. When this has been done, the first question will come upon
choosing the commission which is to supervise the building of the canal.
And but one thought here is permissible—how to get the very best men
of the highest engineering and business and administrative skill, who
will consent to undertake the work. If possible, I wish to see those
men represent different sections and different political parties. But
those questions are secondary. The primary aim must be to get men
who, though able to control much greater salaries than the nation is
able to pay, nevertheless possess the patriotism and the healthy ambi-
tion which will make them put their talents at the government’s service.
So much for what has been done in the Occident. In the Orient the
labor was more difficult.
It is rare indeed that a great work, a work supremely worth doing,
can be done save at the cost not only of labor and toil, but of much
puzzling worry during the time of the performance. Normally, the
nation that achieves greatness, like the individual who achieves great-
ness, can do so only at the cost of anxiety and bewilderment and heart-
wearing effort. Timid people, people scant of faith and hope, and
good people who are not accustomed to the roughness of the life of
effort—are almost sure to be disheartened and dismayed by the work :
and the worry, and Overmuch cast down by the shortcomings, actual or
seeming, which in real life always accompany the first stages even of
what eventually turn out to be the most brilliant victories.
All this is true of what has happened during the last four years in the
Philippine Islands. The Spanish War itself was an easy task, but it
left us certain other tasks which were much more difficult. One of
these tasks was that of dealing with the Philippines. The easy thing
to do—the thing which appealed not only to lazy and selfish men, but to
very many good men whose thought did not drive down to the root of
things—was to leave the islands. Had we done this, a period of wild
chaos would have supervened, and then some stronger power would
have stepped in and seized the islands and have taken up the task which
we in such a case would have flinched from performing. A less easy,
but infinitely more absurd course, would have been to leave the islands
ourselves, and at the same time to assert that we would not permit any
one else to interfere with them. This particular course would have
combined all the possible disadvantages of every other course which
was advocated. It would have placed us in a humiliating position, be-
58 Messages and Speeches
cause when the actual test came it would have been quite out of the
question for us, after some striking deed of Savagery had occurred in
the islands, to stand by and prevent the re-entry of civilization into
them. While the mere fact of our having threatened thus to guarantee
the local tyrants and wrongdoers against outside interference by our-
selves or others, would have put a premium upon every species of tyr-
anny and anarchy, within the islands.
Finally, there was the course which we adopted—not an easy course,
and one fraught with danger and difficulty, as is generally the case in
this world when some great feat is to be accomplished as an incident to
working out national destiny. We made up our minds to stay in the
islands—to put down violence—to establish peace and order—and then
to introduce a just and wise civil rule accompanied by a measure of self-
government which should increase as rapidly as the islanders showed
themselves fit for it. It was certainly a formidable task; but think of the
marvelously successful way in which it has been accomplished . The
first and vitally important feat was the establishment of the supremacy
of the American flag; and this had to be done by the effort of these gal-
lant fellow-Americans of ours to whom so great a debt is due—the offi-
cers and enlisted men of the United States regular and volunteer forces.
In a succession of campaigns, carried on in unknown tropic jungles
against an elusive and treacherous foe vastly outnumbering them, under
the most adverse conditions of climate, weather and country, our troops
completely broke the power of the insurgents, smashed their armies, and
harried the broken robber bands into submission. In its last stages, the
war against Our rule sank into mere brigandage; and what our troops
had to do was to hunt down the parties of ladrones. It was not an
easy task which it was humanly possible to accomplish in a month or a
year; and therefore after the first month and the first year had elapsed,
Some excellent people said that it couldn’t be done; but it was done.
Month by month, year by year, with unwearied and patient resolution,
our army in the Philippines did the task which it found ready at hand
until the last vestige of organized insurrection was stamped out. I do
not refer to the Moros, with whom we have exercised the utmost for-
bearance, but who may force us to chastise them if they persist in at-
tacking our troops. We will do everything possible to avoid having
trouble with them, but if they insist upon it it will come. Among the
Filipinos proper, however, peace has come. Doubtless here and there
sporadic outbreaks of brigandage will occur from time to time, but
organized warfare against the American flag has ceased, and there is
no reason to apprehend its recurrence. Our army in the islands has
been reduced until it is not a fourth of what it was at the time the out-
break was at its height.
Step by step as the army conquered, the rule of the military was sup-
Theodore Roosevelt 59
planted by the rule of the civil authorities—the soldier was succeeded
by the civilian magistrate. The utmost care has been exercised in
choosing the best type of Americans for the high civil positions, and
the actual work of administration has been done, so far as possible, by
native Filipino officials serving under these Americans. The success
of the effort has been wonderful. Never has this country had a more
upright or an abler body of public representatives than Governor Taft,
Vice-Governor Wright, and their associates and subordinates in the
Philippine Islands. It is a very difficult matter, practically, to apply the
principles of an orderly free government to an Oriental people strug-
gling upward out of barbarism and subjection. It is a task requiring in-
finite firmness, patience, tact, broadmindedness. All these qualities, and
the countless others necessary, have been found in the civil and military
officials who have been sent over to administer the islands. It was, of
course, inevitable that there should be occasional failures; but it is
astonishing how few these have been. Here and there the civil govern-
ment which had been established in a given district had to be temporarily
withdrawn because of some outbreak. Let me give you an idea of some
of the difficulties. We have been trying to put into effect the principle
of a popular choice of representative. In one district it proved to be
wholly impossible to make the people understand how to vote. Finally
they took a little hill, and put two candidates, one on one side and one
on the other, and made the people walk up and stand by the candidate
they wanted.
But at last, on the July 4th that has just passed— on the 126th anni-
versary of our independence—it was possible at the same time to de-
clare amnesty throughout the islands and definitely to establish civil
rule over all of them, excepting the country of the Mohammedan
Moros, where the conditions were wholly different. Each inhabitant
of the Philippines is now guaranteed his civil and religious rights, his
rights to life, personal liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, subject only
to not infringing the rights of others. It is worth noting that during
these three or four years under us the Philippine people have attained
to a greater degree of self-government, that they now have more to say
as to how they shall be governed, than is the case with any people in
the Orient which is under European rule. Nor is this all. Congress
has, with far-seeing wisdom, heartily supported all that has been done
by the Executive. Wise laws for the government of the Philippine
Islands have been placed upon the statute books, and under those laws
provision is made for the introduction into the Philippines of repre-
sentative government, with only the delay absolutely necessary to allow
for the establishment of definite peace, for the taking of a census, and
the settling down of the country. In short, we are governing the
Filipinos primarily in their interest, and for their very great benefit.
**-
6O i Messages and Speeches
And we have acted in practical fashion—not trying to lay down rules
as to what should be done in the remote and uncertain future, but turn-
ing our attention to the instant need of things and meeting that need
in the fullest and amplest way. It would be hard to say whether we owe
most to our military or our civil representatives in the Philippines.
The soldiers have shown splendid gallantry in the field; and they have
done no less admirable work in preparing the provinces for civil gov-
ernment. The civil authorities have shown the utmost wisdom in
doing a very difficult and important work, of vast extent. It would
be hard to find in modern times a better example of successful con-
structive statesmanship than the American representatives have given
to the Philippine Islands.
In the Philippines, as in Cuba, the instances of wrongdoing among
either our civil or military representatives have been astonishingly few ;
and punishment has been meted with even-handed justice to all of
fenders.
Nor should it be forgotten that while we have thus acted in the in-
terest of the islanders themselves, we have also helped our own people.
Our interests are as great in the Pacific as in the Atlantic. The welfare
of California, Oregon, and Washington is as vital to the nation as
the welfare of New England, New York, and the South Atlantic
States. The awakening of the Orient means very much to all the
nations of Christendom, commercially no less than politically; and it
would be short-sighted statesmanship on our part to refuse to take
the necessary steps for securing a proper share to our people of this
commercial future. The possession of the Philippines has helped us,
as the securing of the open door in China has helped us. Already the
government has taken the necessary steps to provide for the laying of
a Pacific cable under conditions which safeguard absolutely the interests
of the American public. Our commerce with the East is growing
rapidly. Events have abundantly justified, alike from the moral and
material standpoint, all that we have done in the Far East as a sequel
to our war with Spain.
AT RIVERPOINT, R. I., AUGUST 23, 1902.
Mr. Chairman and you citizens of Rhode Island and men and women
of the Pawtucket Valley:
I am glad to have the chance to stop for so brief a time in this
industrial centre. It seems to me, Mr. Chairman, that Rhode Island
teaches a peculiar lesson to all our country, for while you have been
favored by Providence in material matters in no special way, she
has done much, and what she has done is due to her men and women.
The genius of her inhabitants for making the most out of the nat-
Theodore Roosevelt 61s
ural opportunities at hand has made Rhode Island preeminent among
the States of the United States, for she has done the utmost possible
with her opportunities. The man counts for more than the matter
with which he has to deal. You have water power, mines and other
natural resources, but it is the man that counts. As in warfare it is
the man behind the gun that counts, so it is in civil life the man behind
the machine.
I am glad to be greeted by these men of the Grand Army of the
Republic who in the time of the nation's darkness gave all they had
for the nation’s life. You need the man who can work more than you
need material resources. You need to have the man who holds within
his soul the motive for lofty and disinterested action for the nation.
The man who can only reform others and leaves his own family in
want is not a good and satisfactory citizen. The good citizen also
must have an appreciation of what it is to live in a republic, and he
must remember that each must live; not only for himself, but for
others, too. As you men of the Great War had deep down in your
hearts the honor of the regiment, the corps and the nation, so you
men must have that feeling if you would succeed in civil life. We
must act, year in and year out, the lesson of brotherhood, treating
each man on his own worth without regard to his antecedents. When
you men went to the war, comrades came from town or country;
whether they were bankers or machinists, all you wanted to know
was, whether they would “stay put” when the time came; you wanted
to know if they were loyal, and had the nerve to stand by you. We
can all get on together if we proceed on the assumption that we treat
a man for his worth as a man, and giving square treatment to every-
body.
[Providence Journal, August 24, 1902.]
AT WILLIMANTIC, CONN., AUGUST 23, 1902.
This nation has great problems to face—problems in its external
policy—problems even more important in the administration of its in-
ternal affairs. We can solve them only if, with serious purpose, we set
ourselves to the task alike in the national and state governments and in
the local municipality and the county organizations. We have great
problems ahead of us as a nation. They will task our intelligence but
they will task still more what ranks ahead of intelligence—character.
It is a good thing for a nation to demand in its representatives in-
tellect, but it is a better thing to demand in them that sum of qualities
which we talk of—character. All of you know that this is true in private
life. If you are dealing with a man in a business way, whether as
62 Messages and Sp eeches
employer or employed, or in commerce, with a storekeeper or with any-
one, you want him to be a smart man, but it is a mighty bad thing if
he is only a smart man.
Now, what you want in a private man with whom you deal is what
you want in your representatives. If you are going to get good results
from your association with a man in the business world, in the working
world, it will be because that man has the right stuff in him, because
he has common sense, honesty, decency and courage. And the same
qualities must be shown in public life if we are to make this country
what we will make it—an example to all the nations of mankind.
AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., AUGUST 23, 1902.
Mr. Governor, and you, my fellow citizens:
We are passing through a period of great commercial prosperity,
and such a period is as sure as adversity itself to bring mutterings of
discontent. At a time when most men prosper somewhat some men
always prosper greatly ; and it is as true now as when the tower of
Siloam fell upon all alike, that good fortune does not come solely to
the just, nor bad fortune solely to the unjust. When the weather is
good for crops it is good for weeds. Moreover, not only do the wicked
flourish when the times are such that most men flourish, but, what is
worse, the spirit of envy and jealousy springs up in the breasts of those
who, though they may be doing fairly well themselves, see others no
more deserving, who do better.
Wise laws and fearless and upright administration of the laws can
give the opportunity for such prosperity as we see about us. But that
is all that they can do.” When the conditions have been created which
make prosperity possible, then each individual man must achieve it for
himself by his own energy and thrift and business intelligence. If
when people wax fat they kick, as they have kicked since the days of
Jeshurun, they will speedily destroy their own prosperity. If they go
into wild speculation and lose their heads they have lost that which no
laws can supply. If in a spirit of sullen envy they insist upon pulling
down those who have profited most in the years of fatness, they will
bury themselves in the crash of the common disaster. It is difficult to
make our material condition better by the best laws, but it is easy
enough to ruin it by bad laws.
The upshot of all this is that it is peculiarly incumbent upon us in a
time of such material well-being, both collectively as a nation and in-
dividually as citizens, to show, each on his own account, that we possess
the qualities of prudence, self-knowledge, and self-restraint. In our
government we need above all things stability, fixity of economic policy;
while remembering that this fixity must not be fossilization, that there
*r
Theodore Roosevelt. 63
must not be inability to shift our laws so as to meet our shifting national
needs. There are real and great evils in our social and economic life,
and these evils stand out in all their ugly baldness in time of prosperity;
for the wicked who prosper are never a pleasant sight. There is every
need of striving in all possible ways, individually and collectively, by
combinations among ourselves and through the recognized govern-
mental agencies, to cut out those evils. All I ask is to be sure that we
do not use the knife with an ignorant zeal which would make it more
dangerous to the patient than to the disease.
One of the features of the tremendous industrial development of the
last generation has been the very great increase in private, and especially
in corporate fortunes. We may like this or not, just as we choose, but
it is a fact nevertheless; and as far as we can see it is an inevitablé re-
sult of the working of the various causes, prominent among them steam
and electricity. Urban population has grown in this country, as in all
civilized countries, much faster than the population as a whole during
the last century. If it were not for that Rhode Island could not to-day
be the State she is. Rhode Island has flourished as she has flourished
because of the conditions which have brought about the great increase
in urban life. There is evil in these conditions, but you can’t destroy it
unless you destroy the civilization they have brought about. Where
men are gathered together in great masses it inevitably results that they
must work far more largely through combinations than where they live
scattered and remote from one another. Many of us prefer the old
conditions of life, under which the average man lived more to himself
and by himself, where the average community was more self-dependent,
and where even though the standard of comfort was lower on the aver-
age, yet there was less of the glaring inequality in worldly conditions
which we now see about us in our great cities. It is not true that the
poor have grown poorer; but some of the rich have grown so very
much richer that, where multitudes of men are herded together in a
limited space, the contrast strikes the onlooker as more violent than
formerly. On the whole, our people earn more and live better than ever
before, and the progress of which we are so proud could not have taken
place had it not been for the upbuilding of industrial centres, such as
this in which I am speaking. -
But together with the good there has come a measure of evil. Life is
not so simple as it was ; and surely, both for the individual and the
community, the simple life is normally the healthy life. There is not
in the great cities the feeling of brotherhood which there is still in
country localities; and the lines of social cleavage are far more deeply
marked.
For some of the evils which have attended upon the good. of the
changed conditions we can at present see no complete remedy. For
64 Messages and Speeches
others the remedy must come by the action of men themselves in their
private capacity, whether merely as individuals or by combination. For
yet others some remedy can be found in legislative and executive action
—national, State, or municipal. Much of the complaint against combi-
nations is entirely unwarranted. Under present-day conditions it is as
necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is to have
organizations, unions, among wage-workers. We have a right to ask
in each case Only this: that good, and not harm, shall follow. Exactly
as labor organizations, when managed intelligently and in a spirit of
justice and fair play, are of very great service not only to the wage-
workers, but to the whole community, as has been shown again and
again in the history of many such organizations; so wealth, not merely
individual, but corporate, when used aright is not merely beneficial to
the community as a whole, but is absolutely essential to the upbuilding.
of such a series of communities as those whose citizens I am now ad-
dressing. This is so obvious that it ought to be too trite to mention,
and yet it is necessary to mention it when we see some of the attacks
made upon wealth, as such.
Of course a great fortune if used wrongly is a menace to the com-
munity. A man of great wealth who does not use that wealth decently
is, in a peculiar sense, a menace to the community, and so is the man
who does not use his intellect aright. Each talent—the talent for mak-
ing money, the talent for showing intellect at the bar, or in any other
way—if unaccompanied by character, makes the possessor a menace to
the community. But such a fact no more warrants us in attacking
wealth than it does in attacking intellect. Every man of power, by
the very fact of that power, is capable of doing damage to his neighbors;
but we can not afford to discourage the development of such men merely
because it is possible they may use their power for wrong ends. If
we did so we should leave our history a blank, for we should have no
great statesmen, soldiers, merchants, no great men of arts, of letters,
of science. Doubtless on the average the most useful citizen to the
community as a whole is the man to whom has been granted what the
Psalmist asked for—neither poverty nor riches. But the great captain
of industry, the man of wealth, who, alone or in combination with his
fellows, drives through our great business enterprises, is a factor with-
out whom the civilization that we see round about us here could not
have been built up. Good, not harm, normally comes from the up-
building of such wealth. Probably the greatest harm done by vast
wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we
let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
But there is other harm; and it is evident that we should try to do
away with that. The great corporations which we have grown to
speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the
Theodore Roosevelt 65
State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound
to control them wherever the need of such control is shown. There is
clearly need of supervision—need to possess the power of regulation of
these great corporations through the representatives of the public—
wherever, as in our own country at the present time, business corpora-
tions become so very powerful alike for beneficent work and for work
that is not always beneficent. It is idle to say that there is no need for
such supervision. There is, and a sufficient warrant for it is to be found
in any one of the admitted evils appertaining to them.*
We meet a peculiar difficulty under our system of government, be-
cause of the division of governmental power between the Nation and
the States. When the industrial conditions were simple, very little
control was needed, and the difficulties of exercising such control un-
der our Constitution were not evident. Now the conditions are com-
plicated and we find it hard to frame national legislation which shall
be adequate; while as a matter of practical experience it has been shown
that the States either can not or will not exercise a sufficient control
to meet the needs of the case. Some of our States have excellent laws—
laws which it would be well indeed to have enacted by the National
Legislature. But the widespread differences in these laws, even be-
tween adjacent States, and the uncertainty of the power of enforcement,
result practically in altogether insufficient control. I believe that the
nation must assume this power of control by legislation; if necessary
by constitutional amendment. The immediate necessity in dealing with
trusts is to place them under the real, not the nominal, control of some
sovereign to which, as its creatures, the trusts shall owe allegiance, and
in whose courts the sovereign's orders may be enforced.
This is not the case with the ordinary so-called “trust” to-day; for
the trust nowadays is a large State corporation, which generally does
business in other States, often with a tendency toward monopoly.
Such a trust is an artificial creature not wholly responsible to or con-
trollable by any legislation, either by State or nation, and not subject
to the jurisdiction of any one court. Some governmental sovereign
must be given full power over these artificial, and very powerful, cor-
porate beings. In my judgment this sovereign must be the National
Government. When it has been given full power, then this full power
can be used to control any evil influence, exactly as the government is
now using the power conferred upon it by the Sherman anti-trust law.
Even when the power has been granted it would be most unwise to
exercise it too much, to begin by too stringent legislation. The mechan-
ism of modern business is as delicate and complicated as it is vast, and
*President Roosevelt is one of those who are born to the belief that the earth was meant
for men, not companies, and he does not at all agree to those efforts on the part of Money
which look towards capsizing Providence in that particular.—A. H. L.
66 Messages and Speeches
nothing would be more productive of evil to all of us, and especially
to those least well off in this world's goods, than ignorant meddling
with this mechanism—above all, meddling in a spirit of class legislation
or hatred or rancor. It is eminently necessary that the power should be
had, but it is just as necessary that it should be exercised with wisdom
and self-restraint. The first exercise of that power should be the secur-
ing of publicity among all great corporations doing an interstate busi-
ness. The publicity, though non-inquisitorial, should be real and thor-
ough as to all important facts with which the public has concern. Day-
light is a powerful discourager of evil. Such publicity would by itself
tend to cure the evils of which there is just complaint; it would show
us if evils existed, and where the evils are imaginary, and it would show
us what next ought to be done.
Above all, let us remember that our success in accomplishing any-
thing depends very much upon our not trying to accomplish everything.
Distrust whoever pretends to offer you a patent cure-all for every ill
of the body politic, just as you would a man who offers a medicine
which would cure every evil of your individual body. A medicine that
is recommended to cure both asthma and a broken leg is not good for
either. Mankind has moved slowly upward through the ages, some-
times a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but rarely indeed by
leaps and bounds. At times a great crisis comes in which a great peo-
ple, perchance led by a great man, can at white heat strike some mighty
blow for the right—make a long stride in advance along the path of
justice and of orderly liberty. But normally we must be content if each
of us can do something—not all that we wish, but something—for the
advancement of those principles of righteousness which underlie all real
national greatness, all true civilization and freedom. I see no promise
of any immediate and complete solution of all the problems we group
together when we speak of the trust question. But we can make a
beginning in solving these problems, and a good beginning, if only we
approach the subject with a sufficiency of resolution, of honesty, and
of that hard common-sense which is one of the most valuable, and not
always One of the most common, assets in any nation's greatness. The
existing laws will be fully enforced as they stand on the statute books
without regard to persons, and I think good has already come from .
their enforcement. I think, furthermore, that additional legislation
should be had and can be had, which will enable us to accomplish much
more along the same lines. No man can promise a perfect solution, at
least in the immediate future. But something has already been done,
and much more can be done if our people temperately and determinedly
will that it shall be done.
In conclusion let me add one word. While we are not to be excused
if we fail to do whatever is possible through the agency of government,
Theodore Roosevelt 67
we must keep ever in mind that no action of the government, no action
by combination among ourselves, can take the place of the individual
qualities to which in the long run every man must owe the success he
can make of life. There never has been devised, and there never will be
devised, any law which will enable a man to succeed save by the exercise
of those qualities which have always been the prerequisites of success—
the qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of unflinching will.
Such action can supplement those qualities but it can not take their
place. No action by the State can do more than supplement the initia-
tive of the individual; and ordinarily the action of the State can do no
more than to secure to each individual the chance to show under as
favorable conditions as possible the stuff that there is in him.
AT SYMPHONY HALL, BOSTON, AUGUST 25, 1902.
Governor Crane, Mayor Collins, men and women of Boston:
I want to take up this evening the general question of our economic
and social relations, with specific reference to that problem with which
I think our people are now greatly concerning themselves—the problem
of our complex social condition as intensified by the existence of the
great corporations which we rather loosely designate as trusts. I have
not come here to say that I have discovered a patent cure-all for any
evils. When people's minds are greatly agitated on any subject, and
especially when they feel deeply but rather vaguely that conditions are
not right, it is far pleasanter in addressing them to be indifferent as
to what you promise; but it is much less pleasant afterward when you
come to try to carry out what has been promised. Of course the worth
of a promise consists purely in the way in which the performance
squares with it. That has two sides. In the first place, if a man is an
honest man he will try just as hard to keep a promise made on the
stump as one made off the stump. In the second place, if the people
keep their heads they won't wish promises to be made which are im-
possible of performance. You see, one side of that question represents
my duty, and the other side yours.
Mankind goes ahead but slowly, and it goes ahead mainly through
each of us trying to do the best that is in him and to do it in the sanest
way. We have founded our Republic upon the theory that the average
man will as a rule do the right thing, that in the long run the majority
will decide for what is sane and wholesome. If our fathers were mis-
taken in that theory, if ever the times become such—not occasionally
but persistently—that the mass of the people do what is unwholesome,
what is wrong, then the Republic can not stand, I care not how good its
laws, I care not what marvelous mechanism its Constitution may em-
body. Back of the laws, back of the administration, back of the system
68 Messages and Speeches
of government lies the man, lies the average manhood of our people,
and in the long run we are going to go up or go down accordingly as
the average standard of our citizenship does or does not wax in growth
and grace.
The first requisite of good citizenship is that the man shall do the
homely, every-day, humdrum duties well. A man is not a good citizen,
I do not care how lofty his thoughts are about citizenship in the ab-
stract, if in the concrete his actions do not bear them out; and it does
not make much difference how high his aspirations for mankind at large
may be, if he does not behave well in his own family those aspirations
do not bear visible fruit. He must be a good breadwinner, he must
take care of his wife and his children, he must be a neighbor whom his
neighbors can trust, he must act squarely in his business relations,—
he must do all those every-day ordinary duties first, or he is not a good
citizen. But he must do more. In this country of ours the average
citizen must devote a good deal of thought and time to the affairs of the
State as a whole or those affairs will go backward; and he must devote
that thought and that time steadily and intelligently. If there is any
one quality that is not admirable, whether in a nation or in an indi-
vidual, it is hysterics, either in religion or in anything else. The man
or woman who makes up for ten days’ indifference to duty by an
eleventh-day morbid repentance about that duty is of scant use in the
world. Now in the same way it is of no possible use to decline to go
through all the ordinary duties of citizenship for a long space of time
and then suddenly to get up and feel very angry about something or
Somebody, not clearly defined, and demand reform, as if it were a con-
crete substance to be handed out forthwith. w
This is preliminary to what I want to say to you about the whole
question of great corporations as affecting the public. There are very
many and very difficult problems with which we are faced as the results
of the forces which have been in play for more than the lifetime of a
generation. It is worse than useless for any of us to rail at or regret
the great growth of our industrial civilization during the last half cen-
tury. Speaking academically, we can, according to our several tem-
peraments, regret that the old days with the old life have vanished, or .
not, just as we choose; but we are here to-night only because of the
play of those great forces. There is but little use in regretting that
things have been shaping themselves differently from what we might
have preferred. The practical thing to do is to face the conditions as
they are and see if we can not get the best there is in them out of them.
Now we shall not get a complete or perfect solution for all of the evils
attendant upon the development of the trusts by any single action on
our part. A good many actions in a good many different ways will
be required before we get many of those evils even partially remedied.
Theodore Roosevelt 69
We must first of all think clearly ; we must probably experiment some-
what; we must above all show by our actions that our interest is perma-
nent and not spasmodic; and we must see that all proper steps are taken
toward the solution. Now of course all this is perfectly trite. Every
one who thinks knows that the only way in which any problem of great
importance was ever successfully solved was by consistent and per-
sistent effort toward a given end—effort that did not cease with any
One election or with any one year, but was continued steadily, temper-
ately, but resolutely, toward a given end. It is a little difficult to set
clearly before us all of the evils attendant upon the working of some of
our great corporations, but I think that those gentlemen, and especially
those gentlemen of large means, who deny the, evils exist are acting
with great folly. So far from being against property when I ask
that the question of the trusts be taken up, I am acting in the most
conservative sense in property's interest. When a great corporation is
sued for violating the anti-trust law, it is not a move against property, it
is a move in favor of property, because when we make it evident that
all men, great and small alike, have to obey the law, we put the safe-
guard of the law around all men. When we make it evident that no
man shall be excused for violating the law, we make it evident that
every man will be protected from violations of the law.
Now one of the great troubles—I am inclined to think much the
greatest trouble—in any immediate handling of the question of the
trusts comes from our system of government. Under this system it
is difficult to say where the power is lodged to deal with these evils.
Remember that I am not saying that even if we had all the power we
could completely solve the trust question. If what we read in the
papers is true, international trusts are now being planned. It is going
to be very difficult for any set of laws on our part to deal completely
with a problem which becomes international in its bearings. But a
great deal can be done in various ways even now—a great deal is being
done—and a great deal more can be done, if we see that the power is
lodged somewhere to do it. On the whole, our system of government
has worked marvelously well—the system of divided functions of gov-
ernment, of a scheme under which Maine, Louisiana, Oregon, Idaho,
New York, Illinois, South Carolina can all come together for certain
purposes and yet each be allowed to work out its salvation as it desires
along certain other lines. On the whole, this has worked well; but in
some respects it has worked ill. While I most firmly believe in fixity
of policy, I do not believe that that policy should be fossilized, and
when conditions change we must change our governmental methods to
meet them. I believe with all my heart in the New England town meet-
ing, but you can't work the New England town meeting in Boston—
it is too big. You must devise something else. If you look back in the
7o Messages and Speeches
history of Boston you will find that Boston was very reluctant to admit
this particular truth for some time in the first decades of the nineteenth
century. When this government was founded there were no great
individual or corporate fortunes, and commerce and industry were be-
ing carried on very much as they had been carried on in the days when
Nineveh and Babylon stood in the Mesopotamian Valley. Sails, oars,
wheels—these were the instruments of commerce. The pack train, the
wagon train, the rowboat, the sailing craft—these were the methods of
commerce. Everything has been revolutionized in the business world
since then, and the progress of civilization from being a dribble has be-
come a torrent. There was no particular need at that time of bothering
as to whether the nation or the State had control of corporations. They
were easy to control. Now, however, the exact reverse is the case.
And remember when I say corporations I do not mean merely trusts
technically so-called, merely combinations of corporations, or corpora-
tions under certain peculiar conditions. For instance, some time ago the
Attorney-General took action against a certain trust. There was con-
siderable discussion as to whether the trust aimed at would not seek
to get out from under the law by becoming a single corporation. Now,
I want laws that will enable us to deal with any evil no matter what
shape it takes. I want to see the government able to get at it definitely;
so that the action of the government can not be evaded by any turning
within or without Federal or State statutes. At present we have really
no efficient control over a big corporation which does business in more
than one State. Frequently the corporation has nothing whatever to do
with the State in which it is incorporated except to get incorporated;
and all its business may be done in entirely different communities—com-
munities which may object very much to the methods of incorporation
in the State named. I do not believe that you can get any action by
any State, I do not believe it practicable to get action by all the States
that will give us satisfactory control of the trusts, of big corporations;
and the result is at present that we have a great, powerful, artificial
creation which has no creator to which it is responsible. The creator
creates it and then it goes and Operates somewhere else; and there is
no interest on the part of the creator to deal with it. It does not do
anything where the creator has power; it operates entirely outside of the
creator's jurisdiction.
It is of course a mere truism to say that the corporation is the crea-
ture of the State, that the State is sovereign. There should be a real
and not a nominal sovereign, some One sovereign to which the corpora-
tion shall be really and not nominally responsible. At present if we
pass laws nobody can tell whether they will amount to anything. That
has two bad effects. In the first place, the corporation becomes indif-
ferent to the law-making body; and in the next place, the law-making
Theodore Roosevelt 71
body gets into that most pernicious custom of passing a law not with
reference to what will be done under it, but with reference to its effects
upon the opinions of the voters. That is a bad thing. When any body
of law-makers passes a law, not simply with reference to whether that
law will do good or ill, but with the knowledge that not much will come
of it, and yet that perhaps the people as a whole will like to see it on
the statute books—it does not speak well for the law-makers, and it
does not speak well for the people either. What I hope to see is power
given to the National Legislature which shall make the control real.
It would be an excellent thing if you could have all the States act on
somewhat similar lines so that you would make it unnecessary for the
national government to act; but all of you know perfectly well that the
States will not act on similar lines. No advance whatever has been
made in the direction of intelligent dealing by the States as a collective
body with these great corporations. Here in Massachusetts you have
what I regard as, on the whole, excellent corporation laws. Most of
our difficulties would be in a fair way of solution if we had the power
to put upon the national statute books, and did put upon them, laws
for the nation much like those you have here on the subject of corpora-
tions in Massachusetts. So you can see, gentlemen, I am not advocat-
ing anything very revolutionary. I am advocating action to prevent
anything revolutionary. Now, if we can get adequate control by the
nation of these great corporations, then we can pass legislation which
will give us the power of regulation and supervision over them. If the
nation had that power, mind you, I should advocate as strenuously as
I know how that the power should be exercised with extreme caution
and self-restraint. No good will come from plunging in without having
looked carefully ahead. The first thing we want is publicity; and I do
not mean publicity as a favor by some corporations—I mean it as a
right from all corporations affected by the law. I want publicity as to
the essential facts in which the public has an interest. I want the
knowledge given to the accredited representatives of the people of
facts upon which those representatives can if they see fit base their
action later. The publicity itself would cure many evils. The light of
day is a greater deterrer of wrongdoing. The mere fact of being able
to put out nakedly, and with the certainty that the statements were true,
a given condition of things that was wrong, would go a long distance
toward curing that wrong; and, even where it did not cure it, would
make the path evident by which to cure it. We would not be leaping
in the dark; we would not be striving blindly to see what was good
and what bad. We would know what the facts were and be able to
shape our course accordingly.
A good deal can be done now, a good deal is being done now. As
far as the anti-trust laws go they will be enforced. No suit will be
72 - Messages and Speeches
undertaken for the sake of seeming to undertake it. Every suit that
is undertaken will be begun because the great lawyer and upright man
whom we are fortunate enough to have as Attorney-General, Mr. Knox,
believes that there is a violation of the law which we can get at ; and
when the suit is undertaken it will not be compromised except upon the
basis that the government wins. Of course, gentlemen, no laws amount
to anything unless they are administered honestly and fearlessly. We
must have such administration or the law will amount to nothing. I
believe that it is possible to frame national legislation which shall give
us far more power than we now have, at any rate over corporations
doing an interstate business. I can not guarantee that, because in the
past it has more than once happened that we have put laws on the
statute books which those who made them intended to mean one thing,
and when they came up for decision by the courts, it was found that
the intention had not been successfully put into effect. But I believe
that additional legislation can be had. If my belief is wrong, if it
proves evident that we can not, under the Constitution as it is, give
the national administration sufficient power to deal with these great
corporations, then no matter what our reverence for the past, our duty
to the present and the future will force us to see that some power is
conferred upon the national government. And when that power has
been conferred, then it will rest with the national government to exer-
cise it.
AT NAHANT, MASS., AUGUST 25, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, and fellow citigens:
Any good American who comes to the home of the town meeting feels
that he comes to sit at the feet of Gamaliel as regards republican
democratic government. And you in New England, in the country
which, with the sole exception of the little republic of Switzerland, has
developed to a higher degree than anywhere else the true principle of
democratic republican representative government—you have done more,
much more than your share in leavening the whole Republic; and just
as long as our people show the capacity for self-government which is
made evident in towns like this, just so long we shall prosper as a whole.
And when I address an audience like this, which takes part itself in all
the workings of the government, I do not have to explain—as I have to
explain to some other audiences—that the government cannot do every-
thing. You can do a good deal through the town, but you can do more
for the town than it can do for you. Some people make the mistake
of thinking you can convert that, but you cannot.
I am glad to be here to speak to you after coming through your
library, and especially escorted out here by the veterans of the great
Theodore Roosevelt 73
war, and by you, Gen. Curtis Guild, my comrade of the lesser war.
It is a very good thing, indeed it is an indispensable thing, to have
material well-being. You have got to have that as the basis of our
civilization, but if you do not build something more on top of that you
will have only the foundation, and that is a bad place to live. You have
got to have a superstructure, too. In addition to the material pros-
perity, you must have the spirit which makes that prosperity count.
You must have it in peace; you must have it in war. The spirit that
has made New England identified not only with self-government, but
with the spread of education; the spirit that produces the school and the
library; that is the spirit upon which we must build if we hope to
make this great nation rise loyally both to her deeds and her oppor-
tunities. -
But education is not enough. The men of thin intellects, the men
who are competent to feel only intellectual emotions, are not the men
who will make a great nation. You have got to have, in addition to
the intellect, what counts for much more than intellect—character. And
in character you must have men good, and you must have them strong.
Now you representatives of the great war, who are here to-day, you
went out from '61 to ’65. The men alongside of whom you fought
had to have certain traits. No one trait was enough. They must be
patriotic in the first place. They had to be driven on by love for
country that made them willing to spend the best years of their youth
and young manhood in the service of the nation to their own detriment
—that made them willing to sacrifice everything for the prize of death
in battle for the honor of the flag. But you had to have more than
that. No matter how patriotic a man, if he had the tendency to
run away, he was no good. Besides the love of country you had to
have a strong, virile purpose in the man—the eagerness to do his work
as a man. He had to have courage, strength, fixity of resolution. It
was not all victory, and the man who, after a defeat, thought he would
go home was of no use. You had to have the men who after a defeat
would come back and try again, and after another defeat would come
back and try again and again, until they wrested from defeat the
splendid ultimate triumph.
The army is a poor place for a man of hysterical temperament. The
government is a poor place for a man of hysterical temperament. The
men who are going to do good work for citizenship in this community
are the men who approach their duties in the spirit in which you ap-
proached yours in the time of the Civil War, who are not going to ex-
pect to have everything done for them, but are willing to do their share;
who do not expect the way to be easy and smooth—for the path of na-
tional greatness never is easy or smooth—but who are going to face the
74 Messages and Speeches
t
rough work of the world with the determination to do that work right.
I thank you for the chance to greet you today.
[The Boston Herald, August 26, 1902.]
AT LYNN, MASS., AUGUST 25, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of Lynn:
I thank you from my heart for the way in which you have greeted,
not me, personally, but the chief executive of the American Republic.
And I wish to thank the men of the National Guard, afloat and ashore,
the cavalry and the infantry, for the escort tendered me. There is
but little that I can say to you, for I have come here less to teach than
to learn—here in your city, a city rendered great by the fact that the
individual citizens in it have known how to work, have known how to
do alike their duty in private life and in public life. Whenever I come
into such a community as this, I feel as if the utmost I could say would
be to ask you to learn aright, not from what I say, but from what you
do. In this country we have got to have decent and intelligent govern-
ment, not as a substitute for individual initiative but as a supplement
to it. -
Lynn has been made what it is through its people, through its citizens,
through its people individually, as well as collectively. Now we have
got to apply the same principles to the country as a whole that you
have applied in practice here in Lynn. The government can do some-
thing—it can do a good deal—but it never can begin to do as much
for the individual as the individual can do for the government. The
city of Lynn can do something, but it is the citizens that have built up
the city of Lynn. So in our country as a whole, we must have wise
legislation; we must have honest, fearless and able administrators of
the law. All law must be so administered as to secure justice for all
alike—a square deal for every man, great or small, rich or poor.
That we have got to have, and after that has been attained, it will
then still remain true that the factor in any man’s individual success
must be the sum of those qualities which we speak of as character in
any man—his energy, his perseverance, his intelligence, his business
thrift. }
No laws, however good, can supply the lack of those qualities in
any man. Take the navy department, under your fellow-Massachusetts
man, Mr. Moody. Now in the navy you have got to have good ships
and good guns, but if you have not got the right officers and enlisted
men to work them the ships and the guns are worthless. You have got
to have the men behind the guns—the men in the engine room. That is
what counts. That is what made the difference at Santiago. There is
a difference in guns, but there is also a difference in men. So, exactly
Theodore Roosevelt 75
as you need in war men behind the guns, in peace you need the man
behind the plough, the man at the machine. It is on them that Our
success ultimately depends. Laws are good things, but they are only
the implements with which men who make them and live under them
work out their salvation and the salvation of the Nation.
[The Boston Herald, August 26, 1902.]
AT LOWELL, MASS., AUGUST 26, 1902.
When I got the train this morning one of the first to greet me was ex-
Governor Allen, of Porto Rico, your fellow townsman. Now, you
don’t hear much about our government of Porto Rico, because there
is nothing sensational in a complete success. Under Governor Allen and
since under his successor Porto Rico has been governed so well that it
is not entitled to any space in the newspapers.
Now, gentlemen, we have done our full duty by Porto Rico. We
have done our duty by Cuba. But I want to ask the people to act
further than under a sense of bare duty, to act in a spirit of generosity
such as befits a great republic in dealing with a new and weaker re-
public which, itself, has started on the career of self-government. And
I want, furthermore, that our people should be awake to their own
interest in the seas and lands south of our country. We drove out
those who had been oppressing Cuba and we cleaned house for them.
Not an easy task, for many of those cities had never before been cleaned
in their entire history. We introduced a school system. We made
justice in fact as well as in name. We stamped out the plague of yellow
fever, a plague which was a menace not merely to Cuba, but to our
own Southern States, and then we left them independent. But from
the very necessities of the case we are bound to have intimate relations
with them. Cuba has got to be in a sense a part of our international
political system, and I ask most earnestly that in return we make her
part of our economic system by establishing reciprocal trade relations
with her. And I ask in her interest and in ours. There is a great
market in Cuba, and I wish to see it controlled in the interest of our
own people. º
We did well in Cuba. We did well in Porto Rico. That was be-
cause we could count on the services of men like Governor Allen,
services which should be both interested and intelligent. Mind you,
both. You have got to have morality first, but if morality has not got
common sense with it, the result will be unhappy. And now, in dealing
with Cuba, in dealing with the isthmus across which we are to build
the great inter-ocean canal, we must remember that we can do good
for ourselves permanently only if we do good to those with whom we
are brought in contact. I ask you, then, to see to it that we give Cuba
_*
76 Messages and Specches
reciprocity with this country, primarily in Cuba's interests but also
for our own great benefit.
AT OLD ORCHARD, ME., AUGUST 26, 1903.
It is indeed a pleasure for me to have the chance of visiting your great
and beautiful State, and I thank you from my heart for the greeting
you have extended to me. In almost every meeting I can see veterans
like you, like you over there, and you, with the boy in your arms
there, who wear the button that shows that in the times that tried
men's souls you proved your truth by your endeavors. In those days
Maine was a lesson to all for the way her sons bore themselves in
war. Since then and now she is a lesson to us because of the high
average of citizenship that shows within her borders and I think that
it is the same reason in the one case as in the other. The fact is, that
here you have remained on the whole true to the old American theory
of treating each man on his worth as a man, without regard to the
incidentals of his position.
The State can do much but can’t begin to do everything. The State
can do something for all of us but not as much as we can do for the
State and not as much as each man can and must do for himself. That
is going to count in the long run. The Government, national and
State, can mighty easily spoil chances for all of us. Bad law will work
badly enough, but it is hard for the best of laws to do more than shape
conditions so as to give each man a square and fair chance, and then
he has got to work out his future for himself.
It is a much easier thing to tell people that you have got a patent
recipe that will save them from having to take trouble themselves
than it is to tell them perfectly plain, homely truths. It is an easy thing
to make the promise, but it is a much uglier thing afterwards to carry
out the promise, and, on the whole, it is not worth while making a
promise if you have got to feel ashamed of yourself for breaking it
afterward. g
AT LAWRENCE, MASS, AUGUST 26, 1902.
Here in Lawrence, I am in another of the oldest industrial centres of
this country, one of the cities of modern industrialism. It is greatly to
your credit that you should have built up such a city of our material
prosperity. But you have done more than that. I am greeted here
to-day by the members of Needham Post of the Grand Army of the
Republic. This is the section of the country in which the first blood
was shed in the Revolutionary War which made us a nation, and it
was here also that the two cities of Lowell and Lawrence gave their
Theodore Roosevelt 77
sons to pour out their lifeblood, the first of the ocean of lifeblood
poured out from '61 to ’65 to keep this nation one and great and free.
And so it was characteristic of your city, which sent these men to the
great war, that when a lesser war came, you, my comrades, men of
the 9th Regiment, with whom I served before Santiago, in your turn
sprang to the country's call.
And other comrades of yours, younger comrades of yours, men whom
we knew, men of the 9th Regiment, other men in the far-off Philippines,
have after three years of unspeakable toil and hardship against a cruel,
and reckless and elusive foe, finally won victory for the American
flag. Our people owe the greatest debt possible to you who fought
in the great crisis in the great war, but there is a debt owing also to
the men who so gallantly did their duty during the last three years to
say that the honor of the flag which you handed to them unstained
should be kept undimmed. And now they have fought and their suc-
cess has meant what the success of the American soldier has always
meant. You triumphed and your foes and detractors said that as
mighty an army as yours was meant the establishment of a depotism in
this country, and the minute that the war was over you went back to
the plough, to the factory, the farm and the office, and became citizens
again.
And now in the Philippines our soldiers have fought and won. To
do what? To leave the country and establish the rule of civil authority
under the American flag. And now we have brought peace to the
islands. They are now better off than ever before. Never in their history
has each man had, as he has now, such a good chance for life, liberty
and the pursuit of happiness. You have brought self-governing, in-
dividual freedom to the Filipinos of a kind that they should have never
known under any anarchic tyranny of their own. Now we will govern
the islands well. We will govern them primarily in their interests, but
in our own interests also. Whether we will or not, we as a nation front
a great destiny. We can decide whether we will do our work badly
or well, but we cannot help doing it. We have got to do it somehow,
and I ask that all men stand shoulder to shoulder as Americans to
see that they do it well.
AT LEWISTON, ME., AUGUST 26, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow countrymen and women of this beauti-
ful State:
In the first place, Mr. Mayor, let me in thanking all of you for your
greeting, thank especially the Mayor, the official representative of the
city, for the kindness with which he has spoken. Mr. Mayor, I can
hardly imagine any man able to occupy the Presidency of this people
78 Messages and Speeches
and not feeling, with all his faults, that he was indeed the servant and
the representative of the people, but if it were necessary to have such
feeling words like yours would supply it.
My fellow citizens, coming here this afternoon I saw along the
streets and here and there I see in the audience before me men who
wear the button that shows that in the times that tried men's souls they
proved their truth by their endeavor; they rose level to the nation's need.
It always seems to me when I see such men that the lesson they taught
by what they did during the war, and by the way in which when Once
the war was over they turned to the works of peace, is a lesson peculiarly
applicable to us under the strain of the enormous and complex develop-
ment of our industrial civilization.
Here in Maine you combine as in but few states both the old con-
ditions and the new. In your country districts, on your beautiful farms,
On the edges of the great northern forests, among your seafaring people
on the coast, you have men leading substantially the lives, under sub-
stantially the conditions that obtained in the days of our forefathers
who founded this Republic; and then, again, in industrial centers like
this city of which, Mr. Mayor, you are the chief executive—in these
centers we perceive the full play of the great forces which have brought
about that marvelous material progress of which we are so proud, but
which at the same time have brought us face to face with problems
of wholly different type from those that we confronted in the simpler
life.
These problems are very difficult. I might put it more strongly than
that. It is impossible to devise any one perfect solution, and one com-
plete solution, for all the problems of our latter-day industrial civiliza-
tion. f
But there are certain elementary truths which we tend to forget, but
which nevertheless, remain operative in the biggest city, in the most
feverish industrial center, just as much as on any farm in the country
side.
Fundamentally, through the qualities by which the success of the in-
dividual is attained, must the success of the nation be wrought, and
these are the same qualities the showing of which made the foundation
of this nation possible.
The man who fought in the Civil War, fought with different weapons
from those carried by Washington's Continentals at Trenton and the
Brandywine, through the dark days of Valley Forge, and at the ulti-
mate triumph of Yorktown. And now, in the warfare of to-day the
weapons have changed again, and the tactics have changed with them,
but the man behind the gun has got to be of the same old stuff, or the
best gun won't save him.
No improvement in firearms, no perfection of equipment, no change
Theodore Roosevelt 79
in tactics will avail unless back of them all lies the spirit that sent you
and your fellows from '61 to '65, again and again against the Con-
federate lines; that sent you after defeat back again just as if you had
won, and after defeat again back again, until from defeat you had
wrenched the victory. -
The great battleships of to-day would have seemed veritable night-
mares to Howe and Perry in 1812 and 'I4, and as for the guns, why in
those days, in 1812, the commander of a small vessel could walk up
and down the quarter-deck with an entire broadside of cartridges in
one coat-tail pocket!
But we won so completely in '98 and with such little effort because
we had men with the spirit of 1812, with the spirit of Farragut's fleet
in the Civil War, back of the guns and the ships. It is the man behind
the gun, the man in the engine room, the man in the conning-tower, L
these are they who fundamentally govern. Of course you have got to
have the weapons, but you can't win with bows and arrows.
But it is no matter how good the weapons are which you have, you
must have good men to use them.
And more than that, it is not only courage that counts, it is thor-
oughness in training. That made a big difference between Bull Run
and Gettysburg. Now in our Navy and our Army if we ever have to
face a foreign foe, we want to train in advance, so that Gettysburg
may come without Bull Run, and there must be preparedness in ad-
vance. This is why we want to keep our fleet trained and practiced.
Anyone of you who sees a great modern warship must realize that
no one can learn and be trained to handle that trade in a week, any
more than the ordinary unskilled laborer could learn to become a skilled
machinist or a watch manufacturer in the same length of time. Put
men who mean well but who do not know, on a good ship and send
them against a competent foe and you invite not merely disaster but
a good deal worse—disgrace. Have the men trained in advance—
months and years in advance. That is how the victory comes.
At Manila and at Santiago there were plenty of brave men amongst
the Spaniards but they didn't know how to shoot, and they didn't know
how to keep their machinery in gear, and our men did because they
had taken the time in advance, because they didn't expect off-hand,
in one day, to solve the problem of carrying on the war. Month
in and month out, year in and year out, the ship-wright, the officer, the
enlisted man afloat and ashore, had done their several duties in making
ready the great ships, in maneuvering with them at sea, in drilling the
crews at target practice, until when the final day came we had men who
could rise level to the demand upon them.
Now, my fellow citizens, the same thing is substantially true in our
civil life. Exactly as back of the gun stands the man behind the gun,
8O Messages and Speeches
and more important, so behind legislation, behind the best that can
be done by constitutions and by laws, must stand a high average of
decent citizenship, if we are to get good results in this Republic. We
need good laws, good constitutions, and upright and honest admin-
istration of the laws. We need all these, just as in the navy we need
good ships and guns, but they are not enough. You have to have
men honestly bent on doing the best that is in them under those laws
in order to get the best results. -
And, now, gentlemen, how about doing the best? Is it a work of
special genius P. Not a bit of it. In the army you developed two or three
or half a dozen great geniuses. You had a Grant, a Sherman, a
Sheridan, with a Farragut on the sea; but the great thing is that
you developed the average American citizen who had gone into the
ranks and developed himself into a first-class fighting man,
and he was so developed by those over him, not through genius,
but by doing well all of the small things that were to be done.
In any new regiment there is always a certain proportion of recruits
who want to be heroes, but they don’t want to go through the prelim-
inaries—they don’t want to dig out kitchen sinks. Sentry duty does not
appeal to them; keeping the camp police is rather repulsive. They
want to win a great battle without preparing for it. That sort of man
doesn’t make a hero. He doesn’t even make an ordinarily good soldier.
Now, in our civic life, distrust the man who thinks that if some great
emotional crisis came he would rise up and reform everything, but
meanwhile doesn't want to do his ordinary common-place duty! This
is a work-a-day world, and we can get along in it only if we show
the work-a-day qualities. It is a very essential thing to be able to
show the other qualities. It is a very fine thing. It is neces-
sary for the nation that you shall have men eager to volunteer when
some man like Cushing starts out to do a deed of daring, where death
stares every man in the face, but before the Cushings can get their
chance, there has got to be any amount of wearisome blockading, of
standing on and off before the ports, of training the men until they can
follow the Cushings. f
And so in our civic life, we shall never have any healthy government
in any community until the citizens of that community perform their
own duties of citizenship, not spasmodically or hysterically, but day
by day, regularly, as they come up.
Duties of citizenship. Now, of course, the first business of citizen-
ship is that the man shall care for those dependent upon him; that
the man shall be a good bread-winner; deal well by his wife and
children; that the woman should be able to take care of the house and
the children. I am of an archaic temperament, and I wish you all large
families, by the way. - t
Theodore Roosevelt 8I
And in addition to being straight at home, each man has got to be
straight with his neighbors, has got to be a decent man in his ordinary
work, and if he is not decent at home, if he is not a faithful loyal man
in whom you can trust in the ordinary business relations, in the factory,
in the shop and on the farm; if he is not that, he is not going to be a
good citizen. -
But besides all that he has got to show certain other qualities. He
has got to remember that in addition to his duties to those nearest to
him, under our republican system of government he is not to be ex-
cused if he fails to do his duty to himself and his neighbors and to that
representative of himself and his neighbors, the State, the government.
He does not need to have any unusual grace to make himself a good
citizen in this way. He has got in the first place to be honest and
decent. That first of all. No amount of smartness will avail to make
up for these, the root of righteous living, of righteous dealing with
his neighbors. Don't forget that. There is nothing I dislike more than
hearing some scoundrel spoken of with admiration, as when someone
says, “He is a smart fellow, but you can’t depend on him.” Distrust
the man about whom that is said, and the man who says it,
You have got to be honest first. And that is not enough. In the
Civil War you had to have patriotism first, but the patriotism was no
good if the man wanted to run away. The honest man who is timid
isn't of any use. With honesty you must have courage. Honesty and
courage ' And they are not enough. I do not care how brave and how
honest the man is, if he is a natural born fool you can do nothing with
him. You have to have honesty and courage and then add to them
the saving grace of common sense. And you need it. You need the
common sense in the management of the state just as much as you
need it in the management of your own individual affairs.
The sum and substance of it all is, my fellow citizens, that while we
have many, many problems before us, the greatest problem, the real
problem, is the problem of keeping our average citizens good, upright,
sensible and brave men and women.
[Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Maine, August 27, 1902.]
AT HAVERHILL, MASS., AUGUST 26, 1902.
My fellow citizens:
Naturally at the home of Secretary Moody I should like to say a
word or two about the navy. I think that whenever we touch on
the navy we are sure of a hearty response from any American audience;
we are just as sure of such a response in the mountains and great plains
of the West as upon the Atlantic or Pacific seaboards. The entire coun-
try is vitally interested in the navy, because an efficient navy of ade-
82 Messages and Speeches
quate size is not only the best guarantee of peace, but is also the surest
means for seeing that if war does come the result shall be honorable
to our good name and favorable to our national interests.
Any really great nation must be peculiarly sensitive to two things:
Stain on the national honor at home, and disgrace to the national arms
abroad. Our honor at home, our honor in domestic and internal affairs,
is at all times in our own keeping, and depends simply upon the pos-
session of an awakened public conscience. But the only way to make
safe our honor, as affected not by our own deeds but by the deeds of
others, is by readiness in advance. In three great crises in our history
during the nineteenth century—in the War of 1812, in the Civil War,
and again in the Spanish War—the navy rendered to the nation services
of literally incalculable worth. In the Civil War we had to meet an-
tagonists even more unprepared at sea than we were. On both the
other occasions we encountered foreign foes, and the fighting was done
entirely by ships built long in advance, and by officers and crews who
had been trained during years of sea service for the supreme day when
their qualities were put to the final test. The ships which won at
Manila and Santiago under the Administration of President McKinley
had been built years before under Presidents Arthur, Cleveland, and
Harrison. The officers in those ships had been trained from their
earliest youth to their profession, and the enlisted men, in addition to
their natural aptitude, their intelligence, and their courage, had been
drilled as marksmen with the great guns and as machinists in the engine
rooms, and perfected in all the details of their work during years of
cruising on the high seas and of incessant target practice. It was this
preparedness which was the true secret of the enormous difference in
efficiency between our navy and the Spanish navy. There was no lack
of courage and self-devotion among the Spaniards, but on our side,
in addition to the courage and devotion, for the lack of which no training
could atone, there was also that training—the training which comes
only as the result of years of thorough and painstaking practice.
Annapolis is, with the sole exception of its sister academy at West
Point, the most typically democratic and American school of learning
and preparation that there is in the entire country.* Men go there
from every State, from every walk of life, professing every creed—the
chance of entry being open to all who perfect themselves in the necessary
*Once in conversation I urged on President Roosevelt that the country ought to have a
dozen West Points and as many Annapolises scattered about between the oceans. The nation
should take care that a certain per cent. of the population—enough to command the balance
in case of war—be given a naval and a military education. The whole number of the
thousands graduated at these government schools need not be retained in the service of the
country. But give them the education and turn them back into the herd; then when war
befell we would not be given the spectacle of ignorance captained by incompetency which was
the too-often case during the Civil War as well as the Spanish war. You can do very well with
privates ignorant of war, if you have officers who know their business.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt \ 83
studies and who possess the necessary moral and physical qualities.
There each man enters on his merits, stands on his merits, and grad-
uates into a service where only his merit will enable him to be of value.
The enlisted men are of fine type, as they needs must be to do their
work well, whether in the gun turret or in the engine room; and out of
the fine material thus provided the finished man-of-war's man is evolved
by years of sea-service.
It is impossible after the outbreak of war to improvise either the
ships dr the men of a navy. A war vessel is a bit of mechanism as deli-
cate and complicated as it is formidable. You might just as well ex-
pect to turn an unskilled laborer offhand into a skilled machinist or into
the engineer of a flyer on one of our big railroad systems as to put
men aboard a battleship with the expectation that they will do any-
thing but discredit themselves until they have had months and years in
which thoroughly to learn their duties. Our shipbuilders and gun-
makers must keep ever on the alert so that no rivals pass them by ;
and the officers and enlisted men on board the ships must in their
turn, by the exercise of unflagging and intelligent zeal, keep themselves
fit to get the best use out of the weapons of war intrusted to their care.
The instrument is always important, but the man who iſses it is more
important still. We must constantly endeavor to perfect our navy in
all its duties in time of peace, and above all in manoeuvring in a
seaway and in marksmanship with the great guns. In battle the only
shots that count are those that hit, and marksmanship is a matter of
long practice and of intelligent reasoning. A navy's efficiency in a
war depends mainly upon its preparedness at the outset of that war.
We are not to be excused as a nation if there is not such preparedness
of our navy. This is especially so in view of what we have done during
the last four years. No nation has a right to undertake a big task un-
less it is prepared to do it in masterful and effective style. It would
be an intolerable humiliation for us to embark on such a course of
action as followed from our declaration of war with Spain, and not
make good our words by deeds—not be ready to prove our truth by
our endeavor whenever the need calls. The good work of building up
the navy must go on without ceasing. The modern warship can not
with advantage be allowed to rust in disuse. It must be used up in
active service even in time of peace. This means that there must be
a constant replacement of the ineffective by the effective. The work
of building up and keeping up our navy is therefore one which needs
Our constant and unflagging vigilance. Our navy is now effi-
cient; but we must be content with no ordinary degree of efficiency.
Every effort must be made to bring it ever nearer to perfection. In
making such effort the prime factor is to have at the head of the navy
such an official as your fellow-townsman, Mr. Moody; and the next
84 Messages and Speeches
is to bring home to our people as a whole the need of thorough and
ample preparation in advance; this preparation to take the form not only
of continually building ships, but of keeping these ships in commission
under conditions which will develop the highest degree of efficiency in
the officers and enlisted men aboard them.
AT PORTLAND, ME., AUGUST 26, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of Maine:
I wish to say a word to you in recognition of great service rendered
not only to all our country but to the entire principle of democratic
government throughout the world, by one of your citizens. The best
institutions are of no good if they won’t work. I do not care how
beautiful a theory is, if it won’t fit in with the facts it is of no good.
If you built the handsomest engine that ever had been built and it did
not go, its usefulness would be limited. Well, that was just about the
condition that Congress had reached at the time when Thomas B.
Reed was elected Speaker. We had all the machinery, but it didn't
work,+that was the trouble-and you had to find some one powerful
man who would disregard the storm of obloquy sure to be raised by
what he did in order to get it to work. Such a man was found when
Reed was made Speaker. We may differ among ourselves as to policy.
We may differ among ourselves as to what course government should
follow ; but if we possess any intelligence we must be united in the opin-
ion that it shall be able to follow some course. If government can not go
on it is not government. If the legislative body can not enact laws,
then there is no use of misnaming it a legislative body; and if the
majority is to rule some method by which it can rule must be pro-
vided. Government by the majority in Congress had practically come
to a stop when Mr. Reed became Speaker. Mr. Reed, at the cost
of infinite labor, at the cost of the fiercest attacks, succeeded in
restoring that old principle; and now through Congress we can do
well or ill, accordingly as the people demand, but at any rate, we can
do something—and we owe it more than to any other one man to
your fellow-citizen, Mr. Reed. It is a great thing for any man to be
able to feel that in some one crisis he left his mark deeply scored for
good in the history of his country, and Tom Reed has the right to
that feeling. w
Now a word or two more. I was greeted here not only by your
mayor, not only by other men standing high, but by you, General
Chamberlain, to whom it was given, at the supreme moment of the
war, to win the supreme reward of a soldier. All honor to the man,
and may we keep ourselves from envying because to him came the
supreme good fortune of winning the medal of honor for mighty
Theodore Roosevelt 85
tº
deeds done in the mightiest battle that the nineteenth century saw–
Gettysburg. tº
I see everywhere I stop—in Maine, as in Massachusetts, New
Hampshire and Connecticut—men who in the times that tried the
nation's worth, rose level to the nation's need and offered gladly all
life itself upon the nation’s altar—the men who fought in the great
Civil War from '61 to ’65. They taught us much by their life in war
time, and they have taught us as much by their life ever since. They
were soldiers when we needed soldiers, and they were of the very
best kind, and when the need was for citizenship in civil life they
showed us they could give the highest kind of citizenship. Not
merely did they leave us a reunited country; not merely did they
leave us the memory of the great deeds they did, to be forever after
an inspiration to us, but they left us the memory of the way the deed
was done. All the time, gentlemen, we have people—often entirely
well meaning—who will rise up and tell us that by some patent
device we can all be saved in citizenship or in social life. Now, Gen-
eral, and you, you veterans who wear the button, when you
came down to the root of things in war time you had to depend upon
the qualities of manhood which had made good soldiers from the
days when the children of Israel marched out of Egypt, down. Rifles
now instead of bows then, but the man behind the rifle is more
important than the rifle itself.
So with our laws. We need good laws. We need a wise adminis-
tration of the law, an upright and fearless administration of the law.
But the best constitution that was ever devised by the wit of man
and the best laws that were ever put upon the statute books, will not
avail to save us if the average citizen has not in him the root of right
living. The Army of the Potomac could never have seen Appomattox
if it had not been for the spirit that drove you from the office and
the factory and the farm to take up the burden of war, and when
you went to war to stay there until you saw it through. They did not
conquer in war by hysterics. Doubtless you will remember that after
Bull Run there were some excellent people that thought the war was
over, and over the wrong way. It was not over. Three years and
nine months had to elapse and then it got over the other way.
About the worst quality you can have in a soldier is hysterics or
anything approaching it, and it is pretty nearly the worst quality in
civil life. We need in civil life the plain, practical, every-day virtues
which all of us admit in theory to be necessary and which when we
all practice will come mighty near making a state perfect. Brilliancy
is a good thing. So is genius. Every now and then the chance comes
to render some such great service as I told you about Tom Reed's ren-
dering, some such service, General, as you rendered at Gettysburg, but
86 Messages and Speeches
normally what we want is not genius but the faculty of seeing that
we know how to apply the copy-book moralities that we write down,
and as long as we think of them only as fit for the copy-book there is
not much use in us. -
We need in our public life as in our private life the virtues that
everyone could practice if he would. We need the will to practice
them. There are two kinds of greatness that can be achieved. There
is the greatness that comes to the man who can do what no one
else can do. That is a mighty rare kind, and of course it can only be
achieved by the man of special and unusual qualities. Then there
is the other kind that comes to the man who does the things that
everyone could do but that everyone does not do; who goes ahead and
does them himself. To do that you first of all have got to school
yourselves to do the ordinary, commonplace things.
Now, General, I was a very little time in my war; you were a
long time in yours. I did not see much fighting, but I saw a
lot of human nature. I recollect one young fellow who came down
to join a cavalry regiment. He was filled with enthusiasm, thinking
he was going to look all the time like my friend in that smart khaki
uniform who welcomes me over there, who welcomes me and whom
I want to thank for coming to meet me. After three days
the young man came down to me and said, “Colonel, I
wish to make a complaint, sir; I came down here to fight for my
country, and the captain has put me to work digging kitchen
sinks.” I asked the captain about it and he said, “Yes.” The captain
was a large man from New Mexico, and he explained to that excel-
lent youth that he would go right on digging kitchen sinks, and when
the fighting came he should have all the fighting there was, but at
present his duty was to dig kitchen sinks. In other words, he had
to do the small duties that were done, and thereby best fit himself to
do the big duties that might loom in the future.
So it is with us in the work of everyday citizenship. I believe
that this nation will rise level to any great emergency that may meet
it, but it will only be because now in our ordinary work-a-day life,
the times of peace, in the times when no great crisis is upon us, we
school ourselves by constant practice in the commonplace, everyday,
indispensable duties, so that when the time arrives we shall show that
we have learned aright the primary lessons of good citizenship. I
thank you.
[Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Maine, August 27, 1902.]
AT AUGUSTA, ME, AUGUST 26, 1902.
Governor Burleigh, my fellow citizens, men and women of Maine:
It would be difficult for any man speaking to this audience and
Theodore Roosevelt 87
from in front of the house in which Blaine once lived to fail to feel
whatever of Americanism there was in him stirred to the depths.
For my good fortune I knew Mr. Blaine quite well when he was
Secretary of State, and I have thought again and again during the
past few years how pleased he would have been to see so many of
the principles for which he had stood approach fruition. #
One secret, perhaps I might say the chief secret, of Mr. Blaine's
extraordinary hold upon the affections of his countrymen was his
entirely genuine and unaffected Americanism. When I speak of
Americanism I do not for a minute mean to say, gentlemen, that all
the things we do are all right. I think there are plenty of evils to
correct and that often a man shows himself all the more a good
American because he wants to cut out any evil of the body politic
which may interfere with our approaching the ideal of true Ameri-
canism. But not only admitting but also emphasizing this, it yet remains
true that throughout our history no one has been able to render really
great service to the country if he did not believe in the country.
Mr. Blaine possessed to an eminent degree the confident hope in the
nation’s future which made him feel that she must ever strive to fit
herself for a great destiny. He felt that this Republic must in every
way take the lead in the Western Hemisphere. He felt that this
Republic must play a great part among the nations of the earth. The
last four years have shown how true that feeling of his was. --
He had always hoped that we would have a peculiarly intimate
relation with the countries south of us. He could hardly have antici-
pated—no one could have—the Spanish War and its effects. In
consequence of that war America's interest in the tropic islands to
our south and the seas and coasts surrounding those islands is far
greater than ever before. Our interest in the Monroe Doctrine is
more complicated than ever before. The Monroe Doctrine is simply
a statement of our very firm belief that on this continent the nations
now existing here must be left to work out their own destinies among
themselves and that the continent is not longer to be regarded as
colonizing ground for any European power. The one power on the
continent that can make that doctrine effective is, of course, our-
selves; for in the world as it is, gentlemen, the nation which advances
a given doctrine likely to interfere in any way with other nations
must possess power to back it up if she wishes the doctrine to be
respected.* We stand firmly on the Monroe Doctrine.
The events of the last nine months' have rendered it evident that
we shall soon embark on the work of excavating the Isthmian Canal
*“What will you say to Europe in your forthcoming message?” I once asked President
Roosevelt.
“I shall say,” he replied with an iron twinkle in his eye—“I shall say that we are one
of the most peaceable nations with one of the best navies in the world.”—A. H. L.
88 Messages and Specches
to connect the two great oceans—a work destined to be, probably, the
greatest engineering feat of the twentieth century, certainly a greater
engineering feat than has ever yet been successfully attempted among
the nations of mankind; and as it is the biggest thing of its kind to
be done I am glad it is the United States that is to do it. Whenever
a nation undertakes to carry out a great destiny it must make up its
mind that there will be work and worry, labor and risk, in doing the
work. It is with a nation as it is with an individual; if you are con-
tent to attempt but little in private life you may be able to escape
a good deal of worry, but you won't achieve very much. The man
who attempts much must make up his mind that there will now and
then come days and nights of worry; there will come even moments
of seeming defeat. But out of the difficulties we wrest success. So
it is with the nation. It is not the easy take that is necessarily the best.
Passing through your streets I see, as is natural to a city having a
great Soldiers’ Home in its neighborhood, many men who fought in
the great war for the Union, and no state relatively to its resources did
more splendidly gallant and efficient work than Maine in that mighty
struggle, and the reason the Union cause triumphed then was because
our people had in their hearts deep down the conviction that there
were certain things which far outweighed ease, pleasure, material
success or even life itself.
In '61 the easy thing to do was to let the seceding states go. Not
only the timid, selfish men, but the very good men who did not think
deeply enough said that, in addition to the very good men who were
faint of heart. That was the easy thing to do, and if our fathers had
done it not a man here would be walking with his head as high as
he now holds it, for this country would have embarked upon a career
both mean and contemptible, a career of being split up into half a
dozen squabbling little rival nationalities. We won out because our
fathers had iron in their blood, because they dared greatly and did
greatly, because when they were convinced where their duty lay they
resolutely did it, no matter what the cost.
During the last four years we have had certain lesser ditties, but
still important ones, presented to the nation. The war with Spain
itself was a slight struggle, an easy one, calling for the exercise of
but a fraction of the nation's giant strength. But following that
war there came some real and serious difficulties which commanded
the exercise on the part of this nation of qualities not altogether
remote from those shown in the great days, the days of the Civil
War. The demand upon us during this crisis for the qualities shown
from '61 to '65 was nothing like as great as it was in that time, but
it did not differ greatly in kind; the degree was much less, but the
kind of quality demanded was much the same.
Theodore Roosevelt 89
We found ourselves, for instance, in the Philippines in possession
of a great growth of tropic islands, whose people had moved upward
very unequally a certain distance from savagery and subjection, but
whose people were wholly unable to stand alone. If we went out of
the islands it was certain that they would fall into black chaos and
savagery. It was certain that some other stronger power would step
in to do the work which in such case we would have failed to perform.
Now, the easy thing to do was to get out of the islands, and, as in
'61, all the men of little faith wanted to get out. Every man who
wanted to avoid trouble, every man who put the avoidance of trouble
above everything else, and even the good men whose thoughts did not
strike down to the root of things, wanted to get out. But exactly as
in '61 the heart of the people rang true.
The average common sense of the American people determined our .
course far more than the leadership of any one man. The average
sense of the American people was that we had gotten into the
islands, we had put our hands to that job and we had to see it
through. # * s
It was not very easy. There was a great deal to puzzle and bewilder
us. The warfare was carried on under very difficult conditions of
climate, of country and against a singularly cruel and treacherous
foe, a very elusive foe. It was very hard to find a chance to strike
blows that would end the contest and often the same bit of work had
seemingly to be done over and over and over again, and every time it
had to be done over again there were people out here on this side of the
world in our own country who said that it could not be done. But
it was done, and finally on the Fourth of July last, we were able by
proclamation to announce the definite pacification of the Philippine
islands. I now speak of the Filipinos proper, not of the Mohammedan
Moros. We have been doing our best to avoid trouble with the
Moros. If they insist upon having it, why, they will have it. When
they do have it they will have it for keeps.
But with the Filipinos themselves peace has now definitely come,
and a greater measure not only of good government but of self-
government than they have ever known before during their existence,
before Spanish rule and after it. Each Filipino now has a better
chance for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than he ever
dreamed of having before—than he could have ever dreamed of
acquiring under the rule of any little native oligarchy.
Now, when a nation embarks on such a course of action as that
upon which this nation has embarked, it must count the cost. You
know in the Bible it says when a king goes to war with another king
you want to count the cost to both ; you want to count up the power
of both himself and his rival. Now, whenever we undertake any bit
90 Messages and Speeches
of action, private or public, we show ourselves most foolish if we do
not think it out in advance, and if we do not try so to act as to make
good what we promise or threaten to do. Any man here who goes
into any bit of business on any other plan will not only fail but will
be regarded by his neighbors as a fool, and the nation must show the
good sense that we exact of an individual.
We must, in the first place, in dealing with these new islands, deal
with them so as to give them the highest measure of government effi-
ciency. Now, it is always pleasant to point to an example which we can
follow rather than avoid, and we have such an example ready in
what we have done during the past four years with the island of
Porto Rico. Porto Rico became ours and we undertook to govern
it and we have governed it so well that I haven’t the least doubt that
about half my audience have to think pretty carefully before they can
remember that we are governing it at all.
There is no opportunity whatever for headlines, Governor Burleigh,
in any newspaper about Porto Rico, because no editor would think of
wasting space upon such an announcement as “Everything still pros-
perous in Porto Rico.”
So well has everything been managed there that our very success
has resulted in our not thinking of the matter at all, and it has been
managed because we have sent the best type of men that we could find
to administer the island, and have striven to administer it not only
honestly, not only efficiently, but with due reference to the prejudices
of the people themselves.
Now, the last is a very important point, gentlemen, in dealing with
people whose antecedents are widely different from ours. Every one
of us knows in private life some friend, and I think a great many of
us know some kinsman or kinswoman who may be an excellent person,
but whom we perfectly loathe and dread, because he or she wants us
to live our lives in their way, and not in ours. Their way may be
all right, but it is not ours. We want to manage ourselves in our
own way and not in the other person’s.
Now, in all these new dependencies we want to interfere just as
little as may be with the manners of life, the customs, the methods of
living of the inhabitants. We will have to interfere more or less, but
let the interference be minimized, and where it can possibly take the
shape of education and persuasion let it take that shape. Now, for
One thing especially we have got to give the very best service in the
island; we have got to jealously guard their interests, because that
will guard our own. -
There is something additional we will have to do. The minute we
accept great responsibilities we must show our ability to meet them.
We must, for instance, keep our navy to a high point of perfection.
Theodore Roosevelt 9I
Maine always stood by the navy, and I think it always will. But we
must not only be devoted to the navy, we must be intelligently devoted
to it. Every one of you who has seen or studied about a modern
warship knows that it is a singularly delicate and complicated as well
as a singularly formidable bit of mechanism. You can not build it
in a short time, and still less can you train anyone to handle it in
a short time.
At Manila the ships that went in on that first of May, four years ago,
went in while McKinley was President, but they had been built during
the presidencies of Arthur and Cleveland and Harrison. The men
fought and won the victory on that May day, but they had prepared
themselves to win the victory during years of careful training, of
exercise of the great ships at sea, of exercise of the men at the guns
day in and day out in target practice.
Our men showed valor and self-devotion, but there was valor and
self-devotion also on the side of our foes. Many Spaniards showed
great bravery, but they did not hit what they shot at, and they let
their engines get out of gear; and in this world when you shoot you
want to hit; you want to keep your engines all ready.
That applies in civil life just as much as in military life. There
had been on our part careful preparedness in advance. In consequence
we not only won, but we won practically without getting scratched
Ourselves. It is a good thing to look back at, if it does not make
us commit the grievous error of thinking that we can always count,
in the event of a war, on our antagonists not shooting straight,
That won't do. We have got to proceed upon the assumption that
if-which heaven forbid—there ever should be a war we may have to
encounter a most powerful and skillful antagonist; and to overcome
it we must have not merely a fair degree of efficiency on our part,
but the very highest degree of efficiency; the best ships and guns and
the best men behind the guns.
And now, ladies and gentlemen, in closing, just one word. We
have many external problems to solve, but our internal problems are,
of course, more serious. Life has grown much more complex, much
more difficult during the past century that has closed, and we who
stand on the threshold of a new century see many problems looming
large before us; problems which will tax the energies, tax the courage
and resources of us and our children and our children’s children.
We need to devise new governmental methods for meeting these
problems, but we need the same fundamental qualities of manhood
and womanhood in our average citizen that we always have needed.
Exactly as the soldier of the Civil War, though he fought with
different weapons from those carried by the soldiers in Washington's
army, needed yet the same courage and tenacity, the same soldierly
92 Mcssages and Speeches
devotion to duty and resolute refusal to accept defeat which made the
men who wore the blue and buff victorious, exactly as nowadays when
the high power rifle has revolutionized not merely the armament but
the tactics of armies and yet has left unchanged the need in the soldier
of the old fundamental soldierly qualities, exactly as all that is true,
so it is true in the field of citizenship, of civic work in civic life.
In the old life of the countryside, the life which for Maine's good
fortune Maine retains to so large an extent, the problems are simpler.
It is a little clearer to see our duty to our neighbor and our deep under-
lying brotherhood to him than is the case in a great city.
Yet in a great city in an industrial center, though we need new laws,
though there must be greater interference on the part of the nation and
the state in the affairs that were formerly left purely to individual
initiative, yet deep down under all laws, under all governmental
schemes, there must be the old qualities that make up good citizenship.
You need several of them, but three above everything else. In the
first place, honesty, honesty in the widest meaning of the term ; honesty
that means square dealing as between man and man, readiness on the
part of the individual to do his duty to his fellows and to state. And
honesty is not enough. No matter how honest a man is, if he is afraid
he is no good. The timid good man is of very little help in this world.
A good man, who, when he goes out and meets the forces of evil, is
shocked and wants to go home does not amount to much.
This is a rough world. The men who are going to do good work in
it are those who are able to do rough work, able to do it with clean
hands, but able to do it. You have got to have courage as well as
honesty. And courage and honesty combined are not enough. No
matter how brave a man is, no matter how decent he is, if he is a fool
you can do nothing with him.
You have got to have courage, you must have honesty, and in addition
to that you must have not merely as a preliminary to success in private
life, but as a prerequisite to success in making the nation what it should
and shall be made, the saving virtue of common sense.
[Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine, August 27, 1902.]
AT DOVER, N. H., AUGUST 26, 1902.
I speak here in One of the oldest cities of the old thirteen colonies,
from which sprang the United States; and both in your past and your
present you epitomize much of the national life. We are all of us apt
to get to talking and thinking of the nation and the state as abstractions.
If we will think of ourselves and our neighbors, how we get along and
how they get along, we will have a pretty fair idea of what can be
done, simply on a larger scale in the nation and in the state.
Theodore Roosevelt 93
We are here now, you are here now. I am addressing you all because
of the great industrial expansion, symbolized by your factories, by the
railroad, the telegraph and all of their attendants. We should not be
here if it were not for them, but their exercise has caused great questions
to rise in our national life. It is more complicated business, Mr. Mayor,
to run this city than it was to run Dover when Dover consisted of a
dozen log cabins. With the growth in wealth and in prosperity has
come an accentuation of differences between man and man which do
harm in two ways—which do harm when they make one man arrogant,
which do equal harm when they make-another man envious.
Our salvation now, as in the old days, lies in the practical applying
of principles that, in theory, we admit to be the only principles according
to which it is possible to administer this Republic—the principle of
treating with man on his worth as a man; the principle of recognizing
facts as they are, of recognizing our material needs and of recognizing
further that nothing is to be hoped for from people who are content
only to satisfy their material needs.
If we have not got in us the lift toward righteousness, the lift toward
something better than material needs, prosperity will be a curse instead
of a blessing. We need it, we need it as a foundation; we can’t build
a house without a foundation, but the foundation isn't the house; you
have got to have the superstructure; you have got to have in addition
to business energy, the thrift, industry, which has produced centers
of industrial activity like this. You have to have, you must have, in
addition the spirit that made the men of this neighborhood foremost
in the Revolution; that made this state do her duty so well and so nobly
in the Civil War, business energy, business thrift. We need other
things, too; we have got to have a proper ideal of our lives; each man
must do his duty by his neighbor, both in private life and to that
representative of himself and of his neighbor—the state. And to that
you need three qualities—you need more, but you need three, honesty
above all, in the first place—you can do nothing without it—and that
isn’t enough. I don’t care how honest a man is, if he is timid he is
of very little use in the world; you have got to have courage as well
as honesty. ' And that isn't enough. I don’t care how brave and honest
a man is, if he is a natural born fool you can do little with him.
In addition to honesty, in addition to courage, you need common
sense; and sometimes one is tempted to think it much too uncommon a
quality. You need those qualities in private life and you need them
in public life. There are great problems ahead of us as a nation, but
the really greatest problem is the problem of making better men and
better women of all of us. I thank you for listening.
[Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Maine, August 27, 1902.]
94 Messages and Speeches
AT WATERVILLE, ME., AUGUST 27, 1902.
I passed by your State House in Augusta this morning. Your legis-
lature only meets every other year, and only stays in Session about two
months. Quite right. We do not need too many laws, too much legis-
lation. What we need is stability of laws, fearlessness in applying
legislation to new evils, when the evils spring up, but above all common
sense and self-restraint in applying these remedies, and the fixed and
unchangeable belief that fundamentally each man's salvation rests in
his own hands. All of us stumble at times. There is not a man here
who does not at times need a helping hand stretched out toward him.
Shame upon the man who, when the opportunity to help is given, fails
to stretch out the hand. Help the man who stumbles. Help a brother
who slips. Set him up on his feet. Try to start him along the right
road. But if he lies down, make up your mind you cannot carry him.
If he won’t try to walk himself he is not worth carrying. That is so
among your neighbors; that is so in your families. Every father of a
large family—and being an old-fashioned man, I believe in large
families—knows that if he is to do well by his children they must try
to do well by themselves.
Now, haven’t you in your own experience known men—and I am
sorry to say even more often, women—who think that they are doing
a favor to their children when they shield them from every effort?
When they let the girls sit at ease and read while the mother does all
the housework? Don’t you know cases like that? I do, yes; when
a boy will be brought up to be very ornamental and not particularly
useful? Don’t you know that, too? Exactly. Now, those are not good
fathers and mothers. They are foolish fathers and mothers. They are
not being kind; they are simply being silly. That’s all. It is not any
good that you do your son or your daughter by teaching him or her
how to shirk difficulties; you do him or her good, only if you teach him
or her to face difficulties and by facing them to overcome them. Isn't
that true? Don't you know it to be so in your own families? Well,
it is just so on a larger scale in the state. The only way by which,
in the long run, any man can be helped is by teaching him to help
himself. Of course, there may come sudden cataclysms where you have
got to extend help with a free hand, thinking only of the immediate
need, not of the ultimate results. Of course, new conditions will arise
here and there, especially in the complex industrial life of great cities,
where you must shape the legislation of the country on a new basis to
meet the new conditions. But fundamentally, it is true that the only
permanent betterment in the condition of any nation is to raise the
standards of individual citizenship throughout that nation.
My fellow-citizens, I wish to thank you, to thank all the people of
Theodore Roosevelt * 95
Maine for the way in which I have been greeted. I feel in a certain
sense a right to the greeting, for at least I am trying to put into prac-
tice the principles in which you believe. I feel that the art of successful
government in our country is the art of applying practically the every-
day principles of decency, morality and common sense, which must be
applied by the average citizen if he is to be a good husband, a good
father, a good neighbor and a good citizen.
There is not any wonderful brilliancy or genius in it. What we need
is the application of the everyday principles that a man needs if he is
to make his business a success, if he is to do his duty in his own family
and to his neighbor. Now, up here in Maine you are so fortunate as
to have a State which, on the whole, represents as well as any other in
the Union (better than all, save a very few others, in our Union) the
conditions of life, the ways of looking at life, out of which such a repub-
lican, such a democratic government as ours springs. You believe
practically that each man must work out his fate for himself. And yet
that the state must be called on to try to give each man a fair show
in life.
[Lewiston Evening Journal, Lewiston, Maine, August 27, 1902.]
AT ELLSWORTH, ME., AUGUST 27, 1902.
Mr. Senator, and you, my friends and fellow citizens:
I have thoroughly enjoyed the two days that I have spent in your
beautiful state. I have enjoyed seeing the state and I have enjoyed the
most meeting what really counts in any state—the men and women.
I think that the more one studies the problems of life and of civiliza-
tion the more one realizes the infinitely greater importance of the man
than of his physical surroundings. Of course, one has to have certain
physical advantages in order to exercise to the best advantage one's
own qualities; but it is the last that counts. There are other countries
than ours just as fitted by Nature to be agricultural, commercial, indus-
trial centers, and they fail to reach the height that ours has reached,
because they have not the same men to take advantage of the condition.
Now, we ought not to say that in any spirit of boastfulness. We
ought to say it as a reminder to us that we are not to be excused if
in the future we do any less well than has been done in the past. There
are plenty of problems ahead of us. We stand on the threshold of a
new century. No one can say what trial will be before this nation
during that century, but that there must be trials we may be sure. No
nation can face greatness without having to face trial, exactly as no
man can deliberately enter upon a career which leads upward and
Onward without making up his mind that there will be roughness for
him to surmount.
96 Messages and Speeches
Whether we will or no we must hereafter play in the world the part
of a great power. We can play that part ill or we can play it well,
but play it somehow we must. It is not open to us to dodge difficulties.
We can run away if we want to, but I do not think, gentlemen, that
you are built that way.
I earnestly hope, and I can say in all sincerity that I believe, that
there is but small chance of our having to face trouble abroad, but we
shall avoid it not by blindly refusing to admit that there ever might be
trouble, but by safeguarding against it. And the best possible safeguard
for this nation is an adequate and highly efficient navy. I am glad to
speak in the home of the chairman of the Senate committee on naval
affairs. I do not suppose it is necessary to tell any audience which
has had a thoroughly good common school education that you do not
win victories merely on the day on which the battle is fought. You have
got to prepare for them in advance. When Manila and Santiago were
fought, great glory came to the men aboard the ships who did the fight-
ing, but an equal meed of praise belongs to those men who prepared
in advance.* Dewey's ships won their great victory under the presi-
dency of McKinley, but they were built under Presidents Arthur, Cleve-
land and Harrison. The men and the officers aboard them were able
to do what they did because, through months and years of patient
practice, often under officers to whom it was denied to be in actual
battle, they were trained to the point of efficiency we saw. The men of
Congress, such as my host of this evening and his fellows, who saw
the need, who voted for the ships, who voted for the guns, who voted
to allow money for powder which could be used to best advantage by
being used up in practice—those were the men who rendered that
victory possible. Now, it is the work that is being done in the navy
which will render that navy fit to respond to any call that may be made
upon it, if, which heaven forbid, such call should ever be made. So
much for what is our duty in reference to matters without. Even more
important is it to deal well and wisely with affairs within our own
borders.
Take the evils that come up to our mind when we speak of the trusts.
The word trust is used very loosely in the ordinary significance, which
means simply a large corporation created in one state, probably doing
business in other states and usually with an element of monopoly per-
taining to it. Now, some of the evils are allowed imaginary, others are
very real. Certainly the change produced along a number of lines by
*There were influences in Washington that wanted to weaken Dewey. They would have
taken the Olympia from him if it hadn’t been for the fight that Mr. Roosevelt, then Assistant
Secretary of the Navy, made against it. When at last he triumphed and it was decided not
to weaken Dewey, Mr. Roosevelt cabled the Admiral the news in these words: “Keep the
Olympia and keep her full of coal.” It was Mr. Roosevelt’s foresight, as much as any other
element, that won the battle of Manila.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 97
the increase of the power of these corporations by their increase in
magnitude, is not a change that most of us welcome. There is every
reason why we should resolutely declare our purpose, and put into
effect our purpose, to take cognizance of the evils and find out what of
the alleged evils are real and imaginary and to find out what legis-
lative or administrative expedients can be employed to minimize or to
do away with those evils. On the one hand I believe that the men of
great means should understand that when we demand some method of
asserting the power of the nation over all corporations, we are acting
not against their interest, but in their interest.
[Portland Daily Press, Portland, Maine, August 28, 1902.]
ON THE BALCONY OF THE HOTEL, AT BANGOR, ME.,
AUGUST 27, 1902.
My fellow citizens, my fellow countrymen:
It is indeed a great pleasure to be greeted by you today, as it has
been to be greeted by people all over Maine. I can see by your faces
that the old American spirit still burns as freely as ever. Driving
through the thronged streets I see men who wear the button which
tells that they fought in the great struggle. As soon as I saw the
mounted policemen I knew that some of them were old cavalrymen.
You men who fought in that war did the greatest deed which men
have ever done. You preserved for us a united country and showed
the world that it was ever to be united.
While modes of fighting were different in the time of Lincoln from
that of Washington, and still more different today, the spirit that wins
is just the same. * g
The soldier of today who is worth his salt must have the same spirit
which won at Appomattox. The only way to obtain good government
is for each man to do his own share.
Now, my friends, let me interrupt just for a moment, I have a friend
here who is lost in the crowd somewhere. He is Bill Sewall, of Island
Falls, Aroostook county, and if anyone sees him please say to him that
I want him to come to lunch with me here and now.
[Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine, August 28, 1902.]
AT THE FAIR GROUND AT BANGOR, ME., AUGUST 27, 1902.
My fellow citizens:
I am glad to greet the farmers of Maine. During the century that
has closed, the growth of industrialism has necessarily meant that cities
and towns have increased in population more rapidly than the country
districts. And yet it remains true now, as it always has been, that in
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the last resort the country districts are those in which we are surest
to find the old American spirit, the old American habits of thought and
ways of living. Conditions have changed in the country far less than
they have changed in the cities, and in consequence there has been
little breaking away from the methods of life which have produced the
great majority of the leaders of the Republic in the past. Almost all
of our great Presidents have been brought up in the country, and most
of them worked hard on the farms in their youth and got their early
mental training in the healthy democracy of farm life. r
The forces which made these farm-bred boys leaders of men when
they had come to their full manhood are still at work in our country
districts. Self-help and individual initiative remain to a peculiar degree
typical of life in the country, life on a farm, in the lumbering camp,
on a ranch. Neither the farmers nor their hired hands can work
through combinations as readily as the capitalists or wage-workers of
cities can work. {
It must not be understood from this that there has been no change
in farming and farm life. The contrary is the case. There has been
much change, much progress. The granges and similar organizations,
the farmers’ institutes, and all the agencies which promote intelligent
co-operation and give opportunity for social and intellectual intercourse
among the farmers, have played a large part in raising the level of life
and work in the country districts. In the domain of government, the
Department of Agriculture since its foundation has accomplished results
as striking as those obtained under any other branch of the national
administration. By scientific study of all matters connected with the
advancement of farm life; by experimental stations; by the use of
trained agents, sent to the uttermost countries of the globe; by the
practical application of anything which in theory has been demon-
strated to be efficient; in these ways, and in many others, great good
has been accomplished in raising the standard of productiveness in
farm work throughout the country. We live in an era when the best
results can only be achieved, if to individual self-help we add the mutual
self-help which comes by combination, both of citizens in their indi-
vidual capacity and of citizens working through the state as an instru-
ment. The farmers of the country have grown more and more to
realize this, and farming has tended more and more to take its place
as an applied science—though, as with everything else, the theory must
be tested in practical work, and can avail only when applied in prac-
tical fashion.
But after all this has been said, it remains true that the countryman
—the man on the farm, more than any other of our citizens today, is
called upon continually to exercise the qualities which we like to think
of as typical of the United States throughout its history—the qualities
Theodore Roosevelt 99
of rugged independence, masterful resolution, and individual energy
and resourcefulness. He works hard (for which no man is to be
pitied), and often he lives hard (which may not be pleasant); but his
life is passed in healthy surroundings, surroundings which tend to
develop a fine type of citizenship. In the country, moreover, the con-
ditions are fortunately such as to allow a closer touch between man
and man, than, too often, we find to be the case in the city. Men feel
more vividly the underlying sense of brotherhood, of community of
interest. I do not mean by this that there are not plenty of problems
connected with life in our rural districts. There are many problems;
and great wisdom and earnest disinterestedness in effort are needed
for their solution.
After all, we are one people, with the same fundamental character-
istics, whether we live in the city or in the country, in the East or in
the West, in the North or in the South. Each of us, unless he is con-
tented to be a cumberer of the earth's surface, must strive to do his
life-work with his whole heart. Each must remember that, while he
will be noxious to every one unless he first do his duty by himself, he
must also strive ever to do his duty by his fellow. The problem of how
to do these duties is acute everywhere. It is most acute in great cities,
but it exists in the country, too. A man, to be a good citizen, must
first be a good bread-winner, a good husband, a good father—I hope
the father of many healthy children; just as a woman’s first duty is to
be a good housewife and mother. The business duties, the home duties,
the duties to one's family, come first. The couple who bring up plenty
of healthy children, who leave behind them many sons and daughters
fitted in their turn to be good citizens, emphatically deserve well of
the State.
But duty to one's self and one's family does not exclude duty to one's
neighbor. Each of us, rich or poor, can help his neighbor at times; and
to do this he must be brought into touch with him, into sympathy with
him. Any effort is to be welcomed that brings people closer together,
so as to secure a better understanding among those whose walks of life
are in ordinary circumstances far apart. Probably the good done is
almost equally great on both sides, no matter which one may seem
to be helping the other. But it must be kept in mind that no good will
be accomplished at all by any philanthropic or charitable work, unless
it is done along certain definite lines. In the first place, if the work
is done in a spirit of condescension, it would be better never to attempt
it. It is almost as irritating to be patronized as to be wronged. The
only safe way of working is to try to find out some scheme by which
it is possible to make a common effort for the common good. Each
of us needs at times to have a helping hand stretched out to him or her.
Every one of us slips on some occasion, and shame to the fellow who
TOO Messages and Speeches
then refuses to stretch out the hand that should always be ready to help
the man who stumbles. It is our duty to lift him up; but it is also our
duty to remember that there is no earthly use in trying to carry him.
If a man will submit to being carried, that is sufficient to show that he
is not worth carrying. In the long run, the only kind of help that really
avails is the help which teaches a man to help himself. Such help
every man who has been blessed in life should try to give to those who
are less fortunate, and such help can be accepted with entire self-
respect.
The aim to set before ourselves in trying to aid one another is to
give that aid under conditions which will harm no man's self-respect,
and which will teach the less fortunate how to help themselves as their
stronger brothers do. To give such aid it is necessary not only to
possess the right kind of heart, but also the right kind of head. Hard-
ness of heart is a dreadful quality, but it is doubtful whether, in the
long run, it works more damage than softness of head. At any rate,
both are undesirable. The prerequisite to doing good work in the field
of philanthropy—in the field of social effort, undertaken with one's
fellows for the common good—is that it shall be undertaken in a spirit
of broad sanity no less than of broad and loving charity.
The other day I picked up a little book called “The Simple Life,”
written by an Alsatian, Charles Wagner, and he preaches such whole-
some, sound doctrine that I wish it could be used as a tract through-
out our country. To him the whole problem of our complex, somewhat
feverish modern life can be solved only by getting men and women
to lead better lives. He sees that the permanence of liberty and
democracy depends upon a majority of the people being steadfast in
morality and in that good plain sense which, as a national attribute,
comes only as the result of the slow and painful labor of centuries,
and which can be squandered in a generation by the thoughtless and
vicious. He preaches the doctrine of the superiority of the moral to
the material. He does not undervalue the material, but he insists, as
we of this nation should always insist, upon the infinite superiority
of the moral, and the sordid destruction which comes upon either the
nation or the individual if it or he becomes absorbed only in the desire
to get wealth. The true line of cleavage lies between good citizen
and bad citizen; and the line of cleavage may, and often does, run at
right angles to that which divides the rich and the poor. The sinews
of virtue lie in man’s capacity to care for what is outside himself. The
man who gives himself up to the service of his appetites, the man
who the more goods he has the more wants, has surrendered himself
to destruction. It makes little difference whether he achieves his pur-
pose or not. If his point of view is all wrong, he is a bad citizen
whether he be rich or poor. It is a small matter to the community
Theodore Roosevelt IOI
whether in arrogance and insolence he has misused great wealth, or
whether, though poor, he is possessed by the mean and fierce desire
to seize a morsel, the biggest possible, of that prey which the fortunate
of earth consume. The man who lives simply, and justly, and honor-
ably, whether rich or poor, is a good citizen. Those who dream only
of idleness and pleasure, who hate others, and fail to recognize the
duty of each man to his brother, these, be they rich or poor, are the
enemies of the State. The misuse of property is one manifestation of
the same evil spirit which, under changed circumstances, denies the
right of property because this right is in the hands of others. In a
purely material civilization the bitterness of attack on another's pos-
session is only additional proof of the extraordinary importance at-
tached to possession itself. When outward well-being, instead of being
regarded as a valuable foundation on which happiness may with
wisdom be built, is mistaken for happiness itself, so that material pros-
perity becomes the one standard, then, alike by those who enjoy such
prosperity in slothful or criminal ease, and by those who in no less
evil manner rail at, envy, and long for it, poverty is held to be shameful,
and money, whether well or ill gotten, to stand for merit.
All this does not mean condemnation of progress. It is mere folly
to try to dig up the dead past, and scant is the good that comes from
asceticism and retirement from the world. But let us make sure that
our progress is in the essentials as well as in the incidentals. Material
prosperity without the moral lift toward righteousness means a dimin-
ished capacity for happiness and a debased character. The worth of
a civilization is the worth of the man at its centre. When this man
lacks moral rectitude, material progress only makes bad worse, and
social problems still darker and more complex.
AT THE STATE FAIR GROUNDS, AT CONCORD, N. H.,
AUGUST 28, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, men and women of the state of New Hampshire, my fel-
low citizens, my fellow Americans:
It is a great pleasure to me to be able to come before you, this
afternoon, and to thank you, who have greeted me so cordially to-day.
As the mayor pointed out, you of New Hampshire have made your
state—you and your forefathers—what it is because you have not
sought the mere life of ease, because you have not shrunk from effort,
from toil, because you have dared by your labor, and at need, danger.
In this life as a rule the job that is easy to do is not very well worth
while doing. Now let each man here look back in his life and think
what it is that he is proud of in it—what part of it he is glad to hand
on as a memory to his sons and daughters. Is it his hours of ease?
©
IO2 Messages and Speeches
No, not a bit. Who are the heroes of this nation, who are the two
men that you think of at once? Washington and Lincoln. And why?
Did either lead a life of ease? Because each one of them all his days
worked for himself and worked for others, because one faced death
on a score of stricken fields, and one met it at the hands of an assassin
for the country's sake. They are the men whom America delights to
honor, they and those like them. There has never yet been a man in
our history who led a life of ease whose name is worth remembering.
Now, understand me. Take holidays. I believe in holidays. I believe
in play, and I believe in playing hard while you play, but don’t make
a business of it.
Do your work and do it up to the handle and then play when you
have got time to play, and if you are worth anything enjoy that, too.
Now, what is true of the individual is true of the nation. Here in
this state the forefathers of your people, as the mayor has said, came
to a region where only the strongest and bravest could have wrought
success out of griping need. Since then you who have built so well
upon the foundations laid deep by your forefathers—how have you
done it? You have done it by hard work. It is in the long run the
man who counts. Just exactly as in war, though you have got to have
the best weapons, yet they are useless if the men behind them don’t
handle them well; so in peace the best constitution, the legislation,
the greatest natural advantages will avail nothing if you have not
the right to take the advantage of them. It is not an easy matter to
get a law which shall do us great benefit, but it is only too easy to
get one which shall do us great harm. About all we have a right to
expect from government is that it will see that the cards are not stacked,
and if it sees to that then we will abide by the deal.
Now, it is not necessary to say to an audience in this state that
the farmer is benefited by the success of the manufacturing center,
just as the manufacturing center must in the last resort depend upon
the welfare of the country for its success. Speaking broadly, when-
ever there is a period of prosperity it will benefit all. Now, the grand
problem that we should set before us is to keep prosperity, but above
all never, under any circumstances, to lend ourselves to the leader-
ship of any who appeal to the baser passions of mankind, and who,
because there is inequality in prosperity, would seek to substitute for
that unequal prosperity community in disaster.
Evils have come through our very prosperity, but in warring against
the evil let us be exceeding careful not to war against the prosperity.
Now it would be perfectly possible at any time to make it unpleasant
for trusts—perfectly possible to prevent big corporations from making
money. They did not make any money in 1893—and neither did any
one else. Let us face the fact that there are evils. If any man tells
Theodore Roosevelt IO3
you that he can advance a specific by which all the evils of the body
politic will be made to disappear, distrust him, for if he is honest he
knows not what he says.
Mankind has moved slowly up through the ages, stumbling, halting,
rarely by leaps and bounds, generally by a slow and painful progression.
The Millennium is a good way off yet and we are going to succeed
now, if, as I believe, we shall succeed, by showing exactly the qualities
which our fathers showed when in great crises they succeeded. It is
in civil life as it is in military life. The men who fought in the great
Civil War, under Grant and Sherman, wore different uniforms from
the Continentals who followed Washington, were armed with different
weapons and were drilled with different tactics; but the spirit of the
man himself was the same. There is not any more possibility of rem-
edying all the ills, social, economic, political, of the body politic by
some patent device now than there was such possibility in 1776 or
in 1861.
And greater, sad, patient Lincoln led us to victory from '61 to ’65
because he did not trust to any mere trick or device, because he drove
deep down to the heart of thousands and based his reliance on the
fundamental virtues of mankind—the old, old virtues of mankind.
That is the spirit we have to show in facing the problems of to-day.
Face the problem; realize its gravity, and then approach it in a spirit
that will keep it ever in mind that if we are to succeed at all, it must
be by each doing to the best of his capacity his own business, and yet
by each remembering that in a sense he is also his brother's keeper.
[Daily Kennebec Journal, Augusta, Maine, August 29, 1902.]
AT MANCHESTER, N. H., AUGUST 28, 1902.
It is about I25 years ago that Molly Stark's husband had a saw
mill here. Stark did two things. He had his saw mill. He did his
work here, but when the country called to arms he was going to do
his duty or Molly Stark was going to be a widow, and you and those
like you who have done their duty in modern times, in the last few
years have been showing yourselves fit representatives of Stark and
the men who founded our republic. And gentlemen, we have heard
a good deal of criticism about what our people have done in the Philip-
pines. Those who went out there were our brothers, friends, com-
panions. There was occasionally one of them who did something
wrong. Well, we aren't all of us immaculate at home.
There is every reason why we should put a stop to wrongdoing,
punish the wrongdoer, be he soldier or civilian, and where it has been
possible to get at any soldier who did wrong he has been punished.
But the fact remains that you and those like you in the Philippines
IO4 Messages and Speeches
have written a new page in the honor roll of American history, and
shame to us as a nation if we don't stand behind you and appreciate
what you have done.
And now just one word. This is one of those great industrial cen-
ters the building up of which has meant the building up of the material
prosperity of our country. Now there is always certain to be some
evil in any great movement forward. Our material progress has been
accompanied by certain evils. The marvelous success which has pro-
duced such great corporate and individual wealth has meant that
certain abuses have grown up in connection with the individual wealth
and in connection with the corporations that are the ordinary instru-
ments of industrial activity at present.
There are evils. Let's try to get rid of them, but let's show common
sense in the effort. Let's devote our best thought and best energies to
finding some method of getting rid of any and all evils in the body
politic, but let us above all things beware in using the knife not to
handle it so that it will be dangerous to the community even more than
to the evil attacked. *
AT NASHUA, N. H., AUGUST 28, 1902.
I am glad to have the chance to be greeted by you this morning,
and to acknowledge from my heart your greeting. This is one of the
industrial centres the prosperity of which has meant the prosperity of
the whole country. The great feature of the material growth of this
country during the last fifty years, aside from our expansion westward
across the continent to the Pacific, has been the extraordinary industrial
progress which has built up such cities as this in which I am now
speaking.
We are living in an era of great prosperity. Your city has had its
full share of that prosperity, but prosperity by itself never made any
man happy. You are not going to be happy without it, but you are
not going be be happy if you do not have something else besides.
Prosperity must be the basis. The material well being must be the
foundation, but on it you have to rear a superstructure of kindly
brotherhood, all striving for decency in public and private life, or but
scant will be the good of prosperity.
AT THE WEIRS, N. H., AUGUST 28, 1902.
An American who has a proper sense of the relative proportion of
things must realize that to the men who fought for the Union in the
dark days of the Civil War there is owing a greater debt of gratitude
than to any others. Great were the deeds you did and vital the need
Theodore Roosevelt IO5
of doing them, and many were the lessons taught the rest of us; both
by what you accomplished in the war and by the way in which when
the war was over you turned to the work of peace with the same spirit
which had led you to triumph on the battlefields. During the life-
time of our Republic each generation has had its allotted task. States-
man and soldier, the man in public life and the man in private life,
each has had work to do for the nation. We have moved forward
swiftly or have stumbled and halted according as the work as a whole
was well or ill done.
We have encountered many crises of importance, and from time to
time have been brought face to face with great problems, upon the
rightful solution of which much of the nation’s welfare depended.
But to you alone it was given to face with victorious valor the one
crisis in which not merely the nation’s wellbeing but the nation’s life
was at stake. To you it was given to solve the one problem, which, if
not solved aright, meant death for our people. All of the work of
the men who founded this republic would have gone for nothing had
you not done your part well. It was the statesmanship of Lincoln,
the soldiership of Grant and the loyal valor of those who upheld the
arms of the one and followed the sword of the other which made per-
manent the work of Washington, of Marshall and their compeers.
We won in the great trial of the Civil War and came through the
fiery furnace unscathed. We sprang level to the height of our oppor-
tunity instead of sinking into the gulf of ignoble failure, because in
the early sixties you and those like you—in the flower of youth and
early manhood—had in you the stuff that knows how to prize certain
ideals more than material wellbeing, more than life itself. There was
no money reward for what you did. There was hardly one of you
who did not during those four years receive far less than he could have
earned at home, in safety. But you were driven to the work by the
lash of your own hearts. You were spurred onward by the lift which
only comes to a people of great and generous soul. You felt instinc-
tively that there were causes far greater than anything that has to do
merely with wealth or bodily wellbeing. You were willing to wager
all. for the prize of death in righteous war.
We are now in a time of abundant peace, and not in time of war;
but woe to us if in peace we do not have ideals as lofty as yours, and
if we do not live up to them as you lived up to yours in the dark days
of defeat and in the golden glory of the hour of triumph. Courage
and loyalty, the stern determination to do exact justice, the high pur-
pose to struggle for the right, and the common sense to struggle for
it in practical fashion—all these qualities we must show now in our
civil and social and business life, as you showed them when, in the
days of your youth and lusty strength, you marched forth an army
IO6 Messages and Speeches
with banners and brought back the peace that comes not to the weak-
ling and the craven but to those whose proud eyes tell of triumph
tasted.
Among the greatest benefits of what you did is that you have also
left us the right of hearty and loyal comradeship with your gallant
opponents, who in fighting for what they conscientiously deemed to
be right, fought against the stars in their courses. We are all loyal
Americans now—North, South, East and West—all alike jealous of
the nation’s honor and welfare, proud of the nation’s past and resolute
that her future shall stand even higher than her past.
Besides what you actually did, besides the reunited country, the
undivided nation, which we have received at your hands, we have
received also the lesson of the doing of the deed. There is a great
need now that we should show, if not in degree, at least in kind, the
spirit that you showed. We need, in order successfully to face the
difficult and complex problems of our industrial civilization, all the
courage and loyalty, and all the faith and clearsighted sanity and
purpose which there is at our command. Above all, we need to learn
aright and to apply the great lesson of brotherhood which you taught
and practiced in the four grim years that began with Sumter and ended
with Appomattox.
We have just brought to a conclusion a war in the Far East—a
war which sprang up as a sequel to our short struggle with Spain.
The army which has done its work so well in the Philippine Islands
has had a task which was small indeed, compared with yours, but
which, nevertheless, was fraught with hardship and difficulty peculiarly
its own. The men who, after three years of painful, harassing, in-
credibly laborious warfare in the tropical jungles against a treacherous
and savage foe, have finally brought peace and order and civil govern-
ment in the Philippines are your sons and your successors. They
claim their share in your glory by inheritance, and by their valor and
their steadfast endurance have added new lustre to that glory. They
have been cruelly maligned, even by some who should have known
better,
In an army, in the best army, and especially in an army doing its
work under such wellnigh intolerable conditions as those which con-
fronted our troops in the Philippines, there are bound to be instances
of Occasional wrongdoing. The temptation to retaliate for the fearful
cruelties of a savage foe is very great, and now and then it has been
yielded to. There have been a few, and only a few, such instances in
the Philippines, and punishment has been meted out with unflinching
justice to the offenders. But the real marvel is that under such condi-
tions there should have been so little wrongdoing. As time goes by
and we get our sense of the proper proportion of things these instances
§
Theodore Roosevelt Io'7
will be forgotten, but there will remain for all time new pages on the
honor roll of our history because of what has been done for the nation
in the Philippines. Our officers and men on the march and in battle
showed themselves not unworthy of you, the men of the great war.
They have added to the memories of which Americans are proud, and
by their labor they have brought the peaceful light of civilization into
one of the world's darkest places.
We feel that we have a right to demand the support of all good
citizens for the army in the Philippines because of what it has done,
and we ask it also for the civil officers of the government who, with
faithful toil and wisdom, are building a structure of orderly liberty
on the ground made ready for them by the soldierly courage of the
troops wearing the American uniform.
AT NEWPORT, N. H., AUGUST 29, 1902.
It has been to me a very great pleasure to visit your State, and
above all, to meet your people. Your town here is a curiously exact
production of America as a whole. You have manufactories in your
town—shoes, linen, underwear. You have hay and stock farms outside,
and you, therefore, have in this community the farmer and the towns-
man, the employer and the wage worker. You have all the component
parts that go to make up the entire American body politic. In your
four or five thousand citizens in the town and adjacent neighborhood,
the representatives of whom I am addressing, you have produced all
the essential types of all our people among our eighty million inhabi-
tants of the nation as a whole.
We are going to get good government, square and fair dealing be-
tween man and man in the nation at large, by the application of exactly
the same principles which you find it necessary to apply in order to
get good government and decent living here. There is no royal road
to good government any more than there is a royal road to learning.
You can give a child every advantage, give him books and the teachers,
but he has got to learn, he has got to do that himself, and it is the
same way with citizenship. You can frame laws and have a good
constitution, and after all has been done that you can do in that way
you have accomplished simply the creating of conditions which render
it possible to have good citizenship. The good citizenship has to come
from the people themselves.
AT WHITE RIVER JUNCTION, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
My fellow citizens:
I am very glad to see you here this afternoon. I have enjoyed my
entry into your beautiful State. Vermont is one of those States which
IO8 Messages and Speeches
I feel most typically represent the American ideal; for Vermont has
owed its leadership not to its material resources, but to the quality
of citizenship that has been bred within its borders. It is a good
thing to have great factories and great cities but it is a better thing
to have strong and decent men and women. Vermont has always pro-
duced the type of citizen who knew how to take care of himself in
time of peace and who in time of war knew how to take care of him-
self and of the other fellow too. Quite from its foundation you here
in Vermont have shown by your works the faith that was in you—
you showed that you believed in work. Play is a first rate thing, as
long as you know it is play. Now I believe in playing and I believe in
playing hard; but I don’t believe in making a business of it. You
here in Vermont showed that you were not to be led off into believing
that mere ease was the end and aim of a man’s life. You have shown
that you appreciated the fact that to be a good citizen a man has got
to handle himself not with a view to shirking difficulties but to meet-
ing them and overcoming them. The individual who does that is a
good citizen, and the nation that does it is a good nation.
[Burlington Daily Free Press, Burlington, Vt., Sept. 1, 1902.]
AT BETHEL, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my friends and fellow citizens:
Let me greet personally Mrs. Chapman; I have been told that Mrs.
Chapman lacks but one week of being one hundred years old. Just
up at the fair back here I saw a Vermonter of over ninety, in a trotting
sulky go around a measured half mile at speed with his horse. I think
that this is a State that favors longevity. And the reason is because
in this State you have been sufficiently fortunate never to forget that
the very best product you can have in a State is men and women. You
need to have all the great business resources of the country, and great
credit attaches to those who use them ; but most credit attaches to the
men who carried the guns. Those were the men who did the trick.
You who followed Grant and Sheridan and Sherman and Thomas, you
surrender of the garrison in the name of Jehovah and the Continental
troops—carried by those who with Ethan Allen went to demand the
surrender of the garrison in the name of Jehovah and the continental
Congress. You had different weapons, you were drilled in different
ways; but the spirit that spurred you on was their spirit. And so
nowadays, when we have the modern high-power smokeless powder
rifle and have to fight in open order, no longer with the elbow touch
—it still remains true that if the American people is to rise level in
any future war to what it has done in the past, it must have in its army
the spirit that drove Ethan Allen, that drove Stark at Bennington,
Theodore Roosevelt IO9
It is the man behind the gun in war, and it is the man behind the plough
in peace.
[Burlington Daily Free Press, Burlington, Vt., Sept. 1, 1902.]
AT SOUTH ROYALTON, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
My fellow citizens:
I am very glad to have the chance of greeting you to-day. I have
greatly enjoyed my visit to your State. I am glad to see the school
children here. It is a mighty good thing for a State to have other things
too, but the children are the best. And I am glad to see always the
veterans of the Civil War. I like to see them at the same meetings
where you see the children, because they are the people who have ac-
tually put into practice what you preach to the children that we want
to have done, comrades. Preaching is a first class thing, but practice
is a better one. It is good to be able to have in your own town people
to whom you can point because their metal rang true when the time
of need came—people who have done well in war and who have done
well in peace. Now it is given to but few people in a generation to see
any fighting. You ought not to want to see it anyway; but only now
and then comes the chance to do the good work in war. And I will
tell you it will not be worth while summoning our people to do well
in war if they have not done well in peace beforehand. It is exactly
as it is in the life of any individual hero. You meet the man who
is going to wait before he does anything until he can do something
heroic, and the chance doesn’t come. The man who amounts to any-
thing as a citizen is the man who does the ordinary, everyday, com-
monplace duties well.
[Burlington Daily Free Press, Burlington, Vt., Sept. 1, 1902.]
AT RANDOLPH, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
Mr. Chief Justice, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is a real pleasure to me to meet you; and I am glad to be intro-
duced by the chief justice of your State. Here in America we pride
ourselves on our liberty under the law—a very different thing from
lawlessness. Anarchy in any shape or manner—and by anarchy I
mean all types of mob violence, the violence of one man or the violence
of many by action against the law—anarchy in any shape or way is
the surest handmaiden of tyranny. Here it is our own fault as a
people if the laws are not what we wish, if we do not have them ob-
served as we wish. There is no excuse in this country for violations
of the law. Our safety lies in the sanity, the cool hard-headedness,
the self-restraint, mingled with the resolute purpose of our people to
I IO Messages and Speeches
get the right law on the statute books, to see that it is then enforced
against the great and small with even handed justice, that the rich man
and the poor man are held to an equal accountability before it—that no
man stands beyond the law—that in the interest of the most powerful
man of wealth we enforce the law against him, and thereby show that
the law can be invoked for him at need. The orderly, law-abiding
liberty of our people is the secret of our success as a nation. It is that
spirit that you have shown here in Vermont—the spirit that has made
Vermont do far more than her share in national leadership, in example
to the nation—the fact that here you have been able to work out a
reasonable approximation to the ideal which as a nation I think we
have before us—the ideal of treating each man on his worth as a
man. I never have felt the slightest sympathy for Vermont; you are
not that type—you don't need it. Vermont has practically realized that
when you come to judge a man it is an outrage to discriminate for or
against him because of his being rich or poor—that you ought to judge
him by the stuff that is in him. A little way back I passed by the
station at which Senator Morrill used to get on the train. When he
was home he lived nine miles from any railroad, lived as anything
but a rich man,—in a village; and yet he was one of the men who
throughout this nation counted for most. So Vermont has sent again
and again in every war men to the front, men who were not known
to the country because of their great wealth. Don’t look down on a
man because he is poor, and don’t envy him or vilify him because he
is rich.
[Burlington Daily Free Press, Burlington, Vt., Sept. 1, 1902.]
AT BURLINGTON, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
I thank you most warmly, for the greeting you have extended to
me this evening. I have enjoyed greatly my trip today through your
beautiful State. Vermont has always played far more than her part
to which she was by population entitled in the affairs of the country.
Vermont has always furnished far more than her proportionate share
of leadership because in Vermont you have always kept true to the old
American ideals—the ideals of individual initiative, of self-help, of
rugged independence, of desire to work, and willingness if need to fight.
I feel, and I say it with all sincerity, that when I come to Vermont I
come not to teach but to learn. As a nation we shall succeed very
largely in proportion as we show the spirit that this State has ever
shown in peace and in war. The people of Vermont work hard. For
that I do not pity them. I admire them. It is a good thing for man-
kind to work. The people of Vermont work with honesty of purpose,
the people of Vermont show by their life actions that they are true
Theodore Roosevelt III
to an ideal. It was a pleasure to men and women here, my fellow citi-
zens, to have the cavalry, the regulars, drawn up in line to receive us
as we came in, and it has been a pleasure today wherever I stopped
to see the men who fought in the great Civil War on hand to bear
their part in welcoming the chief executive of the nation. I know that
the rest of you will pardon me for saying that greatly though I value
the greeting of all of you, yet I value most the greeting of those who
in the Supreme hour of the nation's need rose level to that need. Gen-
tlemen and ladies, it has always been a pleasure to me to come here
to your city. I have had the great good fortune of addressing your
citizens more than once and tonight it is with a peculiar sense of grati-
tude that I thank you again for the greeting that you have seen fit to
extend to me.
LBurlington Daily Free Press, Burlington, Vt., Sept. 1, 1902.]
TO THE SOCIETY OF THE SONS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION,
AT MONTPELIER, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
Mr. President, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of Ver-
%Ont.:
I am glad to be here in your beautiful State and I am especially
glad to come here, Mr. Proctor, as the guest of the society of which
you are president, the Society of the Sons of the American Revolution.
It is a great thing to have had forefathers who did their work well
in the world, always providing that the fact of having had them drives
us onward to try to do our part in the world now, instead of being
seized as an excuse for refusing to do our own share.
I like to see a man who is a good citizen, who comes from a line
of good citizens, but I am sure we all feel nothing but an added con-
tempt for the wretched creature who makes worthy ancestors an excuse
for his own failure to do what he should do. But when I come up
here to Vermont, when I see you people, I do not feel as though I
could teach you anything, but I hope I can give expression to certain
thoughts that you and I have.
Now, gentlemen and ladies, the men who in the American Revolution
founded the greatest republic upon which the sun has ever shone,
who not only fought but planned and acted aright in civil life, did
not devise any new scheme of human conduct, they acted according to
the well-tried truths in accordance with which all success worth hav-
ing has been obtained from generation to generation through the ages.
Just this afternoon I was reading a wonderful old poem of “Piers
Plowman” of the 14th century in England and it is curious to see
how closely the poet, speaking to his fellow countrymen, adheres to
II2 Messages and Speeches *
the plain common sense rules of morality to which we must adhere
now if we are to win.
There is a text in the Bible which contains two rules of conduct
where too many people are apt only to take one, sometimes this one,
sometimes that one. You need both. The text is one which teaches
us to be both as wise as serpents and as harmless as doves. Now to
be only harmless is not really to deserve much praise, nor, on the
other hand to possess all the wisdom and all the power that can come
to man shall avail nothing if with it does not come the lift toward right-
eousness, the life toward decency. Now that rule means that we have
got to be both decent and efficient. I can point out, fortunately, here,
from your own State, just what I mean.
I want first to illustrate what I mean by the two men whom Vermont,
this inland State, contributed to the navy of the United States and to
the glory of the entire nation in the Spanish war, Admiral Dewey and
our friend here whom I do not have to name.
Now gentlemen, Admirals Dewey and Clark had to have in them
the courage, that desire to do decently, but it would not have done
them any good if they had not learned their trade as the chances came.
Admiral Dewey went into Manila bay, Admiral Clark took the Oregon
around through Magellan straits and then into the fight at Santiago
and there bore himself with signal valor. They did that not only be-
cause they had in them the raw material that made them able to do it,
but because they had made the most of that raw material so they
could meet the demands made upon them. Dewey could not have begun
to go into Manila bay if he had not been trained year in and year out
at his profession.
If Dewey or Clark had sat down during the long years of peace,
as I have known pretty good men to sit down and say “Oh, well, there
is not anything to be done, when the day comes I will be here all right
but just now I do not care to train the big guns or whatever it is”—
if they had done that, you would not have known the name of either
of them at this moment. It was because each not only had the power
in him, you have to have that too, but he had in him the capacity for
doing well the plain everyday work right along, doing it whether
there was any immediate reward ahead or not. Neither of these two
men could have said there would have been any war before the time
of their retirement came, and if they had not acted upon the principle
that it was well to take pains with the little things of life, the time
of their retirement would have come and you would not have been
aware they had been in the war.
They had the little things, they made the preparations in advance.
Here you can draw the lesson for all of us on that fact. Take the
men on horses back there, the regulars over there. Thank heaven, I
Theodore Roosevelt II3
think we are long past the stage in this country when any of our
citizens feel any jealousy or anything but the heartiest admiration
for the regular army and navy. All honor to the men who spend
their lives in training themselves, and die at need for the honor and
necessity of all of us, should the call be made. In the army and navy
alike the way to make certain success is to train in advance.
When the war with Spain broke out it was too late to teach our
men to shoot, to teach our men in the engine room to keep the gear
in good shape, to teach our captains knowledge of Seamanship, they
had then to make trial of what they had already learned. If ever we
have a war—but I certainly hope we never shall—I believe the chances
are but small for any war in our time—if ever we have a war we are
going to do well or ill largely because of the position in which we are
at the outset of the war.
There was splendid courage among the Spaniards; there were some
very brave men at the Spanish guns, but they could not hit. I do not
care how brave you are if you don't hit, the enemy has no special re-
gard for you. We must have the trained efficiency in advance that
will only come by preparedness in advance, and that is the reason
that every effort is now being made with the army and particularly with
the navy to see that we have not simply a pretty efficient force but
the most efficient force any nation can have. The best is none too
good for this Republic.
I am glad to welcome you here, young men of the National Guard,
some of whom served in the Spanish War with me, but most of all
I am glad to welcome those to whom for their great good fortune it
was given to do the mightiest deed that any generation of men of this
continent have done—than any generation of men in the last century
did, the men who fought to the finish the great Civil War. There
have been other crises in which it was necessary for our people to do
well, but you proved your truth and your valor in the one crisis where
failure meant death to the nation; where failure meant that all that
had been done before would have passed—would have gone for nothing,
that all that had been accomplished by our ancestors in the Revolu-
tionary War would have been torn asunder like an idle page and the
history of our Republic would have been put down as a meaningless
failure.
You did that great feat and you did it by putting ahead certain
fundamental virtues which, men and women of Vermont, I can say
with entire sincerity and without a particle of flattery are typical of
your State. You showed the two great qualities of anxiety to do
honorable work, and of realization that while that work must be prac-
tical, it must be carried on in accordance with a high ideal.
There are people in this government, I regret to say, of whom it
II4 Messages and Speeches
must be said, not that they have had bad ideals but that they have no
ideals at all, and among those I class every man who is unable to
see in this country anything but material prosperity. Material pros-
perity is a great thing, a necessary thing. We must have it as a basis
upon which to build, but it is not everything, it is not even the main
thing. It was Napoleon who said that in war the moral was to the
material as ten to one, and in peace the moral question was many times
as important as the material.
It is to you of the National Guard, here in front, that I speak. I
want you to have, and I hope in the end to see that you have, the best
high power smokeless powder weapon.* I don’t like black powder
weapons at this stage of the game. I had about as soon see our people
armed with crossbows. I want to see this nation and the States join
in giving to the National Guard the best weapons of precision that
can be obtained. After you have got that weapon, what will talk is
the use you make of it. If you are put against equally good men
with better weapons, the equally good men will beat you; if you have
got the best weapon in the world and are second rate men, the first
rate man will beat you for all he has only a club. You have got to
have—you of the Civil War, you fought with widely different weapons
and widely different tactics from the men who were with Ethan Allen
when he struck the first great blow for Jehovah and the Continental
Congress, up here, but the spirit that modeled him and those like him
was yours, and so now, the men who at any time in the future find it
their duty to hand down the honor of the flag that you have handed
down to us—they must have, must be spurred on by the feelings, the
ideals that spurred you on from '61 to '65 if they are to rise to the
level of the nation’s best.
Now what is true in war is true in peace. Great changes come in
the superficial aspects of the social system, and behind all these changes
you need exactly the same old fundamental virtue. Now at the be-
ginning of the 20th century, with our railroads, our telegraph lines,
our wonderful industries, our great corporations, with all that these
changes mean, and the other changes that have been brought about, it
*President Roosevelt, I think, once told me a story of a Tennessee Mountaineer who came
in to enlist for the Spanish war. He had never before been out of his native mountains, and
brought with him an old 8-square squirrel rifle.
“How far can you kill with that?” asked a soldier, pointing to the ancestral 8-square.
“She's sudden death at two hundred yards!” said the mountain man, contemplating the
ancestral arm with vast respect. '
“Look here,” said the soldier; and then, to the amazement of the mountain man, he cut
up a puff of dust, with the bullet from his high-power rifle, on the side of the hill that was
all of a mile away.
The mountain man examined the astonishing rifle in silence. At last he passed it over to
the soldier again with a profound air. sº
“She’s shorely a wonder, soldier!” he said. “Now I should say that if you-all wanted to
down a gent with that gun, you wouldn’t have to see him. All you’d need is his address.”
—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt II.5
still remains true that the Vermont of the 20th century, the America
of the 20th century can be made what they shall be made only by
putting in the fight, by putting into use, by applying the very qualities
that the Vermonters showed at the close of the 18th century, that our
people showed when out of the jangling confederated States just come
through the Revolutionary War, they made this great Republic.
I have spoken to you of the poem of “Piers the Plowman,” that
old I4th century poet; he tells there of certain necessities for the people
of his day. We are just exactly as needy in ours. The need of honesty,
the need of resolute purpose to do work well. You in Vermont have
come to the front. You have given to the nation men of leadership,
altogether disproportionate to your numbers, to the wealth of your
State, because you have acted on the belief unless you worked and
worked hard and well, you were not doing your duty. A body of
men who live only for pleasure, I do not care whether they are rich
men or poor men; whether they are the sons of millionaires or whether
they are those who are commonly known as “hoboes”, if they do not
work, fundamentally they are alike, fundamentally each has shirked his
duty. One has shirked the duty of the wage earner, the other has
shirked his duty to use the great privileges entrusted to him, but each
has also shirked his duty to the State. Each stands on the wrong side in
the line of cleavage which divides good citizens from bad citizens, a line
of cleavage which runs at right angles to the line that divides wealth
and poverty, don't forget that. You have got bad men on both sides
of the line that divides men of moderate means from those that are
very well off, and you have rich men and poor men on both sides
of the line that divides good citizenship from bad citizenship, and any
man who tries to teach you anything to the contrary is your enemy, and
the enemy of the nation as a whole.
This country is full of opportunities. Pardon me for making a
personal allusion, but I am so pleased as an American to come here
to this beautiful city, the capital of this State, this State of which
we are so proud, and see in your Mayor a man who by his life gives
the lie to those who say there is not a chance for a man in America to
rise. There is a chance, a first class chance for the man who takes
advantage of it, but not for the man who is continually grumbling be-
cause there is no chance. &
Then, my fellow countrymen, let us remember constantly that the
way in which we can rise level to what our fathers did, is by applying
the principles upon which they acted, not by sitting down and doing
nothing. We can do our duty now just as our forefathers did in the
Revolution, as you did in the Civil War.
You left us a reunited country and you left us more for you left
us the memory of the deeds by which you kept it reunited, you
II6 Messages and Speeches
left us the memory of what you did in the war, and what you did in
peace, and one of the fundamental lessons we learned from what you
did was the lesson of brotherhood, the lesson of comradeship, and
the lesson implied in that of treating each man according to his worth
as a man. All of you, after you had been in the war but a short while,
grew to value the man on your right or the man on your left
not with reference to this man's past, but to what he was in the
present; whether he came from the town or the country, whether he
was a banker or a bricklayer, a farmer or a mechanic, it made no dif-
ference to you if he had in him the stuff that made him move forward
when the call was to move forward, that was what you wanted to
know. You wanted to know if he would “stay put”. That was what
interested you, and if he was a man whose metal rang true in battle,
if he was a man who was true and tried, a loyal man on the march or
in camp, so you need not have any doubt where he was, that was
what you cared for.
And so it must be with our citizenship in civil life. We must
test a man by the fundamental qualities of his manhood. I have spoken
of these qualities before today but I am going to speak of them again
now. In the first place the man must be honest, must be decent. If
he is not honest, if he is not straight in his dealings with his fellow
men then the more popular he is the more danger he is to the com-
munity as a whole.
Benedict Arnold was as gallant a soldier as ever wore the American
uniform and that was what made him so dangerous when he betrayed
that uniform. Benedict Arnold left a leg at Saratoga, when he fought
at the forefront of the battle. Benedict Arnold had he died then
would have left his name as a heritage of honor for all time to his
children, but he did not have the root of righteousness in him. So
it was in war, so it is in peace. The public man who is brilliant, able,
but who is so absolutely selfish that he is willing to mislead his country-
men to their own destruction is rendered infinitely more dangerous to
them by the qualities that bring him success.
The business man of great talent in affairs, the man who has the
gift of making vast sums of money, if he uses his talent right, if he
plays the part as many great captains of industry have played their
part, is a benefit, a great benefit to the country, but if he uses his
talent wrongly, and if he lacks conscience, if he becomes absorbed
completely in his own selfish wellbeing, he is all the greater curse
because of that great ability. The scoundrel that succeeds is a man
to fear, not the scoundrel that fails. You have got to have then
honesty first, and no other quality will stand for that, ability, courage,
saving grace of common sense, and honesty.
But honesty is not enough; you there, you veterans, you
Theodore Roosevelt I 17
wanted the man next you to be patriotic, but if he ran away his
patriotism did not help. Besides decency, besides honesty and right-
eousness you must have courage. You need it absolutely in war and
you need it in peace. Courage to stand up for the right, the courage
that will refuse to yield either on the one hand to any temptation
either to the illusions and weaknesses of those who use wealth wrongly,
or on the other hand to the none the less base envy and hatred of
those who because they are not well off, feel anger and malice and
rancor towards those who are. You must have courage as well as
honesty, and then in addition to that you have got to have another
quality without which the others lose their savor. I do not care
how honest a man is and how brave a man is, if he is a born fool you
can do nothing for him. I ask for honesty. I ask for courage. Hon-
esty and courage in our citizenship, and I ask that there go with them
the saving grace of common sense.
I thank you.
[The Burlington Free Press and Times, Burlington, Vt., Sept. 1, 1902.]
AT WINDSOR, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
Mr. Evarts and you men and women of Vermont, my fellow citizens,
my fellow Americans:
I am glad indeed to have the chance of greeting you and of saying
a word to you to-day. This is the place where the constitution of
your State was formulated, the first constitution definitely to forbid
human slavery in this continent.
Your State was founded by men who knew how to fight when the
need was to fight, and who knew that fighting was not all; that
they had to work in civil life also. Vermont has done what it has done
throughout our history and furnished the leadership in our public life
which it always has furnished—has shown that healthy sanity of public
sentiment which has so prominently distinguished it—because Vermont
has understood that while it was a mighty good thing to produce ma-
terial prosperity, it was a better thing to produce men and women
to enjoy it. You look through our history and you will see that while,
of course, material prosperity is the basis, the foundation upon which
we build, yet that the leadership of the nation has always lain with
those who realize that material prosperity was an indispensable founda-
tion, but useless if there was not a superstructure upon it—the super-
structure of the lofty lift toward things better which only a great and
generous people can feel.
And your forefathers, the men who founded this country, they under-
stood that no one quality was sufficient for the successful founding
of a country any more than any one quality will do to make a citizen
II8 Messages and Speeches
a success. You have got to make a number of different qualities. In
the first place, you must recognize the sphere that the nation has.
Something, a good deal, can be done by wise laws, by fearless admin-
istration of the laws. But after that has been done there remains the
fact that you must trust to the citizen himself to work out the ultimate
salvation of the state. You can restrain men by the law and by the
execution of the law from wrong-doing. And the wrong-doing man
takes either of two steps; took those steps a century ago; takes those
steps now.
The crimes of craft and the crimes of violence both are equally
dangerous. And we must remember, after all, that those who come
from the set where one kind of crime is dangerous are apt to denounce
the other type of crime. Both must be put down. The man who com-
mits violence, above all, the body of men who commit violence, commit
an outrage not merely against their fellow-Americans, but against the
whole body politic to which they belong. Violence of the individual,
above all, violence of a mob—that type of violence—is incompatible with
free government, with free and orderly liberty in our republic. The
first requisite of liberty, as we and our forefathers have known it, is
the willingness to abide by the law. The government must be just;
the law must be no respecter of persons. The law must get at the big
man who goes wrong just as it gets at the small man who goes wrong,
and it must get at him in his own interest. You can protect the man
of big means against wrong-doing by the law just so long as you
make himself responsible to the law. g
On the other hand, the worst enemy of the people upon whose be-
half mob violence is often invoked is the man who invokes it; the
man who connives at it, or incites it. The worst wrong that can be
done to our people is to try to teach them that aught can be obtained
by mob rule or violence of any kind. We can make this government;
we can keep it what it is ; we cannot only make it what it is, but we
can raise it to still loftier height, but it must be done through orderly,
decent process of liberty, working through law. It is not a kindness
to bring up a child in the belief that it can get through life by shirking
the difficulties. The child who is going to be worth its salt must be
taught to face difficulties and overcome them. Is not that so? You
know it is so.
I pity no man-because he has got to work. I despise the man who
will not work. He is not worth envying; no matter at which end of
the social scale he is. The man who cannot pull his own weight, that
man is not any good in our public life. Now we have got to do it
in widely different ways; each man has got to at least pull his own
weight, and if he is worth his salt, he will pull a little more. And
we cannot afford as a nation, any more than as a family can afford
Theodore Roosevelt I I9
it in the training of the individual members of the family—we cannot
afford to have our citizens brought up in any other theory. Each
man of you who looks back on his life will feel proud to hand to his
children, not the memory of the days of ease, but the days that were
pretty hard, that meant hard work, but wherein he did something.
Now, in every audience that I speak to here, all through New Eng-
land, I see men like you, friend, there, who wear the button that shows
that you fought in the great war. You did not go down there to have
an easy time, did you? You did not go down there for the pay; it
was less than $13 a month, if I remember. You went down in the
prime of your youth, the prime of your strength, leaving all that there
was at home, to spend four years, knowing defeat as well as victory,
until, with stern courage, from defeat you wrested ultimate victory.
But they were not easy years, not a bit of it. They were years of
heart-wearing work for a righteous end, and thrice fortunate the
nation which has citizens within its borders who in time of peace and
in time of war alike, are willing and anxious to spend the best there
is in them to do all that their strength allows, to war for decency and
righteousness, to struggle with all their might for a worthy end.
AT CORNISH, VT., AUGUST 30, 1902.
I want to thank you for what you have done and for the very kind
and graceful way in which you have greeted me this morning; and I
cannot think of anything that augurs better for the country than in
just such a typical old American town as this to have the school children
drawn up before a monument like that in the birthplace of Salmon P.
Chase and to have them look toward you—you the men of the great
Civil War, you who proved your truth by your endeavor—and to see
in you example of what they are to be when they grow up. I believe
in preaching, but I believe in practice a good deal more, and it has
been given to you, my friends of the great Civil War, to practice in the
four years when the life of the republic was at stake the virtues which
we so earnestly ask our children shall learn and you practiced the
virtues not only that count in war, but that count in peace. Of course,
there are exceptions, but ordinarily the man who is a first-class soldier
in war has got in him the stuff that is going to make out of him a
first-class citizen in time of peace. The men who in this beautiful
country of yours till the soil, make their living here, and breed up
American citizens have to show the same fundamental righteousness
and the same strong virile virtues that you did in time of war. It is
not enough, gentlemen, to mean well either in battle or in civil life;
you not only had to mean well, you had to do well, and it is the same
thing in civil life. I think there is but one class of people who de-
I2O Messages and Speeches
serve as well as the soldiers and those are they who teach the children
of the present how to be the masters of our country in the future. I
thank you.
AT NORTHFIELD, MASS., SEPTEMBER 1, 1902.
My fellow citizens:
Here near the seat of the summer school for young men founded by
Dwight L. Moody, I naturally speak on a subject suggested to me by
the life of Mr. Moody and by the aims sought for through the estab-
lishment of the summer school.
In such a school—a school which is to equip young men to do good
in the world—to show both the desire for the rule of righteousness and
the practical power to give actual effect to that desire—it seems to
me there are two texts specially worthy of emphasis: One is, “Be
ye doers of the word and not hearers only;” and the other is, “Not
slothful in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord.” A republic
of freemen is pre-eminently a community in which there is need for
the actual exercise and practical application of both the milder and
the stronger virtues. Every good quality—every virtue and every
grace—has its place and is of use in the great scheme of creation; but
it is of course a mere truism to say that at certain times and in certain
places there is pre-eminent need for a given set of virtues. In our
own country, with its many-sided, hurrying, practical life, the place
for cloistered virtue is far smaller than is the place for that essential
manliness which, without losing its fine and lofty side, can yet hold
its own in the rough struggle with the forces of the world round about
us. It would be a very bad thing for this country if it happened that
the men of righteous living tended to lose the robust, virile qualities
of heart, mind and body, and if, on the other hand, the men best
fitted practically to achieve results lost the guidance of the moral law.
No one-sided development can produce really good citizenship—as
good citizenship is needed in the America of to-day. If a man has
not in him the root of righteousness—if he does not believe in, and
practice, honesty—if he is not truthful and upright, clean and high-
minded, fair in his dealings both at home and abroad—then the stronger
he is, the abler and more energetic he is, the more dangerous he is
to the body politic. Wisdom untempered by devotion to an ideal usually
means only that dangerous cunning which is far more fatal in its
ultimate effects to the community than open violence itself. It is in-
excusable in an honest people to deify mere success without regard to
the qualities by which that success is achieved. Indeed there is a
revolting injustice, intolerable to just minds, in punishing the weak
scoundrel who fails, and bowing down to and making life easy for
Theodore Roosevelt I 21
the far more dangerous scoundrel who succeeds. A wicked man who
is wicked on a large scale, whether in business or in politics, of course
does many times more evil to the community than the man who only
ventures to be wicked furtively and in lesser ways. If possible, the
success of such a man should be prevented by law, and in any event
he ought to be made to feel that there is no condonation of his offenses
by the public. There is no more unpleasant manifestation of public
feeling than the deification of mere “smartness,” as it is termed—of,
mere successful cunning unhampered by scruple or generosity or right
feeling. If a man is not decent, is not square and honest, then the
possession of ability only serves to render him more dangerous to the
community; as a wild beast grows more dangerous the stronger and
fiercer he is.
But virtue by itself is not enough, or anything like enough. Strength
must be added to it, and the determination to use that strength. The
good man who is ineffective is not able to make his goodness of much
account to the people as a whole. No matter how much a man hears
the word, small is the credit attached to him if he fails to be a doer
also ; and in serving the Lord he must remember that he needs to
avoid sloth in his business as well as to cultivate fervency of spirit.
All around us there are great evils to combat, and they are not to be
combated with success by men who pride themselves on their superiority
in taste and in virtue, and draw aside from the world’s life. It mat-
ters not whether they thus draw aside because they fear their fellows
or because they despise them. Each feeling—the fear no less than
the contempt—is shameful and unworthy. A man to be a good Amer-
ican must be straight, and he must also be strong. He must have in
him the conscience which will teach him to see the right, and he must
also have the vigor, the courage, and the practical, hard-headed com-
mon-sense which will enable him to make his seeing right result in
some benefit to his fellows.
AT PROCTOR, VT., SEPTEMBER I, 1902.
We believe in the Monroe Doctrine, not as a means of aggression
at all. It does not mean that we are aggressive toward any power.
It means merely that as the biggest power on this continent, we remain
steadfastly true to the principles first formulated under the Presidency
of Monroe, through John Quincy Adams—the principle that this con-
tinent must not be treated as a subject for political colonization by
any European power. As I say, that is not an aggressive doctrine.
It is a doctrine of peace. A doctrine of defense, a doctrine to secure
the chance on this continent for the states here to develop peaceably
along their own lines. Now, we have formulated that doctrine. If
I 22 Messages and Speeches
our formulation consists simply of statements on the stump or on paper,
they are not worth the breath that utters them or the paper on which
they are written. Remember, that the Monroe Doctrine will be re-
spected as long as we have a first-class, efficient navy, and not very
much longer.
In private life he who asserts something, says what he is going to
do, and does not back it up, is always a contemptible creature, and as
a nation the last thing we can afford to do is to take a position which
we do not intend to try to make good. Bragging and boasting in
private life are almost always the signs of a weak man, and a nation
that is strong does not need to have its public men boast or brag on
its account. Least of all, does a self-respecting nation wish its public
representatives to threaten or menace or insult another power. Our
attitude toward all powers must be one of such dignified courtesy and
respect as we intend that they shall show us in return. We must be
willing to give the friendly regard that we exact from them. We
must no more wrong them than we must submit to wrongdoing by
them, but when we take a position, let us remember that our holding it
depends upon ourselves, depends upon our showing that we have the
ability to hold it.
Shame to us if we assert the Monroe Doctrine, and then, if our
assertion shall be called in question, show that we have only made an
idle boast, that we are not prepared to back up our words by deeds.
[Washington Post, Sept. 2, 1902.]
AT MIDDLEBURY, VT., SEPTEMBER 1, 1902.
I am very glad to be with you in Vermont on Labor Day, because
Vermonters have always worked, it is the law of useful life. Some-
times the work may come on unpleasant lines, but in the world’s
economy it is necessary. . From '61 to ’65 the work day to some of
you was on the battlefield, but since you have taken up with equal
spirit and courage the tasks of field, factory and forge. In the Senate
at Washington and other lines of trust and responsibility it has been
my pleasure to know men who served through the war as privates, but
they did their work well in peace and war. The future of our country
depends on those who work and whether they work with an eye to
the best or not.
[Burlington Daily Free Press, Purlington, Vt., Sept. 2, 1902.]
AT BELLOWS FALLS, VT., SEPTEMBER 1, 1902.
My fellow citizens, my fellow Americans, men and women of Vermont:
I have counted myself fortunate to be in Vermont, and doubly fortu-
x=-º-º-
4.
Theodore Roosevelt I23
nate to be here on Labor Day. A very, very good deal can be done
by associations among ourselves, such associations as you see repre-
sented here today; associations which will teach us practically in the
best way, that a lesson can be taught by applying it, that not only must
each work for himself, but that each must work for all. We can ac-
complish by mutual self-help much, and there yet remains an immense
amount to be done by individual self-help. In every association from
the state, from the nation, to a union, to a corporation, we find that
a man who is to accomplish good for his fellows must steadily endeavor
not to be a passenger. He must pull his weight and a little more.
[The Springfield Daily Republican, Springfield, Mass., Sept. 2, 1902.]
AT RUTLAND, VT., SEPTEMBER 1, 1902.
General, and you, my fellow citizens:
I am very glad to have the chance of saying a word here to the
citizens of Vermont on Labor Day. And before I address myself
specifically to you I know you will pardon me in expressing in a word
my acknowledgment of the greeting of the veterans of the great Civil
War and my good wishes toward the men who served in the Spanish
War and the National Guardsmen here.
The veterans who served in the Civil War gave the supreme lesson
to the people of our country, both in the way that, when the need was,
they fought, and in the lives of labor and effort they have led since.
When the war was ended they came back to civil life to do their part,
as every honest American worthy of the name must do his part, by
working in private life for himself and his family, and no less also by
association with his fellows for the common good.
There is no holiday which should be more typically American, no
holiday which should make our people think more seriously of their
privileges, their rights and their duties than this holiday of Labor Day.
The material side of our civilization is very important because of
the men who stand behind it, exactly as in battle the important thing
is not the gun, but the man behind the gun. So in our civil life it is
the man in the shop, the man on the farm, the man in the factory,
upon whom for well or for ill our whole civilization ultimately depends,
and it is according as that man is able to secure his rights, and, further-
more, as he remembers and performs his duties—it is according to
these two facts that our civilization does or does not make progress.
It is not an easy task for a man to always remember his duties, still
less is it an easy task for him always to do them; but he must keep
them in mind, he must strive faithfully to perform them, or he becomes
but a poor citizen. No man in this country who does not at least pull
his own weight can amount to anything. The man who is only a
I24. Messages and Speeches
passenger, who is not trying to do his share, has no proper place in
our body politic, and it makes no difference what the man's social
position is, what his wealth or poverty is, if he does nothing, if he
fails to take advantage of his opportunities, such as his opportunities
are, then, no matter which end of the social scale he is at, he is a
cumbrance on the earth’s surface, his presence means a burden and
not a benefit to the rest of us. vºr
On the other hand the man who works faithfully, conscientiously,
whatever the line of his work is, if it is honorable work, is a benefit
to the whole country. And the great test to apply, oh, my friends and
fellow citizens, is not as to what work the man is engaged in, but
as to the spirit in which he does it. If he is a square and an honest
man, if he tries to do his best by himself and family, and yet remem-
bers his duty to his neighbor, then, whether he be capitalist or wage-
worker, he is a good citizen and entitled to the respect of good citizens.
If he comes short in either respect, if he shirks his work, or if he em-
ploys his power malevolently or with utter disregard and carelessness
of the rights of others, be he rich or be he poor, he is a bad citizen and
has forfeited all right to the respect of his fellow countrymen.
The law of successful national life is the law of work. Play when
the chance comes, and when you do play, play hard, but do not make
of the play a business. Get all the enjoyment you legitimately can by
all means, but remember that that can only be an interlude, a holiday,
and do not let it interfere with the serious work of life. And let us
remember that while the conditions of social life change, while in the
externals there come such changes as to necessitate a different attitude
of ours toward some of those conditions, yet fundamentally the great
basic principles through which success or failure comes have not been
changed. Our complex industrial civilization means that we cannot
rely as we formerly could upon such simple methods as suffice while
men are brought close together with their relations inextricably inter-
woven. We must meet the new conditions where necessary—meet
them by legislation, and if legislation cannot serve, then meet them
by combination among ourselves as you here, bearing the banners of
this procession, have met them.
Much of great good can come by sub-associations, something can
be done through wise legislation, but do not forget, gentlemen, in
the last resort you cannot find a substitute for a man’s own energy,
resourcefulness, skill, courage and honesty. Work through association
in combination with your fellows, but do not under any circumstances
let any man lose his own capacity for self help. There on the banner is
the sign of brotherhood, the sign of the clasped hands, a good sign
for any union or association, and a good sign for all of us throughout
this nation.
Theodore Roosevelt I25
The lesson of brotherhood, the lesson of the clasped hand, is a lesson
we must not merely learn, but apply, not merely in name, but in deed,
through all our life. Brotherhood, fundamentally, means treating each
man at his worth as a man. You over there, the men of the great
war, that lesson of brotherhood was one of the most important that
you left us, the men who came after you, when you fought in the
great Civil War, when you marched into battle. What you were con-
cerned with as to the man on your right or on your left was not
whether he was a capitalist or wageworker, a painter, a cigarmaker, a
banker, a bricklayer; what you were concerned with was whether he
was a man, a good man, a straight man, an American, worthy of the
name. You did not care for his past position, you did not care for
his antecedents. You cared to know whether when the trial came he
would “stay put”. That is what you wanted to know.
And it is the same lesson we have to learn in civil life. We shall
make our government a success if we shall measure each man by the
standard of his worth as a man, neither looking down upon him be-
cause of the accidents of his position, but valuing him accordingly as
he shows the qualities which entitle him to our respect. That is the
standard which we must set up and up to which we must live if we
are to make our Republic, as we shall and will make it, all that the
fathers deemed it should be; all that men like you men of the Civil
War by your deeds showed your faith that would be, and if we adopt
any other standard the root of righteousness is not in us. Let us
remember, then, that we need good laws, that we need wise admin-
istration of the laws, that we need not only each to work for himself,
but each to work for all, that we need to join in associations with our
fellows for the common good, but let us all never forget that the funda-
mental truth in American citizenship is that each man is entitled in
the last resort to be judged solely on his worth as a man.
AT WESTFIELD, MASS., SEPTEMBER 2, 1902.
This is the town with the second oldest normal school in the country,
and the president of the alumni association of that school is with me
here, my secretary, Mr. Cortelyou. I do not speak of him, of his
services and his ability merely because I should speak of them. I
should speak of them truthfully, and it would be unpleasant for him
to have me use the language practically of flattery which I should have
to 11Se.
Now our Republic has as one of its corner-stones the education of
the citizen. Education is not all.” The educated scamp is a scamp
*President Roosevelt once told me that education was like laying a saber on a grindstone:
it was done to give a man an edge.—A. H. L.
I26 Messages and Speeches
still and all the more dangerous to the community, but, admitting that,
it is always true that while education is not all, without it we would not
amount to much. We must have a high degree of education in the
average citizen or we are not going to be able to solve aright the
problems presented to us. It is no small honor, no small distinction
for a town to have within its borders the second oldest of the institutions
which have accomplished such a marvelous work in giving higher
scholastic training to those best fitted to receive it. Our public school
system is broad at the base, but goes upward so that those who wish
are able to get the highest type of education. Our public school
system—it is a mere truism to say it—stands at the foundation of good
citizenship—it is one of the component parts. There is no one stone
that makes up all the foundation. Education in the schools is one thing,
but it is not a substitute for education at home. Let no father and
mother lay to their souls the flattering notion that they can shirk their
duties, and think that those duties will be performed by the school
teacher, no matter how good that teacher is. All of you know an
occasional father or mother who does just that thing. We have to
have the education; we must have the home bringing up; we must have
the trained mind; and then we must have, in addition, training for what
is more than mind—training for character.
This is fundamentally what counts in the life of the citizen and the
life of the state. To get the best results we must have a high degree
of education, but the highest degree of education, if unaccompanied by
the development in a man’s moral side, which produces character, will
avail but little.
[The Springfield Daily Republican, Springfield, Mass., Sept. 3, 1902.]
AT SPRINGFIELD, MASS., SEPTEMBER 2, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow Americans:
I thank you from my heart for your greeting, and I know you will
not grudge my saying that of all those present I feel peculiarly pleased
to meet here my comrades, the men of your Massachusetts regiment
behind and beside whom I served at Santiago. Ladies and gentle-
men, the men who went to Cuba were your brothers, sons, kindred,
neighbors. The men who served in the Philippines in the uniform of
the American army have been again your brothers, sons and neighbors.
Last night I spent at Northfield. Two centuries and over ago North-
field was the frontier, and we have Massachusetts now because we
were not afraid to expand then, and we are not afraid to expand now.
Our destiny unexpectedly took us to the Philippines. I don't sup-
pose any of us, when you and I, my comrades, went down to Cuba,
thought much of the Philippines, or knew much about them.
*
Theodore Roosevelt I27
I did not. We got there. We found that we had a job to do, and
we did it. And did it well? Yes. That’s good and much more; we
have no apologies to make for it.
Our soldiers in the Philippines have been attacked because occasion-
ally one of them did something wrong. Wherever it has been possible
to find them out the offenders have been punished. And I ask
you, when they blame overmuch Uncle Sam's men in blue fight-
ing for their lives against a treacherous foe in the heartbroken
work of jungle warfare, if our critics remembered, in speaking of
the occasional shortcomings of the men who did wrong under the
stress of such terrible temptation, that we are not altogether immaculate
at home. I would be sorry to have any one of our cities, even the best,
even Springfield, judged by the record of its police courts. If you
paid attention “purely to that you could make it a pretty bad showing
for any city in the land.
Occasionally soldiers in the Philippines did wrong, but on the whole,
the men who for three years in those islands have followed the flag
of the United States have added a new page to the honor roll of the
nation. I think, however, that troops of ours never warred under
greater difficulties than those in the Philippines. Troops of ours have
warred against more dangerous foes, but never in a climate under
conditions which called for such resolute perseverance on the part of
the men. In the steaming heat of the tropic jungles, starving, foot-
sore, so weary that they dropped to sleep in the mud wherever, they
happened to fall down; at every step fearing ambush from a foe who
was felt before he was seen, and among a population that greeted
with friendliness the oncoming troops and seized the stragglers and
put them to death by treachery; those men had, indeed, a heavy burden
to bear, and I think that the men who sat at home could have afforded
to have been more lenient in bearing judgment against them.
AT FITCHBURG, MASS., SEPTEMBER 2, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
There are two or three things that I should like to say to this audi-
ence, but before beginning what I have to say on some of the problems
of the day, I wish to thank for their greeting, not only all of you, my
fellow-citizens here, but particularly the men of the great war, and
second only to them my comrades of a lesser war, where, I hope, we
showed that we were anxious to do our duty, as you had done yours,
only the need did not come to us.
We have great problems before us as a nation. I will not try to
discuss them at length with you today, but I can speak a word as to
I28 Messages and Speeches
the manner in which they must be met if they are to be met successfully.
All great works, though they differ in the method of doing them, must
be solved by substantially the same qualities. You who upheld the arms
of Lincoln, who followed the sword of Grant, were able to do your duty
not because you found some patent device for doing it, but by going
down to the bedrock principles which had made good soldiers since
the world began. *
There was no method possible to devise which would have spared
you from heart-breaking fatigue on the marches, from hardships at
night, from danger in battle. The only way to overcome those difficul-
ties and dangers was by drawing on every ounce of hardihood, of
courage, of loyalty, and of iron resolution. That is how you had to
win out. You had to win as the soldiers of Washington had won
before you, as we of the younger generation must win if ever the call
should be made upon us to face a serious foe. Arms change, tactics
change, but the spirit that makes the real soldier does not change.
The spirit that makes for victory does not change.
It is just so in civic life. The problems change, but fundamentally
the qualities needed to face them in the average citizen are the same.
Our new and highly complex industrial civilization has produced a new
and complicated series of problems. We need to face those problems
and not to run away from them. We need to exercise all our ingenuity
in trying to devise some effective solution, but the only way in which
that solution can be applied is the old way of bringing honesty,
courage, and common sense to bear upon it. One feature of honesty
and common sense combined is never to promise what you do not
think you can perform, and then never fail to perform what you have
promised. And that applies in public life just as much as in pri-
vate life.
If some of those who have seen cause for wonder in what I have
said this summer on the subject of the great corporations, which are
popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as trusts, would
take the trouble to read my messages when I was Governor, what I
said on the stump two years ago, and what I put into my first message
to Congress, I think they would have been less astonished. I said
nothing on the stump that I did not think I could make good, and I
shall not hesitate now to take the position which I then advocated.
I am even more anxious that you who hear what I say should think
of it than that you should applaud it. I am not going to try to
define with technical accuracy what ought to be meant when we speak.
of a trust. But if by trust we mean merely a big corporation, then
I ask you to ponder the utter folly of the man who either in a spirit
of rancor or in a spirit of folly says, “destroy the trusts,” without
giving you an idea of what he means really to do. I will go with
Theodore Roosevelt I29
him if he says destroy the evil in the trusts, gladly. I will try to
find out that evil, I will seek to apply remedies, which I have already
outlined in other speeches; but if his policy, from whatever motive,
whether hatred, fear, panic or just sheer ignorance, is to destroy the
trusts in a way that will destroy all our property—no. Those men
who advocate wild and foolish remedies which would be worse than
the disease are doing all in their power to perpetuate the evils against
which they nominally war, because, if we are brought face to face with
the naked issue of either keeping or totally destroying a prosperity in
which the majority share, but in which some share improperly, why,
as sensible men, we must decide that it is a great deal better that Some
people should prosper too much than that no one should prosper
enough. So that the man who advocates destroying the trusts by
measures which would paralyze the industries of the country is at
least a quack, and at worst an enemy to the Republic.
In 1893 there was no trouble about anybody making too much
money. The trusts were down, but the trouble was that we were all
of us down. Nothing but harm to the whole body politic can come
from ignorant agitation, carried on partially against real evils, par-
tially against imaginary evils, but in a spirit which would substitute
for the real evils evils just as real and infinitely greater. Those men,
if they should succeed, could do nothing to bring about a solution of
the great problems with which we are concerned. If they could destroy
certain of the evils at the cost of overthrowing the well-being of the
entire country, it would mean merely that there would come a reaction
in which they and their remedies would be hopelessly discredited.
Now, it does not do anybody any good, and it will do most of us
a great deal of harm, to take steps which will check any proper growth
in a corporation. We wish not to penalize but to reward a great
captain of industry or the men banded together in a corporation who
have the business forethought and energy necessary to build up a great
industrial enterprise. Keep that in mind. A big corporation may be
doing excellent work for the whole country, and you want, above all
things, when striving to get a plan which will prevent wrong-doing by a
corporation which desires to do wrong, not at the same time to have
a scheme which will interfere with a corporation doing well, if that
corporation is handling itself honestly and squarely. What I am saying
ought to be treated as simple, elementary truths. The only reason
it is necessary to say them at all is that apparently some people for-
get them.
I believe something can be done by national legislation. When I
state that I ask you to note my words. I say I believe. It is not
in my power to say I know. When I talk to you of my own executive
duties I can tell you definitely what will and what will not be done.
I 30 Messages and Speeches
When I speak of the actions of any one else I can only say that I
believe something more can be done by national legislation. I believe
it will be done. I think we can get laws which will increase the
power of the Federal Government over corporations; if we can not,
then there will have to be an amendment to the Constitution of the
nation conferring additional power upon the Federal Government to
deal with corporations. To get that will be a matter of difficulty, and
a matter of time.
Let me interrupt here by way of illustration. You of the great war
recollect that about six weeks after Sumter had been fired on there
began to be loud clamor in the North among people who were not at
the front that you should go to Richmond; and there were any number
of people who told you how to go there. Then came Bull Run, and
a lot of those same people who a fortnight before had been yelling
“On to Richmond at once,” turned around and said the war was over.
All the hysteric brotherhood said so. But you didn’t think so. The
war was not over. It was not over for three years and nine months,
and then it was over the other way. And you got it over by setting
your faces steadily toward the goal, by not relying upon anything im-
possible, but by each doing everything possible that came in his line
to do, by each man doing his duty. You did not win by any patent
device; you won by the generalship of Grant and Sherman and Thomas
and Sheridan, and, above all, by the soldiership of the men who carried
the muskets and the sabres. It did not come as soon as you wanted,
and the men who said it would come at once did not help you much
either.
In dealing with any great problem in civil life, be it the trusts or
anything else, you are going to get along in just about the same fashion.
There is not any patent remedy for all the ills. All we can do is
to make up our minds definitely that we intend to find some method
by which we shall be able to tell, in the first place, what are the real
evils and what of the alleged evils are imaginary; in the next place,
what of those real evils it is possible to cure by legislation; and then
to cure them by legislation and by an honest administration of the
laws after they have been enacted. That statement of the problem will
never be attractive to the man who thinks that somehow, by turning
your hand, you are going to get a complete solution at once.
Grant’s plan of fighting it out on that line, if it took all summer,
was not attractive to the men who wanted it done in a week. But it
was the Only plan that won. The only way we can ever work out even
an approximately satisfactory solution of these great industrial prob-
lems, of which this so-called problem of the trusts is but one, is by
approaching them in a spirit which shall combine equally sanity and
self-restraint on the one hand and resolute purpose on the other.
Theodore Roosevelt I31
It is not given to me or to any one else to promise a perfect solution.
It is not given to me or to any one else to promise you even an
approximately perfect solution in a short time. But I think that we
can work out a very great improvement over the present conditions,
and the steps taken must, I am sure, be along these lines—along the
lines, in the first place, of getting power somewhere so that we shall
be able to say, the nation has power, let it use that power—and not
as it is at present, where it is out of the question to say exactly where
the power is.
We must get power first, then use that power fearlessly, but with
moderation. Let me say that again—with moderation, with sanity,
with self-restraint. The mechanism of modern business is altogether
too delicate and too complicated for us to sanction for One moment any
intermeddling with it in a spirit of ignorance, above all in a spirit of
rancor. Something can be done, something is being done now. Much
more can be done if our people resolutely but temperately will that
it shall be done. But the certain way of bringing great harm upon
ourselves, without in any way furthering the solution of the problem,
but, on the contrary, deferring indefinitely its proper solution, would
be to act in a spirit of ignorance, of violence, of rancor, in a spirit
which would make us tear down the temple of industry in which we
live because we are not satisfied with some of the details of its man-
agement.
I want, you to think of what I have said, because it represents all
of the sincerity and earnestness that I have, and I say to you here,
from this platform, nothing that I have not already stated in effect,
and nothing I would not say at a private table with any of the biggest
corporation managers in the land.
AT DALTON, MASS., SEPTEMBER 3, 1902.
Governor Crane, and you, my friends and fellow citizens:
It seems to me that in a town like this we not only have but ought
to have a better standard of citizenship and a more thorough appre-
ciation of the rights and duties of the individual citizen and of the
possibilities of government than in almost any other community. Here
is a town where you have both farming and manufacturing, where you
have on a small scale all the elements that go to make up the industrial
life of the nation as a whole—the capitalist and wage-earner, the
farmer and the hired man, merchant, men of the professions, you have
them all; you see the forces that have built up the nation and that are
at work in the nation, in play round about you in the farms, in the
factories, in the houses, right among your neighbors and friends. When
I32 Messages and Speeches
men live in a big city they lose touch with Qne another; they tend to
lose intimate touch with the government, and they get to speak of the
state, of the government, as something entirely apart from them.
Now, the government is us, here, you and me, and that ought to make
us understand on the one hand what we have a right to expect from
the government, and on the other hand what it is foolish to expect
from the government. We have a right to expect from it that it will
secure us against injustice; that so far as is humanly possible it will
secure for each man a fair chance; that it will do justice as between
man and man, and that it will not respect persons; that in that division
of the government dealing with justice each man shall stand abso-
lutely on his merits, not being discriminated for or against because of
his wealth or his poverty, because of anything but his own conduct.*
The government can take hold of certain functions which are in
the interest of the people as a whole. More than this the government
can not do or else does at the risk of doing it badly. The government
can not supply the lack in any man of the qualities which must determine
in the last resort the man's success or failure. Instead of “govern-
ment” say “the town.” Now what can the town do for you? A good
deal; but not nearly as much as you can do for it, not nearly as much
as you must do for yourself. The government can not make a man
a success in life.” If we would remember that and remember that when
we use the large terms of the government and nation, we only mean
the town on a large scale, there would be much less danger in our
thinking that perhaps by some queer patent device or some scheme,
the state, the government, the town, can supply the lack of indi-
vidual thrift, energy, enterprise, resolution. It can not supply such
lack. Something can be done by government, that is, by all of us
acting together to protect the rights of all, to accomplish certain things
for all. Something can be accomplished by helping one another. He
is a poor creature who does not give help generously when the chance
comes. But finally in the last resort the man who wins now will be
the man of the type who has won always, the man who can win for
himself. Do not make the mistake of thinking that it is possible ever to
call in any outside force to take the place of the man’s own individual
initiative, the man's individual capacity to do work worth doing.
AT WHEELING, W. V.A., SEPTEMBER 6, 1902.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is a pleasure to come here to your city. I wish to thank the Mayor,
and, through the Mayor, all of your citizens, for the way in which, upon
your behalf, he has greeted me; and I wish to state that it is a special
*President Roosevelt, like Ruskin, believes not only in Fair Play, but Fair Work.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt I33
pleasure to be introduced by my friend, Senator Scott. I have known
the Senator for some time, and I like him, because when he gives you
his word you don’t have to think about it again.
I am glad to have the chance of saying a few words here in this
great industrial center in one of those regions which have felt to a
notable degree the effects of the period of prosperity through which
we are now passing. Probably never before in our history has the
country been more prosperous than it is at this moment; and it is a
prosperity which has come alike to the tillers of the soil and to those
connected with our great industrial enterprises.
Every period has its own troubles and difficulties. A period of
adversity, of course, troubles us all; but there are troubles in connec-
tion with a period of prosperity also. When all things flourish it means
that there is a good chance for things that we don’t like to flourish
also, just exactly as things that we do like. A period of great national
material well-being is inevitably one in which men's minds are turned
to the way in which those flourish who are interested in the manage-
ment of the gigantic capitalistic corporations, whose growth has been
so noted a feature of the last half century—the corporations which we
have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts—accepting the word
in its usual and common significance as a big corporation usually
doing business in several States at least, besides the State in which it
is incorporated, and often, though not always, with some element of
monopoly in it.
It seems to me that in dealing with this problem of the trusts—per-
haps it would be more accurate to say the group of problems which
come into our minds when we think of the trusts—we have two classes
of our fellow-citizens whom we have to convert or over ride. One is
composed of those men who refuse to admit that there is any action
necessary at all. The other is composed of those men who advocate
some action so extreme, so foolish, that it would either be entirely non-
effective, or, if effective, would be so only by destroying everything,
good and bad, connected with our industrial development.
In every governmental process the aim that a people capable of self-
government should steadfastly keep in mind is to proceed by evolu-
tion rather than revolution. On the other hand, every people fit for self-
government must beware of that fossilization of mind which refuses
to allow of any change as conditions change. Now, in dealing with
the whole problem of the change in our great industrial civilization—
in dealing with the tendencies which have been accentuated in so
extraordinary a degree by steam and electricity, and by the tre-
mendous upbuilding of industrial centers which steam and electricity
have been the main factors in bringing about—I think we must set
before ourselves the desire not to accept less than the possible, and at
I 34 Messages and Speeches
the same time not to bring ourselves to a complete standstill by attempt-
ing the impossible. It is a good deal as it is in taking care, through
the engineers, of the lower Mississippi River. No one can dam the
Mississippi. If the nation started to dam it, the nation would waste
its time. It would not hurt the Mississippi, but it would not only
throw away its own means, but would incidentally damage the popu-
lation along the banks. You can’t dam the current. You can build
levees to keep the current within bounds and to shape its direction.
I think that is exactly what we can do in connection with these great
corporations known as trusts. We can not reverse the industrial
tendency of the age. If you succeed in doing it, then all cities like
Wheeling will have to go out of business. Remember that. You can
not put a stop to or reverse the industrial tendencies of the age, but
you can control and regulate them and see that they do no harm.
A flood comes down the Mississippi—you can’t stop it. If you
tried to build a dam across it, it would not hurt the flood, and it would
not benefit you. You can guide it between levees so as to prevent its
doing injury, and so as to ensure its doing good. Another thing: you
don’t build those levees in a day or in a month. A man who told you
that he had a patent device by which in sixty days he would solve
the whole question of the floods along the lower Mississippi would
not be a wise man; but he would be a perfect miracle of wisdom com-
pared to the man who tells you that by any one patent remedy he can
bring the millennium in our industrial and social affairs.
We can do something; I believe we can do a good deal, but our
accomplishing what I expect to see accomplished is conditioned upon
our setting to work in a spirit as far removed as possible from hysteria—
a spirit of sober, steadfast, kindly—I want to emphasize that—kindly
determination not to submit to wrong ourselves and not to wrong
others, not to interfere with the great business development of the
country, and at the same time so to shape our legislation and admin-
istration as to minimize, if we can not eradicate, the unpleasant and
vicious features connected with that industrial development. I have
said that there can be no patent remedy. There is not any one thing
which can be done to remove all of the existing evils, There are a
good many things which, if we do them all, will, I believe, make a
very appreciable betterment in the existing conditions. To do that is
not to make a promise that will evoke wild enthusiasm, but a promise
that can be kept; and in the long run it is much more comfortable
only to make promises that can be kept than to make promises which
are sure of an immense reception when made, but which entail intoler-
able humiliation when it is attempted to carry them out.
I am sufficiently fortunate to be advocating now, as President,
precisely the remedies that I advocated two years ago—advocating
Theodore Roosevelt I35
them not in any partisan spirit, because, gentlemen, this problem is one
which affects the life of the nation as a whole—but advocating them
simply as the American citizen who, for the time being, stands as the
Chief Executive and, therefore, the special representative of his fellow-
American citizens of all parties.
A century and a quarter ago there had been no development of
industry such as to make it a matter of the least importance whether
the nation or the State had charge of the great corporations or super-
vised the great business and industrial organizations. A century and
a quarter ago, here at Wheeling, commerce was carried on by pack
train, by wagon train, by boat. That was the way it was carried on
throughout the whole civilized world—oars and sails, wheeled vehicles
and beasts of burden—those were the means of carrying on commerce
at the end of the eighteenth century, when this country became a
nation.
There had been no radical change, no essential change, in the means
of carrying on commerce from the days when the Phoenician galleys
plowed the waters of the Mediterranean. For four or five thousand
years, perhaps longer, from the immemorial past when Babylon and
Nineveh stood in Mesopotamia, when Thebes and Memphis were
mighty in the valley of the Nile—from that time on through the
supremacy of Greece and of Rome, through the upbuilding of the great
trading cities like Venice and Genoa in Italy; like the cities of the
Rhine and the Netherlands in Northern Europe—on through the period
of the great expansion of European civilization which followed the
voyages of Columbus and Vasco da Gama, down to the time when
this country became a nation—the means of commercial intercourse
remained substantially unchanged. Those means, therefore, limited
narrowly what could be done by any corporation, the growth that could
take place in any community.
Suddenly, during our own lifetime as a nation—a lifetime trivial in
duration compared to the period of recorded history—there came a
revolution in the means of intercourse which made a change in com-
merce, and in all that springs from commerce, in industrial develop-
ment, greater than all the changes of the preceding thousands of years.
A greater change in the means of commerce of mankind has taken
place since Wheeling was founded, since the first settlers built their
log huts in the great forests on the banks of this river, than in all
the previous period during which man had led an existence that can
be called civilized. {
Through the railway, the electric telegraph, and other developments,
steam and electricity worked a complete revolution. This has meant,
of course, that entirely new problems have sprung up. You have
right in this immediate neighborhood a very much larger population
136 Messages and Speeches
than any similar region in all the United States held when the Con-
tinental Congress began its sessions; and the change in industrial
conditions has been literally immeasurable. Those changed conditions
need a corresponding change in the governmental agencies necessary
for their regulation and supervision.
Such agencies were not provided, and could not have been pro-
vided, in default of a knowledge of prophecy by the men who founded
the Republic. In those days each State could take care perfectly well
of any corporations within its limits, and all it had to do was to try
to encourage their upbuilding. Now the big corporations, although
nominally the creatures of one State, usually do business in other
States, and in a very large number of cases the wide variety of State
laws on the subject of corporations has brought about the fact that
the corporation is made in one State, but does almost all its work in
entirely different States.
It has proved utterly impossible to get anything like uniformity of
legislation among the States. Some States have passed laws about
corporations which, if they had not been ineffective, would have totally
prevented any important corporate work being done within their limits.
Other States have such lax laws that there is no effective effort made
to control any of the abuses.
As a result we have a system of divided control—where the nation
has something to say, but it is a little difficult to know exactly how
much, and where the different States have something to say, but where
there is no supreme power that can speak with authority. It is, of
course, a mere truism to say that every corporation, the smallest as well
as the largest, is the creature of the State. Where the corporation is
small there is very little need of exercising much supervision over it, but
the stupendous corporations of the present day certainly should be under
governmental supervision and regulation. The first effort to make
is to give somebody the power to exercise that supervision, that regu-
lation. We have already laws on the statute books. Those laws will
be enforced, and are being enforced, with all the power of the National
Government, and wholly without regard to persons. But the power is
very limited. Now I want you to take my words at their exact value.
I think—I can not say I am sure, because it has often happened in
the past that Congress has passed a law with a given purpose in view,
and when that law has been judicially interpreted it has proved that
the purpose was not achieved—but I think that by legislation addi-
tional power in the way of regulation of at least a number of these
great corporations can be conferred. But, gentlemen, I firmly believe
that in the end power must be given to the National Government to
exercise in full supervision and regulation of these great enterprises,
Theodore Roosevelt I37
and, if necessary, a Constitutional amendment must be resorted to for
this purpose.
That is not new doctrine for me. That is the doctrine that I advo-
cated on the stump two years ago. Some of my ultra-conservative
friends have professed to be greatly shocked at my advocating it now.
I would czplain to those gentlemen, once for all, that they err when-
ever they think that I advocate on the stump anything that I will not
try to put into effect after election. The objection is made that working
along these lines will take time. So it will. Let me go back to my
illustration of the Mississippi River. It took time to build the levees,
but we built them. And if we have the proper intelligence, the proper
resolution, and the proper self-restraint, we can work out the solution
along the lines that I have indicated. Thus, the first thing is to give
the National Government the power. All the power that is given. I
can assure you, will be used in a spirit as free as possible from rancor
of any kind, but with the firmest determination to make big man and
little man alike obey the law.
What we need first is power. Having gotten the power, remember
the work won’t be ended—it will be only fairly begun. And let me say
again and again and again that you will not get the millennium—the
millennium is some way off yet. But you will be in a position to make
long strides in advance in the direction of securing a juster, fairer,
wiser management of many of these corporations, both as regards the
general public and as regards their relationship among themselves and
to the investing public. When we have the power I most earnestly
hope, and should most earnestly advocate, that it be used with the
greatest wisdom and self-restraint.
The first thing to do would be to find out the facts. For that purpose
I am absolutely clear that we need publicity—that we need it not as
a matter of favor from any one corporation, but as a matter of right,
secured through the agents of the Government, from all the corpora-
tions concerned. The mere fact of the publicity itself will tend to
stop many of the evils, and it will show that some other alleged evils
are imaginary, and finally in making evident the remaining evils—
those that are not imaginary and that are not cured by the simple
light of day—it will give us an intelligent appreciation of the methods
to take in getting at them. We should have, under such circum-
stances, One Sovereign to whom the big corporations should be
responsible—a sovereign in whose courts a corporation could be held
accountable for any failure to comply with the laws of the legislature
of that sovereign. I do not think you can accomplish that among the
forty-six sovereigns of the States. I think that it will have to be
through the National Government.
138 Messages and Speeches
}
AT PITTSFIELD, MASS., SEPTEMBER 3, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my friends and fellow citizens:
It is a pleasure to be with you today. I thank you for your greeting,
and I thank you personally, Mr. Mayor, for the kindly and gracious
words in which you have phrased that greeting, and while thanking
you again for the way you have come out to meet me I know you will
not grudge my saying that I am particularly touched and pleased at
having as a guard of honor the veterans of the great war. It was not
given to us to prove our material in the great struggle; all we could
do was to show that we had the desire in us to follow in your footsteps
when the day arose, and I have been particularly pleased with one
incident in connection with the presence of the veterans today. It was
a pleasure to shake hands with Father Boyle, carrying the button of
the Loyal Legion, with Chaplain Walkley, just returned from the Phil-
ippines, and to see my old friend, the Rev. Dr. Sawyer, marching in the
ranks with you. And I was glad to see them, not only for the feeling
of personal friendship, but because it is a good thing to show that the
church, that religion—all that we may mean when we speak of these
terms—that they are included in the service rendered by you and thus,
like you, my comrades, the men who fought in the great war, whose
example we followed, not only give us lessons in soldiership, lessons
only to be applied in the great crisis, but they give us lessons in sound
citizenship.
Here in this community, built up by the industry and the business
capacity of your people, it is well to remember that need of the qualities
which make our material prosperity. We want to remember that... We
want to keep in mind the fact that our material well-being must stand
as a foundation of the mere well-being, but we must remember also
that the foundation is not the building, that the foundation by itself
counts only with reference to the structure raised upon it. When in
'6I mighty Abraham Lincoln summoned you to war, it was a necessary
thing that this country should have all that material prosperity, that
it should have spread over forest, prairie and plain, that there should be
in it the mills and the railroads and the factories, that there should
be wealth and what wealth could command at the country's call, but
the important thing is not the wealth, not the material well-being, but
the men of the country. You it was who counted and who did the
deed; you did it because you felt in your hearts, deep in your hearts,
that there was something for you more important than any material
well-being. You gave up all thoughts of ease for scanty pay, you
showed yourselves willing to lay down your lives because in your souls
was the spirit that the men of the great war showed in the time of
war, and now we must show it in the time of peace. The qualities that
Theodore Roosevelt I39
make good citizenship in their essentials are very much the qualities
that make good soldiership. There are exceptions, of course, but as a
rule the man who is a good soldier is a good citizen, because you need
him in every part of life, you need the qualities of courage, of loyalty,
of capacity for companionship, of the spirit of honest dealing as between
man and man; these are the qualities which the best soldier must
1nevitably have, and, gentlemen, here are two lessons especially taught
by the men who triumphed in the long contest from 1861 to 1865—the
laws of importance of the individual qualities and the laws of brother-
hood. The gun was important, but it was the man behind the gun that
counted. You were drilled in different tactics from those under which
the men wore the blue and buff in the Continental Army of
Washington, your weapons were different from theirs, but the spirit
which drove you on was the same, and so with our younger genera-
tions, we, who if called to war, must fight in open order, not elbow
touch, but in the open, with smokeless powder, high-caliber rifles, with
weapons of great force as compared to those of our forefathers, but
even then we should make a poor fight of it if we did not have the same
spirit back of us, the same spirit in it. The qualities which make a
good soldier now, that made them in '61, that made them in '76, are
fundamentally the same. g
You have got to have the man, a man who is able to take a man's
part in the world, and so now in civil life we have to face the problem
of complex citizenship, a much more complex life than the life our fore-
fathers led. There is need for new laws here and there. In the Con-
stitution there is need for a certain shifting of the part that the State
can play in the affairs of the individual, but in the last resort the
qualities that a man, a good citizen, possessed in the days when the
Constitution was adopted under the leadership of George Washington;
in the days when the Constitution and the country were preserved
under the laws of Abraham Lincoln, these are the qualities you need
to make a good citizen now.
There is no patent device that will take the place of them now. No
law, no scheme, will avail the country if there is not the high average
of citizenship behind the law. Just so it is in war. We need good
weapons. It always irritates me to see any member of a National Guard
armed with a black powder musket. I want to see all of our people
with the best modern weapons, because it is an outrage for a great and
rich country like ours not to provide the American who wears Uncle
Sam's uniform, whether in the regular army, the volunteer, the National
Guards—it is an outrage not to give him a weapon as good as that
carried by any fighting man in the world.
I want to see the best weapon given, but the best weapon by itself
is not anything like enough. If the man who carries the best weapon
I4O Messages and Speeches
is no good, he will be beaten by a good man with a club. You want
a good weapon, but you need a good man to carry the weapon.
That is the last resort. Just so we need good laws and a good Con-
stitution, but in the final resort what we need most is good citizenship.
By a good citizen, I mean the man who understands both his rights
and his duties. The man who only talks of his rights and not of his
duties is not a good citizen. If he does not understand that duty goes
hand in hand with the right, and if he does not understand that each
of us must help each other; must show the brotherhood, must always
try to help a brother who stumbles, yet, that under no circumstances
must he forget that in the last analysis each man shall be saved by his
own character and his own capacity, and above all, by the three in-
dispensable qualities: the quality of honesty, the quality of courage, and
the quality of common sense.
[The Springfield Daily Republican, Springfield, Mass., Sept. 3, 1902.]
TO THE BROTHERHOOD OF LOCOMOTIVE FIREMEN, CHATTA-
NOOGA, TENN., SEPTEMBER 8, 1902.
Mr. Grand Master, Governor McMillan, Mr. Mayor, my brothers,
my fellow citizens: 3.
I am glad to be here today. I am glad to come as the guest of the
Brotherhood. Let me join with you, the members of the Brotherhood
of this country, in extending a most cordial welcome to our fellows
from Canada and Mexico. The fact that we are good Americans only
makes us all the better men, all the more desirous of seeing good
fortune to all mankind. I needed no pressing to accept the invitation
tendered through you, Mr. Hannahan, and through Mr. Arnold to
come to this meeting. I have always admired greatly the railroad men
of the country, and I do not see how any one who believes in what I
regard as the fundamental virtues of citizenship can fail to do so. I
want to see the average American a good man, an honest man, and a
man who can handle himself, and does handle himself, well under
difficulties. The last time I ever saw General Sherman, I dined at his
house, and we got to talking over the capacity of different types of
soldiers, and the General happened to say that if ever there were another
war, and he were to have a command, he should endeavor to get as
many railroad men as possible under him. I asked him why, and he
said, “Because on account of their profession they have developed
certain qualities which are essential in a soldier.” In the first place,
they are accustomed to taking risks. There are a great many men who
are naturally brave, but who, being entirely unaccustomed to risks, are
at first appalled by them. Railroad men are accustomed to enduring
hardship ; they are accustomed to irregular hours; they are accus-
Theodore Roosevelt I4 I
tomed to act on their own responsibility, on their own initiative, and
yet they are accustomed to obeying orders quickly. There is not any-
thing more soul-harrowing for a man in time of war, or for a man
engaged in a difficult job in time of peace, than to give an order and
have the gentleman addressed say “What?” The railroad man has to
learn that when an order is issued there may be but a fraction of a
second in which to obey it. He has to learn that orders are to be
obeyed, and, on the other hand, that there will come plenty of crises
in which there will be no orders to be obeyed, and he will have to act
for himself. & *
Those are all qualities that go to the very essence of good soldiership,
and I am not surprised at what General Sherman said. In raising my
own regiment, which was raised mainly in the Southwest, partly in
the Territory in which Mr. Sargent himself served as a soldier at one
time—in Arizona—I got a number of railroad men. Of course, the
first requisite was that a man should know how to shoot and how to
ride. We were raising the regiment in a hurry, and we did not have
time to teach him either. He had to know how to handle a horse and
how to handle a rifle, to start with. But given the possession of those
two qualities, I found that there was no group of our citizens from
whom better men could be drawn to do a soldier's work in a tight place
and at all times than the railroad men.
But, gentlemen, the period of war is but a fractional part of the life
of our Republic, and I earnestly hope and believe that it will be an
even smaller part in the future than it has been in the past. It was
the work that you have done in time of peace that especially attracted
me to you, that made me anxious to come down here and see you,
and that made me glad to speak to you, not for what I can tell you,
but for the lesson it seems to me can be gained by all of our people
from what you have done.
At the opening of the twentieth century we face conditions vastly
changed from what they were in this country and throughout the
world a century ago. Our complex industrial civilization under which
progress has been so rapid, and in which the changes for good have
been so great, has also inevitably seen the growth of certain tendencies
that are not for good, or at least that are not wholly for good; and
we in consequence, as a people, like the rest of civilized mankind,
find set before us for solution during the coming century problems
which need the best thought of all of us, and the most earnest desire
of all to solve them well if we expect to work out a solution satisfac-
tory to our people, a solution for the advantage of the nation. In
facing these problems, it must be a comfort to every well-wisher of
the nation to see what has been done by your organization. I believe
emphatically in organized labor. I believe in organizations of wage-
I42 Messages and Speeches
workers. Organization is one of the laws of our social and economic
development at this time. But I feel that we must always keep before
our minds the fact that there is nothing sacred in the name itself.
To call an organization an organization does not make it a good One.
The worth of an organization depends upon its being handled with the
courage, the skill, the wisdom, the spirit of fair dealing as between man
and man, and the wise self-restraint which, I am glad to be able to
say, your Brotherhood has shown. You now number close upon
44,OOO members. During the two years ending June 30 last you paid in
to the general and beneficiary funds close upon a million and a half
dollars. More than six and one-half millions have been paid in since
the starting of the insurance clause in the constitution—have been
paid to disabled members and their beneficiaries. Over fifty per cent
of the amount paid was paid on account of accidents. Gentlemen, that
is a sufficient commentary upon the kind of profession which is yours.
You face death and danger in time of peace, as in time of war the
men wearing Uncle Sam's uniform must face them.
Your work is hard. Do you suppose I mention that because I pity
you? No; not a bit. I don’t pity any man who does hard work
worth doing. I admire him. I pity the creature who doesn’t work,
at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being.
The law of worthy work well done is the law of successful American
life. I believe in play, too—play, and play hard while you play; but
don’t make the mistake of thinking that that is the main thing. The
work is what counts, and if a man does his work well and it is worth
doing, then it matters but little in which line that work is done; the
man is a good American citizen. If he does his work in slip-shod
fashion, then no matter what kind of work it is, he is a poor American
citizen. &
I speak to the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen, but what I
say applies to all railroad men—not only to the engineers who have
served an apprenticeship as firemen, to the conductors, who, as a rule,
have served an apprenticeship as brakemen, but to all the men of all
the organizations connected with railroad work. I know you do not
grudge my saying that, through you, I am talking to all the railroad
men of the country. You, in your organization as railroad men, have
taught two lessons: the lesson of how much can be accomplished by
organization, by mutual self-help of the type that helps another in the
Only way by which, in the long run, that is, by teaching him to help
himself. You teach the benefits of organization, and you also teach
the indispensable need of keeping absolutely unimpaired the faculty
of individual initiative, the faculty by which each man brings himself
to the highest point of perfection by exercising the special qualities with
which he is himself endowed. The Brotherhood has developed to
Theodore Roosevelt I43
this enormous extent since the days, now many years ago, when the
first little band came together; and it has developed, not by crushing
out individual initiative, but by developing it, by combining many in-
dividual initiatives.
The Brotherhood of Firemen does much for all firemen, but I firmly
believe that the individual fireman since the growth of the Brother-
hood has been more, not less, efficient than he was twenty years ago.
Membership in the Brotherhood comes, as I understand it, after a
nine months’ probationary period; after a man has shown his worth,
he is then admitted and stands on his footing as a brother. Now,
any man who enters with the purpose of letting the Brotherhood
carry him is not worth much. The man who counts in the Brother-
hood is the man who pulls his own weight and a little more. Much
can be done by the Brotherhood. I have just hinted in the general
figures I gave you, at how much has been done, but it still remains true
in the Brotherhood, and everywhere else throughout American life,
that in the last resort nothing can supply the place of the man's Own
individual qualities. We need those, no matter how perfect the organi-
zation is outside. There is just as much need of nerve, hardihood,
power to face risks and accept responsibilities, in the engineer and
the fireman, whether on a flyer or a freight train, now as there ever
was. Much can be done by the Association. A great deal can be
accomplished by working each for all and all for each; but we must
not forget that the first requisite in accomplishing that is that each
man should work for others by working for himself, by developing
his own capacity.
The steady way in which a man can rise is illustrated by a little thing
that happened yesterday. I came down here over the Queen and
Crescent Railroad, and the General Manager, who handled my train
and who handled yours, was Mr. Maguire. I used to know him in the
old days when he was on his way up, and he began right at the bot-
tom. He was a fireman at one time. He worked his way straight up,
and now he is General Manager.
I believe so emphatically in your organization because, while it
teaches the need of working in union, of working in association, of
working with deep in our hearts, not merely on our lips, the sense of
Brotherhood, yet of necessity it still keeps, as your organization always
must keep, to the forefront the worth of the individual qualities of a
man. I said to you that I came here in a sense not to speak to you,
but to use your experience as an object-lesson for all of us, an object-
lesson in good American citizenship. All professions, of course, do
not call for the exercise to the same degree of the qualities of which
I have spoken. Your profession is one of those which I am inclined
to feel play in modern life a greater part from the standpoint of char-
I44 Messages and Speeches
acter than we entirely realize. There is in modern life, with the
growth of civilization and luxury, a certain tendency to softening of
the national fibre. There is a certain tendency to forget, in conse-
quence of their disuse, the rugged virtues which lie at the back of
manhood; and I feel that professions like yours, like the profession
of the railroad men of the country, have a tonic effect upon the whole
body politic.
It is a good thing that there should be a large body of our fellow-
citizens—that there should be a profession—whose members must, year
in and year out, display those old, old qualities of courage, daring, reso-
lution, unflinching willingness to meet danger at need. I hope to see
all our people develop the softer, gentler virtues to an ever increasing .
degree, but I hope never to see them lose the sterner virtues that make
1 ſie]]. 11162]].
A man is not going to be a fireman or an engineer, or serve well
in any other capacity on a railroad long if he has a “streak of yellow”
in him. You are going to find it out, and he is going to be painfully
conscious of it, very soon. It is a fine thing for our people that we
should have those qualities in evidence before us in the life-work of
a big group of our citizens. ë.
In American citizenship, we can succeed permanently only upon
the basis of standing shoulder to shoulder, working in association, by
organization, each working for all, and yet remembering that we
need each so to shape things that each man can develop to best ad-
vantage all the forces and powers at his command. In your organiza-
tion you accomplish much by means of the Brotherhood, but you ac-
complish it because of the men who go to make up that Brotherhood.
If you had exactly the organization, exactly the laws, exactly the
system, and yet were yourselves a poor set of men, the system would
not save you. I will guarantee that, from time to time, you have men
go in to try to serve for the nine months who prove that they do not
have the stuff in them out of which you can make good men. You
have to have the stuff in you, and, if you have the stuff, you can make
Out of it a much finer man by means of the association—but you must
have the material out of which to make it. So it is in citizenship.
And now let me say a word, speaking not merely especially to the
Brotherhood, but to all our citizens. Governor McMillan, Mr. Mayor:
I fail to see how any American can come to Chattanooga and go over
the great battle-fields in the neighborhood—the battle-fields here in
this State and just across the border in my mother's State of Georgia—
how any American can come here and see evidences of the mighty
deeds done by the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the
gray, and not go away a better American, prouder of the country,
prouder because of the valor displayed on both sides in the contest
Theodore Roosevelt I45
—the valor, the self-devotion, the loyalty to the right as each side saw
the right. Yesterday I was presented with a cane cut from the Chicka-
mauga battle-field by some young men of Northern Georgia. On
the cane were engraved the names of three Union generals and three
Confederate generals. One of those Union generals was at that time
showing me over the battle-field—General Boynton. Under one of
the Confederate generals—General Wheeler—I myself served. In my
regiment there served under, me in the ranks a son of General Hood,
who commanded at one time the Confederate army against General
Sherman. The only captain whom I had the opportunity of promoting
to field rank, and to whom the promotion was given for gallantry
On the field, was Micah Jenkins, of South Carolina, the son of a Con-
federate general, whose name you will find recorded among those who
fought at Chickamauga.
Two of my best captains were killed at Santiago—one was Allyn
Capron, the fifth in line who, from father to son, had served in the
regular army of the United States, who had served in every war in
which our country had been engaged; the other, Bucky O’Neill. His
father had fought under Maher, when, on the day at Fredericksburg,
his brigade left more men under the stone wall than did any other
brigade. I had in my regiment men from the North and the South;
men from the East and the West; men whose fathers had fought
under Grant, and whose fathers had fought under Lee; college grad-
uates, capitalists' sons, wage-workers, the man of means and the man
who all his life had owed each day's bread to the day's toil. I had
Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and Gentile under me. Among my captains
were men whose forefathers had been among the first white men to
settle on Massachusetts Bay and on the banks of the James, and others
whose parents had come from Germany, from Ireland, from England,
from France. They were all Americans, and nothing else, and each
man stood on his worth as a man, to be judged by it, and to succeed
or fail accordingly as he did well or ill. Compared to the giant death-
wrestles that reeled over the mountains round about this city the
fight at Santiago was the merest skirmish; but the spirit in which
we handled ourselves there, I hope was the spirit in which we have to
face our duties as citizens if we are to make this Republic what it
must be made.
Yesterday, in passing over the Chickamauga battle-field, I was im-
mensely struck by the monument raised by Kentucky to the Union
and Confederate soldiers from Kentucky who fell on that battle-field.
The inscription reads as follows: “As we are united in life, and they
united in death, let one monument perpetuate their deeds, and one
people, forgetful of all asperities, forever hold in grateful remembrance
all the glories of that terrible conflict which made all men free and
I46 Messages and Speeches
retained every star on the nation’s flag.” That is a good sentiment.
That is a sentiment by which we can all stand. And oh, my friends!
what does that sentiment have as its underlying spirit? The spirit
of brotherhood |
I firmly believe in my countrymen, and therefore I believe that the
chief thing necessary in order that they shall work together is that
they shall know one another—that the Northerner shall know the
Southerner, and the man of one occupation know the man of another
Occupation; the man who works in one walk of life know the man
who works in another walk of life, so that we may realize that the
things which divide us are superficial, are unimportant, and that we
are, and must ever be, knit together into one indissoluble mass by our
common American brotherhood.
AT DANVILLE, VA., SEPTEMBER 9, 1902.
My fellow citizens:
I did not expect to have the chance of speaking to any of you of
Virginia on this trip. I only wish it had been my good fortune to
be able to go through your grand and beautiful historic State by day-
light. But you have not escaped me, gentlemen; I am going to come
again.
Yesterday and to-day I spent in Tennessee and North Carolina. I
have enjoyed much those two days. It is a good thing for any Amer-
ican, and it is an especially good thing for the American who happens
to be President at any time, to go around the country and meet
his fellow-Americans of different sections and different States. The
more he sees of his fellow-Americans the more he will realize that
the differences which divide them are trivial and that the likenesses
which unite them are fundamental. A good American is a good
American wherever he is, and a bad American is a poor one wherever
he is. If a man is a decent citizen, if he does his duty to his family,
to his neighbors, to the State and the nation, as a decent man ought
to, then he is a man who has a right to claim kinship and comrade-
ship with every other decent American from one end of this country
to the other. If he is a straight man he is a credit to all of us, and if
he is a crooked man he is a disgrace to all of us. Fundamentally,
for weal or for woe, we are knit together; we shall go up or go down
together. If hard times come they come without much regard to
State lines. If good times come they come without regard to State
lines. Wherever a deed is done by an American which reflects credit
upon our country, each of us can walk with his head a little higher in
consequence; and wherever anything happens through the fault of
any of us that is discreditable it discredits all of us more or less.
Theodore Roosevelt I47
Gentlemen and ladies, I thank you greatly for having come down
here to greet me. It is a genuine pleasure to see you. No man of
the United States, proud of the history of the United States, can fail
to feel certain associations of reverence and regard awakened when
he treads the soil of Virginia, which has taken so leading a part in
peace and in war throughout our history.
AT ASHEVILLE, N. C., SEPTEMBER 9, 1902.
It was not far from here as we measure distances in America that
the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was formulated. The
gentleman who introduced me spoke of the great deeds of the men who
in the Revolutionary War followed Marion and McDowell. My fore-
fathers fought under Marion. My forefathers fought with the Georgia
and South Carolina troops, who battled throughout the dark days
when Cornwallis and the red dragoons of Tarleton overran the
Southern states. They were present at King’s Mountain, at the
Cowpens, and they saw the final triumph when the men in blue and
buff who followed Greene wrested victory out of defeat, and when at
last the flag of the thirteen United States, which had been the thirteen
colonies, waved without a rival along the coast and along the foot-
hills of the mountains.
It has been a great and peculiar pleasure to be greeted as I was
to-day by the men who served in the Confederate Army. Yesterday
and to-day I traveled through a region which sent its sons, some to
wear the blue, some to wear the gray, all to serve with courage and
self-devotion the right as it was given to each to see the right.* The
day before yesterday I went over to the battlefields of Chickamauga
and of Chattanooga, over that space of territory which saw for two
months one of the gigantic death wrestles of the Civil War, the terri-
tory partly in Tennessee, partly in my mother's state of Georgia, and
I feel that the man would be but a poor American who did not come
from the scenes commemorating the valiant deeds of those armies a
better American than when he started.
While I was there a delegation of young men from the state of
Georgia came to present me a cane cut from the battlefield, with the
names of three Union generals and three Confederate generals on it.
One of the Union generals, General Boynton, was showing me around
*Judge Jones of Asheville told me how once when President Roosevelt was Civil Service
Commissioner he made a speech in which he paid tribute to the courage of the Confederate
soldier. This impressed the Judge to a point where he wrote the young orator a letter, saying:
“As a Southern man, I want to thank you,” etc.
“I got a very kind reply,” said Judge Jones, “but there was one line in it that I always
remembered and which the whole career of President Roosevelt has borne out. ‘For myself,’
said he in the letter, “I am neither a Southern man nor a Northern man; I’m a United
States man.’”—A. H. L.
I48 Messages and Speeches
the field. One of the Confederate generals, General “Joe” Wheeler,
had been my chief in the Spanish war. Yesterday we stopped at a
little station in Tennessee and among those who gathered to greet
me was an old fellow who had worn the gray. He said: “I was one
of Wheeler's boys.” I said, “So was I.”
Oh, my friends, the lesson of brotherhood, the lesson that is taught
by such a greeting as I am receiving at this moment, the lesson that
is taught whenever you see valiant and true men who wore the blue
meet valiant and true men who wore the gray and strike hands with
them, that lesson applies through all our mational life, and it applies
just as much in forming a judgment between class and class as be-
tween section and section. We never can succeed in making this
country what it can and shall be made until we work together, not
primarily as Northerners or Southerners, Easterners or Westerners,
not primarily as an employee or employer, townsmen or countrymen,
capitalist or wageworkers, but primarily as American citizens to whom
the right of brotherly friendship and comradeship with all other decent
American citizens comes as the greatest of privileges. We need good
laws, we need honest and upright administration of the laws, but
we need as the fundamental prerequisite for good government a high
average standard of good citizenship in the men who make the laws
and stand back of them.
If a man is not decent, then the abler he is the more dangerous he
is to the community. In the Revolutionary War one of the bravest
and most brilliant soldiers during the early years of the contest was
the man who has left his name as a byword of infamy to the nations
for all time; the man who fought with distinguished gallantry in
Canada; the man who led all the American forces in the great de-
cisive battle at Saratoga. That man, with all his courage, all his dar-
ing, all his superb military genius, turned because the root of right-
eousness was not in him; sought to betray his comrades for money, and
left the name of Benedict Arnold as a hissing for evermore.
In civil life the danger is not so patent, but it is just as great if
ability is not accompanied by a rightful sense of accountability to
the moral law. In addition to honesty and decency you must have
courage. I want to see every one be a good man, and in addition to
that I want to see him a man. We must have the manly virtue deeply
imbedded as part of our national characteristics if we are to do our
work aright in peace or in war.
Theodore Roosevelt I49
AT MUSIC HALL, CINCINNATI, ON THE AFTERNOON OF SEPTEM-
BER 20, 1902.
Governor Gordon, Mr. Mayor, Senator Foraker and you, the Captains
of Industry, and you, my fellow Aſnericans, men and women of this
great and beautiful city:
I am glad indeed to have the chance to come out to this festival, this
industrial exposition, held here in your great city—one of those ex-
positions called “the timekeepers of progress”—by the great states-
man and patriot whom Ohio claims, but whom the nation claims
no less, the martyred President, William McKinley, and whose memory
the nation will ever keep in its heart as a symbol of that public and
private virtue which lies under all national greatness.
Cincinnati is a city which by its name commemorates the organiza-
tion of the officers of the Revolutionary army—the organization which
was the Loyal Legion of the men in blue and buff who followed Wash-
ington. Cincinnati stands on the site of the great frontier fort, the
log fort, raised to protect our frontier against the Indians at a time
when this nation expanded, and Cincinnati stands in that Northwest,
which is to a peculiar degree the property of all the nation, for it is
in that Northwest Territory organized under the famous Ordinance
of 1787 which consecrated this portion of the Union forever to free-
dom, so that it was most fitting that this part of the country which
is the Old Northwest, which is now the Central West, the center of
the country, should by virtue of the conditions under which it was
created and grew, become when the crisis of ’61 was upon us the
leader in the great struggle for the Union and for freedom.
Cincinnati is prospering marvelously, and under the theory of our
National Government, which was invoked when this country became a
part of the nation, the nation must continue to do its part in helping
secure the prosperity of Cincinnati and of the entire Ohio Valley by
seeing that the policy of the improvement of the Ohio River is con-
tinued. *
Our Government is a practical exemplification of the great principle
of each for all and all for each. The whole country is benefited by
whatever benefits one part. This Valley of the Ohio, this valley which
includes the drainage basins of portions of some thirteen states, is one
of the great seats of the future industry, not only of this country, but
of the world, and it is to the interest of all the country to see you
prosper; and you will prosper even more than at present as the great
waterways are made more accessible to larger vessels from here to
the gulf, and that will take place coincidently with the beginning of
the great work which is to connect the Pacific and the Atlantic by
an Isthmian Canal—a work destined to be one of the giant per-
I5O Messages and Speechcs
formances, one of the giant material works of the twentieth century—
a work surpassing in magnitude anything of the kind that has ever
before been attempted in the history of mankind. And yet, my fellow
countrymen, in speaking of your material prosperity, do not think that
I forget for one moment the fundamental fact that this great material
prosperity rests upon the intellectual and moral fiber of the men and
women back of it. You have a marvelously fertile region, you have
a great river, but the main thing that you have is the spirit of your
citizens. That is what counts most.
Natural advantages are nothing but opportunities, and you must
have the men to take advantage of them or they will be wasted oppor-
tunities.
In the end a community depends for success upon the average
standard of efficiency and decency of its citizenship. The conditions
change from decade to decade. You, the heads of the industries which
have brought about the prosperity of this city, work under different
conditions from those under which your forefathers worked; but after
all, in the last analysis the qualities that brought success in their day
are the qualities needed to secure success now. That is true of peace
as it was true of war. I passed through the ranks of the veterans,
your comrades, Senator Foraker, on the way up here—the ranks of
those who fought in a war in which striplings who had yet to go to
college went in the ranks and came back with commissions, and, Senator
Foraker, your son and I fought in a very small war afterward. Now,
the men of the Civil War, the men who followed Grant and Sherman
and Thomas and Sheridan, were differently armed from the men
who followed Washington and Mad Anthony Wayne in 1776 to 1782;
they were drilled in different tactics, but the spirit that drove them to
victory was the same. We saw Appomattox crown the four years
of doubtful struggle in 1865, because the men who wore the blue
that followed Grant had in them the same lofty and generous action
that those had who, under Washington, saw the six years of the Revo-
lutionary struggle end in the victory at Yorktown.
And now, should there happen, which I not only earnestly hope,
but believe, never will happen, should this country ever become en-
gaged in another serious war, the tactics will be different, the weapons
used will be small caliber, high power, smokeless powder rifles;
there will be no longer the old elbow to elbow touch; the fighting
must be in open order; the drill will be different, too. If victory comes
it will come because the sons have in them the stuff out of which
the sires were made. Back of the material, and greater than the
material, lies the moral. You have won here in peace, we as a nation
have won in peace, because we have achieved the material success
that has raised us so high through the development of the individual
Theodore Roosevelt I5 I
character of the individual citizen. Intellect is a good thing; bodily
strength is a good thing; but what counts in the long run is character—
character into which enter as the fundamental elements honesty, courage
and common sense. So, Governor Gordon, in thanking you for giv-
ing me the chance to be present to-day and to greet these, the busi-
ness men of Cincinnati, I congratulate you and them. I congratulate
your great and mighty city upon its past, upon its future, upon its
material well being, and, above all, upon that upon which its well being
depends, upon the qualities of character that make good and strong
citizenship everywhere in this our land.
[Cincinnati Enquirer, Sept. 21, 1902.]
AT MUSIC HALL, CINCINNATI, O., ON THE EVENING OF SEPTEM-
BER 20, 1902.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow Americans:
I shall ask your attention to what I say to-night, because I intend to
make a perfectly serious argument to you, and I shall be obliged if
you will remain as still as possible; and I ask that those at the very
back will remember that if they talk or make a noise it interferes with
the hearing of the rest. I intend to speak to you on a serious subject
and to make an argument as the Chief Executive of a nation, who
is the President of all the people, without regard to party, without
regard to section. I intend to make to you an argument from the
standpoint simply of one American talking to his fellow-Americans
upon one of the great subjects of interest to all alike; and that subject
is what are commonly known as trusts. The word is used very loosely
and almost always with technical inaccuracy. The average man,
however, when he speaks of the trusts means rather vaguely all of
the very big corporations, the growth of which has been so signal a
feature of our modern civilization, and especially those big corpora-
tions which, though organized in one State, do business in several
States, and often have a tendency to monopoly.
The whole subject of the trusts is of vital concern to us, because
it presents one, and perhaps the most conspicuous, of the many problems
forced upon our attention by the tremendous industrial development
which has taken place during the last century, a development which is
occurring in all civilized countries, notably in our own. There have
been many factors responsible for bringing about these changed con-
ditions. Of these, steam and electricity are the chief. The extraor-
dinary changes in the methods of transportation of merchandise and
of transmission of news have rendered not only possible, but inevitable,
the immense increase in the rate of growth of our great industrial
centres—that is, of our great cities. I want you to bring home to
I52 Messages and Speeches
yourselves that fact. When Cincinnati was founded news could be
transmitted and merchandise carried exactly as has been the case in
the days of the Roman Empire. You had here on your river the
flat-boat, you had on the ocean the sailing-ship, you had the pack-
train, you had the wagon, and every one of the four was known when
Babylon fell. The change in the last hundred years has been greater
by far than the changes in all the preceding three thousand. Those
are the facts. Because of them have resulted the specialization of in-
dustries, and the unexampled opportunities offered for the employ-
ment of huge amounts of capital, and therefore for the rise in the
business world of those master-minds through, whom alone it is pos-
sible for such vast amounts of capital to be employed with profit. It
matters very little whether we like these new conditions or whether
we dislike them; whether we like the creation of these new oppor-
tunities or not. Many admirable qualities which were developed in
the older, simpler, less progressive life have tended to atrophy under
our rather feverish, high-pressure, complex life of to-day. But Our
likes and dislikes have nothing to do with the matter. The new con-
ditions are here. You can’t bring back the old days of the canalboat
and stagecoach if you wish. The steamboat and the railroad are
here. The new forces have produced both good and evil. We can
not get rid of them—even if it were not undesirable to get rid of
them ; and our instant duty is to try to accommodate our social, eco-
nomic and legislative life to them, and to frame a system of law and
conduct under which we shall' get out of them the utmost possible
benefit and the least possible amount of harm. It is foolish to pride
ourselves upon our progress and prosperity, upon our commanding
position in the international industrial world, and at the same time
have nothing but denunciation for the men to whose commanding
position we in part owe this very progress and prosperity, this com-
manding position.
Whenever great social or industrial changes take place, no matter
how much good there may be to them, there is sure to be some evil;
and it usually takes mankind a number of years and a good deal of
experimenting before they find the right ways in which so far as
possible to control the new evil, without at the same time nullifying
the new good. I am stating facts so obvious that if each one of you
will think them over you will think them trite, but if you read or listen
to some of the arguments advanced, you will come to the conclusion
that there is need of learning these trite truths. In these circum-
stances the effort to bring the new tendencies to a standstill is always
futile and generally mischievous; but it is possible somewhat to de-
velop them aright. Law can to a degree guide, protect and control
industrial development, but it can never cause it, or play more than
Theodore Roosevelt I53
a subordinate part in its healthy development—unfortunately it is easy
enough by bad laws to bring it to an almost complete stop.
In dealing with the big corporations which we call trusts, we must
resolutely purpose to proceed by evolution and not revolution. We
wish to face the facts, declining to have our vision blinded either
by the folly of those who say there are no evils, or by the more dam-
gerous folly of those who either see, or make believe that they see,
nothing but evil in all the existing system, and who if given their way
would destroy the evil by the simple process of bringing ruin and
disaster to the entire country. The evils attendant upon over-capitaliza-
tion alone are, in my judgment, sufficient to warrant a far closer
supervision and control than now exists over the great corporations.
Wherever a substantial monopoly can be shown to exist we should
certainly try our utmost to devise an expedient by which it can be
controlled. Doubtless some of the evils existing in or because of the
great corporations can not be cured by any legislation which has yet
been proposed, and doubtless others, which have really been incident
to the sudden development in the formation of corporations of all
kinds, will in the end cure themselves. But there will remain a cer-
tain number which can be cured if we decide that by the power of
the Government they are to be cured. The surest way to prevent
the possibility of curing any of them is to approach the subject in a
spirit of violent rancor, complicated with total ignorance of business
interests and fundamental incapacity or unwillingness to understand
the limitations upon all lawmaking bodies. No problem, and least
of all so difficult a problem as this, can be solved if the qualities brought
to its solution are panic, fear, envy, hatred, and ignorance. There
can exist in a free republic no man more wicked, no man more dan-
gerous to the people, than he who would arouse these feelings in
the hope that they would redound to his own political advantage.
Corporations that are handled honestly and fairly, so far from being
an evil, are a natural business evolution and make for the general
prosperity of our land. We do not wish to destroy corporations, but
we do wish to make them subserve the public good. All individuals,
rich or poor, private or corporate, must be subject to the law of the
land; and the government will hold them to a rigid obedience thereof.
The biggest corporation, like the humblest private citizen, must be
held to strict compliance with the will of the people as expressed in
the fundamental law. The rich man who does not see that this is in
his interest is indeed short-sighted. When we make him obey the
law we ensure for him the absolute protection of the law.
The savings banks show what can be done in the way of genuinely
beneficent work by large corporations when intelligently administered
and supervised. They now hold over twenty-six hundred millions
I54 Messages and Speeches
of the people's money and pay annually about one hundred millions of
interest or profit to their depositors. There is no talk of danger from
these corporations; yet they possess great power, holding over three
times the amount of our present national debt, more than all the cur-
rency, gold, silver, greenbacks, etc., in circulation in the United States.
The chief reason for there being no talk of danger from them is
that they are on the whole faithfully administered for the benefit of
all, under wise laws which require frequent and full publication of
their condition, and which prescribe certain needful regulations with
which they have to comply, while at the same time giving full scope
for the business enterprise of their managers within these limits.
Now of course savings banks are as highly specialized a class of
corporations as railroads, and we can not force too far the analogy with
other corporations; but there are certain conditions which I think
we can lay down as indispensable to the proper treatment of all cor-
porations which from their size have become important factors in the
social development of the community.
Before speaking, however, of what can be done by way of remedy
let me say a word or two as to certain proposed remedies which, in
my judgment, would be ineffective or mischievous. The first thing
to remember is that if we are to accomplish any good at all it must
be by resolutely keeping in mind the intention to do away with any
evils in the conduct of big corporations, while steadfastly refusing
to assent to indiscriminate assault upon all forms of corporate capital
as such. The line of demarcation we draw must always be on con-
duct, not upon wealth; our objection to any given corporation must
be, not that it is big, but that it behaves badly. Perfectly simple again,
my friends, but not always heeded by some of those who would strive
to teach us how to act toward big corporations. Treat the head of
the corporation as you would treat all other men. If he does well
stand by him. You will occasionally find the head of a big corpora-
tion who objects to that treatment; very good, apply it all the more
carefully. Remember, after all, that he who objects because he is the
head of a big corporation to being treated like any one else is only
guilty of the same sin as the man who wishes him treated worse than
any one else because he is the head of a big corporation. Demagogic
denunciation of wealth is never wholesome and is generally dangerous;
and not a few of the proposed methods of curbing the trusts are
dangerous chiefly because all insincere advocacy of the impossible is
dangerous. It is an unhealthy thing for a community when the appeal
is made to follow a course which those who make the appeal either
do know, or ought to know, can not be followed; and which, if fol-
lowed, would result in disaster to everybody. Loose talk about de-
Theodore Roosevelt I55
stroying monopoly out of hand without a hint as to how the monopoly
should even be defined offers a case in point.
Nor can we afford to tolerate any proposal which will strike at the
so-called trusts only by striking at the general well-being. We are
now enjoying a period of great prosperity. The prosperity is generally
diffused through all sections and through all classes. Doubtless there
are some individuals who do not get enough of it, and there are others
who get too much. That is simply another way of saying that the
wisdom of mankind is finite; and that even the best human system does
not work perfectly. You don’t have to take my word for that. Look
back just nine years. In 1893 nobody was concerned in downing
the trusts. Everybody was concerned in trying to get up himself.
The men who propose to get rid of the evils of the trusts by measures
which would do away with the general well-being, advocate a policy
which would not only be a damage to the community as a whole, but
which would defeat its own professed object. If we are forced to
the alternative of choosing either a system under which most of us
prosper somewhat, though a few of us prosper too much, or else a
system under which no one prospers enough, of course we will choose
the former. If the policy advocated is so revolutionary and destruc-
tive as to involve the whole community in the crash of common disaster,
it is as certain as anything can be that when the disaster has occurred
all efforts to regulate the trusts will cease, and that the one aim will
be to restore prosperity.
A remedy much advocated at the moment is to take off the tariff
from all articles which are made by trusts. To do this it will be
necessary first to define trusts. The language commonly used by the
advocates of the method implies that they mean all articles made by
large corporations, and that the changes in tariff are to be made with
punitive intent toward these large corporations. Of course if the tariff
is to be changed in order to punish them, it should be changed so as to
punish those that do ill, not merely those that are prosperous. It
would be neither just nor expedient to punish the big corporations
as big corporations; what we wish to do is to protect the people from
any evil that may grow out of their existence or maladministration.
Some of those corporations do well and others do ill. If in any case
the tariff is found to foster a monopoly which does ill, of course no
protectionist would object to a modification of the tariff sufficient to
remedy the evil. But in very few cases does the so-called trust really
monopolize the market. Take any very big corporation—I could men-
tion them by the score—which controls, say, something in the neighbor-
hood of half of the products of a given industry. It is the kind of
corporation that is always spoken of as a trust. Surely in rearranging
the schedules affecting such a corporation it would be necessary to
I56 Mcssages and Specches
consider the interests of its smaller competitors which control the re-
maining part, and which, being weaker, would suffer most from any
tariff designed to punish all the producers; for, of course, the tariff
must be made light or heavy for big and little producers alike. More-
Over, such a corporation necessarily employs very many thousands,
often very many tens of thousands of workmen, and the minute we
proceeded from denunciation to action it would be necessary to con-
sider the interests of these workmen. Furthermore, the products of
many trusts are unprotected, and would be entirely unaffected by any
change in the tariff, or at most very slightly so. The Standard Oil
Company offers a case in point; and the corporations which control
the anthracite coal output offer another—for there is no duty whatever
on anthracite coal.
I am not now discussing the question of the tariff as such ; whether
from the standpoint of the fundamental difference between those who
believe in a protective tariff and those who believe in free trade; or
from the standpoint of those who, while they believe in a protective
tariff, feel that there could be a rearrangement of our schedules, either
by direct legislation or by reciprocity treaties, which would result in
enlarging our markets; nor yet from the standpoint of those who feel
that stability of economic policy is at the moment our prime economic
need, and that the benefits to be derived from any change in schedules
would not compensate for the damage to business caused by the wide-
spread agitation which would follow any attempted general revision
of the tariff at this moment. Without regard to the wisdom of any
one of those three positions it remains true that the real evils connected
with the trusts can not be remedied by any change in the tariff laws.
The trusts can be damaged by depriving them of the benefits of a
protective tariff, only on condition of damaging all their smaller com-
petitors, and all the wage-workers employed in the industry. This
point is very important, and it is desirable to avoid any misunderstand-
ing concerning it. I am not now considering whether or not, on
grounds totally unconnected with the trusts, it would be well to lower
the duties on various schedules, either by direct legislation or by legis-
lation or treaties designed to secure as an offset reciprocal advantages
from the nations with which we trade. My point is that changes in
the tariff would have little appreciable effect on the trusts save as they
shared in the general harm or good proceeding from such changes.
No tariff change would help one of our smaller corporations, or one
of our private individuals in business, still less one of our wage-workers,
as against a large corporation in the same business; on the contrary,
if it bore heavily on the large corporation it would inevitably be felt
still more by that corporation’s weaker rivals, while any injurious re-
sult would of necessity be shared by both the employer and the em-
Theodore Roosevelt I57
ployed in the business concerned. The immediate introduction of sub-
stantial free trade in all articles manufactured by trusts, that is, by
the largest and most successful corporations, would not affect some of
the most powerful of our business combinations in the least, save by
the damage done to the general business welfare of the country;
others would undoubtedly be seriously affected, but much less so than
their weaker rivals, while the loss would be divided between the cap-
italists and the laborers; and after the years of panic and distress had
been lived through, and some return to prosperity had occurred, even
though all were on a lower plane of prosperity than before, the rela-
tive difference between the trusts and their rivals would remain as
marked as ever. In other words, the trust, or big corporation, would
have suffered relatively to, and in the interest of, its foreign com-
petitor; but its relative position toward its American competitors would
probably be improved; little would have been done toward cutting out
or minimizing the evils in the trusts; nothing toward securing adequate
control and regulation of the large modern corporations. In other
words, the question of regulating the trusts with a view to minimizing
or abolishing the evils existent in them is separate and apart from the
question of tariff revision.
You must face the fact that only harm will come from a proposition
to attack the so-called trusts in a vindictive spirit by measures con-
ceived solely with a desire of hurting them, without regard as to
whether or not discrimination should be made between the good and
evil in them, and without even any regard as to whether a necessary
sequence of the action would be the hurting of other interests. The
adoption of such a policy would mean temporary damage to the trusts,
because it would mean temporary damage to all of our business inter-
ests; but the effect would be only temporary, for exactly as the damage
affected all alike, good and bad, so the reaction would affect all alike,
good and bad. The necessary supervision and control, in which I
firmly believe as the only method of eliminating the real evils of the
trusts, must come through wisely and cautiously framed legislation,
which shall aim in the first place to give definite control to some
sovereign over the great corporations, and which shall be followed,
when once this power has been conferred, by a system giving to the
Government the full knowledge which is the essential for satisfactory
action. Then when this knowledge—one of the essential features of
which is proper publicity—has been gained, what further steps of any
kind are necessary can be taken with the confidence born of the pos-
session of power to deal with the subject, and of a thorough knowl-
edge of what should and can be done in the matter.
We need additional power; and we need knowledge. Our Constitu-
tion was framed when the economic conditions were so different that
158 Messages and Speeches
each State could wisely be left to handle the corporations within its
limits as it saw fit. Nowadays all the corporations which I am con-
sidering do what is really an interstate business, and as the States
have proceeded on very different lines in regulating them, at present a
corporation will be organized in one State, not because it intends to do
business in that State, but because it does not, and therefore that
State can give it better privileges, and then it will do business in some
other States, and will claim not to be under the control of the States
in which it does business; and of course it is not the object of the State
creating it to exercise any control over it, as it does not do any busi-
ness in that State. Such a system can not obtain. There must be
some sovereign. It might be better if all the States could agree along
the same lines in dealing with these corporations, but I see not the
slightest prospect of such an agreement. Therefore, I personally feel
that ultimately the nation will have to assume the responsibility of
regulating these very large corporations which do an interstate business.
The States must combine to meet the way in which capital has com-
bined; and the way in which the States can combine is through the
National Government. But I firmly believe that all these obstacles
can be met if only we face them, both with the determination to over-
come them, and with the further determination to overcome them in
ways which shall not do damage to the country as a whole; which on
the contrary shall further our industrial development, and shall help
instead of hindering all corporations which work out their success
by means that are just and fair toward all men.
Without the adoption of a constitutional amendment, my belief is
that a good deal can be done by law. It is difficult to say exactly how
much, because experience has taught us that in dealing with these
subjects, where the lines dividing the rights and duties of the States
and of the Nation are in doubt, it has sometimes been difficult for
Congress to forecast the action of the courts upon its legislation. Such
legislation (whether obtainable now, or obtainable only after a con-
stitutional amendment) should provide for a reasonable supervision,
the most prominent feature of which at first should be publicity; that
is, the making public, both to the governmental authorities and to
the people at large, the essential facts in which the public is concerned.
This would give us exact knowledge of many points which are now
not only in doubt, but the subject of fierce controversy. Moreover,
the mere fact of the publication would cure some very grave evils, for
the light of day is a deterrent to wrong-doing. It would doubtless
disclose other evils with which, for the time being, we could devise
no way to grapple. Finally, it would disclose others which would be
grappled with and cured by further legislative action.
Remember, I advocate the action which the President can only ad-
Theodore Roosevelt I59
vise, and which he has no power himself to take. Under our present
legislative and constitutional limitations the national executive can
work only between narrow lines in the field of action concerning great
corporations. Between those lines, I assure you that exact and even-
handed justice will be dealt, and is being dealt, to all men, without re-
gard to persons. -
I wish to repeat with all emphasis that desirable though it is that
the nation should have the power I suggest, it is equally desirable that
it should be used with wisdom and self-restraint. The mechanism of
modern business is tremendous in its size and complexity, and ignorant
intermeddling with it would be disastrous. We should not be made
timid or daunted by the size of the problem; we should not fear to un-
dertake it; but we should undertake it with ever present in our minds
dread of the sinister spirits of rancor, ignorance, and vanity. We
need to keep steadily in mind the fact that besides the tangible prop-
erty in each corporation there lies behind the spirit which brings it
success, and in the case of each very successful corporation this is
usually the spirit of some one man or set of men. Under exactly
similar conditions one corporation will make a stupendous success
where another makes a stupendous failure, simply because one is well
managed and the other is not. While making it clear that we do not
intend to allow wrong-doing by one of the captains of industry any
more than by the humblest private in the industrial ranks, we must
also in the interests of all of us avoid cramping a strength which, if
beneficently used, is for the good of all of us. The marvelous pros-
perity we have been enjoying for the past few years has been due
primarily to the high average of honesty, thrift, and business capacity
among our people as a whole; but some of it has also been due to the
ability of the men who are the industrial leaders of the nation. In
securing just and fair dealing by these men let us remember to do
them justice in return, and this not only because it is our duty, but
because it is our interest; not only for their sakes, but for ours. We
are neither the friend of the rich man as such nor the friend of the
poor man as such ; we are the friend of the honest man, rich or poor;
and we intend that all men, rich and poor alike, shall obey the law
alike and receive its protection alike.
AT DETROIT, MICH., SEPTEMBER 22, 1902.
The first engagement I made this year was when I accepted the invita-
tion so kindly extended to me by the Mayor of this city to speak on this
occasion, for I felt that, coming from him, as it did, and extended in
such a way, I could not refuse.
The war with Spain, though from it such great consequences have
I6O Messages and Speeches
flowed, was itself but a small war, and in the presence of the veterans of
the Grand Army all we can say is that we hope that we of the younger
generation showed a desire to come up to the standard set by our
fathers, the men of 1861 to 1865. Yet, though the actual deeds done
were trivial when measured with the giant struggle in which Grant
and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan and Farragut and Porter won
imperishable renown, it still remains true that the way in which these
deeds were done was of good omen to the country. It emphasized in
peculiar fashion the fundamental unity of our people. It brought home
to us what should be the ever present fact in our minds—that a good
deed done by any American is put down to the credit of all Americans,
and that, therefore, conversely, no act of wrongdoing can be performed
by one of our number without the evil effects being felt to a greater
or less degree by all of us.
Here in Detroit, Michigan, you had the good fortune to illustrate this
national unity. I myself served in the army, and therefore, at Santiago
I served beside two regiments of Michigan volunteers, the Thirty-
third and Thirty-fourth, so that with many of your sons I can claim
that right of comradeship which comes to those who have known one
another under the close intimacy of such conditions. But Michigan
also performed the unique feat for an inland State of manning one of
the war vessels of the nation. A more striking tribute to the national
militia of that State could not be paid than was paid when in their
custody were placed the honor and interest of the United States. For
there is no part of our honor and interest which we more jealously
guard than that bound up in the fate of any one of the war vessels of
the nation.
It had been my good fortune while Assistant Secretary of the Navy
to come here and witness for myself the zeal and workmanlike efficiency
of the officers and enlisted men of your naval militia. It did not need
a long acquaintance with them to convince any one that they meant
business, that they had in them the stuff that would make it safe to
trust them in time of trial, and that they had diligently and assiduously
improved their opportunities in learning all that they could of their
profession. When the period arose to utilize as many as possible of our
people who were trained to go down to the sea in ships, it was natural
and fitting that one of our war craft should be manned by your naval
militia. It is, of course, a far more difficult and complicated thing to
learn war duty afloat than war duty ashore, for the naval profession
is a highly specialized one. A peculiar honor, therefore, rightly belongs
to the naval militia, and especially to the naval militia of the inland
waters, who so quickly and well responded to the call made upon them.
Michigan's action is but one illustration of how closely bound together
all our interests are in this nation. There are many such illustrations.
Theodore Roosevelt I6I
Every State in this country had its sons represented on some of the
war craft which won honor in that short struggle during the summer
of 1898. The names of the ships no less than the birthplaces of the
officers and men aboard them bear witness to the fact that our navy,
like our army, is indeed national in character.
The war itself was an easy one. The tasks left behind us, though
glorious, have been hard. You, the men of the Spanish War, you and
your comrades in arms who fought in Cuba and Porto Rico and in the
Philippines, won renown for the country, added to its moral grandeur
and to its material prosperity; but you also left duties to be done by
those who came after you. In Porto Rico the duty has been merely
administrative, and it has been so well done that very little need be
said about it. - -
In the Philippines the problem was one of extreme difficulty. But,
after three years of bitter fighting, peace has been won by the valor of
our soldiers and civil government has been introduced, so that the
islanders have now greater opportunities for life, liberty and the pur-
suit of happiness than ever they have enjoyed before during their
recorded history. Last week I ordered a taking of the census of the
islands, and two years hence, according to the law of Congress, the
first steps will be taken in the direction of giving the Filipino people a
legislative assembly. No other Oriental country in the possession of
an alien power—indeed, no Oriental country at all, save only Japan—
has been given any such measure of self-government and personal free-
dom as we have already given to the Philippines. One of the most
important recent measures has been the providing of a cable for the
Philippines, this being necessary both from a commercial and from a
military standpoint. It is only just to the Representative to Congress
from Detroit to say that we owe to him more than to any one man
the fact that this cable is to be laid down upon terms, absolutely satis-
factory to the Government, which guarantee to the people of this
country that their every right to and interest in the cable shall be amply
safeguarded.
With Cuba the matter is different. We pledged ourselves solemnly
at the outbreak of the war with Spain to give to Cuba independence.
The world at large sneered at the pledge and even some of our own
people scoffed at the thought that we intended to keep it. But we have
kept it in good faith, with a keen regard for the welfare of the
Cubans. We did not turn Cuba loose to sink into the welter of anarchy.
We first administered the affairs of the island until order had been
brought out of chaos, until the cities had been cleaned, the courts puri-
fied, an educational system started and a just and efficient government
introduced. Then we turned the new republic over to the hands of
I62 Messages and Speeches
those whom its people had elected as its servants and bade it godspeed
On its journey of independence.
But neither our duty to nor our interest in Cuba has come to an end
with the establishment of its independence. Cuba's immediate proxim-
ity to the United States rendered its well-being of such interest to us
that we were forced to interfere in its interest by force of arms. For
the same reason its future welfare can not but be a matter of grave con-
cern to us. We do not desire Cuba to stand toward any other nation
in the same relations of intimate friendship and alliance that we desire
to see it adopt toward us. It must, therefore, be in a certain sense a
part of our international political system, and it accepted this position
when it accepted the Platt amendment. But it is out of the question
for us to expect that it will assume such a position toward us with
regard to international politics without at the same time sharing some-
what in the benefits of our economic system.
It was for this reason that President McKinley urged, and that I
have urged, and shall continue to urge, the need of establishing closer
relations with Cuba by reciprocity. We urge reciprocity because it is
for our interests to control the Cuban market, because we are bound
to place the Cubans on a peculiar standing economically, when they
consent in our interests, as well as their own, to assume a peculiar
status internationally, and because it is fitting for a great and generous
republic to stretch out a helping hand toward her feebler sister just
starting to tread the path of independence. The case stands by itself
and there can be no other like it. Porto Rico, Hawaii and the Philip-
pines have relations of varying intimacy to us; and they have either
been admitted within our economic system or have been given some
of the benefits thereof. Cuba, although independent, also stands in a
peculiar position toward us, and should receive in a similar fashion a
measure of benefit from and partial inclusion within our system.
The questions that ordinarily concern us as of prime weight in a
tariff matter do not come in here as of primary importance. We can
not choose what the articles are which Cuba shall export. Doubtless
very many of us would prefer for reasons connected with our own
tariff policy that her inhabitants were engaged in different industries
from those which they, as a matter of fact, now follow ; just as doubt-
less others of our people would prefer that the market offered by Cuba
was one for other things than those which she actually demands. But
we can neither determine the wants nor the productions of Cuba. We
must accept them as they are, and we must remember that in dealing
with this island, especially now that we are about to build the Isthmian
Canal, and our interest in the West Indian waters has become so
great, we must shape our policy with a far-sighted regard for the future
and for the interest and honor of the nation as a whole.
Theodore Roosevelt 163
I do not believe a particle of harm will come to any American interest
from the adoption of a reasonable measure of reciprocity with Cuba.
I am certain that the adoption of such a measure will be in the interest
of our people as a whole. Above all, while fully acknowledging the
highmindedness and moral sincerity of those of my associates with
whom on this point I differ, I yet feel most strongly that by every con-
sideration of a generous and far-sighted public policy we are bound
to prove to Cuba that our friendship with her is of a continuing char-
acter, and that we intend to aid her in her struggle for the material
well-being which must underlie healthy national development.
I speak in the presence not only of the men who fought in the
Spanish War and in the Philippine War, which was its aftermath, but
in the presence of the veterans who fought in the great war; and, more
than that, I speak here in a typical city of the old Northwest, of what
is now the Middle West, in a typical State of our Union. You men
of Michigan have been mighty in war and mighty in peace. You
belong to a country mighty in war and mighty in peace—a country
of a great past, whose great present is but an earnest of an even
greater future. The world has never seen more marvelous prosperity
than that which we now enjoy, and this prosperity is not ephemeral.
We shall have our ups and downs. The wave at times will recede, but
the tide will go steadily higher. This country has never yet been
called upon to meet a crisis in war or a crisis in peace to which it did
not eventually prove equal, and, decade by decade, its power grows
greater and the likelihood of its meeting successfully any crisis becomes
even more assured.
I preach the gospel of hope to you men of the West, who in thought
and life embody this gospel of hope, this gospel of resolute and con-
fident belief in your own powers and in the destiny of this mighty
Republic. I believe in the future—not in a spirit which will sit down
and look, for the future to work itself out—but with a determination
each of us to do his part in making the future what it can and shall
be made. We are optimists. We spurn the teachings of despair and
distrust. We have an abiding faith in the growing strength, the grow-
ing future of the mighty young nation, still in the flush of its youth
and yet already with the might of a giant which stands on a continent
and grasps an ocean with either hand.
Succeed? Of course we shall succeed How can success fail to
come to a race of masterful energy and resolute character, which has
a continent for the base of its domain and which feels within its veins
the thrill that comes to generous souls when their strength stirs in
them, and they know that the future is theirs? No great destiny ever
yet came to a nation whose people were laggards or faint hearted. No
great destiny ever yet came to a people walking with their eyes on the
I64 Messages and Speeches
ground and their faces shrouded in gloom. No great destiny ever yet
came to a people who feared the future, who feared failure more than
they hoped for success. With such as these we have no part. We know
there are dangers ahead, as we know there are evils to fight and over-
come, but we feel to the full that pulse of the prosperity which we
enjoy. Stout of heart, we see across the dangers the great future that
lies beyond, and we rejoice as a giant refreshed, as a strong man girt for
the race, and we go down into the arena where the nations strive for
mastery, our hearts lifted with the faith that to us and to our children
and our children's children it shall be given to make this Republic the
greatest of all the peoples of mankind.
AT LOGANSPORT, IND., SEPTEMBER 23, 1902.
Fellow citizens:
I am going to ask you to take what I say at its exact face value, as
I like whatever I say to be taken. It is suggested by coming to this
great Western State and speaking to one of its thriving cities. We
believe that the American business man is of a peculiar type; and
probably the qualities of energy, daring, and resourcefulness which have
given him his prominence in the international industrial world find
their highest development here in the West. It is the merest truism
to say that in the modern world industrialism is the great factor in
the growth of nations. Material prosperity is the foundation upon
which every mighty national structure must be built. Of course there
must be more than this. There must be a high moral purpose, a life
of the spirit which finds its expression in many different ways; but
unless material prosperity exists also there is scant room in which to
develop the higher life. The productive activity of our vast army of
workers, of those who work with head or hands, is the prime cause
of the giant growth of this nation. We have great natural resources,
but such resources are never more than opportunities, and they count
for nothing if the men in possession have not the power to take
advantage of them. You have built up in the West these cities of the
Mississippi Valley and the Great Lakes; as all the region round about
them has been built up—that is, because you had the qualities of heart
and brain, the qualities of moral and physical fibre, which enabled you
to use to the utmost advantage whatever you found ready to your hands.
You win, not by shirking difficulties, but by facing and overcoming
them.
In such development laws play a certain part, but individual char-
acteristics a still greater part. A great and successful commonwealth
like ours in the long run works under good laws, because a people
Theodore Roosevelt I65
endowed with honest and practical common-sense ultimately demands
good laws. But no law can create industrial well-being, although it
may foster and safeguard it, but a bad law may destroy it.
The prime factor in securing industrial well-being is the high average
of citizenship found in the community. The best laws that the wit of
man can devise would not make a community of thriftless and idle
men prosperous. No scheme of legislation or of social reform will
ever work good to the community unless it recognizes as fundamental
the fact that each man's own individual qualities must be the prime
factors in his success. Work in combination may help and the State
can do a good deal in its own sphere, but in the long run each man
must rise or fall on his own merits; each man must owe his success
in life to whatever of hardihood, of resolution, of common-sense or
of capacity for lofty endeavor he has within his own soul. It is a good
thing to act in combination for the common good, but it is a very
unhealthy thing to let ourselves think for one moment that anything
can ever supply the want of our own individual watchfulness and
exertion.
Yet given this high average of individual ability and invention, we
must ever keep in mind that it may be nullified by bad legislation, and
that it can be given a chance to develop under the most favorable
conditions by good legislation. Probably the most important aid which
can be contributed by the National Government to the material well-
being of the country is to ensure its financial stability. An honest
currency is the strongest symbol and expression of honest business life.
The business world must exist largely on credit, and to credit confidence
is essential. Any tampering with the currency, no matter with what
purpose, if fraught with the suspicion of dishonesty, in result is fatal
in its effects on business prosperity. Very ignorant and primitive
communities are continually obliged to learn the elementary truth that
the repudiation of debts is in the end ruinous to the debtors as a class;
and when communities have moved somewhat higher in the scale of
civilization they also learn that anything in the nature of a debased
currency works similar damage. A financial system of assured honesty
is the first essential.
Another essential for any community is perseverance in the economic
policy which for a course of years is found best fitted to its peculiar
needs. The question of combining such fixedness of economic policy
as regards the tariff, while at the same time allowing for a necessary
and proper readjustment of duties in particular schedules, as such
readjustment becomes a matter of pressing importance, is not an easy
One. It is perhaps too much to expect that from the discussion of such
a question it would be possible wholly to eliminate political partisan-
ship. Yet those who believe, as we all must when we think seriously
166 Messages and Speeches
on the subject, that the proper aim of the party system is after all
simply to subserve the public good, can not but hope that where such
partisanship on a matter of this kind conflicts with the public good it
shall at least be minimized. It is all right and inevitable that we should
divide on party lines, but woe to us if we are not Americans first, and
party men second. What we really need in this country is to treat the
tariff as a business proposition from the standpoint of the interests of
the country as a whole, and not from the standpoint of the temporary
needs of any political party. It surely ought not to be necessary to
dwell upon the extreme unwisdom, from a business standpoint, from
the standpoint of national prosperity, of violent and radical changes
amounting to the direct upsetting of tariff policies at intervals of every
few years. A nation like ours can adjust its business after a fashion
to any kind of tariff. But neither our nation nor any other can stand
the ruinous policy of readjusting its business to radical changes in the
tariff at short intervals. This is more true now than ever it was
before, for owing to the immense extent and variety of our products,
the tariff schedules of to-day carry rates of duty on more than four
thousand articles. Continual sweeping changes in such a tariff, touch-
ing so intimately the commercial interests of the nation which stands
as one of the two or three greatest in the whole industrial world, can
not but be disastrous. Yet on the other hand where the industrial
needs of the nation shift as rapidly as they do with us, it is a matter
of prime importance that we should be able to readjust our economic
policy as rapidly as possible and with as little friction as possible to
these needs.
We need a scheme which will enable us to provide a reapplication
of the principle to the changed conditions. The problem therefore is
to devise some method by which these shifting needs can be recog-
nized and the necessary readjustments of duties provided without
forcing the entire business community, and therefore the entire nation,
to submit to a violent surgical operation, the mere threat of which, and
still more the accomplished fact of which, would probably paralyze for a
considerable time all the industries of the country. Such radical action
might very readily reproduce the conditions from which we suffered
nine years ago, in 1893. It is on every account most earnestly to be
hoped that this problem can be solved in some manner into which par-
tisanship shall enter as a purely secondary consideration, if at all,
that is, in some manner which shall provide for an earnest effort by
non-partisan inquiry and action to secure any changes the need of
which is indicated by the effect found to proceed from a given rate
of duty on a given article; its effect, if any, as regards the creation
of a substantial monopoly; its effect upon domestic prices, upon the
revenue of the government, upon importations from abroad, upon
Theodore Roosevelt 167
home productions, and upon consumption. In other words, we need
to devise some machinery by which, while persevering in the policy
of a protective tariff, in which I think the nation as a whole has now
generally acquiesced, we would be able to correct the irregularities and
remove the incongruities produced by changing conditions, without
destroying the whole structure. Such machinery would permit us to
continue our definitely settled tariff policy, while providing for the
changes in duties upon particular schedules which must inevitably and
necessarily take place from time to time as matters of legislative and
administrative detail. This would secure the needed stability of
economic policy which is a prime factor in our industrial success, while
doing away with any tendency to fossilization. It would recognize the
fact that, as our needs shift, it may be found advisable to alter rates
and schedules, adapting them to the changed conditions and necessities
of the whole people; and this would be in no wise incompatible with
preserving the principle of protection, for belief in the wisdom of a
protective tariff is in no way inconsistent with frankly admitting the
desirability of changing a set of schedules, when from any cause such
change is in the interests of the nation as a whole—and our tariff
policy is designed to favor the interests of the nation as a whole and
not those of any particular set of individuals save as an incident to
this building up of national well-being. There are two or three differ-
ent methods by which it will be possible to provide such readjustment
without any shock to the business world. My personal preference would
be for action which should be taken only after preliminary inquiry by
and upon the findings of a body of experts of such high character and
ability that they could be trusted to deal with the subject purely from
the standpoint of our business and industrial needs; but, of course,
Congress would have to determine for itself the exact method to be
followed. The Executive has at its command the means for gathering
most of the necessary data, and can act whenever it is the desire of
Congress that it should act. That the machinery for carrying out the
policy above outlined can be provided I am very certain, if only our
people will make up their minds that the health of the community will
be subserved by treating the whole question primarily from the stand-
point of the business interests of the entire country, rather than from
the standpoint of the fancied interests of any group of politicians.
Of course in making any changes we should have to proceed in
accordance with certain fixed and definite principles, and the most
important of these is an avowed determination to protect the interests
of the American producer, be he business man, wage-worker, or farmer.
The one consideration which must never be omitted in a tariff change
is the imperative need of preserving the American standard of living
for the American workingman. The tariff rate must never fall below
I68 Messages and Speeches
that which will protect the American workingman by allowing for the
difference between the general labor cost here and abroad, so as at least
to equalize the conditions arising from the difference in the standard
of labor here and abroad—a difference which it should be our aim to
foster in so far as it represents the needs of better educated, better paid,
better fed, and better clothed workingmen of a higher type than any
to be found in a foreign country. At all hazards and no matter what
else is sought for or accomplished by changes of the tariff, the Ameri-
can workingman must be protected in his standard of wages, that is,
in his standard of living, and must be secured the fullest opportunity
of employment. Our laws should in no event afford advantage to for-
eign industries over American industries. They should in no event
do less than equalize the difference in conditions at home and abroad.
The general tariff policy to which, without regard to changes in detail,
I believe this country to be irrevocably committed, is fundamentally
based upon ample recognition of the difference in labor cost here and
abroad; in other words, the recognition of the need for full develop-
ment of the intelligence, the comfort, the high standard of civilized
living and the inventive genius of the American workingman as com-
pared to the workingman of any other country in the world.
AT THE COLUMBIA CLUB, INDIANAPOLIS, IND., SEPTEMBER
23, IQO2.
My fellow Americans, men and women of this beautiful city; of this
beautiful State:
I am glad to have the chance of witnessing so noteworthy a sight as
this sea of people that has as a background the majestic and beautiful
monument which you have reared to the sons of Indiana who did well
for the Republic in the past. I have come through your State this
morning, seeing on every hand the proofs of the marvelous and abound-
ing prosperity which we now as a people enjoy.
It is a great thing for the State, for the nation, to have such material
well-being. That, of course, is the foundation upon which we must
build. But it is an even greater thing when the people of a great State
erect a monument such as this to those of her sons whom the people
must delight to honor. Material well-being counts for much, for very
much, but the lift of lofty deeds counts for even more, and with the
citizens of this great Republic, when we come together on an occasion
like this, we come as preachers and exponents of the gospel of hope,
not the gospel of despair.
The men who have done mightily for the nation in the past have
been the men who believed with all their hearts and souls in the nation
Theodore Roosevelt I69
and in the nation's destiny. The men who won eternal honor in the
Civil War were the men who said the Union must be preserved, and
then made their words good by their deeds. We have our faces set
toward the future. Our sympathy is not with men who fear for
S11CCESS.
This nation is to play a great part in the world, and it moves into
the arena where the nations strive for the great opportunity of shaping
the destinies of mankind. We feel our veins fill with the evident faith
that our children and our children's children will be given days to face
dangers and glories; not to shirk them, to do our duty at home and
abroad. To dare to be great and make our nation what it shall be,
the greatest upon which the sun ever shone. I thank you.
[The Indianapolis Journal, Sept. 24, 1902.]
AT TOMLINSON HALL, INDIANAPOLIS, IND., SEPTEMBER 23, 1902.
In speaking to the men who volunteered for the Spanish War, I wish
to lay particular stress on the need of preparedness. Modern war of a
serious kind is determined quite as much by what the antagonists have
done in advance of the outbreak as by what they do afterward. Modern
conditions have brought all parts of the world closer together, and
while this nearness tells for good generally, it may at times tell for evil
also. For all practical purposes our frontier is many times nearer
Europe on the one hand and Asia on the other than it was in the days
of sailing ships. Moreover, a nation which begins to play a great part
in the world must count the cost and be willing to pay it, unless it is
content to accept humiliation. As a result of the Spanish War we
took a world position which had never hitherto been ours. We now
have before us a destiny which must be one of great failure or success.
We can not play a small part in the world, no matter how much we
might wish to. We shall be obliged, willingly or unwillingly, to play
a large part; all that we can determine is whether we will play that
large part well or ill.
Owing to our position, we do not need a large regular army. Two
or three years ago you remember how it was prophesied by certain
(perhaps not altogether serious) alarmists that it was the intention of
those in power continually to increase the size of our regular army
until it should become a menace to our people at home. How comic
the prophecy now seems. As a matter of fact, at the present time
advantage has been taken of the Philippine peace to reduce the army
to but little more than two-thirds of the number allowed by law. Our
army is small, but the individual units composing it we believe to be
not inferior to the best of those of any foreign nation. And it is our
purpose, beginning with the present year, to institute a series of
170 Messages and Speeches
manoeuvres which shall offer some opportunity for training our officers
to handle their men in masses.
Normally, however, in any contest we must expect that in the future
as in the past the bulk of the American army will be composed of
volunteers. It should be our object in every way to encourage the
National Guards of the States and to build them up to the highest point
of efficiency; to give them proper arms and teach them how to use
these arms, and how to take care of themselves in field service.
But as regards the navy, there is no chance of doing what can be
done with the army. The average American is, we believe, a man
offering unusually good material out of which to make a soldier—a man
who already possesses the fighting edge and needs only to have it
developed, and who readily learns how to march, to shoot, and to take
care of himself in the open. But no man can in a short time learn
such highly specialized work as is that aboard our great modern war-
ships. One of these ships can not be built under three years, and the
officers and enlisted men aboard her would be absolutely helpless to
make use of the formidable engines of destruction ready to their hands
unless they had enjoyed periods of training ranging in accordance with
the station of the man from a dozen months to twice as many years.
No powerful fighting vessel, and still less an effective fighting crew,
can be improvised after the outbreak of a war.
Therefore, any war in which we could possibly be engaged—and I
earnestly hope and believe that there is not the slightest chance of our
being engaged in such a war—would probably be determined mainly
by the navy, and what the navy could do would depend absolutely upon
the condition in which it was at the outbreak of the war. The fighting
units would be the war craft already in existence and the crews which
had already been carefully trained. In other words, our success would
depend primarily upon preparations made in time of peace, upon the
forethought shown when there was no immediate enemy to fear.
If we are not prepared to back up words by deeds, it is far better to
omit the words.” I believe in the Monroe Doctrine with all my heart.
I believe in asserting it because I believe the American people are
willing to back it up. But it never can be backed up by words alone.
If it became the interest of some great power to violate it, most assur-
edly that great power would do so if it was thought that we would only
bluster and threaten, or if it was believed our force was too weak to be
formidable in a fight. A good navy is absolutely essential if we intend
to treat the Monroe Doctrine as we should treat it—that is, as the
cardinal feature of our foreign policy. The fleet is in a peculiar sense
the property of the nation as a whole. Every American, whether inland
*It was Oliver Cromwell who said: “A wº is your best ambassador,” and President
Roosevelt entertains a not dissimilar view.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 171
or on the seacoast, if he is both far-sighted and patriotic, should be
particularly jealous about the efficiency of the navy. It would be the
right arm of this country in the event of foreign trouble. Disaster to
it would send a thrill of mortal anguish through the heart of every good
citizen; and the triumphs won by it would in the future, as they have in
the past, make every American hold his head higher in pride and joy.
The navy must be built up, and it must be continually exercised and
trained, so that the officers and men may attain the highest degree of
excellence in handling the great war engines intrusted to their care,
AT MANASSAS, VA., NOVEMBER I, 1902.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I wish to thank you very much for the way you have come to greet
me. I have thoroughly enjoyed my day here. I regret to state that
the turkeys did not materialize. In the first place I had a good walk.
It is the first I have had for six weeks, and I appreciated it. I was
delighted to have a chance to visit the great battle-fields here; and it
is a very pleasant thing for any man who has the least desire to be a
good American to come through your historic town and to see the two
avenues named in memory of Grant and Lee. I feel that all of us in
any part of this country now have an equal right to glory in the valor
and the devotion to duty, as each saw his duty, alike of those who wore
the blue and those who wore the gray. I thank you for having
greeted me. º
[Washington Post, Nov. 2, 1902.]
AT THE SESQUECENTENNIAL ANNIVERSARY CELEBRATION BY
THE GRAND LODGE OF FREE AND ACCEPTED MASONS OF
PA. OF GEO. WASHINGTON'S APPRENTICESHIP
INTO MASONRY, AT PHILADELPHIA,
PA., NOVEMBER 5, 1902.
It seems to me that that which this country needs more than every-
thing else is not to preach only, but to practice the virtues we try to
realize through Masonry and to show to the memory of the greatest
Mason that ever lived—Washington—the homage of deeds, not merely
words. One of the things which attracted me so greatly to Masonry,
that I hailed the chance of becoming a Mason, was that it really did
live up to what we as a government are pledged to—of treating each
man on his merits and as a man. When Brother George Washington
went into a lodge of a fraternity he went into the One place in the
United States where the idea of our government was realized as far as
it is humanly possible to realize a lofty ideal.
172 Messages and Speeches
Masonry should make and must make each man who conscientiously
and understandingly takes up his obligations the best type of American
citizen, because Masonry teaches him his obligations to his fellows in
a practical fashion. It is a good thing to read the Declaration of
Independence every Fourth of July; it is a good thing to talk of what
Washington and his fellows did for us; but what counts most is how
we live up to the lessons that we read or that we speak of.
AT THE DEDICATION OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE BUILD-
ING, NEW YORK, NOVEMBER II, 1902.
Mr. President, ex-President Cleveland, gentlemen :
As I am to speak to you this evening I shall now simply say a word
of greeting to you and to your guests. I have been asked here as the
Chief Executive of the nation, and so I can speak not merely on your
behalf but on behalf of our people as a whole, in greeting and thanking
for their presence here, those representatives of foreign countries, who
have done us the honor and pleasure of being present to-day. I greet
the Ambassador” whose approaching departure we so sincerely regret,
the Ambassador to whom on his advent we extend such hearty greet-
ings, and the special representatives of those great civilized nations with
whom we intend to be knit ever closer by ties of commercial and social
good will in the future, and now, gentlemen, having greeted your
guests, on behalf of you, I greet you in the name of the people, not
merely because you stand for commercial success but because this body
has been able to show that the greatest commercial success can square
with the immutable and eternal laws of decent and right living and of
fair dealing between man and man. I greet you.
AT THE BANQUET OF THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE OF THE
STATE OF NEW YORK, AT NEW YORK, NOVEMBER 11, 1902.
Mr. President, gentlemen, and you, the guests, whom we welcome
here this evening:
I do not wish to speak to you in the language of idle compliment, and
yet it is but a bare statement of fact to say that nowhere in our country
could there be gathered an audience which would stand as more typically
characteristic than this of all those qualities and attributes which have
given us of the United States our commanding position in the industrial
world. There is no need of my preaching to this gathering the need
of combining efficiency with upright dealing, for as an American and
*The departing ambassador was M. Jules Cambon, the representative of France. The new
arrival was the British ambassador, Sir Michael Herbert, whose early death was a source of
general regret in diplomatic circles.
Theodore Roosevelt I73
as a citizen of New York I am proud to feel that the name of your
organization carries with it a guarantee of both ; and your practice
counts for more than any preaching could possibly count. New York
is a city of national importance, because its position toward the nation
is unique, and the Chamber of Commerce of New York must of neces-
sity be an element of weight in the commercial and industrial welfare
of the entire people. New York is the great port of entry for Our
country—the port in which centers the bulk of the foreign commerce
of the country—and her welfare is therefore no matter of mere local
or municipal, but of national, concern. The conduct of the Govern-
ment in dealing with all matters affecting the financial and commercial
relations of New York must continually take into account this fact;
and it must be taken into account in appreciating the importance of the
part played by the New York Chamber of Commerce.
This body stands for the triumphs of peace both abroad and at home.
We have passed that stage of national development when depreciation
of other peoples is felt as a tribute to our own. We watch the growth
and prosperity of other nations, not with hatred or jealousy, but with
sincere and friendly good-will. I think I can say safely that we have
shown by our attitude toward Cuba, by our attitude toward China,
that as regards weaker powers our desire is that they may be able to
stand alone, and that if they will only show themselves willing to deal
honestly and fairly with the rest of mankind we on our side will do all
we can to help, not to hinder, them. With the great powers of the world
we desire no rivalry that is not honorable to both parties. We wish
them well. We believe that the trend of the modern spirit is ever
stronger toward peace, not war; toward friendship, not hostility, as the
normal international attitude. We are glad indeed that we are on good
terms with all the other peoples of mankind, and no effort on our part
shall be spared to secure a continuance of these relations. And remem-
ber, gentlemen, that we shall be a potent factor for peace largely in
proportion to the way in which we make it evident that our attitude
is due, not to weakness, not to inability to defend ourselves, but to a
genuine repugnance to wrongdoing, a genuine desire for self-respecting
friendship with our neighbors. The voice of the weakling or the craven
counts for nothing when he clamors for peace; but the voice of the
just man armed is potent. We need to keep in a condition of pre-
paredness, especially as regards our navy, not because we want war,
but because we desire to stand with those whose plea for peace is
listened to with respectful attention.
Important though it is that we should have peace abroad, it is even
more important that we should have peace at home. You, men of the
Chamber of Commerce, to whose efforts we owe so much of our in-
dustrial well-being, can, and I believe surely will, be influential in
I74 Messages and Speeches
helping toward that industrial peace which can obtain in society only
when in their various relations employer and employed alike show
not merely insistence each upon his own rights, but also regard for
the rights of others, and a full acknowledgment of the interests of the
third party—the public. It is no easy matter to work out a system
or rule of conduct, whether with or without the help of the lawgiver,
which shall minimize that jarring and clashing of interests in the
industrial world which causes so much individual irritation and suffer-
ing at the present day, and which, at times, threatens baleful conse-
quences to large portions of the body politic. But the importance of
the problem can not be overestimated, and it deserves to receive the
careful thought of all men such as those whom I am addressing
to-night. There should be no yielding to wrong; but there should
most certainly be not only desire to do right but a willingness each to
try to understand the viewpoint of his fellow, with whom, for weal or
for woe, his own fortunes are indissolubly bound.
No patent remedy can be devised for the solution of these grave
problems in the industrial world; but we may rest assured that they
can be solved at all only if we bring to the solution certain old-time
virtues, and if we strive to keep out of the solution some of the most
familiar and most undesirable of the traits to which mankind has owed
untold degradation and suffering throughout the ages. Arrogance,
suspicion, brutal envy of the well-to-do, brutal indifference toward
those who are not well-to-do, the hard refusal to consider the rights
of others, the foolish refusal to consider the limits of beneficent
action, the base appeal to the spirit of selfish greed, whether it take the
form of plunder of the fortunate or of oppression of the unfortunate—
from these and from all kindred vices this Nation must be kept free if
it is to remain in its present position in the forefront of the peoples of
mankind. On the other hand, good will come, even out of the present
evils, if we face them armed with the old homely virtues; if we show
that we are fearless of soul, cool of head, and kindly of heart; if,
without betraying the weakness that cringes before wrongdoing, we
yet show by deeds and words our knowledge that in such a government
as Ours each of us must be in very truth his brother's keeper.
At a time when the growing complexity of our social and industrial
life has rendered inevitable the intrusion of the State into spheres of
work wherein it formerly took no part, and when there is also a grow-
ing tendency to demand the illegitimate and unwise transfer to the
government of much of the work that should be done by private per-
sons, singly or associated together, it is a pleasure to address a body
whose members possess to an eminent degree the traditional American
self-reliance of spirit which makes them scorn to ask from the govern-
ment, whether of State or of Nation, anything but a fair field and no
Theodore Roosevelt I75
favor; who confide not in being helped by others, but in their own skill,
energy, and business capacity to achieve success. The first requisite
of a good citizen in this Republic of ours is that he shall be able and
willing to pull his weight—that he shall not be a mere passenger,
but shall do his share in the work that each generation of us finds
ready to hand; and, furthermore, that in doing his work he shall show
not only the capacity for sturdy self-help but also self-respecting regard
for the rights of others.
The Chamber of Commerce, it is no idle boast to say, stands in a
pre-eminent degree for those qualities which make the successful mer-
chant, the successful business man, whose success is won in ways
honorable to himself and beneficial to his fellows. There are very
different kinds of success. There is the success that brings with it the
seared soul—the success which is achieved by wolfish greed and vulpine
cunning—the success which makes honest men uneasy or indignant in
its presence. Then there is the other kind of success—the success
which comes as the reward of keen insight, of sagacity, of resolution,
of address, combined with unflinching rectitude of behavior, public and
private. The first kind of success may, in a sense—and a poor sense
at that—benefit the individual, but it is always and necessarily a curse
to the community; whereas the man who wins the second kind, as an
incident of its winning becomes a beneficiary to the whole common-
wealth. Throughout its history the Chamber of Commerce has stood
for this second and higher kind of success. It is, therefore, fitting that
I should come on here, as the Chief Executive of the Nation, to wish
you well in your new home; for you belong not merely to the city, not
merely to the State, but to all the country, and you stand high among
the great factors in building up that marvelous prosperity which the
entire country now enjoys. The continuance of this prosperity depends
in no small measure upon your sanity and common-sense, upon the way
in which you combine energy in action with conservative refusal to
take part in the reckless gambling which is so often bred by, and which
so inevitably puts an end to, prosperity. You are men of might in the
world of American effort; you are men whose names stand high in the
esteem of our people; you are spoken of in terms like those used in the
long-gone ages when it was said of the Phoenician cities that their
merchants were princes. Great is your power and great, therefore, your
responsibility. Well and faithfully have you met this responsibility
in the past. We look forward with confident hope to what you will
do in the future, and it is therefore with sincerity that I bid you
godspeed this evening and wish for you, in the name of the Nation, a
career of ever-increasing honor and usefulness.
176 Messages and Speeches
AT DENNISON, O., NOVEMBER 12, 1902.
Gentlemen and ladies:
I want to thank you very much for coming here to greet me, and to
say that I appreciate it. I only wish that I was not always afraid of
some accident happening to the small folks. You know the problem
of the little apples in the middle of the barrel. The little folks are just
like that—always come in the middle.
I shall not try to make a speech to you. I am going South to meet
at Memphis a man—General Luke Wright—who has done distin-
guished service in the Philippines; and I am going to take four or
five days holiday first.
It is a great pleasure to come here in your beautiful State; to have
passed through Pennsylvania, as I just have. I have not merely the
hope, but the belief, that our people, as a whole, will so handle them-
selves that the good times we are enjoying may be continued; that we
shall be careful not to mar them by foolish action, and at the same
time will have the forethought to cut out any evil that hampers the
development of the good.
[The Enquirer, Cincinnati, Ohio, Nov. 13, 1902.]
TO THE COLORED CITIZENS OF MEMPHIS, TENN., NOVEMBER
I9, IQ02.
Mr. Chairman, General Wright, and you, my fellow citizens:
I am indeed glad to have been here to witness and to share in your
greeting to General Wright. I can well understand how inevitable
it was that he should succeed in the post of high responsibility he has
occupied outside of our country, when he has had the character that
has entitled him to the profound respect and regard of all his fellow
citizens.
General Wright has succeeded in the Philippines by displaying just
those qualities which each one of us must in a lesser degree display,
if we are to be good citizens here at home. There is nothing peculiar
in government. Good government consists in applying the old hum-
drum everyday, commonplace virtues which all of us learn, but which
all of us do not practice. If a man is fearless, is honest, has consid-
eration for others and is gifted with the crowning grace of common
sense, he is going to do fairly well.
We, all of us, tend to rise or fall together. If any set of us goes
down the whole nation sags a little. If any of us raise ourselves a
little, then by just so much the nation, as a whole, is raised. Every
man who does markedly good work in one sphere of government by
just so much helps all of us and elevates all of us. It is a great
,”
Theodore Roosevelt 177
thing when we can point to any American who has rendered signal
service in any position. It makes all of us a little better Americans,
makes us feel spurred on to do a little better work as citizens, each
in his own sphere of activity.
General Wright stands for duty well done in the Philippines. He
stands for the qualities of firmness, of strength, of fair dealing with
all, fair play for each, according to his capacity and character, which
we must apply at home just as much. All of us should remember that
the qualities which we are anxious to have the other fellow apply we
must apply ourselves.
For that reason we owe to General Wright a double debt of grati-
tude as Americans, as men and women interested in the honor of our
common country. We owe him a debt of gratitude for the way in
which he has administered the greatest of the country’s dependencies,
which came to it as a result of the Spanish war. And, furthermore,
as American citizens, we owe him a debt of gratitude for having prac-
ticed in a high position those qualities of good citizenship which each
of us must practice in Our several degrees, if we are to make and
to keep this nation what it shall be made among the nations of the
earth.
AT THE BANQUET TENDERED GENERAL LUKE. E. WRIGHT, AT
• MEMPHIS, TENN., NOVEMBER 19, 1902.
Mr. Toastmaster, General Wright, and you, my friends, whose greeting
to-night I shall ever remember:
It is a real and great pleasure to come to this typical city of the
southern Mississippi Valley in order to greet a typical American, a
citizen of Tennessee, who deserves honor not only from his State,
but from the entire country—General Luke E. Wright. We have a
right to expect a high standard of manhood from Tennessee. It was
one of the first two States created west of the Allegheny Mountains,
and it was in this State that the first self-governing community of
American freemen was established upon waters flowing into the Gulf.
The pioneers of Tennessee were among the earliest in that great west-
ward march which thrust the nation’s border across the continent to
the Pacific, and it is eminently fitting that a son of Tennessee should
now play so prominent a part in the further movement of expansion
beyond the Pacific. There have been Presidents of the United States
for but one hundred and thirteen years, and during sixteen of those
years Tennesseeans sat in the White House. Hardihood, and daring,
and iron resolution are of right to be expected among the sons of a
State which nurtured Andrew Jackson and Sam Houston; which sent
178 Messages and Speeches
into the American Navy one of the most famous fighting admirals of
all time, Farragut.
There is another reason why our country should be glad that it was
General Wright who rendered this service. General Wright fought
with distinguished gallantry among the gallant men who served in
the armies of the Confederacy during the Civil War. We need no
proof of the completeness of our reunion as a people. When the war
with Spain came the sons of the men who wore the blue and the sons
of the men who wore the gray vied with one another in the effort to
get into the ranks and face a foreign foe under the old flag that had
been carried in triumph under Winfield Scott and Zachary Taylor and
Andrew Jackson. It was my own good fortune to serve under that
fearless fighter, old Joe Wheeler, a memory of which I shall always
be proud. But if we needed any proof of the unity of our interests
it would have been afforded this very year by General Wright, the
ex-Confederate, in his administration as Acting Governor of the Philip-
pine Islands. Upon him during the months of summer rested a heavier
burden of responsibility than upon any other public servant at that
particular time; and not the least of his titles to our regard is the way
in which he was able to work on terms of cordial good-will with the
head of the army, himself a man who had honored the blue uniform
as Wright had honored the gray.
General Wright’s work has been as difficult as it was important.
The events of the last four years have definitely decided that, whether
we wish to or not, we must hereafter play a great part in the world.
We can not escape facing the duties. We may shirk them if we are
louilt of poor stuff, or we may take hold and do them if we are fit sons
of our sires—but face them we must, whether we will or not. Our
duty in the Philippine Islands has simply been one of the duties that
thus have come upon us. We are there, and we can no more haul down
our flag and abandon the islands than we could now abandon Alaska.
Whether we are glad or sorry that events forced us to go there is
aside from the question; the point is that, as the inevitable result of
the war with Spain, we found ourselves in the Philippines and that
we could not leave the islands without discredit. The islanders were
wholly unfit to govern themselves, and if we had left there would
have been a brief period of bloody chaos, and then some other nation
would have stepped in to do the work which we had shirked. It can
not be too often repeated that there was no question that the work
had to be done. All the question was, whether we would do it well
or ill; and, thanks to the choice of men like Governor Wright, it has
been done well. The first and absolutely indispensable requisite was
order—peace. The reign of lawless violence, of resistance to legitimate
Theodore Roosevelt I79
authority, the reign of anarchy, could no more be tolerated abroad than
it could be tolerated here in our own land.
The American flag stands for orderly liberty, and it stands for it
abroad as it stands for it at home. The task of our soldiers was to
restore and maintain order in the islands. The army had the task to
do, and it did it well and thoroughly. The fullest and heartiest praise
belongs to our soldiers who in the Philippines brought to a triumphant
conclusion a war, Small indeed compared to the gigantic struggle in
which the older men whom I am addressing took part in the early six-
ties, but inconceivably harassing and difficult, because it was waged
amid the pathless jungles of great tropic islands and against a foe
very elusive, very treacherous, and often inconceivably cruel both to-
ward our men and toward the great numbers of peace-loving Filipinos
who gladly welcomed our advent. The soldiers included both regulars
and volunteers, men from the North, the South, the East and the
West, men from Pennsylvania and from Tennessee, no less
than men from the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific Slope—and to
all alike we give honor, for they acted as American soldiers should.
Cruelties were committed here and there. The fact that they were
committed under wellnigh intolerable provocation affords no excuse
for such cruelties, nor can we admit as justification that they were
retaliatory in kind. Every effort has been made to detect and punish
the wrongdoers and the wrongdoing itself has been completely stopped.
But these misdeeds were exceptional, and their occurrence in no wise
alters the fact that the American army in the Philippines showed as a
whole not only splendid soldierly qualities but a high order of humanity
in dealing with their foes. A hundred thousand of our troops went to
the Philippines. Among them were some who offended against the
right. Well, are we altogether immaculate at home? I think not. I
ask for no special consideration to be shown our friends and kinsmen,
Our sons and brothers, who during three years so well upheld the
national honor in the Philippines. I ask merely that we do the same
equal justice to the soldier who went abroad and faced death and
lived hard as we show to his fellow who stayed at home and lived
easily and in comfort; and if we show that equal justice we will doff
our hats to the man who has put the whole country under obligations
by the victory he helped to win in the Philippines.
But the soldier's work as a soldier was not the larger part of what
he did. When once the outbreak was over in any place, then began
the work of establishing civil administration. Here, too, the soldier
did his part, for the work of preparing for the civil authority was
often done by the Officers and men of the regular army, and well done,
too. Then the real work of building up a system of self-government
for the people who had become our wards was begun, under the auspices
18O Messages and Speeches
of the Philippine Commission, Judge Taft being made Governor, and
I having had the honor myself to appoint General Wright as Vice-
Governor. During the critical period when the insurrection was ending
and the time was one of transition between a state of war and a state
of peace, at the time that I issued a proclamation declaring that the
state of war was over and that the civil government was now in com-
plete command, General Wright served as Governor of the archipelago.
The progress of the islands both in material well-being and as regards
Order and justice under the administration of Governor Wright and
his colleagues has been astounding.
There is no question as to our not having gone far enough and
fast enough in granting self-government to the Filipinos; the Only
possible danger has been lest we should go faster and further than
was in the interest of the Filipinos themselves. Each Filipino at the
present day is guaranteed his life, his liberty, and the chance to pursue
happiness as he wishes, so long as he does not harm his fellows, in a
way which the islands have never known before during all their re-
corded history. There are bands of ladrones, of brigands, still in
existence. Now and then they may show sporadic increase. This will
be due Occasionally to disaffection with some of the things that our
government does which are best—for example, the effort to quarantine
against the plague and to enforce necessary sanitary precautions, gently
and tactfully though it was made, produced violent hostility among
some of the more ignorant natives. Again, a disease like the cattle
plague may cause in some given province such want that a part of the
inhabitants revert to their ancient habit of brigandage. But the islands
have never been as orderly, as peaceful, or as prosperous as now ; and
in no other Oriental country, whether ruled by Asiatics or Europeans,
is there anything approaching to the amount of individual liberty and
of self-government which our rule has brought to the Filipinos. The
Nation owes a great debt to the people through whom this splendid
work for civilization has been achieved, and therefore on behalf of the
Nation I have come here to-night to thank in your presence your fel-
low-townsman, because he has helped us materially to add a new page
to the honor roll of American history.
General Wright, I greet you, I thank you, and I wish you well.
AT THE RECEPTION TO GENERAL WRIGHT, AT MEMPHIS, TENN,
NOVEMBER 19, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow Americans:
I am glad indeed to have the honor of coming today to your beauti-
ful city in your beautiful State to greet, on behalf of the whole country,
a Tennesseean who has rendered high and honorable service to the
Theodore Roosevelt I81
*
whole country—a Tennesseean of whom it can be said, as it has been
said of the Greek hero:
“Much has he seen and known, cities of men,
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Himself not least, but honored of them all;
Has drunk delight of battle with his peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy.”
We are one people absolutely. The memories of the Civil War are
now heritages of honor alike for those whose fathers wore the blue
and for those whose fathers wore the gray. There is one curious
and not inappropriate coincidence to-day—my mother's brother served
under Mrs. Wright's father in the Confederate Navy. I am proud of
his valor; and I can say this freely, for if I had been old enough I
would myself have surely worn the blue uniform.
I come here to-day to greet General Wright because it has been
given to him to render a peculiar service to the whole country. A man
can render service of the very highest character at home, but owing
to the very nature of our system of government, he must, in his election
at least, represent particularly a given party. I say in his election at
least, for after election, if he is worth anything, he must be a repre-
sentative of the whole country. But there are certain branches of the
public service in which if we are wise and far-seeing we will never
allow partisan politics to enter. There must be no partisan politics in
the army or the navy of the United States. All that concerns us to
know about any general or admiral, about a mighty captain by sea or
by land, is whether he is a thoroughly fit commander of men and loyal
to the country as a whole. In the same way if we are wise, if we care
for our reputation abroad, if we are sensitive of our honor at home, we
will allow no question of partisan politics ever to enter into the admin-
istration of the great islands which came under our flag as a result of
the war with Spain.
Hence I say that General Wright, like Governor Taft and his asso-
ciates, has rendered a peculiar service to every man jealous of the
honor of the American name in what he has done in administering the
Philippine Islands. For fourteen months it has been part of my busi-
ness to see how the work there was done. I am not speaking exag-
geratedly, I am speaking literally, telling the naked truth, when I say
that never during that time has a question of party politics entered into
even the smallest action of those in control of the Philippine Islands.
My fellow Americans, we can not afford to have the honor of the
Nation in any way smirched in connection with our dependencies. We
can not afford to have it smirched anywhere; but if we wrong our-
selves here at home we are to blame and we pay the penalty, while
I82 Messages and Speeches
if we allow wrong in connection with the islands, not only the 1slands
suffer, but an indelible stigma of shame comes to the American name.
I am earnestly desirous that the administration of the Philippine Islands
shall be put and kept upon such a plane of patriotic efficiency that no
change will be made in it owing to any change of party here at home.
Party feeling should, of course, stop at the water-line. The inestimable
service rendered by Governor Wright in the Philippine Islands has
been because he has so conducted the government of those islands as
to make it not only of signal benefit to them, but of signal honor to
every citizen of our country; that he has so handled the administration
of affairs as to make us feel a justifiable confidence that hereafter the
storms of party politics in the United States shall never touch the
government of the Philippine Islands, and that whatever changes of
administration there are here in the Union, there shall not be a ripple
of change in the course of conduct of the Philippines marked out by
Governor Wright and his associates. The man of whom that can be
truthfully said is a man entitled to honor from his fellow-countrymen;
and it can be truthfully said of Governor Wright.
AT THE DEDICATORY EXERCISES OF THE NEW HIGH-SCHOOL
BUILDING, PHILADELPHIA, PA., NOVEMBER 22, 1902.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of being present at the formal dedica-
tion of this new building, which in its management stands in line of
succession to a series of buildings, themselves typifying in no small
degree the extraordinary development of the public-school system of
the United States. It was some sixty-four years ago that this institu-
tion was first established under a man of great eminence alike in the
work of pedagogy and in other fields—Professor Biggs. At the time
when it was started the public-school system of the United States had
begun and was in the process of its first development. Now, in the
city of Philadelphia in attendance upon the public schools, including
the night schools, there are some hundred and seventy thousand pupils
and over four thousand teachers. The development of the high school,
especially during the last half century, has been literally phenomenal.
Nothing like our present system of education was known in earlier
times. No such system of popular education for the people by the
representatives of the people existed.
It is, of course, a mere truism to say that the stability and future
welfare of our institutions of government depend upon the grade of
citizenship turned out from our public schools. And no body of public
servants, no body of individuals associated in private life, are better
worth the admiration and respect of all who value citizenship at its
Theodore Roosevelt 183
true worth, than the body composed of the teachers in the public schools
throughout the length and breadth of this Union. They have to deal
with citizenship in the raw and turn it out something like a finished
product. I think that all of us who also endeavor to deal with that
citizenship in the raw in our own homes appreciate the burden and the
responsibility. The training given in the public schools must, of course,
be not merely a training in intellect, but a training in what counts for
infinitely more than intellect—a training in character. And the chief
factor in that training must be the personal equation of the teachers;
the influence exerted, sometimes consciously and sometimes uncon-
sciously, by the man or woman who stands in so peculiar a relation
to the boys and girls under his or her care—a relation closer, more
intricate, and more vital in its after-effects than any other relation save
that of parent and child. Wherever a burden of that kind is laid, those
who carry it necessarily carry a great responsibility. There can be no
greater. Scant should be our patience with any man or woman doing
a bit of work vitally worth doing, who does not approach it in the
spirit of sincere love for the work, and of desire to do it well for the
work’s sake.
Doubtless most of you remember the old distinction drawn between
the two kinds of work, the work done for the sake of the fee and the
work done for the sake of the work itself. The man or woman in
public or private life who ever works only for the sake of the reward
that comes outside of the work, will in the long run do poor work.
The man or woman who does work worth doing is the man or woman
who lives, who breathes that work; with whom it is ever present in his
or her soul; whose ambition is to do it well and to feel rewarded by
the thought of having done it well. That man, that woman, puts the
whole country under an obligation. As a body all those connected
with the education of our people are entitled to the heartiest praise
from all lovers of their country, because as a body they are devoting
heart and soul to the welfare of those under them.
It is a poor type of school nowadays that has not a good playground
attached. It is not so long since, in my own city at least, this was held
as revolutionary doctrine, especially in the crowded quarters where
playgrounds were most needed. People said they didn't need play-
grounds. It was a new-fangled idea. They expected to make good
citizens of the boys and girls who, when they were not in School, were
put upon the streets in the crowded quarters of New York to play at
the kind of games alone that they could play at in the streets. We
have passed that stage. I think we realize what a good healthy play-
ground means to children. I think we understand not only the effects
for good upon their bodies, but for good upon their minds. We need
healthy bodies. We need to have schools physically developed.
I84 Messages and Speeches
Sometimes you can develop character by the direct inculcation of
moral precept; a good deal more often you cannot. You develop it
less by precept than by your practice. Let it come as an incident of
the association with you; as an incident to the general tone of the whole
body, the tone which in the aggregate we all create. Is not that the
experience of all of you, in dealing with these children in the schools,
in dealing with them in the family, in dealing with them in bodies any-
where? They are quick to take the tone of those to whom they look
up, and if they do not look up to you, then you can preach virtue all
you wish, but the effect will be small.
I have not come here to try to make any extended speech to you, but
I should hold myself a poor citizen if I did not welcome the chance
to wish you godspeed in your work for yourselves and to wish you
godspeed in your work as representatives of that great body of public-
school teachers, upon the success of whose efforts to train aright the
children of to-day depends the safety of our institutions of to-morrow.
AT THE FOUNDERS’ DAY BANQUET OF THE UNION LEAGUE,
PHILADELPHIA, PA., NOVEMBER 22, 1902.
Mr. President, gentlemen of the Union League:
Forty years ago this club was founded, in the dark days of the Civil
War, to uphold the hands of Abraham Lincoln and give aid to those
who battled for the Union and for human liberty. Two years ago
President McKinley came here as your guest to thank you, and through
you all those far-sighted and loyal men who had supported him in his
successful effort to keep untarnished the national good faith at home
and the national honor abroad, and to bring back to this country the
material well-being which we now so abundantly enjoy. It was no
accident which made the men of this club who stood as in a peculiar
sense the champions and upholders of the principles of Lincoln in the
early sixties stand no less stoutly for those typified in the person of
McKinley during the closing years of the century. The qualities apt
to make men respond to the call of duty in One crisis are also apt to
make them respond to a similar call in a crisis of a different character.
The traits which enabled our people to pass unscathed through the fiery
ordeal of the Civil War were the traits upon which we had to rely in
the less serious, but yet serious, dangers by which we were menaced in
1896, 1898, and IQOO.
From the very beginning our people have markedly combined prac-
tical capacity for affairs with power of devotion to an ideal. The lack
of either quality would have rendered the possession of the other of
small value. Mere ability to achieve success in things concerning the
body would not have atoned for the failure to live the life of high en-
Theodore Roosevelt I85
deavor; and, on the other hand, without a foundation of those qualities
which bring material prosperity there would be nothing on which the
higher life could be built. The men of the Revolution would have
failed if they had not possessed alike devotion to liberty and ability
(once liberty had been achieved) to show common-sense and self-re-
straint in its use. The men of the great Civil War would have failed
had they not possessed the business capacity which developed and or-
ganized their resources in addition to the stern resolution to expend
these resources as freely as they expended their blood in furtherance
of the great cause for which their hearts leaped. It is this combination
of qualities that has made our people succeed. Other peoples have
been as devoted to liberty, and yet, because of lack of hard-headed
common-sense and of ability to show restraint and subordinate indi-
vidual passions for the general good, have failed so signally in the
struggle of life as to become a byword among the nations. Yet other
peoples, again, have possessed all possible thrift and business capacity,
but have been trampled under foot, or have played a sordid and ignoble
part in the world, because their business capacity was unaccompanied
by any of the lift toward nobler things which marks a great and gen-
erous nation. The stern but just rule of judgment for humanity is
that each nation shall be known by its fruits; and if there are no fruits,
if the nation has failed, it matters but little whether it has failed through
meanness of soul or through lack of robustness of character. We must
judge a nation by the net result of its life and activity. And so we
must judge the policies of those who at any time control the destinies
of a nation.
Therefore I ask you to-night to look at the results of the policies
championed by President McKinley on both the occasions when he
appealed to the people for their suffrages, and to see how well that
appeal has been justified by the event. Most certainly I do not claim
all the good that has befallen us during the past six years as due solely
to any human policy. No legislation, however wise, no Administration,
however efficient, can secure prosperity to a people or greatness to a
nation. All that can be done by the law-maker and the administrator
is to give the best chance possible for the people of the country them-
selves to show the stuff that is in them. President McKinley was
elected in 1896 on the specific pledge that he would keep the financial
honor of the Nation untarnished and would put our economic system
On a stable basis, so that our people might be given a chance to secure
the return of prosperity. Both pledges have been so well kept that, as
is but too often the case, men are beginning to forget how much the
keeping of them has meant. When people have become very pros-
perous they tend to become sluggishly indifferent to the continuation
of the policies that brought about their prosperity. At such times as
I86 Messages and Speeches
these it is of course a mere law of nature that some men prosper more
than others, and too often those who prosper less, in their jealousy of
their more fortunate brethren, forget that all have prospered somewhat.
I ask you soberly to remember that the complaint made at the present
day of our industrial or economic conditions never takes the form of
stating that any of our people are less well off than they were seven
or eight years back, before President McKinley came in and his policies
had a chance to be applied; but that the complaint is that some people
have received more than their share of the good things of the world.
There was no such complaint eight years ago, in the summer of 1894.
Complaint was not then that any one had prospered too much ; it was
that no one had prospered enough. Let each one of us think of the
affairs of his own household and his own business, let each of us com-
pare his standing now with his standing eight years back, and then
let him answer for himself whether it is not true that the policies for
which William McKinley stood in 1896 have justified themselves thrice
over by the results they have brought about.
In 1900 the issues were in part the same, but new ones had been
added. Prosperity had returned ; the gold standard was assured; our
tariff was remodeled on the lines that have marked it at all periods
when our well-being was greatest. But as must often happen, the
President elected on certain issues was obliged to face others entirely
unforeseen. Rarely indeed have our greatest men made issues—they
have shown their greatness by meeting them as they arose. President
McKinley faced the problems of the Spanish War and those that fol-
lowed it exactly as he had faced the problems of our economic and
financial needs. As a sequel to the war with Spain we found ourselves
in possession of the Philippines under circumstances which rendered
it necessary to subdue a formidable insurrection which made it im-
possible for us with honor or with regard to the welfare of the island
to withdraw therefrom. The occasion was seized by the opponents of
the President for trying to raise a new issue, on which they hoped they
might be more successful than on the old. The clamor raised against
him was joined in not only by many honest men who were led astray
by a mistaken view or imperfect knowledge of the facts, but by all who
feared effort, who shrank from the rough work of endeavor. The
campaign of 1900 had to be fought largely upon the new issue thus
raised. President McKinley met it squarely. Two years and eight
months ago, before his second nomination, he spoke as follows:
“We believe that the century of free government which the American
people have enjoyed has not rendered them irresolute and faithless,
but has fitted them for the great task of lifting up and assisting to
better conditions and larger liberty those distant peoples who through
the issue of battle have become our wards. Let us fear not. There
Theodore Roosevelt 187
is no occasion for faint hearts, no excuse for regrets. Nations do not
grow in strength, the cause of liberty and law is not advanced by the
doing of easy things. The harder the task the greater will be the
result, the benefit, and the honor. To doubt our power to accomplish
it is to lose faith in the soundness and strength of our popular institu-
tions. . . . We have the new care and can not shift it. And,
breaking up the camp of ease and isolation, let us bravely and hope-
fully and soberly continue the march of faithful service, and falter not
until the work is done. . . . The burden is our opportunity. The
opportunity is greater than the burden.”
There spoke the man who preached the gospel of hope as well as
the gospel of duty, and on the issue thus fairly drawn between those
who said we would do our new work well and triumphantly and those
who said we would fail lamentably in the effort, the contest was joined.
We won. And now I ask you, two years after the victory, to look
across the seas and judge for yourselves whether or not the promise
has been kept. The prophets of disaster have seen their predictions
so completely falsified by the event that it is actually difficult to arouse
even a passing interest in their failure. To answer them now, to review
their attack on our army, is of merely academic interest. They played
their brief part of obstruction and clamor; they said their say; and the
current of our life went over them and they sank under it as did their
predecessors who, thirty-six years before, had declared that another
and greater war was a failure, that another and greater
struggle for true liberty was only a contest for subjugation
in which the United States could never succeed. The insurrection
among the Filipinos has been absolutely quelled. The war has been
brought to an end sooner than even the most sanguine of us dared to
hope. The world has not in recent years seen any military task done
with more soldierly energy and ability; and done, moreover, in a spirit
of great humanity. The strain on the army was terrible, for the con-
ditions of climate and soil made their work harassing to an extraordi-
nary degree, and the foes in the field were treacherous and cruel, not
merely toward our men, but toward the great multitude of peaceful is-
landers who welcomed Our rule. Under the strain of wellnigh intolerable
provocation there were shameful instances, as must happen in all wars,
where the soldiers forgot themselves, and retaliated evil for evil. There
were One hundred thousand of our men, in the Philippines, a hundred
thousand hired for a small sum a month apiece, put there under condi-
tions that strained their nerves to the breaking point, and some of the
hundred thousand did what they ought not to have done. But out of a
hundred thousand men at home, have all been faultless? Every effort
has been made to detect such cases, to punish the offenders, and to
prevent any recurrence of the deed. It is a cruel injustice to the
I88 Messages and Speeches
gallant men who fought so well in the Philippines not to recognize
that these instances were exceptional, and that the American troops
who served in the far-off tropic islands deserve praise the same in kind
that has always been given to those who have well and wailiantly fought
for the honor of our common flag and common country. The work
of civil administration has kept pace with the work of military ad-
ministration, and when on July 4 last amnesty and peace
were declared throughout the islands the civil government assumed
the complete control. Peace and order now prevail and a greater
measure of prosperity and of happiness than the Filipinos have ever
hitherto known in all their dark and checkered history; and each one
of them has a greater measure of liberty, a greater chance of happi-
ness, and greater safety for his life and property than he or his fore-
fathers have ever before known.
Thus we have met each task that has confronted us during the past
six years. Thus we have kept every promise made in 1896 and 1900.
We have a right to be proud of the memories of the last six years.
But we must remember that each victory only opens the chance for a
new struggle; that the remembrance of triumphs achieved in the past
is of use chiefly if it spurs us to fresh effort in the present. No nation
has ever prospered as we are prospering now, and we must see to it
that by our own folly we do not mar this prosperity. Yet we must see
to it also that wherever wrong flourishes it be repressed. It is not the
habit of our people to shirk issues, but squarely to face them. It is not
the habit of our people to treat a good record in the past as anything
but a reason for expecting an even better record in the present; and
no Administration, gentlemen, should ask to be judged save on those
lines. The tremendous growth of our industrialism has brought to
the front many problems with which we must deal; and I trust that we
shall deal with them along the lines indicated in speech and in action
by that profound jurist and upright and fearless public servant who
represents Pennsylvania in the Cabinet—Attorney-General Knox. The
question of the so-called trusts is but one of the questions we must
meet in connection with our industrial system. There are many of
them and they are serious; but they can and will be met. Time may
be needed for making the solution perfect; but it is idle to tell this
people that we have not the power to solve such a problem as that of
exercising adequate Supervision over the great industrial combinations
of to-day. We have the power and we shall find out the way. We
shall not act hastily or recklessly; but we have firmly made up our
minds that a solution, and a right solution, shall be found, and found
it will be. º
No nation as great as Ours can expect to escape the penalty of great-
ness, for greatness does not come without trouble and labor, There
Theodore Roosevelt 189
are problems ahead of us at home and problems abroad, because such
problems are incident to the working out of a great national career.
We do not shrink from them. Scant is our patience with those who
preach the gospel of craven weakness. No nation under the sun ever
yet played a part worth playing if it feared its fate overmuch—if it did
not have the courage to be great. We of America, we, the sons of a
nation yet in the pride of its lusty youth, spurn the teachings of dis-
trust, spurn the creed of failure and despair. We know that the future
is ours if we have in us the manhood to grasp it, and we enter the
new century girding our loins for the contest before us, rejoicing in the
struggle, and resolute so to bear ourselves that the Nation’s future
shall even surpass her glorious past.
AT THE BANQUET TO JUSTICE HARLAN, THE NEW WILLARD
HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., DECEMBER 9, 1902.
Mr. Chairman and gentlemen:
It is a peculiar privilege to be here to-night as one of those gathered
to do homage to a career which has honored America. It is difficult
to say certain of the truths which must need be said without being
guilty of truisms in saying them. It is not an idle boast of this country
when we speak of the court upon which Mr. Justice Harlan sits as the
most illustrious and important court in all the civilized world. It is
not merely our own people who say that—it is the verdict of other
nations as well.
Mr. Justice Harlan has served for a quarter of a century on that
court. During that time he has exercised an influence over the judicial
statesmanship of the country of a kind such as is possible only under
our own form of government. For the judges of the Supreme Court
of the land must be not only great jurists, but they must be great con-
structive statesmen. And the truth of what I say is illustrated by every
study of American statesmanship, for in not one serious study of Ameri-
can political life will it be possible to omit the immense part played
by the Supreme Court in the creation, not merely the modification, of
the great policies through and by means of which the country has
moved on to its present position.
Thrice fortunate is the court when it has as one of its members a
man who has played a great part in other spheres of our composite
national life. Mr. Justice Harlan came from Kentucky, a State in
which the patriotism of the people was put to so peculiarly a severe
test in the Civil War. In the States of the further North it was easy
for the man to make up his mind on which side he would unsheathe
his sword. In the States of the further South it was equally easy. In
Kentucky the task was a difficult one. I remember, Mr. Justice, being
I90 Messages and Speeches
told by a Kentuckian, who was a stanch friend of yours and One of
the greatest lawyers and most patriotic citizens whom this country had
—John Mason Brown—that he came back from a trip from the West
as a young man of twenty-one, just at the time of the outbreak of
the Civil War, just after Sumter had been fired upon, and his mother
brought down to him the sword that his father had carried in the
Mexican War, and said to him :
“My son, this is the sword your father carried. I hope you will
draw it on the side that defends the flag for which your father fought,
but, for one side or the other, draw it you must.”
In any audience in any State of the Union, take it as far north as
you wish, I can appeal with confidence to the people I address when I
say that next to the homage we pay to the men who proved the truth of
their endeavor as they battled in the blue uniform is the homage we
pay to the men who, with equal sincerity, with equal devotion to the
right, as it was given them to see the right, wore the gray. And none
pay that tribute of regard so frankly as those who themselves wore
the blue in battle.
And having said that, I am sure that none of my friends who fought
in the Confederate service will misunderstand me or will grudge what
I am about to say when I say that the greatest debt owed by this
country to any set of men is owed by it to those men of the so-called
border States—the men who in statesmanship followed Clay and the
Crittendens and the Blairs; the men who as soldiers fought on the
same side with Thomas and Farragut, the men who were for the
Union, without regard to whether their immediate associates were
for it or not. In New York, in Massachusetts, in Illinois, in Iowa,
the men who stood for the Union went with the stream. In parts of
Kentucky, of Virginia, of Missouri, they stemmed the torrent. And,
gentlemen, I am half a Southerner myself. Two of my uncles fought
in the Confederate Navy. One of them served under the father-in-
law of Vice-Governor Luke Wright, of the Philippine Islands. And
so I think I have the right to say that, knowing the Southern people
as I do, I would heartily advocate fighting twice as hard as you fought
from 1861 to 1865 for the privilege of staying in the same Union
with them.
The man to be a great statesman on the bench of the Supreme Court
must have many qualities, and fortunate are we that this evening we
can point to Justice Harlan as embodying them. A good citizen must
be a good citizen in peace and in war. He must have the decent and
Orderly virtues, and he must have the essential manliness for the lack
of which no good intention can atone. It will be a bad thing for the
nation if ever we grow as a nation to submit to the suppression of
efficiency and morality, if we ever grow to accept the belief that we
Theodore Roosevelt I9I
&
are to have two camps, in one of which will be grouped the men who
mean well, but who don’t do things, and in the other the men who
do things, but who do not mean well.
The art of successful self-government is not an easy art for people
or for individuals. It comes to our people here as the inheritance of
ages of effort. It can be thrown away; it can be unlearned very
easily, and it surely will be unlearned if we forget the vital need not
merely of preaching, but of practicing both sets of virtues—if we forget
the vital need of having the average citizen not only a good man, but
a Iſla Il.
It is a fine thing to have on the Supreme Court a man who dared
venture all for the great prize of death in battle when the country
called for him, and a man who, after the war was closed, did not
content himself with living an ignoble life on the plea that he had
done so well it was not necessary to do more, but who continued to
do his duty as a citizen all the better because he had done it as a
soldier; the man who remembered that duty done, to be of practical
use, must serve not as an excuse for not doing further duty, but as
an incentive, as a spur, to make him feel ashamed that his present
or future should fall short of his past.
So, Judge Harlan, I greet you personally, sir. I wish to express
my own personal debt to you for your influence, for your example, but
I wish far more, speaking as the representative of all our people, to
express the infinite sense of obligation we have to you for having
shown by your life what the type of fearless American citizenship
should be.
AT THE DEDICATION OF THE WASHINGTON PUBLIC LIBRARY,
WASHINGTON, D. C., JANUARY 7, 1903.
Mr. Carnegie, ladies and gentlemen:
I count myself fortunate in being able to come here to-day not only
for my own private individual sake, but as in some sort representing
the people of all the country, to express my profound appreciation of
what is emphatically a gift of wisdom, a gift to do the utmost possible
benefit to all of the people of this country, from you, Mr. Carnegie.
It seems to me that a man has a right to call himself thrice blessed
who combines the power and the purpose to use his wealth for the
benefit of the people at large in a way that shall do them real benefit,
and in no way can more benefit be done than through the gift of
libraries such as this—a free library, where each man, each woman,
has the chance to get for himself or herself the training that he or
she has the character to desire and to acquire.
I92 Messages and Speeches
&
Of course our common school system lies at the foundation of
our educational system. But it is the foundation only. Of those who
are to stand pre-eminent as the representatives of the culture of the
community, the enormous majority must educate themselves. The
work done by this library is helpful because it represents one side of
the way in which all healthy work in this community must be done.
Mr. Carnegie, neither you nor any one else can make a man wise or
cultivated. All you can do is to give him a chance to add to his own
wisdom or to his own cultivation. That is all you can do in any kind
of philanthropic work. The only philanthropic work that counts in the
long run is the work that helps a man to help himself. That is true
socially, sociologically and in every way. The man who will submit
or demand to be carried is not worth carrying. And if you make the
effort it helps neither him nor you. But every man of us needs help
—needs more and more to be given the chance to show for himself
the stuff that is in him; and this kind of free library is doing in the
world of cultivation, the world of scholarship, what it should be our
aim to do in the great world of political and social development—
that is, it is as far as may be equalizing the opportunities and then
leaving to the men themselves to show how they are able to take
advantage of them. In other words, this is the kind of gift that steers
the happy middle course between the Charybdis of failure to show
public spirit on the one hand and on the other the Scylla of showing
that public spirit in a way that will demoralize and pauperize those
who take advantage of it. To quote an expression that I am fond
of—that is equally far from the two prime vices of our civilization,
hardness of heart and softness of head. t
I am not here to make a speech. I unfortunately have to leave at
once, as the President has several duties to perform. I have come
because I feel that the movement for securing better facilities for
self-training, better facilities for education in its widest and broadest
and deepest sense, is one of such prime importance that the President
of the United States could nowhere more appropriately come than to
this building, Mr. Carnegie, at this time, to thank you for the gift
that you have made to the people of the national capital.
RECEPTION OF A DELEGATION FROM THE NATIONAL BOARD
OF TRADE, WASHINGTON, D. C., JANUARY 15, 1903.
Mr. Randall and gentlemen:
I shall not try to make you any speech. I wish simply to say
what a very real pleasure it is to see you, and also to say this—
that I am glad to see the meetings of the big business interests take
place sometimes in Washington. Nothing can be better both for
Theodore Roosevelt I93
the business interests and for legislation than to have as close a
touch as possible between the elective representatives here and the
men whose welfare is so interwoven with what is done in the halls
of Congress. It is a very great help to all of us to have you come
here. I thank you for coming.
AT THE BANQUET OF THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIA-
TION, NEW WILLARD HOTEL, WASHINGTON,
D. C., JANUARY 19, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, gentlemen:
It is no accident that we should meet here to celebrate a record of
fifty years—that period which covers the half century which has
seen the gigantic industrial change of the world, which has seen the
fruition of the forces that have brought about a revolution, socially
and industrially, within the fifty years such as was hardly seen within
any preceding five centuries. Life has been very intense, has been
carried on at a very high pressure, during that half century; more
intense, carried on a higher pressure, than ever before. That means
of course that all the forces have been raised to a higher degree of
power—the forces of evil, and, thank heaven, also the forces of good.
If it had not been for the work of such organizations as this, for such
organized effort as that represented by you here to-night, the immense
material progress of the world during the past half century would
have been a progress that would have told for ill for the nations,
not for good. We can say with truth that we are better off than we
were. We can say that the creed of those who have faith is the right
creed as justified in present history, because side by side with this
great material development, and with an even stronger rate of growth
than the forces of evil, have grown the forces of good. If it had
not been for the work done by those who founded this movement,
and of course by all those who have taken part in similar movements,
in all movements for good, in every movement for social betterment,
for civic betterment, in every movement to make men decent and
manly and strong—if it had not been for the work done by them,
if they had sat supine and thought things would make themselves
better, things would have become steadily worse. We see all around
us people who say, “Oh, well, things will come out all right.” So
they will; but not because there are men who are content to say that
they will come out all right; but because there is a sufficient number
of earnest men with the root of righteousness in them who are bound
to do what will make them come out right.
The remarkable concentration of our lives during the last half cen-
194 Messages and Speeches
tury has rendered it possible for anything that is evil to manifest itself
more strongly than ever before, and therefore made it necessary for
us to see that the good has a corresponding development. A hundred
years ago there was no such need for the Young Men's Christian Asso-
ciations, for the invaluable Young Women’s Christian Associations.
Life was simpler. The temptation would come surely to every man,
but it would not come so frequently and in so intense a form. As the
forces of evil manifested themselves in stronger and stronger form
they had to be met, if they were to be successfully grappled with, by
organized effort, by the effort of the many, which must always be
stronger than the effort of one; and the successful effort to combat
the forces of evil had to take just such shape as has been given to the
growth of the Young Men's Christian Associations. It had to take
the shape of combining decency and efficiency. There are many things
that are so true that it seems almost trite to speak of them, and yet
it is continually necessary to speak of them. There have been phil-
anthropic movements led and supported by most excellent people, which,
nevertheless, have produced results altogether incommensurable with
the efforts spent, because they failed to combine as this movement has
combined a recognition of the needs of human nature with a resolute
effort to make that human nature better.
I have been acquainted especially with three types of your work:
the work in the army and navy, the work among railroad men, and the
work among college students. These three classes are not going to
be effectively reached as classes by any effort which fails to take ac-
count of the fact that they demand manliness as well as virtue; and
you can make them straight only on condition that in making them
straight you also keep in mind that it is necessary for them to be
strong. Remember Wesley's remark when some one criticised him
because his hymn tunes were so good. He answered that he was
not going to leave all the good tunes to the devil. We want to be
exceedingly careful that the impression shall not get about that good
men intend to leave strength to those who serve the devil. I was very
much interested in what was said by Mr. Mott as to the meeting at
Yale a few nights ago, where the captain of the football team and the
captain of the crew of next season both were present. I think that is
typical of the whole movement. I am certain that those who have had
experience in the army and navy have seen that in the long run the
man who is a decent man is apt to be the man who is the best soldier.
The work among the railroad men always particularly appealed to me
because the railroad men are those who follow that modern industry
which more than any other modern industry makes demand upon its
followers for the heroic virtues, for the willingness to take risks, the
willingness to accept responsibilities, the readiness to adopt a standard
Theodore Roosevelt I95
of duty which will require at need the sacrifice of life; those who
follow it must possess both the power to obey and the power to act
on individual initiative—the power to take responsibility. You can
make men like that accept morality if you can make them understand
that it is not only compatible with but is demanded by essential manli-
ness. The work of the Y. M. C. A. has grown so among college stu-
dents, for instance, because (I think I am right in saying) it has
tried, not to dwarf any of the impulses of the young, vigorous men,
but to guide them aright.* It has sought not to make a man's develop-
ment one-sided, not to prevent his being a man, but to see that he is
in the fullest sense a man, and a good man. We greet to-night with
peculiar pleasure the men who served in the great war. Those men won
in the day of trial because they and their fellows had in them, in the
first place, the power of devotion to an ideal, and, in the next place,
the strength to realize that power in effective fashion. If the men of
'6I had not been driven forward by a spirit which made them anxious
to lay down their lives if need should be rather than to see the flag
of the Union torn in twain, if they had not had in them the lift toward
loftier things which comes to those who value life as of small account
compared to devotion to country and to the flag, if they had not in
the truest and greatest and deepest sense of the word been patriotic,
then no amount of fighting capacity would have saved them. I don’t
care how good natural soldiers or sailors they had been, if their
ambitions had been personal, if they had been fundamentally disloyal,
if each had been striving to build up himself and had viewed his fel-
lows as rivals to be trampled down for his own advantage, then failure
would have come upon them. If Grant and Sherman and Thomas
and Farragut had not all felt that they were fighting for one end, that
they were holding up the arms of mighty Lincoln as he toiled and
wrought and suffered for the people, then their prowess would have
availed naught, and this Nation would have gone down into bloody
anarchy, would have crumbled into dust as so many republics had
*President Roosevelt is a firm believer in what might be called the civic value of the
churches, and in all expressions of them such as the Sunday School and the Y. M. C. A.
They make for order and good citizenship. His religious convictions have no tendency, how-
ever, towards a sallowness of cheek or a flaccidity of muscle. They are robust like his con-
victions social and political. They tell a story of him when at Harvard. Following, as he
saw it, a duty, he taught a class of boys in one of the Cambridge Sunday Schools. On one
occasion one of the boys appeared with a black eye of very recent construction. Young
Roosevelt was instantly interested and inquired as to the black eye’s genesis. The story was
simple. The boy, in coming to Sunday School, had met a scoffer of his own age. The
scoffer spake despitefully of Sunday School as an institution. The Sunday School boy was
not, in the verbal sense, a finished conversationalist, and did not trust himself to reply in
words; the risk of defeat in any wordy argument was too great. So, hanging his coat on the
poet Longfellow’s fence, he went at the scoffer argumentum ad hominem with his fists. He
convinced the scoffer, albeit the victory cost him the black eye. Young Roosevelt so warmly
approved this display of energetic Christianity that he gave the boy of the black eye a dollar
as a reward of merit. Later, when the severe graybeards heard of the business, they
gasped.—A. H. L.
196 Messages and Speeches
crumbled of old. They needed fervent devotion to country, devotion
to the right, and power to fight.
In addition to the lofty ideal—in no way as a substitute for it, but
in addition to this power of devotion to an ideal—the man must have
the fibre of heart, the fibre of body, to make his devotion take effective
shape for the Nation's welfare. And nowadays we shall win out,
in the fight for a loftier life—we shall make this twentieth century bet-
ter and not worse than any century that has gone before it—in
proportion as we approach the problems that face us as this Society
has approached those problems, with a firm resolution to neglect neither
side of the development of our people, to strive to make the young
men decent, God-fearing, law-abiding, honor-loving, justice-doing ; and
also fearless and strong, able to hold their own in the hurly-burly of
the world’s work, able to strive mightily that the forces of right may
be in the end triumphant.
AT THE BANQUET AT CANTON, O, JANUARY 27, 1903, IN HONOR
OF THE BIRTHDAY OF THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY.
Mr. Toastmaster, ladies, and gentlemen:
Throughout our history, and indeed throughout history generally,
it has been given to only a very few thrice-favored men to take so
marked a lead in the crises faced by their several generations that
thereafter each stands as the embodiment of the triumphant effort of
his generation. President McKinley was one of these men.
If during the lifetime of a generation no crisis occurs sufficient to
call out in marked manner the energies of the strongest leader, then
of course the world does not and can not know of the existence of
such a leader; and in consequence there are long periods in the history
of every nation during which no man appears who leaves an indelible
mark in history. If, on the other hand, the crisis is one so many-sided
as to call for the development and exercise of many distinct attributes,
it may be that more than one man will appear in order that the re-
quirements shall be fully met. In the Revolution and in the period
of constructive statesmanship immediately following it, for our good
fortune it befell us that the highest military and the highest civic at-
tributes were embodied in Washington, and so in him we have one
of the undying men of history—a great soldier, if possible an even
greater statesman, and above all a public servant whose lofty and
disinterested patriotism rendered his power and ability—alike on fought
fields and in council chambers—of the most far-reaching service to
the Republic. In the Civil War the two functions were divided, and
Lincoln and Grant will stand for evermore with their names inscribed
Theodore Roosevelt I97
on the honor roll of those who have deserved well of mankind by
saving to humanity a precious heritage. In similar fashion Thomas
Jefferson and Andrew Jackson stand each as the foremost representa-
tive of the great movement of his generation, and their names sym-
bolize to us their times and the hopes and aspirations of their times.
It was given to President McKinley to take the foremost place in
our political life at a time when our country was brought face to
face with problems more momentous than any whose solution we have
ever attempted, save only in the Revolution and in the Civil War;
and it was under his leadership that the Nation solved these mighty
problems aright. Therefore he shall stand in the eyes of history not
merely as the first man of his generation, but as among the greatest
figures in our national life, coming second only to the men of the
two great crises in which the Union was founded and preserved.
No man could carry through successfully such a task as President
McKinley undertook, unless trained by long years of effort for its
performance. Knowledge of his fellow-citizens, ability to understand
them, keen sympathy with even their innermost feelings, and yet
power to lead them, together with far-sighted sagacity and resolute
belief both in the people and in their future—all these were needed
in the man who headed the march of our people during the eventful
years from 1896 to 1901. These were the qualities possessed by
McKinley and developed by him throughout his whole history previous
to assuming the Presidency. As a lad he had the inestimable privilege
of serving, first in the ranks, and then as a commissioned officer, in the
great war for national union, righteousness, and grandeur; he was
one of those whom a kindly Providence permitted to take part in a
struggle which embodied every man who fought therein. He who
when little more than a boy had seen the grim steadfastness which aſter
four years of giant struggle restored the Union and freed the slaves
was not thereafter to be daunted by danger or frightened out of his
belief in the great destiny of our people.
Some years after the war closed McKinley came to Congress, and
rose, during a succession of terms, to leadership in his party in the
lower House. He also became Governor of his native State, Ohio.
During this varied service he received practical training of the kind
most valuable to him when he became Chief Executive of the Nation.
To the high faith of his early years was added the capacity to realize
his ideals, to work with his fellow-men at the same time that he led
them.
President McKinley's rise to greatness had in it nothing of the
sudden, nothing of the unexpected or seemingly accidental. Through-
out his long term of service in Congress there was a steady increase
alike in his power of leadership and in the recognition of that power
I98 Messages and Speeches
&
both by his associates in public life and by the public itself. Session
after session his influence in the House grew greater; his party an-
tagonists grew to look upon him with constantly increasing respect,
his party friends with constantly increasing faith and admiration.
Eight years before he was nominated for President he was already con-
sidered a Presidential possibility. Four years before he was nomi-
nated only his own high sense of honor prevented his being made a
formidable competitor of the chief upon whom the choice of the con-
vention then actually fell. In 1896, he was chosen because the great
mass of his party knew him and believed in him and regarded him
as symbolizing their ideals, as representing their aspirations. In esti-
mating the forces which brought about this nomination and election
I do not undervalue that devoted personal friendship which he had
the faculty to inspire in so marked a degree among the ablest and
most influential leaders; this leadership was of immense consequence
in bringing about the result; but, after all, the prime factor was the
trust in and devotion to him felt by the great mass of men who had
come to accept him as their recognized spokesman. In his nomination
the national convention of a great party carried into effect in good
faith the deliberate judgment of that party as to whom its candidate
should be. sº
But even as a candidate President McKinley was far more than
the candidate of a party, and as President he was in the broadest and
fullest sense the President of all the people of all sections of the
country.
His first nomination came to him because of the qualities he had
shown in healthy and open political leadership, the leadership which
by word and deed impresses itself as a virile force for good upon the
people at large and which has nothing in common with mere intrigue
or manipulation. But, in 1896, the issue was fairly joined, chiefly
upon a question which as a party question was entirely new, so that
the old lines of political cleavage were, in large part, abandoned.
All other issues sank in importance when compared with the vital need
of keeping our financial system on the high and honorable plane im-
peratively demanded by our position as a great civilized power. As
the champion of such a principle President McKinley received the
support not only of his own party, but of hundreds of thousands of
those to whom he had been politically opposed. He triumphed, and
he made good with scrupulous fidelity the promises upon which the
campaign was won. We were at the time in a period of great in-
dustrial depression, and it was promised for and on behalf of McKinley
that if he were elected our financial system should not only be pre-
served unharmed but improved and our economic system shaped in ac-
cordance with those theories which have always marked our periods
Theodore Roosevelt ſø9
of greatest prosperity. The promises were kept and following their
keeping came the prosperity which we now enjoy. All that was fore-
told concerning the well-being which would follow the election of
McKinley has been justified by the event. But as so often happens in
our history, the President was forced to face questions other than those
at issue at the time of his election. Within a year the situation in
Cuba had become literally intolerable. President McKinley had fought
too well in his youth, he knew too well at first hand what war really
was, lightly to enter into a struggle. He sought by every honorable
means to preserve peace, to avert war. He made every effort con-
sistent with the national honor to bring about an amicable settlement of
the Cuban difficulty. Then, when it became evident that these efforts
were useless, that peace could not be honorably entertained, he de-
voted his strength to making the war as short and as decisive as pos-
sible. It is needless to tell the result in detail. Suffice it to say that
rarely indeed in history has a contest so far-reaching in the importance
of its outcome been achieved with such ease. There followed a harder
task. As a result of the war we came into possession of Cuba, Porto
Rico, and the Philippines. In each island the conditions were such
that we had to face problems entirely new to our national experience,
and, moreover, in each island or group of islands the problems differed
radically from those presented in the others. In Porto Rico the task
was simple. The island could not be independent. It became in all
essentials a part of the Union. It has been given all the benefits of
our economic and financial system. Its inhabitants have been given
the highest individual liberty, while yet their government has been
kept under the supervision of officials so well chosen that the island
can be appealed to as affording a model for all such experiments in
the future; and this result was mainly owing to the admirable choice
of instruments by President McKinley when he selected the governing
officials.
In Cuba, where we were pledged to give the island independence,
the pledge was kept not merely in letter but in spirit. It would have
been a betrayal of our duty to have given Cuba independence out of
hand. President McKinley, with his usual singular sagacity in the
choice of agents, selected in General Leonard Wood the man of all
others best fit to bring the island through its uncertain period of
preparation for independence, and the result of his wisdom was shown
when last May the island became in name and in fact a free Republic,
for it started with a better equipment and under more favorable con-
ditions than had ever previously been the case with any Spanish-
American commonwealth.
Finally, in the Philippines, the problem was one of great perplexity.
2OO Messages and Speeches
There was an insurrectionary party claiming to represent the people
of the islands and putting forth their claim with a certain speciousness
which deceived no small number of excellent men here at home, and
which afforded to yet others a chance to arouse a factious party spirit
against the President. Of course, looking back, it is now easy to see
that it would have been both absurd and wicked to abandon the Philip-
pine Archipelago and let the scores of different tribes—Christian,
Mohammedan, and pagan, in every stage of semi-civilization and
Asiatic barbarism—turn the islands into a welter of bloody savagery,
with the absolute certainty that some strong power would have to step
in and take possession. But though now it is easy enough (> see that
our duty was to stay in the islands, to put down the insurrection by
force of arms, and then to establish freedom-giving civil government,
it needed genuine statesmanship to see this and to act accordingly
at the time of the first revolt. A weaker and less far-sighted man
than President McKinley would have shrunk from a task very diffi-
cult in itself, and certain to furnish occasion for attack and misrepre-
sentation no less than for honest misunderstanding. But President
McKinley never flinched. He refused to consider the thought of
abandoning our duty in our new possessions. While sedulously en-
deavoring to act with the utmost humanity toward the insurrectionists,
he never faltered in the determination to put them down by force
of arms, alike for the sake of our own interest and honor, and for
the sake of the interest of the islanders, and particularly of the great
numbers of friendly natives, including those most highly civilized, for
whom abandonment by us would have meant ruin and death. Again
his policy was most amply vindicated. Peace has come to the islands,
together with a greater measure of individual liberty and self-govern-
ment than they have ever before known. All the tasks set us as a
result of the war with Spain have so far been well and honorably
accomplished, and as a result this Nation stands higher than ever be-
fore among the nations of mankind.
President McKinley's second campaign was fought mainly on the
issue of approving what he had done in his first administration, and
specifically what he had done as-regards these problems springing out
of the war with Spain. The result was that the popular verdict in his
favor was more overwhelming than it had been before.
No other President in our history has seen high and honorable
effort crowned with more conspicuous personal success. No other
President entered upon his second term feeling such right to a pro-
found and peaceful satisfaction. Then by a stroke of horror, so
strange in its fantastic iniquity as to stand unique in the black annals
of crime, he was struck down. The brave, strong, gentle heart was
stilled forever, and word was brought to the woman who wept that
Theodore Roosevelt 2OI
she was to walk thenceforth alone in the shadow. The hideous in-
famy of the deed shocked the Nation to its depths, for the man thus
struck at was in a peculiar sense the champion of the plain people, in
a peculiar sense the representative and the exponent of those ideals
which, if we live up to them, will make, as they have largely made,
our country a blessed refuge for all who strive to do right and to
live their lives simply and well as light is given them. The Nation
was stunned, and the people mourned with a sense of bitter bereave-
ment because they had lost a man whose heart beat for them as the
heart of Lincoln once had beaten. We did right to mourn; for the
loss was ours, not his. He died in the golden fulness of his triumph.
He died victorious in that highest of all kinds of strife—the strife for
an ampler, juster, and more generous national life. For him the
laurel; but woe for those whom he left behind ; woe to the Nation that
lost him ; and woe to mankind that there should exist creatures so
foul that one among them should strike at so noble a life.
We are gathered together to-night to recall his memory, to pay
our tribute of respect to the great chief and leader who fell in the
harness, who was stricken down while his eyes were bright with “the
light that tells of triumph tasted.” We can honor him best by the
way we show in actual deed that we have taken to heart the lessons
of his life. We must strive to achieve, each in the measure that he
can, something of the qualities which made President McKinley a
leader of men, a mighty power for good—his strength, his courage, his
courtesy and dignity, his sense of justice, his ever-present kindliness
and regard for the rights of others. He won greatness by meeting
and solving the issues as they arose—not by shirking them—meeting
them with wisdom, with the exercise of the most skilful and cautious
judgment, but with fearless resolution when the time of crisis came.
He met each crisis on its own merits; he never sought excuse for shirk-
ing a task in the fact that it was different from the one he had ex-
pected to face. The long public career, which opened when as a
boy he carried a musket in the ranks and closed when as a man in
the prime of his intellectual strength he stood among the world’s chief
statesmen, came to what it was because he treated each triumph as
opening the road to fresh effort, not as an excuse for ceasing from
effort. He undertook mighty tasks. Some of them he finished com-
pletely, others we must finish, and there remain yet others which he
did not have to face, but which, if we are worthy to be the inheritors
of his principles, we will in our turn face with the same resolution, the
same sanity, the same unfaltering belief in the greatness of this coun-
try, and unfaltering championship of the rights of each and all of our
people, which marked his high and splendid career.
2O2 Messages and Speeches
TO NATIONAL FRATERNAL PRESS ASSOCIATION, FEBRUARY
4, IQ03.
Gentlemen of the National Fraternal Press Association:
I am delighted and exceedingly pleased to meet you, especially in view
of the nature of the interests you represent, you being the representa-
tives of institutions whose business it is to care for the home. If I am not
greatly mistaken, you have the same objects in view, and are adopting
largely the same methods of government which prevail in the National
government of our country; and no government will ever be perfect
until every citizen can say, “I am my brother’s keeper.” It is very
gratifying to me to learn of the magnificent work your societies have
already accomplished in relieving the necessities of the widows and
orphans of your deceased members. In working out the great prob-
lems which confront our nation, we must depend wholly upon the
sentiments which actuate and pervade your fraternities, viz., the
brotherhood of man and the sacredness of American home life.
I am confident that in the final analysis, we shall find that the stability
of our government depends not so much upon our armies and navies,
though they may be vastly important, but rather we will have to depend
upon the brotherhood of humanity as represented in the great fra-
ternities. The fraternal societies represented by your association are
in my opinion, one of the greatest powers for good government and
the protection of the home that we have in this country. This govern-
ment will endure just so long as we protect the great interests repre-
sented by the fraternal orders.
I thank you, gentlemen, for this interview, and I am heartily with
you in this great fraternal work, and trust that you may succeed in
your present mission to Washington.
[The Loyal Guard, Flint, Mich., Feb. 5, 1903.1
AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNERSTONE OF THE WAR COLLEGE,
WASHINGTON, D. C., FEBRUARY 21, 1903.
Ladies and gentlemen:
It should be a matter of pride and congratulation to every American
citizen interested in the welfare of his country that to-day we lay the
foundation stone of a building the erection of which signalizes a long
stride forward in securing the efficiency of the United States Army—
a step less important than that marked by the enactment of the law
to create a general staff, but a step supplementing the passage of the
act, rounding it out and rendering it of a far wider and far deeper
usefulness.
Theodore Roosevelt * 2O3
One word first to the nation, and then another word to the army.
To the nation first: It has well been said that the surest way to in-
vite national disaster is for a nation to be opulent, aggressive and
unarmed. The nation that is rich, that is so high-spirited as to be
somewhat careless of giving offense, and that yet refrains from that
preparedness which is absolutely necessary if efficiency in war is ever
to be shown—such a nation is laying deep the foundation for humilia-
tion and disaster. As a people, whether we will or not, we have
reached the stage when we must play a great part in the world. It
is not open to us to decide whether or not we shall play it. All we
have to decide is whether we shall play it well or ill. The part is
before us. We have to play it. All that rests for us to do is to say
that we will play it well. This nation has, by the mere trend of events,
been forced into a position of world power during the last few years.
It has responsibilities resting upon it here in the Occident, and in
the Orient as well. It cannot bear these responsibilities aright unless
its voice is potent for peace and justice, and its voice can be potent
for peace and justice only on condition of its being thoroughly under-
stood that we ask peace not in the spirit of the weakling and the
craven, but with the assured self-confidence of the just man armed.
So much for the lesson to be learned by our people from the move-
ment in which the erection of this building is a part.
Now a word to the officers and enlisted men of the army. The
last two or three years have witnessed a notable awakening in our
people to the well being of the army. Our people are understanding
as never before the fact that the army, like the navy, will do well in
war mainly in proportion as it has been prepared well in peace; that
after the war is begun it is too late for us to prepare for the victory.
Defeat will come inevitably and surely if the preparation is put off
until the war begins, and victory will come if it has been prepared
for in time of peace, and on no other terms.
During the session of Congress that is now closing we have seen
the first stride taken in putting the National Guard, the militia of
the country, on a footing of efficiency—the first long stride taken on
the lines marked out by Washington himself, the first successful effort
made to put into effect Washington’s plea which for one hundred
and ten years was disregarded by our people. And, again, the first
long stride has been taken toward the modernization, toward increas-
ing the efficiency of the army in accordance with modern methods as
devised by General Sherman over a quarter of a century ago. It
takes time and thought and care to work out necessary reforms. They
don’t come in a jump. All kinds of obstructions of deliberate purpose,
obstructions of mere inertia, obstructions of carelessness, have to be
2O4 Messages and Speeches
met with and overcome, but at last they are overcome if only a suffi-
cient intensity of purpose lies behind those backing the reform. And
now these great steps have been taken. Methods have been provided
for securing the increased efficiency of the army, and it rests with
the army itself to profit by what has been done. More and more it
has become evident in modern war that the efficiency of the unit of
the individual officer and the individual enlisted man is going to be
the prime factor in deciding the fate of fought fields. The exercises
of the barracks and the parade ground do not make five per cent of
the soldier's real work, and do not count for five per cent in his real
efficiency. They are very spectacular, serve a good purpose and must
be well done, but they count for but the smallest part in the qualities
the sum of which makes the army effective or ineffective in actual
service. Officer and man alike must be trained to the highest point in
the theory and in the practice of the profession. The forces of mere
truism say that if they are trained in the theory without the crowning
of practice they will amount to nothing, but they must have the train-
ing and the theory too. They must have that training, or they can
never reach the highest standard of perfection in their art. The army
of the United States is, and it is not desirable that it should be other
than, a small army relatively to the population of the country, but
we have a right to expect that that small army shall represent for its
size the very highest point of efficiency of any army in the civilized
world, and I have the most absolute faith that to that degree of effi-
ciency it will attain, and that it will attain it in no small part because
of the wise and zealous use it will make of the opportunities afforded
by the erection of this very building.
AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, N. Y., FEBRUARY 26, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of addressing this representative body
of the great Church which Wesley founded, on the occasion of the com-
memoration of the two hundredth anniversary of his birth. America,
moreover, has a peculiar proprietory claim on Wesley's memory, for it
is on our continent that the Methodist Church has received its greatest
development. In the days of our Colonial life Methodism was not on
the whole a great factor in the religious and social life of the people.
The Congregationalists were supreme throughout most of New Eng-
land; the Episcopalians on the seaboard from New York southward;
while the Presbyterian congregations were most numerous along what
was then the entire Western frontier; and the Quaker, Catholic, and
Dutch Reformed Churches each had developments in special places.
Theodore Roosevelt 2O5
The great growth of the Methodist Church, like the great growth
of the Baptist Church, began at about the time of the Revolutionary
War. To-day my theme is purely Methodism.
Since the days of the Revolution not only has the Methodist Church
increased greatly in the old communities of the thirteen original States,
but it has played a peculiar and prominent part in the pioneer growth
of our country, and has in consequence assumed a position of im-
mense importance throughout the vast region west of the Alleghanies
which has been added to our Nation since the days when the Con-
tinental Congress first met.
For a century after the Declaration of Independence the greatest
work of our people, with the exception only of the work of self-preserva-
tion under Lincoln, was the work of the pioneers as they took posses-
sion of this continent. During that century we pushed westward from
the Alleghanies to the Pacific, southward to the Gulf and the Rio
Grande, and also took possession of Alaska. The work of advanc-
ing our boundary, of pushing the frontier across forest and desert
and mountain chain, was the great typical work of our Nation; and
the men who did it—the frontiersmen, the pioneers, the backwoods-
men, plainsmen, mountain men—formed a class by themselves. It
was an iron task, which none but men of iron Soul and iron body
could do. The men who carried it to a successful conclusion had
characters strong alike for good and for evil. Their rugged natures
made them powers who served light or darkness with fierce intensity;
and together with heroic traits they had those evil and dreadful tenden-
cies which are but too apt to be found in characters of heroic possi-
bilities. Such men make the most efficient servants of the Lord if
their abounding vitality and energy are directed aright; and if mis-
directed their influence is equally potent against the cause of Chris-
tianity and true civilization. In the hard and cruel life of the border,
with its grim struggle against the forbidding forces of wild nature
and wilder men, there was much to pull the frontiersman down. If
left to himself, without moral teaching and moral guidance, without
any of the influences that tend toward the uplifting of man and the
subduing of the brute within him, sad would have been his, and there-
fore our, fate. From this fate we have been largely rescued by the
fact that together with the rest of the pioneers went the pioneer
preachers; and all honor be given to the Methodists for the great pro-
portion of these pioneer preachers whom they furnished.
These preachers were of the stamp of old Peter Cartwright—men
who suffered and overcame every hardship in common with their flock,
and who in addition tamed the wild and fierce spirits of their fellow-
pioneers. It was not a task that could have been accomplished by
men desirous to live in the soft places of the earth and to walk easily
2O6 Messages and Speeches
on life’s journey. They had to possess the spirit of the martyrs; but
not of martyrs who could merely suffer, not of martyrs who could
oppose only passive endurance to wrong. The pioneer preachers warred
against the forces of spiritual evil with the same fiery zeal and energy
that they and their fellows showed in the conquest of the rugged con-
tinent. They had in them the heroic spirit, the spirit that scorns ease
if it must be purchased by failure to do duty, the spirit that counts
risk and a life of hard endeavor if the goal to be reached is really
worth attaining. Great is our debt to these men and scant the patience
we need show toward their critics. At times they seemed hard and
narrow to those whose training and surroundings had saved them from
similar temptations; and they have been criticised, as all men, whether
missionaries, soldiers, explorers, or frontier settlers, are criticised when
they go forth to do the rough work that must inevitably be done by
those who act as the first harbingers, the first heralds, of civilization
in the world's dark places. It is easy for those who stay at home in
comfort, who never have to see humanity in the raw, or to strive against
the dreadful naked forces which appear clothed, hidden, and subdued
in civilized life—it is easy for such to criticise the men who, in rough
fashion, and amid grim surroundings, make ready the way for the
higher life that is to come afterward; but let us all remember that
the untempted and the effortless should be cautious in passing too
heavy judgment upon their brethren who may show hardness, who
may be guilty of shortcomings, but who nevertheless do the great deeds
by which mankind advances. These pioneers of Methodism had the
strong, militant virtues which go to the accomplishment of such great
deeds. Now and then they betrayed the shortcomings natural to men
of their type; but their shortcomings seem small indeed when we
place beside them the magnitude of the work they achieved.
And now, friends, in celebrating the wonderful growth of Methodism,
in rejoicing at the good it has done to the country and to mankind,
I need hardly ask a body like this to remember that the greatness
of the fathers becomes to the children a shameful thing if they use
it only as an excuse for inaction instead of as a spur to effort for
noble aims. I speak to you not only as Methodists—I speak to you
as American citizens. The pioneer days are over. We now all of us
form parts of a great civilized nation, with a complex industrial and
social life and infinite possibilities both for good and for evil. The
instruments with which, and the surroundings in which, we work, have
changed immeasurably from what they were in the days when the
rough backwoods preachers ministered to the moral and spiritual needs
of their rough backwoods congregations. But if we are to succeed,
the spirit in which we do our work must be the same as the spirit in
which they did theirs. These men drove forward, and fought their
Theodore Roosevelt 2O7
way upward, to success, because their sense of duty was in their hearts,
in the very marrow of their bones. It was not with them something
to be considered as a mere adjunct to their theology, standing separate
and apart from their daily life. They had it with them week days as
well as Sundays. They did not divorce the spiritual from the secular.
They did not have one kind of conscience for one side of their lives
and another for another.
If we are to succeed as a nation we must have the same spirit in
us. We must be absolutely practical, of course, and must face facts
as they are. The pioneer preachers of Methodism could not have
held their own for a fortnight if they had not shown an intense prac-
ticability of spirit, if they had not possessed the broadest and deepest
sympathy for, and understanding of, their fellowmen. But in addi-
tion to the hard, practical common-sense needed by each of us in life,
we must have a lift toward lofty things or we shall be lost, individually
and collectively, as a nation. Life is not easy, and least of all is
it easy for either the man or the nation that aspires to do great deeds.
In the century opening, the play of the infinitely far-reaching forces
and tendencies which go to make up our social system bids fair to be
even fiercer in its activity than in the century which has just closed.
If during this century the men of high and fine moral sense show
themselves weaklings; if they possess only that cloistered virtue which
shrinks shuddering from contact with the raw facts of actual life; if
they dare not go down into the hurly-burly where the men of might
contend for the mastery; if they stand aside from the pressure and con-
flict; then as surely as the sun rises and sets all of our great material
progress, all the multiplication of the physical agencies which tend for
our comfort and enjoyment, will go for naught and our civilization will
become a brutal sham and mockery. If we are to do as I believe we shall
and will do, if we are to advance in broad humanity, in kindliness, in the
spirit of brotherhood, exactly as we advance in our conquest over the
hidden forces of nature, it must be by developing strength in virtue
and virtue in strength, by breeding and training men who shall be both
good and strong, both gentle and valiant—men who scorn wrong-
doing, and who at the same time have both the courage and the strength
to strive mightily for the right. Wesley accomplished so much for
mankind because he refused to leave the stronger, manlier qualities
to be availed of only in the interest of evil. The Church he founded
has through its career been a Church for the poor as well as for the
rich and has known no distinction of persons. It has been a Church
whose members, if true to the teachings of its founder, have sought
for no greater privilege than to spend and be spent in the interest of
the higher life, who have prided themselves, not on shirking rough
duty, but on undertaking it and carrying it to a successful conclusion.
t
2O8 Messages and Speeches
I come here to-night to greet you and to pay my tribute to your
past because you have deserved well of mankind, because you have
striven with strength and courage to bring nearer the day when peace
and justice shall obtain among the peoples of the earth.
AT A MEETING OF THE SOCIETY OF AMERICAN FORESTERS,
HELD AT THE RESIDENCE OF MR. GIFFORD PINCHOT,
WASHINGTON, D. C., MARCH 26, 1903.
Mr. Pinchot, Mr. Secretary, and gentlemen:
I have felt that this evening the meeting was of such a character
as not merely to warrant but in a sense require that I should break
through my custom of not coming out to make speeches of this sort.
For I believe there are few bodies of men who have it in their power
to do a greater service to the country than those engaged in the scientific
study and practical application of improved methods of forestry for
the preservation of our woods in the United States. I am glad to
see here this evening not only the officials, including the head, of the
Department of Agriculture, but those, like Governor Richards, most
concerned in carrying out the policy of the Department of the Interior.
First and foremost, you can never afford to forget for one moment
what is the object of the forest policy. Primarily that object is not
to preserve forests because they are beautiful—though that is good
in itself—not to preserve them because they are refuges for the wild
creatures of the wilderness—though that too is good in itself—but the
primary object of the forest policy as of the land policy of the United
States, is the making of prosperous homes, is part of the traditional
policy of home-making of our country. Every other consideration
comes as secondary. The whole effort of the government in dealing
with the forests must be directed to this end, keeping in view the fact
that it is not only necessary to start the homes as prosperous, but to
keep them so. That is the way the forests have need to be kept. You
can start a prosperous home by destroying the forest, but you do not
keep it. You will be able to make that policy permanently the policy
of the country only in so far as you are able to make the people at
large, and then all the people concretely, interested in the results in
the different localities, appreciative of what it means; give them a full
recognition of its value, and make them earnest and zealous adherents
of it. Keep that in mind too. In a government such as ours it is out
of the question to impose a policy like this upon the people from
without. A permanent policy can come only from the intelligent con-
viction of the people themselves that it is wise, and useful; nay, indis-
pensable. We shall decide in the long run whether we will or will
not preserve the forests of the Rocky Mountains accordingly as we
Theodore Roosevelt 209
are or are not able to make the people of the States around the moun-
tains, in their neighborhood, hearty believers in the policy of forest
preservation. This is the only way in which this policy can be made a
permanent success. In other words, you must convince the people of
the truth—and it is the truth—that the success of home-makers de-
pends in the long run upon the wisdom with which the Nation takes
care of its forests.” That seems a strong statement. It is none too
strong. There are small sections of this country where what is done
with the woodlands makes, no difference; but over the great extent
of the country the ultimate well being of the home-maker will depend
in very large part upon the intelligent use made of the forests. In
other words, you, yourselves, must keep this practical object before
your mind. You must remember that the forest which contributes noth-
ing to the wealth, progress, or safety of the country is of no interest
to the government, and it should be of little to the forester. Your at-
tention should be directed not to the preservation of the forests as an
end in itself, but as the means for preserving and increasing the pros-
perity of the Nation. Forestry is the preservation of forests by wise
use. We shall succeed, not by preventing the use, but by making the
forests of use to the settler, the rancher, the miner, the man who lives
in the neighborhood, and indirectly the man who may live hundreds
of miles off, down the course of some great river which has its rise
among the forests.
The forest problem is in many ways the most vital internal problem
of the United States. The more closely this statement is examined
the more evident its truth becomes. In the arid regions of the West
agricultural prosperity depends first of all upon the available water
supply. Forest protection alone can maintain the streamflow necessary
for irrigation in the West and prevent floods destructive to agriculture
and manufactures in the East. The relation between forests and
the whole mineral industry is an extremely intimate one,
for mines can not be developed without timber, and usually
not without timber close at hand. In many regions of the West ore
is more abundant than wood, and where the ore is of low grade,
transportation of the necessary mine timbers from a distance is out
of the question. The use of the mine is strictly limited to the man
who has timber available close at hand. The very existence of lumber-
ing, the fourth great industry of the United States, depends upon
the success of your work and our work as a Nation in putting prac-
tical forestry into effective operation.
As it is with mining and lumbering, so it is in only less degree with
*President Roosevelt believes in the importance of a tree almost as he believes in the
importance of a man. He is the friend of every tree as much as any Thoreau, and feels that
the wanton felling of one is a kind of murder.—A. H. L.
2IO Messages and Speeches
transportation, manufacture, and commerce in general. The rela-
tion of all these industries to the forests is of the most intimate and
dependent kind. It is a matter for congratulation that so many of
these great interests are waking up to this fact. The railroads, espe-
cially, managed as they are by men who are obliged by the very nature
of their profession to possess insight into the future, have awakened
to a clearer realization of the vast importance of economical use both
of timber and of forests. Even the grazing industry, as it is carried
out in the great West, which might at first sight appear to have little
relation to forestry, is nevertheless closely related to it, because great
areas of winter range would be entirely useless without the summer
range in the mountains, where the forest reserves lie.
The forest resources of our country are already seriously depleted.
They can be renewed and maintained only by the co-operation of the
forester and the lumberman. The most striking and encouraging
fact in the forest situation is that lumbermen are realizing that practical
lumbering and practical forestry are allies and not enemies, and that
the future of each depends upon the other. The resolutions passed
at the last great meeting of the representative lumber interests held
here in Washington are strong proof of this fact and the most en-
couraging feature of the present situation. As long as we could not
make the men concerned in the great lumbering industry realize that
the foresters were endeavoring to work in their interests and not
against them, the headway that could be made was but small. And
we will be able to work effectively to bring about immediate results
of permanent importance largely in proportion as we are able to con-
vince the men at the head of that great business of the practical wisdom
of what the foresters of the United States are seeking to accomplish.
In the last analysis, the attitude of the lumbermen toward your work
will be the chief factor of the success or failure of that work. In
other words, gentlemen, I can not too often say to you, as indeed it
can not be too often said to any body of men of high ideals and of
scientific training who are endeavoring to accomplish work of real
worth for the country, you must keep your ideals, and yet seek to
realize them in practical ways.
The United States is exhausting its forest supplies far more rapidly
than they are being produced. The situation is a grave one, and
there is but one remedy. That remedy is the introduction of practical
forestry on a large scale, and of course that is impossible without
trained men; men trained in the closet and trained by actual field work,
under practical conditions. You will have created a new profession; a
profession of the highest importance; a profession of the highest use-
fulness toward the State; and you are in honor bound to yourselves
and to the people to make your profession stand as high as the pro-
Theodore Roosevelt 2II
fession of law, as the profession of medicine, as any other profession
most intimately connected with our highest and finest development
as a nation. You are engaged in pioneer work in a calling whose
opportunities for public service are very great. Treat the calling
seriously; remember how much it means for the country as a whole;
remember that if you do your work in crude fashion, if you only half
learn your profession, you discredit it as well as yourselves. Give
yourselves every chance by thorough and generous preparation and
by acquiring not only a thorough knowledge, but a wide outlook over
all the questions on which you have to touch. The profession which
you have adopted is one which touches the Republic on almost every
side, political, social, industrial, commercial; and to rise to its level
you will need a wide acquaintance with the general life of the Nation,
and a viewpoint both broad and high. Any profession which makes
you deal with your fellowmen at large makes it necessary that, if you
are to succeed, you should understand what these fellowmen are, and
not merely what they are thought to be by people who live in the closet
and the parlor. You must know who the men are with whom you
are acting; how they feel; how far you can go; when you have to
stop; when it is necessary to push on ; you must know all of these
things if you are going to do work of the highest value.
I believe that the foresters of the United States will create and apply
a more effective system of forestry than we have yet seen. If you don’t,
gentlemen, I will feel that you have fallen behind your brethren of
other callings; and I don't believe you will fall behind them. Nowhere
else is the development of a country more closely bound up with the
creation and execution of a judicious forest policy. This is of course
especially true of the West; but it is true of the East also. Fortunately
in the West we have been able relatively to the growth of the country
to begin at an earlier day; so that we have been able to provide great
forest reserves in the Rocky Mountains, instead of waiting and at-
tempting to get Congress to pay a very large sum for their creation,
as we are now endeavoring to do in the Southern Appalachians. In
the administration of the national forest reserves, the introduction of
conservative lumbering on the timber tract of the lumberman and the
woodlot of the farmer, in the practical solution of forest problems
which affect every industry and every activity of the nation, the mem-
bers of this society have an unexampled field before them. You have
heavy responsibilities—every man that does any work that is worth
doing has a heavy responsibility—for upon the quality of your work
the development of forestry in the United States and the protection
of the industries which depend upon it will largely rest. You have
made a good beginning, and I congratulate you upon it. Not only is
a sound national forest policy coming rapidly into being, but the lumber-
2I2 Messages and Speeches
men of the country are proving their interest in forestry by prac-
ticing it. Twenty years ago a meeting such as this to-night would
have been impossible, and the desires we hear expressed would have
been treated as having no possible relation to practical life. I think,
Mr. Secretary, that since you first came into Congress here there has
been a complete revolution in the attitude of public men toward this
question. We have reached a point where American foresters, trained
in American forest schools, are attacking American forest problems
with success. That is the way to meet the larger work you have be-
fore you. It is a work of peculiar difficulty, because precedents are
lacking. It will demand training, steadiness, devotion, and above all
esprit de corps, fealty to the body of which you are members, zeal to
keep the practice as well as the ideals of that body high. The more
harmoniously you work with each other, the better your work will
be. And above all a condition precedent upon your usefulness to the
body politic as a whole is the way in which you are able both to instil
your own ideals into the mass of your fellowmen with whom you
come in contact, and at the same time to show your ability to work
in practical fashion with them; to convince them that as a business mat-
ter it will pay for them to co-operate with you; to convince the public
of that, and then also to convince the people of the localities of
the neighborhoods in which you work, and especially the lumbermen
and all others who make their life trades dealing with the forests.
AT HARRISBURG, PA., APRIL 1, 1903.
Congressmen, Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Mr. Mayor, gentlemen and
ladies: *
I am very greatly touched and pleased by this greeting—a wholly
unexpected one. I had not supposed that my speechmaking would
begin before to-morrow. There is not much for me to say to you.
I feel rather when I come here like sitting at the feet of Gamaliel and
learning. (
The prosperity in which you of this state, you of this city have so
abundantly shared must come primarily from two sources, the indi-
vidual skill and efficiency of the individual man, capitalist or wage
worker, working for himself as a foundation, but upon it is the super-
structure of the men who work not merely for themselves, but for one
another.
The President of the Senate was kind enough to speak of what
has been done for the wage worker and therefore the citizens as a
whole, in this State. I go away from Washington with a light heart,
very largely because of the admirable work done by the gentlemen
on the Anthracite Strike Commission. And surely no publication by
Theodore Roosevelt 213
any association designed purely to teach a moral lesson to our people
can be better worth scanning and learning than the document con-
taining the conclusions of those men; and, if as a people we will take
to heart the lessons taught therein, it will be better for all of us.
Fundamentally our interests are the same. Fundamentally you
hurt or help some of our people, and inevitably you hurt or help others.
Fundamentally the most important lesson to be learned in our national
life is the lesson of our solidarity of interests, and, that every man of
us, if he is fit to be a citizen of this republic, must pull his own weight
and must also do his best to help his brother at the same time.
AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNERSTONE OF THE NEW LAW
SCHOOL OF CHICAGO UNIVERSITY, AT CHICAGO,
ILL., APRIL 2, 1903.
Mr. President, men and women of the university, and you, my fellow
citizens, people of the great city of the West:
I am glad indeed to have the chance of being with you this after-
noon to receive this degree at the hands of President Harper, and in
what I have to say there is little that I can do save to emphasize cer-
tain points made in the address of Dr. Judson. I speak to you of this
university, to you who belong to the institution, the creation of which
has so nobly rounded out the great career of mercantile enterprise and
prosperity which Chicago not merely embodies but of which in a
peculiar sense the city stands as symbolical.
It is of vast importance to our well being as a nation that there
should be a foundation deep and broad of material well being. No
nation can amount to anything great unless the individuals composing
it have so worked with the head or with the hand for their own benefit,
as well as for the benefit of their fellows in material ways, that the
sum of the national prosperity is great.
But that alone does not make true greatness or anything approaching
true greatness. It is only the foundation for it, and it is the existence
of institutions such as this, above all the existence of institutions turn-
ing out citizens of the type which I know you turn out, that stands
as one of the really great assets of which a nation can speak when
it claims true greatness. From this institution you will send out
scholars, and it is a great and a fine thing to send out scholars to add
to the sum of productive scholarship.
To do that is to take your part in doing one of the great duties
of civilization, but you will do more than that, for greater than the
school is the man, and you will send forth men; men who will scorn
what is base and ignoble; men of high ideals who yet have the robust
sense necessary to allow for the achievement of the high ideal by
2I4 Messages and Speeches
practical methods. It was also a sage who said that it was easier to
be a harmless dove than a wise serpent.
Now, the aim in production of citizenship must not be merely the
production of harmless citizenship. Of course it is essential that you
should not harm your fellows, but if after you are through with life
all that can be truthfully said of you is that you did not do any harm
it must also be truthfully added that you did no particular good.
Remember, that the commandment had the two sides, to be harmless
as doves and wise as serpents; to be moral in the highest and broadest
sense of the word; to have the morality that does and fears, the
morality that can suffer and the morality that can achieve results. To
have that, and coupled with it to have the energy, the power to ac-
complish things which every good citizen must have if his citizenship
is to be of real value to the community. Dr. Judson said in his ad-
dress to-day that what we need—the things that we need are elemental.
We need to produce, not genius, not brilliancy, but the homely, com-
monplace, elemental virtues. The reason we won in 1776, the reason
that in the great trial from 1861 to 1865 this nation rang true metal
was because the average citizen had in him the stuff out of which
good citizenship has been made from time immemorial, because he
had in him courage, honesty, common sense.
Brilliancy and genius P Yes, if we can have them in addition to
the other virtues. If not, if brilliant genius comes without the ac-
companiment of the substantial qualities of character and soul, then it
is a menace to the nation.
If it comes in addition to those qualities, then, of course, we get the
great general leader, we get the Lincoln, we get the man who can
do more than any common man. But without it much can be done.
The men who carried musket and saber in the armies of the East
and the West through the four grim years which at last saw the sun
of peace rise at Appomattox had only the ordinary qualities, but they
were pretty good ordinary qualities. #
They were the qualities which, when possessed as those men pos-
sessed them, made in their sum what we call heroism, and what those
men had need to have in time of war we must have in time of peace,
if we are to make this nation what she shall ultimately become, if we
are to make this nation in very fact the great republic, the greatest
power upon which the sun has ever shone. And no quality is enough.
First of all, honesty, and again remember I am using the word in its
broadest signification, honesty, decency, clean living at home, clean
living abroad, fair dealing in one's own family, fair dealing with the
public. *.
And honesty is not enough. If a man is never so honest, but is
timid, there is nothing to be done with him. In the Civil War you
Theodore Roosevelt Af 2I5
needed patriotism in the soldier, but if the soldier had patriotism, yet
felt compelled to run away, you could not win the fight with him.
Together with honesty you must have the second of the virile virtues,
courage; courage to dare, courage to stand against the wrong and to
fight aggressively and vigorously for the right.
And if you have only honesty and courage you may yet be an
entirely worthless citizen. An honest and valiant fool has but a small
place of usefulness in the body politic. With honesty, with courage,
must go common-sense; ability to work with your fellows, ability
when you go out of the academic halls to work with the men of this
nation, the men of millions who have not got an academic training, who
will accept your leadership on just one consideration, and that is if
you show yourself in the rough work of actual life fit and able to lead,
and only so.
You need honesty, you need courage and you need common-sense.
Above all, you need it in the work to be done in the building the corner
stone of which we laid today, the law school, out of which are to come
the men who, at the bar and on the bench, make and construe, and in
construing make the laws of this country, the men who must teach by
their actions all our people that this is in fact essentially a govern-
ment of orderly liberty under the law.
Men and women, you the graduates of this university, you the under-
graduates, upon you rests a heavy burden of responsibility; much has
been given to you; much will be expected of you. A great work lies
before you. If you fail in it you discredit yourselves, you discredit
the whole cause of education. And you can succeed and will succeed if
you work in the spirit of the words and the deeds of President Harper
and of those men whom I have known so well who are in your faculty
today. I thank you for having given me the chance to speak to you.
[The Chicago Record-Herald, April 3, 1903.]
TO THE STUDENTS OF NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY, AT EVAN-
* STON, IL.L., APRIL 2, 1903.
Mr. President, and you, my fellow alumni:
The first degree of Doctor of Laws that I ever received was from
your university—and I am doubly glad to have the chance of coming
here ten years later to meet you and wish you well. One word before I
speak especially to college men and women, and that is a word, Mr.
Mayor, about the City of Evanston—to say how glad I am to be here
in this beautiful city; how glad I have been to see your people, and
especially the children.
And it seems to me, Mr. Mayor, that they are all right in point both
of quality and quantity.
2I6 Messages and Speeches
And I wish to state in all seriousness that a deficiency in either can
not be atoned for by excellence in the other respect.
And now a word, and only a word, to you on the college here. The
President has said that still, after 2,000 years, it is a subject of discus-
sion as to exactly how much a college education does for a man or a
woman. It seems to me that the explanation why that is still a question
is, after all, simple. If either the boy or the girl, the man or the woman,
has not got the right stuff in him or her, you can not bring it out.
But if you have got the right stuff in you, why, then, surely it is
the veriest truism to say that the better your training the better will be
the kind of work that you can do. This, above all, to the young men
going out, each to do a man's work in the world—and if he has not
that purpose he is of no use whatsoever in our American life; we have
no room for the idler here; we have no room for the man who merely
wishes to lead a pleasant life; if that is all he desires he can never
count in American work; if the man has not got in him the desire to
count, the desire to do good work in whichever line he adopts, then
scant is our use for him.
But if he has got it in him, then all that I ask him to remember is
this—all that I ask each one of you here to remember is this: that if
you go from this university—from any university—feeling merely that
your course here has given you special privileges; if you feel that it
has put you in a class apart, you will fail in life. If you feel, on the
other hand, that the very fact of your having had special advantages
imposes upon you special responsibilities, makes it specially incumbent
upon you to show that you can do your duty with peculiar excellence;
if you approach life in that spirit the university training will have done
much for you.
We need all the training for mind that can be given. We need all
the training for body that can be given. I welcome every form of
rough, vigorous athletic sports.
Some of the cheering this morning made me feel as if I was looking
on at a good football game. {
I welcome all forms of manly, vigorous, rough exercise. The best
kind of work that can be done is such as is done by your life-saving
crew here.
But all universities can not be placed beside a lake, where there is
a chance for a crew. They are going to do the best they can with the
nine and the eleven.
Now, it is a great thing to have a safe and a strong and a vigorous
body.
It is a better thing to have a sage, a strong and a vigorous mind.
But best of all is to have that which is partly made up of both, and
partly made up of something higher and better—character.
Theodore Roosevelt 217
That is what counts. That is what counts, and the main good that
can be done to you after all in a university such as this is to give you
what I am certain universities do give—character, a fine and high type
of citizenship. That is what we must strive to produce in our uni-
versities.
Physical strength 2 Yes. Mental strength? Yes, even more than
physical.
But above all, let us strive to develop that for the lack of which
neither bodily prowess nor mental capacity can atone—the quality of
the soul, of the heart, the qualities of strength, of courage, of sweetness,
which we group together when we say that a man or woman has
character.
I thank you for listening to me today.
AT CHICAGO, IL.L., APRIL 2, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
Today I wish to speak to you, not merely about the Monroe Doctrine,
but about our entire position in the Western Hemisphere—a position so
peculiar and predominant that out of it has grown the acceptance of
the Monroe Doctrine as a cardinal feature of our foreign policy; and
in particular I wish to point out what has been done during the life-
time of the last Congress to make good our position in accordance with
this historic policy.
Ever since the time when we definitely extended our boundaries west-
ward to the Pacific and southward to the Gulf, since the time when the
old Spanish and Portuguese colonies to the south of us asserted their
indepehdence, our Nation has insisted that because of its primacy in
strength among the nations of the Western Hemisphere it has certain
duties and responsibilities which oblige it to take a leading part thereon.
We hold that our interests in this hemisphere are greater than those of
any European power possibly can be, and that our duty to ourselves
and to the weaker republics who are our neighbors requires us to see
that none of the great military powers from across the seas shall en-
croach upon the territory of the American republics or acquire control
thereover.
This policy, therefore, not only forbids us to acquiesce in such terri-
torial acquisition, but also causes us to object to the acquirement of a
control which would in its effect be equal to territorial aggrandizement.
This is why the United States has steadily believed that the construction
of the great Isthmian Canal, the building of which is to stand as the
greatest material feat of the twentieth century—greater than any simi-
lar feat in any preceding century—should be done by no foreign nation
218 Messages and Speeches
but by ourselves. The canal must of necessity go through the territory
of one of our smaller sister republics. We have been scrupulously
careful to abstain from perpetrating any wrong upon any of these
republics in this matter. We do not wish to interfere with their rights
in the least, but, while carefully safeguarding them, to build the canal
ourselves under provisions which will enable us, if necessary, to police
and protect it, and to guarantee its neutrality, we being the sole guar-
antor. Our intention was steadfast; we desired action taken so that
the canal could always be used by us in time of peace and war alike,
and in time of war could never be used to our detriment by any nation
which was hostile to us. Such action, by the circumstances surrounding
it, was necessarily for the benefit and not the detriment of the adjacent
American republics.”
After considerably more than half of a century these objects have
been exactly fulfilled by the legislation and treaties of the last two years.
Two years ago we were no further advanced toward the construction of
the Isthmian Canal on our terms than we had been during the preceding
eighty years. By the Hay-Pauncefote treaty, ratified in December, 1901,
an old treaty with Great Britain, which had been held to stand in the
way, was abrogated and it was agreed that the canal should be con-
structed under the auspices of the Government of the United States, and
that this Government should have the exclusive right to regulate and
manage it, becoming the sole guarantor of its neutrality.
It was expressly stipulated, furthermore, that this guaranty of
neutrality should not prevent the United States from taking any meas-
ures which it found necessary in order to secure by its own forces the
defence of the United States and the maintenance of public order.
Immediately following this treaty Congress passed a law under which
the President was authorized to endeavor to secure a treaty for acquir-
ing the right to finish the construction of, and to operate, the Panama
Canal, which had already been begun in the territory of Colombia by
a French company. The rights of this company were accordingly
obtained and a treaty negotiated with the Republic of Colombia. This
treaty has just been ratified by the Senate. It reserves all of Colom-
bia's rights, while guaranteeing all of our own and those of neutral
nations, and specifically permits us to take any and all measures for the
defence of the canal, and for the preservation of our interests, when-
ever in our judgment an exigency may arise which calls for action on
our part. In other words, these two treaties, and the legislation to
carry them out, have resulted in our obtaining on exactly the terms we
*Next to Lincoln, President Roosevelt admires Jackson. One evening he asked me:
“What would Jackson have done in this Canal business?”
“He would have had it cut and corded up a year ago,” said I.
“Precisely true!” exclaimed the President, bringing his hand down on the table with a
mighty, and, as I thought, approving thump.–A. H. I.
Theodore Roosevelt 2I9
desired the rights and privileges which we had so long sought in vain.
These treaties are among the most important that we have ever nego-
tiated in their effects upon the future welfare of this country, and mark
a memorable triumph of American diplomacy—one of those fortunate
triumphs, moreover, which redound to the benefit of the entire world.
About the same time trouble arose in connection with the Republic
of Venezuela because of certain wrongs alleged to have been com-
mitted, and debts overdue, by that Republic to citizens of various
foreign powers, notably England, Germany, and Italy. After failure
to reach an agreement these powers began a blockade of the Vene-
zuelan coast and a condition of quasi-war ensued. The concern of our
Government was of course not to interfere needlessly in any quarrel
so far as it did not touch our interests or our honor, and not to take
the attitude of protecting from coercion any power unless we were
willing to espouse the quarrel of that power, but to keep an attitude of
watchful vigilance and see that there was no infringement of the Mon-
roe Doctrine—no acquirement of territorial rights by a European power
at the expense of a weak sister republic—whether this acquisition might
take the shape of an outright and avowed seizure of territory or of the
exercise of control which would in effect be equivalent to such seizure.
This attitude was expressed in the two following published mem-
oranda, the first being the letter addressed by the Secretary of State
to the German Ambassador, the second the conversation with the Sec-
retary of State reported by the British Ambassador:
“DEPARTMENT OF STATE,
“WASHINGTON, December 16, 1901.
“HIS ExcelleNCY DR. von Hol.I.EBEN, etc. :
“Dear Excellency: I inclose a memorandum by way of reply to that
which you did me the honor to leave with me on Saturday, and am,
as ever, Faithfully yours,
“JoHN HAY.
“Memorandum.
“The President in his message of the 3d of December, 1901, used
the following language:
“‘The Monroe Doctrine is a declaration that there must be no terri-
torial aggrandizement by any non-American power at the expense of
any American power on American soil. It is in no wise intended as
hostile to any nation in the Old World.’”
“The President further said:
“‘This doctrine has nothing to do with the commercial relations of
any American power, save that it in truth allows each of them to form
22O Messages and Speeches
such as it desires. . . . We do not guarantee any State against
punishment if it misconducts itself, provided that punishment does not
take the form of the acquisition of territory by any non-American
power.’
“His Excellency the German Ambassador, on his recent return from
Berlin, conveyed personally to the President the assurance of the Ger-
man Emperor that His Majesty's Government had no purpose or inten-
tion to make even the smallest acquisition of territory on the South
American continent or the islands adjacent. This voluntary and friendly
declaration was afterward repeated to the Secretary of State, and was
received by the President and the people of the United States in the
frank and cordial spirit in which it was offered. In the memorandum
of the 11th of December, His Excellency the German Ambassador
repeats these assurances as follows: “We declare especially that under
no circumstances do we consider in our proceedings the acquisition or
the permanent occupation of Venezuelan territory.’
“In the said memorandum of the IIth of December, the German .
Government informs that of the United States that it has certain just
claims for money and for damages wrongfully withheld from German
subjects by the Government of Venezuela, and that it proposes to take
certain coercive measures described in the memorandum to enforce the
payment of these just claims.
“The President of the United States, appreciating the courtesy of
the German Government in making him acquainted with the state of
affairs referred to, and not regarding himself as called upon to enter
into the consideration of the claims in question, believes that no meas-
ures will be taken in this matter by the agents of the German Govern-
ment which are not in accordance with the well-known purpose, above
set forth, of His Majesty the German Emperor.”
SIR MICHAEL HERBERT TO THE MARQUIs OF LANSDOWNE.
“WASHINGTON, November 13, 1902.
“I communicated to Mr. Hay this morning the substance of Your
Lordship's telegram of the IIth instant.
“His Excellency stated in reply, that the United States Government,
although they regretted that European powers should use force against
Central and South American countries, could not object to their taking
steps to obtain redress for injuries suffered by their subjects, pro-
vided that no acquisition of territory was contemplated.”
Both powers assured us in explicit terms that there was not the
slightest intention on their part to violate the principles of the Monroe
Doctrine, and this assurance was kept with an honorable good faith
Theodore Roosevelt 22I
which merits full acknowledgment on our part. At the same time, the
existence of hostilities in a region so near our own borders was fraught
with such possibilities of danger in the future that it was obviously no
less our duty to ourselves than our duty to humanity to endeavor to put
an end to that. Accordingly, by an offer of our good services in a
spirit of frank friendliness to all the parties concerned, a spirit in which
they quickly and cordially responded, we secured a resumption of
peace—the contending parties agreeing that the matters which they
could not settle among themselves should be referred to The Hague
Tribunal for settlement. The United States had most fortunately
already been able to set an example to other nations by utilizing the
great possibilities for good contained in The Hague Tribunal, a ques-
tion at issue between ourselves and the Republic of Mexico being the
first submitted to this international court of arbitration.
The terms which we have secured as those under which the Isthmian
Canal is to be built, and the course of events in the Venezuela matter,
have shown not merely the ever growing influence of the United States
in the Western Hemisphere, but also, I think I may safely say, have
exemplified the firm purpose of the United States that its growth and
influence and power shall redound not to the harm but to the benefit
of our sister republics whose strength is less. Our growth, therefore,
is beneficial to humankind in general. We do not intend to assume any
position which can give just offence to our neighbors. Our adherence
to the rule of human right is not merely profession. The history of
our dealings with Cuba shows that we reduce it to performance.
The Monroe Doctrine is not international law, and though I think
one day it may become such, this is not necessary as long as it remains
a cardinal feature of our foreign policy and as long as we possess both
the will and the strength to make it effective. This last point, my
fellow-citizens, is all important, and is one which as a people we can
never afford to forget. I believe in the Monroe Doctrine with all my
heart and soul; I am convinced that the immense majority of our
fellow-countrymen so believe in it; but I would infinitely prefer to see
us abandon it than to see us put it forward and bluster about it, and
yet fail to build up the efficient fighting strength which in the last
resort can alone make it respected by any strong foreign power whose
interest it may ever happen to be to violate it.
Boasting and blustering are as objectionable among nations as among
individuals, and the public men of a great nation owe it to their sense
of national self-respect to speak courteously of foreign powers, just as
a brave and self-respecting man treats all around him courteously. But
though to boast is bad, and causelessly to insult another, worse, yet
worse than all is it to be guilty of boasting, even without insult, and
when called to the proof to be unable to make such boasting good.
222 Messages and Speeches
There is a homely old adage which runs: “Speak softly and carry a
big stick; you will go far.” If the American Nation will speak softly,
and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training, a thoroughly
efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far. I ask you to think over
this. If you do, you will come to the conclusion that it is mere plain
common-sense, so obviously sound that only the blind can fail to see
its truth and only the weakest and most irresolute can fail to desire
to put it into force.
In the last two years I am happy to say we have taken long strides
in advance as regards our navy. The last Congress, in addition to
smaller vessels, provided nine of those formidable fighting ships upon
which the real efficiency of any navy in war ultimately depends. It
provided, moreover, for the necessary addition of officers and enlisted
men to make the ships worth having. Meanwhile the Navy Depart-
ment has seen to it that our ships have been constantly exercised at sea,
with the great guns, and in manoeuvres, so that their efficiency as fight-
ing units, both individually and when acting together, has been steadily
improved. Remember that all of this is necessary. A warship is a huge
bit of mechanism, wellnigh as delicate and complicated as it is formid-
able. It takes years to build it. It takes years to teach the officers and
men how to handle it to good advantage. It is an absolute impossibility
to improvise a navy at the outset of war. No recent war between any
two nations has lasted as long as it takes to build a battleship; and it
is just as impossible to improvise the officers or the crews as to im-
provise the navy.
To lay up a battleship and only send it afloat at the outset of a war,
with a raw crew and untried officers, would be not merely a folly but
a crime, for it would invite both disaster and disgrace. The navy which
so quickly decided in our favor in the war of 1898 had been built and
made efficient during the preceding fifteen years. The ships that tri-
umphed off Manila and Santiago had been built under previous Admin-
istrations with money appropriated by previous Congresses. The
officers and the men did their duty so well because they had already
been trained to it by long sea service. All honor to the gallant officers
and gallant men who actually did the fighting; but remember, too, to .
honor the public men, the shipwrights and steel workers, the owners
of the shipyards and armor plants, to whose united foresight and exer-
tion we owe it that in 1898 we had craft so good, guns so excellent,
and American seamen of so high a type in the conning towers, in the
gun-turrets, and in the engine rooms. It is too late to prepare for war
when war has come; and if we only prepare sufficiently no war will
ever come. We wish a powerful and efficient navy, not for purposes
of war, but as the surest guarantee of peace. If we have such a navy—
if we keep on building it up—we may rest assured that there is but the
Theodore Roosevelt 223
smallest chance that trouble will ever come to this Nation; and we may
likewise rest assured that no foreign power will ever quarrel with us
about the Monroe Doctrine.
AT WAUKESHA, WIS., APRIL 3, 1903.
Gentlemen and ladies, my fellow citizens of Wisconsin:
You are men and women of Wisconsin, but you are men and women
of America first. I am glad of having the chance of saying a few
words to you today. I believe with all my heart in this nation playing
its part manfully and well. I believe that we are now, at the outset
of the twentieth century, face to face with great world problems; that
we can not help playing the part of a great world power; that all we
can decide is whether we will play it well or ill. I do not want to see
us shrink from any least bit of duty. We have not only taken during
the past five years a position of even greater importance in this Western
Hemisphere than ever before, but we have taken a position of great
importance even in the furthest Orient, in that furthest West, which
is the immemorial East. We must hold our own. If we show our-
selves weaklings we will earn the contempt of mankind, and—what
is of far more consequence—our own contempt; but I would like to
impress upon every public man, upon every writer in the press, the fact
that strength should go hand in hand with courtesy, with scrupulous
regard in word and deed, not only for the rights, but for the feelings,
of other nations. I want to see a man able to hold his own. I have
no respect for the man who will put up with injustice. If a man will
not take his own part, the part is not worth taking. That is true. On the
other hand, I have a hearty contempt for the man who is always walk-
ing about wanting to pick a quarrel, and above all, wanting to say
something unpleasant about some one else. He is not an agreeable
character anywhere; and the fact that he talks loud does not necessarily
mean that he fights hard either. Sometimes you will see a man who
will talk loud and fight hard; but he does not fight hard because he
talks loud, but in spite of it. I want the same thing to be true of us
as a nation. I am always sorry whenever I see any reflection that seems
to come from America upon any friendly nation. To write or say any-
thing unkind, unjust, or inconsiderate about any foreign nation does
not do us any good, and does not help us toward holding our own if
ever the need should arise to hold our own. I am sure you will not
misunderstand me; I am sure that it is needless for me to say that I
do not believe the United States should ever suffer a wrong. I
should be the first to ask that we resent a wrong from the strong, just
as I should be the first to insist that we do not wrong the weak. As
a nation, if we are to be true to our past, we must steadfastly keep
224 Messages and Speeches
these two positions—to submit to no injury by the strong and to
inflict no injury on the weak. It is not at all necessary to say disagree-
able things about the strong in order to impress them with the fact
that we do not intend to submit to injury. Keep our navy up to the
highest point of efficiency; have good ships, and enough of them; have
the officers and the enlisted men on them trained to handle them, so
that in the future the American navy shall rise level, whenever the
need comes, to the standard it has set in the past. Keep in our own
hearts the rugged, manly virtues, which have made our people for-
midable as foes, and valuable as friends throughout the century and a
quarter of our national life. Do all that; and having done it, remem-
ber that it is a sensible thing to speak courteously of others.
I believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I shall try to see that this nation
lives up to it; and as long as I am President it will be lived up to.
But I do not intend to make the doctrine an excuse or a justification
for being unpleasant to other powers, for speaking ill of other powers.
We want the friendship of mankind. We want to get on well with
the other nations of mankind, with the small nations and with the big
nations. We want so to carry ourselves that if (which I think most
unlikely) any quarrel should arise, it would be evident that it was not a
quarrel of our own seeking, but one that was forced on us. If it is
forced on us, I know you too well not to know that you will stand up
to it if the need comes; but you will stand up to it all the better if
you have not blustered or spoken ill of other nations in advance. We
want friendship, we want peace. We wish well to the nations of man-
kind. We look with joy at any prosperity of theirs; we wish them
success, not failure. We rejoice as mankind moves forward over the
whole earth. Each nation has its own difficulties. We have difficulties
enough at home. Let us improve ourselves, lifting what needs to be
lifted here, and let others do their own work; let us attend to our own
business; keep our own hearthstone swept and in order. Do not shirk
any duty; do not shirk any difficulty that is forced upon us, but do not
invite it by foolish language. Do not assume a quarrelsome and un-
pleasant attitude toward other people. Let the friendly expressions of
foreign powers be accepted as tokens of their sincere good will, and
reflecting their real sentiments; and let us avoid any language on our
part which might tend to turn their good will into ill will. All that
is mere common-sense; the kind of common-sense that we apply in our
own lives, man to man, neighbor to neighbor; and remember that sub-
stantially what is true among nations is true on a small scale among
ourselves. The man who is a weakling, who is a coward, we all despise,
and we ought to despise him. If a man can not do his own work and
take his own part, he does not count; and I have no patience with those
who would have the United States unable to take its own part, to do
/
Theodore Roosevelt 225
its work in the world. But remember that a loose tongue is just as
unfortunate an accompaniment for a nation as for an individual. The
man who talks ill of his neighbors, the man who invites trouble for him-
self and them, is a nuisance. The stronger, the more self-confident the
nation is, the more carefully it should guard its speech as well as its
action, and should make it a point, in the interest of its own self-respect,
to see that it does not say what it can not make good, that it avoids
giving needless offence, that it shows genuinely and sincerely its desire
for friendship with the rest of mankind, but that it keeps itself in shape
to make its weight felt should the need arise.
That is in substance my theory of what our foreign policy should be.
Let us not boast, not insult any one, but make up our minds coolly what
is necessary to say, say it, and then stand to it, whatever the conse-
quences may be.
AT MILWAUKEE, WIS., APRIL 3, 1903.
Mr. Toastmaster, gentlemen:
Today I wish to speak to you on the question of the control and
regulation of those great corporations which are popularly, although
rather vaguely, known as trusts; dealing mostly with what has actually
been accomplished in the way of legislation and in the way of enforce-
ment of legislation during the past eighteen months, the period covering
the two sessions of the Fifty-seventh Congress. At the outset I shall
ask you to remember that I do not approach the subject either from
the standpoint of those who speak of themselves as anti-trust or anti-
corporation people, nor yet from the standpoint of those who are fond
of denying the existence of evils in the trusts, or who apparently pro-
ceed upon the assumption that if a corporation is large enough it can
do no wrong.
I think I speak for the great majority of the American people when
I say that we are not in the least against wealth as such, whether indi-
vidual or corporate; that we merely desire to see any abuse of corporate
or combined wealth corrected and remedied; that we do not desire the
abolition or destruction of big corporations, but, on the contrary, recog-
nize them as being in many cases efficient economic instruments, the
results of an inevitable process of economic evolution, and only desire
to see them regulated and controlled so far as may be necessary to
subserve the public good. We should be false to the historic principles
of our government if we discriminated, either by legislation or admin-
istration, either for or against a man because of either his wealth or his
poverty. There is no proper place in our society either for the rich man
who uses the power conferred by his riches to enable him to oppress
and wrong his neighbors, nor yet for the demagogic agitator who,
226 Messages and Speeches
instead of attacking abuses as all abuses should be attacked wherever
found, attacks property, attacks prosperity, attacks men of wealth, as
such, whether they be good or bad, attacks corporations whether they
do well or ill, and seeks, in a spirit of ignorant rancor, to overthrow the
very foundations upon which rests our national well-being.
In consequence of the extraordinary industrial changes of the last
half century, and notably of the last two or three decades, changes due
mainly to the rapidity and complexity of our industrial growth, we are
confronted with problems which in their present shape were unknown
to our forefathers. Our great prosperity, with its accompanying con-
centration of population and of wealth, its extreme specialization of
faculties, and its development of giant industrial leaders, has brought
much good and some evil, and it is as foolish to ignore the good as
wilfully to blind ourselves to the evil.
The evil has been partly the inevitable accompaniment of the social
changes, and where this is the case it can be cured neither by law nor
by the administration of law, the only remedy lying in the slow change
of character and of economic environment. But for a portion of the evil,
at least, we think that remedies can be found. We know well the danger
of false remedies, and we are against all violent, radical, and unwise
change. But we believe that by proceeding slowly, yet resolutely, with
good sense and moderation, and also with a firm determination not to be
swerved from our course either by foolish clamor or by any base or
sinister influence, we can accomplish much for the betterment of
conditions.
Nearly two years ago, speaking at the State Fair in Minnesota, I
said:
“It is probably true that the large majority of the fortunes that now
exist in this country have been amassed, not by injuring our people,
but as an incident to the conferring of great benefits upon the com-
munity, and this no matter what may have been the conscious purpose
of those amassing them. There is but the scantiest justification for
most of the outcry against the men of wealth as such: and it ought to
be unnecessary to state that any appeal which directly or indirectly leads,
to suspicion and hatred among ourselves, which tends to limit oppor-
tunity, and therefore to shut the door of success against poor men of
talent, and, finally which entails the possibility of lawlessness and vio-
lence, is an attack upon the fundamental properties of American citizen-
ship. Our interests are at bottom common; in the long run we go up or
go down together. Yet more and more it is evident that the State, and
if necessary the Nation, has got to possess the right of supervision and
control as regards the great corporations which are its creatures; par-
ticularly as regards the great business combinations which derive a
portion of their importance from the existence of some monopolistic
Theodore Roosevelt 227
tendency. The right should be exercised with caution and self-
restraint; but it should exist, so that it may be invoked if the need
arises.”
Last fall in speaking at Cincinnati, I said:
“The necessary supervision and control, in which I firmly believe as
the only method of eliminating the real evils of the trusts, must come
through wisely and cautiously framed legislation, which shall aim in
the first place to give definite control to some sovereign over the great
corporations, and which shall be followed, when once this power has
been conferred, by a system giving to the government the full knowl-
edge which is the essential for satisfactory action. Then, when this
knowledge—one of the essential features of which is proper publicity—
has been gained, what further steps of any kind are necessary can be
taken with the confidence born of the possession of power to deal with
the subject, and of a thorough knowledge of what should and can be
done in the matter. We need additional power, and we need knowl-
edge. . . . Such legislation—whether obtainable now or obtain-
able only after a Constitutional amendment—should provide for a rea-
sonable supervision, the most prominent feature of which at first should
be publicity; that is, the making public, both to the government
authorities and to the people at large, the essential facts in which the
public is concerned. This would give us exact knowledge of many
points which are now not only in doubt but the subject of fierce con-
troversy. Moreover, the mere fact of the publication would cure some
very grave evils, for the light of day is a deterrent to wrongdoing. It
would doubtless disclose other evils with which, for the time being,
we could devise no way to grapple. Finally, it would disclose others
which could be grappled with and cured by further legislative action.”
In my Message to Congress for Igol I said:
“In the interest of the whole people the Nation should, without inter-
fering with the power of the States in the matter, itself also assume
power of supervision and regulation over all corporations doing an
interstate business.”
The views thus expressed have now received effect by the wise, con-
servative, and yet far-reaching legislation enacted by Congress at its
last session. In its wisdom Congress enacted the very important law
providing a Department of Commerce and Labor, and further providing
therein under the Secretary of Commerce and Labor for a Commis-
sioner of Corporations, charged with the duty of supervision of and of
making intelligent investigation into the organization and conduct of
corporations engaged in interstate commerce. His powers to expose
illegal or hurtful practices and to obtain all information needful for
the purposes of further intelligent legislation seem adequate; and the
publicity justifiable and proper for public purposes is satisfactorily guar-
228 Messages and Speeches
anteed. The law was passed at the very end of the session of Con-
gress. Owing to the lateness of its passage Congress was not able to
provide proper equipment for the new Department; and the first few
months must necessarily be spent in the work of organization, and the
first investigations must necessarily be of a tentative character. The
satisfactory development of such a system requires time and great labor.
Those who are intrusted with the administration of the new law will
assuredly administer it in a spirit of absolute fairness and justice and
of entire fearlessness, with the firm purpose not to hurt any corporation
doing a legitimate business—on the contrary to help it—and, on the
other hand, not to spare any corporation which may be guilty of illegal
practices, or the methods of which may make it a menace to the public
welfare. Some substantial good will be done in the immediate future;
and as the Department gets fairly to work under the law an ever larger
vista for good work will be opened along the lines indicated. The
enactment of this law is one of the most significant contributions which
have been made in our time toward the proper solution of the problem
of the relations to the people of the great corporations and corporate
combinations.
But much though this is, it is only a part of what has been done in
the effort to ascertain and correct improper trust or monopolistic prac-
tices. Some eighteen months ago the Industrial Commission, an able
and non-partisan body, reported to Congress the result of their investi-
gation of trusts and industrial combinations. One of the most im-
portant of their conclusions was that discriminations in freight rates
and facilities were granted favored shippers by the railroads and that
these discriminations clearly tended toward the control of production
and prices in many fields of business by large combinations. That this
conclusion was justifiable was shown by the disclosures in the investi-
gation of railroad methods pursued in the fall and winter of 1901-1902.
It was then shown that certain trunk lines had entered into unlawful
agreements as to the transportation of food products from the West
to the Atlantic seaboard, giving a few favored shippers rates much be-
low the tariff charges imposed upon the smaller dealers and the general
public. These unjust practices had prevailed to such an extent and
for so long a time that many of the smaller shippers had been driven
out of business, until practically one buyer of grain on each railway
system had been able by his illegal advantages to secure a monopoly
on the line with which his secret compact was made; this monopoly
enabling him to fix the price to both producer and consumer. Many
of the great packing house concerns were shown to be in combination
with each other and with most of the great railway lines, whereby they
enjoyed large secret concessions in rates and thus obtained a practical
monopoly of the fresh and cured meat industry of the country. These
ſ
Theodore Roosevelt 229
fusions, though violative of the statute, had prevailed unchecked for
so many years that they had become intrenched in and interwoven with
the commercial life of certain large distributing localities; although
this was of course at the expense of the vast body of law-abiding mer-
chants, the general public, and particularly of unfavored localities.
Under those circumstances it was a serious problem to determine the
wise course to follow in vitalizing a law which had in part become
obsolete or proved incapable of enforcement. Of what the Attorney-
General did in enforcing it I shall speak later. The decisions of the
courts upon the law had betrayed weaknesses and imperfections, some
of them so serious as to render abortive efforts to apply any effective
remedy for the existing evils.
It is clear that corporations created for quasi public purposes, clothed
for that reason with the ultimate power of the state to take private
property against the will of the owner, hold their corporate powers as
carriers in trust for the fairly impartial service of all the public.
Favoritism in the use of such powers, unjustly enriching some and
unjustly impoverishing others, discriminating in favor of some places
and against others, is palpably violative of plain principles of justice.
Such a practice unchecked is hurtful in many ways. Congress, having
had its attention drawn to the matter, enacted a most important anti-
rebate law, which greatly strengthens the interstate-commerce law.
This new law prohibits under adequate penalties the giving and as
well the demanding or receiving of such preferences, and provides the
preventive remedy of injunction. The vigorous administration of this
law—and it will be enforced—will, it is hoped, afford a substantial
remedy for certain trust evils which have attracted public attention
and have created public unrest. *
This law represents a noteworthy and important advance toward
just and effective regulation of transportation. Moreover, its passage
has been supplemented by the enactment of a law to expedite the hear-
ing of actions of public moment under the anti-trust act, known as the
Sherman law, and under the act to regulate commerce, at the request
of the Attorney-General; and furthermore, additional funds have been
appropriated to be expended under the direction of the Attorney-
General in the enforcement of these laws.
All of this represents a great and substantial advance in legislation.
But more important even than legislation is the administration of the
law, and I ask your attention for a moment to the way in which the
law has been administered by the profound jurist and fearless public
servant who now occupies the position of Attorney-General, Mr. Knox.
The Constitution enjoins upon the President that he shall take care
that the laws be faithfully executed, and under this provision the
Attorney-General formulated a policy which was in effect nothing but
23O Messages and Speeches
the rigid enforcement, by suits managed with consummate skill and
ability, both of the anti-trust law and of the imperfect provisions of
the act to regulate commerce. The first step taken was the prosecution
of fourteen suits against the principal railroads of the Middle West,
restraining them by injunction from further violations of either of the
laws in question.
About the same time the case against the Northern Securities Com-
pany was initiated. This was a corporation organized under the laws
of the State of New Jersey with a capital of four hundred million
dollars, the alleged purpose being to control the Great Northern and
the Northern Pacific railroad companies, two parallel and competing
lines extending across the northern tier of States from the Mississippi
River to the Pacific Ocean. Whatever the purpose, its consummation
would have resulted in the control of the two great railway systems—
upon which the people of the Northwestern States were so largely
dependent for their supplies and to get their products to market—being
practically merged into the New Jersey corporation. The proposition
that these independent systems of railroads should be merged under
a single control alarmed the people of the States concerned, lest they
be subjected to what they deemed a monopoly of interstate transporta-
tion and the suppression of competition. The Governors of the States
most deeply affected held a meeting to consider how to prevent the
merger becoming effective and passed resolutions calling upon the
National Government to enforce the anti-trust laws against the alleged
combination. When these resolutions were referred to the Attorney-
General for consideration and advice, he reported that in his opinion
the Northern Securities Company and its control of the railroads men-
tioned was a combination in restraint of trade, and was attempting a
monopoly in violation of the national anti-trust law. Thereupon a suit
in equity, which is now pending, was begun by the Government to test
the validity of this transaction under the Sherman law.
At nearly the same time the disclosures respecting the secret rebates
enjoyed by the great packing house companies, coupled with the very
high price of meats, led the Attorney-General to direct an investigation
into the methods of the so-called beef trust. The result was that he
filed bills for injunction against six of the principal packing house
companies, and restrained them from combining and agreeing upon
prices at which they would sell their products in States other than those
in which their meats were prepared for market. Writs of injunction
were issued accordingly, and since then, after full argument, the
United States Circuit Court has made the injunction perpetual.
The cotton interests of the South, including growers, buyers, and
shippers, made complaint that they were suffering great injury in their
business from the methods of the Southern railroads in the handling
Theodore Roosevelt 23I
and transportation of cotton. They alleged that these railroads, by
combined action under a pooling arrangement to support their rate
schedules, had denied to the shippers the right to elect over what roads
their commodities should be shipped, and that by dividing upon a fixed
basis the cotton crop of the South all inducement to compete in rates
for the transportation thereof was eliminated. Proceedings were insti-
tuted by the Attorney-General under the anti-trust law, which resulted
in the destruction of the pool and in restoring to the growers and
shippers of the South the right to ship their products over any road
they elected, thus removing the restraint upon the freedom of commerce.
In November, 1902, the Attorney-General directed that a bill for an
injunction be filed in the United States Circuit Court at San Francisco
against the Federal Salt Company—a corporation which had been or-
ganized under the laws of an Eastern State, but had its main office
and principal place of business in California—and against a number of
other companies and persons constituting what was known as the salt
trust. These injunctions were to restrain the execution of certain con-
tracts between the Federal Salt Company and the other defendants, by
which the latter agreed neither to import nor buy or sell salt, except
from and to the Federal Salt Company, and not to engage or assist
in the production of salt west of the Mississippi River during the con-
tinuance of such contracts. As the result of these agreements the price
of salt had been advanced about four hundred per cent. A temporary
injunction order was obtained, which the defendants asked the court
to modify on the ground that the anti-trust law had no application to
contracts for purchases and sales within a State. The Circuit Court
overruled this contention and sustained the Government's position.
This practically concluded the case, and it is understood that in conse-
quence the Federal Salt Company is about to be dissolved and that
no further contest will be made.
The above is a brief outline of the most important steps, legislative
and administrative, taken during the past eighteen months in the direc-
tion of solving, so far as at present it seems practicable by national
legislation or administration to solve, what we call the trust problem.
They represent a sum of very substantial achievement. They represent
a successful effort to devise and apply real remedies; an effort which
so far succeeded because it was made not only with resolute purpose
and determination, but also in a spirit of common-sense and justice,
as far removed as possible from rancor, hysteria, and unworthy dema-
gogic appeal. In the same spirit the laws will continue to be enforced.
Not only is the legislation recently enacted effective, but in my judg-
ment it was impracticable to attempt more. Nothing of value is to be
expected from ceaseless agitation for radical and extreme legislation.
The people may wisely, and with confidence, await the results which
232 Messages and Speeches
are reasonably to be expected from the impartial enforcement of the
laws which have recently been placed upon the statute books. Legisla-
tion of a general and indiscriminate character would be sure to fail,
either because it would involve all interests in a common ruin, or be-
cause it would not really reach any evil. We have endeavored to
provide a discriminating adaptation of the remedy to the real mischief.
Many of the alleged remedies advocated are of the unpleasantly dras-
tic type which seeks to destroy the disease by killing the patient. Others
are so obviously futile that it is somewhat difficult to treat them seri-
ously or as being advanced in good faith. High among the latter I
place the effort to reach the trust question by means of the tariff. You
can, of course, put an end to the prosperity of the trusts by putting
an end to the prosperity of the Nation; but the price for such action
seems high. The alternative is to do exactly what has been done during
the life of the Congress which has just closed—that is, to endeavor,
not to destroy corporations, but to regulate them with a view of doing
away with whatever is of evil in them and of making them subserve
the public use. The law is not to be administered in the interest of
the poor man as such, nor yet in the interest of the rich man as such,
but in the interest of the law-abiding man, rich or poor. We are no
more against Organizations of capital than against Organizations of
labor. We welcome both, demanding only that each shall do right
and shall remember its duty to the Republic. Such a course we con-
sider not merely a benefit to the poor man, but a benefit to the rich
man. We do no man an injustice when we require him to obey the
law. On the contrary, if he is a man whose safety and well-being
depend in a peculiar degree upon the existence of the spirit of law
and order, we are rendering him the greatest service when we require
him to be himself an exemplar of that spirit.
ON BEING MADE A MEMBER OF THE PRESS CLUB, AT MIL-
WAUKEE, WIS., APRIL 3, 1903.
Mr. President, gentlemen:
I accept with all gratitude the honorary membership in your club. I f
am glad that I was here some years ago and that I am able to come
back now. And as ye are speaking among ourselves—with no re-
porters present—I want to say just one word, and that with all my
heart. I have found that if I felt I wished to tell something to someone
whom I know would not repeat it, if there was secret essential to keep
quiet, I could take an honorable man connected with the press into my
confidence and my faith would be justified. Among the closest friends
I have made in every station which I have held where I wanted to
test a man's friendship to see if he had the stuff in him that made it
Theodore Roosevelt 233
worth while making friends with him, whether in the army, as gov-
ernor, or now as president, I found that among men in your profession
I have some of the closest and staunchest of friends. And as you are
reasonably astute men it would not be worth while to tell you anything
but the truth, so what I say I mean—I believe. I will say also that I
did not always get along well with them all. There are some to whom
I have objected, and they have known it. But I wish to say with all
emphasis that there has been no more honorable body than the men
of your profesion; the vast majority of them are men the same as you
would have in your club.
[The Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wis., April 4, 1903.]
AT MADISON, WIS., APRIL 3, 1903.
Mr. Governor, and you, my fellow citizens:
I am glad to come to Wisconsin. I am glad to see so typical an
American city, for I feel that here, throughout your life as a state, you
embody and put into practice in a peculiar degree that principle that
adopts as its motto the cry of “all men up,” rather than “some men
down.” I think that you here have shown by your actions your appre-
ciation of the fact that in the long run, for weal or woe, our needs
are indissolubly bound one with another's.
We are passing through a period of great material prosperity. There
will be ups and downs in that prosperity; the wave will sometimes
break a little higher, the wash of the wave will come back a little down
the beach, but in the long run the tide will go on, if we but prove true
to ourselves, true to the traditional beliefs of our forefathers.
We can win socially, materially, governmentally, in this country only
on condition of understanding that the vices of hatred, of envy, of
jealousy, are more evil in their workings in the state than in their
workings privately, individually, between man and man. We can win
only if we show in our actual lives that we are prepared to realize
the doctrine that each must be for all, and all for each ; that no man
can afford to do less than his best; that each man must scorn to owe
to others his success; and yet that we must work hand in hand, shoulder
to shoulder, for the common good; that we must be able to combine in
proper degree the spirit of individualism, the spirit of individual initia-
tive, which has made the American what he is, and to combine with that
also the spirit of co-operation, the spirit that makes men join success-
fully in a common effort for the common good.
Each man must work for himself; if he does not pull his own weight
he won’t pull anyone else's; if he cannot support himself he will be but
a drag on all mankind. Each man must work for himself and for
those close to him; and each man must also work for the common good.
A man who is a man will scorn to feel that he owes his success
234 Messages and Speeches
primarily to anything but his own stout heart and strong hand and
cool head. Each must show those qualities, and yet each must wish
and be able to help his neighbor when he slips. There is not a man
of us here that does not now and then slip, that does not now and
then need to have a helping hand stretched out to him. Shame to any
one of us who fails on such an occasion to stretch out the helping hand
to the brother that stumbles. Lift him up; but remember this: You
can lift him up, set him on his feet so that he can walk; but if he will
not walk you cannot carry him. The man that wants to be carried,
the man that takes that attitude, is not worth trying to carry. You
will not help him, and you will not help yourselves either.
Fundamentally the solution of the problem of our national life, the
solution of that infinitely composite problem which consists of so many
lesser ones, is to be found in the proper combination of the quality of
self-help with the quality of abundantly and cheerfully each of us
striving wisely, sanely, and temperately to help his fellows as it is
given to him to extend that help.
[The Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wis., April 4, 1903.]
BEFORE THE WISCONSIN LEGISLATURE AT MADISON, APRIL
3, I903.
I am glad to have the chance of saying a few words to you this
morning in this beautiful city, the capital of your state, the seat of
your great university.
Just one word of congratulation to you upon the fact that it is a
beautiful city, and that you have been able to join in one place the
capital and the seat of the great state institution of learning. I think
that more and more of Qur people are realizing the fact that practical
efficiency in the direction of shaping means to an end does not bar us
out from paying proper heed to beauty, to surroundings. I remember
well one spring when I visited this city feeling it was a fortunate thing
for any young fellow to have the thousand associations that must in-
evitably cling around the seat of his education in his mind entwined
with a place as beautiful as this is, with the two lakes, with the wooded
hill separating them, with the capitol of the state, and that sacred,
cloistered calm that always associates itself with university buildings.
But beauty of life is not everything. It is not the main thing. It is a
good thing if it comes in connection with other matters.
Now one word first, especially with reference to your university. I
am glad to see any institution of learning brought as closely into touch
with the governmental methods of managing the state as must inevitably
be the case here where there is such juxtaposition between the univer-
sity and the state capital. Our universities, our colleges and academies
fill a double purpose throughout the country. In the first place there
Theodore Roosevelt 235
is a percentage of the members who are to be trained in pure scholar-
ship, sometimes scholarship of a sort that has direct reference to cer-
tain pursuits in after life of immediate practical value; sometimes
scholarship to be followed for the sake of the scholarship. And re-
member, eminently practical people though we are, we have from the
beginning of our history, I am glad to say, recognized the worth of
scholarship for its own sake.
..There is that side to education, the desire to turn out scholars, stu-
dents, teachers, each of whom I hope will be turned out within him
the purpose to add to the sum of productive work of the country. Some
time I would like to have a chance of speaking to the university just
on that line. I want to see the student of the American university
turned out, having deeply implanted in him the purpose to strive to do
new work of value in the field of scholarship, not merely to go over
those portions of the field that have been harrowed by ten thousand har-
rows before him, but to strike out and do original work of value; and I
congratulate you of this university that already Wisconsin has con-
tributed through the graduates of her university to such substantive
work, to positive achievement in new fields. Therefore, our university
must turn out scholars, but it must do more than that. It must turn out
men—men and women'
I have followed the University of Wisconsin's really remarkable
career in athletic fields. It does not confine itself to playing football
in the west, it rows in the east. And any crew that is rowing against
the crew of Wisconsin has no business in the game if it is not a first
class crew. We like that. We like to see the boy who has got a healthy
vigor in him which means he has not only developed his muscle, but
has developed his pluck, his grit, his courage, his resolution. And to
you who have ever seen, much less taken part, in the work of a nine
or an eight or an eleven, you know besides physical prowess you have
got to draw on a fund of resolution and pluck.
It is a good and first class thing to have our young men develop
their bodies and develop the hardier, rougher qualities as well; I believe
in athletics thoroughly. Let me add one proviso—I believe in them in
their place. I do not want to see the nothing but an athlete.* I would
like to use a much stronger expression. It is a first class thing for a
young fellow of twenty to be a crack halfback, but if at forty all you
can say of him is that once he was a good halfback, then I am sorry
for him. Good, hard play is an admirable thing as long as you recol-
*President Roosevelt, no more than Kipling, believes in the “muddied oaf’’ and “flanneled
fool.” He believes in brawn; but he no more believes that a man should stop at brawn than
a house should stop at its foundations. He demands a superstructure of intelligence, morality,
honesty, courage—he wants all the virtues. I have often thought that the good done mankind,
and particularly American mankind, by President Roosevelt, will not rest upon a Panama
canal, or any single stroke of practical statesmanship, but upon the lesson which he teaches
of a balanced, a perfect manhood in all he says and all he does and all he is.-A. H. L.
236 Messages and Speeches
lect it is play. If you mistake it for work, if you think it is the end
you had better not play at all. The boy who is a good man on the
crew, a good man on the team, if he, when he leaves college, treats
that as partly an agreeable incident, partly a bit of preparation for the
real work of life, it is a service to him. But if he thinks he has struck
what ought to be his main profession, it is a misfortune. To repeat
what I said a few days ago, I want to see the young men of America,
whether in or out of the universities, fine of body; I want still more
to see them fine of mind; but most of all we must hope that they de-
velop well that which counts for more than body, for more than mind
—character.
I passed by on the way to this chamber the room in which, Gov-
ernor, you said I should have a chance to look On our way back; the
room the memorial of the Grand Army, the memorial of those who
fought in the great war. I do not think we can ever over estimate the
need there is that we should constantly keep in mind and apply to our-
selves the lessons taught by those who fought in the great war; who
saw the dark, bitter struggle from '61 to '65, success in which meant
the making of this nation, the most glorious upon which the sun has
ever shown.
Now those who won in that great contest, and those, our brothers,
who valiantly fought against us, who lost and who now are heartily
and forever one with us, both alike had to show more than one set of
qualities. In the first place they had to show downright physical
prowess and strength. No nation of weaklings could have won out
in those years of trial. We needed to have the rough, powerful fiber
of body, just as we needed to have the rougher, manlier, virile virtues
in us. No mere sweetness, no mere love of culture, love of education,
no mere capacity for adapting ourselves to the softer side of civiliza-
tion, would have availed the men who fought to a triumphant ending
the great civil war.
They had in them the stuff out of which heroes are made; the cour-
age, the iron resolution, the unshaken resolve to face everything, to
face death itself, rather than see failure come and the flag rent in two
and dishonored. They had to show these traits; but, then, these traits
would not have been enough. Back of them there had to be the lofty
disinterestedness of purpose which is embodied in and typified by
mighty Abraham Lincoln. You have got to have both qualities. No
matter how good we had been ; no matter how virtuous, we should
have failed, we should have been overthrown if as a people we had not
had the fundamental fighting virtues, and, on the other hand, the fight-
ing virtues would merely have made us a curse to ourselves and our
neighbors if they had not been guided by a lofty disinterestedness of
purpose,
Theodore Roosevelt 237
In how many a nation's history in the past the student reads of the
destruction that comes because to courage, to ability, to energy, to all
the strong, manly qualities is added not disinterestedness, not the
higher resolve to work with one's fellows for the common good; but
the mean, angry, bitter desire to sacrifice all else for one’s own personal
advancement. If in the civil war our generals and statesmen, our
leaders in the field and in council, had been Only anxious each to win
what power and glory he could for his own, this country would have
gone down in ruin. We were saved because it was given to our people
to develop not merely the qualities that endured and dared and did, but
the loftier qualities that needed the endurance and the daring and the
doing, all part of the successful effort for the common good of our
people and of mankind. That was what was done in the iron days.
We live in peaceful days, but we need just the same qualities to
work out aright our salvation in peace as were needed then to work
out our salvation through war. In the end the qualities that we need
for good citizenship are not the very extraordinary qualities. They
are simply ordinary qualities properly developed. Courage is an ordi-
nary quality, but it is a good One. Decency, honesty—decency in home
life, decency in public life—nothing extraordinary about it, but very
necessary. Common sense—I wish it were more common; not genius,
not remarkable brilliancy, but just plain common sense. No man is
going to be worth anything in private life if he has not got it; on the
contrary, he is going to be very uncomfortable to live with. And in
public life, if he has not got it, he is going to be a menace to the body
politic. I do not care how brilliant he is, if he has not got the saving
grace of common sense you can do but little with him. Just a one-
sided development will never do. No one quality developed to the
exclusion of others will save us. We have got to develop along several
different lines; along the lines of courage, along the lines of honesty,
along the lines of common sense, if we are to do good work, and the
future of the United States, is, I think, safe, because the average state
does on the whole develop as yours has developed, along those lines.
I am glad to be here in Wisconsin. I think that not only the people
of Wisconsin, but the people of the country have a right to be proud
of her development as a state, of what she has done, of the part she
has taken in war, of the part she has taken in peace; and the people
of Wisconsin and their development now also have a peculiar interest
for every one concerned with trying to see what the American of the
future is to be, because in Wisconsin one sees with unusual clearness
the development of that American. He is going to be a man in whose
blood flow streams from many different race strains.
From the foundation of the colonies here on this side from which
the nation sprung, many different race elements from the old world
238 Messages and Speeches
have joined to make first colonial Americans, then the Americans of
this independent republic. And that process has gone on from that
day to this. The American is not descended from any one stock. The
American of the future will be descended, and no few Americans of
to-day are descended, from two-thirds of the stocks of western and
northern Europe, all the strains joining together to make a new type
of man, different from and yet akin to many old world types, a type
of man that I firmly believe will have in him something a little better
than has yet been produced in this world, and who will develop into
that something a little better, not by boasting about it, not by stating
what a great and glorious man he is, but by setting to work plainly
and steadfastly to become a middling decent man and keep on a mid-
dling decent man, and then go on getting better.
Promise is an excellent thing, but performance is a better one; and
the more we settle soberly down to facing our own faults—and there
are many of them in private life—we all admit that when we talk with
one another—settle down to study our own faults, to getting rid of
them, to seeing along what lines we are to strive for our betterment,
and then strive along those lines, the better work we do for the Ameri-
can of the next generation.
We have every right to be proud of our past achievements. We have
every right as a nation to believe that in view of those past achieve-
ments an even greater future opens before us, and we can do the best
work toward winning glory and success in the future if we set our-
selves soberly to work facing the fact that we have faults, and grave
faults, but resolved to overcome them, resolved to develop an even
higher degree of the national traits of which we are proud, and confi-
dent that if we will steadfastly and in good faith work along those lines
we shall in very truth make of this nation a nation the like of which
has never before been seen on the broad bosom of the earth.
[The Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wis., April 4, 1903.]
AT THE MILWAUKEE NATIONAL SOLDIERS' HOME, APRIL 3, 1903.
Colonel, comrades: ſ
You fought in a great war; I and those with me in a little war. But
it was enough to give us an idea of what you had to do; enough to
give us an idea of the debt the whole country is under to you and those
like you—to you to whom we owe it that we are Americans and citizens
of a great and mighty nation. There are certain things, and it seems
almost needless to repeat them, and yet it is these which we need to
keep as living facts if we are to make of this nation all it should be
made. The lessons which you taught us by what you did in the war are
the same lessons that, in later conditions, must be applied to what we
Theodore Roosevelt 239
do in times of peace. In the first place, you learned that it is not the
man who wishes to do some heroic act that is needed, but that it was,
in the long run, the man who in times of a great crisis stood firm and
ready, who was the most desired.
All of you will remember from your own experiences who the man
was that really did well as a soldier. I suppose that every man here
has found, as I have from my small experience, the young fellow, red
hot for glory, wanting to make a splurge, but not contented to do the
other things first. I will give you an example out of my own experi-
ence. I remember a young fellow, a man of well-to-do parents, who
had read about the war and wanted to join a cavalry regiment and take
part in the war. He came to me after three days in camp, after he had
been to the captain—the captain, by the way, was a gruff fellow from
New Mexico, and not very sympathetic—and he said, “Colonel, I have
come down here to fight for my country and they put me to digging
trenches.” I said, “Now, my friend, if they have put you digging,
go ahead and dig, and if you dig well perhaps they will try you at
fighting later.” Now, you could pretty near make a guess at what kind
of a soldier that man would make by the way he went at his digging.
If he did that well, so also would he perform his other duties. It is
just so in civil life.
The man who is always waiting until there comes a chance to do
something heroic will never do anything. The constant, faithful per-
formance of each duty as it arises makes as good a citizen as it makes
a soldier. You, who have seen four years of warfare, such as has not
been seen in any other modern war, have you not seen thirty times the
faithful, sacred performance of the humdrum duty for the one time
where it was necessary to plunge into the soul-stirring activities?
Which of you grew to feel, as all men must grow to feel, the apprecia-
tion of the man on the right, or the man on the left, according to the
way he did his duty P If he shirked it a little bit you suffered as well
as he did. Now, you had it on a thousand times greater scale than
we did. We had one man who would carry hard tack and another
bacon. They would take great, big loads, and, about four o'clock in
the afternoon, would find they were very tired and would drop their
loads. Then at night, they would feel offended because they could not
have half the bacon of their comrades. I can put it in another way.
You remember the first march with blankets and the inevitable re-
cruit who carried too much, and who started off by going to carry
everything? At ten o'clock the blanket grew too heavy, and the fellow
dropped it, and he wished he had two blankets by ten o’clock at night.
Don't you remember? Gf course, you do. The fellow who had a
claim on sharing the rations of the man who carried them, was not an
enviable person for a companion. It is just the same in civil life, just
24O Messages and Speeches
the same in doing the work of a citizen. The man who attends to the
ordinary humdrum duties and who makes a good citizen is the man
who goes at a thing in a regular, business-like way, and who remem-
bers the duties to family and to the state and does them, not spasmodic-
ally, but as a regular thing.
Did you, as soldiers, not admire the men who met every occasion
as it arose, charged as they charged Fredericksburg, up the stone wall,
who, as the occasion arose, did some one single feat of heroism? The
man who helped in the policing of the camp, who did not straggle in
the march, who did not drop all of his things because they were so
hard to carry and expect the other man to share with him. The man
who did all these things and then had the stuff in him to fight when
the occasion came—that is the man who will succeed in war as well
as in civil life. That is the lesson you have all taught us of the younger
generation by what you did. Yes, you even taught us more than that.
In the first place, the lessons which were taught in the Civil War by
the duties of you who fought, showed us that a man is worth only
what he is worth as a man. We see in your modern life too much hate,
too much envy, too much of an effort to divide men along lines that
are not significant. It makes no difference what rank a man occupies.
The looking down upon the less well off, or the envy of the better off
is equally evil. You and all self-respecting men will consider the look-
ing down upon the less fortunate an evil.
Well, it is just as much an evil to look up to any man save the
man whose quality entitles him to be iodked up to. The man who
envies mere wealth pays it a compliment to which it was never entitled
in our history. The men who left names of which we are proud, coura-
geous men, such as those you followed—Grant, Sheridan, Thomas,
Sherman, Logan and Farragut—the great leaders in war and the
great leaders in peace, the men who by their lives added to the achieve-
ments of the nation—these leaders—those were the men whom it is
worth while envying. Do not pay to ignoble lives the compliment of
envy.
Which of you, as you went forward to battle, were interested to
know about the man on your right or the man on your left, or inter-
ested about the profession he followed, whether he was a banker or a
bricklayer? Or which of you cared in which way he worshiped his
Creator? And did you care whether he was born here or abroad,
whether his stock came over in the Mayflower, or settled in the earliest
days on the banks of the Hudson or the James, or whether it came
from the Rhine or the coast of Ireland P
All you cared for was “did he stand pat?” If he had the heart in
him to do his duty in camp, if you could count on his standing with
you, you were for him.
Theodore Roosevelt 24I
So let it be in civil life, whether he be rich or poor, whether upon
One side or the other, let him worship in the way he chooses. About
those things we need not concern ourselves; if we know that he has
the right kind of living in him, then accept him for his worth as a
man. Gauge his worth as you did the worth of your comrades.
Now I cannot stay and talk with you as long as I would like to. I
would like to spend a couple of hours with you, because you and your
comrades Occupy the position of envy that never has been occupied
by any other men save the men of Washington in the blue and buff—
the men of '76. I do not know whether it will ever be occupied again
in Our history—the position of the men who have made our nation of
all times their debtor—the position of the men to whose lives we turn
for lessons for every generation. I thank you. Good-bye.
[The Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wis., April 4, 1903.]
AT MILWAUKEE, WIS., APRIL 3, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow Americans, men and women of this
great city of the northwest—the old northwest—the middle west now
—the heart of the country:
I thank you for the greeting that you have extended to me; and, Mr.
Mayor, I think that there are but few other cities that could furnish a
chorus such as this city has furnished, to which we have listened.
Milwaukee has set an example in many things to the other cities of
the country; and we profit by some of that example now.
I thank you, Mr. Mayor, and your colleagues representing the city
government; and I know you will not grudge my saying a special
word of thanks to the men of the Spanish-American war, my comrades.
And I want to tell you that it pleases me to learn that the fireman
on the train that brought me to Milwaukee this afternoon was a veteran,
was a man that served in the First United States Regular cavalry, in the
same division that I did, down in Santiago.
There is no more typically American state than Wisconsin. There
is no more typically American city than Milwaukee. From the time,
now nearly 300 years ago, when the first scattered settlements were
made on the banks of the James, the Hudson, the Delaware, and in
Massachusetts bay; from that time to this there has been going on in
what is now this great independent republic a constant mixture of the
strains of blood from the old world. The American of to-day, the
American of the past, the American of the future, is, has been and will
be something akin to, but different from, each of the European nation-
alities from whom part of the strains in our composite life blood are
derived. In the days of the revolution, if you glance over the list of
names of the generals who fought under Washington, of the statesmen
who with him in the Second Continental congress declared our inde-
242 Messages and Speeches
pendence, or in the constitutional government performed the great
work of constructive statesmanship in consequence of which we are
now a nation—if you look over that list of names you will see that
from the beginning many different race-stocks entered into the forma-
tion of the American type. English, Scotch and Irish, French, German,
Scandinavian, my own people the Dutch of Holland, Slavonic stock—
all those stocks have sent their strains of blood into the making of the
American type.
In the Revolutionary War there were men like Muehlenberg and
Sullivan who fought side by side with men like Wayne, Greene, and
Marion. In the Civil War men like Sheridan and Siegel, who fought
side by side with men like Grant, Sherman, and Farragut. The race-
stocks of our ancestors are various, We come from many peoples, but
we come here together as Americans, and nothing else.
Each stock can contribute something of value to the common lot;
each stock can put a new element of worth into the American body
politic. But, fundamentally, my fellow citizens, what we need to re-
member ever to keep before our eyes all the time, is to learn the lesson
to which I have just referred in addressing the veterans out at the
Soldiers' Home; the men who came from many different states, many
of whom were born beyond the seas, but who paid no heed to whether
their forefathers had first settled in Massachusetts bay or among the
Virginia capes, or whether their immediate parents had come hither
from the banks of the Rhine, or the coasts of Ireland; were concerned
only in seeing that each man did his duty as a man.
You and I, my comrades of the small war, had to learn the same
lesson taught by the men of the big war. What concerns each soldier,
if he wishes to see his army do a feat of might, is not the birth-
place or ancestry of his fellows; still less the creed according to which
that fellow of his worships his Maker; not the man’s occupation
or social position; but the man’s worth as a man. That is the vital
point. And as it is on stricken fields, so it is in the never ending
work of strife for civic and social uplifting. Woe will surely await
this people if we ever permit ourselves to draw lines of distinction
as between class and class, or creed and creed, or along any other line
save that which divides good citizenship from bad citizenship.” If the
*There is no more sincere democrat in the word's broadest sense than President Roosevelt.
He picks his friends without reference to money, social place, ancestry or any of those scores
of matters which are so important to shallowists who to please an inane vanity call them-
selves an aristocracy and play at caste. With him the great one question is the Man; he
goes no farther Also, he has his own never flagging sense of humor. Once, while we were
together in his study and he was talking in a general all-round way, he asked: “Do you
know Yellowstone Kelly P” I said that I had not the pleasure of Mr. Kelly’s acquaintance.
“He’s a fine fellow,” he continued, after a pause, “a very fine fellow. The name Kelly
might sound as though he were somewhat recent in his Americanism; but I think he comes
of an old American family. I think so,” he went on with the smile peculiar to himself-
“I think so because his father was hanged during the Civil War as a bushwhacker. I had
Yellowstone Kelly at the White House yesterday to lunch, and I see this morning that the
Theodore Roosevelt 243
man does his duty as a man; if he is fearless and honorable, upright
in his dealings with his fellows; if he does his duty to his family, to
his neighbors and to the state, that is all that we have the right to
ask about him. If he does those things he is entitled to our regard,
and to our esteem. If he does not do them, then he has forfeited all
rights to the respect of decent men.
I appeal for the qualities that tell for good citizenship. They are
many. But after all, they come down chiefly into three categories.
In the first place honesty and decency—I use the words in their widest
significance; not merely the honesty that refrains from theft; but the
aggressive honesty that will not see a wrong without trying to right it.
That first. But by itself that is not enough. No matter how honest
a man may be, if he is timid, there is but little chance of his being use-
ful to the body politic. In addition to honesty you must have strength
and courage. We live in a rough world, and good work in it can be
done only by those who are not afraid to step down into the hurly
burly to do their part in the dust and smoke of the arena. The man
who is a good man, but who stays at home in his own parlor, is of
small use. It is easy enough to be good, if you lead the cloistered life,
which is absolutely free from temptation to do evil because there is
no chance to do it.
In addition to honesty and decency you need courage and strength
You need not only the virtues that teach you to refrain from wrong
doing, but the virtues that teach you positively and aggressively to
do right. You have to have those, too. And if you have got them,
still it is not enough. You are valueless without them ; you are value-
less as a citizen unless you are both honest and brave, but if, in addi-
tion to that, you are a natural born fool, may the Lord be with you.
We need courage and we need honesty, and finally we need the
saving grace of common sense. And we shall get good results from
good citizenship exactly in proportion as the average citizen is developed
along the three lines that I have indicated; for that is the man who
will have high ideals, and yet will be able to realize them in practical
fashion. That is the man who will keep his eyes on the stars, and yet
not forget that in this world of ours he must have his feet on the
ground. The man who will strive after a high ideal, but strive after
it in methods that will permit of its realization.
And One side of so striving, and of having such an ideal, lies in
event has vastly discouraged several of the daily papers. Apparently they hold that no one
below the official rank of a senator or capitalist ought to lunch at the White House. It will
be different while I am here. I shall have to lunch people whom I like—people like my friend
Yellowstone. Not,” he observed, following a reflective pause, “but what senators and capi-
talists have their uses. Still, while I am President my friend Yellowstone the plainsman
shall come to the White House as freely as my friend Mr. M. the capitalist or Mr. Q. the
senator. I find I am not capable of invidious distinction.” Here he beamed as doubtless
Mark Twain beamed when he said, “I ever try to treat a rich man with all the respect and
deference I do a poor man.”-A. H. L.
244 Messages and Speeches
making promise and performance coincide—speaking the truth, and
acting the truth when spoken. Now, there are two sides to that. It
is a very bad thing—a very bad thing—for a public man not to per-
form what he has promised. A man who lies on the stump will lie
off the stump, and a promise made in public life should be held as
binding on every honest man as a promise made in private life. The
other side is that the people must remember that they themselves will
be to blame if they ask a promise which, from the nature of things,
can not be kept; such a promise is the promise, sometimes demanded,
that such a course of action shall be taken that in effect the millennium
will come at once, and all poverty and all suffering be over.
The millennium is a good way off—a very good way off yet. It is
possible to promise a course of action, legislative and administrative,
by which the best possible chance shall be given each man to work out
his own fate, as his own qualities enable him to work it out. More
than that, it is not possible for any man to promise, who knows enough
to know what is possible, and who cares enough for his word to wish
to make that word good.
That much should be promised by every decent man, and the promise
should be kept; and a decent man who values the truth should be
cautious about promising much more, because a promise of more than
that can not be kept.
I ask for high ideals. I ask that high ideals be demanded in those
that represent you. That you insist upon honesty, courage, upright-
ness and fair dealing in public life. But, I ask, in your interest, and
therefore, in the interest of the men who represent you that in addi-
tion to courage, in addition to honesty and clean and upright living,
you demand in others, and you exact from yourselves, the virtue of
common sense. I thank you.
[The Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wis., April 4, 1903.]
AT ST. PAUL, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903.
Ladies and gentlemen and my fellow citizens:
I shall only keep you a few minutes. I am deeply touched by your
greetings, and let me say that it is fitting that the President of the
United States should be so greeted. He stands as a representative
of the people, not as the representative of a particular party or creed.
Your great state of Minnesota is in the heart of the country, and it
typifies all that is most American. As I was passing through the hall-
way of the capitol building here a moment ago I noticed in a glass
case the old flag relics of the civil war.
There were the flags of the famous First Minnesota and there was
the flag used at Gettysburg when that regiment won that high and
Theodore Roosevelt 2.45
dreadful honor of having lost more men than the other regiments.
The small remnant that was left held its ground and the flag which
it had taken.
You represent a stock peculiarly and typically American. You have
robust strength and the ability and the willingness to do alike in peace
and in war. There are many different race strains in the Northwest,
and more especially so in Minnesota.
The state represents America as but few states do. You have much
of the old world stock and out of the mixture of the races has come
a type to be proud of.
I greet you. I welcome you. I thank you for your welcome of me.
I am glad to see the men. I am glad to see the women. I am glad to
see the children and to know that all is right, both as regards quality
and quantity. Good luck to you all.
[The Minncapolis Tribune, April 5, 1903.]
AT LA CROSSE, WIS., APRIL 4, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, men and women of Wisconsin:
Let me at the outset state to you that, after listening to the vivid
description of the Senator as to how I shoot and ride, I am bound that
you of Wisconsin shall never have the chance to see for yourselves.* I
would far rather that you should take his word for it. I am glad indeed
to have the chance of coming through your great State, in the heart
of the country, a state peculiarly typical of the great republic, in its
diversity of occupation, its diversity of stock within its limits, and
its absolute unity in patriotic feeling and purpose.
I am sure that the rest of you whom I greet so heartily will not
grudge my saying a word of special greeting to those to whom all
Americans owe more than to any other set of our people who ever
have been on this continent, the men who from '61 to '65 proved their
truth by their endeavor, whose conscience and heart rang true on war's,
red touchstone.
You, the men of the great war, taught by your example what to do
in war, and you, my comrades, the men of the lesser war in '98, the
men who went to Porto Rico or Cuba or the Philippines, speaking
on behalf of you, I want to say to the veterans that while we did not
*President Roosevelt can not alone ride and shoot but in shooting he can go very close
to the game. In his study one evening I picked up a rifle. The stock showed deep traces of
the furious teeth of some animal, and a huge splinter of the tough wood had been bitten away.
“That was done by a mountain lion,” he said simply. “He seemed to want to bite some-
thing or somebody, so I gave him the butt of my gun.”
President Roosevelt’s study on the second floor of the White House tells mightily the
story of the man. There are not only books by the thousands, but rifles, six-shooters, sabers,
foils, fencing masks, gauntlets, jackets, single-sticks, boxing gloves—everything, anything that
goes with athletics and sports by field and flood, as well as all that belongs with the master
of arts and letters. And he is as familiar with rifles as he is with literature—as weapon-wise
as he is book-wise.-A. H. L.,
246 Messages and Speeches
have a big job to do, we did it at any rate. We in that war suffered
from a complaint that you did not suffer from at all, there was not
enough war to go 'round. You didn't have any such difficulty. You
not only taught us the lessons of war, but you taught us the lessons
of peace. It is an awfully good thing for a man to be brought into
contact with his fellowmen on terms which are reduced down to the
elemental basis of things.
In ordinary life we are so apt to be divided by artificial distances.
Our lives are so hemmed around that we often do not have the chance
to test a man on his worth as a man. You, who fought in the great war,
had to judge your comrades by the stuff there was in them. You re-
member the marches, when, at Io o'clock, the blanket was too heavy,
and if you were a raw recruit, you threw it away, and in about twelve
hours it was too light.
You knew what it was to toil, footsore and weary, under the blazing
heat of the southern sun; you knew what it was to lie in the trenches
in the frozen mud of winter; you faced death by bullets, death on the
fever cot of the hospital; you saw the brightest and the bravest around
you shed their blood like water for the sake of an ideal; you did all
that, and you knew what was the test you applied to the men around
you. Little you cared whether they came from one state or another.
Little you cared what their creed was ; little you cared whether their
ancestors had come to this country two centuries and a half ago, or
whether they themselves had been born on the other side, but came
over here and proved as you did, by their valor, their loyalty to their
adopted flag. You cared for none of these things, they were not the
essentials; what you cared for was whether the man had the right
fiber in him. You wanted to know that when the order was given to
move he would move in the right direction; that was what you were
concerned with then.
It is just the same in citizenship now ; what we need as never before
in this country, if we are to make, as we assuredly shall and will make,
our scheme of government a success, what we need to keep ever be-
fore us is the fact that any distinction is artificial which divides one
man from his fellow. It is just as wicked, no matter from which stand-
point the line of division is drawn, whether it is from a standpoint
of those who look down with arrogance upon the less well off, or from
the standpoint of those who regard with mean envy and rancor and
hate others who are better off. In every case is the feeling unworthy
of the citizens of a great republic, one worthy of the heirs of the
spirit of Washington, of Lincoln, and of Grant.
We have a right to demand that each man shall do his duty by
his neighbor and his state; beyond that it is not our affair. Let him
manage his own private business as he wishes, so long as he infringes
Theodore Roosevelt 247
no right of any one else. Let him lead his private life as he desires;
it is not our concern, provided only that he is a square and decent
man, who wrongs no one and does his duty in peace and war, and that
is the common sense spirit of Americanism.
That common sense spirit can be applied in more ways than one
when an appeal is made to any set of our people to do something wrong
in their own interest. It would be well for them to remember what is
almost always implied in the character of a man who asks you to do
something that is not quite straight, when he says it will be for
your benefit. Let me tell you a short story.
A number of years ago I myself lived far west of here, out on the
plains, a cow puncher, and by the way it is curious what relative terms
east and west are. I lived out on the Little Missouri in those days and
at the end of one season one of the punchers came to me and said:
“Boss, I would like my time.” I said, “What are you going to do?”
He said, “I am going to spend the winter in the far east.” I said,
“What do you mean by the far east, Norway or Nubia?” He said,
“No, Duluth.” Duluth represented to him the most eastern point
of the horizon. lº
You know in a cow country in those days, and to a slight extent
still, there were no fences, and the cowboy and the branding iron took
the place of them, and the way you kept up your herd was that the
calf was branded with the brand of the cow. Mavericks were unbranded
yearlings, or well grown calves, and people of not over sensitive hon-
esty would put a brand on them that did not indicate the cow. One
day when I was out riding with a cow puncher we struck a cow and
a pretty well grown calf. He got down his rope and tied it down and
as he took the cinch ring made a fire and heated it and started to run
on the brand. I said: “Hello, you are putting on my brand; this
is a Thistle cow.” He said: “That's all right.” I said: “I don't
know about that; what do you mean?—oh, I see; now come back
to the ranch and get your time.” He said: “I was running on your
brand.” I said: “Yes, but if you will steal for me you will steal
from me.” *
That's a pretty safe rule to go on. If a man will do something
crooked and ask you to back him on the ground that it will turn out
to your advantage, he will do something crooked to your harm if the
chance comes.
In public life and in private life no country can afford in the long
run to tolerate any standard but absolute honesty of fair dealing as
between man and man, neighbor and neighbor, and in the long run
the most useful kind of politics is the kind of politics that teaches each
man and set of men to demand justice, to be satisfied with no less
than justice, but to do justice also.
248 Messages and Speeches
So it is, gentlemen, in the field of international societies. Our re-
public has to take a great place in the world. It cannot help it. We
have had worthy citizens during the last few years who have felt
reluctant about our republic going out into the world to do its duty.
It cannot be helped. If you are a big nation you have got to play a
big nation's part.
You can play it badly if you want to, but you have got to play it well
or badly one way or the other, and I think I know you too well for you
not to desire to see it played well. Let us play it manfully, but courte-
ously and fairly. Let us scrupulously refrain from wronging the weak,
and see to it that we are not wronged by the strong. Let us remember
that boasting, speaking ill of our neighbors, is just as Offensive in
a nation as in an individual.
Here in your own community, among your own friends, on the
farms, in the shops, in business, in all the ways of life, you despise
a man who can not take his own part. It is not worth taking, and you
will a good deal more than despise him if he oppresses others; you
dislike him as well as despise him if he is quarrelsome and always
speaking ill of his neighbors and inviting trouble.
It is just the same in international affairs. I want to see our public
men and Our writers in the press make the point of speaking courteously
of other nations; of refraining from any expression that will invite
trouble; of remembering that nobody likes to have disagreeable things
said of him; that this country is growing so big that what its people
say is read abroad, and that therefore it is wise and it is decent not
to use language that will hurt other people's feelings upon any ques-
tion of Our foreign policy. Let me quote again my favorite proverb:
“Speak softly and carry a big stick; you will go far.”
Remember that this country wants peace; we are honorable, desirous
of peace with all the nations of mankind, we wish them well. Let
us treat them with the spirit of scrupulous fair dealing, do everything
we can to avoid trouble and then keep ourselves in such shape that it
will be mighty poor policy for any one to have trouble with us. Now
is not that sound common sense?
In closing just let me say one word of thanks to all of you for
coming out to greet me, to you veterans of the great war, to my com-
rades who furnished the guard today, let me here have the chance of
thanking, as I will never have the chance otherwise, the members of
the local Brotherhood of Engineers for the greeting they conveyed
and bouquet of flowers they sent me through their representative, Mr.
Russell.
We all of us are under a debt to the railroad men, among other
things for the fact that they furnished one of the members of the
anthracite strike commission, whose report, I feel, marks as good a
Theodore Roosevelt 249
bit of work as has been done in our country towards settling one of
the gravest problems that, as a nation, we have before us. Let me
thank all of you, and say how glad I am to see you, and, in particular,
how glad I have been to see the children. They seem to be all right
in quality, and all right in quantity, and, as I think very highly of you,
I should be mighty sorry if I thought the stock were dying out.
[The Sentinel, Milwaukee, Wis., April 5, 1903.]
BEFORE THE MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE, ST. PAUL, APRIL 4, 1903.
Mr. Governor, Mr. Lieutenant-Governor, Mr. Speaker, members of the
Legislative Body, men and women of Minnesota:
I thank you for greeting me and for giving me the chance to say a
word or two in welcome and in acknowledgment of your greeting.
To any American capable of any depth of reflection whatever, it
should always be a somewhat solemn thing to come into the presence
of two bodies—one a legislative body, the other an educational body;
the legislative body, which is not only the method but the symbol of
our free government; the educational body, which, using educational in
its broadest and truest sense, means the body that fits us for self-
government. Self-government is not an easy thing. The nations of
antiquity, the nations of the middle ages, that tried the experiment of
independent self-government which should guarantee freedom to the
individual, and yet safety from without and within to the body politic
itself, rarely lasted long, never rose to a pitch of greatness, such as
ours, without having suffered some radical and, as it proved ulti-
mately, fatal change of structure. Until our Republic was founded
it had proved impossible in the long run to combine freedom for the
individual and greatness for the nation. The republics of antiquity
and of the middle ages went one of two lines, either proved fataſ.
Either the individual’s interests were sacrificed, and, while retaining the
forms of freedom, the republic became in effect a despotism; or else
the freedom of the individual was kept at the cost of utter impotence
either to put down disorder at home or to repel aggression from abroad.
It has been given to us during the century and a quarter of our
national life so to handle ourselves as a people that we have escaped
both dangers. We have been able to escape the leadership of those
who feared Scylla so much that they would plunge us into Charybdis,
and of those who feared Charybdis so much that they would plunge us
into Scylla. We have been able to preserve orderly liberty and strength
to grow in greatness among the nations of the earth, while becom-
ing steadily more and more democratic in the truest and broadest
sense of the word. I believe with all my heart that we shall continue
on the path thus marked out for us; but we shall so continue only if
250 Messages and Specches
we remember that in the last analysis the safety of the Republic de-
pends upon the high average of individual citizenship.
We can keep all the forms of free government; and every Fourth
of July we can talk possibly a little too boastfully of both the past and
the present; and yet it shall not avail us if we do not have in our
hearts the spirit that makes for decent citizenship, the spirit that alone
counts in the formation of a true republic. And that spirit is es-
sentially the same in public life as in private life. The manifestations
of it differ, but the spirit is the same. A public man is as much bound
to tell the truth on the stump as off the stump. On the other hand, his
critics will do well to remember that truth-telling is a virtue for them
to practice also. What we need in public life and in private life is
not genius so much as the many-sided development of the qualities
which in their sum make good citizenship. In a great crisis we shall
need a genius; thrice and thrice over fortunate is the nation which
then develops a Lincoln to lead it in peace; a Grant to lead it in war;
a Washington to lead it in war and peace.
But what we need as a nation, as an individual, at the ordinary times
which are so much larger in the aggregate than the extraordinary times,
and upon our conduct in which really depends our conduct in extra-
ordinary times, are the commonplace virtues which we all recognize,
and which when we were young we wrote about in copybooks, and
which, if we practice, will count for a thousand times more in the long
run than any brilliance and genius of any kind or sort whatsoever.
I want to say just a word on the other side of the two great ques-
tions, the legislative and educational questions. Education must be
twofold. Of course if we do not have education in the school, the
academy, the college, the university, and have it developed in the
highest and wisest manner, we shall make but a poor fist of American
citizenship. One of the things that is most hopeful in our Republic is
the way in which the State has taken charge of elementary educa-
tion; and the way in which, in the East through private gift, here
in the West through the wise liberality of the several States, the higher
education has been taken care of, as in your own University of Minne-
sota. But such education can never be all. It can never be more than
half, and sometimes not that. Nothing can take the place of the
education of the home; and that education must be largely the un-
conscious influence of character upon character. There is no use
in the father trying to instil wise saws and precepts into the son,
if his own character gives the lie to his advice. And unfortunately
it is just as true in the education of children as in everything else,
that it is almost as harmful to be a virtuous fool as a knave. So often
throughout our social structure from the wealthiest down to the poorest
you see the queer fatuity of the man or the woman which makes
Theodore Roosevelt 25I
them save their children temporary discomfort, temporary unpleasant-
ness, at the cost of future destruction; you see a great many men,
and I am sorry to say a great many women, who say, “I have had
to work hard; my boy or my girl shall not do anything.” I have
seen it in every rank. I have heard the millionaire say, “I have had
to work all my life to make money, let my boy spend it.” It would
be better for the boy never to have been born than to be brought
up on that principle. On the other hand, I have seen the overworked
drudge, the laborer's wife, who said, “Well, I have had to work my
heart out all my days; my daughters shall be ladies”; and her con-
ception of her daughters being ladies was to have them sit around
useless and incompetent, unable to do anything, brought up to be
discontented cumberers of the earth’s surface. As Abraham Lincoln
said: “There is a deal of human nature in mankind.” Fundamentally,
virtues and faults are just the same in the millionaire and the day
laborer. The man or the woman who seeks to bring up his or her
children with the idea that their happiness is secured by teaching them
to avoid difficulties is doing them a cruel wrong. To bring up the
boy and girl so sheltered that they can not stand any rough knocks,
that they shrink from toil, that when they meet an obstacle they feel
they ought to go around or back instead of going on over it—the
man or woman who does that, is wronging the children to a degree
that no other human being can wrong them. If you are worth your
salt and want your children to be worth their salt, teach them that
the life that is not a life of work and effort is worthless, a curse to
the man or woman leading it, a curse to those around him or her.
Teach the boys that if they are ever to count in the world they will
count not by flinching from difficulties, but by warring with and
overcoming them.* What utter scorn one feels for those who seek
only the life of ease; the life passed in dexterous effort to avoid all
angular corners, to avoid being put in the places where a strong
man by blood and sweat and toil and risk wins triumph What a
wretched life is the life of the man passed in endeavoring to shirk
his share of the burden laid upon him in this world ! And it makes
no difference whether that man is a man of inherited wealth or one
who has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; it is equally
ignoble in either case. What is true of the individual is true of the
nation. The man who counts is not the man who dodges work, but
he who goes out into life rejoicing as a strong man to run a race,
*President Roosevelt believes in work for work's sake and the tonic healthfulness that
comes from it. Equally he is afraid of idleness and luxury as a direct sapping of the founda-
tions of a race. He inclines to say with Cato the Censor when that rugged Roman, ruminating
on the fancy prices paid in the market place for lamprey eels, and denouncing the luxury
those prices pointed to, said: “It is difficult to save that community from ruin where a fish
sells for more than an ox.”—A. H. L.
252 Messages and Speeches
girding himself for the effort, bound to win and wrest triumph from
difficulty and disaster.
So it is with our Nation. No nation which has bound itself only
to do easy things ever yet amounted to anything, ever yet came to
anything throughout the ages. We have become a great people. At
the threshold of this twentieth century we stand with the future loom-
ing large before us. We face great problems within and great problems
without. We can not if we would refuse to face those problems.
All we can decide is whether we will do them well or ill; for the re-
fusal to face them would itself mean that we were doing them ill.
We are in the arena into which great nations must come. We must
play our part. It rests with us to decide that we shall not play it
ignobly; that we shall not flinch from the great problems that there
are to do, but that we shall take our place in the forefront of the great
nations and face each problem of the day with confident and resolute
hope.
IN THE CHAPEL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNE-
APOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903.
Mr. President, ladies and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of greeting you this evening, but I
regret that the engagements for me have been so numerous that it
will be only a greeting. I wish I could be here to see your beautiful
grounds and buildings by daylight, and to see a little of the life of
the university.
There are plenty of tendencies for good, and, I am sorry to say,
plenty of tendencies for evil in our modern life, and high among the
former must be placed the rapid growth of the great institutions of
learning in this country. There is a twofold side to the work done
in any institution of this kind. In the first place the institution is to
turn out scholars and men proficent in the different technical branches
for which it trains them. It should be the aim of every university
which seeks to develop the liberal side of education to turn out men
and women who will add to the sum of productive achievement in
scholarship; who will not merely be content to work in the fields
that have already been harrowed a thousand times by other workers,
but who will strike out for themselves and try to do new work that
counts; so in each technical school if the institution is worthy of
standing in the front rank, it will turn out those who in that particular
specialty stand at the head. But in addition to this merely technical
work, the turning out of the scholar, the professional man, the man
or woman trained on some special line, each university worthy the
name must endeavor to turn out men and women in the fullest sense
Theodore Roosevelt 253
of the word, good citizens, men and women who will add by what
they do to the sum of noble work in the whole community.
It is a good thing that so much attention should be given to physical
development. I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports.
I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets bat-
tered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal, and if he feels any
sympathy for himself I do not like him. I believe thoroughly in the
sound and vigorous body. I believe still more in the vigorous mind.
And I believe most of all in what counts for more than body, for more
than mind, and that is character. That is the sum of the forces that
make the man or the woman worth knowing, worth revering, worth
holding to. Play hard while you play, but do not mistake it for work.
If a young fellow is twenty it is a good thing that he should be a
crack half-back; but when he is forty I am sorry, if he has never been
anything else except once at twenty a good half-back. Keep the sense
of proportion. Play hard; it will do you good in your work. But
work hard and remember that this is the main thing.
Finally, in closing, I think it is a safe thing to take a motto that
I heard from the lips of an old football player once: “Don’t flinch,
don’t foul, and hit the line hard.”
AT MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
At the special session of the Senate held in March the Cuban reci-
procity treaty was ratified. When this treaty goes into effect, it
will confer substantial economic benefits alike upon Cuba, because
of the widening of her market in the United States, and upon the
United States, because of the equal widening and the progressive
control it will give to our people in the Cuban market. This treaty
is beneficial to both parties and justifies itself on several grounds. In
the first place we offer to Cuba her natural market. We can confer
upon her a benefit which no other nation can confer; and for the very
reason that we have started her as an independent republic and that
we are rich, prosperous and powerful, it behoves us to stretch out
a helping hand to our feebler younger sister. In the next place, it
widens the market for our products, both the products of the farm
and certain of our manufactures; and it is therefore in the interests of
our farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and wage-workers. Finally,
the treaty was not merely warranted but demanded, apart from all
other considerations, by the enlightened consideration of our foreign
policy. More and more in the future we must occupy a preponderant
position in the waters and along the coasts in the region south of us;
not a position of control over the republics of the south, but of con-
trol of the military situation so as to avoid any possible complications
254 Messages and Speeches
in the future. Under the Platt amendment Cuba agreed to give us
certain naval stations on her coast. The Navy Department decided
that we needed but two, and we have specified where these two are
to be. President Palma has concluded an agreement giving them to
us—an agreement which the Cuban legislative body will doubtless
soon ratify. In other words, the Republic of Cuba has assumed a
special relation to our international political system, under which she
gives us outposts of defence, and we are morally bound to extend to
her in a degree the benefit of our own economic system. From every
standpoint of wise and enlightened home and foreign policy the rati-
fication of the Cuban treaty marked a step of substantial progress
in the growth of our nation toward greatness at home and abroad.
Equally important was the action on the tariff upon products of
the Philippines. We gave them a reduction of twenty-five per cent,
and would have given them a reduction of twenty-five per cent more
had it not been for the opposition, in the hurried closing days of the
last session, of certain gentlemen who, by the way, have been repre-
senting themselves both as peculiarly solicitous for the interests of
the Philippine people and as special champions of the lowering of
tariff duties. There is a distinctly humorous side to the fact that
the reduction of duties which would benefit Cuba and the Philippines
as well as ourselves was antagonized chiefly by those who, in theory
have been fond of proclaiming themselves the advanced guardians of
the oppressed nationalities in the islands affected and the ardent advo- .
cates of the reduction of duties generally, but who instantly took violent
ground against the practical steps to accomplish either purpose.
Moreover, a law was enacted putting anthracite on the free list and
completely removing the duties on all other kinds of coal for one year.
We are now in a condition of prosperity unparalleled not merely
in our own history but in the history of any other nation. This pros-
perity is deep rooted and stands on a firm basis because it is due to
the fact that the average American has in him the stuff out of which
victors are made in the great industrial contests of the present day,
just as in the great military contests of the past; and because he is
now able to use and develop his qualities to best advantage under our
well-established economic system. We are winning headship among
the nations of the world because our people are able to keep their
high average of individual citizenship and to show their mastery in
the hard, complex, pushing life of the age. There will be fluctuations
from time to time in our prosperity, but it will continue to grow
just so long as we keep up this high average of individual citizenship
and permit it to work out its own salvation under proper economic
legislation.
The present phenomenal prosperity has been won under a tariff
Theodore Roosevelt 255
which was made in accordance with certain fixed and definite prin-
ciples, the most important of which is an avowed determination to
protect the interests of the American producer, business man, wage-
worker, and farmer alike. The general tariff policy, to which, with-
out regard to changes in detail, I believe this country is irrevocably
committed, is fundamentally based upon ample recognition of the
difference between the cost of production—that is, the cost of labor—
here and abroad, and of the need to see to it that our laws shall in
no event afford advantage in our own market to foreign industries
over American industries, to foreign capital over American capital,
to foreign labor over our own labor. This country has and this country
needs better-paid, better-educated, better-fed, and better-clothed work-
ingmen, of a higher type, than are to be found in any foreign country.
It has and it needs a higher, more vigorous, and more prosperous type
of tillers of the soil than is possessed by any other country. The busi-
ness men, the merchants and manufacturers, and the managers of
the transportation interests show the same superiority when com-
pared with men of their type abroad. The events of the last few
years have shown how skilfully the leaders of American industry
use in international business competition the mighty industrial weapons
forged for them by the resources of our country, the wisdom of our
laws, and the skill, the inventive genius, and the administrative capacity
of our people.
It is, of course, a mere truism to say that we want to use every-
thing in our power to foster the welfare of our entire body politic.
In other words, we need to treat the tariff as a business proposition,
from the standpoint of the interests of the country as a whole, and
not with reference to the temporary needs of any political party. It
is almost as necessary that our policy should be stable as that it should
be wise. A nation like ours could not long stand the ruinous policy
of readjusting its business to radical changes in the tariff at short
intervals, especially when, as now, owing to the immense extent and
variety of our products, the tariff schedules carry rates of duty on
thousands of different articles. Sweeping and violent changes in
such a tariff, touching so vitally the interests of all of us, embracing
agriculture, labor, manufactures, and commerce, would be disastrous
in any event, and they would be fatal to our present well-being if
approached on the theory that the principle of the protective tariff was
to be abandoned. The business world, that is, the entire American
world, can not afford, if it has any regard for its own welfare, even
to consider the advisability of abandoning the present system.
Yet, on the other hand, where the industrial conditions so fre-
quently change, as with us must of necessity be the case, it is a matter
of prime importance that we should be able from time to time to
256 Messages and Speeches
adapt our economic policy to the changed conditions. Our aim should
be to preserve the policy of a protective tariff, in which the Nation
as a whole has acquiesced, and yet wherever and whenever necessary
to change the duties in particular paragraphs or schedules as matters
of legislative detail, if such change is demanded by the interests of
the Nation as a whole.
In making any readjustment there are certain important considera-
tions which can not be disregarded. If a tariff law has on the whole
worked well, and if business has prospered under it and is prospering,
it may be better to endure some inconveniences and inequalities for
a time than by making changes to risk causing disturbance and per-
haps paralysis in the industries and business of the country. The
fact that the change in a given rate of duty may be thought desirable
does not settle the question whether it is advisable to make the change
immediately. Every tariff deals with duties on thousands of articles
arranged in hundreds of paragraphs and in many schedules. These
duties affect a vast number of interests which are often conflicting.
If necessary for our welfare, then of course Congress must consider
the question of changing the law as a whole or changing any given
rates of duty, but we must remember that whenever even a single
schedule is considered some interests will appear to demand a change
in almost every schedule in the law; and when it comes to upsetting
the schedules generally the effect upon the business interests of the
whole country would be ruinous. $
One"point we must steadily keep in mind. The question of tariff
revision, speaking broadly, stands wholly apart from the question of
dealing with the trusts. No change in tariff duties can have any
substantial effect in solving the so-called trust problem. Certain
great trusts or great corporations are wholly unaffected by the tariff.
Practically all the others that are of any importance have as a matter
of fact numbers of smaller American competitors; and of course a
change in the tariff which would work injury to the large corporation
would work not merely injury but destruction to its smaller competi-
tors; and equally of course such a change would mean disaster to all
the wage-workers connected with either the large or the small corpora-
tions. From the standpoint of those interested in the solution of the
trust problem such a change would therefore merely mean that the
trust was relieved of the competition of its weaker American com-
petitors, and thrown only into competition with foreign competitors;
and that the first effort to meet this new competition would be made
by cutting down wages, and would therefore be primarily at the cost
of labor. In the case of some of our greatest trusts such a change
might confer upon them a positive benefit. Speaking broadly, it is
evident that the changes in the tariff will affect the trusts for weal
Theodore Roosevelt 257
or for woe simply as they affect the whole country. The tariff affects
trusts only as it affects all other interests. It makes all these interests,
large or small, profitable; and its benefits can be taken from the large
only under penalty of taking them from the small also.
To sum up, then, we must as a people approach a matter of such
prime economic importance as the tariff from the standpoint of our
business needs. We can not afford to become fossilized or to fail
to recognize the fact that as the needs of the country change it may
be necessary to meet these new needs by changing certain features
of our tariff laws. Still less can we afford to fail to recognize the
further fact that these changes must not be made until the need for
them outweighs the disadvantages which may result; and when it be-
comes necessary to make them they should be made with full recogni-
tion of the need of stability in our economic system and of keeping
unchanged the principle of that system which has now become a settled
policy in our national life. We have prospered marvelously at home.
As a nation we stand in the very forefront in the giant international
industrial competition of the day. We can not afford by any freak
or folly to forfeit the position to which we have thus triumphantly at-
tained.
AT SIOUX FALLS, S. D., APRIL 6, 1903.
Fellow citizens:
There are many, many lesser problems which go to make up in their
entirety the huge and complex problems of our modern industrial life.
Each of these problems is, moreover, connected with many of the
others. Few indeed are simple or stand only by themselves. The most
important are those connected with the relation of the farmers, the
stock growers and soil tillers, to the community at large, and those
affecting the relations between employer and employed. In a country
like ours it is fundamentally true that the well-being of the tiller of
the soil and the wage-worker is the well-being of the State. If they
are well off, then we need concern ourselves but little as to how
other classes stand, for they will inevitably be well off too; and, on the
other hand, there can be no real general prosperity unless based on
the foundation of the prosperity of the wage-worker and the tiller
of the soil. 4%
But the needs of these two classes are often not the same. The
tiller of the soil has been of all our citizens the one, on the whole, the
least affected in his ways of life and methods of industry by the giant
industrial changes of the last half century. There has been change
with him, too, of course. He also can work to best advantage if he
keeps in close touch with his fellows; and the success of the national
Department of Agriculture has shown how much can be done for
258 Messages and Speeches
him by rational action of the Government. Nor is it only through
the Department that the Government can act. One of the greatest
and most beneficent measures passed by the last Congress, or indeed
by any Congress in recent years, is the Irrigation Act, which will do
for the States of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain region.
at least as much as ever has been done for the States of the humid
region by river and harbor improvements. Few measures' that have
been put upon the statute books of the Nation have done more for
the people than this law will, I firmly believe, directly and indirectly
accomplish for the States in question.
The Department of Agriculture devotes its whole energy to working
for the welfare of farmers and stock growers. In every section of
our country it aids them in their constantly increasing search for a
better agricultural education. It helps not only them, but all the nation,
in seeing that our exports of meats have clean bills of health, and
that there is rigid inspection of all meats that enter into interstate
commerce. Thirty-eight million carcasses were inspected during the
last fiscal year. Our stock growers sell forty-five million dollars’ worth
of live stock annually, and these animals must be kept healthy or
else our people will lose their trade. Our export of plant products
to foreign countries amounts to over six hundred million dollars a
year, and there is no branch of its work to which the Department of
Agriculture devotes more care. Thus the Department has been suc-
cessfully introducing a macaroni wheat from the headwaters of the
Volga, which grows successfully in ten inches of rainfall, and by.
this means wheat growing has been successfully extended westward
into the semi-arid region. Two million bushels of this wheat were
grown last year; and being suited to dry conditions it can be used
for forage as well as for food for man.
The Department of Agriculture” has been helping our fruit men to
establish markets abroad by studying methods of fruit preservation
through refrigeration and through methods of handling and packing.
On the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas, thanks to the Department
of Agriculture, a rice suitable to the region was imported from the
Orient and the rice crop is now practically equal to our needs in this
country, whereas a few years ago it supplied but one-fourth of them.
The most important of our farm products is the grass crop; and to
*Mr. J. Sterling Morton when Secretary of Agriculture under President Cleveland, in his
first annual report started out by a bold recommendation that the Agricultural Department be
abolished. He based the suggestion on the argumeht that the Department was in its way a
piece of favoritism, and the farmer no more entitled to a special department with its repre-
sentative in the Cabinet than the coal miner or the doctor or the carpenter or the lawyer or
the follower of any other reputable trade or profession. This was Secretary Morton’s view;
but President Cleveland, mindful of the political uproar such a recommendation would
unloose, prevailed upon him to strike the suggestion with the argument which supported it
from the report before he officially handed it in, on the broad ground that they were banded
together as an administration to direct the departments, not destroy them.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 259
show what has been done with grasses, I need only allude to the
striking change made in the entire West by the extended use of
alfalfa.
Moreover, the Department has taken the lead in the effort to pre-
vent the deforestation of the country. Where there are forests we
seek to preserve them; and on the once treeless plains and the prairies
we are doing our best to foster the habit of tree planting among our
people. In my own lifetime I have seen wonderful changes brought
about by this tree planting here in your own State and in the States
immediately around it.
There are a number of very important questions, such as that of
good roads, with which the States alone can deal, and where all that
the National Government can do is to co-operate with them. The
same is true of the education of the American farmer. A number
of the States have themselves started to help in this work and the
Department of Agriculture does an immense amount which is in the
proper sense of the world educational, and educational in the most
practical way.
It is therefore clearly true that a great advance has been made in
the direction of finding ways by which the Government can help the
farmer to help himself—the only kind of help which a self-respecting
man will accept, or, I may add, which will in the end do him any good.
Much has been done in these ways, and farm life and farm processes
continually change for the better. The farmer himself still retains,
because of his surroundings and the nature of his work, to a pre-
eminent degree the qualities which we like to think of as distinctly
American in considering our early history. The man who tills his
own farm, whether on the prairie or in the woodland, the man who
grows what we eat and the raw material which is worked up into
what we wear, still exists more nearly under the conditions which
obtained when the “embattled farmers” of '76 made this country a
nation than is true of any others of our people.
But the wage-workers in our cities, like the capitalists in our cities,
face totally changed conditions. The development of machinery and
the extraordinary change in business conditions have rendered the
employment of capital and of persons in large aggregations not merely
profitable but often necessary for success, and have specialized the
labor of the wage-worker at the same time that they have brought
great aggregations of wage-workers together. More and more in our
great industrial centres men have come to realize that they can not
live as independently of one another as in the old days was the case
everywhere, and as is now the case in the country districts.
Of course, fundamentally each man will yet find that the chief
factor in determining his success or failure in life is the sum of his
260 Messages and Speeches
own individual qualities. He can not afford to lose his individual
initiative, his individual will and power; but he can best use that power
if for certain objects he unites with his fellows. Much can be done
by organization, combination, union among the wage-workers; finally
something can be done by the direct action of the State. It is not
possible empirically to declare when the interference of the State should
be deemed legitimate and when illegitimate.
The line of demarcation between unhealthy over-interference and
unhealthy lack of regulation is not always well defined, and shifts with
the change in our industrial needs. Most certainly we should never
invoke the interference of the State or Nation unless it is absolutely
necessary; but it is equally true that when confident of its necessity
we should not on academic grounds refuse it. Wise factory laws, laws
to forbid the employment of child labor and to safeguard the em-
ployees against the effects of culpable negligence by the employer,
are necessary, not merely in the interest of the wage-worker, but in
the interest of the honest and humane employer, who should not be
penalized for his honesty and humanity by being exposed to un-
checked competition with an unscrupulous rival. It is far more diffi-
cult to deal with the greed that works through cunning than with
the greed that works through violence. But the effort to deal with
it must be steadily made.
Very much of our effort in reference to labor matters should be
by every device and expedient to try to secure a constantly better un-
derstanding between employer and employee. Everything possible
should be done to increase the sympathy and fellow-feeling between
them, and every chance taken to allow each to look at all questions,
especially at questions in dispute, somewhat through the other's eyes.
If met with a sincere desire to act fairly by one another, and if there
is, furthermore, power by each to appreciate the other's standpoint,
the chance for trouble is minimized. I suppose every thinking man
rejoices when by mediation or arbitration it proves possible to settle
troubles in time to avert the suffering and bitterness caused by strikes.
Moreover, a conciliation committee can do best work when the trouble
is in its beginning, or at least has not come to a head. When the
break has actually occurred, damage has been done, and each side feels
sore and angry; and it is difficult to get them together—difficult to
make either forget its own wrongs and remember the rights of the
other. If possible the effort at conciliation or mediation or arbitra-
tion should be made in the earlier stages, and should be marked by
the wish on the part of both sides to try to come to a common agree-
ment which each shall think in the interests of the other as well as
of itself.
When we deal with such a subject we are fortunate in having be-
Theodore Roosevelt 261
fore us an admirable object-lesson in the work that has just been
closed by the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission. This was the Com-
mission which was appointed last fall at the time when the coal strike
in the anthracite regions threatened our Nation with a disaster second
to none which has befallen us since the days of the Civil War. Their
report was made just before the Senate adjourned at the special session;
and no Government document of recent years marks a more important
piece of work better done, and there is none which teaches sounder
social morality to our people. The commission consisted of seven as
good men as were to be found in the country, representing the bench,
the church, the army, the professions, the employers, and the employed.
They acted as a unit, and the report which they unanimously signed
is a masterpiece of sound common-sense and of sound doctrine on the
very questions with which our people should most deeply concern them-
selves. The immediate effect of this commission's appointment and
action was of vast and incalculable benefit to the Nation; but the ul-
timate effect will be even better, if capitalist, wage-worker, and law-
maker alike will take to heart and act upon the lessons set forth in the
report they have made.
Of course the National Government has but a small field in which
it can work in labor matters. Something it can do, however, and that
something ought to be done. Among other things I should like to see
the District of Columbia, which is completely under the control of
the National Government, receive a set of model labor laws. Washing-
ton is not a city of very large industries, but still it has some. Wise
labor legislation for the city of Washington would be a good thing in
itself, and it would be a far better thing, because a standard would
thereby be set for the country as a whole.
In the field of general legislation relating to these subjects the action
of Congress is necessarily very limited. Still there are certain ways in
which we can act. Thus the Secretary of the Navy has recommended,
with my cordial and hearty approval, the enactment of a strong em-
ployers'-liability law in the navy yards of the Nation. It should be ex-
tended to similar branches of the Government work. Again, sometimes
such laws can be enacted as an incident to the Nation’s control over in-
terstate commerce. In my last annual Message to Congress I advocated
“the passage of a law in reference to car couplings—to strengthen the
features of the One already on the statute books so as to minimize the
exposure to death and maiming of railway employees. Much opposi-
tion had to be overcome. In the end an admirable law was passed “to
promote the safety of employees and travelers upon railroads by com-
pelling common carriers engaged in inter-state commerce to equip
their cars with automatic couplers and continuous brakes and their
locomotives with driving-wheel brakes.” This law received my signa-
262 Messages and Speeches
ture a couple of days before Congress adjourned. It represents a real
and substantial advance in an admirable kind of legislation.
AT MITCHELL, S. D., APRIL 6, 1903.
You can lift up a man if he stumble, if he lies down you cannot carry
him. If you try to, it will not help him and it will not help you. So,
fundamentally, it must rest upon yourself to win success. As I said,
law can do something, wise legislation, wise administration of govern-
ment can do something.
If you have bad laws, badly administered, they will spoil any pros-
perity. It is easy enough to get a bad law that will stop the whole
business, but to get a good law is not so easy. It is easy to sit outside
and say how the man inside should run the machine, but it is not so
easy to go inside and run the machine yourself.
This prosperity to which we have attained, has been reached under
a series of economic moves included in a system through carrying
out certain ideas in the currency and in the tariff. We cannot afford
to reverse the system.
Improvements can be made. In the tariff, for instance, schedules
are not sacred, and as the needs of the nation change and shift it
will be necessary to change certain schedules to meet those shifting
needs.
[The Minneapolis Tribune, April 7, 1903.]
AT ABERDEEN, S. D., APRIL 7, 1903.
I appreciate deeply your having come out to greet me this evening.
All day I have been traveling through your beautiful State, and now I
have come to your city in the heart of the wheat belt, and the more
I have seen the firmer my conviction has been that South Dakota not
only grows first class products of the farm; that she not only is great
in stock raising, but that she does what is better still—produces the
right type of men and women. That is what really counts. We have to
have a foundation deep and broad of material prosperity. Without that
foundation, we cannot build the superstructure of lofty national life,
but we must build that superstructure on it; and passing through your
State to-day nothing has struck me more than the frequency of the
colleges, academies, high schools, and the little schools out on the
prairie. You are getting the right type of citizenship. I speak to
pioneers, the sons of pioneers, and those who have come in just after
them and have had to share in the roughness of pioneer life; and we
must never forget that much though there is due to the pioneer, almost
as much, quite as much in the end, is due to the educator, the school
Theodore Roosevelt 263
teacher, the clergyman, who came out here to help to build up the
higher life.
To make a good citizen, more than one quality is needed. In the
first place—in speaking to an audience like this you can take it for
granted that you have got the basic quality of strength—strength,
hardihood, courage, and qualities that make a man. This is not a
place for weaklings. No weak or timid man could have come out here
and out of the prairie have carved this commonwealth. It was nec-
essary to have men to do the work in this state; but that is not enough.
In addition to being men, if you are not decent men you will make but
a poor fist of the government. Decency will not avail without strength,
and neither will strength avail without decency. Mere cunning, mere
craft, mere smartness, if unbalanced by the moral sense, make the
man a curse to himself and his neighbors. The rugged virtues that
make a man are indispensable, but in addition to them, hand in hand
with them, have got to go the virtues that make a man a good man in
private life, a decent neighbor, a man with whom it is safe to do
business, and a man who does his duty by the state.
There is not a royal road to good citizenship, to doing well in public
life, any more than there is a royal road to learning. What you need in
public life and private life alike is to possess the old, work-a-day,
ordinary virtues that we read about when we were children and wrote
about in the copybooks, but do not always remember when we grow
older. In managing the state, in managing the nation, fundamentally,
we need just the qualitics that are necessary in the home, or in business.
People will speak to you saying that there is some patent device by
which the state or the nation can do something that will make every-
body happy and prosperous. It is not so. What the nation can do,
or the state can do, is to have such laws enacted and have them so
administered that each man shall have the best possible chance to
exercise his qualities, to show the stuff that there is in him. And if
there is not any stuff in him it cannot be brought out. No law that the
wit of man has ever devised, or ever will devise, can make a fool wise,
or a weakling strong, or a coward brave. A man has got to develop
the qualities of courage, of honesty, of strength of purpose, of will,
of power for effort. He has got to develop them from within. There
is not any law that can put them into him from without. He has got
to have those in him and develop them, and then the laws can be so
shaped as to give the fairest and fullest chance for these qualities to
show their effects. Something can be done by the law; something can
be done by each of us in relation to the others.
There is not a man here, not one of us, who does not sometimes
slip, sometimes stumble.* There is not one of us who does not some-
*In his speeches it will be observed that President Roosevelt never teaches people so
much as he confers with them. He never talks from a pedestal, never talks down hill. He
264 Messages and Speeches
times need to have a helping hand stretched out to him; and shame
to any one of us who, on such an occasion, fails to stretch out his hand
to his brother who has slipped or fallen. But if a man lies down you
cannot carry him. You can help him up if he stumbles, but he has
got to have the desire to walk or he will be down again. All that the
law can do is to smooth the path somewhat for the man who is willing
and anxious to walk.
During the last few years we have had great prosperity. If the hand
of the Lord is heavy upon us, if there comes drought or freshet, if
there comes pestilence or some other form of evil with which our finite
human powers can but struggle ill, then disaster will come upon the best
of us, for ever since the days when the tower of Siloam fell, disaster
has fallen too often alike on the deserving and on the undeserving—but
under Providence prosperity can come and will come to us if we keep a
system of law and administration which will enable us to do good work,
and then what is more important by far if we do the good work our-
selves. It is easy enough by bad legislation, by bad laws, to put a stop
to all chance of prosperity. Good laws can give the chance to develop
it, and that is all. If the business world turns crazy, if it loses its head,
it has lost what no legislation can supply. All that can be done is to
do as we have done, to have such a financial system, to have such an
economic system, especially under the tariff, as to give the best chance
to our people; and then my abiding faith in the American people is,
given that chance, that they themselves will take advantage of it.
I have been glad today to meet the men and women of Dakota, and
the children, and I congratulate you on the quality and quantity of
them.
This is a first class stock and I do not want to see it die out; and
I believe you are free from the danger here.
In closing let me try to impress upon every man in his dealings with
public affairs that you need just the same kind of qualities in a public
servant that you need in a neighbor, in a friend, in a member of your
meets his audience on level terms; he talks with people rather than to people. And it is this
genius which he possesses for the honestly familiar, this refusal to transact his greatness at'
the expense of other men, this lack of lordliness coupled with an overplus of manhood and
mere face-to-face humanity which is the secret of his unique popularity. I have met four presi-
dents; he is the only one who did not pose and act “presidential.” He never seems to remember
he is president; they never for a moment forgot it, and like a saber clumsily worn it got some-
times between the legs of their attitude towards you and tripped it up. This simplicity of manner
on the part of President Roosevelt is the surest mark of an indubitable greatness. Weak men
change as their surroundings or their positions change. Take them up, they swell; take them
down, they collapse. They are affected by an altitude, as much as any balloon, and are
arrogant or cringing as their condition is high or low. Not so does one find the Lincolns,
the Grants and the Roosevelts. Such men never change; they are immutable; and they are
great. Such as President Roosevelt have their prides but no vanities; they emulate but never
envy. Littleness! Greatness! The peacock struts; the mountain looks on! It is the Lincolns,
the Grants and the Roosevelts who become the snubbing posts of history: it is to such as they
a race ties up to keep itself from going adrift.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 265
household. For one thing you want any man with whom you have
dealings to keep his word. If he will always tell the truth, you
can pardon some other shortcomings, because you know where you
are. It is just as unpardonable to promise anything on the stump and
not keep the promise, as to promise it off the stump and not keep it.
And the man should be held to the same rugged accountability for
doing it. Now there is another side to that. You must not ask him to
promise what, if he is a sensible man, he knows cannot be done. If you
are dealing at a store you have got a right that the man with whom
you are dealing shall promise you a good quality of goods and deliver
them, and you are a fool if you deal with him when he has broken his
word. But if you permit yourself to be led away by the man who
promises what now he cannot give, if he is a straight man, then you
are to blame if you are disappointed. If you demand in a public man
that he promise the millennium you can guarantee that he will never be
able to meet your expectation. The millennium is some way off. The
world is getting better, but it has got a long way to travel before it
becomes perfect. You need in public life, as you need in private life,
the qualities that you prize in the home, the qualities that you prize
among your neighbors with whom you do business. And those qual-
ities when you get them all sifted down can be resolved into three. In
the first place, decency and honesty. It does not make any difference
how smart a man is, if he is not a square man his smartness makes
him a curse to all about him. It has always seemed to me a distressing
thing to hear among our people a certain admiration of mere smartness,
unbalanced by any moral sense. All of you know men of whom some
one will say that while they are not quite straight they are dreadfully
smart. That type of man is a poor creature, and the man who ad-
mires him is a poor creature. You can not afford, if you wish to retain
your self-respect, to admire any man who has not the root of decency in
him. But that is not enough. I do not care how honest a man is, or
how upright he is, if he is afraid he is no good. If he has not got
pluck, hardihood, courage, you can do nothing with him. Look back
in your own experience. You wanted decent men in the state, but no
man, I do not care how decent he was, if he had been afraid he could not
have come into this state and built it up; he could not have stood the
pioneer days. With honesty we must have courage. And honesty and
courage by themselves are not enough. I do not care how brave a
man is, nor how honest he is, if he is a natural born fool you can do
nothing with him. With honesty and courage must go the saving
grace of common sense, intelligence, power to think, power to work,
power to make the best of circumstances that arise.
I am glad to have seen you, and I think when I have been describing
266 Messages and Speeches
the qualities of good citizenship, I have been describing them to an
audience that has more than its fair share of them.
[Fargo Forum, Fargo, N. D., April 7, 1903.]
AT. FARGO, N. D., APRIL, 7, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
The Northwest, whose sons in the Civil War added such brilliant
pages to the honor roll of the Republic, likewise bore a full share in the
struggle of which the war with Spain was the beginning—a struggle
slight indeed when compared with the gigantic death wrestle which
for four years stamped to and fro across the Southern States in the
Civil War—but a struggle fraught with consequences to the Nation,
and indeed to the world, out of all proportion to the smallness of the
effort upon our part.
Three and a half years ago President McKinley spoke in the ad-
joining State of Minnesota on the occasion of the return of the Thir-
teenth Minnesota Volunteers from the Philippine Islands, where they
had served with your own gallant sons of the North Dakota regiment.
After heartily thanking the returned soldiers for their valor and pa-
triotism, and their contemptuous refusal to be daunted or misled by
the outcry raised at home by the men of little faith who wished us to
abandon the islands, he spoke of the islands themselves as follows:
“That Congress will provide for them a government which will
bring them blessings, which will promote their material interests as well
as advance their people in the path of civilization and intelligence, I
confidently believe. They will not be governed as vassals or serfs or
slaves. They will be given a government of liberty, regulated by
law, honestly administered, without oppressing exactions, taxation
without tyranny, justice without bribe, education without distinction of
social condition, freedom of religious worship, and protection in ‘life,
liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’”
What he said then lay in the realm of promise. Now it lies in the
realm of positive performance.
It is a good thing to look back upon what has been said and com-
pare it with the record of what has actually been done. If promises are
violated, if plighted word is not kept, then those who have failed in
their duty should be held up to reprobation. If, on the other hand,
the promises have been substantially made good; if the achievement has
kept pace and more than kept pace with the prophecy, then they who
made the one and are responsible for the other are entitled, of just
right, to claim the credit which attaches to those who serve the Nation
well. This credit I claim for the men who have managed so admirably
the military and the civil affairs of the Philippine Islands, and for those
Theodore Roosevelt 267
other men who have so heartily backed them in Congress, and without
whose aid and support not one thing could have been accomplished.
When President McKinley spoke, the first duty was the restoration
of order; and to this end the use of the Army of the United States—
an Army composed of regulars and volunteers alike—was necessary.
To put down the insurrection and restore peace to the islands was a
duty not only to ourselves but to the islanders also. We could not have
abandoned the conflict without shirking this duty, without proving
ourselves recreants to the memory of our forefathers. Moreover, if
we had abandoned it we would have inflicted upon the Filipinos the
most cruel wrong and would have doomed them to a bloody jumble of
anarchy and tyranny. It seems strange, looking back, that any of our
people should have failed to recognize a duty so obvious; but there
was such failure, and the Government at home, the civil authorities
in the Philippines, and above all our gallant Army, had to do their
work amid a storm of detraction. The Army in especial was attacked
in a way which finally did good, for in the end it aroused the hearty
resentment of the great body of the American people, not against the
Army, but against the Army’s traducers. The circumstances of the war
made it one of peculiar difficulty, and our soldiers were exposed to pe-
culiar wrongs from their foes. They fought in dense tropical jungles
against enemies who were very treacherous and very cruel, not only to-
ward our own men, but toward the great numbers of friendly natives,
the most peaceable and most civilized among whom eagerly welcomed
our rule. Under such circumstances, among a hundred thousand hot-
blooded and powerful young men serving in small detachments on the
other side of the globe, it was impossible that occasional instances of
wrongdoing should not occur. The fact that they occurred in retalia-
tion for wellnigh intolerable provocation can not for one moment be
admitted in the way of excuse or justification. All good Americans re-
gret and deplore them, and the War Department has taken every step in
its power to punish the offenders and to prevent or minimize the chance
of repetition of the offence. But these offences were the exception and
not the rule. As a whole our troops showed not only signal courage
and efficiency, but great humanity and the most sincere desire to pro-
mote the welfare and liberties of the islanders. In a series of exceed-
ingly harassing and difficult campaigns they completely overthrew the
enemy, reducing them finally to a condition of mere brigandage; and,
wherever they conquered, they conquered only to make way for the
rule of the civil government, for the introduction of law, and of liberty
under the law. When, by last July, the last vestige of organized in-
surrection had disappeared, peace and amnesty were proclaimed.
As rapidly as the military rule was extended over the islands by the
defeat of the insurgents, just so rapidly was it replaced by the civil
268 Messages and Speeches
government. At the present time the civil government is supreme and
the army in the Philippines has been reduced until it is sufficient merely
to provide against the recurrence of trouble. In Governor Taft and
his associates we sent to the Filipinos as upright, as conscientious, and
as able a group of administrators as ever any country has been blessed
with having. With them and under them we have associated the best
men among the Filipinos, so that the great majority of the Officials, in-
cluding many of the highest rank, are themselves natives of the islands.
The administration is incorruptibly honest; justice is as jealously safe-
guarded as here at home. The government is conducted purely in
the interests of the people of the islands; they are protected in their
religious and civil rights; they have been given an excellent and well
administered school system, and each of them now enjoys rights to
“life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” such as were never before
known in all the history of the islands.
The Congress which has just adjourned has passed legislation of high
importance and great wisdom in the interests of the Filipino people.
First and foremost, they conferred upon them by law the present ad-
mirable civil government; in addition they gave them an excellent cur-
rency; they passed a measure allowing the organization of a native
constabulary; and they provided, in the interests of the islands, for a
reduction of twenty-five per cent in the tariff on Filipino articles brought
to this country. I asked that a still further reduction should be made.
It was not granted by the last Congress, but I think that in some shape
it will be granted by the next. And even without it, the record of legis-
lation in the interests of the Filipinos is one with which we have a right
to feel great satisfaction.
Moreover, Congress appropriated three million dollars, following the
precedent it set when the people of Porto Rico were afflicted by sudden
disaster; this money to be used by the Philippine government in order
to meet the distress occasioned primarily by the terrible cattle disease
which almost annihilated the carabao or water-buffalo, the chief and
most important domestic animal in the islands. Coming as this disaster
did upon the heels of the havoc wrought by the insurrectionary war,
great suffering has been caused; and this misery, for which this Gov-
ernment is in no way responsible, will doubtless in turn increase the dif-
ficulties of the Philippine government for the next year or so. In
consequence there will doubtless here and there occur sporadic increases
of the armed brigandage to which the islands have been habituated
from time immemorial, and here and there for their own purposes the
bandits may choose to style themselves patriots or insurrectionists;
but these local difficulties will be of little consequence save as they give
occasion to a few men here at home again to try to mislead our people.
Not only has the military problem in the Philippines been worked out
Theodore Roosevelt 269
quicker and better than we had dared to expect, but the progress
socially and in civil governments has likewise exceeded our fondest
hopes.
The best thing that can be done in handling such a problem as that
in the Philippine Islands, so peculiar, so delicate, so difficult and so re-
mote, is to put the best man possible in charge and then give him the
heartiest possible support, and the freest possible hand. This is what
has been done with Governor Taft. There is not in this Nation a higher
or finer type of public servant than Governor Taft. He has rendered
literally inestimable service, not only to the people of the Philippine
Islands but also to the people of the United States, by what he has
done in those islands. He has been able to do it, because from the
beginning he has been given absolute support by the War Department,
under Secretary Root. With the cessation of organized resistance the
civil government assumed its proper position of headship.” The army
in the Philippines is now one of the instruments through which Gov-
ernor Taft does his admirable work. The civil government, of which
Governor Taft is the head, is supreme, and will do well in the future
as it has in the past, because it will be backed up in the future as it has
been in the past.
Remember always that in the Philippines the American Government
has tried and is trying to carry out exactly what the greatest genius
and most revered patriot ever known in the Philippine Islands—José
Rizal—steadfastly advocated. This man shortly before his death, in
a message to his countrymen, under date of December 16, 1896, con-
demned unsparingly the insurrection of Aguinaldo, terminated just
before our navy appeared upon the scene, pointed out the path his
people should follow to liberty and enlightenment. Speaking of the
insurrection and of the pretence that Filipino independence of a whole-
some character could thereby be obtained, he wrote:
“When, in spite of my advice, a movement was begun, I offered of my
own accord, not only my services, but my life and even my good name
to be used in any way they might believe effective in stifling the rebel-
lion. I thought of the disaster which would follow the success of the
revolution, and I deemed myself fortunate if by any sacrifice I could
block the progress of such a useless calamity.
“My countrymen, I have given proof that I was one who sought
liberty for our country and I still seek it. But as a first step I insisted
*One evening President Roosevelt was discussing the speech of a senator delivered that
day, and commented on the fact that the senator in arguing what should be our course in the
Philippines, never once took into account the constitutional peculiarities of the Filipino himself.
The good senator appeared to think that all we need do was give the Filipinos a copy of our
constitution and the Revised Statutes and send them off to set up shop for themselves.
“The trouble with Senator H.,” said President Roosevelt, “is this. He believes in the
Measure and not in the Man. He thinks, and honestly thinks at that, that if one were to
introduce the New England town meeting system among the Zulus, and the Zulus accepted
it, they would one and all instantly become Yankees.”—A. H. L.
27o Messages and Speeches
upon the development of the people in order that, by means of educa-
tion and of labor, they might acquire the proper individual character
and force which would make them worthy of it. In my writings I have
commended to you study and civic virtue, without which our re-
demption does not exist. . . . I cannot do less than condemn,
and I do condemn, this absurd and savage insurrection planned behind
my back, which dishonors us before the Filipinos and discredits us with
those who otherwise would argue in our behalf. I abominate its
cruelties and disavow any kind of connection with it, regretting with all
the sorrow of my soul that these reckless men have allowed themselves
to be deceived. Let them return, then, to their homes, and may God
pardon those who have acted in bad faith.”
This message embodied precisely and exactly the avowed policy upon
which the American Government has acted in the Philippines. What
the patriot Rizal said with such force in speaking of the insurrection
before we came to the islands applies with tenfold greater force to those
who foolishly or wickedly opposed the mild and beneficent government
we were instituting in the islands. The judgment of the martyred
public servant, Rizal, whose birthday the Philippine people celebrate,
and whom they worship as their hero and ideal, sets forth the duty
of American sovereignty; a duty from which the American people will
never flinch.
While we have been doing these great and beneficent works in the
islands, we have yet been steadily reducing the cost at which they are
done. The last Congress repealed the law for the war taxes, and the
War Department has reduced the Army from the maximum number of
one hundred thousand allowed under the law to very nearly the mini-
mum of sixty thousand.
Moreover, the last Congress enacted some admirable legislation af-
fecting the Army, passing first of all the militia bill and then the bill to
create a general staff. The militia bill represents the realization of a re-
form which had been championed ineffectually by Washington, and
had been fruitlessly agitated ever since. At last we have taken
from the statute books the obsolete militia law of the Revolutionary
days and have provided for efficient aid to the National Guard of the
States. I believe that no other great country has such fine natural
material for volunteer soldiers as we have, and it is the obvious duty
of the nation and of the States to make such provision as will enable
this volunteer soldiery to be organized with all possible rapidity and
efficiency in time of war; and, furthermore, to help in every way the
National Guard in time of peace. The militia law enacted by Con-
gress marks the first long step ever taken in this direction by the Na-
tional Government. The general-staff law is of immense importance
and benefit to the Regular Army. Individually, I would not admit that
Theodore Roosevelt 271
the American regular, either officer or enlisted man, is inferior to any
other regular soldier in the world. In fact, if it were worth while to
boast, I should be tempted to say that he was the best. But there must
be proper training, proper organization and administration, in order to
get the best service out of even the best troops. This is particularly the
case with such a small army as ours, scattered over so vast a country.
We do not need a large Regular Army, but we do need to have our
small Regular Army the very best that can possibly be produced.
Under the worn-out and ineffective organization which has hitherto
existed, a sudden strain is absolutely certain to produce the dislocation
and confusion we saw at the outbreak of the war with Spain; and
when such dislocation and confusion occur it is easy and natural, but
entirely improper, to blame the men who happen to be in office in-
stead of the system which is really responsible. Under the law just
enacted by Congress this system will be changed immensely for the bet-
ter, and every patriotic American ought to rejoice; for when we come
to the Army and the Navy we deal with the honor and interests of all
our people; and when such is the case party lines are as nothing, and
we all stand shoulder to shoulder as Americans, moved only by pride
in and love for our common country.
AT MEDORA, N. D., APRIL 7, 1903.
My friends and neighbors:
I am very glad to see you all. I made up my mind that, come what
would, I would stop at Medora. I first came to Medora twenty years
ago, so I am a middling old-settler. I meet boys, great big strapping
men, and mothers of families who were children about three feet high
when I knew them here. It is a very pleasant thing for me to see you.
I shall not try to make you more than a very short talk, because I want
to have the chance to shake hands with you. Most all of you are old
friends. I have stopped at your houses and shared your hospitality.
With some of the men I have ridden guard around the cattle at night,
worked with them in the round-up, and hunted with them, so that I
know them pretty well. It is the greatest possible pleasure to me to
come back and see how you are getting along, to see the progress made
by the State, to see the progress made up at this end in the place that
I know so well, and it does me good to come here and see you. There is
not a human being who is more proud of what you have done, and more
pleased with your welfare and progress, than I am.
AT JAMESTOWN, N. D., APRIL 7, 1903.
Mr. Chairman and my fellow citizens:
I have only time to develop one thought to you today, and that is
272 Messages and Speeches
suggested to me by a letter sent me by a labor organization here in
your city thanking me for some of the work that has been done in
Congress this year, in connection with labor matters, in connection with
what is called trust legislation. All that we have been trying to do,
with a certain fair amount of success, through legislation and through
administration, has been to do square and equal justice between man
and man; to try to give every man a fair chance, to try to secure good
treatment for him, if he deserves it, be he rich or poor, and to try to
see that he does not wrong his fellows. After all, that is about what
must be the essence of legislation, if it is to be really good legislation.
Take such a matter as these so-called anti-trust laws—I always hate to
have them called anti-trust laws or anti-corporation laws because they
are not designed to hurt any corporation, they are simply designed for
such regulations and control as will prevent the doing of ill. Take the
anti-rebate law passed by the last Congress. It was merely designed
to make effective previous legislation, to prevent any discrimination
by any railroad in favor of or against any particular shipper—not trying
to favor the big shipper or the little shipper; only trying to secure a
fair deal for each, get fair play for each, so that each man shall have
the chance to which he is entitled. That is not a bill aimed at the rail-
roads, it is only aimed at a any railroad that does anything wrong, in the
same way that it is aimed at a shipper that does anything wrong—no
more against the big shipper than the little shipper. It is meant to do
Square justice to each man, big or little, and to ensure, as far as by
legislation we can secure, that he will do fair justice in return.
Take the report of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission and the
spirit in which that commission went to work. They were not trying to
decide for the operators or for the miners. They were trying to do
justice to both the operator and the miner, and to secure justice for the
general public.
Legislation to be thoroughly effective for good must proceed upon
the principle of aiming to get for each man a fair chance to allow him
to show the stuff there is in him. No legislation can make some men
prosperous; no legislation can give wisdom to the foolish, courage to
the timid, strength to the shiftless. All that legislation can do, and
all that honest and fearless administration of the laws can do is to give
each man as good a chance as possible to develop the qualities he has in
him, and to protect him, so far as is humanly possible, against wrong of
any kind at the hands of his fellows. That is what legislation can
do, and that I think I may say we have successfully tried to do both by
legislation and by the administration of the law.
I have seen you grow up. I am proud of you. I can assure you that
so far as in me lies the efforts of the National Government, legislative
and administrative, will be to help you and all others of our people in
Theodore Roosevelt 273
the only way in which they can be helped—to help them to help them-
selves, to help them so that each man shall have the fairest field to show
the stuff that there is in him, the qualities that he has at his command.
AT LAYING OF CORNERSTONE OF GATEWAY TO YELLOWSTONE
NATIONAL PARK, GARDINER, MONTANA, APRIL 24, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Superintendent, and my fellow citizens:
I wish to thank the people of Montana generally, those of Gardiner
and Cinnabar especially, and more especially still all those employed in
the Park, whether in civil or military capacity, for my very enjoyable
two weeks’ holiday.
It is a pleasure now to say a few words to you at the laying of the
cornerstone of the beautiful road which is to mark the entrance to this
Park. The Yellowstone Park is something absolutely unique in the
world, so far as I know. Nowhere else in any civilized country is there
to be found such a tract of veritable wonderland made accessible to all
visitors, where at the same time not only the scenery of the wilderness,
but the wild creatures of the Park are scrupulously preserved ; the only
change being that these same wild creatures have been so carefully pro-
tected as to show a literally astounding tameness. The creation and
preservation of such a great natural playground in the interest of our
people as a whole is a credit to the nation; but above all a credit to Mon-
tana, Wyoming and Idaho. It has been preserved with wise foresight.
The scheme of its preservation is noteworthy in its essential democracy.
Private game preserves, though they may be handled in such a way as to
be not only good things for themselves, but good things for the sur-
rounding community, can yet never be more than poor substitutes, from
the standpoint of the public, for great national playgrounds such as this
Yellowstone Park. This Park was created, and is now administered,
for the benefit and enjoyment of the people. The government must
continue to appropriate for it especially in the direction of completing
and perfecting an excellent system of driveways. But already its
beauties can be seen with great comfort in a short space of time and at
an astoundingly small cost, and with the sense on the part of every
visitor that it is in part his property, that it is the property of Uncle
Sam and therefore of all of us. The only way that the people as a
whole can secure to themselves and their children the enjoyment in per-
petuity of what the Yellowstone Park has to give is by assuming the
ownership in the name of the nation and by jealously safeguarding and
preserving the scenery, the forests, and the wild creatures. When we
have a good system of carriage roads throughout the Park—for of
course it would be very unwise to allow either steam or electric roads in
the Park—we shall have a region as easy and accessible to travel in as
274 Messages and Speeches
it is already every whit as interesting as any similar territory of the
Alps or the Italian Riviera. The geysers, the extraordinary hot springs,
the lakes, the mountains, the canyons, and cataracts unite to make this
region something not wholly to be paralleled elsewhere on the globe.
It must be kept for the benefit and enjoyment of all of us; and I hope
to see a steadily increasing number of our people take advantage of its
attractions. At present it is rather singular that a greater number of
people come from Europe to see it than come from our own Eastern
States. The people near by seem awake to its beauties; and I hope that
more and more of our people who dwell far off will appreciate its really
marvelous character. Incidentally I should like to point out that
some time people will surely awake to the fact that the Park has
special beauties to be seen in winter; and any hardy man who can go
through it in that season on skis will enjoy himself as he scarcely could
elsewhere.
I wish especially to congratulate the people of Montana, Wyoming,
and Idaho, and notably you of Gardiner and Cinnabar and the im-
mediate outskirts of the Park, for the way in which you heartily co-
operate with the superintendent to prevent acts of vandalism and de-
struction. Major Pitcher has explained to me how much he owes to
your co-operation and your lively appreciation of the fact that the Park
is simply being kept in the interest of all of us, so that every one may
have the chance to see its wonders with ease and comfort at the mini-
mum of expense. I have always thought it was a liberal education to
any man of the East to come West, and he can combine profit with
pleasure if he will incidentally visit this Park, the Grand Canyon of
the Colorado, and the Yosemite, and take the sea voyage to Alaska.
Major Pitcher reports to me, by the way, that he has received invaluable
assistance from the game wardens of Montana and Wyoming, and that
the present game warden of Idaho has also promised his hearty aid.
The preservation of the forests is of course the matter of prime im-
portance in every public reserve of this character. In this region of
the Rocky Mountains and the great plains the problem of the water
supply is the most important which the home-maker has to face. Con-
gress has not of recent years done anything wiser than in passing the
irrigation bill; and nothing is more essential to the preservation of the
water supply than the preservation of the forests. Montana has in its
water power a source of development which has hardly yet been
touched. This water power will be seriously impaired if ample protec-
tion is not given the forests. Therefore this Park, like the forest re-
serves generally, is of the utmost advantage to the country around from
the merely utilitarian side. But of course this Park, also because of its
peculiar features, is to be preserved as a beautiful natural playground.
Here all the wild creatures of the old days are being preserved, and
Theodore Roosevelt 275
their overflow into the surrounding country means that the people
of the surrounding country, so long as they see that the laws are ob-
served by all, will be able to insure to themselves and to their children
and to their children’s children much of the old-time pleasure of the
hardy life of the wilderness and of the hunter in the wilderness. This
pleasure, moreover, can under such conditions be kept for all who have
the love of adventure and the hardihood to take advantage of it, with
small regard for what their fortune may be. I can not too often repeat
that the essential feature in the present management of the Yellowstone
Park, as in all similar places, is its essential democracy—it is the pres-
ervation of the scenery, of the forests, of the wilderness life and the
wilderness game for the people as a whole, instead of leaving the en-
joyment thereof to be confined to the very rich who can control private
reserves. I have been literally astounded at the enormous quantities of
elk and at the number of deer, antelope and mountain sheep which I
have seen on their wintering grounds; and the deer and sheep in par-
ticular are quite as tame as range stock. A few buffalo are being
preserved. I wish very much that the government could somewhere
provide for an experimental breeding station of cross-breeds between
buffalo and the common cattle. If these cross-breeds could be success-
fully perpetuated we should have animals which would produce a robe
quite as good as the old buffalo robe with which twenty years ago every
One was familiar, and animals moreover which would be so hardy that I
think they would have a distinct commercial importance. They would,
for instance, be admirably suited for Alaska, a territory which I look to
see develop astoundingly within the next decade or two, not only be-
cause of its furs and fisheries, but because of its agricultural and pas-
toral possibilities.
AT NEWCASTLE, WYO., APRIL 25, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I want to talk to you about the qualities that tell for good citizen-
ship. They are many; but they come down chiefly into three cate-
gories. In the first place honesty and decency—I use the words in
their widest sense—not merely the honesty that refrains from actual
theft, but the aggressive honesty that will see no wrong without trying
to right it. Next to honesty you must have courage, the virtue that
teaches you positively and aggressively to do right. These you must
have; but you must have more in addition. You may be honest and
you may be brave, but if you are a natural-born fool, may the Lord
be with you. We need courage, and we need honesty, and finally
we need the saving grace of common sense. We shall get good results
from good citizenship exactly in proportion as the ordinary citizen is
276 Messages and Speeches
developed along the three lines that I have indicated, but nothing on
earth can take the place of those qualities in the average man.
There are other countries with institutions like those of our great
republic, which, nevertheless, have failed to come up to the standard
we have set, because they did not have the man back of the law. Just
as on the battlefield it is the man behind the gun who counts most, so
in civil life it is the average citizen back of the law that counts most.
We must have clean and decent government; we must have good laws;
we must have decent officials to make and to execute the laws. If we do
not it is your own fault. In closing let me just repeat one thing: There
is no royal road to prosperity any more than there is any royal road
to good government. Good government does not come by any special
genius or brilliancy; good government comes from the average man
showing the qualities which we recognize as making a good friend and
good neighbor. Prosperity comes not from any juggling with the
laws, not by any effort to show smartness unaccompanied by moral
sense; it comes by the constant exercise on the part of the individual
of those qualities which each of us recognizes as making a desirable
citizen of our neighbor in private life.
AT ALLIANCE, NEB., APRIL 25, 1903.
Honor to all good citizens, but honor most of all to the men who
took the lead in taming the shaggy wilderness, to the trail blazers,
to the men who first of the world marked out that earliest of high-
ways, the spotted line, the blazed trail; the men who first on horse-
back steered across the great lonely plains and drove their cattle up
to feed upon the ranges, from which the buffalo had not yet vanished
, To you from the Black Hills, who coming here in 1876, or at the time
immediately around that date, have developed the wonderful mines of
that region, have built up in what was then an Indian haunt, a wilder-
ness, cities like Deadwood and Lead, it has fallen to your lot to see one
of the great epoch feats of the country. You are among that body of
men who conquered a continent for a race and a people, who did your
full share in making the nineteenth century the most wonderful upon
which the Sun has ever shone. The pioneer days have gone, but the
need of the old pioneer virtues remains the same as ever. You won, and
you could win only because you had in you the stuff out of which strong
men are made. In the days of 1876, here in the Black Hills, the room
for the weakling or the coward was small, and now the man who will
do decent work here must be the man who has got the stuff in him.
[Nebraska State Journal, April 28, 1903.]
Theodore Roosevelt 277
AT FAIRMONT, NEB., APRIL 27, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I want to thank you all for coming. Let me say a word first of
greeting to the men of the Grand Army, and say how I appreciate
their having turned out to greet me; then to you, my comrades of
the National Guard, to you who furnished the men in '98, who volun-
teered to show that the sons of Nebraska could do in the Philippine
Islands what their fathers had done in the great days from '61 to '65.
You of the Grand Army did the big job, while ours was a little one,
but we did it all right. You did not have to have any complaint about
there not being a big enough war, there was lots from '61 to ’65;
with us there was not enough to go around. I want to thank those,
and then I want especially to thank the school children, from whom
I have received these flowers.
I have just come through Nebraska, seeing the prosperity which
you now so abundantly have; seeing in the far-west of the state the
ranches, here the farms, and I want to congratulate you on the diversi-
fication of crops. I congratulate you on all your crops, but the best
crop of all is the children.
[The Omaha Daily Bee, Omaha, Neb., April 28, 1903.]
AT GRAND ISLAND, NEB., APRIL 27, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, men and women of Nebraska, my fellow Ameri-
cans, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a pleasure to come into your great and beautiful state.
Yesterday afternoon, for my good fortune, I had a ride, and as I
went through your country I was struck not merely with its natural
fertility, but with the way in which that fertility has been enhanced
and varied by your own efforts.
In the first place let me say how glad I am to see so much alfalfa
as well as corn. If you have got two staples you do not have as much
misery when one staple happens to fail. In the next place I was
more struck than I can say by the amount of timber I saw, the groves
and rows of trees. I knew, of course, that over 200,000 acres of forest
land had been planted in Nebraska, but to know a thing is one thing
and to see it is another. And it was a matter of good augury for all
the state to see as I did at Mr. Stalley's place, where a saw mill has
been started to saw logs from timber planted and grown by our own
people. Nebraska was originally a well-nigh treeless state. The
great bulk of the trees here have been planted by its own people. I
am glad to say that now, through the wisdom of your senators and
representatives in helping to establish forest reserves in the sand hills,
the national government will be able to co-operate with your own
278 Messages and Speeches
spirit of private enterprise. What Nebraska has done in tree planting
has extended beyond its own limits. The founder of Arbor Day was
that upright and able public servant, the late ex-Secretary Sterling
Morton. Arbor Day has extended far beyond the limits of the state
and all over the Union. . Now millions of children as well as millions
of grown people learn practically on Arbor Day the wisdom of trying
to plant trees where they do not exist, and trying to preserve them for
the public use where they, do exist.
This morning I turned the sod in preparation for the building
of the new library; and I passed between great rows of school children
on my way here, and I see some children here and there in the crowd.
Now I am proud, as an American, of what Nebraska has done with
its products of the field and range; I am proud of your material devel-
opment. But after all what really counts in the end in any state is
the character of the men and women whom the state produces. That
is the essential thing. The school, the library, the church, the hundred
instruments for moral and intellectual betterment, those are what
count more than aught else in developing the type of citizenship in
which, as Americans, we have a right to feel satisfaction. I am glad
to see the children.* I believe in your stock and I want to see it
kept up.
In closing let me thank you all for your greeting. The rest of
you will not grudge my thanking especially the men of the Grand
Army, who in the times that tried men's souls proved their worth by
their endeavor; but beyond that I wish to thank you all, and to con-
gratulate you upon what I see about me. The material prosperity
which we now all so abundantly enjoy, that prosperity which must
stand at the base of our national welfare, and that over and above that
you have reared on that indispensable foundation what is absolutely
necessary if the building is to be worthy of the architect—the super-
structure of intellect and moral wellbeing and righteousness; the super-
structure of which the cornerstones are the library, the school, the
church. I believe in the men and women of Nebraska, of the west,
because I feel that you are in a sense typical Americans. Your fore-
fathers came into this country and as pioneers carved the prairie into
fertile farms. You have had in the past to face hardships and disaster.
The work of taming the new country is a rough one. You not only
have to tame it, but you have to find out what can be done with it,
and the penalty of trying to do the wrong thing is sometimes heavy.
You have succeeded. You have put this state on a permanent plane
*On the subject of children President Roosevelt shows himself the Spartan as he does in
most things. Lycurgus would have taken him by the hand.—A. H. L.
[Lycurgus considered children to be the property, not of the parents but of the state; in
consequence, in his Code of Laws, he punished persistent bachelors with a variety of social
penalties, deeming them persons who had neglected their duty to the state.]
Theodore Roosevelt 279
of prosperity. That prosperity has been helped by wise laws and the
administration of the laws; but after all has been said and done, while
something can be done by law, and while we must demand honest
and upright administration of the law, yet in the last resort each man
must rely as the chief factor in working out his own salvation upon
the sum of the qualities that go to make his individual character, upon
his honesty, his courage and his common sense.
[Nebraska State Journal, April 28, 1903.]
AT HASTINGS, NEB., APRIL 27, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
I have struck a Nebraska zephyr and I shall try to do little more
than thank you for your greeting. I want to thank all of you, but
especially two classes—in the first place, the men who wear the button
that tells that from '61 to ’65 they did the work which made us a nation
—the veterans of the great war; and I am sure you feel a just pride in
the fact that when a lesser war came Nebraska sent her sons instantly
to the front; and the record of the First Nebraska regiment in the
Philippines was one in which the state and the nation have just cause
to feel keen pride. I greet you. In the next place I want to greet
the small folks. I am always glad to see the boys and girls, and I have
just got a few words to say to them. I believe in work and I believe
in play. Play hard while you play and when you work do not play
at all—work.
I am here in the home of my good friend, Senator Dietrich, and
I wish to express my acknowledgments for the support I have
received from Nebraska in so much that I have striven to do. Here
in the true west, there are needs to be met of a special kind. I spoke
this morning a word of appreciation of the remarkable work done by
Nebraska in tree-planting, and of the just tribute of regard that must
be paid by all of our people, not only here in Nebraska but through-
out the country, to the memory of the late Sterling Morton, whose
interest in tree culture was so great. More than that, it is through
the aid of men such as your senators and representatives in Nebraska
that we have made a permanent beginning at last of the irrigation
system.
I have been glad to see in Nebraska the prosperity that you are so
abundantly enjoying. I am glad to see the diversification of crops, to
see the green alfalfa take its place among the corn and the winter
wheat. I am glad to see the prosperous look of your farms. I con-
gratulate you on all your crops, especially on the crop I see before me
—the children. I believe in the stock and I want to see it kept up.
In closing let me say just a word. Something can be done by law
28O Messages and Speeches
for you; something can be done by the honest and upright adminis-
tration of the law. You have a right to insist upon wise legislation,
upon upright administration. But after all, when all is said and done,
after we have done the best we can with the law, the final factor in
success must be the individual man’s character; his courage, his in-
telligence, his honesty and morality. That is what counts finally.
Bodily strength is a good thing; intellect is a better thing, and best
of all is character. That is what counts in the long run. I believe
in the success of Nebraska. I believe in the success of the west, and
I believe in the success of this entire country, because I believe that
the average American citizen has in him those qualities out of which
we build a mighty and prosperous nation.
[Nebraska State Journal, April 28, 1903.]
AT LINCOLN, NEB., APRIL 27, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow Americans, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a pleasure for me to come to the state of Nebraska and
to its capital to-day, and in thanking all of you for your greeting,
the rest I am sure will not mind my saying a special word of thanks
to the men to whom we owe it that there is a United States or a
President of it to-day. I come here now at the outset of the twentieth
century, because from 1861 to 1865 you had it in you to be willing
to give up life itself for the sake of the ideal of the government and
of freedom. And it was natural enough that when in 1898 the little
war came Nebraska should have sent her sons to the Philippines to
show that the spirit that had burned in their sires’ hearts was not
extinguished yet. I greet you.
Let me say a word also to the representatives of the university.
I am glad to see you. My creed is a fairly simple one. I believe in
play and I believe in work. Play hard while you play and when you
work don’t play, but work hard. &
1 also wish to say a word of special greeting to two other bodies.
First to the National Guard. I wish to congratulate your city upon
the admirable arrangements, and to say how I appreciate the Guard
having turned out and the way in which they carried themselves, the
ease with which they made it possible for this great audience to be
reached. And now especially a word to the school children.
Coming through the state of Nebraska to-day I have rejoiced in
your fertile soil; I rejoice in the crops you raise, and after all the
best product of any soil is the product of the man and the woman. I
was mighty glad to see your children. They seemed to be all right
in quality and in quantity. I think you have a mighty good stock. I
want to see it go on.
And now, my friends and fellow citizens, I have but a word to say
Theodore Roosevelt 4. 28I
to you. I wish to speak one word only upon government—good gov-
ernment. There is nothing peculiar or wonderful in getting a good
government any more than there is anything peculiar or wonderful
in a man's making a success in private life. The same qualities that
make a man a good man in his family, a good husband and father, a
good neighbor, a man with whom you like to work or to deal, those
same qualities make him a good citizen, a good man in the state when
applied in his relations to the state. We need honesty, we need
courage, we need common sense. We need to show in civic life the
same spirit that you showed in the Civil War in battle; what you cared
to know about as to the man on your right hand or your left, was not
the way in which he worshiped his Maker; not his social standing
or wealth; you cared nothing whether he were farmer or mechanic,
lawyer or business man, bricklayer or banker; what you wanted to
know was whether he would do his duty like a man. This is what
you cared for—whether he would stay “put” when the time came.
It is the same thing in civil life now.
Any man that preaches anything that argues contrary, because he is
less well off or less distinguished, shows a feeling that is a contemptible
feeling for an American freeman to have. We can go, in this Republic,
only on the theory of trying each man on his worth as a man, or
guaranteeing him his rights and seeing that he does no wrong; that
he wrongs no one and that he is protected in return in so far as he
does right.* The pride of our land is counted on because we enjoy
liberty under the law, and it will go on prosperously just so long as
capitalists and wage workers, the men of the farms and the men of
the towns are all alike pursuing that spirit. If we allow envy, hatred, or
anger to rule us; if we permit wrong to be done by any man against
capitalists and wage workers, the men of the farms and the men of
fail to protect him in them, by just so much are we coming short of
the standard set for us by the men who in 1776 founded this nation
and by the men who in the years from '61 to ’65 preserved it.
Now anything that I say of that kind must necessarily be general
in its nature; each community has its own special conditions to which
the rule applies, but the principle of which I have spoken must be
applied in each individual case according to that case's nature, under
penalty of seeing partial failure at least. The principles of order, of
law, and of liberty under and through the law, need to be actuated by
*It is a theory of President Roosevelt that society ought as it were to keep books on a
man. When he does right he should be credited; when he does wrong he should be debited.
The balance, whether in his favor or against him, would show where that man stands, and
whether the public is in debt to him or no. This thought cropped out one evening when I
spoke of a man who had been sent to the penitentiary for gambling, and who was also a
veteran of the Civil War.
“Veteran, is he?” said the President, “If I were Governor in Albany that fact would go
a long way towards getting him pardoned.”—A. H. L.
282 Messages and Speeches
a spirit of genuine brotherhood, the spirit which regards one's neigh-
bors’ interests as well as one's Own, and which thinks it a shame to
impugn the rights of any one else. More than that, something can
be done by the law; something can be done by the honest and fearless
and wise administration of the law. But after all, in the last resort,
we must depend upon the high average of our individual citizenship
for success.
Uniform in battle is a good thing; a good rifle is a better thing.
But if you have got a poor man with a good rifle, a good man with
a poor rifle will beat him with a club. You have got to have the
proper spirit in the man behind the law, in the average citizen, to get
the proper results from the law. It is upon the average of our citizen-
ship that we have to rely. More than that. We can do a good deal by
combination among ourselves. Combination for business purposes,
combination to help those who are wage-workers, always provided that
each combination acts under and in accordance with the law ; always
in accordance with law, can help us to help one another. There is not
a man of us here who does not at times stumble, at times slip, at
times need a helping hand. Shame to the brother who will not then
extend the helping hand.
Help any man up, help him to try to walk, but if he lies down you
cannot carry him. If he lies down and won’t walk and you try to
carry him it does not do you or him any good. You can help a man
in that way by helping him to help himself. That is the only way
in which in the end you can do a man real good.
Men and women of Nebraska, I congratulate you upon what I see
in your great and beautiful state. I believe that whatever may be
the temporary ebb and flow, on the whole, Nebraska will in the
future share, even to war, her expected proportion of the prosperity
that is sure to come in the end to a nation such as ours, composed of
such people with a continent back of it.
I believe in it because I believe in the character of the men and
women who make up the state here. I believe in it as I believe in the
future of the United States, because I believe in the average citizen-
ship of the United States.
It is a great thing to have the soil that you have got in this state,
to have the crops that you have got. You need that as the foundation
upon which to build, but the building itself depends upon the use
that you make of the foundation. I congratulate you upon your house-
holds, upon your churches and upon what is done in your households.
I congratulate you most of all because you are doing your best to
keep up the average of citizenship here. But in making good citizens
you need first of all honesty in its widest sense; the spirit of fair
dealing as between man and man. The spirit that makes a man
Theodore Roosevelt 283
N
jealous of the rights of his neighbors as he is jealous of his own.
Now you of the great war. You won because each of you had it in
you to care for something more than for himself; a care for the
honor of the regiment, the honor of the flag and the honor of the
nation more than even for his own life. So we will get good citizen-
ship only on condition that we have in us the power of adherence to
the lofty idea and that is not enough. In the Civil War it didn't make
any difference how patriotic a man was if he ran away. In addition
to the love of country you had to have the courage that made you
put that love of country into action. And so now I don't care how
good a man, how virtuous, if he stays at home and does nothing, it
don’t count. The man that counts is the man, the honorable man, who
has got the stuff in him to go out into the world, into the hurly burly
of actual life and hold his own as a man among men. That is the
man that counts.
You have got to have energy and courage, the qualities of virile
manhood in addition to the qualities of honesty and decency. But
that is not enough. I don't care how honest a man is and how brave
he is, if he is a natural born fool you can do little with him. In addi-
tion to courage, in addition to honesty, you must have the saving grace
of common sense. Shame on the man whose heart is hard. I want
softness of heart, but I don’t want it to be extended to the softness
of the head. -
Citizens, we don’t need brilliancy or genius in citizenship. We
need most of all the capacity which makes a man do well the ordinary
things of life; we need the development of the ordinary qualities
which we feel the average citizen should possess; the qualities that
make a man and that make a good man; the qualities that make a
man good in his family, good in his relations with his neighbors and
a square and brave man in dealing with the state. The qualities that
stand above physical strength, that stand above intellect, the qualities
that go to make up what we call character. And in their essence
those qualities can be divided into three, the quality of honesty, the
quality of courage, and the quality of common sense. I thank you
for coming here to greet me. It is a pleasure to see you here. I be-
lieve in you with all my heart. I believe in your future. I know you. .
I welcome you here today and I bid you godspeed for the future.
AT OMAHA, NEB., APRIL 27, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow citigens:
It is a great pleasure to come before you this evening. Since Satur-
day I have been traveling through your great and beautiful State. I
know your people; I have been with them; I have worked with them;
284 A. Messages and Speeches
and it is indeed a joy to come here now and see from one end of your
state to the other the signs of your abounding prosperity. I feel that
the future of Nebraska is secure. There will be temporary ups and
downs, and of course if any of you are guilty of folly, from your own
folly nothing can save you but yourselves. But if you act as I believe
and trust that you will act, this State has a future before it second to
that of no other state in this great Nation.
I addressed you to-night on the anniversary of the birth of the great
silent soldier—Ulysses Grant, and I am glad to have the chance of
saying a few words to an audience such as this in this great typical
city of the West on the occasion of the birthday of the great Western
general, the great American general. It is a good thing to pay homage
with our lips to the illustrious dead. It is a good thing to keep in mind
what we owe to the memories of Washington and his fellows, who
founded this mighty Republic; to Abraham Lincoln and Grant and
their fellows, who saved it. It is a far better thing to pay the homage
that counts—the homage of our lives and our deeds. Illustrious mem-
ories of the Nation's past are but curses if they serve the men of the
Nation at present as excuses for shirking the problems of the day.
They are blessings if they serve to spur on the men of today to see
that they act as well in their time as the men of yesterday did in theirs.
Each generation has its peculiar problems; each generation has
certain tasks allotted to it to do. Shame to it if it treats the glorious
deeds of a generation that went before as an excuse for its own failure
to do the peculiar task it finds ready to hand. Upon the way in which
we solve our problems will depend whether our children and our
children’s children shall look back or shall not look back to us with
the veneration which we feel for the men of the mighty years of the
Civil War. Our task is a lighter one than theirs, but it is an important
one, and do it we must, if we wish to rise level to the standard set us
by our forefathers. You in Nebraska have passed through periods
of terrible privation of misery and hardship. They were evil times.
And yet, there is no experience, no evil, that out of it good can not
come, if only we look at it right. Things are better now. Things can
be kept better, but only on condition that we face facts with coolness
and sanity, with clear-eyed vision that tells us what is true and what
is false. When things go wrong there is a tendency in humanity to
wish to blame some of its fellows. It is a natural tendency, and
by no means always a wholesome tendency. There is always a ten-
dency to feel that somehow by legislation, by the enactment of some
law, by the trying of some patent scheme things can be made perma-
nently better. Now, something can be done by law. A good deal
can be done by law. Even more can be done by the honest adminis-
tration of the law; an administration which knows neither fear nor
Theodore Roosevelt 285
favor, which treats each man exactly as that man’s record entitles
him to be treated; the kind of enforcement of the law which I think
I may promise that you will have while Mr. Knox remains Attorney-
General. But more than the law, far more than the administration
of the law, depends upon the individual quality of the average citizen.
The chief factor in winning success for your state, for the people in
the state, must be what the chief factor in winning the success of a
people has been from the beginning of time—the character of the
individual man, of the individual woman.
I have spoken of the homage we should pay to the memory of
Grant.* It is the homage we should pay to the memory of Lincoln,
the homage we should pay to all of our fellow-countrymen who have
at any time rendered great service to the Republic, and it can be ren-
dered in most efficient form not by merely praising them for having
dealt with problems which now we do not have to face, but by facing
our problems in the same spirit in which they faced theirs. Nothing
was more noteworthy in all of Lincoln's character than the way in
which he combined fealty to the loftiest ideal with a thoroughly prac-
tical capacity to achieve that ideal by practical methods. He did not
war with phantoms; he did not struggle among the clouds; he faced
facts; he endeavored to get the best results he could out of the warring
forces with which he had to deal. When he could not get the best
he was forced to content himself, and did content himself, with the
best possible. What he did in his day we must do in ours. It is not
possible to lay down any rule of conduct so specific that it will enable
us to meet each particular issue as it arises. All that can be done is
to lay down certain general rules, and then to try, each man for him-
self, to apply those general rules to the specific cases that come up.
Our complex industrial civilization has not only been productive
of much benefit, but has also brought us face to face with many
puzzling problems; problems that are puzzling, partly because there
are men who are wicked, partly because there are good men who are
foolish or short-sighted. There are many such to-day—the problems
of labor and capital, the problems which we group together rather
vaguely when we speak of the problems of the trusts, the problems
affecting the farmers on the one hand, the railroads on the other. It
would not be possible in any one place to deal with the particular
shapes which these problems take at that time and in that place. And
yet, there are certain general rules which can be laid down for dealing
with them, and those rules are the immutable rules of justice, of sanity,
of courage, of common sense. Six months ago it fell to my lot to
appoint a commission to investigate into and conclude about matters
*I once asked President Roosevelt:
“Who was the greatest president?”
“Lincoln l’’ he retorted with much emphasis and no hesitation.—A. H. L.
286 Messages and Speeches
connected with the great and menacing strike in the anthracite coal
fields of Pennsylvania. On that commission I appointed representa-
tives of the church, of the bench, of the army, a representative of the
capitalists of the region, and a representative of organized labor. They
published a report which was not only of the utmost moment because
it dealt with the great and vital problem with which they were
appointed to deal, but also because in its conclusions it initiated cer-
tain general rules in so clear and masterful a fashion that I wish most
earnestly it could receive the broadest circulation as a tract wherever
there exists, or threatens to exist, trouble in any way akin to that with
which those commissioners dealt.
If I might give a word of advice to Omaha, I should like to see
your daily press publish in full the concluding portion of that report
of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, signed by all the members
thereof, by those in a special sense the champion of the wage-worker,
and by those in a special sense identified with capital, organized or
unorganized; because, men and women of Omaha, those people did
not speak first as capitalist or as laborer, did not speak first as judge,
as army man, as churchman, but all of them signed that report as
American citizens anxious to see right and justice prevail. No one
quality will get us out of any difficulty. We need more than one; we
need a good many. We need, as I said, the power first of each man's
honestly trying to look at the problem from his fellow's standpoint.
Capitalist and wage-worker alike should honestly endeavor each to
look at any matter from the other's standpoint, with a freedom on
the one hand from the contemptible arrogance which looks down upon
the man of less means, and on the other, from the no less contemptible
envy, jealousy and rancor, which hates another because he is better
off. Each quality is the supplement of the other, and in point of
baseness there is not the weight of a finger to choose between them.
Look at the report signed by those men; look at it in the spirit in which
they wrote it, and if you can only make yourselves, make this com-
munity, approach the problems of to-day in the spirit that those men,
your fellows, showed in approaching the problem of yesterday, your
problems will be solved.
Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of
creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect
to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is, in the long run,
with absolute certainty that class's own worst enemy. In the long
run, and as a whole, we are going to go up or go down together. Of
course there will be individual exceptions, small, local exceptions,
exceptions in kind, exceptions in place; but as a whole, if the common-
wealth prospers some measure of prosperity comes to all of us. If
it is not prosperous, then the adversity, though it may fall unequally
Theodore Roosevelt 287
upon us, will weigh more or less upon all. It lies with us ourselves
to determine our own fate. I can not too often say that the wisest
law, the best administration of the law, can do naught more than
give us a fair field in which to work out that fate aright. If, as indi-
viduals, or as a community, we mar our future by our own folly, let
us remember that it is upon ourselves that the responsibility must rest.
AT OSCEOLA, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
It is a great pleasure to come here today and be introduced by
Colonel Hepburn, who has been traveling with me throughout his
district. And in departing from it and from him I wish to state my
sense of obligation to him and to all the Iowa delegation for the aid
they gave me last year—the invaluable aid in bringing about certain
bits of legislation, non-partisan in character, which I deemed of the
utmost importance; such as a wise supervision and regulation of cer-
tain great corporations, of the type popularly known as trusts, notably
of those engaged in doing an interstate business—legislation which I
deemed invaluable not only because of its courage, but because of its
sanity, and because it does not pretend to do anything that it does
not do. A promise should be kept on the stump just as much as off
the stump.* The worth of any promise lies in its fulfillment by action,
and it was, thanks to Colonel Hepburn, thanks to the Congress, to the
members of both the Senate and the House from Iowa, and their
fellows, that I am able to come before you feeling that all that had
been said by us as to the need of such regulation has been made good
in fact. Improvements in the law have been made, better legisla-
tion has been put on the statute books, and the legislation on the
statute books has been enforced with honesty and with fearlessness.
AT THE STATE HOUSE, DES MOINES, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
Coming through the state of Nebraska today I have rejoiced in
your great prosperity; I rejoiced in your fertile soil; I rejoiced in the
crops you raised, as the product of the soil is the product of the men
and women. I was mighty glad to see your children. They seem
to excel in quality and quantity. I think you have a mighty good
stock, and I want to see it grow. And now, my friends and fellow
citizens, I have a word to say to you upon government—good gov-
ernment. There is nothing peculiar or wonderful in getting a good
government more than there is anything peculiar or wonderful in a
man's making a success in private life. The same qualities that make
* As a rule stump speeches in politics are vastly like the bell-ringing that precedes the
auction. Neither has much to do with what happens after election is over or the sale begins.
—A. H. L.
288 Messages and Speeches
a man a good man in his family, a good husband and father, a good
neighbor, a man with whom you like to work or to deal, those
same qualities make him a good citizen, a good man in the state when
applied in his relations to the state. We need honesty, we need
courage, we need common sense. We need to show in civic life the
same spirit that you showed in the Civil War in battle; what you cared
to know about as to the man on your right or the one on the left,
was not the way in which he worshiped his Maker; not his social
standing or wealth; you cared nothing whether he were a farmer or
mechanic, lawyer or business man, a bricklayer or banker; what you
wanted to know was whether he would do his duty like a man. This
is what you cared for, whether he would “stay put” when the time
came. It is the same thing in civil life now.
[The Register and Leader, Des Moines, Iowa, April 29, 1903.]
AT SHENANDOAH, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is a very great pleasure to greet you this morning and to say a
word of appreciation to you for coming here to welcome me. In
thanking all of you, I know the others will not object to my saying a
special word of greeting to the men who, from '61 to '65, did the
great deeds because of which we now have a country; because of
which there is a President to come and speak with you. It has always
seemed to me that after all in civil life what we have to do is merely
to apply practically the principles which you and your comrades ap-
plied in the Civil War. It was not, in the last resort, genius or bril-
liancy that won in the Civil War. You needed that; you had to develop
it in a sense; you had to develop finally, as the years went by, men
like Grant, and Sherman, and Thomas, and Sheridan, and Farragut;
but the factor that was decisive in the war was the fighting quality of
the individual soldier. That is what counted; that is what you were
concerned with knowing. You needed the uniform, the training, the
rifle; you needed a good rifle; but the best rifle, if in the hands of a
poor man would mean that he would be beaten by a good man with
a club. It is the man that counts in the long run. We won because
our people, from '61 to '65, had in them the stuff that made them
see to it that the policy of Lincoln was upheld; that the course which
he sought for most should be traveled undeviatingly. So it is in civil
life now. We need all that there is at the command of the nation in
special training to meet the problems that arise from time to time;
and yet, in their ultimate analysis, these problems must be solved by
just the same qualities which each man brings to solve the problems
of his own life; which the soldiers of the Civil War brought to the
Theodore Roosevelt 289
solving of the problem that was ahead of them. In the first place we
need honesty (and I use the word in its broadest acceptation), de-
cency, the spirit that makes a man behave well in his own family, that
makes him a good neighbor, a good friend—the spirit that makes one
man love another, that makes both love and serve the state.” In the
Civil War the fundamental quality that you had to have was the quality
that made you willing at need to lay down your lives for the flag—
the spirit of patriotism, the spirit of love of country. And by itself,
that is not enough. You have got to have virtue, and you have got to
have something more. In '61 to '65 it did not make any difference
how patriotic a man was, if he did not have in him the stuff out of
which you could make a fighting man you could do but little with
him. I do not care how patriotic he was, if he was timid there was
nothing to be done with him. Besides virtue, decency, honesty, you
must have the qualities which we speak of when we say of a man that
he is not only a good man, but emphatically a man. You must have
hardihood, courage, strength, the desire not to sit at home in ease and
say how wrong the world has gone, but the desire to go out and do
your part to right it. You remember in '61 to ’65 there was plenty
to stay at home and say how poorly the war was being carried on,
but the fellow that did the job was the man who went out and did his
duty on the field of battle. That is the man that counts. And so it
is now. The man that counts in life is the man that goes out and tries
to do the thing. The man who makes his way in private life is not
the man who dreams golden dreams, but the man who tries to put
them into practice, who works at his profession, who tries to count
in this world.
So it is in public life, and so it is in doing all the work of the
Nation that has got to be done. In addition to virtue, in addition to
the spirit of loving kindness, to the love that each man should have for
his fellows, you must have the strong virile qualities, the qualities of
hardihood, of manliness and courage. And finally, in addition to these
two sets of qualities you must have another also. It makes but little
difference how brave a man is, or how honest he is, if the man is a
fool you can do but little with him. We need courage, we need de-
cency, and we need the saving grace of common sense.
In concluding, my fellow citizens, after having thanked all of you,
and thanked especially the men and women, I shall just say one word
of congratulation upon the fact of meeting so many children. I am
mighty glad of all your products, and of your children especially. I
am glad to see that they are all right in quality and all right in quan-
tity. I believe in the stock and I want to see it keep up.
[The Register and Leader, Des Moines, Iowa, April 29, 1903.]
*Evidently President Roosevelt does not believe with Pope, the little hunchback of
Twickenham, that “The fool's a patriot in every age.”—A. H. L.
290 Messages and Speeches
AT CLARINDA, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a great pleasure to have the chance of seeing you this
morning and of being here in your great and beautiful state. As
I go through your state and see the soil, the crops, and above all
the men and women, I do not wonder that Iowa is all right.
In thanking you all I know the others will not grudge my saying
a special word of thanks to those who, beyond any others in the
nation, are entitled to the gratitude of all of us, to the men of the
Grand Army of the Republic. We have a country, and there is a
President to address you just because of what you did from '61 to ’65.
I am going to go from one extreme to the other. I greet the Grand
Army first; next I want to greet the younger generation. I like your
stock and I am glad to see it is being kept up. The children look
all right in quality and quantity. And now one word to them and
it is about the same kind of a word I would speak to you—I am
awfully glad to see you, boys and girls. I believe in play and I
believe in work, and I am pretty sure from the faces of some of the
small boys I see that they believe in play too. Play hard while you
play, but do not play while you work. Work hard while you work.
That is sound sense, and it is sound sense for the children of the
larger growth, for all of us. I believe in having a good time in life.
But I do not believe in shirking any work for the sake of having a
good time. I am sure that each one of us knows in his or her ac-
quaintance some unwise father—I regret to state an occasional mother
—who having worked hard and done his or her duty well, seems to
forget that life in the long run is satisfactory about in the propor-
tion that it means duty well done, and deliberately starts to bring up
his or her child to do nothing, to be a little soft-hearted and try
to shield them from all work. You have seen the mother, who be-
comes a mere household drudge, say that her daughters shall not
touch a stitch of work; or the father, who is a hard working man, who
lets his boys grow up as idlers; and then that father or mother will
have a feeling that it is because they are so fond of their children.
It is not because they are fond of their children; it is because they
are foolish. The poorest lesson that any American can be taught
is the lesson of trying merely to have a good time, of trying to shirk
what is hard and unpleasant.
I have spoken a word about the men of the Civil War. From '61
to '65 you gave up the life of ease at home, you left your families,
you left comfort, and you went into the army. Heavens knows you
did not enter it for the money—it was only $11 or $13 a month, I
have forgotten which. You knew what it was to march all day long
under the intolerable heat of the southern sun in summer, when at about
Theodore Roosevelt 29I
noon, if you were recruits, one blanket was so heavy you threw it
away, and at midnight you would like two. You knew what it was
to lie out in the frozen mud of the trenches in winter; you faced
fever cots in the hospital, death and maiming in battle; you saw the
brightest and bravest pour out their life's blood like water, all for
the sake of an ideal. It was because you had it in you to do that,
that we doff our hats to you now ; that we stand here as freemen
of the greatest republic upon which the sun has ever shown. If you
will look back over your lives as you hand on the memories to your
children and to your country, to what part of your life is it a pleasure—
the easy part? No. It was when you dared and did all you could do,
and toiled and worked, and fought, and spent your sweat and your
blood in saving the nation. What is true of you in military life, is
true of all of us in civil life. Each man here as he grows older looks
back with pleasure and is glad to recall to the memories of his chil-
dren, not the days that were easiest, but the days when he did his
best work. That is what counts—having work to do that is worth
doing, and then doing it as well as a man can. In the long run
that is the greatest pleasure in life, and of all social pleasures the
one which quickest turns to dust and ashes in the mouth is the love
of pleasure for pleasure's own sake. The man or the woman who
deliberately sits down to try to lead a life that shall be merely one
that shall result in selfish pleasure, is not only a curse to the com-
munity, but a curse to himself or herself as well. In bringing up
your children, the lesson to teach them is not how to shirk difficulties,
but how to meet them and overcome them.
Here in Iowa you have built up this great state because you had
in you the stuff out of which good citizenship is made; you have
built up this city and the hundreds of others like it; you have built
up the country around you, because your people have tried to do
a man's work as a man's work should be done. This is what counts
in the nation—two qualities, the desire to act squarely and decently,
the desire to show in practical shape that you love your brother, that
you will do what you can to help him and do your duty by the
State—the desire to show the belief in you in morality, in honesty
and in decency is not, with you, an empty form; and then in addi-
tion to that, the sanity that makes you follow out that virtue in a
practical fashion; cloistered virtue does not count. In the Civil War
it did not make any difference how patriotic a man was if he ran
away. You wanted to have the man in the right feeling first, the
right feeling for the flag, the right feeling for the country, and then
to have him of the fiber that would make him stay “put” when the
time came.
So it is in civic and social life now ; so it is in the life of the man
292 Messages and Speeches
in his family, of the man in his relations to his neighbors, in his
relations to the state; you have got to be decent; you have got to
have morality; you have got to have virtue, not of the cloistered type,
not virtue that sits at home in its parlor and wishes things were
well outside, but the type of virtue that comes to the strong man who,
when he sees a wrong, wishes to go out and right it; who is glad to
step down into the hurly-burly of battle, in the struggle of actual
life, and does his best to bring things about as they should be brought.
In closing let me thank particularly the members of the National
Guard for having turned out as an escort; let me say how glad I am
to meet you. I believe in you with all my heart and soul and I wish
you well always.
[The Register and Leader, Des Moines, Iowa, April 29, 1903.]
AT SHARPSBURG, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
I wish to say what a pleasure it is to me to greet you this morn-
ing and how I appreciate your coming to see me—the men and the
small folks. I am an expert in those for I have six myself, and as
I believe in your stock I want to see it kept up. It is a great pleasure
to me to come through your beautiful state and to see your pros-
perity, a prosperity due in part to your soil and climate, but due
mainly to the character of your men and women. That is the all
important factor in determining the upgrowth of any state of the
Union. We need good laws, we need good, honest and fearless ad-
ministration of the laws, and we need to have the laws administered
without respect to persons so that whether a man be rich or poor,
whether he be in one occupation or another, he shall be held to ac-
countability under the law and protected by the law.” In the long
run, as I said, it is the character of the individual man or individual
woman that counts most in the making up of a state. Exactly as
in the army, I care not what the training is, or what the weapons are,
you can get but little fight out of the army if the average soldier has
not the fight in him. So it is in citizenship. There are other nations
which have copied our constitution and our laws, but the result has
been wholly different because they did not have the type of citizen
behind the law. As in battle it is the man behind the gun that counts,
so in a community it is the men back of the law that count most.
Upon them must we rely for proper results under our constitution
and our laws. I greet you, I believe in you with all my heart. I
* President Roosevelt is so far like Solon that he does not believe that the laws should be
as “cobwebs that entangle only the weak but are broken by the strong.”—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 293
think that Iowa's future will be even greater than her past. I wish
you good luck.
[The Register and Leader, Des Moines, Iowa, April 29, 1903.]
AT WAN WERT, I.A., APRIL 28, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
It is indeed a pleasure to meet you this morning and to come through
your great and beautiful state. I do not wonder that Iowa has taken
the position it has in the councils of the Nation, that it has assumed
the leadership which it has done, when I see not merely your soil,
your farms, your products, but those best of all products—the men
and women. You have in the territory the raw material out of which
to make the state, but it has been made because those in it have had
in them the stuff with which to make it. O
At every place that I have stopped I have seen men carrying the
button which recalls to mind the fact that, in the time that tried
men’s souls, Iowa sent her sons to the front to pour out their blood
like water for the cause of the Union. The qualities that these men
showed in military life are after all the same qualities which we need
in order to bring success in civil affairs. Unless there is a fundamental
spirit of decency, of honesty, of regard for right living no success
will come to the state any more than to the individual. Of all qual-
ities to be abhorred in a republic like ours the quality which is some-
times called Smartness, ability unaccompanied by scruple, is the worst.
That is the quality which makes a bad neighbor and an evil public
servant. The abler, the more fearless a man is, if he has not got
the root of decent living in him, the more dangerous he is to the
state. We must have as the basis of citizenship a high ideal, a decent
observance of the law and of the relationships of human society.
But such alone will not avail. In addition to virtue if you are to
make it count, you have to have strength and courage back of it. But
little can be done with a man who is afraid. The timid man is of no
use, I do not care how good he is. And scant need be our patience
with the virtue which sits at home, in its own house, and says how
bad the world is. You want morality, decency, high thinking, and
in addition you must have the qualities which we speak of when we
say of anyone that he is not merely a good man, but a man. The
qualities that make a man fit to do his work in the actual hurly-
burly of real life; the qualities which, if we are wise, each of us
will strive to instil into the minds of his sons, of his daughters, so
as to teach the boy and the girl that the thing to do in life is not
to find some way of dodging difficulties, but to meet them and over-
come them. In the great war, in addition to being patriots, it was
294 Messages and Speeches
necessary to have the quality of staying “put.” You needed in the
army the men who loved their country, and you also needed the man
who did not run, or, if he ran, ran in the right direction. You
had to have a combination of the two qualities.
[The Register and Leader, Des Moines, Iowa, April 29, 1903.]
AT OTTUMWA, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
Mr. Senator, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a privilege to have the chance of addressing you this
evening and I have enjoyed greatly my trip through Iowa to-day.
As I began to speak at 7 o'clock this morning and as I have met
about every man, woman and child within a reasonable radius of the
railway I will not detain you long.
I wish to say, in greeting to you all and in expressing my acknowl-
edgment of the magnificent reception you have tendered me here,
that I know you will not object to my saying a special word of greet-
ing to the men of the Grand Army of the Republic, because the rest
of us owe the fact that there is a President of this country to what
they did. And they teach us a lesson, not merely of war but also
of peace, for, mighty as was the triumph they won in the years that
closed at Appomattox, mighty also was the deed when the army dis-
banded and the brave boys in blue went back to their counting rooms,
their shops, their farms, and each took up the work he had abandoned
when President Lincoln called for arms.
I am speaking in One of the chief manufacturing cities of Iowa and
to those from round about who come from that rich agricultural
country which takes in practically the entire prosperous and happy
state. I congratulate you upon your prosperity and upon your well-
being. -
Something can be done—I think I may say, has been done—by law,
to create and preserve that condition of well being, and more can be
done by honest and faithful administration of the law. But most of
all such well-being depends upon the character of the average man.
It was just so in the war. You needed uniforms, needed good guns,
needed training, but you didn’t wait. If there was any man who
hadn’t the stuff in him, you couldn’t get it out of him, and we won
because the average man in blue had the sturdy constitution, the
courage, iron will, and dauntless resolution. These characteristics
moved them to enlist, and they saw them through the war.
And here we are in this great state which was built up, not merely
by the soil or the climate, but because of the right kind of men and
women, who were not afraid of work and were not seeking to lead a
Theodore Roosevelt 295
life of ease and enjoyment, but rather to play their parts well in the
world.
I have drawn more than one lesson from your careers and now
allow me to draw another. You, when you left a life of ease, left
your home and dear ones, and went down to spend the best years
of your youth marching under the hot sun of a southern summer—
you for whom at noon the blanket was too heavy, and if a recruit you
dropped it, but at midnight you found that two blankets were not
near enough.
And as you look back over your past lives, of what years are you
proud—the years of ease and pleasant prosperity? No. The years
of, effort and toil, and when you risked your lives, endured your
wounds, faced unflinchingly the fever cots in the war hospitals, and
saw the best among you shed their blood for the sake of the lofty
idea which led them on.
So it is in peace. Look back, each man of you, at the part of your
life of which you are proudest to tell your children, the part you
wish them to follow. It is not when conditions were the easiest but
the time when the life was hard, when there were obstacles to be
overcome, dangers to be dealt with. That's what you hope to see
your children emulate. *
O men and women of Iowa, I believe in you and in your sturdy
manhood and womanhood, and therefore I know that you will teach
your children not to go through life choosing the easiest course
they can pursue, but will see that they rather choose the hardest, that
they trample down the obstacles which intervene in their way to suc-
cess. That is what makes men and women like the citizens of Iowa.
I owe a peculiar debt of gratitude to Iowa, because I have taken
a quarter of my cabinet from this state. Somebody has intimated
that this is more than Iowa's share, but I say that when any other
state does as well relatively in citizenshp, then I will take a quarter
from it.
I have traveled all day through Iowa with my valued friend, Sec-
retary Shaw, and now I would say a few words regarding the absent
secretary, Mr. Wilson. It was very fitting that from Iowa should
come the secretary of agriculture, for no state in the Union has done
more to develop the highest grade of farming than has this. Both
the experimental work by the Government and educational work by
the State have been employed to make the farmer's work one of such
scientific skill as to put it fairly beside any of the more prominent
professions.
It is a mere truism to say that upon the welfare of the farmer and
wage-worker rests the welfare of the entire state. If the conditions
of these two great classes are well, the rest of the state is also right.
296 Messages and Speeches
And therefore, residents of this city of manufactories and wage-
workers, in this state of farmers, I congratulate you on having so
well solved your share of the problems which confront the entire
nation.
I don’t have to do much preaching in Iowa. I think your prac-
tice sets a mark for my preaching here. I don’t have to preach in the
presence of these men of the great war except to remind us younger
men that we should be held thrice shamed if we do not remember
to do well so that you may feel that our homage to your memory is
not simply coming from the mouth but from our hearts.
I am not preaching the gospel of work. You made your standard
of work as well as your standard of play, but let me say just this—
play when you play, but don't play when you work. I am glad to
see any harmless enjoyment from which anyone can derive a benefit,
only don’t let it interfere in doing each his or her duty as the chance
CO1116 S.
As I have passed through Iowa today I have been struck with
the soil, the climate, the rich farms, the prosperity and happiness
of the towns and cities, and by the high average of citizenship which
is noticeable everywhere. It has been my pleasure in the country
districts to notice how the electric cars, the telephones, and the rural
free delivery have joined to make the life of the farm less weary
and to bring it more upon an equitable plane with the pleasures
and the conveniences of the city. I admire the people and I con-
gratulate them upon their crops and their products.
I think the thing that has pleased me most, with the possible ex-
ception of the meeting with the old veterans, is the representation
from the other end of the line—the children. I congratulate you
upon all your crops, and especially upon your crop of children. They
are certainly all right in quality and they seem to be all right in quan-
tity. I like your stock and I am glad it is not dying out.
Now I will not detain you longer. I have only come to say that
I believe in you, believe in you heart and soul, and that I wish for
you in the future a greater measure of prosperity and happiness than
you have enjoyed in the past. And now I will bid you good night.
[Ottumwa (Iowa), Daily Courier, April 29, 1903.J
AT THE AUDITORIUM, DES MOINES, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
Mr. Chairman and ladies and gentlemen:
When I see this audience before me, it is a matter of real regret
to me that I have not the time to stay and speak to you at length.
Owing to the fact that Iowa has been so very attractive that I have
Theodore Roosevelt 297
been getting behind time going through it, all I can do is to thank
you for your greetings and wish you well.
I have enjoyed to the full my trip today through your great and
beautiful state, and my visit to your beautiful city. I have enjoyed
the drive. I want to say that I appreciate the quality of the horseman-
ship of those who accompanied me on this drive, and from the appear-
ance of that part of the guard immediately by me, I should have been
glad to have had them in my regiment.
I will say sincerely, and without flattery, that it does me good to
travel through your state: though I am glad to see you with so fer-
tile a soil; though I am glad to learn of your abounding prosperity
and all that you raise; yet, I am most glad of the quality of citizen-
ship you raise. I suppose there is no state in the Union which sur-
passes Iowa in the average of happiness of its citizens. You are
fortunate in your farming districts, in your farming population, and
in the character of your cities. Iowa is among the leading states
of agricultural life, and of course, in recent years, the use of the
telephone, the use of electric cars, the introduction of rural free de-
livery, has made an enormous difference towards equalizing the ad-
vantages of the country and city, and glad though I am to come into
cities like this, I know that even the people of the cities will not mis-
represent the saying, that I am particularly glad to see the farm
grow more attractive, so that the young men will stay in the country.
We can not afford to fail to do all in our power to keep up the standard
of our country population.
So I want to say, how glad I am to be here, how glad I am to be
greeted thus, and I want to say that I am particularly glad of having
been greeted by so many children; they seem all right in quality, and
are all right in quantity. I congratulate you; I believe in you, and
I want to see others grow up like you.
Good bye and good luck.
[The Register and Leader, Des Moines, Ja., April 29, 1903.]
*
AT THE DEDICATION OF THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSO-
CIATION BUILDING, AT OSKALOOSA, IA., APRIL 28, 1903.
Ladies and gentlemen:
It is with pleasure that I come here to take part in the dedication
of this Y. M. C. A. building. I feel that there is something peculiarly
appropriate in the presence of the men who fought in the great war
at any ceremony which tends to make for decency, for high thinking,
for good citizenship.
I wish first to say one word about your Congressman, Mr. Lacey,
at whose request I stopped. In public life generally we are not apt
298 Messages and Speeches
to find the man whose interests go for the whole country as well
as for those who have his immediate fate in their hands, and I wish
to congratulate this district on having in the American Congress a
man who spends his best efforts for the whole United States. Gen-
tlemen, I never say before a man what I would not say behind him,
or vice versa, and I do not speak hyperbolically, I say what I mean,
and I wish to pay this tribute to Mr. Lacey: Wherever there is a
matter that I feel is of real and serious consequence to the nation
as a whole, I can ask Mr. Lacey to come to me, or can go to him,
with the absolute certainty that he will approach the matter simply
from the standpoint of the public service. He wishes to do well his
duty by the public, and the fact that the work is worth doing is a
sufficient reward for doing it. And that I regard as high praise for
any man in public life.
Now a word about the building itself and what purpose it sub-
serves. We can not afford to have our civilization go on without
united and ordered effort on the part of decent people to see that
the forces of decency have the upper hand. We do not need to bother
about the weeds, they will grow anyhow ; but the grain needs some
careful tending and nothing augurs better for the future of this
country than the way in which efforts are made, such as this, which
has resulted in the erection of this association building here. Nature
abhors a vacuum, and if you leave a young man's time when he
is at liberty absolutely vacant he will fill it; and it is liable with what
is not best worth having in it. Give him occupation; give him the
chance to improve himself; make the path fairly easy that leads to
clean living and decent work and you will help him up more than
you will by a hundred mere preachings; you will give him the chance
to be decent. More and more the Young Men's Christian Associa-
tion has tended to do good throughout the nation because it has
proceeded in so sane a spirit; a spirit which seeks not to dwarf or
suppress healthy instincts, but to get them to turn in the right di-
rection, because, like all true educational institutions, it recognizes
what an education must mean; (we are all of us being educated
all the time); that it can help the body; that it can help what is of
more good than the body, the mind, and finally that it can help what
counts for far more than mind and body, character—the sum of all
qualities that we call character. That is what counts in the long run.
It is a good thing to be a strong man; it is a better thing to be an
intelligent and intellectual man; but best of all it is to be a Man, a good
man, a brave and a strong man.
That is what counted, oh my comrades, with you in the great war.
When you went into that struggle you went into a struggle that
could have been brought to a successful conclusion only by men whose
Theodore Roosevelt 299
stout bodies and cool heads united the brave heart. That is what
counted in the long months of inaction, in the weariness of the
marches, in the sleepless vigils of the cold winter nights and finally
in the red hot fire and agony of the fight. That was when you proved
the stuff that there was in the man; then you could see the qualities
that you had to have in order to make the man able to do a little
more than his fair share. And it is just so in our life now, in our
life relative to the state, the life of the man in his own family, or in
dealing with his neighbors—the thing that counts is the combination
of qualities which we call character, at the door of which we call
decency, honesty, the spirit that makes a man treat his fellows squarely
and fairly, that makes him a good husband, a good father, a good
neighbor, a good man to do business with, a good man to have his
property next to yours or to work beside in the shop or on the farm;
and decency is not enough. In addition to this you have to have
something else; just as you, the men of the great war, needed more than
patriotism. You had to have the quality of courage, the usual quality of
hardihood, the quality of iron strength. I do not care how patriotic
a man was, if he had a tendency to run away there was nothing to
be done with him. So it is now ; you have got to have decency, hon-
esty, virtue, morality as the bedrock, but if you have got nothing
built upon it it is a poor structure.
The virtue that sits at home and complains that vice has the upper
hand, the parlor virtue, the far sighted virtue, does not count. What
you need is the good man who is not afraid, that virtue that will
go out into the world and try to do something. The decent man
who is not afraid of the hurly burly of actual life, and it is rough
work, too. Most things that are worth having come by effort. That
is true in civil life as in military. You need decency; you need courage,
and in addition to this you need the saving grace of common sense.
Common sense you have got to have to guide the other aright. It
is a mighty good thing to have softness of heart, but it is a pity when
the softness extends its area and you get softness of the head as well.
I congratulate you, the people of this beautiful State, upon what
you are doing upon the higher life of which the erection of this
building is but a symbol. In closing let me say how glad I am to
be here. How I have enjoyed coming through Iowa. Let me thank
especially the men of the Grand Army for coming out and then my
own comrades, the men of the National Guard, for coming here to
act as escort. I was pleased to pass so many children. I congratulate
Iowa on many things. On her soil, her climate, her crops, but above
all her citizenship. I congratulate her upon the men and women who
have made her what she is. Because men and women, I do not have
to do much preaching to you. I feel rather more like sitting at the
3OO Messages and Speeches
feet of Gamaliel. I feel that you practice what I want to preach,
and I congratulate you in it. Finally, as I said, I like crops, but as
I like your stock, the crop I like best to see is the children. I con-
gratulate you on their quality. That is all right and it seems to me
the quantity is all right. I like your stock and I should be very sorry
to see it die out.
[The Register and Leader, Des Moines, Iowa, April 29, 1903.]
AT KEOKUK, IA., APRIL 29, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, my fellow Americans:
It is indeed a pleasure to have the chance of saying even a few
words to you this morning here in the Gate City of Iowa. Yes-
terday I traveled through your great and beautiful state and oh!
my fellow citizens, how sincerely I congratulate you upon it. I con-
gratulate you on such soil, such a climate, so well watered a coun-
try, a state, that tends itself to diversified industries so that while
agriculture is the staple pursuit, yet, as for instance here in Keokuk,
you are developing manufactories in a degree that would have seemed
absolutely impossible even a couple of decades ago. It is a great
thing to have such a soil, such physical material possibilities, but
the greatest of all things is to have, as Iowa has, the men and
women who can turn those possibilities to advantage. That is ulti-
mately what counts most. \
In thanking all of you for your greeting I know that the rest
of you will not grudge me saying a special word of thanks and ac-
knowledgment to those to whom the rest of us owe so much—to
the men of the Grand Army of the Republic. To you, the soldiers
and sailors of the Civil War to whom we owe the fact that there is
a President to address you. The lesson that they teach us who have
come after them is not merely a lesson for war, it is a lesson for
peace; for great though your deeds were, friends and comrades, great
though they were in the four years of the war, during which we
settled it that we should have a country of which to be proud, if
anything, even greater was the way in which, the war once done,
you turned to the pursuits of peace and did your full duty as citizens
again.
I passed the statue of General Curtis on the way up here “and
took off my hat to it,” and I felt that General Curtis in his life typified
what you had done in war and in peace. When the appeal to arms
came General Curtis, already a veteran of the Mexican war, turned
in and rendered service which was literally priceless in campaign
and battle; and the war Once over, he did not confine himself to
fighting it over and over again; then he took hold of the business
of pushing across the continent the first great trans-continental line
Theodore Roosevelt 3OI
and did that in the same spirit in which he had marched to battle.
The spirit that you showed in the war is the spirit we must show now
in peace, if we want to win. One of the great things of the war was
that you left us that right of kinship with and of feeling proud of,
your gallant antagonists; and I never speak to a meeting of the Grand
Army without the certainty of feeling that they will be more prompt
than any other to respond to a statement as to the gallantry of our
brethren who wore the gray. You left us the right of brotherhood
with them, the right of brotherhood with all in this country and
above all you taught us by your example what the spirit of brother-
hood really means. You won because out of the grinding need of
war was developed the capacity of each man on his worth as a man;
giving honor to whom honor is due ; putting forward, not trying for
motives of jealousy to throw him down because he was big, not trying
to put him up except because he could do the job, treating him on his
worth as a man.
You developed Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Thomas, Farragut, Foote,
out of the army and navy by the simple process of refusing to con-
sider aught but the man's fitness to do the job; and so in the work in
the ranks, among the Officers no less than among the enlisted men,
you won because you went upon the basis of treating the man ac-
cording to his individual worth. Each one of you as you marched,
as you went into battle, was concerned much about your comrades.
You needed to have them develop certain qualities, you were much
interested in certain of their traits, but you were not a bit interested in
the unessential ones. You did not care a snap of your finger as to the
way in which the man on your right or the man on your left wor-
shipped his Maker—as to his creed—you did not care as to his social
position; as to whether he had means, or all his life long had earned
his day's bread by the sweat of his brow; for that day, you did not
care whether he was a mechanic or a farmer, a banker or a brick-
layer; what you wished to know was, when the time of trial came he
would stay “put,” that was what you wanted to know. That is ex-
actly what you want to know in civil life.
We have not a problem so great and so terrible as the problem
which you had to solve with all your strength; with all your courage;
which you had to solve at the cost of crippling and the risk of death.
But we have problems. The complexity of our industrial civiliza-
tion has brought us face to face with them. We can solve them all
right only if we approach them as you approached your great duty
in the years from '61 to '65.
The details of application of the principles change, but the im-
mutable laws of morality and decency and common sense do not
change. We can solve all our problems, industrial, social, economic,
3O2 Messages and Speeches
political in the long run if we approach them in the spirit that recog-
nizes certain fundamental truths, of which the most essential is a
desire to do justice and to see that justice is done to each man, that
each man has his rights, that no man wrongs another, and we take
care to avoid two equally bad sets of vices. One is the vice of ar-
rogance, the vice of brutal disregard for the rights of the weak, of
arrogant looking down upon those who are less fortunate than we
are, of arrogant disregard for those who have not the peculiar ad-
vantages of position or of intellect, the advantages of any kind that
some have. We want to beware of the vices that from time im-
memorial have accompanied power, whether that power takes the
form of wealth or takes any other shape, and, on the other hand, just
as much do we need to guard ourselves against the equally base,
equally mean vices of jealousy, hatred, rancor, towards those who
are better off. The two sets of vices are complementary one to the
other; in essence they are the same. The man who looks down and
seeks to oppose the man of less means has at the bottom exactly the
same soul as the man who hates and strives to pull down another
man because he has been successful and the two are equally mean
vices.
Mean jealousy and envy of those who are well off are just as con-
temptible and mean as base arrogance towards those who are not
well off; and we are false to the principles of our government, false
to the principles of the men who, with Washington, founded the
nation, of the men who, under Lincoln and Grant, saved the nation,
if we do not equally avoid each kind of vice.
Another lesson to be learned from you is that you taught the virtue
of organization and yet the virtue of individual initiative. If you
had remained a mob each man dealing with his own interest, you
could not have accomplished anything. You had to have an organ-
ization, the training to develop the leadership, to develop the sys-
tematic plan of action, but you had each of you to do his part well
or no organization could have helped you. You needed the organi-
zation and you needed good weapons, but I do not care how well you
have been drilled, or how good the weapons have been, if you had
not had the right stuff in you you could not have gotten the right
stuff out of you. The American soldier left so imperishable a monu-
ment because he had in him the fighting edge, because he was able
to hold his own, because he had within his own breast what spurred
him on to effort, what spurred him on to triumph. Each of you
found that you needed help, that you could help others, but that it
was not worth while helping certain men, because they would not
take advantage of it when the help came. It is just the same in
civil life. There is not one of us who does not stumble; there is
Theodore Roosevelt 3O3
not one of us who is not guilty of shortcomings. Each of us needs
at times to have a helping hand stretched out to him or her, and
shame to whoever refuses to stretch out the helping hand. Every
man will slip and it is the duty of every man to help him on, to put
him on his feet and help him to walk, but if he lies down you can
not carry him. We will win in solving the political and social problems
of the day by showing the traits you and your comrades showed in
the great war; the traits of capacity for organization and yet fullest
recognition of the need of individual initiative, the fullest recognition
of the fact that the prime factor in determining whether a man is
a good citizen is exactly the same as the prime factor in determining
whether he is a good soldier; the man's own individual character. We
can win if we apply the lessons of the civil war to our own life nowa-
days. And, my fellow countrymen, when I come to Iowa I feel that
I can learn rather than teach, because in peace and in war you men
and women of Iowa have acted on exactly those principles. I thank
you for greeting me today. It has been a pleasure and joy to see you.
I wish you well and wish you prosperity in the future as you have
so abundantly enjoyed it in the past.
AT QUINCY, IL.L., APRIL 29, 1903.
Mr. Chairman and my fellow citizens:
There is one matter which I think presses for national legislative
attention—the matter of the currency. From your sister State of
Iowa I have a Secretary of the Treasury, who, as he showed last
fall, can be counted on to act with courage and with wisdom when-
ever the need arises, and to use fearlessly and coolly whatever the
law now allows him to use. Our currency laws have been recently
improved by specific declarations intended to secure permanency of
values; but this does not imply that these laws may not be further
improved and strengthened. It is wellnigh universally admitted, cer-
tainly in any business community such as this, that our currency system
is wanting in elasticity; that is, the volume does not respond to the
varying needs of the country as a whole, nor to the varying needs
of the different localities as well as of different times. Our people
scarcely need to be reminded that grain-raising communities require
a larger volume of currency at harvest time than during the summer
months; and the same principle in greater or less extent applies to
every community. Our currency laws need such modification as
will ensure definitely the parity of every dollar coined or issued by
the government, and such expansion or contraction of the currency as
will promptly and automatically respond to the varying needs of com-
merce. Permanent increase would be dangerous, permanent con-
traction ruinous, but the needed elasticity must be brought about by
3O4 Messages and Speeches
provisions which will permit both contraction and expansion as the
varying needs of the several communities and business interests at
different times and in different localities require.
AT ODEON HALL, ST. LOUIS, MO., BEFORE THE NATIONAL AND
INTERNATIONAL GOOD ROADS CONVENTION,
APRIL 29, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
When we wish to use descriptive terms fit to characterize great
empires and the men who made those empires great, invariably one
of the terms used is to signify that that empire built good roads.
When we speak of the Romans, we speak of them as rulers, as con-
querors, as administrators, as road builders. There were empires that
rose over night and fell over night, empires whose influence was ab-
solutely evanescent, which have passed away without leaving a trace
of their former existence; but wherever the Roman established his
rule the traces of that rule remain deep to-day, stamped on the lan-
guage and customs of the people, or stamped in tangible form upon
the soil itself. And so passing through Britain fifteen centuries and
over after the dominion of Rome passed away, the Roman roads as
features still remain; going through Italy, where power after power
has risen, and flourished, and vanished since the days when the
temporal dominion of the Roman emperors transferred its seat from
Rome to Byzantium—going through Italy after the Lombard, the
Goth, the Byzantine, and all the people of the Middle Ages that have
ruled that country—it is the imperishable Roman road that reappears.
The faculty, the art, the habit of road building marks in a nation
those solid, stable qualities which tell for permanent greatness. Merely
from the standpoint of historic analogy we should have a right to ask
that this people which has tamed a continent, which has built up a
country with a continent for its base, which boasts itself, with truth, as
the mightiest republic that the world has ever seen, which I firmly
believe will in the century now opening rise to a position of headship
and leadership such as no other nation has ever yet attained—merely
from historic analogy, I say, we should have a right to demand that
such a nation build good roads. Much more have we the right to
demand it from the practical standpoint. The great difference be-
tween the semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages and the civilization
which succeeded it was the difference between poor and good means
of communication. And we to whom space is less of an obstacle
than ever it was in the history of any other nation, we who have
spanned a continent, who have thrust our border westward in the
course of a century and a quarter until it has gone from the Atlantic
to the Alleghanies, from the Alleghanies down into the valley of
Theodore Roosevelt 305
the Mississippi, across the great plains, over the Rockies to where the
Golden Gate lets through the long heaving waters of the Pacific, and
finally to Alaska, to the Arctic regions, to the tropic islands of the
sea—we who take so little account of mere space must see to it that
the best means of nullifying the existence of space are at our com-
mand. ~
Of course, during the last century there has been an altogether
phenomenal growth of one kind of road wholly unknown to the
people of an earlier period—the iron road. The railroad is, of course,
something purely modern. A great many excellent people have pro-
ceeded upon the assumption that somehow or other having good rail-
ways should be a substitute for having good highways, good ordinary
roads. A more untenable position can not be imagined. What the
railway does is to develop the country; and of course its development
implies that the developed country will need more and better roads.
A few years ago it was a matter of humiliation that there should
be so little attention paid to our roads; that there should be a will-
ingness not merely to refrain from making good roads, but to let the
roads that were in existence become worse. I can not too heartily
congratulate our people upon the existence of a body such as this,
ramifying into every section of the country, having its connections in
every State of the country, and bent upon that eminently proper
work of making the conditions of life easier and better for the people
whom of all others we can least afford to see grow discontented
with their lot in life—the people who live in the country districts.
The extraordinary, the wholly unheard-of, rate of our industrial de-
velopment during the past seventy-five years, together with the good
sides, has had some evil sides. It is a fine thing to see our cities built
up, but not at the expense of the country districts. The healthy thing
to see is the building up of both the country and city go hand in hand.
But we can not expect the ablest, the most eager, the most ambitious
young men to stay in the country, to stay on the farm, unless they
have certain advantages. If the farm life is a life of isolation, a life
in which it is a matter of great and real difficulty for One man to
communicate with his neighbor, you can rest assured that there will
be a tendency to leave it on the part of those very people whom we
should most wish to see stay in it. It is a good thing to encourage
in every way any tendency which will tend to check an unhealthy
flow from the country to the city. There are several such tendencies
in evidence at present. The growth of electricity as a means of trans-
portation tends to a certain degree to exercise a centrifugal force to
offset the centripetal force of steam. Exactly as steam and electricity
have tended to gather men in masses, so now electricity, as applied
... to the purposes which steam has so long claimed as exclusively its
306 Messages and Speeches
own, tends again to scatter out the masses. The trolley lines that
go out into the country are doing a great deal to render it more
possible to live in the country and yet not to lose wholly the advan-
tages of the town. The telephone is not to be minimized as an
instrument with a tendency in the same direction; and rural free
delivery is playing its part along the same lines. But no one thing
can do more to offset the tendency toward an unhealthy growth from
the country into the city than the making and keeping of good roads.
They are needed for the sake of their effect upon the industrial con-
ditions of the country districts; and I am almost tempted to say
they are needed for the sake of social conditions in the country dis-
tricts. If winter means to the average farmer the existence of a long
line of liquid morasses through which he is to move his goods if bent
on business, or to wade and swim if bent on pleasure; if winter means
that after an ordinary rain the farmer boy or girl can not use his or
her bicycle; if a little heavy weather means a stoppage of all com-
munication not only with industrial centres but with the neighbors,
you must expect that there will be a great many young people of both
sexes who will not find farm life attractive. It is for this reason
that I feel the work you are doing is so pre-eminently one in the
interest of the Nation as a whole. I congratulate you upon the fact
that you are doing it. In our American life it would be hard to over-
estimate the amount of good that has been accomplished by asso-
ciations of individuals who have gathered together to work for a
common object which was to be of benefit to the community as a
whole; and among all the excellent objects for which men and women
combine to work to-day, there are few indeed which have a better
right to command the energies of those engaged in the movement,
and the hearty sympathy and support of those outside, than this move-
ment in which you are engaged.
|
AT ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY, ST. LOUIS, MO., APRIL 29, 1903.
Cardinal Gibbons, ladies and gentlemen:
It is indeed a pleasure to be received here as a guest of the first
and oldest university founded in our country west of the Mississippi
River in the Louisiana Purchase. I know your work. I have myself
been much in the West, and I have come across the traces of your
work, both among the communities of our own people and among
the Indian tribes.
I thank you personally for your kind allusions to me, and would
hold myself recreant to the principles upon which this government
was founded did I not strive as Chief Executive to do fair and equal
justice to all men without regard to the way in which any man chooses
to worship his Maker.
Theodore Roosevelt 307
AT THE DEDICATION CEREMONIES OF THE LOUISIANA PUR-
CHASE EXPOSITION, ST. LOUIS, APRIL 30, 1903.
Mr. President, ladies, and gentlemen:
At the outset of my address let me recall to the minds of my hearers
that the soil upon which we stand, before it was ours, was successively
the possession of two mighty empires, Spain and France, whose sons
made a deathless record of heroism in the early annals of the New
World. No history of the Western country can be written without
paying heed to the wonderful part played therein in the early days
by the soldiers, missionaries, explorers, and traders, who did their
work for the honor of the proud banners of France and Castile.
While the settlers of English-speaking stock, and those of Dutch,
German, and Scandinavian origin who were associated with them,
were still clinging close to the Eastern seaboard, the pioneers of
Spain and of France had penetrated deep into the hitherto unknown
wilderness of the West, had wandered far and wide within the
boundaries of what is now our mighty country. The very cities them-
selves—St. Louis, New Orleans, Santa Fe—bear witness by their
titles to the nationalities of their founders. It was not until the
Revolution had begun that the English-speaking settlers pushed west
across the Alleghanies, and not until a century ago that they entered
in to possess the land upon which we now stand.
We have met here to-day to commemorate the hundredth anni-
versary of the event which more than any other, after the foundation
of the Government and always excepting its preservation, determined
the character of our national life—determined that we should be a
great expanding Nation instead of relatively a small and stationary
One, ^.
Of course it was not with the Louisiana Purchase that our career
of expansion began. In the middle of the Revolutionary War the
Illinois region, including the present States of Illinois and Indiana,
was added to our domain by force of arms, as a sequel to the ad-
venturous expedition of George Rogers Clark and his frontier rifle-
men. Later the treaties of Jay and Pinckney materially extended
our real boundaries to the West. But none of these events was of
so striking a character as to fix the popular imagination. The old
thirteen colonies had always claimed that their rights stretched west-
ward to the Mississippi, and vague and unreal though these claims
were until made good by conquest, settlement, and diplomacy, they
still served to give the impression that the earliest westward move-
ments of our people were little more than the filling in of already
existing national boundaries. *
But there could be no illusion about the acquisition of the vast
territory beyond the Mississippi, stretching westward to the Pacific,
308 Messages and Speeches
which in that day was known as Louisiana. This immense region
was admittedly the territory of a foreign power, of a European king-
dom. None of our people had ever laid claim to a foot of it. Its
acquisition could in no sense be treated as rounding out any existing
claims. When we acquired it we made evident once for all that con-
sciously and of set purpose we had embarked on a career of expan-
sion, that we had taken our place among those daring and hardy na-
tions who risk much with the hope and desire of winning high posi-
tion among the great powers of the earth. As is so often the case in
nature, the law of development of a living organism showed itself in
its actual workings to be wiser than the wisdom of the wiseSt.
This work of expansion was by far the greatest work of our people
during the years that intervened between the adoption of the Consti-
tution and the outbreak of the Civil War. There were other ques-
tions of real moment and importance, and there were many which
at the time seemed such to those engaged in answering them; but
the greatest feat of our forefathers of those generations was the deed
of the men who, with pack train or wagon train, on horseback, On
foot, or by boat, pushed the frontier ever westward across the con-
tinent.
Never before had the world seen the kind of national expansion
which gave our people all that part of the American continent lying
west of the thirteen original States; the greatest landmark in which
was the Louisiana Purchase. Our triumph in this process of ex-
pansion was indissolubly bound up with the success of our peculiar
kind of federal government; and this success has been so complete that
because of its very completeness we now sometimes fail to appre-
ciate not only the all-importance but the tremendous difficulty of the
problem with which our Nation was originally faced.
When our forefathers joined to call into being this Nation, they
undertook a task for which there was but little encouraging precedent.
The development of civilization from the earliest period seemed to
show the truth of two propositions: In the first place, it had always
proved exceedingly difficult to secure both freedom and strength in
any government; and in the second place, it had always proved well-
nigh impossible for a nation to expand without either breaking up or
becoming a centralized tyranny. With the success of our effort to
combine a strong and efficient national union, able to put down dis-
order at home and to maintain our honor and interest abroad, I have
not now to deal. This success was signal and all-important, but it
was by no means unprecedented in the same sense that our type of
expansion was unprecedented. The history of Rome and of Greece
illustrates very well the two types of expansion which had taken place
in ancient time and which had been universally accepted as the only
Theodore Roosevelt 369
possible types up to the period when as a Nation we ourselves began
to take possession of this continent. The Grecian States performed
remarkable feats of colonization, but each colony as soon as created
became entirely independent of the mother State, and in after years
was almost as apt to prove its enemy as its friend. Local self-govern-
ment, local independence, was secured, but only by the absolute sacri-
fice of anything resembling national unity. In consequence, the Greek
world, for all its wonderful brilliancy and the extraordinary artistic,
literary, and philosophical development which has made all mankind
its debtors for the ages, was yet wholly unable to withstand a for-
midable foreign foe, save spasmodically. As soon as powerful, perma-
nent empires arose on its outskirts, the Greek states in the neighbor-
hood of such empires fell under their sway. National power and great-
ness were completely sacrificed to local liberty.
With Rome the exact opposite occurred. The imperial city rose to
absolute dominion over all the peoples of Italy and then expanded
her rule over the entire civilized world by a process which kept the
nation strong and united, but gave no room whatever for local liberty
and self-government. All other cities and countries were subject to
Rome. In consequence this great and masterful race of warriors,
rulers, road-builders, and administrators stamped their indelible im-
press upon all the after life of our race, and yet let an Over-centraliza-
tion eat out the vitals of their empire until it became an empty shell;
so that when the barbarians came they destroyed only what had al-
ready become worthless to the world.
The underlying viciousness of each type of expansion was plain
enough and the remedy now seems simple enough. But when the
fathers of the Republic first formulated the Constitution under which
we live this remedy was untried and no one could foretell how it would
work. They themselves began the experiment almost immediately by
adding new States to the original thirteen. Excellent people in the
East viewed this initial expansion of the country with great alarm.
Exactly as during the colonial period many good people in the mother-
country thought it highly important that settlers should be kept out
of the Ohio Valley in the interest of the fur companies, so after we
had become a Nation many good people on the Atlantic Coast felt
grave apprehension lest they might somehow be hurt by the west-
ward growth of the Nation. These good people shook their heads
over the formation of States in the fertile Ohio Valley which now
forms part of the heart of our Nation; and they declared that the
destruction of the Republic had been accomplished when through the
I.ouisiana Purchase we acquired nearly half of what is now that
same Republic's present territory. Nor was their feeling unnatural.
Only the adventurous and the far-seeing can be expected heartily to
3IO Messages and Speeches
welcome the process of expansion, for the nation that expands is a
nation which is entering upon a great career, and with greatness there
must of necessity come perils which daunt all save the most stout-
hearted. *
We expanded by carving the wilderness into Territories and out
of these Territories building new States when once they had received
as permanent settlers a sufficient number of our own people. Being
a practical Nation we have never tried to force on any section of our
new territory an unsuitable form of government merely because it
was suitable for another section under different conditions. Of the
territory covered by the Louisiana Purchase a portion was given
Statehood within a few years. Another portion has not been ad-
mitted to Statehood, although a century has elapsed—although doubt-
less it soon will be. In each case we showed the practical govern-
mental genius of our race by devising methods suitable to meet the
actual existing needs; not by insisting upon the application of some
abstract shibboleth to all our new possessions alike, no matter how
incongruous this application might sometimes be.
Over by far the major part of the territory, however, our people
spread in such numbers during the course of the nineteenth century
that we were able to build up State after State, each with exactly
the same complete local independence in all matters affecting purely
its own domestic interests as in any of the original thirteen States—
each owing the same absolute fealty to the Union of all the States
which each of the original thirteen States also owes—and finally each
having the same proportional right to its share in shaping and di-
recting the common policy of the Union which is possessed by any
other State, whether of the original thirteen or not.
This process now seems to us part of the natural order of things,
but it was wholly unknown until our own people devised it. It seems
to us a mere matter of course, a matter of elementary right and justice,
that in the deliberations of the national representative bodies the
representatives of a State which came into the Union but yesterday
stand on a footing of exact and entire equality with those of the Com-
monwealths whose sons once signed the Declaration of Independence.
But this way of looking at the matter is purely modern, and in its
origin purely American. When Washington during his Presidency
saw new States come into the Union on a footing of complete equality
with the old, every European nation which had colonies still adminis-
tered them as dependencies, and every other mother-country treated
the colonist not as a self-governing equal but as a subject.
The process which we began has since been followed by all the
great peoples who were capable both of expansion and of self-govern-
ment, and now the world accepts it as the natural process, as the rule;
Theodore Roosevelt 3II
but a century and a quarter ago it was not merely exceptional ; it
was unknown.
This, then, is the great historic significance of the movement of con-
tinental expansion in which the Louisiana Purchase was the most
striking single achievement. It stands out in marked relief even among
the feats of a nation of pioneers, a nation whose people have from the
beginning been picked out by a process of natural selection from
among the most enterprising individuals of the nations of western
Europe. The acquisition of the territory is a credit to the broad and
far-sighted statesmanship of the great statesmen to whom it was imme-
diately due, and above all to the aggressive and masterful character
of the hardy pioneer folk to whose restless energy these statesmen gave
expression and direction, whom they followed rather than led. The
history of the land comprised within the limits of the Purchase is an
epitome of the entire history of our people. Within these limits we
have gradually built up State after State until now they many times
surpass in wealth, in population, and in many-sided development, the
original thirteen States as they were when their delegates met in the
Continental Congress. The people of these States have shown them-
selves mighty in war with their fellow-man, and mighty in strength
to tame the rugged wilderness. They could not thus have conquered
the forest and the prairie, the mountain and the desert, had they not
possessed the great fighting virtues, the qualities which enable a people
to overcome the forces of hostile men and hostile nature. On the other
hand, they could not have used aright their conquest had they not in
addition possessed the qualities of self-mastery and self-restraint, the
power of acting in combination with their fellows, the power of yield-
ing obedience to the law and of building up an orderly civilization.
Courage and hardihood are indispensable virtues in a people; but the
people which possesses no others can never rise high in the scale either
of power or of culture. Great peoples must have in addition the
governmental capacity which comes only when individuals fully recog-
nize their duties to one another and to the whole body politic, and
are able to join together in feats of constructive statesmanship and of
honest and effective administration.
The old pioneer days are gone, with their roughness and their hard-
ship, their incredible toil and their wild half-savage romance. But
the need for the pioneer virtues remains the same as ever. The peculiar
frontier conditions have vanished; but the manliness and stalwart
hardihood of the frontiersmen can be given even freer scope under the
conditions surrounding the complex industrialism of the present day. ,
In this great region acquired for our people under the Presidency of
Jefferson, this region stretching from the Gulf to the Canadian border,
from the Mississippi to the Rockies, the material and social progress
3I2 Messages and Speeches
has been so vast that alike for weal and for woe its people now share
the opportunities and bear the burdens common to the entire civilized
world. The problems before us are fundamentally the same east and
west of the Mississippi, in the new States and in the old, and exactly
the same qualities are required for their successful solution.
We meet here to-day to commemorate a great event, an event which
marks an era in statesmanship no less than in pioneering. It is fitting
that we should pay our homage in words; but we must in honor make
our words good by deeds. We have every right to take a just pride
in the great deeds of our forefathers; but we show ourselves unworthy
to be their descendants if we make what they did an excuse for Our
lying supine instead of an incentive to the effort to show ourselves by
our acts worthy of them. In the administration of city, State, and
Nation, in the management of our home life and the conduct of our
business and social relations, we are bound to show certain high and
fine qualities of character under penalty of seeing the whole heart of
our civilization eaten out while the body still lives.
We justly pride ourselves on our marvelous material prosperity,
and such prosperity must exist in order to establish a foundation upon
which a higher life can be built; but unless we do in very fact build
this higher life thereon, the material prosperity itself will go for but
very little. Now, in 1903, in the altered conditions, we must meet
the changed and changing problems with the spirit shown by the men
who in 1803 and in the subsequent years gained, explored, conquered,
and settled this vast territory, then a desert, now filled with thriving
and populous States.
The old days were great because the men who lived in them had
mighty qualities; and we must make the new days great by showing
these same qualities. We must insist upon courage and resolution,
upon hardihood, tenacity, and fertility in resource; we must insist upon
the strong, virile virtues; and we must insist no less upon the virtues
of self-restraint, self-mastery, regard for the rights of others; we must
show our abhorrence of cruelty, brutality, and corruption, in public
and in private life alike. If we come short in any of these qualities
we shall measurably fail; and if, as I believe we surely shall, we de-
velop these qualities in the future to an even greater degree than in
the past, then in the century now beginning we shall make of this
Republic the freest and most orderly, the most just and most mighty
nation which has ever come forth from the womb of time.
AT KANSAS CITY, MO., MAY 1, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow Americans and my fellow citizens:
I am glad to have the chance of coming before the people of Kansas
City this morning. I have been traveling through your great and
Theodore Rooseºclf 3 I3
beautiful State, and now I have come to one of those typical American
cities of which all of us, in whatever part of the country we live, are
genuinely proud, and in thanking you—including my old college mates
—for this greeting this morning I know that the rest of you will not
grudge my saying a special word of acknowledgment and of greeting
to the men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray in the
times that tried men's souls. I do not usually say anything about our
being a reunited country, because it is unnecessary. Of course we are
reunited, and in every northern audience, wherever I see a group of
men wearing the button of the Grand Army of the Republic, I am
certain to find a group of men prompt to cheer every allusion to the
gallantry of the men who wore the blue and the gray. It was my
good fortune to command a regiment in the little war—you see, gen-
tlemen, with our war the trouble was there wasn’t enough to go
around; that wasn’t a trouble from which you suffered—I had the
good fortune to command a regiment filled alike with the sons of Con-
federate and Union soldiers, and as a mere matter of course the
only rivalry was the eager desire of each to do the most by his actions
to the common glory of the armies.
And you, by your lives, by what you did, taught us lessons, not
merely of war, but of peace. Never before in the history of this world
has any country been so fortunate as to see two great armies disband
after so gigantic a struggle and instantly every man turn his attention
to working as hard in peace as he had fought hard in war. You left
us, you men of those two armies, not only the right to glory in the
courage and to glory in the faith, but in the valor and the steadfast
devotion of each to the right as God gave you to see the right.
You left us not only that right to glory, but you left us the lesson
of the way in which you fought and in which you met defeat when
defeat had to come; and the lessons you learned then teach us now the
lesson we need most to apply: The lesson of sincere devotion to a
lofty idea; the lesson of facing each task as it comes, with the world-
old virtues needed throughout the ages by every people, which is to
work out successfully its problems in the world’s history. In the first
place there is the lesson of brotherhood. Standing together and judg-
ing each man his neighbor by that neighbor’s real worth, as each of
you moved to battle, as each of you spent the long weary months in
camps, in some ways harder than the battle, each grew to feel of
necessity that if he was to make a success of his part in the conflict
it would be by showing the essential manliness of the soldier, and
each was forced to recognize in his associates that manliness. It
mattered very little what part of the country that man came from ; it
mattered not at all what way he chose to worship his Maker, whether
or not he was a man of means or a man of poverty. What you were
3I4 Messages and Speeches
concerned with was if he was indeed a man, whether when the crisis
came, he would stay “put,” when the order came to move he would
move in the right direction.
That war could not have been fought as it was, it could not have
left us such deathless memories; memories of the valor shown by each
side; it could not have done that had you been riven among yourselves
by any artificial distinctions, and if we of today let any divisions creep
in among us, whether of creed against creed, race against race, or rich
man against poor man, it will go evil with us in the future. There is
no patent device for getting good government, as there is none for
winning in war. Weapons change and tactics change, but the quality
of the fighting man remains unchanged as the qualities that made
Caesar's legions victorious—the quality that made such superb soldiers
out of the men who followed Grant and Lee. Discipline is necessary
and the fool that will not submit will only be beaten. If you put the
best of weapons in the hands of a coward he will be defeated by the
brave man with a club.
After all has been done in the way of taking advantage of the best
weapons it remains true that against a foe equal in power we can win
only by showing the iron resolution, the hardened will that never bends
till the end sought has been attained. No device that the wit of man
can produce, no form of law or of organization among ourselves can
supply the lack of fundamental virtues the absence of which has meant
the downfall of any nation since the world began. No smartness, no
cleverness, unaccompanied by the sense of moral responsibility will
ever supply the presence of fundamental precepts put forth in the
Bible and put forth in the code of morals of every successful nation
in the history of the world from antiquity to modern times.
Always, in any government, among any people, there are certain
forces for evil that take many shapes, but which are rooted in the
same base and evil characteristics of the human soul, in the evil of
arrogance, of jealousy, envy, hatred; and to certain people the appeal
is made to yield to one set of evil forces. To some it is made to yield
to another set, and the result is equally bad in each case. The vice of
arrogance, of hard and brutal indifference on the part of those with
wealth toward those who have not, is a shameful and dreadful vice.
It is not one whit worse than the rancorous hatred and jealousy of
those who are not well off for those who are. The man, who, either
by practice or precept, seeks to give to any man or withhold from him
any advantage in law or society or in the workings of Society or busi-
ness because of wealth or poverty, is false to the traditions of this
republic. We don’t have to face the tremendous problems with which
you, from '61 to '65, were brought face to face. We have some of our
own to solve, and, if we are worthy to claim kinship, we must accept
Theodore Roosevelt 3I 5
your great deeds, not as an excuse for our lying at ease, but as a
spur to urge us on to effort, a whip to make us feel the keenest shame
if we fall short.
Your problems were those of war.” At the opening of the Twentieth
century ours are problems of peace. The tremendous industrial de-
velopment of this country with its complexities has brought with it
very much of good and some of evil. It is because of that that you
and I are here to-day. Kansas City exists to-day because of the
tremendous growth of the country because of the wonderful improve-
ment in the mechanism of business, both material mechanism, steam,
electricity, machinery, and in the improved mechanism of minds which
has developed good leaders capable of handling them. Let us think
carefully before, by any act of folly, we destroy what has thus so mar-
velously been built up. It is easy to pull down but not so easy to re-
build or to replace, and let us take serious thought from the history of
the republics of old and avoid the rocks on which they foundered and
the chief rock—the chief danger in the path of each of the old repub-
lics of antiquity of the middle ages. This chief danger came from the
growth and encouragement of anything in the nature of class hostility.
It will be an evil day for us when we try to make this a government
especially designed to help any One class, save as that class includes
honest, fearless, upright, hard-working citizens. And it will be only
a less evil day when any considerable proportion of our people fail to
remember that it is the duty of the government not to favor the rich
man nor to discriminate against him : nor to favor the poor man or
discriminate against him, but to favor every man, rich or poor, if he
but behaves himself and does his duty to the state and to his neighbors.
Every locality has its own particular shape of problem, and as these
change or shift from time to time it would be useless to try to advise
this or any other community with a view to any specific instance. All
that can be done is to lay down certain general rules of conduct. In
doing so I am well aware how easy it is to disregard advice on general
lines, and yet all that can be done is to lay down a general rule and try
‘Many of President Roosevelt's critics—they are becoming beautifully less, by the way—
have found fault with him for his evident leaning towards the army. They said that he
liked war, and then, after dilating on what they call “the horrors of war,” leaned com-
placently back with the assumption that any man who would favor any war with its attendant
horrors must be a very wrong-headed, much mistaken man. As a matter of fact, President
Roosevelt does not favor war but peace. His record shows it at every angle. For all that,
those timidly respectable ones, who deplore and denounce war under any and all circumstances
and who regard a recital of war’s “horrors” as conclusive in support of their pose, should,
when they have done talking of war, bend themselves to a consideration of the “horrors of
peace.” If mere “horror” be a reason against a condition, then as many exist in disfavor of
peace as of war. Walk through the East Side of New York, where humanity, by the crowded
thousands, freezes in winter, burns in summer, starves always. These anti-war humanitarians
do not seem deeply worried over these “horrors of peace” however. Perhaps they think it
better to die in a garret than on a battlefield, of pestilence instead of lead or steel. As for
any question of sudden death: among other “horrors of peace” it should be noted that the
cable cars of New York, during the same space of time, killed and wounded more Americans
than did the Spanish war.—A. H. L.
316 Messages and Speeches
in good faith, and then adapt our conduct to that general rule. In
the general life of the country to-day, that country will go forward,
each section, each organized unit within certain cities, states or coun-
ties, much in proportion to the way in which the dwellers therein
realize that in the long run the good of all is the good of each, and in
the long run we will go up or down together.
If misery comes to us it will be felt unequally but more or less by
each. If good fortune comes again, it will be felt unequally but more
or less by all. In our complex relations, the employer to the employed,
one class with another, one section with another, we can work out a
really successful result only if each of those brought together makes
an honest effort to understand his neighbor's viewpoint, and then
makes an honest effort while working for his own interests to avoid
working to the detriment of his neighbors. This advice is so old, I
suppose that it is almost trite, but we need to work on it in our indus-
trial relations one with another. We are not going to make any new
commandments at this stage of the world’s progress that will take the
place of the old ones. The truths that were spoken on Mount Sinai
are truths to-day. The things that were true when the Golden Rule
was promulgated are true now. Each man must work for himself; if
he does not do so, there is no use for anyone to work for him ; and
each must try to get ahead, for his own sake, for the sake of his wife
and children and with a full recognition of his duty to his neighbors,
or in the end he will bring disaster not merely to his neighbor, but to
himself, and a wrong done is as much a wrong if done by the big as
by the little, as much by capital as labor, as much by the laborer as
the capitalist; and the man is no real friend of his country, no real
friend of any set of people in the country, if he appeals to the people
only from the standpoint of asking them to see that they get their full
share and omits to ask them to do full justice to others also.
In the long run the wage worker and the capitalist will go down in
common ruin if each does not try to do justice to the other and work
out a scheme of action. which shall work to the common advantage;
let me tell you just one story: It is a very easy thing to complain
when people are feeling badly, or even if they are not feeling at
all, and it has become common to kick when they wax fat, which is
by no means in accordance with ethical standards. Well, in the old
days I had a ranch in the Western country where the cowboy and the
branding iron were more common than barb wire fences. There was a
practice then and still is, I suppose, for the men to gather in all the
stray calves. If no owner and no mother, properly branded, appeared
to claim the calf at the end of the round up it was a maverick and by
range law it would be branded with the brand of the range on which
it was found. I had a man once—a good man—working for me, and
Theodore Roosevelt 317
one day while riding with him we found a maverick. We built a sage
brush fire and the man took the cinch ring from the saddle and got
ready to brand it with the thistle brand. When he was ready I stopped
him. “Hold on,” I said, “you’re putting on my brand.” “I know ;
I always put on my boss's brand.”
“You go to the ranch,” said I, “and get your time. If you’ll steal
for me, you’ll steal from me.”
This is a homely anecdote, but it has an application in social and
business life, and no set can afford to follow any man who asks them
to go into a career of self-interest. If they do, that man will get them
to do wrong. We cannot trifle with the fundamental laws of right-
eousness and morality, and, least of all, in the complex relations of
capital and labor.
Another thing, I maintain there is a certain tendency among many
excellent people to believe that everything can be accomplished by
law, that where there is a bad law it is due to the state and society,
and that there is an immediate need for radical changes. The mil-
lennium is a good way off yet. Mankind lived some thousands of years
ago. We have made steady progress, but it has been because while we
kept our eye on the stars we kept our feet on the ground. It has been
by working up to lofty ideals in practical ways that law can do some-
thing, at times a good deal. The honest and fearless administration
of the law can do much good, but a bad administration can bring all
our efforts to nothing. Often much can be done by organization among
ourselves, but when all has been said and done, when the best laws
have been enacted and well administered and we have done all we can
do to help one another, it still remains fundamentally true, and has
been so since the beginning of the world, that in the long run the chief
factor in any man's success must be the sum of that man's qualities
and characteristics. No law will ever make a coward brave, a fool
wise or a weakling strong. All the law can do is to shape things
that no injustice shall be done by one to another and so that each man
shall be given the chance to show the stuff that is in him.
You, men of war, as I said, you might take a man with the best
weapons devised by genius and you could not make a soldier out of
him, because if he does not have the stuff in him it would be im-
possible to get it out. So in civil life there is not a man of us, not
One, who does not at times stumble, slip, at times need a helping hand,
and shame then on him who will not stretch it out. Shame on such
a man! But if the man lies down you cannot carry him. If he will
not walk for himself, help him up into the right path and help him in
the only way. Help him to help himself. But if he won’t exert him-
self, if he wants to rely on others, above all, if he wants to moan
about his “wrongs,” make up your minds you can do little with him.
There is no device to make good government. There are plenty
318 Messages and Speeches
of countries like ours, governed under the same laws, and the net
outcome is absolutely different, because back of the laws lies a differ-
ent set of men, who determine the success or failure of any republic,
and there is no patent device for getting good citizenship. We need
strong bodies; we need more than that; we need strong minds, and,
more than that, we need character into which many elements enter,
the principal ones being honesty in its widest and deepest sense, de-
cency and morality. These make a man a good father, a good hus-
band, a good employer, a good man in his relations to the state, and
something more. But it matters nothing how good a man be if he
is afraid; you can’t do a thing with him. The man who sits at home
in the parlor and bemoans his fate will never succeed. We need more
of daring, strength and will. When we say “He is not only a good
man, but a man,” we say a good deal, but we must also be able to say
“He is a real sensible man,” for in every man we need the saving
grace of common sense.
If we fail in developing the qualities in our average citizenship we
shall fail as a nation. And Oh, my fellows, my countrymen, we are
going to succeed. As a nation we are going to make this the great-
est the sun has ever shone upon, because we are going to develop a
sense of honesty and character to a degree hitherto unknown among
the nations of the earth.
AT TOPEKA, KANS., MAY 1, 1903.
Colonel McCook, gentlemen, and ladies:
It needed no urging to get me to accept your invitation. I hailed
the chance of speaking a few words to you on this Occasion, because
it seems to me that the railroad branch of the Young Men's Christian
Association exemplifies in practice just exactly what I like to preach;
that is, the combination of efficiency with decent living and high ideals.
In our present advanced civilization we have to pay certain penalties
for what we have obtained. Among the penalties is the fact that in
very many occupations there is so little demand upon nerve, hardi-
hood, and endurance, that there is a tendency to unhealthy softening
of fibre and relaxation of fibre; and such being the case I think it is a
fortunate thing for our people as a whole that there should be certain
occupations, prominent among them railroading, in which the man
has to show the very qualities of courage, of hardihood, or willing-
ness to face danger, the cultivation of the power of instantaneous de-
cision under difficulties, and the other qualities which go to make up
the virile side of a man's character—the qualities, Colonel McCook,
which you and those like you showed when as boys, as young men,
they fought to a finish the great Civil War.
Theodore Roosevelt 3I9
So much for the manliness, so much for the strength, so much for
the courage, developed by your profession, all of which you show,
and have to show, or you could not succeed in doing the work
you are doing as your life work. These qualities are all-im-
portant, but they are not all-sufficient. It is necessary absolutely to
have them. No nation can rise to greatness without them; but by
them alone no nation will ever become great. Reading through the
pages of history you come upon nation after nation in which there
has been a high average of individual strength, bravery, and hardi-
hood, and yet in which there has been nothing approaching to national
greatness, because those qualities were not supplemented by others
just as necessary. With the courage, with the hardihood, with the
strength, must come the power of self-restraint, the power of self-
mastery, the capacity to work for and with others as well as for one's
self, the power of giving to others the love which each of us must
bear for his neighbor, if we are to make our civilization really great.
And these are the qualities which are fostered and developed, which
are given full play, by institutions such as the Young Men's Christian
Association.
The other day in a little Lutheran church at Sioux Falls I listened
to a most interesting and most stimulating sermon, which struck me
particularly because of the translation of a word which, I am ashamed
to say, I had myself always before mistranslated. It was on the old
text of faith, hope, and charity. The sermon was delivered in Ger-
man, and the word that the preacher used for charity was not charity,
but love; preaching that the greatest of all the forces with which we
deal for betterment is love. Looking it up I found, of course, what I
ought to have known but did not, that the Greek word which we have
translated into the word charity, should be more properly translated
love. That is, we use the word charity at present in a sense which
does not make it correspond entirely to the word used in the original
Greek. This Lutheran preacher developed in a very striking but
very happy fashion the absolute need of love in the broadest sense of
the word, in order to make mankind even approximately perfect.*
We need then the two qualities—the quality of which I first spoke
to you which has many shapes, the quality which rests upon courage,
upon bodily and mental strength, upon will, upon daring, upon resolu-
tion, the quality which makes a man work; and then we need the
quality of which the preacher spoke when he spoke of love as being
the great factor; the ultimate factor, in bringing about the kind of
human fellowship which will even approximately enable us to come
up toward the standard after which I think all of us with many short-
* It is this which I have had in mind when more than once I have printed that “It is
better to do good than to do right.”—A. H. L.
32O Messages and Speeches
comings strive. Work, the quality which makes a man ashamed not
to be able to pull his own weight, not to be able to do for himself as
well as for others without being beholden to any one for what he is
doing. No man is happy if he does not work. Of all miserable crea-
tures the idler, in whatever rank of society, is in the long run the most
miserable. If a man does not work, if he has not in him not merely
the capacity for work but the desire for work, then nothing can be
done with him. He is out of place in our community. We have in
our scheme of government no room for the man who does not wish
to pay his way through life by what he does for himself and for the
community. If he has leisure which makes it unnecessary for him
to devote his time to earning his daily bread, then all the more he is
bound to work just as hard in some way that will make the com-
munity the better off for his existence. If he fails in that, he fails
to justify his existence. Work, the capacity for work, is absolutely
necessary; and no man’s life is full, no man can be said to live in the
true sense of the word, if he does not work. This is necessary, and
yet it is not enough. If a man is utterly selfish, if utterly disregardful
of the rights of others, if he has no ideals, if he works simply for the
Sake of ministering to his own base passions, if he works simply to
gratify himself, small is his good in the community. I think even then
he is probably better off than if he is an idler, but he is of no real use
unless together with the quality which enables him to work he has the
quality which enables him to love his fellows, to work with them and
for them for the common good of all.
It seems to me that these Young Men's Christian Associations play
a part of the greatest consequence, not merely because of the great
good they do in themselves, but because of the lesson of brotherhood
that they teach all of us. All of us here are knit together by bonds
which we can not sever. For weal or for woe our fates are inextricably
intermingled. All of us in our present civilization are dependent upon
one another to a degree never before known in the history of mankind,
and in the long run we are going to go up or go down together. For
a moment some man may rise by trampling on his fellows; for a
moment, and much more commonly, some men may think they will
rise or gratify their envy and hatred by pulling others down. But
any such movement upward is probably illusory, and is certainly short-
lived. Any permanent movement upward must come in such a shape
that all of us feel the lift a little, and if there is a tendency downward
all of us will feel that tendency, too. We must, if we are to raise
ourselves, realize that each of us in the long run can with certainty
be raised only if the conditions are such that all of us are somewhat
raised. In order to bring about these conditions the first essential is
that each shall have a genuine spirit of regard and friendship for
Theodore Roosevelt 321
others, and that each of us shall try to look at the problems of life
somewhat from his neighbor’s standpoint—that we shall have the ca-
pacity to understand one another's position, One another’s needs, and
also the desire each to help his brother as well as to help himself. To
do that wisely, wisely to strive with that as the aim, is not very easy.
Many qualities are needed in order that we can contribute our mite
toward the upward movement of the world—among them the quality
of self-abnegation, and yet combined with it the quality which will
refuse to submit to injustice. I want to preach the two qualities going
hand in hand. I do not want a man to fail to try to strive for his own
betterment, I do not want him to be quick to yield to injustice; I want
him to stand for his rights; but I want him to be very certain that he
knows what his rights are, and that he does not make them the wrongs
of some one else.
I have a great deal of faith in the average American citizen. I
think he is a pretty good fellow, and I think he can generally get on
with the other average American citizen if he will only know him.
If he does not know him, but makes him a monster in his mind, then
he will not get on with him. But if he will take the trouble to know
him and realize that he is a being just like himself, with the same in-
stincts, not all of them good, the same desire to overcome those that
are not good, the same purposes, the same tendencies, the same short-
comings, the same desires for good, the same need of striving against
evil; if he will realize all this, then if you can get the two together
with an honest desire each to try not only to help himself but to help
the other, most of our problems will be solved. And I can imagine
no way more likely to hurry forward such a favorable solution than
to encourage the building up of just such institutions as this.
Therefore, I congratulate you with all my heart upon this meeting
today. Therefore I esteem myself most fortunate in having the
chance of addressing you. It is a very good thing to attend to the
material side of life. We must in the first instance attend to our
material prosperity. Unless we have that as a foundation we can not
build up any higher kind of life. But we shall lead a miserable and
sordid life if we spend our whole time in doing nothing but attending
to our material needs. If the building up of the railroads, of the farms,
of the factories, of the industrial centres, means nothing whatever but
an increase in the instruments of production and an increase in the
fevered haste with which those instruments are used, progress amounts
to but a little thing. If, however, the developing of our material pros-
perity is to serve as a foundation upon which we raise a higher, a
purer, a fuller, a better life, then indeed things are well with the
Republic. If as our wealth increases the wisdom of our use of the
wealth increases in even greater proportion, then the wealth has
322 Messages and Speeches
*
justified its existence many times over. If with the industry, the skill,
the hardihood, of those whom I am addressing and their fellows, noth-
ing comes beyond a selfish desire each to grasp for himself whatever
he can of material enjoyment, then the outlook for the future is indeed
grave, then the advantages of living in the twentieth century sur-
rounded by all our modern improvements, our modern symbols of
progress, are indeed small. But if we mean to make of each fresh
development in the way of material betterment a step toward a fresh
development in moral and spiritual betterment, then we are to be con-
gratulated.
To me the future seems full of hope because, although there are
many conflicting tendencies, and although some of these tendencies
of our present life are for evil, yet, on the whole the tendencies for
good are in the ascendency. And I greet this audience, this great body
of delegates, with peculiar pleasure because they are men who embody,
by the very fact of their presence here, the two essential sets of
qualities of which I have been speaking. They embody the ca-
pacity for self-help with the desire mutually to help one the other.
You have several qualities I like. You have sound bodies. Your pro-
fession is not one that can be carried on, at least in some of its
branches, without the sound body. You have sound minds, and that
is better than sound bodies; and finally, the fact that you are here, the
fact that you have done what you have done, shows that you have that
which counts for more than body, for more than mind—character.
I congratulate you upon what you are doing for yourselves, and I
congratulate you even more upon what you are doing for all men who
hope to see the day brought nearer when the people of all nations,
will realize—not merely talk of, but realize—what the essence of
brotherhood is. I congratulate you, as I say, not only because you
are bettering yourselves, but because to you, for your good fortune,
it is given to better others, to teach, in the way in which teaching is
most effective, not merely by precept but by action. The railroad men
of this country are a body entitled to the well wishes of their fellow-
men in any event, but peculiarly is this true of the railroad men of
the country who join in such work as that of the Young Men's Chris-
tian Associations, because they are showing by their actions—and oh,
how much louder actions speak than words!—that it is not only
possible, but very, very possible and easy to combine the manliness
which makes a man able to do his own share of the world’s work, with
that fine and lofty love of one's fellow-men which makes you able to
come together with your fellows and work hand in hand with them
for the common good of mankind in general.
[The Kansas City Star, May 2, 1903.]
Theodore Roosevelt 323
AT DENVER, COL., MAY 4, 1903.
Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
Colorado has certain special interests which it shares with the group
of States immediately around it. To my mind one of the best pieces
of legislation put upon the statute books of the National Government
of recent years was the irrigation act; an act under which we declare
it to be the national policy that exactly as care is to be taken of the
harbors and the lower courses of the rivers, so in their upper courses
care is to be taken by the Nation of the irrigation work to be done
in connection with them.
Under that act a beginning has been made in Colorado, Montana,
Wyoming, Nevada, and the Territory of Arizona. There is bound to
be disappointment here and there, where people have built hopes with-
out a quite sufficient warranty of fact behind. But good will surely
come at once and wellnigh immeasurable good in the future from the
policy which has thus been begun. In Colorado two-thirds of your
products come from irrigated farms, and four years ago those products
already surpassed fifteen million dollars. With the aid of the govern-
ment far more can be done in the future even than has been done in
the past. The object of the law is to provide small irrigated farms to
actual settlers, to actual home-makers; the land is given away ultimately
in small tracts under the terms of the homestead act, the settlers repay-
ing the cost of bringing water to their lands in ten annual payments;
and lands now in private ownership can be watered in small tracts by
similar payments, but the law forbids the furnishing of water to large
tracts, and the aim of the government is rigidly to prevent the acquisi-
tion of large rights for speculative purposes. The purpose of the law
was, and that purpose is being absolutely carried out, to promote set-
tlement and cultivation of small farms carefully tilled. Water made
available under the terms of this law becomes appurtenant, under the
law, to the land, and can not be disposed of without it, and thus monop-
Oly and speculation in this vitally important commodity are prevented,
or at least their evil effects minimized so far as the law or the adminis-
tration of the law can bring about that end. This is the great factor
in future success. The policy is a policy of encouragement to the
home-maker, to the man who comes to establish his home, to bring up
his children here as a citizen of the commonwealth, and his welfare is
guarded by the union of the water and the land.
The government can not deal with large numbers individually. We
have encouraged the formation of associations of water users, of culti-
vators of the soil in small tracts. The ultimate ownership and control
of the irrigation works will pass away from the government into the
hands of those users, those home-makers, who through their officers
do the necessary business of their associations. The aim of the govern-
324 Messages and Speeches
ment is to give locally the ultimate control of water distributed and to
leave neighborhood disputes to be settled locally; and that should be
so as far as it is possible. The law protects vested rights; it prevents
conflict with established laws or institutions; but of course it is im-
portant that the legislatures of the States should co-operate with the
National Government. When the works are constructed to utilize the
waters now wasted, happy and prosperous homes will flourish where
twenty years ago it would have seemed impossible that a man could
live. It is a great national measure of benefit, and while, as I say,
it is primarily to benefit the people of the mountain States and of the
great plains, yet it will ultimately benefit the whole community. For,
my fellow-countrymen, you can never afford to forget for one moment
that in the long run anything that is of benefit to one part of our
Republic is of necessity of benefit to all the Republic. The creation
of new homes upon desert lands means greater prosperity for Colo-
rado and the Rocky Mountain States, and inevitably their greater pros-
perity means greater prosperity for Eastern manufacturers, for South-
ern cotton growers, for all our people throughout the Union.
*
AT SANTA FE, N. M., MAY 5, 1903.
Mr. Governor, Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen:
It is, of course, with a peculiar feeling of pleasure that I come here
to New Mexico, from which Territory half (and if my memory serves
me correctly—a little over half) of the men of my regiment came. The
man is but a poor man wherever he may be born to whom One part
of this country is not exactly as dear as any other part. And I should
count myself wholly unworthy of the position I hold if I did not
strive to represent the people of the mountains and the plains ex-
actly as much as those of the Mississippi Valley or of either coast,
Atlantic or Pacific. I know your people, Mr. Governor, and I need
not say how fond I am of them, for that you know yourself. How
could I help being fond of people with whom I have worked, with
whom I marched to battle? The only men here to whom I would
doff my hat quicker than to the men of my own regiment are the
men of the great war. You know well the claim that comradeship
in war makes between man and man; and it has always seemed to
me, Mr. Governor, that in a sense my regiment in its composition was
a typical American regiment. Its people came from the West chiefly,
but some from the East; many from the South, but some from the
North, so that every section was represented in it. They varied
in birthplace as in creed; some were born on this side of the water,
some on the other side; some of their ancestors had come to New
Mexico, as did your ancestors, Mr. Governor, when this was already
Theodore Roosevelt 325
a city and at a time when not one English-speaking community ex-
isted on the Atlantic seaboard; some were men whose forefathers
were among the early Puritans and Pilgrims; some were of those
whose forefathers had settled by the banks of the James even be-
fore the Puritan and Pilgrim came to this country; but after your
people came. There were men in that regiment who themselves were
born, or whose parents were born, in England, Ireland, Germany, or
Scandinavia, but there was not a man, no matter what his creed, what
his birthplace, what his ancestry, who was not an American and noth-
ing else. We had representatives of the real, original, native Amer-
icans, because we had no inconsiderable number who were in whole
or in part of Indian blood. There was in the regiment but one kind
of rivalry among those men, and but one would have been tolerated.
That was the rivalry of each man to see if he could not do his duty
a little better than any one else. Short would have been the shrift of
any man who tried to introduce division along lines of section, or
creed, or class. We had, serving in the ranks, men of inherited wealth
and men who all their lives had earned each day's bread by that day's
labor, and they stood on a footing of exact equality. It would not
have been any more possible for a feeling of arrogance to exist on
one side than for a feeling of rancor and envy to exist on the other.
I appreciate to the full all the difficulties under which you labor,
and I think that your progress has been astonishing. I congratulate
you upon all that has been done, and I am certain that the future will
far more than make good the past. I believe that we have come
upon an era of fuller development for New Mexico. That develop-
ment must of course take place principally through the average of
foresight, thrift, industry, energy and will of the citizens of New
Mexico; but the government can, and will, help somewhat. This is a
great grazing State. Because of the importance of the grazing in-
dustry I wish to bespeak your support for the preservation in proper
shape of the forest reserves of the State. These forest reserves are
created and are kept up in the interest of the home-maker. In
many of them there is much natural pasturage. Where that is the
case the object is to have that pasturage used by the settlers, by
the people of the Territory, not eaten out so that nobody will have
the benefit after three years. I want the land preserved so that the
pasturage will do, not merely for a man who wants to make a good
thing out of it for two or three years, but for the man who wishes
to see it preserved for the use of his children and his children's chil-
dren. That is the way to use the resources of the land. I build no
small hope upon the aid that under the wise law of Congress will
ultimately be extended to this as to other States and Territories in
the way of governmental aid to irrigation. Irrigation is, of course,
326 Messages and Speeches
to be in the future wellnigh the most potent factor in the agricultural
development of this Territory and one of the factors which will do
most toward bringing it up to Statehood. Nothing will count more
than development of that kind in bringing the Territory in as a State.
That is the kind of development which I am most anxious to see
here—the development that means permanent growth in the capacity
of the land, not temporary, not the exploiting of the land for a year
or two at the cost of its future impoverishment, but the building up
of farm and ranch in such shape as to benefit the home-maker whose
intention it is that this Territory of the present, this State of the
future, shall be a great State, in the American Union.
AT THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL, ALBUQUERQUE, N. M., MAY 5, 1903.
Bishop:
Permit me to thank you and to say how much I appreciate the
courtesy you showed in putting yourself to such inconvenience to
come here to greet me. I had hoped to meet you at Santa Fe, in
the cathedral, where I participated in the baptism of the son of one
of the men of my regiment.
I greet the school children and the sisters. There can be no greater
privilege than to meet a missionary who has done good work. Of
all the work that is done or that can be done for our country, the
greatest is that of educating the body, the mind, and above all the
character, giving spiritual and moral training to those who in a few
years are themselves to decide the destines of the Nation.
AT THE INDIAN SCHOOL, ALBUQUERQUE, N. M., MAY 5, 1903.
Mr. Superintendent:
I wish to express the peculiar pleasure it is to have seen the Indian
schools to-day, and through you, Mr. Superintendent, I want to say
to the Indians that are right behind you, what a fine thing it is to
see the industry and thrift of their people. I was struck by their
orchards, the irrigated fields, and by seeing them working in the fields
and along the road. The Indian who will work and do his duty will
stand on a par with any other American citizen. Of course I will do
as every President must do, I will stand for his rights with the same
jealous eagerness that I would for the rights of any white man. I.
am glad to see the Indian children being educated as these are edu-
cated so as to come more and more into the body of American citizen-
ship, to fit themselves for work in the home, work in the fields, for
leading decent, clean lives, for making themselves self-supporting,
for being good providers and good housekeepers; in other words,
for becoming American citizens just like other American citiz
Theodore Roosevelt 327
AT GRAND CANYON, ARIZ, MAY 6, 1903.
Mr. Governor, and you, my fellow citizens:
I am glad to be in Arizona to-day. From Arizona many gallant
men came into the regiment which I had the honor to command. Ari-
zona sent men who won glory on fought fields, and men to whom
came a glorious and an honorable death fighting for the flag of their
country. As long as I live it will be to me an inspiration to have
served with Bucky O'Neill. I have met so many comrades whom
I prize, for whom I feel respect and admiration and affection, that
I shall not particularize among them except to say that there is none
for whom I feel all of respect and admiration and affection more than
for your Governor.
I have never been in Arizona before. It is one of the regions from
which I expect most development through the wise action of the
National Congress in passing the irrigation act. The first and big-
gest experiment now in view under that act is the one that we are
trying in Arizona. I look forward to the effects of irrigation partly
as applied by and through the government, still more as applied by
individuals, and especially by associations of individuals, profiting
by the example of the government, and possibly by help from it—I
look forward to the effects of irrigation as being of greater conse-
quence to all this region of country in the next fifty years than any
other material movement whatsoever.
In the Grand Canyon, Arizona has a natural wonder which, so
far as I know, is, in kind, absolutely unparalleled throughout the rest
of the world. I want to ask you to do one thing in connection with
it, in your own interest and in the interest of the country—to keep this
great wonder of nature as it now is. I was delighted to learn of
the wisdom of the Santa Fe railroad people in deciding not to build
their hotel on the brink of the canyon. I hope you will not have
a building of any kind, not a summer cottage, a hotel, or anything
else, to mar the wonderful grandeur, the sublimity, the great loneli-
ness and beauty of the canyon. Leave it as it is. You cannot im-
prove on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only
mar it. What you can do is to keep it for your children, your chil-
dren's children and for all who come after you, as one of the great
sights which every American, if he can travel at all, should see. We
have gotten past the stage, my fellow-citizens, when we are to be
pardoned if we treat any part of our country as something to be
skinned for two or three years for the use of the present generation,
whether it is the forest, the water, the scenery. Whatever it is, handle
it so that your children's children will get the benefit of it. If you
deal with irrigation, apply it under circumstances that will make it of
benefit, not to the speculator who hopes to get profit out of it for two
328 Messages and Speeches
or three years, but handle it so that it will be of use to the home-maker,
to the man who comes to live here, and to have his children stay
after him. Keep the forests in the same way. Preserve the forests
by use; preserve them for the ranchman and the stockman, for the
people of the Territory, for the people of the region round about.
Preserve them for that use, but use them so that they will not be
squandered, that they will not be wasted, so that they will be of
benefit to the Arizona of 1953 as well as the Arizona of 1903.
To the Indians here I want to say a word of welcome. In my regi-
ment I had a good many Indians. They were good enough to fight
and to die, and they are good enough to have me treat them exactly
as square as any white man.* There are many problems in con-
nection with them. We must save them from corruption and from
brutality; and I regret to say that at times we must save them from
unregulated Eastern philanthropy. All I ask is a square deal for
every man. Give him a fair chance. Do not let him wrong any one,
and do not let him be wronged.
I believe in you. I am glad to see you. I wish you well with all my
heart, and I know that your future will justify all the hopes we have.
At BARStow, CAL, MAY 7, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
This is the first time I have ever been to California, and I cannot
say to you how much I have looked forward to making the trip. I
can tell you now with absolute certainty that I will have enjoyed it
to the full when I get through.
I have felt that the events of the last five or six years have been
steadily hastening the day when the Pacific will loom in the world’s
commerce as the Atlantic now looms, and I have wished greatly to
see these marvelous communities growing up on the Pacific slope.
There are plenty of things that to you seem matters of course, that
I have read about and know about from reading, and yet when I see
them they strike me as very wonderful—the way the railroads have
been thrust across the deserts, until now we come to the border of that
wonderful flower land, the wonderful land of your State.
One thing that strikes me more than anything else as I go through
the country—as I said I have never been on the Pacific slope; the
Rocky Mountain States and the States of the great plains I know quite
as well as I know the Eastern seaboard; I have worked with the men,
* Treating an Indian as though he were a white man would be a good deal like treating
a coyote as though he were a dog—it won’t do in a sheep country. Treat an Indian as
squarely as you do a white man, yes. That is, don’t rob him, don’t maltreat him. Also don’t
take your eye off him, and per incident bring up your horses and wear your guns while he’s
hanging around.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 329
played with them, fought with them; I know them all through—the
thing that strikes me most as I go through this country and meet the
men and women of the country, is the essential unity of all Americans.
Down at bottom we are the same people all through. That is not
merely a unity of section, it is a unity of class. For my good for-
tune I have been thrown into intimate relationship, into intimate
personal friendship, with many men of many different occupations,
and my faith is firm that we shall come unscathed out of all our
difficulties here in America, because I think that the average American
is a decent fellow, and that the prime thing, in getting him to get on
well with the other average American, is to have each remember that
the other is a decent fellow, and try to look at the problems a little
from the other's standpoint.
I am speaking here to the men who have done their part in the tre-
mendous development of this country—railroad men, the ranchers,
the people who have built up this country. Something can be done
by law to help in such development, something can be done by the
administration of the law; but in the last analysis we have to rely upon
the average citizenship of the country to work out the salvation of the
Nation. Back of the law stands the man; just exactly as in battle it
is the man behind the gun that counts most, even more than the gun.
So it is the man and woman, it is the average type of manhood and
womanhood, that makes the State great in the end. In the individual
nothing can take the place of his own qualities; in the community
nothing can take the place of the qualities of the average citizen. The
law can do something, but the law never yet made a fool wise or a
coward brave or a weakling strong. The law can endeavor to secure
a fair show for every man, so far as it is in the wit of man to secure
such a fair show, but it must then remain for the man himself to show
the stuff there is in him; and if the stuff is not in him, you cannot get
it out of him.
I believe in the future of this country because I believe in the men
and women whom we are developing in the country. I am more glad
than I can say at being in California. I thank you for coming out
here to greet me. I wish you well for the future with all my heart.
AT VICTORVILLE, CAL., MAY 7, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I want to say what a pleasure it is to see you. I am enjoying so
much coming into California. I have looked forward toward visiting
your wonderful and beautiful State for years, and I am so glad of
having the chance of being here. I welcome you all. I am glad to see
33O Messages and Speeches
the men, the women, and especially the children, for I believe in your
stock and I am glad it is being kept up.
AT REDLANDS, CAL., MAY 7, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Governor, and you, my fellow Ameri-
cans, men and women of California:
I am glad indeed to have the chance to visit this wonderful and
beautiful State. And yet, first, let me tell you, my fellow-citizens, I
did not need to come here to be one of you and devoted to your
interests. I know California. I know what her sons and daughters
are and what they have done, for if I did not I would augur myself
but a poor American. Rarely have I enjoyed a day more than this.
I waked up coming through the Mojave Desert, and all that desert
needs is water, and I believe you are going to get it. Then we came
down into this wonderful garden spot, and though I had been told all
about it, told about the fruits and the flowers, told of the wonderful
fertility and thought I knew about it, it was not possible in advance
to realize all the fertility, all the beauty, that I was to see. Indeed I
congratulate myself on having had the chance to visit you.
Coming today over the mountain range,” coming down here, seeing
what you have done, makes me realize more and more how much
this whole country should lay stress on what can be done by the wise
use of water, and, therefore, the wise use of the forests on the moun-
tains. When I come to California I can sit at the feet of Gamaliel
and learn about forestry and water. I do not have to preach it. All
I can do is to ask you to go ahead and follow your own best practice.
The people of our country have grown to realize and are more and
more in practice showing that they realize how indispensable it is to
preserve the great forests on the mountains and to use aright the water
supply that those forests conserve. This whole country here in South-
ern California shows what can be done by irrigation, what can be
done by settlers foresighted enough to use the resources in such way
as to perpetuate and better, not exhaust, them. We have passed the
time when we could afford to let any man skin the country and leave it.
Forestry, irrigation, all the efforts of the Nation and the State govern-
ments, all the efforts of the individual and of local associations are to
be bent to the object of building up the interests of the home-maker.
The man we want to favor is the man who comes to live, and whose
*The Rockies are the backbone of the American future—the best hope of the Nation as it
should be. They make one third of the country. It has been written of mountains by Provi-
dence that in their midst slavery is impossible and freedom secure. Neither gold, nor the
plots of politicians, nor the ambitions of kings can prevail against them. Within the fastnesses
of the Rocky Mountains are to be sheltered the American Swiss. They may be relied upon
not alone to defend their own liberties, but see to it that liberty does not perish from the
plains below,-A, H, I.
• * *
• * * º º * .
* . • , . g
& • *
&
ge
Theodore Roosevelt 33L
interest it is that his children and his children's children shall enjoy
to an even greater degree what he has enjoyed himself. He is the
man whom we must encourage in every possible way; and it is because
he is awake to his true interests that the marvelous progress has been
made, largely through forestry, largely through irrigation, here in
California and elsewhere in the mighty Western land which forms the
major half of this Republic. I think our citizens are more and more
realizing that they wish to perpetuate the things that are of use and
also the things that are of beauty. You in California are preserving
your great natural scenery, your great objects of nature, your valleys,
your giant trees. You are preserving them because you realize that
beauty has its place as well as use, because you wish to make of
this State even more than it now is the garden spot of the continent,
the garden spot of the world. Here in Southern California I wish to
congratulate you upon the way in which your citizens have built up
these new cities, of which I speak in well-nigh the newest. These
new cities and this new country in fashion illustrate the efforts of the
pioneer, of the early settler, of the man who first turns to account virgin
soil, and yet have been fortunate enough to escape the roughness, the
rawness, that too often necessarily acompanies such early settlement.
Already in what you have done, you people of this new land, you have
been fortunate to set examples which it would be well for the cities
and the country districts of older lands to follow. Because, funda-
mentally, men and women whom I am addressing, we must remember
that much though climate and soil can do, it is man himself who does
most. I congratulate you upon your astounding material prosperity.
I congratulate you upon your fruit farms, your orchards, your
ranches, upon your cities, upon your industrial and agricultural develop-
ment, but above all I congratulate you on the quality of your citizen-
ship. I am glad to meet you and to be greeted by you. I know the rest
of you will not grudge my saying that among all of you who have
greeted me, I prize finost the presence of the men who fought in the
great war. Two years ago you came here to welcome your comrade,
my chief and predecessor in office, President McKinley. He had
fought in the war in which you fought. He had done his part in the
work that you did, the work which, if left undone, would have meant
that today we had neither country nor President. Now we of the
younger generation are bound in honor and in good faith to carry on
the work that he and you did in war, the work that he did in peace.
The lessons you taught were not lessons of war only, they are les-
sons to be applied in peace just as much. In the war it was necessary
to have training; it was necessary to have arms, but the thing that was
fundamental was to have men. And you won because you had in you
the quality which drove you forward to victory. You won because in
332 Messages and Speeches
the iron times you showed that you could recognize each man for his
naked worth as a man. You fought for liberty under the law, through
the law—not license—not any spirit that rises above the law; the self-
governing liberty of self-governing and self-restraining freemen who
know that anarchic violence, that disorder of any kind, is the hand-
maiden of tyranny, the foe of freedom.
I greet you first, you on whose conduct we must model ours, and
next I greet the future. I am very glad, my fellow citizens, that you
do so well with fruits, crops, and all of that, but I am even more
pleased that you do as well with children. To the children I have got
but one word to say, and that applies just as well to the grown-up
people, too. I believe in play and I believe in work. Play hard while
you play, and when you work do not play at all. That is common
sense for all of us.
I wish to express my thanks to the men of the National Guard,
some of whom wear medals which show that they fought in the same
war in which I did. Ours was a little war, but we hope that we
showed the desire at least not to fall too far short of the standard set
by you of the great war. I must thank especially the gentlemen in the
not unfamiliar uniform whom I see before me.
Now just one word in closing. Do you know what strikes me most,
as I meet you, the people of Southern California, representing a com-
munity which has drawn its numbers from all the civilized peoples
of the globe, from all the States of the Union? What strikes me
most is that good Americans are good Americans from one end of the
Union to the other. I come to speak to you, and I appeal to you for the
same ideals and in the name of the same great principles and the same
great men who illustrate those principles as I should speak on the
Atlantic seaboard. You, the men of the West, the men pre-eminently
American, the men and women who illustrate in their lives exactly
those characteristics which we are proudest to consider as typical of
our country, I greet you because I am at home with you. Because
there is no longer any need of saying that the worst American, the
genuine traitor to the country, is the man who would inflame either
Section against section, or class against class.
Good laws can do much. Good administration of the laws can do
much. We must have both. Law and the honest enforcement and
administration of the law can do much, but most of all must be done
by the man himself. Nothing can take the place of the exercise of the
man's own individual qualities. Just exactly as in battle it is the man
behind the gun who counts most, and just exactly as it is true that the
change in tactics does not mean any change in the fundamental qualities
necessary to make the soldier, so it is true of good citizenship. You
and I, you who went to the Philippines, we who fought in the smaller
Theodore Roosevelt 333
war, we had a small caliber, high-power gun if we were lucky. You
did not have it at first in the Philippines, I understand. We had new
weapons, we had new tactics, but we did well exactly in proportion
as we had the spirit that made you do well from '61 to '65. Weapons
change and tactics change, but the same kind of men who did well
in Caesar's tenth legion would have done well following Grant or Lee
in the days before Appomattox. No weapon, no system of tactics,
could take the place of the fighting edge in the man, of the courage,
resolution, power of individual initiative, readiness to obey and to obey
on the instant, power to act by one’s self and yet to act in combination
with one's fellows. So now it is in citizenship. Something can be
done by law, but no law that the wit of man can devise can make out
of a man who has not got the spirit of decency and clean living in him
a décent man. No law that the wit of man can devise will ever make
the weakling, the man who does not know how to handle himself, able
to hold his own in competition with his fellows. Law can and must
secure justice, justice alike to the rich and to the poor, to the man
in the country, and the man in the town, to prevent any one from
wronging his fellows, and to safeguard him against wrong in return,
but after the law has done that it yet remains true, as it will remain
true in the future, as it has remained true since history dawned, that
the prime factor in working out any man's success must be the sum
of that man’s own individual qualities. We need strong bodies. More
than that we need strong minds, and finally we need what counts for
more than body, for more than mind—character—character, into which
many elements enter, but three above all.* In the first place, morality,
decency, clean living, the faculty of treating fairly those round about,
the qualities that make a man a decent husband, a decent father, a good
neighbor, a good man to deal with or to work beside; the quality
that makes a man a good citizen of the State, careful to wrong no
one; we need that first as the foundation, and if we have not got that
no amount of strength or courage or ability can take its place. No mat-
ter how able a man is, how good a soldier naturally, if the man were a
traitor then the abler he was the more dangerous he was to the regi-
ment, to the army, to the nation. It is so in business, in politics, in
every relation of life. The abler a man is, if he is a corrupt politician,
an unscrupulous business man, a demagogic agitator who seeks to set
one portion of his fellow men against the other, his ability makes
him but by so much more a curse to the community at large. In
character we must have virtue, morality, decency, square dealing as the
foundation; and it is not enough. It is only the foundation. In war
you needed to have the man decent, patriotic, but, no matter how pa-
\
*Time and again throughout his speeches President Roosevelt shows that he does not
hold to the doctrine, so favorably received by many, that the best dressed citizen is necessarily
the best citizen.—A. H. L.
334 Messages and Speeches
triotic he was, if he ran away he was no good. So it is in citizenship;
the virtue that stays at home in its own parlor and bemoans the wicked-
ness of the outside world is of scant use to the community. We are
a vigorous, masterful people, and the man who is to do good work in
our country must not only be a good man, but also emphatically a man.
We must have the qualities of courage, of hardihood, of power to hold
one's own in the hurly-burly of actual life. We must have the man-
hood that shows on fought fields and that shows in the work of the
business world and in the struggles of civic life. We must have manli-
ness, courage, strength, resolution, joined to decency and morality, or
we shall make but poor work of it. Finally those two qualities by
themselves are not enough. In addition to decency, and courage, we
must have the saving grace of common sense. We all of us have
known decent and valiant fools who have meant so well that it made
it all the more pathetic that the effect of their actions was so ill.
Men and women of California, I believe in you, I believe in your
future, because I think that the average citizenship of this State has
in it just exactly the qualities of which I have spoken. I believe in
the future of this Nation because I think that the average citizenship
of the Nation also is based on those three qualities, the quality of
decency, the quality of courage, and the saving grace of common sense.
I greet you today. I am glad to be here in your beautiful country. I
am glad to see you, men and women of California. I wish you well
and I firmly believe that your mighty future will make your past, great
though your past is, seem small by comparison.
TO THE SCHOOL CHILDREN, SAN BERNARDINO, CAL., MAY 7, 1903.
Children:
I wish to say how glad I am to see you. I wish to congratulate
the men and women of this city upon the children. You seem to be
all right in quality and in quantity.
I wish to say a word of special acknowledgment to the teachers.
There is no body of men and women in the country to whom more
is owing than to that body of men and women upon whose efforts
so much of the cleanliness and efficiency of our government twenty
years hence depends; because on their training largely depends the kind
of citizenship of the next generation. There is no duty as important
as the duty of taking care that the boys and girls are so trained as to
make the highest type of men and women in the future. It is a duty
that cannot be shirked by the home. The fathers and mothers must
remember that it is the duty that comes before everything else after
the getting of mere subsistence. The first duty, after the duty of self-
support, is the training of the children as they should be trained. That
Theodore Roosevelt 335
comes upon the fathers and mothers. They cannot put it off
entirely upon the teachers; but much depends upon the teachers also,
and the fact that they have done and are doing their duty so well
entitles them in a peculiar degree to the gratitude of all Americans
who understand the prime needs of the Republic. I am glad to see
you, I believe in you, and I thank you.
AT SAN BERNARDINO, CAL., MAY 7, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Governor, and you, my fellow citizens:
It gives me the utmost pleasure to be presented to those who are
among the best on earth because they are Americans. It is half a
century since the early pioneers founded this place, and while time
goes fast in America anywhere, it has gone fastest here on the Pacific
Slope, and in the regions of the Rocky Mountains directly to the east-
ward. If you live in the presence of miracles you gradually get accus-
tomed to them. So it is difficult for any of us, and it is especially diffi-
cult for those who have themselves been doing the things, to realize
the absolute wonder of the things that have been done. California
and the region round about have in the past fifty or sixty years tra-
versed the distance that separates the founders of the civilization of
Mesopotamia and Egypt from those who enjoy the civilization of today.
They have gone further than that. They have seen this country
change from a wilderness into one of the most highly civilized regions
of the world's surface. They have seen cities, farms, ranches, railroads
grow up and transform the very face of nature. The changes have
been so stupendous that in our eyes they have become commonplace.
We fail to realize their immense, their tremendous importance. We
fail entirely to realize what they mean. Only the older among you
can remember the pioneer days, the early pioneer days, and yet today I
have spoken to man after man yet in his prime who, when he first came
to this country, warred against wild men and wild nature in the way
in which that warfare was waged in the prehistoric days of the Old
World. We have spanned in the single life—in less than the life of
any man who reaches the age limit prescribed by the Psalmist—in less
than that time we have gone over the whole space from savagery to
barbarism, to semi-civilization, to the civilization that stands two thou-
sand years ahead of that of Rome and Greece in the days of their
prime. \
The old pioneer days have gone, but if we are to prove ourselves
worthy sons of our sires we cannot afford to let the old pioneer virtues
lapse. There is just the same need now that there was in '49 for the
qualities that marked a mighty and masterful people. East and West
336 Messages and Speeches
we now face substantially the same problems. No people can advance
as far and as fast as we have advanced, no people can make such pro-
gress as we have made and expect to escape the penalties that go with
such speed and progress. The growth and complexity of our civiliza-
tion, the intensity of the movement of modern life, have meant that
with the benefits have come certain disadvantages and certain perils.
A great industrial civilization cannot be built up without a certain dis-
location and certain disarrangement of the old conditions, and there-
fore the springing up of new problems. The problems are new, but the
qualities needed to solve them are as old as history itself, and we shall
Solve them aright only on condition that we bring to the solution the
same qualities of head and heart that have been brought to the solution
of similar problems by every race that has ever conquered for itself a
space in the annals of time. It is not possible for any man to say
exactly what a given community of our people is to do with a given
problem at the moment, unless he is thoroughly familiar with all the
conditions attendant thereon, but he can lay down certain general rules
of conduct with the absolute certainty that our people have to proceed
in accordance with them, if they are to do aright their work in the
State and the Nation.
Wherever I have been in the West I see men who wear the button
which shows that in the times that tried men's souls they proved their
truth by their endeavor; that they belonged to those who in the years
from '61 to ’65 dared all to see that the Nation did not flinch from
its destiny; and great though the praise is that is due to them, an even
greater praise in my mind belongs to the women of their generation
who sent them out to battle, who stayed at home with the breadwinner
absent, who had to suffer not only fear of the ſate that might befall
father, husband, son, lover or brother, but who had to get on as best
they could in their own household without the help of the arm on
which they had been accustomed to rely. You men and women of
that time proved yourselves worthy to be freemen by displaying the
old heroic qualities that had marked masterful men and womanly
women from the days when the world began. You won because you
showed the spirit that the men of '76 showed under Washington,
Wayne and Greene. You won by showing the traits of character that
must be shown in any crisis by men who are to meet that crisis—
perfectly ordinary traits.
You do not win in a big fight by any patent device. There is not
any way by which you can turn your hand and conquer in a time of
great trial. You have got to conquer as your fathers and grandfathers
conquered before you. You have got to conquer as strong men have
conquered in every struggle of history, and draw on whatever fund of
courage, of resolution, of hardihood, of iron will that you have at your
Theodore Roosevelt 337
command, and you can conquer only if you draw on just those qualities.
Another thing which you will remember very well, from '61 to '65,
what my comrades here, the men who went into the great war and
the men who went into the Spanish War or went to the Philippines
will remember also, that there was a certain proportion of men who
joined your ranks who for one reason or another fell by the wayside.
There were different reasons—some for whom one simply felt an
entirely respectful pity, who lacked the stamina to be able to stand the
hard work, and it was mighty hard work. In the lesser war there
was trouble that there was not in the big war, for there was not enough
to go around. Among others the man would come around who wanted
to be a hero right off, but did not want to do the other work of the
moment. I recollect perfectly in my regiment, a young fellow joined,
and on the second day he came to me and said: “Colonel, I came down
here to fight for my country, and they are treating me like a serf, and
making me dig kitchen sinks.” His Captain, who was a large man
from New Mexico, explained to him that he would go right on and dig
kitchen sinks; that that was what his business was at the moment, and
that if he dug them well we would see to the hero business later. The
man who did well in the army in those days was, as a rule, the man
who did not wait to do well until something big occurred, but who did
his duty just as his duty came, during the long marches, during the
weary months of waiting in camp, did his duty just exactly as in the
battle. He was the man on whom you relied, whom you trusted, whom
you wanted to have with you in your troop, as your bunky, whatever it
was, he was the man you wanted around. It is just exactly the same
with citizenship. It was just exactly the same in the pioneer days.
The pioneers, men and women, faced much such difficulty as the men
of the Grand Army, and for you, the men of that generation, and your
wives, there was the same hardship, the same endurance of grinding
toil, the same years of effort that too often seemed fruitless, the same
iron will, and the same ultimate triumph, and if we are to Suceced we
must show the same qualities that the men of the Grand Army showed,
that the pioneers showed, that all men and all women have showed who
were fit to be fathers and mothers in a vigorous State. I would plead
with my countrymen to show not any special brilliancy, or special
genius, but the ordinary humdrum commonplace qualities which in the
aggregate spell success for the nation, and spell success for the in-
dividual. Remember that the chance to do the great heroic work may
or may not come. If it does not come, then all that there can be to
our credit is the faithful performance of every-day duty. That is all
that most of us throughout our lives have the chance to do, and it is
enough, because it is the beginning, because it means most for the
Nation when done, and if the time for the showing of heroism does
338 Messages and Speeches
come you may guarantee that those who show it are most likely to be
the people who have done their duty in average times as the occasion
for doing the duty arose.
My friends, I am very glad to see you. I am very glad to be in
California. Today is the first time I ever was in your wonderful and
beautiful State. I do not know if this is a fair sample, but if it is
California is certainly to be congratulated all through. In saying good-
by I wish to express the pleasure it has given me to see you. I believe
in the State; I believe in what the State produces, but I believe most
of all in the men and women of the State. It is a good thing to have
your soil and your climate, your great industrial possibilities; it is a
better thing to have the type of citizenship which California has pro-
duced. I congratulate you; I congratulate the American people, of
whom you are part. I wish you well with all my heart, and I believe
that your future will be infinitely greater even than the mighty present,
even than your past has warranted us in believing.
AT RIVERSIDE, CAL., MAY 7, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
I have enjoyed to the full getting into your beautiful State. I had
read about what I should expect here in Southern California, but I
had formed no idea of the fertility of your soil, the beauty of your
scenery, or the wonderful manner in which the full advantage of that
Soil had been taken by man. Here I am in the pioneer community of
irrigated fruit growing in California. In many other parts of the
country I have had to preach irrigation. Here you practice it, and
all I have to say here is that I earnestly wish that I could have many
another community learn from you how you have handled your busi-
ness. Not only has it been most useful, but it is astonishing to see
how with the use you have combined beauty. You have made of this
city and its surroundings a veritable little paradise.
It has been delightful to see you. Today has been my first day in
California. I need hardly say that I have enjoyed it to the full. I am
glad to be welcomed by all of you, but most of all by the men of the
Grand Army, and after them by my own comrades of the National
Guard, and I have been particularly pleased to pass between the rows
of school children. I like your stock and I am glad it is not dying
Out.
I shall not try this evening to do more than say to you a word of
thanks for your greeting to me. I admire your country, but I admire
most of all the men and women of the country. It is a good thing to
grow citrus fruits, but it is even a better thing to have the right kind
of citizenship. I think you have been able to combine the very extra-
Theodore Roosevelt 339
ordinary material prosperity with that form of the higher life which
must be built upon material prosperity if it is to amount to what it
should in the long run.
I am glad to have seen you. I thank you for coming here to greet
me. I wish you well at all times and in every way, and I bid you good
luck and good night. *
AT POMON A COLLEGE, CLAREMONT, CAL., MAY 8, 1903.
Mr. President, men and women:
Even in a distinctly college and school gathering I know you will
not grudge my saying my first word of greeting to those whom before
all others we honor for what they did, to those because of whom we
have a country or a President or any method of moving forward along
the path of greatness—the men of the Grand Army. I always envy
you men of the Grand Army because you do not have to preach; you
practiced. All we have got to do is to try to come up to the standard
in peace which you set alike in war and in peace.
It is a very good combination to have the red with the white and
blue. You can see over there that Harvard, which is my college, has
the red and then comes the blue and white of yours. It did me good to
get into a circle of the higher education, and listening to you I thought
at once of football.” My friends and fellow citizens, it is such a pleasure
to be in this college town today. It is so wonderful a thing to look at
the country through which I have come, to realize that the site of this
college but a few years ago was exactly as the rest of the plain was,
to realize that all of the cultivation that I see, all of the agricultural
work that has been done, that has so completely changed the face of the
country, has been done within this brief space of time; to see the two
things together and realize that you people of California are laying
broad and deep by your industry and intelligence the foundation of
material prosperity, and that upon that foundation of material pros-
perity you are erecting the superstructure of intellectual, moral and
spiritual well-being, without which the foundation would never be any-
thing but a base with no building upon it. Of course, we have to have
material prosperity as underlying our life. The first thing that the in-
dividual man has to do is to pull his own weight, to earn his own way,
not to be a drag on the community. And the individual who wants to
do a tremendous amount in life, but who will not start by earning his
own way is not apt to be of much use in the world. He is akin
to those admirable creatures who from '61 to '65 were willing to
*In West Point is the son of a Boston merchant. He was sent there by President
Roosevelt, who, observing the pluck and the wise cool courage of the lad as displayed by
him in a game of football, decided that he was the stuff from which soldiers are
made.—A. H. L.
34O Messages and Speeches
begin as brigadier generals. We must have first the desire to do
well in the day of small things, the day through which all of us must
pass, the day which lasts very long with most of us. We must have
the desire and the power to do well industrially as a community,
as individuals. Before we can do anything with the higher life,
before we can have the higher thinking, there must be enough of
material comfort to allow for at least plain living. We have got
to have that first before we can do the high thinking; but if we
are to count in the long run we must have built upon the material
prosperity the power and desire to give to our lives other than a
merely material side. It would be a poor thing for this State
and for this country if, no matter how great our success in busi-
ness, in agriculture, in all that pertains to the body, we had not
provided for our children and those that come after us, to get what
is good alike for the soul and the mind. The college and school,
any institution of learning, has the two sides—I will say three sides,
because now we all recognize the need of the healthy body. There is
not must need of educating the body if one pursues certain occupa-
tions, but the minute that you come to people who pursue a sedentary
life, there is a great need for educating the body. All of us recognize
that, if we come to think of it. The man that is the ideal good citizen
is the man who in the event of trial, in the event of a call from his
country, can respond to that call as you responded in the great war.
Then when that call is made you need not only fiery enthusiasm,
but you need the body containing that fiery enthusiasm to be suf-
ficiently hardy to bear it up, to bear it up on the march, to bear it
up in the camp, to bear it into battle; you need a sound body, then
you need a sound mind and a trained mind. Of course, there has
got to be a capacity for intellectual development there to train, but
it is a very great error, and an error into which in the past we as
a nation have been prone to fall, to believe that you can trust to
that intellectual capacity without training. You cannot. There are
wholly exceptional people who will make the greatest success with
insufficient training. We cannot judge by those wholly exceptional
people. Every college should aim from its intellectual side, from
the intellectual standpoint, to add to the sum of productive scholar-
ship of the nation; and I trust that this college, that all colleges like
this in these great new States, will add to the purely American type
of American scholarship. By purely American I do not mean that you
should self-consciously strive in your scholarship to have little points of
unimportant difference. I mean that you should turn your attention
to the thing that you find naturally at hand, or to which your minds
naturally turn, and try in dealing with that to deal in so fresh a way
that the net outcome shall be an addition to the world’s stock of
Theodore Roosevelt 34I
wisdom and knowledge. Every college should strive to bring to
development among the students the capacity to do good original
work. That is important. Even more important, however, than any-
thing you can do for your intellect, or anything that can be done for
the intellect in the schools, for the children whom I see over there, is
what can be done for that which counts for more than body, for
more than mind, for character; that is what ultimately counts in
shaping the fate of the nation, the destiny of the nation in great
crises and in ordinary times. Brilliancy, genius, cleverness of all
kinds, do not count for anything like as much as the sturdy traits
that we group together under the name of character. In the Civil
War it was a good thing to be clever, to be capable, but it was an
infinitely better thing to have in you the spirit that declined to accept
defeat, and that drove you forward to the ultimate triumph. That
was what counted. So in life what counts as the chief factor in
the success of a man or a woman is character, and character is partly
inborn and partly developed; partly developed by the man’s individual
will, the woman's individual will, partly developed by the wise training
of those above the young man or young woman, the boy or the girl,
partly developed by the myriad associations of life, in just such an
institution of learning as this. Character has two sides. It is com-
posed of two sets of traits; in the first place the set of traits which
we group together under such names as clean living, decency, morality,
virtue, the desire and power to deal fairly each by his neighbor, each
by his friends, each toward the State; that we have to have as funda-
mental. The abler, the more powerful any man is the worse he is
if he has not got the root of righteousness in him. In any regiment
the man who has no loyality to his fellows, no spirit of devotion to
the flag, no desire to see the regiment stand high, to do his duty
and see his fellows rise with him, that man, no matter how brave,
or how able, is a curse to the regiment, and the sooner you can get
him out the better. So in civil life, the abler a man is in business, in
politics, in social leadership, the worse he is if he is a scoundrel,
whether his scoundrelism takes the form of corruption in business,
corruption in politics, or that most sinister of all forms, the effort
to rise by inciting class hatred, by inciting lawlessness, by exciting
the spirit of evil, the spirit of jealousy and envy as between man and
man; and that spirit is equally base, whether it take the form of ar-
rogance on the part of the well-to-do toward those less well-to-do,
or of mean and base envy and jealousy on the part of those not well-
to-do for those who are better off. It is equally evil against the prin-
ciples of our government in one case as in the other. And having
those traits, we must have others in addition. The virtue that sits
at home is of scant use in the world; the virtue that is very good in
342 Messages and Speeches
its own parlor and bemoans the wickedness of those outside does not
do much for the benefit of mankind. In the war you had to have
patriotism, but there was but little to be made of the man who was
patriotic but who had a tendency to run away. In addition to de-
cency, morality, virtue, clean living, you must have hardihood, resolu-
tion, courage, the power to do, the power to dare, the power to
endure, and when you have that combination, then you get the
proper type of American citizenship. I hail the chance of being
met by such a gathering as this, because it is of good augury for the
Republic to see in this mighty Western State, this typically American
State, the things of the body and the things of the soul equally cared
for. I greet you and I thank you. -
AT PASADENA, CAL., MAY 8, 1903.
Mr. Congressman, Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, men,
women and children of Pasadena:
I am not going to talk to you very long this morning, because
I am too much interested in your community. I want to see all
I can see. We speak often of the old pioneer days, and the won-
derful feats of our countrymen in those days, but we are living
right in the middle of them now, only we are living under pleasanter
auspices. To think of the well-nigh incredible fact that all of this
that I have been looking at-the city, the development of the country
—that it has all occurred within twenty years; that twenty years has
separated the sheep pasture from this city, from the fertile irrigated
region round about. It is hard to believe it. You have done this
great work of building up a new community; you have built up the
new community, and yet have preserved all the charm, all the re-
finement, of the oldest civilizations. It is all so striking that it is
difficult for me to know what to comment upon. Yesterday and
today I have been traveling through what is literally a garden of
the Lord, in sight of the majestic and wonderful scenery of the
mountains, going over this plain tilled by the hand of man as you
have tilled it, that has blossomed like the rose—blossomed as I never
dreamed in my life that the rose could blossom until I came here.
Everywhere I have gone I have been greeted by the men who wear
the button that shows that they belong to the Grand Army of the
Republic, men who fought in that army in many different regi-
ments, from many different States, who have come here from many
different States; but who as they fought, all, no matter from what.
State they came—as they fought all for the federal flag and the
federal Union have come here from their original home to become
Californians while remaining Americans. For, oh, my friends, the
Theodore Roosevelt 343
thing that has impressed me most here in this State of the West,
this wonderful commonwealth that has grown up on the Pacific
Slope, the thing that has impressed me most is that I am speaking
to Americans just as I speak in any other section of the country !
We are all pretty much alike, and I believe so unqualifiedly in the
future of the country because I believe in the average American, be-
cause I believe in the average standard of our citizenship; and I
believe that serious though the problems are that now confront
us, they will all be solved exactly as you solved the far more serious
problems of the early '60's, if we approach them in the same spirit
in which you approached yours. You went to war for liberty, union,
and the brotherhood of man, and now, in peace, it rests for us to
stand for the indivisible nation, for liberty under and through the
law, and for brotherhood in its widest, deepest and truest sense;
the brotherhood which recognizes in each man a brother to be helped,
which will not suffer wrong and will not inflict it. I wish to see the
average American take in reference to his fellows the attitude that
I wish to see America take among the nations of the world; the
attitude of one who scorns equally to flinch from injustice by the
strong and to do injustice to the weak. You fought for liberty under
the law, not liberty in spite of the law. Any man who claims that
there can be liberty in spite of and against the law is claiming that
anarchy is liberty. From the beginning of time anarchy in all its
forms has been the hand-maiden, the harbinger, of despotism and
tyranny. We must remember ever that the surest way to over-
turn republican institutions, the surest way to do away with the
essential democratic liberty that we enjoy, is to permit any one
under any excuse to put the gratification of his passions over the
law. The law, the supreme law of the land, must be obeyed by
every man, rich or poor, alike. Ours is a government of equal
rights under the law, guaranteeing those rights to each man so
long as he in his turn refrains from wronging his brother. We can-
not exist as a republic unless we are true to the fundamental prin-
ciples of those who founded the republic in '76, and those who per-
petuated it in the years from '61 to '65. And if we remain true to
the philosophy preached and practiced by Washington and Lincoln we
cannot go far wrong.
New problems come up all the time. The tremendous growth
of our complex industrialism means that we have to face new con-
ditions, that we enjoy new benefits, and must overcome new diffi-
culties; but the spirit in which we must face them must be the old
spirit which has won victory in military strife and under civic con-
ditions since the dim days when history dawned. We can win only
if we show the principles that made you win. You did not win
344 Messages and Speeches
by any patent device. You did not win in that way. There is not
any patent device for getting the millennium, and any man who says
that by following him, that by invoking some specific remedy, all
injustice, and all evil, and all suffering will be done away with misleads
himself and you. Something can be done by law. Much can be done by
honest and fearless administration of the law; but in the long run the
prime factor in deciding each man’s success must be the sum of the
man's individual qualities. We must work in combination. We
must work together; but we must remember that no man can do
anything with others unless he can do something for himself.
In the army you will remember that there was an occasional man
whom nothing under heaven could have turned into a good soldier.
You could train him, arm him, drill him, but on the important day
he fell sick. If he stayed in action you had to watch him so nar-
rowly for fear he got out that he simply distracted your attention
from your legitimate business. You have got just the same type
of man in civic life. And still each one of us must remember that
any one may and will at times slip. There is not a man of us here
who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to
him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping
hand to his brother. While we must remember that—remember that
every man at times stumbles and must be helped up, if he lies down
you cannot carry him. He has got to be willing to walk. You can help
him in but one way, the only way in which any man can be helped
permanently—help him to help himself.
We can solve aright all the difficult problems that come up be-
cause of and through our modern civilization, if we approach them
in accordance with the immutable laws of righteousness and of com-
mon sense; if we treat each man on his worth as a man; if we
demand from him, be he rich or poor, obedience to the law and just
dealing toward his fellows; if we demand it and are scrupulously
careful in return to do the right we demand; if we remember our
duties just as keenly as we remember our rights.
Glad though I am to see all of you, to see the grown-ups, I think
I am even more glad to see the children. I was greeted by the high
school in a way that made me feel perfectly certain that the nine
and eleven had their parts in the curriculum. It is, of course, the
merest truism to say that important though it is to develop factories,
railroads, farms, commerce, the thing that counts is the development
of citizenship; that the one thing that decides ultimately what the
nation is, is the character of the average man or woman in the
nation. That is what decides the future of the commonwealth; and
I am very glad to see the kind of children and to see how many
there are. I like your stock and I am glad it is being kept up.
Theodore Roosevelt 345
I wish to say a special word of appreciation to those engaged in
doing the most vitally necessary work in the community—the school
teachers, all engaged in education. They are the people who are
deciding, next only to the fathers and mothers themselves, what
the future destiny of this country shall be. If we have the most
marvelous material development that the world has ever seen, and
yet if we train up the next generation wrong, that material de-
velopment will be as dust and ashes in the balance; it will count
for nothing and less than nothing. It is indispensable as a founda-
tion, and it is worthless unless there is a superstructure upon it.
I believe in you. I believe in your future. I believe in our future.
I believe in our people, in the American people from one side of the
continent to the other, because I believe that the fathers and mothers,
the teachers of this generation, are bringing up the children, the
boys and the girls, to be in the future such men and women as
those who in the iron days of the Civil War left us a heritage of glory
and honor forever.
AT LOS ANGELES CAL., MAY 8, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I greet you and thank you for the enjoyment you have given
me today. I cannot say how I have appreciated being here in your
beautiful State and your beautiful city. I do not remember ever
seeing quite the parallel to the procession I have just witnessed.
I find, men and women of California, that California believes im-
plicitly in two of my own favorite beliefs—the navy and irrigation.
The navy, because this country is one of the great leading nations
of mankind and is bound to become ever greater as the years roll
by, and therefore it must have a navy corresponding to its position.
Moreover, we as a nation front two great Oceans, and we must
have a navy capable of asserting our position alike on the Pacific
and the Atlantic. This year we have begun the preparations for the
completion of the Isthmian Canal. That is important commercially;
it will become even more important should we ever become involved
in war, because holding that canal it would be open to our own warships
and closed to those of any hostile power. I want a navy, I want
to see the American Republic with a fighting navy, because I never
wish to see us take a position that we cannot maintain. I do not
believe in a bluff. I feel about a nation as we all feel about a man;
let him not say anything that he cannot make good, and having said
it let him make it good. I believe in doing all we can to avoid a
quarrel, to avoid trouble; I believe in speaking courteously of all the
other peoples of mankind, in scrupulously refraining from wronging
346 Messages and Speeches
them and in seeing that in return they do not wrong us. I believe
in the Monroe doctrine, and I believe in it not as an empty formula
of words, but as something we are ready to make good by deeds,
and therefore I believe in having an adequate navy with which to
make that doctrine good. More than that, here on the Pacific,
the greatest of the oceans, we, as a Nation, are growing by leaps
and by bounds, our interests increasing with ever accelerating rapidity,
and if we are to protect those interests, and to take the position we
should take, we must see that the growth of the navy takes place
with equal rapidity with the growth of the interests that it is to pro-
tect.
When I come to speak of the preservation of the forests, of the
preservation of the waters, of the use of the waters from the moun-
tains and of the waters obtained by artesian wells, I only have to
appeal to your own knowledge, to your experience. I have been
passing through a veritable garden of the earth yesterday and today,
here in the southern half of California, and it has been made such
by the honesty and wisdom of your people, and by the way in which
you have preserved your waters and utilized them. I ask that you
simply keep on as you have begun, and that you let the rest of the
nation follow suit. We must preserve the forests to preserve the
waters, which are themselves preserved by the forests, if we wish to
make this country as a whole blossom as you have made this part of
California blossom.
In saying good-by to you I want to say that it has been the greatest
pleasure to see you, and I am glad, my fellow-Americans, to think that
you and I are citizens of the same country.
AT OXNARD, CAL., MAY 9, 1903.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I wish to say what a great pleasure it has been to be here today,
and to see the tangible evidence of the extraordinary industry that
has been started here within the last five years. It has been the
greatest pleasure. I am not surprised at it, because the last two days
in California have taught me not to be surprised at anything. And
I am glad to see what has been done by your beet culture, fruit culture
of every kind, irrigation, and tilling of the soil.
AT VENTURA, CAL., MAY 9, 1903.
Senator Bard, and you, my fellow citizens, my fellow Americans:
I have enjoyed to the full the time I have spent in your wonder-
ful and beautiful State. Just now I have for the first time in my
Theodore Roosevelt 347
life seen the greatest of all the oceans. When I come here to
California I am not in the West, I am west of the West. It is just
California. And yet, oh, my fellow countrymen, the thing after
all that strikes me most is the fact that when I speak to you who
dwell beside the Pacific, I, who have come from beside the Atlantic,
am speaking to my own people, with the same thoughts and the
same ideals. How could it be otherwise in a community where I am
greeted first by the men of the Grand Army, by the men who, in
the days that tried men's souls, so worked and so fought that today
we have one country and one flag; and each of us here, each man
and each woman, is walking with head erect because of citizenship
in the proudest and greatest Republic upon which the sun has ever
shone?
This is the third day that I have been traveling among the people
who, as the Senator said, are primarily tillers of the soil, whose
cities have been built up because of the abundant yield of the soil
thus tilled, and I have had the experience that all of us have had
who read about things in advance, and yet cannot quite realize them
until they see them. I had known from hearsay and from books
of the wonderful fertility, the wonderful beauty, of this semi-tropical
climate and soil, but I had not realized all that it was until I saw
it myself. I am now for the third day passing through a veritable
little earthly paradise. I do not wonder that you look happy. I
should be ashamed of you if you did not. I have been, of course,
amazed at the yield of your soil, treated as it has been with such
wisdom and industry by those who have tilled it, showing especially
the amount that can be done by irrigation, the amount that can be
done by a combination of scientific and practical agriculture, at your
oranges, at the growth of the beet-sugar industries, at all your fruit
products, at all your agricultural products. I have also been glad to
see such good horses.
I want to say a word of special greeting to my friends over yonder,
of the school, who are on horseback. You know the old idea of
education was to teach a boy to ride, shoot, and tell the truth. Now
we want to teach him something besides that, but he wants to know
those three things also. Of course, if he does not tell the truth then
nothing can be done with him in any way or shape. You can pardon
most anything in a man who will tell the truth, because you know
where that man is; you know what he means. If any one lies, if
he has the habit of untruthfulness, you cannot deal with him, because
there is nothing to depend on. You cannot tell what can be done
with him or by his aid. Truth telling is a virtue upon which we
should not only insist in the schools and at home, but in business
348 Messages and Speeches
and in politics just as much.* The business man or politician who
does not tell the truth cheats; and for the cheat we should have no use
in any walk of life.
I wish, Senator Bard, speaking from this building, to thank es-
pecially the teachers for what they have done. While, of course,
each man and each woman must remember that no one can relieve
them from their duties in educating their children, yet their work
must be supplemented by that of the teachers; and it must be work
done not merely for the sake of the wage, but for the sake of doing
the work, if the next generation is to be worthy of the generation
that fought in the Civil War. I wish to express always the debt
of gratitude which all good citizens must feel that we owe to the
men and women who make their special work the training of the
children. Our whole future, of course, depends primarily upon how
the next generation turns out. All of the agricultural improvements,
all of the cultivation of the soil, all of the building up of cities and
railroads, all the growth of commerce, all the growth of manu-
factures, will count for nothing if you have not got the right type of
men and women in the future. It is upon that ultimately that the fate
of the nation depends.
I was greeted here by the pioneers, the men who first came here.
They could come here, our people could come here, and conquer
this continent only because of the individual worth of the average
citizen, because the average pioneer had in him the quality which
made him fit to do battle with, and to overcome, wild man and
wild nature. We are here upon the foundations of an old colony
which had been in existence well-nigh three-quarters of a century
before the people of our stock came to California. That old colony
represented much for which we have to be grateful, and I am glad
to see every effort made to cherish the memories of that time, to
keep alive what was best in it, but at the same time we must re-
member the obvious truth that in the half century that followed the
advent of the first people of our stock here, this country progressed
a thousand-fold more rapidly than it had in the preceding three-
quarters of a century. It thus progressed primarily because of the
individual quality of the men who came into it. And it will progress in
the future only on condition that we keep up to the highest standard
that quality of individual citizenship; and that can be kept up only
if the boys and girls of today are so trained that the men and women
of the future shall come up to the highest standard demanded in
American life. Trained in body ? Of course I believe in that em-
phatically. I wish to see our people hardy, vigorous, strong, able
*Besides, if you want to deceive a man and he knows it, your surest, shortest method
is to tell him the truth. Bismarck always told the truth, and misled more diplomats than ever
did Talleyrand,—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 349
to hold their own in whatever test may arise. I wish to see them
able to work and able to play hard. I believe in play, and I like
to see people play hard while they play, and when they work I do
not want to see them play at all. That is good sense for the younger
people and good sense for the older people. If I had any word
of advice (which is a very cheap commodity) to give to you I should
say: Get all the enjoyment you legitimately can out of life, but re-
member that the only sure way of getting in the end no enjoyment
out of life, is to start in to make it the end of your existence. The
poorest life that any one can live from the standpoint of pleasure
is the life that has nothing but pleasure as its end and aim. While
I hope that as the chance occurs each man will get all the fun he
can out of life, remember that when it comes not merely to look-
ing back upon it, but to living it, the kind of life that is worth
living is the kind of life that is embodied in duty worth doing which
is well done. I want to see the children brought up with strong
bodies. I wish them to have strong minds, and I wish them to have
that which counts for more than body, for more than mind—char-
acter; character, into which many elements enter, but above all, the
three, of honesty, of courage and of common sense.
AT SANTA BARBARA, CAL., MAY 9, 1903.
Judge, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of Santa Barbara:
It has been a great and singular pleasure to spend these three days
in Southern California. I do not know that I ever before so thor-
oughly understood the phrase, “A Garden of the Lord.” That is what
you are living in, and I do not wonder that you look happy and con-
tented. I should think but ill of you if you were not. Today, for the
first time in my life, I have seen the greatest of the oceans; I have
come across the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific; from the
East to the West, and now west of the West, into California. I am
particularly glad to be greeted here at Santa Barbara, by the men who
wear afloat the uniform of Uncle Sam. At every stop here in your
State I am met by representatives of the Grand Army of the Republic,
of the men to whom we owe it that because they showed their faith
by their works when works meant blood and toil and effort well-nigh
superhuman, because they did that, when I come here, I come to a peo-
ple living under the same flag that floats from the gulf to the great
lakes in the Eastern half of our land; it is because of what they did
that there is a President to come here at all; it is because of what
they did that when I come here I see the men from the United States
Navy ashore here in California; it is because of what they did that
when the war came in 1898, the great warship Oregon steamed south-
35O Messages and Speeches
ward from California around the Cape, up the Atlantic in time to take
part in the decisive victory off Santiago Harbor. The fundamental
lesson to learn from one end of this country to the other is the essential
unity of our people; and I speak here in a State which is what it now is
because the pioneers who came here came with empire in their brains,
came to pitch a new commonwealth by the side of the great Ocean,
as old world men pitched tents, because they were of a stock which
dared to be great, and we in our time now must dare to be great. Our
country looks eastward across the Atlantic and westward across the
Pacific, across to that West which is the hoary East, from the Occident
west to the Orient. I fail to see how any son of this country, worthy
to be descended from the men of ’61 to ’65—the men who upheld the
statesmanship of Lincoln and who followed to victory Grant and Sher-
man and Thomas and Sheridan—I fail to see how any true son of theirs
can in his turn fail to welcome with eager joy the chance to make
this country greater even than it has been before. Of course we have
great tasks before us. The man who has not got great tasks to do
cannot achieve greatness. Greatness only comes because the task to
be done is great. The men who lead lives of mere ease, of mere pleas-
ure, the men who go through life seeking how to avoid trouble, to avoid
risk, to avoid effort, to them it is not given to achieve greatness. Great-
ness comes only to those who seek not how to avoid obstacles, but how
to overcome them.
Here I speak in a region where there remain memorials of an older
civilization than ours, of a civilization that was in California three-
quarters of a century before the first hardy people of the new stock
crossed the desert, crossed the mountain chains, or came by ships up
from the Isthmus, and I want to congratulate you upon the way in
which you are perpetuating the memorials of that older civilization.
It is a fine thing in a new community to try to keep alive the continuity
of historic interests; it is a fine thing to try to remember the background
which even those of us who are most confident of the future may be
pleased to see existed in the past; and I am pleased to see how in your
architecture, both in the architecture of new and great buildings going
up, and in the architecture of the old buildings, and in many other ways,
you are, by keeping the touch and flavor of the older civilization, giv-
ing a peculiar flavor to our own new civilization, and in an age when
the tendency is a trifle toward too great uniformity.
I wonder whether you really appreciate how beautiful your country
is. Sometimes people grow so familiar with their surroundings that
they fail entirely to appreciate them. I had read and heard of the
marvelous beauty of Southern California, the beauty of your climate,
the wonderful fertility of your soil, but I had not realized it; I could
not realize it until I saw it. It seems to me as though there could
Theodore Roosevelt 351
not be another spot on the world's surface blessed in quite the same
way that this has been blessed. And now, my fellow citizens, as much
has been given to you, so much must of right be expected from you.
As you have for your good fortune been placed down in this beautiful
region with its wonderful climate, with its soil, with all the chance for
development that it offers, so we have a right to expect a particularly
high type of American citizenship from you. In the long run, mind
you, that is what counts. I have been delighted to see the orange
groves, to see your olive orchards, to see all the marvelous products
of this soil, the products temperate and semi-tropic. Of course, in
the last analysis the material prosperity of any country rests more even
than upon its manufactures, its commerce, or its mines, upon what is
successfully accomplished by the tillers of the soil, upon the products of
the soil; and our material well-being depends in the long run, more
than upon anything else, upon what we develop agriculturally; so that
I congratulate you upon that. I congratulate you upon your wonder-
ful material prosperity; but it is only the foundation for the higher
life of citizenship, and it can be no more. It is indispensable as a
foundation of course; the house cannot be built unless the foundation is
broad and deep; we cannot develop the higher life unless we have the
material prosperity, the physical well-being upon which to develop it.
But we are not to be excused if we fail to go on and build the super-
structure of intellectual, moral, spiritual growth upon the well-being
of the body. In introducing me, Judge, you spoke of the problems
that confront our civilization from within and from without. The
problems differ from generation to generation, but the qualities that
are needed to solve them remain unchanged from world's end to world's
end. The qualities needed to solve aright the problems of today are
the same qualities that were needed by the men who in 1861 found
themselves confronted with the question of whether or not this country
should remain all united and free, or divided and partially unfree, and
we can solve, and we will solve, all the questions that come up if we
approach them in the spirit with which Abraham Lincoln and the
men of his generation approached the mighty task that the Lord had
set them to do, if we approach them with his courage, his patience,
his resolution and his sane and human common sense. The lessons
that you taught—you men of the great war—applied not only in war,
but apply in peace. You sought the lesson of brotherhood first. Was
there ever brotherhood closer than the brotherhood of those who
marched to battle together, who fought together, who lay out in the
frozen mud of the winter trenches together, and who saw the brightest
and best of those around them give up their young lives under battle,
under bayonet, or on the fever cots of the hospital? No brother could
be closer than that. How did you work out your problems there?
352 Messages and Speeches
You worked them out fundamentally by standing each on his worth
as a man.* You worked them out by treating the man on your right
and the man on your left according to what they proved themselves
to be without regard to any adventitious or accidental outside cir-
cumstances. Take the man on the right hand or the man on the left—
little you cared for his wealth; little you cared for his social position;
small was your concern as to the creed according to which he worshiped
his Maker. What did concern you was to know whether his mettle
would ring true on war's red touchstone. That is what was of vital
consequence to you. If he had that in him ; if he had the iron will, the
spirit that drove him forward over defeat to the ultimate triumph, all
else was of small consequence.
The same thing is true of citizenship now. There is not any patent
device by which we can get good government. There is not any way
by which we can alter or reshape the general scheme of things, by
which we can avoid the necessity of practicing the old, humdrum,
everyday, commonplace virtues, for the lack of which in the individual
as in the nation, no brilliancy, no genius, can ever atone. As a nation
and individually we must show the fundamental qualities of hardihood,
courage, manliness, of decency, morality, clean living, fair dealing as
between man and man, of common sense, the saving grace of common
sense. We must show the qualities which made us as a Nation able to
free ourselves in 1776, able to preserve our national existence in 1861 ;
and if we fail to show them we will go down; and because we will
show them we will make of this country the mightiest upon which
the sun has ever shone.
New methods must be devised for meeting the various problems that
come up. Our complex industrial civilization with its great concentra-
tion of population and of capital in cities, with its extraordinary in-
crease in the rapidity and ease of communication, alike communication
of news and transportation—that complex civilization has brought new
problems before us. It has brought much of good and some evil; but
it has not altered in the slightest the need for the old, fundamental
virtues. The men of ’61 fought for liberty under the law, liberty by
and through the law. They fought to establish the principle that the
law was Supreme; that no man, great or small, stood above it or without
it; that no man could violate it, and that no man could be denied its
protection. Now in civil life no man can be allowed to put him-
self above the law, the law that is to check greed and violation, that
*This is not only good oratory but good literature. That bandarlog of letters, the
critics, might doubtless find fault with it, holding, as they do, that nothing is literature unless
it sounds as though it were written in bed; they would object to it for its sweep of current
and the flash and dash of its cascade style. The every day reader, however, who, when
all is said, is the sole true critic of literature, will say as I do and give his vote to bear
me out.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt • 353
is to put a stop to every form of outrage by one man against another,
the law under and through which alone can we preserve republican
institutions and democratic liberty. The violence that accompanies
license is the hand-maiden of tyranny, and has throughout the world's
history proved but the harbinger of despotism. You, of the great war,
forever established the fact that there should be no appeal to sectional
hate in this country, and just as evil is it to strive to arouse any spirit
of antagonism based upon class or creed. Any form of hatred of one's
neighbor is hostile to the spirit of our government, whether it take
the shape of the arrogance which looks down upon those who are less
well off, which would oppress those less able to protect themselves,
or the rancor and envy which regard with jealous ill will those who
are better off. Either feeling is unworthy of American freemen.
I make my appeal to you, my fellow citizens, in the name of those
qualities which underlie the very existence of our form of government.
I ask for brotherhood. I ask for the willingness of each to help the
other; for the readiness of men to act in combination for the common
good; but I ask you also, as you will not inflict wrong, so not to suffer
it. I ask you to remember that though the law can do something, that
though the honest administration of the law can do more, that though
Something more can be done by acting in organization, in combination,
with one's fellows privately, yet in the long run, in the ultimate
analysis, each man's success must rest upon the sum of that man's
individual qualities. That is the determining factor in the end as to
whether the man rises or falls.
Every one of you veterans knows that in the war there were some
men who would not by any training or arming make good soldiers.
If the man did not have the stuff in him it was not there to get out of
him. It is just so in citizenship. There is not a man of us who
does not at times slip or stumble, and in that case it speaks ill of any
one who fails to reach out a helping hand to his brother; but if a
man lies down you cannot carry him. You can help a man only in
the way which alone is of real ultimate help—you can help him to help
himself. He has got to have it in him to make the effort, to strive.
He has got to have in him the qualities which will make him a good
husband, a good father, a good neighbor, a man who deals justly by
others, and does his duty by the State. If he has not got it in him,
you cannot help him. He will remain to the end a drag upon himself
and upon every one else. I ask that we keep that in mind; that we
remember our obligations to ourselves and to the country, and that
we steadfastly strive to raise ever higher the average of individual
citizenship, for if that average is high enough, scant need be our
concern as to the fate of the State. I believe in your future, I believe
in our future, because I believe with all my heart that in the future
354 Messages and Speeches
all America will raise the standard of individual citizenship; that we
will raise that standard not merely in body and in mind, but in that
which counts for more than body, for more than mind, in character—
character, upon which ultimately rests the fate of every nation.
TO THE FOREST RANGERS AT SANTA BARBARA, MAY 9, 1903.
Let me say a word of thanks to the members of the Forestry force
who acted as my escort. I wish to thank the other gentlemen also,
but particularly the members of the Forestry force. I am, as you gen-
tlemen probably know, exceedingly interested in the question of forestry
preservation. I think our people are growing more and more to under-
stand that in reference to the forests and the wild creatures of the
wilderness our aim should be not to destroy them simply for the selfish
pleasure of one generation, but to keep them for our children and our
children's children. I wish you, the Forest Rangers, and also all the
others, to protect the game and wild creatures, and of course in Cali-
fornia, where the water supply is a matter of such vital moment, the
preservation of the forests for the merely utilitarian side is of the ut-
most, of the highest possible conesquence; and there are no members
of our body politic who are doing better work than those who are
engaged in the preservation of the forests, the keeping of nature as
it is for the sake of its use and for the sake of its beauty.
Q AT SURF, CAL., MAY 9, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I cannot say how much I have enjoyed these three days in California.
It is the first time I ever was in your great and beautiful State; and
but a few hours ago I saw for the first time the greatest of all the
oceans. I have enjoyed it to the full. I have enjoyed the climate, see-
ing the fruits of the soil, seeing all that has been done agriculturally
and industrially. I have enjoyed noting the marvelous material pro-
gress and prosperity; but what I have enjoyed most has been seeing
the men and women of California. It has been to me an education to
come here to California. I did not need to feel what I felt already,
how much of our destiny lay on the Pacific, but I am glad to have seen
your people. I have realized more even than I already realized it the
fundamental oneness of the American Nation. I have come from the
Atlantic across the continent, and here I am addressing an American
audience with the same ideals, the same aspirations, the same hopes,
the same purposes, that the audiences have on the Atlantic seaboard,
or in the Mississippi Valley. I am glad to have met you. I believe
Theodore Roosevelt 355
in you with all my heart and soul, and I believe that your future will
be even greater than your past.
AT SAN LUIS OBISPO, CAL., MAY 9, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a great pleasure to have the chance of meeting you this
afternoon. For three days now I have been traveling through your
wonderful and beautiful State, and I marvel at its fertility. I am not
surprised to see you looking happy. I should be ashamed of you if you
did not.
I know of this country in connection with certain Eastern agricul-
tural producers, for unless I mistake, those who offered prizes for the
largest vegetables and fruits of certain kinds have had to bar the pro-
ducts from this county, because they invariably won the prizes. I know
of one Eastern producer who said that the products of this county
would have to be barred, because he had spent already $500 in prizes
to the county and had gotten back but $14 for seeds. I have forgotten
all of the records that you have in the county. I know that the largest
pumpkin, watermelon and onion came from here, so that your agri-
cultural products have made a name for themselves to be feared. Of
course, in stock raising and dairying, the county stands equally promi-
nent. I am glad to learn that the State of California is erecting here
the polytechnic institute for giving all the scientific training in the
arts of farm life. More and more our people have waked to the fact
that farming is not only a practical, but a scientific pursuit, and that
there should be the same chance for the tiller of the soil to make his a
learned profession that there is in any other business.
For three days I have been traveling through one of those regions
of our country where the interests are agricultural and pastoral, where
the tiller of the soil, the man who grows stock, who is engaged in
agriculture, is the man whose interest is predominant; and of course
it is the merest truism to say that it is the earth tiller, the soil tiller,
the man of the farms, the man of the ranches, who stands as the one
citizen indispensable to the entire community. The welfare of the na-
tion depends even more than upon the welfare of the wage-worker,
upon the welfare of the home-maker of the country regions. I con-
gratulate you people of California upon the evidence that you have
grasped the fact which our people must grasp, that the legislation of
the country must be shaped in the direction of promoting the interests
of the man who has come on the soil to stay and to rear his children
to take his place after him. We have passed the stage as a nation
when we can afford to tolerate the man whose aim it is merely to skin
the soil and go on; to skin the country, to take off the timber, to
356 Messages and Speeches
exhaust it, and go on; our aim must be by laws promotive of irrigation,
by laws securing the wise use in perpetuity of the forests, by laws
shaped in every way, to promote the permanent interests of the country.
Our aim must be to hand over to our children not an impoverished
but an improved heritage. That is the part of wisdom for our people.
We wish to hand over our country to our children in better shape, not
in worse shape, than we ourselves got it.
I have congratulated you upon your material well-being and upon
the steps that you are taking still further to increase that material
well-being. I wish further to congratulate you upon what counts even
more than material prosperity, upon taking care of the interests that
go to make up the higher life of the Nation. I am greeted here by men
who wear the button that shows that they proved true to a lofty ideal
when Abraham Lincoln called to arms in the hour of the Nation's
agony. Our Nation showed itself great in those days because the Na-
tion’s sons in '6I and the years immediately following had it in them to
care for something more even than material well-being, because they
had it in them to feel the lift toward lofty things which only generous
souls can feel. I see around me the men who took part in the great
Civil War, whose presence should excuse me from preaching, for their
practice preaches louder than any words of mine could.
I have seen everywhere through your State, in addition, the care you
are taking in educating the children. I have been struck by the schools,
and as I have said a special word of greeting to the men who deserve
So well of the Nation, so I wish to say a special greeting to the future,
to the children, to those who are to be the men and women of the next
generation; and upon whom it will depend whether this country goes
forward or not. It is a good thing to raise such products as you have
raised on your farms; it is a better thing to bring up such children
as I think I have been seeing today. I like the way in which, through
your schools, you are training the children to citizenship in the future.
Ultimately, though soil and climate will count for much, what will count
for most is the average character in the individual citizen, the individual
man or woman ; that is what counts in the long run in making a nation.
I go from you with an even increased faith in the future of our
country, the future of America, because I go with an even increased
faith and confidence in what the average American citizen is and will be.
I believe in you, men and women of California, men and women of
America, of the United States, because I feel that you are not only
sound in body and sound in mind, but that which counts for more than
body, more than mind—character, into which many different elements
enter—but above all, the elements of decency, of courage, and of com-
111011 Seil Se.
Theodore Roosevelt 357
AT PASO ROBLES, CAL., MAY 9, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I cannot say how much I have enjoyed the three days I have spent in
California. I had heard much and rcad much of the wonderful beauty
of your State, of its climate, of the fertility of its soil, but I had not
been able to fix in my mind what it really would be. I think I was a
pretty good American when I came here, but I feel that I am a better
American now. It has done me good to see you. I congratulate you
upon all that you have done in business, in agriculture, in commerce, in
industries of all kinds; but most of all I congratulate you and all of us
upon the type of citizenship that you have produced. In the last analy-
sis the Nation will go up or go down according to the standard of the
average man or woman. It is a good thing to have farms, ranches,
railroads, factories and commerce, but they will avail nothing if we
have not the right type of average citizen to take advantage of them.
One thing that has pleased me particularly in coming through your
State has been to see the schools, the attention paid to the education
of your children. I have been glad to meet the men and women, and
I think I have been even more glad to see the children. Of course it is
the merest truism to say that not all our natural advantages, not all
our industrial success will avail unless the American of the future is
able to take advantage of the achievements of the past and to turn them
to the best possible account. We need the material well-being as the
foundation upon which to build and we cannot build unless we have
that foundation, but it is only the foundation and upon it must be
raised the superstructure of the higher civic life. And for that life
you are providing in preparing those of the next generation for the ever
higher spiritual, moral and intellectual development. I have been very
glad to see you; glad to have come from the Atlantic, from the East,
through the West, and now to this West of the West—to California.
There is another thing I was glad here on the Seacoast to see—a vessel
of the United States Navy. We have begun to take our position as a
world power, a power situated on a continent fronting on two oceans,
and we must have a navy to assert our position.
AT PAJARO, CAL., MAY II, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I want to thank you for coming out to greet me this morning. I
bave been giving much more time to California than to any other State,
and I am glad of it, for I have enjoyed every hour I have been in your
beautiful and wonderful State. I have been traveling up from the
South and shall now visit San Francisco, then go straight through
to the North. It seems to me every good American that can should
358 Messages and Speeches
visit the Pacific Slope, to realize where so much of our country's great-
ness in the future will lie. I did not need to come out here in order
to believe in you and your work. I knew you well and believed in you
before with all my heart, but it has done me good to get in touch with
you. The thing that has impressed me most coming from the Atlantic
across to the Pacific has been that good Americans are good Americans
in every part of this country. That is the fundamental point to remem-
ber. *
I am glad to have seen you. I want to welcome the men and
women, and especially the children. Of course, it is a mere truism to
say that this country depends upon what the next generation is.
AT WATSONVILLE, CAL., MAY II, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
I have but a minute here, and I can only express to you my appre-
ciation of your having come out to greet me. This is a great fruit
center; California is a great fruit State, a great agricultural State, but,
above all, California is a great State for Californians.
The thing that has impressed me most in this country coming from
the Atlantic to the Pacific is the essential oneness of our people, the
fact that good Americans are good Americans from Maine to Califor-
nia, from the Golden Gate to Sandy Hook. That is the important
part.
Glad though I am to see all your products, I want to congratulate
you especially upon one—the children. I do not come here to teach; I
come here to learn. It has done me good to be in your State and
to meet your people. Until last week I had never been in California,
and I go back an even better American than I came, and I think I
came out a fairly good one. Things that are truisms, that you expect
as simply part of the natural order of events, need to be impressed
upon our people as a whole. We need to understand the command-
ing position already occupied, and the infinitely more commanding
position that will be occupied in the future by our Nation on the Pacific.
This, the greatest of all the oceans, is one which more and more during
the century opening must pass under American influence; and as in-
evitably happens, when a great effort comes, it means that a great
burden of responsibility accompanies the effort. A nation cannot be
great without paying the price of greatness, and only a craven nation
will object to paying that price.
I believe in you, my countrymen; I believe in our people, and there-
fore I believe that they will dare to be great, therefore I believe they
will hail the chance this century brings as one which it should rejoice
a mighty and masterful people to have. And we can face the future
Theodore Roosevelt 359
with the assured confidence of success if only we face it in the spirit
in which our fathers faced the problems of the past.
AT SANTA CRUZ, CAL., MAY II, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
I thank you for the greeting that you have extended to me. I wish
to say a word of special acknowledgment to the men of the Grand
Army, to the representatives of the pioneers, to the men who proved
their loyalty in the supreme test from '61 to '65, and to the pioneers
who showed the same qualities in winning this great West that you of
the Civil War showed in your feat. I also wish to say how pleased I
am to have had as my escort the men of the Naval Militia. The one
thing on which this country must forever be a unit is the navy. We
must have a first-class navy. A nation like ours, with the unique posi-
tion of fronting at once on the Atlantic and the Pacific, a nation forced
by the mere fact of destiny to play a great, a mighty, a masterful part in
the world, cannot afford to neglect its navy, cannot afford to fail to
insist upon the building up of the navy. We must go on with the
task as we have begun it. We have a good navy now. We must make
it an even better one in the future. We must have an ample supply
of the most formidable type of fighting ships; we must have those ships
practiced; we must see that not only are our warships the best in the
world, but that the men who handle them, the men in the gun turrets,
the men in the engine rooms, the men in the conning towers, are also
the best of their kind. I think that our navy is already wonderfully
good and we must strive to make it even better.
I am about to visit the Grove of the Great Trees. I wish to con-
gratulate you people of California, people of this region, and to con-
gratulate all the country on what you have done in preserving these
great trees. Cut down one of these giants and you cannot fill its place.
The ages were their architects and we owe it to ourselves and to our
children's children to preserve them. Nothing has pleased me more
here in California than to see how thoroughly awake you are to pre-
serve the monuments of the past, human and natural. I am glad to
see the way in which the old Mission buildings are being preserved.
This great, wonderful, new State, this State which is itself an empire,
situated on the greatest of Oceans, should keep alive the sense of his-
toric continuity of its past, and should as one step towards that end
preserve the ancient historic landmarks within its limits. I am even
more pleased that you should be preserving the great and wonderful
natural features here, that you should have in California a park like
the Yosemite, that we should have State preserves of these great trees
and other preserves where individuals and associations have kept them,
360 Messages and Speeches
We should see to it that no man for speculative purposes or for mere
temporary use exploits the groves of great trees. Where the individuals
and associations of individuals cannot preserve thém, the State, and, if
necessary, the Nation, should step in and see to their preservation. We
should keep the trees as we should keep great stretches of the wilder-
ness as a heritage for our children and our children's children. Our
aim should be to preserve them for use, to preserve them for beauty,
for the sake of the Nation hereafter. I shall not try to make any ex-
tended address to you. I shall only say how glad I am to be here, bid
you welcome with all my heart, and say how thoroughly I believe in
you, and that I am a better American for being among you.
AT THE BIG TREE GROVE, SANTA CRUZ, CAL., MAY II, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and ladies first, and to the rest of the guests in the second
place:
I want to thank you very much for your courtesy in receiving me,
and to say how much I have enjoyed being here. This is the first
glimpse I have ever had of the big trees, and I wish to pay the highest
tribute I can to the State of California, to those private citizens and
associations of citizens who have co-operated with the State in preserv-
ing these wonderful trees for the whole nation, in preserving them in
whatever part of the State they may be found. All of us ought to want
to see nature preserved; and take a big tree whose architect has been
the ages, anything that man does toward it may hurt it and cannot help
it; and above all, the rash creature who wishes to leave his name to
mar the beauties of nature should be sternly discouraged. Take those
cards pinned up on that tree; they give an air of the ridiculous to this
solemn and majestic grove. To pin those cards up there is as much
out of place as if you tacked so many tin cans up there. I mean that
literally.* You should save the people whose names are there from the
reprobation of every individual by taking down the cards at the earliest
possible moment; and do keep these trees, keep all the wonderful scen-
ery of this wonderful State unmarred by the vandalism or the folly of
man. Remember that we have to contend not merely with knavery,
but with folly; and see to it that you by your actions create the kind of
public opinion which will put a stop to any destruction of or any
marring of the wonderful and beautiful gifts that you have received
from nature, that you ought to hand on as a precious heritage to your
children and your children's children. I am, oh, so glad to be here,
to be in this majestic and beautiful grove, to see the wonderful red-
*Here crops out one of the best and strongest characteristics of President Roosevelt.
He is ever ready to tell folks what he thinks and why he thinks it. Also, he is never so
well pleased as when one pays him the compliment of following his frank example.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 361
woods, and I thank you for giving me the chance, and I do hope that
it will be your object to preserve them as nature made them and left
them, for the future.
AT SAN JOSE, CAL., MAY II, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, men and women, my fellow citizens, my fellow
Americans:
It is a great pleasure to greet you today, to speak to the citizens of
this beautiful city in this great and fertile valley and county. Ever
since our train came into the Santa Clara Valley it has been as though
we were passing through a garden. I do not wonder at the products,
now that I have seen the place. This is one of the famous agricul-
tural counties of the whole country. In hardly any other county has
work quite of your kind been done in the raising of deciduous fruits,
notably prunes. Your city is bound to grow because your county is
bound to grow, and of course the city will grow where the country
tributary to it produces so much. But there was something that pleased
me even more than the prunes, and that was the school houses as I
passed.
Here in this county you have many notable educational institutions.
I understand that you have the oldest normal school in the State; that
Santa Clara is the oldest college; you also have the University of the
Pacific, the Lick Observatory and Leland Stanford University; and
above all, that upon which all the higher education rests—the common
school educational system of the State. It is a fine thing, an absolutely
necessary thing, to have a foundation of material well-being upon
which to build the higher life; but it is equally indispensable that upon
that foundation the higher life shall be built. I congratulate you that
in your care for the body you have not forgotten to care for the higher,
the intellectual, the spiritual side of man. I have been greeted here as
I have been greeted throughout California by the men of the great
Civil War, the veterans to whom we owe it that there is a country
for you and me to be proud of today. They, by their lives, by the
record of their deeds, teach us in more practical fashion than it can be
taught by any preaching, for they teach us by practice, that in the ulti-
mate analysis the greatness of a nation is to be measured not by the
output of its industrial products, not by its material prosperity, not by
the products of the farm, factory, business house, but by the products
of its citizenship, by the men and women that that nation produces.
When Sumter's guns thundered on that April morning in '61 no
amount of industrial prosperity unaccompanied by the lift toward higher
things could have saved the Nation. We had then come to one of
those great crises of national affairs when the need was for the ele-
362 Messages and Speeches
mental virtues of mankind to be displayed, when it was too late to
appeal to mechanical ingenuity, mechanical inventiveness, business
capacity on the greater or on the lesser scale, when nothing could save
us but the manhood of the men and the womanhood of the women,
when we had to rely upon the man who went to battle and upon the
woman to whom fell the harder task of staying at home, with brother
or lover, father or husband gone to the front, left without the bread-
winner, to work her way as best she could, and to endure, in addition,
the sickening anxiety for the loved ones who were in the forefront of
the battle. We had to depend upon the men who, when the final call
was made, were willing to count everything, life itself, as dross in the
scale compared with their eager championship of national honor, of the
unity of the flag, the sacredness of the Republic—the men whose one
ambition it was to spend and be spent when Abraham Lincoln called,
and to follow the flag of Grant, of Sherman, of Thomas, of Sheridan
and Farragut through the years of alternating victory and defeat until
over the hills of disaster they saw the sunset of triumph at Appomat-
tox. j
The problems that confront us from generation to generation change.
The methods of solution for each problem must be sought out carefully
in order that that problem may be solved aright; but the funda-
mental qualities needed by the men of today are those that were
needed by the men of yesterday, and they will be the same that in their
turn the men of tomorrow will need. There is no patent substitute for
the fundamental virtues. Nothing can make good citizenship in men
who have not got in them courage, hardihood, decency, sanity, the spirit
of truth-telling and truth-seeking, the spirit that dares and endures,
the spirit that knows what it is to have a lofty ideal, and yet to endeavor
to realize that ideal in practical fashion. That is why I congratulate
you upon the care you are paying to your educational system, to the
training of the young.” Of course there are natures which no training
can develop, because if the stuff is not there nothing can be made out
of them. But training will make a good citizen a better citizen. Train-
ing when applied to raw material will do good to that raw material.
I congratulate you, I congratulate all our people, upon the realiza-
tion shown by California of the fact that though the interests of the
body are great, the interests of the soul are greater; that though we
must take care of the first—we are not to be excused if we fail to show
thrift, energy, business intelligence, the power of hard work for
material ends—we are not to be excused if we fail to show those quali-
ties, yet that those qualities cannot by themselves suffice, that to them
*Aside from what might be called the utilities of an education and which a man may
measure by watching his bank account, there is a comfort that goes with it and to be drawn
from it, of which Chesterfield was thinking when he said that if you planted the tree of
learning in your youth it would shade your old age.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 363
we must add others. The body should be trained; even more should
the mind be trained; and most of all should we train character; char-
acter, into which so many elements enter; but three above all—decency,
the spirit of fair dealing, of decent behavior in the family, in the neigh-
borhood, towards the State; and to decency to be added courage, the
spirit that dares and endures and does, and to both to be added the Sav-
ing grace of common sense. I congratulate you upon your thought for
the next generation, for California’s greatness. The greatness of the
Union in the future will depend upon the kind of men and women who
act as your heirs. If they are not the right kind they will mar and
spoil the heritage you have left; and that heritage can be kept as it
should and will be kept, because the boys and girls of today are being
trained to become fit citizens of tomorrow.
In closing I want to thank you and to say how I have enjoyed being
here in California. Above all things, I have enjoyed the knowledge
that coming across this continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from
the East to the West, and now west of the West into California—
for California stands by itself—wherever I have been address-
ing any audience I have been able to make my appeal to the men and
women to whom I speak purely as Americans, speaking to them as
Americans, and as nothing else. You, the men of the great
war, fought to put an end once for all to the evil spirit of sec-
tional hatred. No man is a good American—I could put that stronger
—the worst enemy of American institutions is the man who seeks
to excite one set of Americans against their fellow-Americans.
And it matters nothing whether the appeal is made in the
fancied interest of a class, of a creed, or of a section, the man who
makes it is a traitor to our institutions and their spirit. We can make
this government a success only by proceeding in accordance with its
fundamental proposition and treating each man, Northerner or South-
erner, Easterner or Westerner, whatever his birthplace, whatever his
creed, his occupation, his means, as a man and as nothing else.
I believe in you, I believe in the future of this State, I believe
in the future of this nation, because I am sure that ultimately,
no matter what may be any temporary Swerving, our people will con-
sent to no other base for the management of this government, and will
insist invariably in the long run that we remain true to the principles
of those who with Washington founded the government, and those
who with Lincoln preserved the government and made this a nation of
freemen, each guaranteed his rights, each prevented from wronging
any one else and each assured of his being treated exactly as his conduct
entitled him to be treated.
364 Messages and Speeches
AT CAMPBELL, CAL., MAY II, 1903.
It is a very great pleasure to be here. It is a great pleasure to take
part in planting this tree in the presence of the children of Campbell
County. I do not know of anything that bids better for our material
well-being than the tree culture; and I know of nothing among the
many things that the National Grange has done that it has done better
than fostering the habit of caring for the forests where they exist,
and the planting of new trees. And then, even above trees, come the
children, that is the all-important part. It is a peculiar pleasure to me
to address the children. I have but just one word to say to you, it
is something I should say to your elders also. I believe in play and
I believe in work. I want to see you play hard while you play, and
when you work do not play at all.
AT LELAND STANFORD JR. UNIVERSITY, PALO ALTO, CAL,
MAY I2, 1903.
President Jordan, and you, my fellow citizens, and especially you, my
fellow college men and women:
I thank you for your greeting, and I know you will not grudge my
saying, first of all, a special word of thanks to the men of the Grand
Army. It is a fine thing to have before a body of students men
who by their practice have rendered it unnecessary that they should
preach; for what we have to teach by precept, you, the men of
'61 to '65, have taught by deed, by action. I am glad, I am proud
as an American college man myself to have seen the tablet outside,
within the court, which shows that this young university sent eighty-
five of her sons to war when the country called for them. I came
from a college which boasts as its proudest building that which
is to stand to the memory of Harvard's sons who responded to the
call of Lincoln when the hour of the nation's danger was at hand. It
will be a bad day for this country and a worse day for all educational
institutions in this country if ever such a call is made, and the men
of college training do not feel it peculiarly incumbent upon them to
respond.
The last week I have thoroughly enjoyed, and my enjoyment would
have been unmarred by a flaw if I had not been obliged to make
speeches. I have been traveling through California. It is the first
time I have ever come to the Pacific Coast and my visit to the wonder-
ful and beautiful State has been to me one of absorbing interest. I
cannot say how I have appreciated being here; the chance to see the
natural products, the scenery, the landscape, all that man has done with
the soil, how he has taken advantage of the climate, what he has done
materially and socially, what he has done in building upon the material
Theodore Roosevelt 365
well-being which he has secured from soil and climate the higher life
of the intellect, the spirit and the soul. Now I have come to this great
institution of learning and I wonder whether you yourselves fully
appreciate the mere physical beauty of your surroundings. I was not
prepared in the least (and I thought I was prepared for it) for the
beauty of your surroundings. You have had these plans of your
university made by a great architect, native to our own American soil,
who himself had the sense to adapt—not to copy in servile fashion—
but to adapt the old Californian arcihtecture to the new university
uses, and so we have here a great institution of learning absolutely
unique, even in its outward aspect, situated in this beautiful valley
with the hills in the background, under this sky, with these buildings,
and if this university does not turn out the right kind of citizenship
and the right kind of scholarship, I shall be more than disappointed.
I want to say one word personally. President Jordan has been
kind enough to allude to me as an old friend. Mr. Jordan is too
modest to say that he has long been not only a friend, but a man to
whom I have turned for advice and help, before and since I became
President. I am glad to have the chance of acknowledging
my obligations to him, and I am also glad that when I ask you
to strive toward productive scholarship, toward productive citizenship,
I can use the president of the university as an example. Of course,
in any of Our American institutions of learning, even more important
than the production of scholarship, is the production of citizenship.
That is the most important thing that any institution of learning can
produce. There is a great proportion, a great number of students
who cannot and should not try, in after life, to lead a career of scholar-
ship, but no university can take high rank if it does not aim at the
production of, and succeed in producing, a certain number of deep
and thorough scholars. Not scholars whose scholarship is of the
barren kind, but men of productive scholarship, men who do good
work, I trust great work, in the fields of literature, of art, of science,
in all their manifold activities. Here in California this nation, com-
posite in its race stocks, speaking an Old World tongue, and with an
inherited Old World culture, has acquired an absolutely new domain.
I do not mean new only in the sense of additional territory like that
already possessed, I mean new in the sense of new surroundings, to
use the scientific phrase, of a new environment. Being new, I think
we have a right to look for a substantial achievement on the part of
your people along new lines. I do not mean the self-conscious striv-
ing after newness, which is only too apt to breed eccentricity, but I
mean that those among you whose bent is toward scholarship as a
career, if those will keep in mind the fact that such scholarship should
be productive, and should therefore aim at giving to the world some
366 Messages and Speeches
addition to the world's stock of what is useful or beautiful, and if you
work simply and naturally, taking advantage of your surroundings as
you find them, then in my belief a new mark will be made in the history
of the intellectual achievement by our people, by our race. You of
this institution are blessed in its extraordinary physical beauty and
appropriateness of architecture and surroundings, with its suggestion
of what I might call the Americanized Greek. Such is your institu-
tion, situated on the shores of this great ocean, built by a race which
has come steadily westward, which has come to where the Occident
looks west to the Orient, a race whose members here, fresh, vigorous,
with the boundless possibilities of the future brought to their very
doors in a sense that cannot be possible for the members of the race
situated farther east—surely there will be some great outcome in the
way not merely of physical, but of moral and intellectual work worth
doing. I should think but ill of you if you developed along the lines
of the prig, and if what I have read about California is true, if
the present proper desire for athletic sports continues to develop,
you are saved from that danger. I do not want you to turn out
prigs; I do not want you to turn out the self-conscious. I believe,
with all my heart, in play. I want you to play hard without encroach-
ing on your work. I do, nevertheless, think you Ought to have at
least the consciousness of the serious side of what all this means, and
of the necessity of effort, thrust upon you, so that you may justify by
your deeds in the future your training and the extraordinary advan-
tages under which that training has been obtained.
America, the Republic of the United States, is of course in a peculiar
sense typical of the present age. We represent the fullest develop-
ment of the democratic spirit joined to the extraordinary and highly
complex industrial growth of the last half century. It behoves us to
justify by our acts the claim made for that political and economic prog-
ress. We will never justify the existence of the republic by merely
talking about what the republic has done each Fourth of July. If
our homage is lip loyalty merely the great deeds of those who went
before us, the great deeds of the times of Washington and of the
times of Lincoln, the great deeds of the men who won the Revolution
and founded the nation, and of the men who preserved it, who made it
a Union and a free Republic—these great deeds will simply arise to
shame us. We can honor our fathers and our fathers' fathers only
by ourselves striving to rise level to their standard. There are plenty
of tendencies for evil in what we see round about us. Thank heaven,
there are an even greater number of tendencies for good, and one of
the things, Mr. Jordan, which it seems to me give this nation cause
for hope is the national standard of ambition which makes it possible
to recognize with admiration and regard such work as the founding of
Theodore Roosevelt 367
a university of this character. It speaks well for our nation that men
and women should desire during their lives to devote the fortunes
which they were able to acquire or to inherit because of our system of
government, because of our social system, to objects so entirely worthy
and SO entirely admirable as the foundation of a great seat of learning
such as this. All that we outsiders can do is to pay our tribute of
respect to the dead and to the living who have done such good, and at
least to make it evident that we appreciate to the full what has been
done. *
I have spoken of scholarship; I want to go back to the question of
citizenship, the question affecting not merely the scholars among you,
not merely those who are hereafter to lead lives devoted to science, to
art, to productivity in literature. And just let me say one word—
when you take up science, art and literature, remember that one first-
class bit of work is better than one thousand fairly good bits of work;
that as the years roll on the man or the woman who has been able to
make a masterpiece with the pen, the brush, the pencil, in any way,
that that man, that woman, has rendered a service to the country such
as not all his or her compeers who merely do fairly good second-rate
work can ever accomplish. But only a limited number of you, only a
limited number of us, can ever become scholars or work successfully
along the lines I have spoken of, but we can all be good citizens. We
can all lead a life of action, a life of endeavor, a life that is to be
judged primarily by the effort, somewhat by the result, along the lines
of helping the growth of what is right and decent and generous and
lofty in our several communities, in the State, in the nation.
And you, men and women, who have had the advantages of a college
training are not to be excused if you fail to do not as well as, but if
you fail to do more than the average man outside who has not had
your advantages. Every now and then I meet (at least I meet him
in the East, and I dare say he is to be found here) the man who, having
gone through college, feels that somehow that confers upon him a
special distinction which relieves him from the necessity of showing
himself as good as his fellows. I see you recognize the type. That
man is not only a curse to the community, and incidentally to himself,
but he is a curse to the cause of academic education, the college and
university training, because by his existence he serves as an excuse for
those who would like to denounce such education. Your education,
your training, will not confer on you one privilege in the way of
excusing you from effort or from work. All it can do, and what it
should do, is to make you a little better fitted for such effort, for such
work; and I do not care whether that is in business, politics, in no
matter what branch of endeavor, all it can do is by the training you
have received, by the advantages you have received, to fit you to do a
368 Messages and Speeches
little better than the average man that you meet. It is incumbent
upon you to show that the training has had that effect. It ought to
enable you to do a little better for yourselves, and if you have in you
souls capable of a thrill of generous emotion, souls capable of under-
standing what you owe to your training, to your alma mater, to the
past and the present that have given you all that you have—if you
have such souls, it ought to make you doubly bent upon disinterested
work for the State and the nation. Such work can be done along
many different lines.
I want today, here in California, to make a special appeal to all of
you, and to California as a whole, for work along a certain line—the
line of preserving your great natural advantages alike from the stand-
point of use and from the standpoint of beauty. If the students of this
institution have not by the mere fact of their surroundings learned
to appreciate beauty, then the fault is in you and not in the surround-
ings. Here in California you have some of the great wonders of the
world. You have a singularly beautiful landscape, singularly beautiful
and singularly majestic scenery, and it should certainly be your aim to
try to preserve for those who are to come after you that beauty; to
try to keep unmarred that majesty. Closely entwined with keeping
unmarred the beauty of your scenery, of your great natural attractions,
is the question of making use of, not for the moment merely, but for
future time, of your great natural products. Yesterday I saw for the
first time a grove of your great trees, a grove which it has taken the
ages several thousands of years to build up ; and I feel most emphat-
ically that we should not turn a tree which was old when the first
Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the valley of the Euphrates, which
it has taken so many thousands of years to build up, and which can
be put to better use, into shingles. That, you may say, is not looking
at the matter from the practical standpoint. There is nothing more
practical, in the end, than the preservation of beauty, than the preserva-
tion of anything that appeals to the higher emotions in mankind.
But, furthermore, I appeal to you from the standpoint of use. A few
big trees, of unusual size and beauty, should be preserved for their
own sake; but the forests as a whole should be used for business
purposes, only they should be used in a way that will preserve them
as permanent sources of national wealth. In many parts of California
the whole future welfare of the State depends upon the way in which
you are able to use your water supply; and the preservation of the
forests and the preservation of the use of the water are inseparably
connected. I believe we are past the stage of national existence when
we could look on complacently at the individual who skinned the land
and was perfectly content for the sake of three years’ profit for himself
to leave a desert for the children of those who were to inherit the
Theodore Roosevelt 369
Soil. I think we have passed that stage. We should handle, and I
think we now do handle, all problems such as those of forestry and of
the preservation and use of our waters from the standpoint of the
permanent interests of the home-maker in any region—the man who
comes in not to take what he can out of the soil and leave, having
exploited the country, but who comes to dwell therein, to bring up his
children, and to leave them the heritage in the country not merely
unimpaired, but if possible even improved. That is the sensible view
of civic obligation, and the policy of the State and of the nation should
be shaped in that direction. It should be shaped in the interest of the
home-maker, the actual resident, the man who is not only to be bene-
fited himself, but whose children and children's children are to be
benefited by what he has done. California has for years, I am happy
to say, taken a more sensible, a more intelligent interest in forest
preservation than any other State. It early appointed a forest com-
mission, later on some of the functions of that commission were re-
placed by the Sierra Club, a club which has done much on the Pacific
coast to perpetuate the spirit of the explorer and the pioneer. Then
I am happy to say a great business interest showed an intelligent and
farsighted spirit which is a happy augury, for the Redwood Manu-
facturers of San Francisco were first among lumbermen's associations
to give assistance to the cause of practical forestry. The study of the
redwood which the action of this association made possible was the
pioneer study in the co-operative work which is now being carried out
between lumbermen all over the United States and the Federal Bureau
of Forestry. All of this kind of work is peculiarly the kind of work
in which we have a right to expect not merely hearty co-operation
from, but leadership in college men trained in the universities of this
Pacific Coast State; for the forests of this State stand alone in the
world. There are none others like them anywhere. There are no
other trees anywhere like the giant Sequoias; nowhere else is there a
more beautiful forest than that which clothes the western slope of the
Sierra. Very early your forests attracted lumbermen from other
States, and by the course of timber land investments some of the best
of the big tree groves were threatened with destruction. I am sorry
to say destruction came upon some of them, but I am happy to say that
the women of California rose to the emergency through the California
Club, and later the Sempervirens Club took vigorous action, but the
Calaveras grove is not yet safe, and there should be no rest until
that safety is secured, by the action of private individuals, by the action
of the State, by the action of the nation. The interest of California
in forest protection was shown even more effectively by the purchase
of the Big Basin Redwood Park, a superb forest property the possession
370 Messages and Speeches
of which should be a source of just pride to all citizens jealous of
California's good name. º
I appeal to you, as I say, to protect these mighty trees, these wonder-
ful monuments of beauty. I appeal to you to protect them for the
sake of their beauty, but I also make the appeal just as strongly on
economic grounds; as I am well aware that in dealing with such
questions a farsighted economic policy must be that to which alone
in the long run one can safely appeal. The interest of California in
forests depends directly of course upon the handling of her wood and
water supplies and the supply of material from the lumber woods and
the production of agricultural products on irrigated farms. The great
valleys which stretch through the State between the Sierra Nevada
and the Coast Ranges must owe their future development as they owe
their present prosperity to irrigation. Whatever tends to destroy the
water supply of the Sacramento, the San Gabriel, and the other valleys
strikes vitally at the welfare of California. The welfare of California
depends in no small measure upon the preservation of water for the
purposes of irrigation in those beautiful and fertile valleys which can-
not grow crops by rainfall alone. The forest cover upon the drain-
age basins of streams used for irrigation purposes is of prime impor-
tance to the interests of the entire State. Now keep in mind that the
whole object of forest protection is as I have said again and again
the making and maintaining of prosperous homes. I am not advocat-
ing forest protection from the aesthetic standpoint only. I do advocate
the keeping of big trees, the great monarchs of the woods, for the
sake of their beauty, but I advocate the preservation and wise use of
the forests because I feel it essential to the interests of the actual
settlers. I am asking that the forests be used wisely for the sake of
the successors of the pioneers, for the sake of the settlers who dwell
on the land and by doing so extend the borders of our civilization.
I ask it for the sake of the man who makes his farm in the woods, or
lower down along the side of the streams which have their rise in the
mountains. Every phase of the land policy of the United States is,
as it by right ought to be, directed to the upbuilding of the home-maker.
The one sure test of all public land legislation should be: does it help
to make and to keep prosperous homes? If it does, the legislation is
good. If it does not, the legislation is bad. Any legislation which
has a tendency to give land in large tracts to people who will lease
it out to tenants is undesirable. We do not ever want to let our land
policy be shaped so as to create a big class of proprietors who rent to
others. We want to make the smaller men who, under such conditions,
would rent—we want to make them actual proprietors. We must
shape our policy so that these men themselves shall be the land owners,
the makers of homes, the keepers of homes.
Theodore Roosevelt 37I
Certain of our land laws, however beneficent their purposes, have
been twisted into an improper use, so that there have grown up abuses
under them by which they tend to create a class of men who, under
one color and another, obtain large tracts of soil for speculative pur-
poses, or to rent out to others; and there should be now a thorough
scrutiny of our land laws with the object of so amending them as to do
away with the possibility of such abuses. If it were not for the
national irrigation act we would be about past the time when Uncle
Sam could give every man a farm. Comparatively little of our land
is left which is adapted to farming without irrigation. The home-
maker on the public land must hereafter, in the great majority of cases,
have water for irrigation, or the making of his home will fail. Let
us keep that fact before our mind. Do not misunderstand me when I
have spoken of the defects of our land laws. Our land laws have
served a noble purpose in the past and have become the models for
other governments. The homestead law has been a notable instrument
for good. To establish a family permanently upon a quarter section
of land, or of course upon a less quantity if it is irrigated land, is the
best use to which it can be put. The first need of any nation is intelli-
gent and honest citizens. Such can only come from honest and
intelligent homes, and to get the good citizenship we must get the
good homes. It is absolutely necessary that the remainder of our
public land should be reserved for the home-maker, and it is necessary
in my judgment that there should be a revision of the land laws and a
cutting out of such provisions from them as in actual practice under
present conditions tend to make possible the acquisition of large tracts
for speculative purposes or for the purpose of leasing to others.
I have said that good laws alone will not secure good administration.
Citizenship is the prime test in the welfare of the nation; but we need
good laws; and above all we need good land laws throughout the
West. We want to see the free farmer own his own home. The
best of the public lands are already in private hands, and yet the rate
of their disposal is steadily increasing. More than six million acres
were patented during the first three months of the present year. It
is time for us to see that our remaining public lands are saved for the
home-maker to the utmost limit of his possible use. I say this to you
of this university because we have a right to expect that the best
trained, the best educated men on the Pacific Slope, the Rocky Moun-
tains and great plains States will take the lead in the preservation and
right use of the forests, in securing the right use of the waters, and of
seeing to it that our land policy is not twisted from its original pur-
pose, but is perpetuated by amendment, by change when such change
is necessary in the line of that purpose, the purpose being to turn the
372 Messages and Speeches
public domain into farms, each to be the property of the man who
actually tills it and makes his home on it.
Infinite are the possibilities for usefulness that lie before such a body
as that I am addressing. Work! Of course you will have to work.”
I should be sorry for you if you did not have to work. Of course
you will have to work, and I envy you the fact that before you, before
the graduates of this university lies the chance of lives to be spent in
hard labor for great and glorious and useful causes, hard labor for
the uplifting of your State, of the Union, of all mankind.
AT BURLINGAME, CAL., MAY 12, 1903.
Let me thank you for coming out to see me, and say how I have
enjoyed coming here. I have enjoyed being in Califorina for the
last week, and it has been the greatest possible pleasure.
AT THE DEDICATION OF THE BUILDING OF THE YOUNG MEN'S
CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 12, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of this
great city, of this great State:
Few things could have given me more pleasure than the privilege
of taking part at the dedication, free of debt, of this building to the
uses for which it is dedicated. It would be hard to overestimate the
amount of good work done by the Young Men's Christian Associations
and the Young Women's Christian Associations. I well remember
that I used to feel for a long time indignant that there were not Young
Women's Christian Associations also, and how pleased I was when
they started and the development they attained. It seems to me that
the Y. M. C. A. has been able to a very marked degree to combine
that practical efficiency in action, in adherence to a lofty ideal which
should be the aim of all decent citizenship throughout our country.
Of course it is not enough to have mere efficiency. The more
efficient a man is the more dangerous he is if that efficiency is not
guided by the proper type of spirit, by the proper sense of moral
responsibility. Of course it is a mere truism to say that the very
abilities, physical, mental, moral, that the very abilities of the body,
the mind and the soul, which make a man potent for good if they are
guided aright, make him dangerous to himself and to the whole com-
munity if they are guided wrong. And the man who because of his
strength, because of his courage, of his power, can do best work for
decency if these attributes are used in the proper service, will do most
*President Roosevelt everywhere gives notice that he subscribes to that philosophy which
declares that Idleness is the holiday of a fool.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 373
harm if there is no guiding principle behind them. As I say, that is
a mere truism; you all of you know, in dealing in your own families,
with your neighbors, in your relations with the State, that strength of
any kind, physical, mental, is but a source of danger if it is not guided
aright. On the other hand it is just as important for every man or
woman who is striving for decency to keep ever in mind the further
fact that unless there is power, efficiency, behind the effort for decency,
scant is the good that will come. It is not enough to have mere
aspiration after righteousness; it is not enough to have the lofty ideal;
with it must go the power of in some sort practically realizing it.
The cloistered virtue which fears the rough contact with the world can
avail but little in our eminently practical civilization of today, in the
rough and tumble life made necessary by, inevitably attendant upon, the
development of a strong and masterful people working out its fate
through the complex industrialism of this age. With decency there
must go the power practically to apply it in life, practically to work it
out, and to work it out for the benefit of others as well as for one's
self. The Y. M. C. A. stands for so much because it represents the
work of men and women who to a generous enthusiasm for their
fellows, to a lofty ideal of service for the Giver of good, and for all
mankind, join the power to realize that ideal in practical ways, the
power to work concretely for the attainment of at least some measure
of the good sought.
I have come across the work of the Young Men's Christian Associa-
tion in many different walks of life. I do not know any branch of it
that has done better work than the branch connected with the railway
organizations, for instance, and I naturally feel a peculiar interest in
and rejoice peculiarly over the work done among the soldiers and
sailors wearing the uniform of the United States Government. Every
decent American ought to be proud of the army and the navy of Uncle
Sam. Therefore, it is peculiarly incumbent upon us to see that the
man in that army or navy has a help, given in the right way, not the
wrong way; that he is given a chance for wholesome amusement, a
chance to lead an upright and honorable life in his hours of relaxation.
Another thing the Y. M. C. A. represents, and that is knowledge of
human nature. You are not going to do very much good with human
nature if you attempt to take the bad out of it, by leaving a vacuum,
for that vacuum is going to be filled with something, and if you do
not fill it with what is good it will be filled with what is evil. The
Young Men's Christian Association represents the effort to provide
for the body as well as for the mind, to help young men to educate
themselves, to train themselves for the practical life as well as for the
higher life, and to give them amusement and relaxation that will
educate and not debase them. In other words, the Y. M. C. A. in all its
374 Messages and Speeches
branches is working for civic and social righteousness, for decency,
for good citizenship. There is no patent recipe for getting good cit-
izenship. You get it by applying the old, old rules of decent conduct,
the rules in accordance with which decent men have had to shape their
lives from the beginning. A good citizen, a man who stands as he
should stand in his relation to the State, to the nation, must first of
all be a good member of his own family; a good father or son, brother
or husband, a man who does right the thing that is nearest, a man
who is a good neighbor,” and I use neighbor broadly, who handles
himself as his self-respect should bid him handle himself in his rela-
tions with the community at large, in his relations with those whom he
employs, or by whom he is employed, with those with whom he comes
in contact in any form of business relations, or in any other way. If
there is one lesson which I think each of us learns as he grows older,
it is that it is not what the man works at, provided, of course, it
is respectable and honorable in character, that fixes his place; it is the
way he works at it. Providence working in ways that to us are
inscrutable conditions our lives so that but few men can choose exactly
the work they would like best. One man finds that his lines lie in
pleasant places; another not; one man finds that to him is allotted
one task and another that he must undertake an entirely different task.
All the tasks are necessary. Every man engaged in this great city
on this day in any of the innumerable kinds of work necessary to the
legitimate life of the city, is himself doing necessary and honorable
work; and if we are sincere in our professions of adherence to the
principles laid down by the Founder of Christianity, if we are sincere
in our professions of adherence to the immutable laws of righteousness
we will honor in others and ourselves the power of each to do decently
and well the work allotted to him and ask nothing further than that.
If we can get ourselves and the community at large really imbued with
that spirit nine tenths of the difficulties that beset us will vanish. For
far more important in causing trouble than any material misery or
material misfortune, is the moral misery, the moral misfortune, or the
moral wrong-doing which, on the one hand, makes a man arrogant
to those whom he regards as less well off than himself, and which on
the other hand manifests itself in the equally base shape of rancor,
hate, envy, or jealousy for those better off. One form of misconduct
is just as bad as the other, and to preach against either only to those
afflicted by the other does no good. When we practically realize that
the worth lies in the way of doing the work; that that applies whether
*President Roosevelt has no sympathy with the heresy of Cain. He is right. It isn’t
the man who looks often in the glass and seldom from the window who succeeds. Even
selfishness, if it be wise, will broaden its concern so as to include everyone about it: for
he who is most interested in promoting the good of his neighbor is best interested in him-
self.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 375
your work is that of employer or employed, of townsman or country-
man, of the man who works with his head or the man who works with
his hands; when we practically realize that each man will have too
much respect for himself and for his brother ever to permit himself
either to look down upon that brother, or to regard him with envy
and jealousy, either one—when we get that spirit in the community
we will have taken a longer stride toward at least an imperfect realiza-
tion in this world of the principle of applied Christianity than has
ever been taken in the world before.
I thank you for giving me the opportunity to share, in however small
a degree, in the work that you are doing, and I wish you godspeed.
AT BANQUET TENDERED BY THE CITIZENS OF SAN FRANCISCO,
CAL., AT PALACE HOTEL, MAY 12, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mayor, Mr. Governor, and you, my hosts:
Let me thank you with all my heart for the more than kindness,
the more than courtesy and cordiality, with which I have been treated
in California from the hour when I first set foot within her borders.
Governor, the message that I shall send back is: I have come to
California; I have seen; and I have been conquered by California's
citizens and California's Governor.
And, Mr. Mayor, as you said in your speech, the thing that has
struck me most coming here, coming from the East through the West,
and west of the West to California—the thing that has struck me most is
that though I have never been in your great and beautiful State before,
though I have known your citizens only as I met them elsewhere, I am
absolutely at home, for I am speaking as one American to his fellow-
Americans. I have been pleased with the diversity of the country,
but, oh my fellow-countrymen, I have been pleased infinitely more with
the unity of our country. While I am not by inheritance a Puritan,
I have acquired certain traits one of which is an uneasy feeling which
I think a large number of Americans share, that when we are having
a good time, it is not quite right. And during the week that I have
been in California I have enjoyed myself so much that I have had a
slight feeling that maybe I was not quite doing my duty. But I can-
not say that I am penitent about it.
And now, my fellow-citizens, let me try to express, for I can only
try, I cannot fully express, how I have enjoyed and appreciated my
visit to California, my sojourn among you. It has been a genuine
revelation, for while I knew of much that I should see, I could not
realize it until I had seen it. I think I was a fairly good American
a week ago when I came into your State, but I am a better one now,
and even more confident in the nation's future and more resolute to do
376 Messages and Speeches
whatever in my power lies to bring about that future. I thank you ;
I thank the citizens of the Golden State for their greeting. I rejoice
with you in the wonderful prosperity of California, and that prosperity
is but part of the prosperity of the whole nation. Speaking broadly,
prosperity must of necessity come to all of us or to none of us. There
are sporadic exceptions. Of course we all of us know people who
cannot be made prosperous by any season of good fortune. There will
be exceptions, individual and local, but the law of brotherhood is the
universal law, the law upon which the well-being of this nation is
based, and taken as a whole we can state with absolute certainty that if
good times come they will come more or less to all sections and all
classes, and that if hard times come, while they may bear unequally
upon us, yet more or less they bear upon each State, upon each set of
individuals. For weal or for woe, we of this country are indissolubly
bound together. In the long run we shall go up or go down accord-
ingly as the whole nation goes up or goes down. Therefore it is that
no more wicked deed can be done than the deed of him who would
seek to make any of our people believe that they can rise by trampling
down their fellows. And no more wicked appeal can be made than
the appeal to rancor, to hatred, to jealousy, whether made in the name
of a section or in the name of a class.
The Golden State has a future of even brighter promise than most
of her older sisters, and yet the future is bright for all of us. Cali-
fornia, still in her youth, can look forward to such growth as only a
few of her sisters can share, yet there are immense possibilities of
growth for all our States from one end of the Union to the other.
In this growth, in keeping and increasing our prosperity, the most
important factor must be the character of our citizenship. Nothing
can take the place of the average quality of energy, thrift, business
enterprise and sanity in our community as a whole. Unless the
average individual in our nation has to a high degree the qualities
that command success we cannot expect to deserve it or to keep what
it brings. Our future is in my opinion well assured from the very
fact that there is this high degree of character in the average American
citizen. I cannot over-emphasize the fact that law and the adminis-
tration of the law can merely supplement and help to give full play
to the forces that make the individual man a factor of usefulness in
the community. If the individual citizen has not got the right stuff
in him you cannot get it out of him, because it is not there to get out.
No law that the wit of man has ever devised ever has made or ever
will make the fool wise, the coward brave, or the weakling strong.
When we get down to those places where you see humanity in the raw
then it is the native strength of the man that will count more than
aught else; and we cannot afford in this community ever to weaken
Theodore Roosevelt 377
the spirit of individual initiative, ever to make any man believe that
if he cannot walk himself somehow the law can carry him. It cannot.
There is but one real way in which any man can be helped, and that
is by teaching him to help himself.
Remember that the factor of the sum of the individual’s own qualities
comes first. With that admitted, with that kept in mind, it is then
true that something, and oftentimes a good deal, can be done by wise
legislation and by upright, honest and fearless enforcement of the laws,
an enforcement of the laws which must and shall know no respect of
persons—laws local, laws State, laws national. We have attained our
present position of economic well-being, of economic leadership in
the international business world under a tariff policy in which I think
our people, as a whole, have acquiesced as essentially wise, alike from
the standpoint of the manufacturer, the merchant, the farmer, and the
wageworker. Doubtless as our needs shift it will be necessary to
reapply in its details this system so as to meet those shifting needs;
but it would certainly seem from the standpoint of our business interests
—and such a question, primarily a business question, should be ap-
proached only from the standpoint of our business interests—it would
seem most unwise to abandon the general policy of the system under
which our success has been so signal.
In financial matters we are to be congratulated upon having definitely
determined that our currency system must rest upon a gold basis,
for to follow any other course would have meant disaster so wide-
spread that it would be difficult to overestimate it. There is, however,
unquestionably need of enacting further financial legislation so as to
provide for greater elasticity in our currency system. At present there
are certain seasons during which the rigidity of this system causes a
stringency most unfortunate in its effects. The last Congress in its
wisdom took up and disposed of various matters of vital moment;
such as those dealing with the regulation and supervision of the great
corporations commonly known as trusts, with securing in effective
fashion the abolition of rebates by transportation companies, that is,
with securing fair play as between the big man and the little man in
getting their products to market, and in initiating the national system
of irrigation. So in my judgment the Congress that is to assemble
next fall should take up and dispose of the pressing questions relating
to banking and currency. I believe that such action will be taken,
and I am sure that it ought to be taken. It is needed in the interest
of the business world and it is needed even more in the interest of the
world of producers, of earth tillers, of men who make their living by
the products of the farm and ranch. Such action would supplement
in fitting style the excellent work that has already been done in recent
years in regard to our monetary system. There always will be need
378 Messages and Speeches
of wise legislation and an even greater need of the wisdom which
recognizes when the wisest policy is to have no legislation; and it is
of prime importance to us to remember that we cannot afford to con-
done in public life any deviation from the principles of common sense
and of rugged honesty which we deem essential in private and business
life.
There is no royal road to good government. Good government
comes to the nation the bulk of whose people show in their relations
to that government the humdrum, ordinary, work-a-day virtues, and
it comes and can come upon no other condition. We need the best
intellectual skill, we need the most thorough training in public life,
but such skill and such training can be only supplementary to and in
some sense substitutes for the fundamental virtues that have marked
every great and prosperous nation since the dim years when history
dawned, the fundamental virtues of decency, honesty, courage, hardi-
hood; the spirit of fair dealing as between man and man, the spirit
that dares, that foresees, that endures, that triumphs; and added to
all those qualities, the saving grace of common sense.
AT THE HALL OF THE NATIVE SONS OF THE GOLDEN WEST,
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL, IN RESPONSE TO GREETINGS FROM
THE ASSOCIATION OF PIONEERS, MEXICAN WAR
VETERANS, NATIVE SONS OF THE GOLDEN
WEST, AND NATIVE DAUGHTERS OF
THE GOLDEN WEST, MAY 13, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, Mrs. Keith, and you who have greeted me today:
I thank you, men and women of the Golden State. I thank you not
merely for the greeting you have given me today, but through you I
thank your State for the week I have spent within her borders. I
trust I came within them a fairly good American, and I leave them a
better American.
I am deeply touched by the beautiful gift you have given me, and
you see this shows that even a President can be a successful bear
hunter. I had begun to think that my acquaintance with that noble
animal must cease.
Mr. Phalen, you pleased and touched me very much by what you
said as to my feeling toward the pioneers. Of course I am glad to
be welcomed by you, for you, the men of '49, the men of the Mexican
War, you have done what I preach, and practice is always better than
preaching. I should be sorry indeed if there were not societies like
those of the Native Sons and Native Daughters of this State to keep
alive the sense of historic continuity with the State's mighty past.
Theodore Roosevelt 379
I have welcomed the sight of the feeling which has made the people
of this State wish to preserve the ancient landmarks, landmarks of
man and landmarks of nature, and which has made them desirous of
keeping alive the memory of the great deeds and great doers which
gave the State to the Union.
Proud of your State? Of course you are proud of your State.
How could you help being? I do not praise you for being proud of
your State. I would be ashamed of you if you were not.
It is sometimes difficult for us fully to realize what has been done.
Colonel, you and your fellow-veterans took part in a war which in its
effects dwarfed into insignificance all the struggles of contemporary
Europe. It often happens that at the time being two great contests
are seen entirely out of perspective, that the real importance of them
is shrouded from the eyes that look on at the moment, so that at the
time of the decay of the Roman empire the struggles of the rival
claimants for the throne of the Caesars seemed all-important to the
people on the shores of the Mediterranean, but now we forget even the
names of those under whose banners the rival factions fought, while
for all time deeply imprinted in history are the deeds of the men, the
barbarians, who came from the north and who founded France, Eng-
land, Lombardy and Spain as we know them today, those deeds were
of lasting consequence, but we have forgotten what the others fought
about, so now no one cares to try to disentangle the cause of the wars
between the successors to the empire of Alexander for the fragments
of his monarchy, but the issue of the struggle between Rome and
Carthage was big with the fate of the world. Here on this continent
while great European nations spent their blood and their treasure in
devastating warfare for tiny provinces, it was given to this people to
wage war against man, to wage war against nature, for the possession
of the vast, lonely spaces of the earth which we have now made the
seat of a mighty civilization. Why, Colonel, you and your fellows,
you and the men who came here as pioneers, settled the destiny of
half a continent and ultimately settled the destiny of the greatest of
all the Oceans.
Great were your feats; great the deeds you did; you did them in
iron times; and you could have done them only on condition of having
iron in your blood, of having within you the spirit that drives a man
onward over obstacles, over difficulties, that makes him refuse to be
daunted, and out of failure through effort win ultimate success. The
days have changed. The pioneer days have gone, but the need for
the old pioneer virtues remains as great as ever. In every generation
we see people who treat the mighty deeds of the fathers as an excuse
for failing to do all that should be done themselves. It is therefore
the duty of those of each generation who appreciate to the full what
380 Messages and Speeches
the work of the fathers meant, to keep alive the memory of that work
as a spur to ever fresh effort on their part. For that reason I hail
with especial pleasure the existence of such societies as those which
seek to band together the young men and young women native born
to this State and seek to keep alive in them the spirit which will make
them in their turn do mighty works, mighty deeds, of which their
children shall be proud.
We are proud of you. We are proud of the men of the war of '46,
of the men of '49, because in 1846 and in 1849 you did not hold the
fact that your fathers had done well in 1776 as an excuse for your
doing nothing, And we, if we expect our children to be proud of us
and not to have to skip a generation in order to have cause to be
proud, if we expect them to be proud of us, we must in our turn try
to do to the best of our capacity the deeds ready at hand; try to grapple
with the work that the nation finds to be done without its boundaries
and within, the work of civic and municipal administration, the work
of endeavoring to better our social as well as our political system, the
work of striving to make more real, more part of our lives in practice,
the principles of brotherhood to which we all in the abstract pay our
homage, and also of keeping up our work as a people without our
boundaries. As the Colonel said, this was the boundary. It is not.
Sail westward and westward and you will find that the boundary has
gone. San Francisco is not on the westernmost verge of our posses-
sions. Run down the lines of longitude and you will find that it is
the exact center.
I ask then, men and women of this great and beautiful State, this
wonderful State, that you, that all of us approach our duties of today
in the spirit that our fathers have shown in the different crises of the
past, that we approach them realizing that nothing can take the place
of the ordinary, everyday performance of duty, that we need the virtues
which do not wait for heroic times, but which are exercised day in
and day out in the ordinary work, the ordinary duty of the life domestic,
the life social, the life in reference to the State; and if we show those
qualities, if we show the qualities that make for good citizenship,
for decency and civic righteousness in ordinary times, my faith is
firm that when the need for the heroic efforts arises our people will in
the future as they have always done in the past show that they have
the capacity for heroic work.
Theodore Roosevelt 381
AT THE CEREMONIES INCIDENT TO THE BREAKING OF SOD
FOR THE ERECTION OF A MONUMENT IN MEMORY OF
THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY, AT SAN
FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 13, 1903.
Friends and fellow Americans:
It is a befitting thing that the first sod turned to prepare for the
monument to commemorate President McKinley should be turned in
the presence of his old comrades of the great war, and in the presence
of the men who, in a lesser war, strove to show that they were not
wholly unworthy of those who in the dark years from '61 to ’65 proved
their truth by their endeavor; and with their blood cemented the founda-
tion of the American Republic. It is a solemn thing to speak in mem-
ory of a man who, when young, went to war for the honor and the life
of the nation, who for four years did his part in the camp, on the
march, in battle, rising steadily upward from the ranks, and to whom
it was given in after life to show himself exemplary in public and in
private conduct, to become the ideal of the nation in peace as he had
been a typical representative of the nation's young sons in war.
It is not too much to say that no man since Lincoln was as widely
and as universally beloved in this country as was President McKinley.
For it was given to him not only to rise to the most exalted station but
to typify in his character and conduct those virtues which any citizen
worthy of the name likes to regard as typically American; to typify
the virtues of cleanly and upright living in all relations, private and
public, as in the most intimate family relations, in the relations of
business, in the relations with his neighbors, and finally, in his conduct
of the great affairs of state. And exactly as it was given to him to
do his part in settling aright the greatest problem which it has ever
befallen this nation to settle since it became a nation—the problem of
the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery—exactly as
it was his good fortune to do his part as a man should in his youth in
settling that great problem, so it was his good fortune when he became
in fact and in name the nation's chief, the nation's titular and the
nation's real chief, to settle the problems springing out of the Spanish
War; problems less important only than those which were dealt with
by the men who, under the lead of Washington, founded our govern-
ment, and the men who, upholding the statesmanship of Lincoln and
following the sword of Grant, or Sherman, or Thomas or Sheridan,
saved and perpetuated the Republic.
When 1898 came and the war which President McKinley in all
honesty and in all sincerity sought to avoid became inevitable, and was
pressed upon him, he met it as he and you had met the crisis of 1861.
He did his best to prevent the war coming; once it became evident that
382 Messages and Speeches
it had to come then he did his best to see that it was ended as quickly
and as thoroughly as possible. It is a good lesson for nations and
individuals to learn never to hit if it can be helped and never to hit
soft. I think it is getting to be fairly understood that that is our
foreign policy. We do not want to threaten; certainly we do not
desire to wrong any man; we are going to keep out of trouble if we
possibly can keep out; and if it becomes necessary for our honor and
our interest to assert a given position we shall assert it with every
intention of making the assertion good.
The Spanish War came. As its aftermath came trouble in the
Philippines, and it was natural that this State within whose borders
live and have lived so many of the men who fought in the great war—
it was natural that this State should find its sons eagerly volunteering
for the chance to prove their truth in the war that came in their
days; and it was to be expected that California’s sons should do well,
as they did do well, in the Philippines in the new contest.
And now it is eminently fitting that the men of the great war and
the men of the lesser war claiming not only to have been good soldiers
but to be good citizens should come here to assist at laying the founda-
tion of the monument to him who typified in his career the virtues of
the soldier and exemplified in his high office our ideals of good citizen-
ship. I am glad that a monument should have been erected here in
this wonderful State on the shores of the Pacific; in this city with a
great past and with a future so great that the most sanguine among
us cannot properly estimate it; this city, the city of the Occident
which looks west to the Orient across the Pacific, westward to the
West that is the hoary East; this city situated upon that giant ocean
which will in a not distant future be commercially the most important
body of water in the entire world.
I have enjoyed coming into your State; coming into your city,
and speaking to an audience like this, an audience composed so largely
of volunteer soldiers, old and young. I wish to say how I have
enjoyed seeing, and to-day reviewing, the officers and enlisted men of
the army and navy of the United States—the regulars. Thank
Heaven! the day is long past when the thought of any rivalry save
that of honest and generous emulation in the service of the Republic
could exist between regular and volunteer. Need I say between
regular and volunteer? Why, the regulars are all volunteers. In our
country every officer, every enlisted man, in the navy or the army is
a volunteer because he has volunteered to go in. And as I looked at the
faces of the officers and men under General MacArthur and Admiral
Glass I felt proud as Commander-in-Chief that they formed our army
and navy and prouder as an American citizen to see such American
citizens wearing the uniform of Uncle Sam.
Theodore Roosevelt 383
I thank you for coming here and for giving me the privilege of
joining with you today in these solemn ceremonies of commemoration,
the ceremonies of laying the foundation of the monument which is to
keep green in mind the memory of McKinley as a lesson in war and a
lesson in peace, as a lesson to all Americans of what can be done by
the American who in good faith strives to do his whole duty by the
mighty Republic.
ON BEING PRESENTED WITH A CANTEEN BY VARIOUS ORGANI-
ZATIONS OF THE SPANISH WAR VETERANS, AT
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 13, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
Now, comrades, I guess you do not wonder that I am fond of the
men of my regiment. In receiving this beautiful canteen I want to
say that I shall prize it even more than the old one, and all of us know
how we prize the old one. I want to thank you and my comrades of
the Spanish-American War from my heart; and I do not have to say
to you of the old war that there is no other bond that can unite men
quite so closely together as the bond of having in actual service drunk
out of the same canteen.
I want to say to you a word about Mr. King. The only time I ever
saw him nervous was just now. He was not only a first-class soldier,
but I am sure that all of you will understand me when I say that in
the field he was also a first-class cook. I shall never forget one day
right after the San Juan fight when I had lived sumptuously for
thirty-six hours on two hard-tacks, Comrade King, somehow or other,
had evolved the ingredients of a first-class stew, and with an affection
which was mighty real in its results to me at that moment, brought
some of it to me. And I have never tasted, not even at the wonderful
banquet that I have attended in San Francisco, anything quite so
good.
I have four comrades in this city and I had almost to break their
hearts yesterday in the interests of the chief there by refusing to have
them act as my escort in the procession. It is such a pleasure to see
them here and to see all my comrades of the Spanish War. None of
the men of my own generation or of this younger, stands as close
to me as you of my regiment, as the men of the Spanish War do, and
I know you younger ones will not object to my saying that there are
some that stand even closer, because we join in doffing our hats to
them, the men of the great war, our examples in all that we strove
to do.
384 Messages and Speeches
AT MECHANICS PAVILION, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 13, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, and you, men and women of San Francisco, of
California:
I should be indeed unappreciative if I were not deeply stirred by
the greeting I have received in your State, in your city, and especially
by this audience tonight. It has been a great pleasure to come into
wonderful and beautiful California, to see the State itself, but most of
all the citizens of the State. Today I have been especially pleased
and struck by the greeting of the children. You know I believe in
children; and I was not only glad to see the kind of children you had,
but also how many you had. And above all, I have been pleased this
evening driving through the streets to be greeted by the children of the
night schools and their teachers. {
I have in New York a very dear friend named Jacob Riis—
(let any one that will applaud him, for they ought to), -who has
written and taught by precept and practice that each one of us Ought
to be his brother’s keeper when the chance arises, and who has devoted
himself particularly to the welfare of the children, and especially to
those children to whom life does not come too easily and to those who
have to strive for their education at the same time that they are
earning their living, and to whom the education is bound to be of ten-
fold more value because it is acquired as things worth acquiring gen-
erally must be acquired—by effort and self-sacrifice.*
I have come from the Atlantic across this continent to the Pacific.
I have greeted many audiences. I see a little diversity, but, oh my
fellow-citizens, what strikes me most and pleases me most is the
fundamental unity, is the fact that wherever I go I speak to an audience
of Americans, be they East or be they West. And I make the same
appeal with the same confidence here beside the Golden Gate that I
should make by the Great Lakes or in the upper Mississippi Valley
or on the Atlantic Ocean. This is a government of freemen, who have
achieved liberty under the law, who have, by force of arms as well as
by legislation, established once for all as the fundamental principle of
our governinent that there shall not in this country be license; that
there shall not be in this country liberty to oppress without the law .
that liberty and freedom shall come under and in pursuance of the law,
of the law that is no respecter of persons, under a government that is
a government neither for the rich man as such nor for the poor man as
such, but for every man, rich or poor, if he is a decent man and does
his duty to the State.
Before I came to the Pacific Slope I was an expansionist, and after
*This is one of the secrets of President Roosevelt's great hold on the people. You
everywhere find him appealing to their sympathies as much as to their understanding—to
their hearts as often as to their heads.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 385
having been here I fail to understand how any man convinced of his
country's greatness and glad that his country should challenge with
proud confidence its mighty future, can be anything but an expansion-
ist. In the century that is opening, the commerce and the command
of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s
history.
The seat of power ever shifts from land to land, from sea to sea.
The earliest civilizations, those seated beside the Nile and in Mesopota-
mia, had little to do with sea traffic. But with the rise of those people
who went down to the sea in ships, with the rise of the Phoenicians,
the men of Tyre and Sidon, the Mediterranean became the central
sea on whose borders lay the great wealthy and cultivated powers of
antiquity. The war navies and the merchant marines of Carthage,
Greece and Rome strove thereon for military and industrial supremacy.
Its control was the prerequisite to greatness, and the Roman became
lord of the Western world only when his fleet rode unchallenged from
the AEgean to the Pillars of Hercules. Then Rome fell. But for
centuries thereafter the wealth and the culture of Europe were centered
on its southern shores, and the control of the Mediterranean was
vital in favoring or checking their growth. It was at this time that
Venice and Genoa flourished in their grandeur and their might.
But gradually the nations of the North grew beyond barbarism,
and developed fleets and commerce of their own. The North Sea, the
Baltic, the Bay of Biscay, saw trading cities rise to become independent
or else to become props of mighty civilized nations. The seafaring
merchants ventured with ever greater boldness into the Atlantic. The
cities of the Netherlands, the ports of the Hansa, grew and flourished
as once the Italian cities had grown. Holland and England, Spain,
Portugal and France sent forth mercantile adventurers to strive for
fame and profit on the high seas. The Cape of Good Hope was doubled,
America was discovered, and the Atlantic Ocean became to the greater
modern world what the Mediterranean had been to the lesser world
of antiquity.
Now, men and women of California, in our own day, the greatest
of all the oceans, of all the seas, and the last to be used on a large
scale by civilized man, bids fair to become in its turn the first in point
of importance. The empire that shifted from the Mediterranean will
in the lifetime of those now children bid fair to shift once more west-
ward to the Pacific. When the 19th century opened the lonely keels
of a few whale ships, a few merchantmen, had begun to furrow the
vast expanse of the Pacific; but as a whole its islands and its shores
were not materially changed from what they had been in the long
past ages when the Phoenician galleys traded in the purple of Tyre,
386 Messages and Speeches
the ivory of Lybia, the treasures of Cyprus. The junks of the Orient
still crept between China and Japan and Farther India, and from the
woody wilderness which shrouded the western shores of our own con-
tinent the red lords of the land looked forth upon a waste of waters
which only their own canoes traversed. That was but a century ago;
and now, at the opening of the 20th century, the change is so vast
that it is well-nigh impossible for us to estimate its importance. In
the South Seas the great commonwealth of Australia has sprung into
being. Japan, shaking off the lethargy of centuries, has taken her
rank among civilized, modern powers. European nations have seated
themselves along the eastern coast of Asia, while China by her mis-
fortunes has given us an object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting
to exist as a nation at all, if at the same time both rich and defenseless.
Meanwhile our own mighty republic has stretched from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, and now in California, Oregon, and Washington, in
Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines, holds an extent of coast line
which makes it of necessity a power of the first class in the Pacific.
The extension in the area of our domain has been immense, the exten-
sion in the area of our influence even greater. America's geographical
position on the Pacific is such as to insure our peaceful domination of
its waters in the future if only we grasp with sufficient resolution the
advantages of that position. We are taking long strides in that direc-
tion; witness the cables we are laying down, the steamship lines we
are starting—some of them already containing steamships larger than
any freight carriers that have previously existed. We have taken the
first steps toward digging an Isthmian Canal, to be under our own
control, a canal which will make our Atlantic and Pacific coast lines
in effect continuous, which will be of incalculable benefit to our mer-
cantile navy, and above all to our military navy in the event of war.
The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine
Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be
called Providential. Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show
ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we
must go on with the work we have undertaken. I most earnestly hope
that this work will ever be of a peaceful character. We infinitely
desire peace, and the Surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are
not afraid of war. We should deal in a spirit of justice and fairness
with weaker nations, and we should show to the strongest that we
are able to maintain our rights. Such showing cannot be made by
bluster; for bluster merely invites contempt. Let us speak courteously,
deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready. If we do these
things we can count on the peace that comes to the just man armed,
to the just man who neither fears nor inflicts wrong. We must keep
on building and maintaining a thoroughly efficient navy, with plenty
Theodore Roosevelt 387
of the best and most formidable ships, with an ample supply of officers
and men, and with those officers and men trained in the most efficient
fashion to perform their duties. Only thus can we assure our position
in the world at large. It behoves all men of lofty soul fit and proud
to belong to a mighty nation to see to it that we keep our position in
the world; for our proper place is with the great expanding peoples,
with the peoples that dare to be great, that accept with confidence a
place of leadership in the world. All our people should take that
position, but especially you of California, you of the Pacific Slope,
for much of our expansion must go through the Golden Gate. And
inevitable you who are seated by the Pacific must take the lead in and
must profit by the growth of American influence along the coasts and
among the islands of that mighty Ocean, where East and West finally
become one.
My countrymen, I believe in you with all my heart. I am proud
that it has been granted to me to be a citizen in a nation of such
glorious opportunities, with the wisdom, the hardihood, and the
courage to take advantage of them. We have no choice, we people of
the United States, as to whether or not we shall play a great part
in the world. That has been determined for us by fate, by the march
of events. We have to play that part. All that we can decide is
whether we shall play it well or ill. We are not and cannot and never
will be one of those nations that can progress from century to century
doing little and suffering little, standing aside from the great world
currents. We must either succeed greatly or fail greatly. The citizen
of a small nation may keep his self-respect if that nation plays but a
small part in the world, because it is physically impossible for the
nation to do otherwise; but the citizen of a great nation which plays
a small part should hang his head with shame.
I do not preach to this country the life of ease, any more than I
should preach it to any man worth his salt living in the country. The
citizen that counts, the man that counts in Our life is the man who
endeavors not to shirk difficulties but to meet and Overcome them; is
the man who endeavors not to lead his life in the world's soft places,
not to walk easily and take his comfort; but the man who goes out to
tread the rugged ways that lead to honor and success, the ways the
treading of which means good work worthily done.
What father or what mother here, if capable of taking the right view,
does not wish to see his or her children grow up trained not to flinch
but to overcome, trained not to avoid whatever is hard and rough and
difficult, but to go down into the hurly burly of actual life and win
glory in the arena, heedless of the dust and the sweat and blood of the
Contest.
You men of the West, the older among you, came here, hewed out
388 Messages and Speeches
your own fates for yourselves. The younger among you are the heirs
of the men who did this, and you cannot, unless you are false to your
blood, desire to see the nation, which is but the aggregate of the
individuals, act otherwise than in the way which you esteem as honora-
ble for the individual.
Our place as a nation is and must be with the nations that have left
indelibly their impress on the centuries. Men will tell you that the
great expanding nations of antiquity have passed away. So they have ;
and so have all others. Those that did not expand passed away and
left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded,
the Roman passed away, but the Roman has left the print of his law,
of his language, of his masterful ability in administration, deep in the
world's history, deeply imprinted in the character of the races that came
after him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of its
opportunities. I do not ask that it seek for the easiest path. In 1861
the easiest thing for each man to do was to stay at home, and let the
Union be broken up. That was the easy thing to do, and thank
Heaven for the iron in the blood of our fathers, thank Heaven for the
souls within them, that made the easy thing impossible to do.
Mighty Lincoln, sad, patient Lincoln, called, and the young men
of the country sprang to arms and answered his call, and the nation,
the Republic, the peaceful Republic of the West, until then the incarnate
genius of peace, sprang to her feet with sword and shield, a helmeted
queen among nations. Our people went to the war. The women
cheered them on, the women whose task was harder than the task of
the husbands, of the lovers, of the fathers, of the sons they sent to
battle.* For four years they fought until the ultimate triumph came
to crown the effort, the long weary months of waiting and disappoint-
ment, the bitter hours of failure, the anguish of defeat—the triumphs
came, and those men of ’61, the men who wore the blue, left us a
reunited country and the right of brotherhood with the sons of the
men who wore the gray. So that now every American can glory alike
in the valliant deeds done by all Americans, Northern or Southern,
who in that great hour of strife did their duty as the light was given
them severally to see that duty.
If our fathers had preferred ease to effort, if they had been content
to say: “Go in peace; we would prefer that the Union were kept, but
we are not willing to pay the price in blood and effort of keeping it;”
if they had done that there is not a man or woman in this hall who
would now walk with head erect, who would now have the right to feel
*Little Jack Downes was a Portsmouth boy who acted as orderly for Paul Jones during
the fight with the Serapis. Later, the Duchess de Chartres, amazed that one so small as
Jack should go to war at all, asked:
“How could your mother let you go?”
“Madam,” returned Jack, “my mother didn’t let me go. She sent me.”—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 389
as we have the right to feel that we challenge equality with the citizens
of the proudest country that the world has yet seen. I ask that this gen-
eration and future generations strive in the spirit of those who strove to
found the Republic, of those who strove to save and perpetuate it. I
ask that this nation shape its policy in a spirit of justice toward all and a
spirit of resolute endeavor to accept each duty as the duty comes, and to
rest ill-content until that duty is done. I ask that we meet the many
problems with which we are confronted from without and from within,
not in the spirit that seeks to purchase present peace by the certainty of
future disaster, but with a wise, a fearless, and a resolute desire to
make of this nation in the end, as the centuries go by, the example
for all the nations of the earth, to make of it a nation in which we
shall see the spirit of peace and of justice incarnate, but in which also
we shall see incarnate the spirit of courage, of hardihood, the spirit
which while refusing to wrong the weak is incapable of flinching from
any fear of the strong.
AT DEDICATION OF NAVY MEMORIAL MONUMENT,
SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 14, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, my fellow citizens, men and women of San Francisco:
The ground for this monument was first turned by President Mc-
Kinley, and I am glad to have the chance of saying a few words in
dedication of the completed monnument. 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 sea-
coast 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 gen-
erous emotion at the erection of a monument to the navy, a mon-
ument 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 today dedi-
cate 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 by the navy,
And good though it is to erect this monument, it is better still to go
390 Messages and Speeches
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 dis-
grace 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 as antiquated as if they had been the galleys of
Alcibiades, and it would have been a wicked absurdity to have sent
them against the ships of any great power. Then we began to build
up the navy. Every ship that fought under Dewey had been built be-
tween 1883 and 1898. 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 Congress controlled by both political parties
for the previous fifteen years, there had been a resolute effort to build
adequate ships and see that they were practiced. The ships that
went in under Dewey had been constructed under different successive
Secretaries of the Navy, and had been provided for by different suc-
cessive 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 is
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 with
providing formidable warcraft whose hammering guns beat out destiny
on the high seas, with providing the Officers, with providing the men,
and with 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 cannot 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
Theodore Roosevelt 39 I
do their duty in conning tower, in the engine room, in the gun turrets.
The shots that count in battle are the shots that hit, and only those.
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 Gov-
ernor of New York, I leaned often for advice and assistance in the
problems with which I had to deal. And 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 today. We were talking over the
University of California, and from that we spoke of the general educa-
tional system of our country. Facts tend to become commonplace,
and we tend to lose sight of their importance when once they become
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, educa-
392 Messages and Speeches
tion 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 much,
very much ; witness also this university. And each one of us who has
obtained an education has obtained something for which he or she has
not personally paid. No matter what the school, what the university,
every American who has a school training, a university training, has
obtained something given to him outright by the State, or given to
him by those dead or those living who were able to make provision
for that training because of the protection of the State, because of
existence within its borders. Each one of us then who has an educa-
tion, 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 today, 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 going to permit the people of a Northern stock for
the first time in the history of that Northern stock to gain education
under physical circumstances, 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. To 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 pro-
portion, 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,
Theodore Roosevelt 393
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 plat-
form, 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 Presi-
dent Wheeler said today, 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 rever-
ence, are the names of the statesmen, of the soldiers, of the poets—the
architects of our material prosperity also, but only 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-Gen-
ral 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 people 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 estab-,
lishment 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 com-
394 Messages and Speeches
mercial 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
American college-bred man and that, therefore, we did not have to
consider the chance of a possible temptation appealing to them.
Taft has gone 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—
seeking to obtain for that dominant race only 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
hidous welter of a war, cruel and sanguinary beyond anything that we
in this fortunate country can readily conceive, to take a people down in
the depths of poverty, in the depths of misery, just recovering from
suffering which it 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 se-
cured absolute safety for life and property. He did the kind of gov-
Theodore Roosevelt 395
ernmental work which should be the undying honor of our people for-
ever. 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 honor, fresh
honor, upon the uniform of the United States army.
I have chosen Taft and Wood simply as examples, simply as in-
stances of what other men by the hundred have done, Americans who
have graduated from no college, Americans who have graduated from
all our different colleges, and especially by practically all those Ameri-
cans who have graduated from the two great typical American institu-
tions 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 man 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—for envy. The least mean form of envy
is the envy of the man who does such work as they do. Every one
here, every man, every woman, 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, everyday duties because there may come
a chance for the display of heroism. Let me just tell you one anecdote,
then I am through. When I raised my regiment prior to going to Cuba
we had recruits from every portion of the country in it, some of them
without a very clear idea of what was ahead of them. I had one
young man, full of enthusiasm, who about the third day came to me
and said: “Colonel, I came down here to fight for my country; they
have treated me like a serf; they have put me to burying a dead horse.”
At that moment his Captain, who was a large man from New Mexico,
and not wholly sympathetic, came up and explained to him that he
would go right on burying that dead horse and that the next task
ahead of him was digging kitchen sinks; and if he did all that well we
would attend to the hero business later.
*It is one of the greatest compliments that President Roosevelt pays Americans that
one finds him appealing oftener to their honesty and their patriotism than to either their
self-interest or their fear. He does not follow the rule laid down by Machiavelli...—A. H. L.
396 Messages and Speeches
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 OAKLAND, CAL., MAY 14, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of Oakland:
It has been a great pleasure to come into your beautiful city; and
it could not but stir any man's heart to be greeted as you have greeted
me. I am glad indeed to see you, to see the men, the women, and the
children. As I drove through your beautiful streets I passed by one
house where there was a large family party assembled, and they had a
strip of bunting and printed on it were the words: “No Race Suicide
Here;” and I got up and bowed my acknowledgments and congratu-
lations. I have been delighted, passing through your streets, to be
greeted by the children. They seem all right in quality, and all right
in quantity.
My fellow citizens, I have enjoyed to the utmost my stay in Califor-
nia, my visits to its greatest cities; I have appreciated your wonderful
scenery, your wonderful climate; but most of all have I enjoyed meeting
your men and women. It is a great thing to have such agricultural
products, such industrial prosperity, as I have seen here; but it is a
greater thing to have the right type of citizenship.
In thanking all of you for your greeting I am sure that the others
will not mind my saying a special word of greeting to two sets of
men—first of all to the service men of the Spanish-American War.
I came aboard to be ferried over your bay today on the dock from
which the great majority of our soldiers went to the Philippines. I
have seen by the shores of this bay the place where the Eighth Corps
was assembled, the Eighth Corps which numbered successively almost
a hundred thousand men, so many of whom came from your own Coast,
your own State. As I saw my escort, the service men of the Spanish
War, marching in the familiar gray campaign hat, blue shirt, khaki
trousers and leggings, I was glad that I had the right of comradeship
with them, and that I was one of those to whom by good fortune
it was given to have the chance to show that at least we desired
to do as the men of the great war had done from '61 to ’65. Wher-
ever I have been in California I have been greeted by men who wear
the button that shows that, like the chief executive of this city, in the
times that tried men's souls they were true to their ideals. Now I
greet you here. I have not got much to say to you, because since I
have been in California I have felt a good deal more like learning than
Theodore Roosevelt 397
teaching; indeed, my fellow citizens, there have been moments when I
have felt that the only thing that marred my visit was the fact that I
had to speak. But I am glad to say just this word to you, to greet you,
to express the pleasure it has been to me to come here, and finally to say
this: I have come from the Atlantic across the continent to the Pacific;
I have come from the East through the West, beyond the West, to
California; for California stands by itself; and from one end of this
country to the other, addressing any audience, I have felt absolutely at
home; I have felt that I was speaking to men and women who felt
as I did and thought as I did, to whom I could appeal with the cer-
tainty of being understood; because wherever I have spoken I have ad-
dressed audiences like this, audiences composed of Americans and noth-
ing else.
Great is your State, oh my fellow citizens; great is your State, men
and women of California, and a great thing it is to be a Californian ;
but it is even a greater thing to be what all of us are—Americans,
the citizens of the greatest republic upon which the sun has ever shone.
TO THE SERVICE MEN OF THE SPANISH WAR, WHO ACTED
AS HIS ESCORT AT OAKLAND, CAL., MAY 14, 1903.
Afloat and ashore, nothing could have pleased me more than to have
you turn out to be my escort today; to see the familiar gray hat, blue
shirt, khaki trousers and leggings, I feel as if I was at home with you.
I see men who served in the cavalry (I was a yellow-leg myself), in-
fantry and artillery. I wish to state that it made me proud as I looked
at you, and I appreciate your coming out, and now, as each one of
you goes back into civil life, let you and me resolve that we will do our
part, in the first place to see that the standard of citizenship is kept up,
and in the next place that the average American citizen understands
what a good man our brother, the army and navy man, officer and
enlisted man of the regular service, was and is.
TO THE VETERANS WHO ESCORTED HIM TO THE DOCK AT
OAKLAND, CAL., MAY I4, 1903.
My Comrades of the Great War:
I wish to thank you for the privilege. These are the only bodies
of men to whom it gives me even greater pleasure to pay greeting than
to my own comrades of the lesser war. Pleased though I was to have
the service men of the war parade as my escort, looking so familiar
in the uniform that I knew so well, yet it is an even greater pleasure to
be greeted by you whose example we endeavored to follow, and the
398 Messages and Speeches
memories of whose deeds must forever be to all Americans a source
of inspiration to duty, whether it be in war or in peace.
AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNERSTONE OF THE Y. M. C. A.
AUXILIARY CLUBHOUSE, VALLEJO, CAL., MAY 14, 1903.
Mrs. McCalla, and you, my fellow citizens:
I am glad to have the chance of taking part in these ceremonies, for
no worthier object can be striven after than the creation of a building
such as this for the benefit of those to whom every American Owes so
much—the enlisted men of the United States navy. I wish here to
relate something told me yesterday by Secretary Moody, which shows
the spirit that actuates the men of our navy. In visiting the hospital
at Mare Island yesterday Secretary Moody found that there was a little
library of two hundred standard novels, and a sum of money with in-
terest amounting to $30 a year to be spent on magazines, all for the
use of the patients, for the use of the enlisted men in that hospital,
and he found that that was due to the action of a man now dead,
who had served twenty-five years in the United States navy, had become
a boatswain, and when he died had left all his small savings to be thus
devoted in perpetuity to the use of his fellows who should need the
hospital thereafter. His name was Alexander White, and Secretary
Moody told me he intended to find out where he was buried and put a
fitting stone over him if he had to pay for it himself. That is the spirit
of devotion to the flag and the country, and to one’s fellows which the
United States navy develops.
I wish to take this opportunity of thanking the men who work
in the Navy Yard for the quality of the work that they do. It has been
a pleasure to hear from Admiral Miller, as we came up on the torpedo
boat, the kind of service rendered by those engaged in the actual labor in
the yard. I want to emphasize what we can never over-emphasize, that
the credit for any victory must lie exactly as much with those who pre-
pare for it as with those who win it.
Today I have dedicated the monument to those who won the battle
of Manila Bay. That monument is in reality dedicated just as much
to the men who in any degree helped make ready the ships for that
battle, to the Congressmen who voted the appropriations; and those
who did not, by the way, have no right to any share whatever in the
credit attached to the nation for that day, to the Congressmen who voted
the appropriations, to the Cabinet officials and their subordinates, the
heads of the bureaus in the Navy Department, under whom and in
accordance with the directions of whom the money was expended, the
Owners of the private shipyards, to the men who worked in the private
Theodore Roosevelt 399
shipyards and to the men who worked in the national shipyards, any
man who did his part at any stage in preparing the hulls, the engines,
the armor, the guns of those ships, and all men who took part in train-
ing the crews aboard them, the men in the engine rooms, the men at
the guns, in fitting them for service, to all alike some portion of the
credit of the victory is due. Let me repeat what I said this morning.
I am glad that we have the chance to erect a monument to commemorate
a naval victory of the United States, and let us see to it that our children
have the chance to erect a similar monument, should the need arise,
in their turn. In other words, let us see to it that the work of building
up the United States navy goes on without a halt.
I thank those who have provided for the building of this in-
stitution. When a war comes I think a heavier burden is laid upon
the women whose sons and husbands, fathers and lovers have gone to
the war than upon the men who go. It was certainly so in the Civil’
War, where the woman was left at home with the breadwinner gone,
to face often need as well as the anxiety for his safety; and it is
but a further debt we owe now for the building of institutions of this
kind. They do incalculable good. I do not know of anything that was
done, any one work of benevolence of the same extent which was bet-
ter worth doing than that done by Miss Helen Gould when she erected
a building similar to this in the New York Navy Yard; and I am glad
to have had the chance of laying the corner stone of this building
today. I thank you for coming to greet me. I thank especially my
own comrades of the Spanish-American War, those who fought in
that war, and those by whose example we profited—the men of the
Great War, the men who have left to this country a heritage of
honor and glory forever.
AT THE BANQUET TENDERED HIM BY THE UNION LEAGUE
CLUB OF SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY I4, 1903.
Mr. Toastmaster, and you, my fellow members of the Union League
Club:
Let me say in all sincerity, Mr. Davis, that you have expressed far
better than I could express (and I mean it) what I hold to be essential
in American citizenship. It was a privilege, sir, to be greeted by you
as you have greeted me tonight. No one can too strongly insist upon
the elementary fact that you cannot 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, decent, the representative and
exponent and symbol of decency, it must be so made through the de-
cency, public and private, of the average citizen. Mr. Davis was quite
safe in saying he hoped I had enjoyed my stay in San Francisco. I
4OO Messages and Speeches
should indeed be ungrateful, unappreciative, if I were not deeply
touched and moved by the way in which the people of San Francisco
have received me; and I have enjoyed to the full the two days and a
half I have spent here. I have enjoyed it all and I have enjoyed no
part more, General McArthur, than my ride down the line, reviewing
the troops with you.
Californians are good Americans, and therefore it is not necessary
to appeal to them on behalf of the army and the navy. I shall not de-
tain you long this evening. I am promised by Colonel Pippy the
chance, after my speech, of meeting and shaking hands with each of
you, in the rooms of the Club. I have just got two thoughts, not con-
nected together, to which I want to give utterance tonight; one sug-
gested by something that Mr. Davis said.
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 cannot 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 demand-
ing 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 méans putting a pre-
mium 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. If you meet a doctor who asserts that
he had a specific remedy that will cure all the ills to which human
flesh is heir, distrust him. He hasn’t got it. If you meet the busi-
ness man who vociferates that he is always selling everything to you at
a loss, and you continue to deal with him, I am glad if you suffer for
it. Any man who promises as a result of legislation or administration
the millennium is making a promise which he will find difficulty in
keeping. Any man who asserts that by any law it will be possible, out
of hand, to make all humanity good and wise, is again promising what
he cannot perform. It is indispensable that we should have good laws
and upright and honest and fearless administration of the laws; and we
are not to be excused if we fail to hold our public men to a rigid
accountability if they fail, in their turn, to see that we have proper
Theodore Roosevelt 4OI
legislation and proper administration. No public man worth his salt
will be other than glad to be held accountable in that fashion.
But important though the law is, though the administration of the
law is, we can never escape having to face the fundamental truth that
neither begins to be of the decisive importance that the average in-
dividual’s character is. In the last analysis it is the man's own char-
acter which is and must ever be the determining factor in his success
or failure in life, and therefore in the last analysis it is the average
character of the average citizenship of a nation which will in the long
run determine whether that nation is to go up or down.
The one indispensable thing for us to keep is a high standard of
character for the average American citizen.
Now for my unrelated second thought, and that is to reiterate some-
thing that I said this morning. I had the very great pleasure of dedi-
cating the monument to Dewey's fleet for its victory at Manila. We
today were enjoying the aftermath of the triumph, due in part to what
Dewey and his officers and men did on the first day of May, five years
ago, and in even greater part to what those men did who in the past
fifteen years had prepared for the winning of that triumph. I have
very great confidence in the capacity of our average soldier or sailor to
turn out well, to do admirably when put to the supreme test. But
the best man alive, if untrained, if unfitly armed, may be beaten by a
poorer man who has had the training and the arms. There is nothing
more foolish, nothing less dignified than to indulge in boastfulness, in
self-glorification as to the capacity of our soldiers and sailors while
denying them the material which we are in honor bound to give them
in order that their splendid natural qualities shall be fitly supplemented.
I have seen our people send American volunteers against a European
soldiery, that European soldiery armed with the finest type of modern
rifle and ours with an old black-powder weapon, which was about as
effective as a mediaeval crossbow; and those who failed to prepare
- the proper weapons for our people are not to be thanked, because by
making drafts of an extraordinary kind upon the other good qualities
of the American soldier, we escaped disaster.
And who were those who failed to prepare? It is very easy and
worse than foolish, it is wicked, to hold the people who at the moment
are obliged to use those weapons responsible when the real respon-
sibility lay with the representatives of our people and our people them-
selves for failing to make the preparation in advance.
The business of finding a scapegoat to send loose into the wilder-
ness is neither honorable nor dignified for a self-respecting people to be
engaged in. We commemorated today by a monument a great naval
victory. We commemorated there the foresight, the prudence of
the public men, of the great business men, of the shipwrights, the
4O2 Messages and Speeches
men who worked physically at the armor, the guns, the engines, the
hulls, in getting the fleet ready; and, more than that, we commemorated
the men who trained that fleet in readiness. Many an Officer who was
retired before the Spanish War came is entitled to his full share of the
credit for what was done in that war, although he never saw it, be-
cause he had done his part in actual sea service in training the men
to handle the mighty and delicate weapons of war intrusted to their
C2 TC.
Every public man who by his vote helped to make efficient that
navy, every business man, every wage-worker, who did honest work
on the ships, and every representative of the navy, officer or enlisted
man, who in the years before the war faithfully did his duty aboard
the ships in fitting crews and ships for the test of war, is entitled to a
portion of the credit for the victory in Manila Bay.
So it is with the army. I believe—no, I am not going to boast, and
so I am going to say a little less than I think—I shall shift the form
of my sentence and say that I have entire confidence in the average
officer and average enlisted man in the army of the United States if
only he is given any kind of a fair chance, but give him good weapons
and give him a chance to handle them and to handle himself so as to be
prepared for war. The best man alive, if he is given no chance to prac-
tice, cannot be expected when first put to a test to show his abilities
at their best. Give us a chance to handle our men in masses in time
of peace. Remember that if you scatter the army in fifties or hundreds
all over the country, you must expect as inevitable, and as not in the
least blameworthy on the part of the army, trouble when you come to
gather them together as an army and to send them into a foreign
country.
Give our army a chance, or even half a chance, to practice in time of
peace the performance of its proper function in time of war, and I can
guarantee that the American people will ever in the future have the
same cause that they have had in the past to be proud of the army
and navy of the United States.
AT RAYMOND, CAL., MAY 15, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen:
I did not realize that I was to meet you today, still less to address
an audience such as this 1 and I had only come prepared to go into the
Yosemite with John Muir, so I must ask you to excuse my costume.
I have enjoyed so much seeing Southern California and San Francisco
that I felt my trip would be incomplete if I did not get up into your
beautiful country and then see the Yosemite. Before I came on this
trip I was inclined to grumble because I found we were giving relatively
Theodore Roosevelt 4O3
four times as much time to California as to any other State. Now I
feel that we did not give it half enough. It Ought to have been eight
times instead of four times. I have enjoyed being here. I have never
been on the Pacific Coast before. For a number of years I lived in the
Rockies. I was in the cow business in those days. Great though my
pleasure has been in seeing your wonderful soil, your wonderful cli-
mate, your fruits and flowers, your extraordinary and beautiful natural
products, yet what I have liked most has been meeting the men and
women, and finding that the fundamental fact throughout this country
is that wherever you go, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, a good Ameri-
can is a good American, and nothing else. Here, as everywhere that I
have been in California, I am greeted by men who wear the button
which shows that in the times that tried men's souls they proved their
truth by their endeavor. As they then belonged to different regiments,
doubtless raised in different States, but fought for one flag and one
country, so now wherever we are citizens, in the East, in the West, or
here beyond the West, in California, wherever we are citizens, our
duties are the same; our duty is to lead our lives in a spirit of decency,
of courage, and of common sense, that will make us fit to be citizens
of this great republic.
AT BERENDA, CAL., MAY 18, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you of this won-
derful and fertile valley, the San Joaquin Valley; and even glimpses
I have got of it have made me appreciate its fertility. I am glad that
the soil and the climate here are such as to give us that indispensable
base of material prosperity, the foundation upon which we must rest,
but, gentlemen and ladies, the thing that pleases me most, even more
than the crops, is the men and women I meet. I believe in your
future, because I believe in you—not only in the climate and the soil.
You can take the best climate and the best soil and put a poor, shiftless,
trifling creature on the soil and you do not get any results. To take
advantage of the greatest opportunities you must have the men. I
fail to see how any public man cannot believe in the future of this coun-
try after he has gone, as I have gone, from one side of the continent
to the other, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and has met audiences
everywhere to whom he can appeal in the name of the fundamental
virtues of American citizenship, fundamental virtues that go to make up
good men and good women everywhere, and have gone to make them
up since time began. I believe not in brilliancy, not in genius, I believe
in the ordinary, humdrum, work-a-day virtues that make a man a good
man in his family, a good neighbor, a good man to deal with in business,
4O4 Messages and Speeches
a good man to deal with in the State, and when you have got a man
with those characteristics in him you have a man who if the need
comes will rise level to that need. There are any number of different
kinds of work that we have to do, all of which have to be done. There
is the work of the farmer, the work of the business man, the work
of the skilled mechanic, the work of the men to whom I owe my safety
every day and every night—the work of the railroad men; the work
of the lawyer, the work of the sailor, the work of the soldier, the work
in ten thousand ways; it is all good work; it does not make any differ-
ence what work the man is doing if he does it well. If the man is a
slack, shiftless creature I wish we could get rid of him. He is of no
use. In every occupation you will find some men whom you will have
to carry. You cannot do much with them. Every one of us will stum-
ble at times, and shame to the man who does not at such times
stretch out a helping hand, but if the man lies down you cannot carry
him to any permanent use. What I would plead for is that we recog-
nize that fact, that we bring up our children to work, so that each re-
spects the other. I do not care whether a man is a banker or a brick-
layer;” if he is a good banker or a good bricklayer he is a good citizen;
if he is dishonest, if he is tricky, if he shirks his job or tries to cheat
his neighbor, be he great or small, be he the poor man cheating the rich
man, or the rich man oppressing the poor man, in either case he is a bad
citizen. I thank you and want to say what a pleasure it has been to
see you here this evening.
AT MERCED, CAL., MAY 18, 1903.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I am glad to have the chance of stopping here to greet you, and
to say how much I have enjoyed my trip up in your mountains and
my whole trip through California. It has been the greatest possible
pleasure to get out here. I have enjoyed seeing the mountains; I
have enjoyed seeing your scenery; I have enjoyed witnessing the won-
derful products of your climate and soil; but what I have enjoyed most
has been the chance to see the men and women of California.
AT MODESTO, CAL., MAY 18, 1903.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I am very glad to catch this glimpse of you. I have passed four
delightful days in your mountains up there in the Yosemite and I can
not say how much I have enjoyed them, but I have enjoyed even more
my entire trip through California and the courtesy and hospitality with
*Plainly President Roosevelt has read his Burns to good effect.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 405
which I have been received. It has been a great pleasure to me to come
from the East to the West, then west of the West to California, and to
see your wonderful State. And while I have enjoyed it all, enjoyed
seeing the soil and the climate, enjoyed witnessing the abounding pros-
perity that you have succeeded in making, the thing that I have enjoyed
most has been seeing the men and women, the citizens of California, for
that is what counts most in the long run. The soil and the climate will
not count for anything if the people have not got it in them to take
advantage of the soil and climate. I think I came to California a mid-
dling good American and I will go away a better American. It has
been the greatest pleasure to see you all.
AT TRUCKEE, CAL., MAY 19, 1903.
Mr. Chairman and you my fellow citizens:
I want to thank you for coming out to greet me. Most of all, I wish
to thank the men of the Grand Army who are present. It has been a
peculiarly pleasant thing wherever I have been in California to be
greeted by some of those men to whose actions we owe it that there is
now a common country of ours or a President over it. It has always
seemed to me that we should profit by the lessons that they taught,
not merely in war, but in peace. In speaking to you here in this great
and wonderful State of California, with its marvelously diversified in-
dustries, with its irrigated agriculture in the south, with its agriculture
carried on in ordinary fashion in the north, its pasturage, its mines,
its commerce, its manufactures, its wonderful railroad development, I
speak to a community which has risen and gone forward because of the
type of character, the type of manhood and womanhood among its sons
and daughters.
The lesson to be learned from the men of the Civil War is the lesson
of resolute endeavor for a worthy cause. I would not preach to any
man the life of ease, the life of safety only. Instead of the life of ease I
preach to all worthy to be called men, the life of work, the life of en-
deavor, and instead of the life of safety I preach the doctrine that
teaches us now as it taught the men of the Civil War, that there are
times when safety is the last thing to be considered. Here in America,
throughout our country, what we need are the virtues of the pioneers,
and among the pioneers I put high the pioneers of the churches who
went hand in hand to do the work of the Lord with their fellow
men. You need various qualities to make a State great, a nation great,
just as you needed those qualities to make an army great. No one of
them will suffice. In the first place, you must have the base of morality,
of decency, love of country, love of friends, the quality that makes
a man a good father, a good neighbor, a decent citizen. You need that
4O6 Messages and Speeches
first, just as in the Civil War you needed to have patriotism first,
love of country, the spirit that drove you to think nothing of ease, noth-
ing of comfort, but to go out to do the work of the nation when that
nation called, when Abraham Lincoln summoned you to battle; but that
was not enough. I do not care how patriotic a man was, if he ran away
you could do nothing with him. It is the same way here in civil
life. I wish a man to be decent, a square man, a fair dealing man, but
he has got to be a man also or you cannot do much with him. He
has got to have courage, hardihood, power to work, power to hold
his own, to do whatever his hands find to do, he has got to have that
or he will not amount to much. He has got to have it in him to make
his own way or he is a weakling and will fall by the wayside. In
addition to the qualities of decency, of honesty, there must be the quali-
ties of manliness, of hardihood, the qualities that sent the pioneers
across the trackless wastes, the quality that sends the soldier to battle,
the quality that makes a man discontented and ill at ease if he cannot
do his work well on the farm, in the shops, wherever his work is,
You need those and you need something in addition, for I do not care
how brave a man is, how honest he is, if he is a fool you can do nothing
with him. He needs the saving grace of common sense to help him out,
to make his work count.
There is another lesson taught by the men who wore the blue—the
lesson of brotherhood; brotherhood in its broadest sense; brotherhood
that does not recognize the difference of sections and that recognizes
just as little the difference of class, that treats a man on his worth as a
man, and if he is square stands by him; if he is not square is against
him, and recognizes other distinctions as accidental, not fundamental.
One lesson of that brotherhood is the self-respect that respects others.
In the army, from the lieutenant-general down to the last newly enlisted
recruit, the thing that concerned you was how the man did his duty in
his place, and not what that place was. There are in this country
a thousand different shapes of work. We have got to do them all,
and we can do them well only if we recognize the need that each
work should be well done; whether the man is a business man, a lawyer,
a farmer, a railroad man, a mechanic, matters nothing. What mat-
ters is, does he do his work and his duty well? Is he a square man
and a brave man, a good citizen, a good neighbor, a man whom you
are glad to have associate with you as an American? If he is, he is a
good citizen and entitled to honor; if he is not, I care not whether he be
high or low in Social standing or in wealth, he is a bad citizen and a
curse to the State. All kinds of honorable work entitle those following
them to honor. For the last few weeks and for the next few, every
minute and every hour my safety depends upon how the railroad men
do their work. Naturally, I take a peculiar interest in them. But we
Theodore Roosevelt 4O7
must take the same interest in all men who do their work well. If a
man does his duty he is a good citizen and we should be proud of him.
Just let me say one word especially to the railroad men. I recol-
lect the last time I ever met General Sherman he told me that if he
had to raise an army composed purely of one class he would take
railroad men because they developed four or five qualities that counted
more than anything else, qualities of taking risks, of irregular hours
(so that to be up at night does not strike them with horror), of
accepting responsibility, and yet of obeying orders, and obeying them
at Once, not wondering whether to turn the switch then or later,
but turning it then, and in consequence the men who have had that
training will make good soldiers, and when you make a really good
soldier you will make a good citizen. We cannot all be railroad men,
but we can all be good citizens and show the same type of quality.
I am glad to see all of you, but perhaps I am most glad to see the
children.
AT COLFAX, CAL., MAY 19, 1903.
My fellow citizens, my fellow Americans, men and women of Placer
County:
It is the greatest pleasure to have caught even a glimpse of the miners
here. I do not have to preach to you. You practice what I preach, and
I hope I do myself, too. You in your lives here have done the things
which it makes all of us proud as Americans to have done. We do not
believe here in this republic in the men who seek only the life of ease,
the life of absence of effort. We believe in the men who face toil,
who face risk, who dare, who do and who triumph because they have
done it.
AT AUBURN, CAL., MAY 19, 1903.
My fellow citigens:
I thank you most heartily for your kindness in coming to greet me,
and I am so pleased to see you, men and women of Placer County. I
have enjoyed to the full my visit to California. I have been astonished
and delighted with your extraordinary success in so many different
types of industries—mining, agriculture of so many kinds, manufactur-
ing, your wonderful commerce. It is particularly a pleasure to be in a
State already great, and yet with an infinitely greater future before it.
But pleased though I am to see your abounding material prosperity, the
products of your soil, the thing I am most pleased with is you your-
selves, the men and women. It has been a great pleasure to have
caught this glimpse of you.
408 Messages and Speeches
AT THE PARK, SACRAMENTO, CAL., MAY 19, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, men and women of Sacramento, and to you, the
children: -
I am particularly glad to see the children this afternoon. I want to
say a word to the teachers. There is no body of men and women in all
our country to whom so much is owing as to those who are training
the next generation, because it is the merest truism to say that the next
generation determines the fate of this country. It is a great thing to
have such commerce, such industry, such manufactures, such agricul-
ture, as I have seen evidences of here in California; but the important
thing, after all, is the quality of the citizenship. Therefore, the future
of the State depends not upon what is material, for that you can produce
if you have the heart, the hand, and the head to do it; it depends
upon the quality of heart, hand and head in the average American.
That is what counts. Therefore a peculiar debt is owing to those who
are educating the boys and girls of today, who will be the men and
women of tomorrow, and upon whom we must depend to keep alive
the traditions of our citizenship.
I greet with pleasure you boys and girls, and you of the high school,
you who in not many years will have to take upon yourselves the duties
that come with full growth of body and mind. I am going to repeat
to you one bit of advice which I have already given, advice to the
young, which applies also to the old. I believe in play and I believe
in work. I believe in having a good time, provided it does not inter-
fere with your doing the work there is to do. Play hard while you play,
and when you work do not play at all.
It has given me the keenest pleasure to witness tonight this wonderful
gathering in this beautiful place. I have come from the Atlantic across
this continent to the Pacific, and in meeting the different bodies of
my fellow citizens one thing has struck me particularly, and that is the
essential unity of our people. East or West, North or South, by the
Atlantic, in the great valley of the Mississippi, among the Rockies, and
here beside the greatest of all the oceans, wherever I meet a body
of our people I meet men and women to whom I can appeal as Ameri-
cans, and nothing else. I greet you. I thank you for coming. I am
proud of you, proud to be your fellow citizen. I believe in you with
all my heart and I believe that the century that is opening contains the
promise of the greatest achievement for this nation that any nation has
ever enjoyed since the dim days when history dawned.
Theodore Roosevelt 4O9
TO THE SACRAMENTO SOCIETY OF CALIFORNIA PIONEERS,
SACRAMENTO, CAL., MAY 19, 1903.
I wish to thank you and the members of the Sacramento Society of
California Pioneers. Of course, the members of your society must
ever feel not merely a particular interest in, but a part in the develop-
ment of this State such as no other can have. To you it was given in
the heroic days to do the great deeds by which this republic was
made in very truth the mistress of the two great oceans, for such
she shall be in the years to come. It was following your guidance that
our people conquered this continent and made it the base for this
mighty and wonderful nation, a nation mighty in its past, mightier yet
in the possibility that the looming future holds for it. I thank you
most heartily and appreciate particularly the courtesy of you and your
fellow members.
AT THE CAPITOL BUILDING, SACRAMENTO, CAL., MAY 19, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is a great pleasure to have the chance of meeting you here in the
capital city of your wonderful State. In greeting all of you I know that
the others will not grudge my saying a special word of acknowledg-
ment to those whose mettle rang true on war's red touchstone, to the
men to whom we owe it that we have tonight one country or that
there is a President to speak to you—the men of the Grand Army, the
veterans of the great war. I wish also to express at this time my
acknowledgment to my escort, the National Guard, many of them my
comrades in the lesser war of '98. You see, in '98 we had a difficulty
from which you were wholly free in '61, because with us there was not
enough war to go around.
I have enjoyed to the full my visit to California. I have come
across the continent from the East to the West, and now beyond
the West to California, for California stands by itself. I have en-
joyed every hour of my stay here. I have just come from a four
days' rest in the Yosemite, and I wish to say one word to you here in
the capital city of California about certain of your great natural re-
sources, your forests and the water supply coming from the streams
that find their sources among the forests of the mountains.
California possesses a wonderful climate,” a wonderful soil, and
throughout the portions that I have visited it is literally astounding
to see how the land yields a hundred and a thousand fold when water
is put upon it. And where it is possible to irrigate the land the
*It is one of the faults of California perhaps that its climate is so much in excess of
its weather,”-A. H. L.
4IO Messages and Speeches
result is, of course, far better than having to depend upon rainfall
anywhere, but no small part of the prosperity of California in the
hotter and drier agricultural regions depends upon the preservation
of her water supply; and the water supply cannot be preserved unless
the forests are preserved. As regards some of the trees, I want them
preserved because they are the only things of their kind in the world,
Lying out at night under those giant Sequoias was lying in a temple
built by no hand of man, a temple grander than any human architect
could by any possibility build, and I hope for the preservation of the
groves of giant trees simply because it would be a shame to our civil-
ization to let them disappear. They are monuments in themselves.
I ask for the preservation of the other forests on grounds of wise
and far-sighted economic policy. I do not ask that lumbering be
stopped at all. On the contrary, I ask that the forests be kept for
use in lumbering, only that they be so used that not only shall we here,
this generation, get the benefit for the next few years, but that our
children and our children's children shall get the benefit. In Califor-
nia I am impressed by how great the State is, but I am even more
impressed by the immensely greater greatness that lies in the future,
and I ask that your marvelous natural resources be handed on unim-
paired to your posterity. We are not building this country of ours
for a day. It is to last through the ages. We stand on the threshold
of a new century. We look into the dim years that rise before us,
knowing that if we are true the generations that succeed us here
shall fall heir to a heritage such as has never been known before. I
ask that we keep in mind not only our own interests, but the interests
of our children. Any generation fit to do its work must work for
the future, for the people of the future, as well as for itself. You,
men of the Civil War, fought from '61 to ’65 for the Union of that
day; yes, and for the Union that was to stand while nations stand in
the hereafter. You fought to make the flag that had been rent asunder
once more whole and without a seam and to float over you and to float
over all who come after you likewise. You fought for the 'future;
you fought for the looming greatness of the republic in the centuries
that were to come, and now I ask that we, in fulfilling the duties of
citizenship, keep our gaze fixed likewise on the days that are to come
after us. You are building here this great State within whose bounds
lies an area as great as an Old World empire, a State with a commerce
already vast, but with a commerce which within the century that has
now opened shall cover and dominate the entire Pacific Ocean. You
are building your factories, you are tilling the fields; business man,
professional man, farmer, wage-worker, all here in this State see a
future of unknown possibilities opening before them.
Theodore Roosevelt 4II
I earnestly ask that you see to it that your resources, º
perpetuated for the use of the peoples yet unborn. Use them, but
in using, keep and preserve them. Keep the waters; keep the forests;
use your lands as you use your bays, your harbors, as you use the cities
here, so that by the very fact of the use they will become more
valuable as possessions.
I have spoken of the material things, of the things which are indis-
pensable as the foundation, the base of national greatness. We must
care for the body first. We must see to it that our tremendous indus-
trial development goes on, that the well-being continues; that the soil
yields its wealth in the future as it has in the past, aye, and tenfold
more. We cannot for one moment afford to underestimate the vital
importance of that material well-being, of the prosperity which we so
abundantly enjoy, but I ask also that you remember the things of the
mind and the soul as well as the body. Nothing has struck me more in
going through California than the interest you are paying to the cause
of education, than the way in which your citizens evidently realize that
upon the proper training of the children, of those who are to be the
men and women of a score of years hence, depends the ultimate welfare
of the republic. Let me draw a lesson from you, the men of the Civil
War. You needed strong bodies, you needed the supplies, the arms,
but more than all, you needed the hearts that drove the bodies into
battle. What distinguished our men was the spirit that drove them
onward to effort and to strife, onward into action, onward through the
march, through the long months of waiting in camp, onward through
the fiery ordeal of battle, when men's souls were winnowed out as
before the judgment seat. You then rose level to the duty that was
before you because of the spirit that burned within your breasts, because
you had in you the capacity of generous enthusiasm for the lofty ideal,
because you realized that there was something above the body and
greater than the body. And now, my fellows, men and women of
California, men and women of the American Union, I ask throughout
this country that our people keep in their hearts the capacity of devo-
tion to what stands above mere bodily welfare, to the welfare of the
spirit, of the mind, of the soul. I ask that we have strong bodies, well
cared for, well clothed, well housed. I ask for what is better than a
strong body, a sane mind. And I ask finally for what counts for more
than body, for more than mind, for character; character which in the
last analysis tells most in settling the welfare of either a nation or an
individual; character into which many elements enter, but three, above
all; in the first place, as a foundation, decency, honesty, morality, the
quality that makes a man a good husband, a good neighbor, a man who
deals fairly and squarely with those about him, who does his duty to
those around him and to the State; and that is not enough. Decency
4I2 Messages and Speeches
and honesty are not enough. Just as in the Civil War you needed
patriotism first, but it made no matter how patriotic a man was, if he
ran away you could do nothing with him. So in civic life you must
have decency and honesty, for without them ability makes a man only
the more dangerous to his fellows, the greater force for evil. Just
again as in the Civil War, if the man did not have in him the capacity
of loyalty to his fellows, loyalty to his regiment, loyalty to the flag, if
he did not have in him that capacity, the abler he was the worse he was
to have in the army. So it is now in civil life; the abler a man is, if he
has not the root of righteousness in him the more dangerous a foe to
decent government he is, and we shall never rise level to the needs of
our nation until we make it understood that the scoundrel who succeeds
is to be hunted down by public opinion, by the condemnation and scorn
of his fellows, exactly as we hunt down the weaker scoundrel who fails.
But that is not enough. Decency and honesty are a basis, but that is
all. I do not care how moral a man is, if his morality is only good
while he sits at home in his own parlor, you can do nothing with him.
Scant is the use we have for the timid good. In the war you needed
patriotism, and then you needed the fighting edge. You had to have
that. So in civil life we need the spirit of decency, of honesty, and
then, in addition, the quality of courage, of hardihood, of manliness,
that makes a man fit to go out into the hurly-burly and do a man’s work
in the world. That must come, too; and that is not enough. I do not
care how moral a man is and how brave he is, if he is a natural born
fool you can do nothing with him. I ask, then, for decency as the
foundation, for courage and manliness thereon, and finally, in addition
to both, I ask for common sense as the moderator and guide of both.
My fellow-countrymen, I believe in you; I believe in your future;
I believe in the future of the American republic, because I believe that
the average American citizen has in him just those qualities—the quality
of honesty, the quality of courage, and the quality of common sense.
While we keep in the community the power of adherence to a lofty ideal
and at the same time the power to attempt its realization by practical
methods, we can be sure that our progress in the future will be even
more rapid than our progress has been in the past, and that in the
century now opening, in the centuries that succeed it, this country,
already the greatest republic upon which the sun has ever shone, will
attain a position of prominence in the world's history that will dwarf
into insignificance all that has ever been done before.
AT REDDING, CAL., MAY 20, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is a great pleasure to see you to-day. This is to be my last day
Theodore Roosevelt 4I 3
in California, and I leave the State with the liveliest appreciation of the
courtesy with which I have been received, and with memories which I
shall ever keep of the pleasant days I have had within your borders.
I have seen pretty much all the State from the ocean up to the Sierras
and into them; I have come from the south and am leaving at the
northern end; and I am impressed, as every man must be, with what our
nation is, to have within its borders a State such as this, a State in
resources and size the equal of many an Old World empire. I have
enjoyed everything, seeing your farms, your ranches, your cities,
noting the diversification of your industries, seeing the products of the
ranch, of the irrigated agriculture, of the mine, of the forest, realizing,
as a man must who sees San Francisco and that wonderful harbor, that
here is one of the cities which must in time now near do its full share
in dominating the commerce of the world. I have enjoyed all of these
sights; but most of all I have enjoyed seeing you, the men and women
of California. That is what counts ultimately in any nation. We need
of course the physical advantages, but they are useless if we have not
got the men to take advantage of them. Constitution, laws, they are
good things, indispensable things, to have right, but you must have
the men behind them or they will amount to but little. There are other
nations with the same type of constitution, the same theoretical form
of government as ours, and yet those other nations have failed where
we have succeeded because the type of citizenship was different. So
here, the climate and soil would amount to nothing, if you did not
have men and women of the right type to take advantage of them.
You here in California, who succeeded the pioneers, you have won
your place by showing the qualities which we like to think of as typical
of American citizens. If we of this great Republic are to continue in
the future to rise level to our opportunities as our forefathers rose in
the past, we must so rise by showing the traits which they showed.
There is no patent recipe for making a good citizen any more than
there is any patent recipe for making a successful man. Success will
come in the long run to the man or the nation possessing the attributes
that have conquered success from the days when we first have written
records of the nations of mankind. If our people have courage, per-
severance, self-restraint, self-mastery, will power and common sense—
you need that always—we will win out. I said common sense; I think
that there is only one quality worse than hardness of heart and that is
softness of head. I want to see the average American citizen be in
the future as he has been in the past, a decent man, doing no wrong,
and on the other hand able to hold his own also ; and just as I want
to see with the average citizen, I want to see with the nation.
4I4 Messages and Speeches
AT DUNSMUIR, CAL., MAY 20, 1903.
My friends:
It is a great pleasure to greet you today. I have enjoyed the last
two hours traveling up by this beautiful river and getting my first
glimpses of Shasta. It has been a very great pleasure to come here to
this State beside the Pacific Ocean and see your people. I think I
can say that I came to California a pretty good American, and I go
away a better one. Glad though I have been to see your wonderful
products, your plains and your mountains, your rivers, to see the great
cities springing up, most of all have I enjoyed meeting the men and
women to whom we owe what has been done with mine and railroad
and lumbering camp and irrigated field, with the ranch and the count-
ing-house—the men and women who have made California what
she is.
Almost everywhere I have been greeted by men who are veterans
of the Civil War; or else by men who came here in the early pioneer
days; and where that has not been the case I have met those who are
their worthy successors, who are doing now the kind of work that is
worth doing. I pity no man because he has to work. If he is worth
his salt he will work. I envy the man who has a work worth doing
and does it well; and surely no men alive are more worthy of admira-
tion than those men to whom it is given to build up a giant common-
wealth like this. It is the fact of doing the work well that counts, not
the kind of work, as long as that work is honorable.
I speak to citizens of a community which has reached its present
pitch of prosperity because they have done each his duty as his lines
were laid. To the true American nothing can be more alien than the
spirit either of envy or of contempt for another who is leading a life
as a decent citizen should lead it. In this country we have room for
every honest man who spends his life in honest effort; we have no
room either for the man of means who, in a spirit of arrogant baseness,
looks down upon the man less well off, or for the other man who
envies his neighbor because that neighbor happens to be better off.
Either feeling is a base feeling, unworthy of a self-respecting man.
I used the word envy, myself, just now, but I did not use it in a
bad sense. If you use envy in the ordinary sense of the word its exist-
ence implies a feeling of inferiority in the man who feels it, a feeling
that a self-respecting man will be ashamed to have. If the man is a
good American and is doing his work squarely he need not envy
anybody, because he occupies a position such as no one else in any
other country, in any other age has occupied ; and because we hold our
citizenship so high, because we feel and have the right to feel satisfac-
tion with what our people have done, we should also feel that the only
Theodore Roosevelt 4I5
spirit in which to regard any other man who does well, is a spirit of
kindly regard and good will if he acts squarely; if he does not, then I
think but ill of you if you do not regard him as a man to feel at least
the public scorn, public contempt. It is, of course, a perfectly trite
saying that in no country is it so necessary to have decency, honesty,
Self-restraint, in the average citizen as in a republic, in a democracy;
for successful self-government is founded upon that high average of
citizenship among our people; and America has gone on as she has
gone because we have had that high average of citizenship. Our
government is based upon the rule of a self-respecting majority. Our
government has so far escaped the twin dangers of the older republics,
government by a plutocracy or government by a mob, either of them
absolutely alien to American ideals.
It has been a great pleasure to see you. I haven't any special word
of preaching to say, because after all, men and women of California,
I can only preach what in substance you have practiced, what our
people have practiced in the making and carrying on of this govern-
ment. From the days of Washington to the days of Lincoln" we went
onward and upward because the average American was of the Stuff
that made the nation go onward and upward. We cannot be dragged
up, we have got to push ourselves up. No law that ever was devised
can give wisdom to the fool, courage to the coward, strength to the
weakling. We must have those qualities in us, for iſ they are not in
us they cannot be gotten out of us. Of course all you have to do is to
compare what other nations have done with governments founded as
ours, the same type of constitution, the same type of law, which never-
theless have failed, have produced chaos because they did not have the
right type of citizen back of the law, the right type of citizen to work
out the destiny of the Nation under and through the law. Of course
we need the right law; we need even more the honest and fearless en-
forcement of the law, enforcement in a spirit of absolute fair play to
all men, showing favoritism to none, doing justice to each. We need
such laws, such administration of the laws, but most of all we need to
keep up that for the lack of which nothing else can atone in any people
—the average standard of citizenship—so that the average man shall
have certain fundamental qualities that come under many different
heads, but under three especially. In the first place, that he shall
have at the foundation of his character the moral forces, the forces
that make a man a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor, a
man who deals fairly by his fellows, whether he works with them on
the railroad or in the shops or in the factories, whether he deals with
them as a mechanic, as a lawyer, as a doctor, whether he grows the
*From the days of Washington to the days of Lincoln the average American could say
a prayer and shoot a gun—and did. The present day, if one may read the signs, would
seem to be falling a little behind in these accomplishments.-A. H. L.
4I6 Messages and Speeches
products of the soil as an earth-tiller, a miner, a lumberman, a sailor,
whatever he is, whatever his wealth, if he acts squarely he has fulfilled
the first requisites of citizenship. We cannot afford in our Republic
to draw distinctions between our citizens save on that line of conduct.
There are good men and bad men everywhere. All of you know
them in private life; all of you have met them. You have got to have
decency and morality in the first place, and, of course, that is not
enough. It does not begin to be enough. No matter how decent a
man is, if he is afraid he is no good. In addition to the quality of
self-mastery, self-restraint, decency, you have got to have the quality
of hardihood, courage, manliness, the quality which, if the people who
founded this State had lacked, there never would have been a State
founded here. You have got to have the men who can hold their
own in work, and, if necessary, in fighting. You have got to have
those qualities in addition, and you have got to have others still. I do
not care how brave a man is and how decent he is, if he is a natural
born fool you can do very little with him. In addition to decency, in
addition to courage, you must have the saving grace of common sense;
the quality that enables any man to tell what he can do for himself
and what he can do for his neighbor, for the nation. Sometimes each
of us has the feeling that if he has to choose between the fool and the
knave he will take the knave, because he can reform him perhaps, and
he cannot reform the fool; and even hardness of heart is not much
more destructive in the long run than softness of head.
In our life what we need is not so much genius, not so much
brilliancy, as the ordinary commonplace everyday qualities which a
man needs in private life, and which he needs just as much in public
life.
In coming aeross the continent from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the
thing that has struck me most is that, fundamentally, wherever one
goes in this broad country, a good American is a good American.
I thank you with all my heart for coming here, and I wish you all
good fortune in the future as in the past.
AT SISSON, CAL., MAY 20, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is indeed a great pleasure to have had the chance of going through
your wonderful State; now I have come to the people who live among
the mountains in the north; I come among the pine forests, and in
sight of the great mountains. I hardly think that you yourselves can
realize what a wonderful State it is, a State as large and as diversified
as many an Old World empire. It is a great pleasure to have come
here to see this wonderful State with its change from semi-tropic,
Theodore Roosevelt 417
irrigated plains of the south, here to the northern mountains, a State
situated between the Sierras and the Pacific; and especially I have
enjoyed meeting the people who have made the State what it is.
Wherever I have been I have seen in the audiences men who wear the
button which shows that they fought in the great Civil War; and it
seems to me that the qualities which made those men victorious in the
mortal strife of the Republic are akin to the qualities which made our
people able to conquer plain and mountain, prairie and forest, and to
create these commonwealths from the Atlantic seaboard across to the
Pacific.
I am glad to meet all of you. I congratulate you upon all the crops,
but especially upon the children. I spoke of the soldiers of the great
Civil War just now, and of your pioneer people; each was required
to show the characteristics which have to be shown also in civil life if
this Republic is to be made all that it should be made. In '61, when
you and those like you went to battle, the first feeling that you had to
have was the capacity for devotion to a lofty ideal, the spirit that
made ease, comfort, safety, as nothing compared with the desire to
keep the flag and to ring true when the country called. In addition
to that you had to have courage, hardihood, resolution, or you could
not have made your aspirations good. It is just so in civil life, and
the man has to be a decent man, a square man, a man who acts square
by his neighbors, fairly by the State, or he cannot amount to anything;
but in addition to the qualities of decency and fair dealing he must
have the qualities that make a man a man, or he cannot do a man's
work in the world. He has to have hardihood, courage and endurance.
AT MONTAGUE, CAL., MAY 20, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is a great pleasure to meet you this afternoon. I have enjoyed
to the full my trip through California. I have come from the south
through the State and now go out at the north. When the trip was
made up I asked why it was necessary to give relatively four times as
much time to California as to any other State. I understand now.
I only wish it had been possible to make it eight times as much instead.
This morning I have been greatly impressed in traveling through
these mountains and meeting the men who have done so much in
lumbering, as I have already met the men of the mines, and ranches,
of the commerce and industries of the great cities. This State is in
boundaries and resources greater than many an Old World empire;
and think what it is to be a citizen of a Union in which a commonwealth
like this is a State. I have come from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from
the East through the West to beyond the west to California, for that
418 Messages and Speeches
stands by itself. The thing that has impressed me more than anything
else in addressing the different audiences is that a good American is
a good American in whatever part of this country he lives.
AT HORNBROOK, CAL., MAY 20, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
I have just said good-bye to the Governor of California, and I am
very, very sorry to part with him. He has been with me throughout
my trip in California, and I have gone pretty fairly over the State with
him. Today I have been traveling through the northern part of
California, among the mountains and the forests, and it has given me
an ever fresh view of your wonderful and beautiful State. As I have
said more than once since entering your State, I knew as one
knows by reading and by hearing people talk of all the resources that
it had, but I could not fully realize them until I had seen them.
Going through California, I have been struck with the prosperous and
contented look of its people, and of course you are contented; I should
be ashamed of you if you were not, living in such a state as this. And
glad though I have been to see your soil and climate, to see your
products, the products of your fields, and mines and woods, what you
have done with railroads, with transportation companies on the water,
with factories, with industries of every kind, what I have been most
pleased with after all has been the way in which you are training the
citizenship of the future, the attention paid to the schools of every
grade here in this State; and above all with the type of men and
women and children whom it has been my good fortune to encounter.
The essential thing in any State is the character of the average man
or woman, and I am proud to be your fellow-citizen, and to have men
the type of people I have met in California.
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 have 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-trader, and
then some sixty years ago those entered in whose children were to
possess the land. Across the continent in the early 40's came the
Theodore Roosevelt 4I9
ox-drawn, white-topped wagons bearing the pioneers, the stalwart,
sturdy, sun-burned men, with their wives and their little ones who
entered into the 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 today 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 have 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 we govern the Philippines primarily
in the interest of the people of the islands, and just so long as men
like Taft and Luke Wright are there they will be so governed; 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 wrong, and base is the man who suffers
a wrong to be done him.
I was greeted here today by men of the Grand Army of the Republic,
by the men who wear the button which shows that in the times that
tried men's souls they were willing to prove their truth on war's red
touchstone. In those days we won because the men who responded to
the call of Abraham Lincoln had iron in the blood, because in addition
to having a lofty ideal, in addition to being resolute that there should
indeed be freedom and unity within the borders of the Republic founded
by the men of '76, they had the courage, the hardihood and the
strength to make them realize their ideal in war, in battle. I ask of
the men today that they do their duty as the men of yesterday did
theirs. Remember this, if we only pay homage to their deeds in
words, we show ourselves unworthy to be their successors. We can
pay homage to them only by behaving in time of trial as they behaved
in their time of trial. In 1861 if our men had confined themselves
to glorifying the acts of the men of 1776, we would not have anything
to glorify now ; the President of this Republic is able to travel across
the Pacific Slope and still be just as much in his country as on the
42O Messages and Speeches
Atlantic Slope, because you of ’61 dared and did and died at need,
but triumphed in the end.
Today the Secretary of the Navy spoke of the great pride we take
in the feats of the mighty battleship which bears the name of this
State—the Oregon. It is a good thing to cheer her, but it is a better
thing to see that we keep on building other ships like her, but even
better. That is the right way to cheer the Oregon; to see to it that
Our Senators and Representatives in Congress go on with the building
up of the United States Navy. Whether we wish it or not we have
to be a great power; we have to play a great part. All we can decide
is whether we will play that part well or ill, and if I know my country-
men there is scant doubt as to how the decision will come out. We
can glory now in the deeds of Manilla and Santiago, because for the
dozen years before our people were building up the Navy. The Navy
which won in '98 won because for a dozen years before our people
had been building ships and seeing that the officers and men were trained
in their use. It is too late to improve a Navy when the need comes.
Not one ship which counted effectively in the war of '98 was built
in that year or even the year before. They were all built from two to
fifteen years in advance—and the men of Manila and Santiago, do you
think they learned their trade after it became evident that war could
not be averted? Not a bit of it. They were trained through years of
practice to handle the ships, and the guns, and the engines, and we
won with such small loss of life and so decisively because we had men
who, when they shot, hit. And to hit in time of war it means you
have to spend money for powder in time of peace. I ask that you
show your appreciation of what the Navy did in '98, that you show
your appreciation of what was done in the past by the pioneers who
won this land by making ready for the future. If we do not, then our
children when they look back for cause of pride in our history will
have to skip our generation. I ask that we, the inheritors of the glory
of the men who founded the Republic under Washington, of the men
who saved it under Lincoln, in our turn play our part and do aright
the lesser tasks of today.
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 will leave to our
children and our children's children an even mightier heritage than
we received in our turn. I ask it, and I am sure that it will be granted.
I know you men and women of Oregon; men and women of the United
States; and because I know you I am confident that before this Repub-
Theodore Roosevelt 42I
lic there lies a future so brilliant that even the deeds of the past will
seem dim in comparison.
AT TACOMA, WASH., MAY 22, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is the greatest pleasure to me to have come this morning through
the Southwestern part of this great and beautiful State, and now to
have seen your beautiful city here on Puget Sound. I wish to express
my acknowledgments to the men of the Grand Army and to my com-
rades of the Spanish War for having come out to greet me. I also
wish to express a particular word of greeting to the delegates of the
State Sunday School Convention who have come here today, and to
say how glad I am to see them.
Pleased though I am to see this marvelous material prosperity in
which the State of Washington so abundantly rejoices, I am even
more pleased to see the evidences in every city through which I pass
of the resolute purpose of your people to build upon that material
well-being the higher life, without which prosperity by itself can have
no durable basis.
I believe in your people—in my people—because I believe they
have in them not only the power to win success in actual affairs; to
build up great cities; to turn the wilderness into a smiling garden;
to build commerce and factories; but because I think that they have
also the power to raise a structure of citizenship based upon decency,
upon clean living and high thinking, upon the virtues that make men
good neighbors, good husbands and fathers, and good citizens in their
relation alike to the State and the Nation.
I wish to say just one word this afternoon to you here in this City
of Destiny, in this city by the Sound, on our foreign policy, and upon
what must ever be the main prop of any good foreign policy—the
American Navy. In the old days, when I first came to the Little
Missouri, there was a motto on the range, “Never draw unless you
mean to shoot.” That is a pretty sound policy for a nation in foreign
affairs. Do not threaten ; do not bluster; above all, do not insult other
people; but when you make up your mind that the situation is such
as to require you to take a given position, take it and keep it, and
have it definitely understood that what you say you are ready to make
good. I earnestly believe, and of course I hope with all my heart,
that there will be always peace between the United States and other
powers; but I wish that peace to come to us not as a favor granted
*There is a paper in New York that is never tired of berating President Roosevelt as
“a jingo” and publishing cartoons of “The Big Stick.” One need not forget in such con-
nection that Washington, Jackson, Grant were one and all profound “jingoes,” and that
each was a firm believer in “The Big Stick.”—A. H. L.
422 Messages and Speeches
in contempt, but to be the kind of peace that comes to the just man
armed, the peace that we can claim as a matter of right. Of course,
it is the merest truism to say that the best way to keep peace is to
show that you are not afraid of war, if unjustly treated or wronged.
The events of the last few years have shown that whether we wish or
not, we must play a great part in the world. It is not open to us to
decide whether we will play it. All that is open to us to decide is
whether we will play it well; and I know my countrymen too thoroughly
to have any doubt as to what their answer will be.
You men of the great Civil War fought to keep us a' Nation; to
make us really one Nation. You fought the greatest war of the kind;
and because you dared to fight for four years, you have forever pur-
chased internal peace for the Republic.
Peace came to us for all time because you dared to fight; and the
people who in your day called for peace at any price, if they had had
their way, would have doomed us to generations of struggle—to gen-
erations of war. So you, my own comrades of the Army, and members
of the Navy in '98 and the years immediately following, by what you
did you gave this Nation an assured position such as it could have
acquired in no other way; and you made it infinitely less liable (not
more liable) that we should ever, for instance, have serious trouble
with any nation as to the Monroe Doctrine.
The events of that war, moreover, showed that the United States
had to be a dominant power on the Pacific Ocean. Our interests in
the trade that goes across that ocean are such, our positions of com-
mand in reference to the ocean are such, that we must have a decisive
say in its future. We can only have that say in peace by building up
an adequate Navy.
If we fail to build an adequate Navy, then sometime some great
power, throwing off the restraint of international morality, will take
some step against us, relying upon the weakness of our Navy; and
again I know my countrymen, and I know that in such case they would
fight anyhow ; and therefore, in your own interest, I ask you to see to
it that you do not fight with the odds against you; and above all that
by preparing sufficiently you obviate all need whatever of fighting
at all.
The surest guarantee of peace is an adequate Navy. The best
possible assurance against war is an adequate navy. I ask for a navy,
primarily, because it is the surest means of keeping peace; and also
because if war does come, surely there can be no American who
will tolerate the idea of its having anything other than a successful
issue.
In the fighting in Manila bay and in Santiago in 1898, in which
such ships as the Olympia and the Oregon—named for the Northwest-
Theodore Roosevelt 423
ern Coast, and built on the Pacific Ocean—did their part, what con-
trolled the issue of those fights, what was done at the moment? No,
the preparation had been made in advance. The ships that won the
victories of Manila and Santiago had been built years before, when
there was no thought, and could have been no thought, of war with
Spain. In 1883 we had a navy composed of antiquated war craft, as
unfit to go against a modern battleship as the galleys in which Rome
and Carthage fought for mastery of the Mediterranean. If at that
time we had been put in such a position as we were in 1898, bitter
humiliation would have been in store for us before we eventually won,
for, mind you, I think we would have eventually won anyhow. But I
do not want to see a generation of humiliation precede the victory. We
won because we prepared in advance. We built the ships, established
the shipyards, created the armor plants, created the gun foundries,
and we made ships which, in hulls, guns and engines, need to fear no
comparison with those of any power; and then put the men on them
and trained the men to do their part in the battle.
The only shots that count are the shots that hit. I believe in
marksmanship ashore and marksmanship afloat. You and I, my com-
rades, who fought ashore, had a simpler task in learning how to handle
our weapons. Most of us knew something of the rifle in advance; if
we did not, we had our time to learn it. But get on a big ship—and
any man who has been on one knows it is a mighty complicated and
delicate bit of machinery to handle the guns in the gun turrets; to
handle the ship itself, needs the training of a specialist. You can take
the best men alive and put them upon one of our modern battleships,
and, unless they have had some training, the fact that they are the best
men alive will not help them. They have got to have the training;
and it was because our officers and men were trained well that when
the crucial minute came we not only won, but we won at a minimum of
loss to ourselves and a maximum of damage to the enemy.
It is a pleasant thing to come together and congratulate ourselves
upon the great deeds of the past, but that is not the way to prepare for
great deeds in the future. In '61 the men of the Civil War won, not
by attending Fourth of July celebrations; not by glorifying what had
been done by the men of the Revolution, but by turning in themselves
to try to distance the deeds of the men of the Revolution. That is
how you did it, and we of the younger generation were helped by
your example, because we felt that what you had done did not excuse
us from effort, but required us to try to rise level to the great deeds of
the past.
I ask you, the sovereigns of the country, for you are the sovereigns,
and therefore, you are not to be excused if you do not exercise your
sovereignty aright, to see to it that the work of preparing the Navy in
424 Messages and Speeches
time of peace goes on. The last Congress did its duty—no more than
its duty—by going on with the building up of the Navy, and see to
it that the next Congress ends with a record as good. If we stop,
we go back. The only way to do in building up the Navy is to
keep on with it, to provide the ships, and to provide that they shall
be the best of their kind, and then to provide for the men on them,
and for training them at the great guns and in sea practice, which shall
make them in their turn the best of their kind; and I believe—I do not
want to boast—but I believe that the American fighting man, if you
will give him a chance, is at least as good as any one else; that the
man on Our ships, in our armies, will do everything that we can
possibly demand of him if we give him the chance, and because
he is such a good man, I ask that you give him the chance. It has
been a great and a real pleasure to see you.
AT OLYMPIA, WASH., MAY 22, 1903.
It is no wonder the people of Washington have shown themselves true
to the practices and principles of the men who fought in the great war.
I have just been introduced to two of your fellow citizens, the father
and mother of one of the gallant young fellows who in the Philippines
captured Aguinaldo. With men such as you, and with two of your
citizens, the father and mother of a boy like that, of course you are
expansionists. If you were not I would want to know what was
the matter with you. I congratulate Washington on its agriculture,
its lumber, its mines, upon all that it produces, but most of all upon
its crop of children.
AT THE ALASKAN RECEPTION, SEATTLE, WASH., MAY 23, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, and you, men and women of Alaska:
I confess I am for the moment a little surprised at the aspect of
so many of the Alaskan pioneers. I knew that in the immediate fu-
ture Alaska would become a highly civilized community, but I did
not know that it had already become so.
Seriously, let me thank you and the members of the Arctic Brother-
hood for their greeting and their gifts. 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 dwell on the Pacific slope are beginning to under-
stand that in the very near future Alaska will be, not merely a regu-
larly 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
Theodore Roosevelt 425
Occupying the Scandinavian countries of the Old World; and Alaska
lies in the same latitude as and can and will in the lifetime of those I
am now addressing support as great a population as the Scandinavian
peninsulas of the Old World. 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 who esteemed themselves, in point of training and
culture, best fitted to shape the nation's destiny.” In 1803, when we
acquired the so-called Louisiana Purchase, when we acquired the ter-
ritory 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 dissolution of the Republic.
And think how absolutely the event falsified the predictions of those
II1611.
And so when, in the late sixties, we by treaties acquired Alaska, this
great territory, this 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—many men who held that we were doing ourselves and the
nation a wrong by acquiring this territory which is now one of the pos-
sessions upon which we pride ourselves most.
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. And in every instance
how the after events of history have falsified the predictions of the
men of little faith.
...And now 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 don’t know the cost, but we know that it will be more than
repaid ten times over by the result. What it may ultimately mean
we don’t know ; what the present holds, what the present needs demand,
we know, and we take the present and hold ourselves ready to abide
the results of whatever the future may bring.
And when I speak to you of the Pacific slope, to you of the Northwest
—the new Northwest; to you whose cities are seated here by the Sound
—I speak to people abounding in their youth and their virile manhood;
people who do not fear to grasp opportunity as the opportunity comes,
and who weigh slight risk but lightly in the balance when on the
*In this connection it is just as well to remember that nations are like serpents in this:
That the head is always driven forward by the tail.—A. H. L.
426 Messages and Speeches
other side of the scale come the greatness of triumph, the greatness
of conquest, 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 handed over to our children
and our children’s children.
And now I speak to you, citizens of Alaska, people who have dwelt
therein, to say how much all our people have to owe to you. During
the last year many wise laws have been put upon the statute book in
reference to Alaska; but not as many as should have been put there by 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 recog-
nized exponent whose duty it shall be to place their 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 type of legislation,
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
untold possibilities of agricultural and pastoral development. Not
only her mines, her fisheries, her furs, but her agriculture and her stock
raising will combine to make Alaska one of the great wealth produc-
ing and man producing portions of our republic. And I am anxious
that our laws should be framed, not in the interest of those who wish
to skin the country and then leave it, but 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. *
And I ask your help, and pledge you my help, in the effort to secure
such legislation. Let me tell you just exactly how I mean it. In the
case of a mine, you get the metal out of the earth. You cannot
1eave any metal in there to produce other metal. In the case of
a fishery, a salmon fishery, if we are wise—if you are wise, you will in-
sist upon its being carried on under conditions which will make the
salmon fishery as profitable in that river thirty years hence as now.
Don't take all of the salmon out and go away and leave the empty
river to your children and children's children. Take it out under
conditions—and, mind you, the conditions are ready to be carried
out for you by the national fish commission, which has been so
singularly successful in its work—under conditions which will secure
the preservation of that river as a salmon river; which will secure
the perpetuation of the salmon canneries along its banks, so that it
Theodore Roosevelt 427
will be not an industry carried on by imported Orientals in the employ
of three or four alien capitalists.
I think you see that I understand some of the conditions, but see
that it is carried on in such a way as to be a perpetual source of
income to the actual settlers resident in the locality. Now, is not that
the common sense way to go at the situation? Exactly. 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 forest for the settlers
and the settlers' children that are to come in and inherit the lands.
I wish to see the land laws so enacted—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, and to make a home for himself. Subject to this condition—
that is, subject to the condition of shaping the legislation in the interest
of the actual homeseeker who is making a home for himself and for
future generations; subject to that condition, I desire to see legislation
shaped in a spirit of the broadest liberality, that will secure the
quickest possible development of the resources of Alaska. And with
that end in view, to have all of the encouragement possible given to
those seeking to establish, by steamship line and by railway, quick and
efficient transportation facilities in the Territory.
I believe in the pioneer, even when he is as well dressed as the pio-
neer I am addressing. I recollect, by the way, of recently speaking to
an Arctic explorer who had come across Siberia, and he told me of the
immense hardships he had suffered as he worked along across the
Asiatic provinces of Russia, and with infinite labor and at an immense
peril of starvation finally got to the waters which separated Asia from
America and crossed the American possessions within the Arctic, where
he at once found himself in a summer hotel, where on account of de-
ficiency in civilized clothing, he was not allowed to dine at the first
table.
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 re-
sources of Alaska have been developed, and when one sees what has
been done there 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 wooded wilderness between the Alle-
ghanies and the Mississippi, and then steered their way across the vast
seas of grass from the Mississippi to the Rockies, who penetrated the
passes of the barren mountains and then came to this, the greatest of
all the oceans—that their qualities 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
428 Messages and Speeches
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 peo-
pling of the Alaska seacoast puts us in a position of dominance as
regards the Pacific which no other nation shares or can share.
Let me say a word of greeting now, not only to the Alaskans pres-
ent, but to all of you, Alaskans and others, simply as Americans; a
word of especial greeting to my friends, the exponents of the higher
education. As I came in there were fond moments when I almost
imagined myself at a football match. Seriously, nothing has pleased
me more in coming through the Pacific Northwest, than to see the way
in which, together with your astounding material progress, you have
prepared for the building upon it of the higher life, intellectual and
spiritual. A material foundation is indispensable. Without it we can
do nothing, but with only that material foundation we could do little.
We need to have built upon it the kind of life which will give to the
citizenship of the community the chance of developing itself along the
loftiest lines, and you who have received from the State a college educa-
tion, you who have received from the State any education, or who have
received from any source any education, you are bound to feel that you
have been derelict in your duty unless you make for that education the
return of good and enlightened citizenship.
It is not open to you to say that you will or will not make that
return as you choose. If you do not make it you are derelict in your
duty and you have shown yourselves unworthy of what you have
received. We have a right to demand from you that you shall show
yourselves able to take the lead in all the work of the State which
requires a disinterested and far-sighted adherence to the principles
which have made this nation great in time past.
Wherever I have gone today, wherever I have gone since I have
struck the Pacific coast, I have been greeted by men of the Grand Army,
by men who fought in the great war for the Union; and I wish to
state, also, that I have been greeted here and there by Americans, just
as loyal, just as devoted to our country, who in that contest wore the
gray instead of the blue; for one great feature of that war was that
the victors left us the right of brotherhood with the vanquished; left
us the right of feeling keen pride in the valor and self-devotion of
all Americans who took part in that contest, whether they fought
against the Stars in their course or with them; and those men left us a
heritage of undying honor and glory, because when the call was made
they rose above all material considerations, because they were spurred
on by a lofty and generous enthusiasm which counted all that life held
dear and life itself as naught in the balance compared with fealty to an
Theodore Roosevelt 429
ideal, and I ask now that the people of this generation, the men and
women” of this generation, in their turn show in their lives the same
capacity for high endeavor, the same resolute purpose, the same fealty
to a lofty ideal combined with the power of seeking to achieve it in
practical ways that was shown by the men of the great Civil War; I
ask that and because I know that you, my fellow countrymen, you and
those like you, from one end of this country to the other, have in you
the spur of the spirit which will drive you to give it, because you have
that spur and will respond to it, I believe in your future with all my
heart and Soul, and I am proud that I can call myself your fellow
citizen.
Good night.
AT EVERETT, WASH., MAY 23, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Governor, and fellow citizens:
It is with great pleasure that I have come to this astonishing new
city here by Puget Sound. I am a pretty good Westerner; I am accus-
tomed to seeing extraordinary growth, but what I have seen today has
astonished me. I do not believe that even you yourselves realize how
great the future is that stretches before this country, that stretches
before this State. In half a century we shall see grouped around
Puget Sound not one or two, but a dozen cities, each of which in an
older civilization would be accepted as the capital of a large common-
wealth. Think of having a Sound with about fifteen hundred miles of
possible dockage | No wonder you look happy and contented. I
would be ashamed of you if you were not.
In greeting you let me say a word or two of special greeting; in the
first place to the Grand Army—ever and always a word of special greet-
ing to them, because if it were not for what they and their fellows did
in the early sixties you and I would not be here now. You would not
have any one country with one President over it. It is because of
what they did that the President of the United States can travel from
the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Rio Grande to the forty-ninth
parallel and be at home everywhere.
I want to thank the men of the National Guard who have acted as
escort; some of the members of your National Guard were comrades of
mine in the lesser war of '98, where our trouble was not what troubled
the men of '61 to '65; for the trouble with us was that there was not
enough war to go around. *
Now a special word of greeting to the future—the children. It has
*He who reads the speeches of President Roosevelt cannot fail to be impressed by the
fact that in the economy of government he never fails to give weight to the feminine.
Plainly he believes of America as Napoleon did of France that “What the country needs
most is good mothers.”—A. H. L.
43O Messages and Speeches
pleased me particularly traveling through this State, with its marvelous
future, to see how, in addition to taking advantage of the present to
the utmost, the citizens of the State are seeing to it that the boys and
girls of today shall have the kind of training that will fit them to be men
and women of tomorrow, able to carry on the work that you yourselves
have done. It is a great thing to have such marvelous physical advan-
tages as you have here in Washington; it is a great thing to have this
extraordinary Sound, unmatched in the entire world for the advantage
of commercial intercourse which it bestows, to have your rivers, your
forests, your possibilities of agriculture, of manufacturing, of lumber-
ing ; it is a great thing to have the physical qualities of soil and climate,
the physical configuration of the country which bestows such privileges;
but they would all be wasted if you did not have the right kind of men
and women to take advantage of them.
What I congratulate you most upon is the type of citizenship which
you have produced. I ask that in using your great advantages you
use them with an eye to the future, use them, but keep them also for
your children in the future. This is a town hewed right out of the
forest, a manufacturing town, a commercial town, and a town con-
nected, as so many of the other cities along this coast are, with the
lumbering interests.
I see throughout Washington and Oregon two great interests—the
lumbering and the fishing interests. It is most important that you
should carry On your work in a way that will keep for your successors
the advantages you enjoy; when it comes to mining you take the metal
out of the earth and that is all there is to it—in lumbering and
in fisheries the aim should be not to exhaust the resources of the State,
but while utilizing them to the fullest extent, yet so to preserve them
that those who come after you shall share in the benefits.
We have passed the age in this country when we could afford to
tolerate the man whose aim was to skin the country and get out. That
is not what you want. What we want is a population of the home-
makers, a population intending to stay on the land and intending that
their children and children's children shall occupy the land and shall
receive it, not impoverished, but enriched.
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.
Theodore Roosevelt 43 I
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, but 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.
Such an industry so vitally connected with many others in the country
cannot 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 ax during the decade in which the ax has
been at work. Our aim should be to get the fullest from the forest
today, 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 climate 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 de-
pends chiefly upon the wisdom with which the practical lumberman,
the expert in dealing with the lumber industry, works with the men
who have studied the scientific side of forestry; co-operation between
them is the best and surest way of saving our forests.
But, after all has been said, after we have gotten the best laws and
the best administration of the laws, it remains true that the essential
factor in the success of any community is the average citizenship of
that community, just as the essential factor in the success of any in-
dividual must be, now and in the future, as it ever has been in the past,
the sum of the qualities which go to make up the character of that
individual. Nothing will take the place of that. You know how that
was in the Civil War, all of you here who have been soldiers. There
are some men whom you can drill all you wish, and give them the best
weapons, the best training, the best uniforms, and after you have done
it all the men will be worthless, because if they have not the right stuff
in them you cannot get it out.
It is just so in citizenship. There are any number of people whom
no law and no administration of the law can possibly make prosperous
because they have not got it in them to be prosperous. All of us at
432 Messages and Speeches
times need help, and there is just one way in which you can help another
man, and that is to help him to help himself. It is because our people
here have proceeded upon that assumption that we have built up cities
like this and states like this.
In closing, just one word more, and again I appeal for example to
the men of the Civil War, to the men who have worn Uncle Sam's uni-
form as regulars and as volunteers, and who, therefore, have made their
fellow citizens their debtors. I ask that in civil life we judge men
exactly on the principles by which you judged your comrades in the
great war, by which any man when he gets down into the stress of
things has got to judge the man on his right or his left hand; in that
war, in time of trial, when the marching was hard, when the battle
was sore, what you cared for about the man on your right hand or your
left was not in the least whether he was wealthy or not, what creed
he worshiped his Maker by, whether he came from one State or another,
what his birthplace was, whether he was a banker or a bricklayer,
lawyer, mechanic, or farmer.” What you wanted to know was whether
he would “stay put”. That was enough.
So it is in civil life. The surest way to bring disaster upon this
people is to separate along the lines of caste, creed or locality, and the
worst enemy of this people is the man who seeks to excite hatred of
section, creed against creed, or class against class. The man who
does that is no true American, and is an enemy of the principles upon
which this government was founded. The republics of antiquity and of
the middle ages all failed and almost invariably because a bitter fac-
tional war began among them and they either became oligarchies, slip-
ping into the hands of the powerful or wealthy, or else slipping into
the hands of the mob pledged to destroy the powerful and the wealthy.
This government cannot and shall not become a government either
of a plutocracy or of a mob. It can continue to exist only if governed
on the principles for which you fought from '61 to ’65—of liberty and
equal rights under and through and by the law for all worthy men and
upright citizens. The spirit of class hatred is as base if it takes one
shape as if it takes the other. It is as base if it takes the form of an
arrogant over-riding of the rights of those not so well off as if it takes
the form of an envious or mean hatred and rancor toward those better
off. Any man who indulges in either feeling shows himself no true
American.
And, oh, my fellow countrymen, I am too proud of you and I believe
in you too much to be willing to see any man worthy to be called an
American dignify another man by envying him, for that is what envy
does. Envy is always a confession of inferiority except for the qualities
*President Roosevelt never for one moment humors the fallacy that the best dressed
citizen is necessarily the best citizen.—A.
Theodore Roosevelt 433
which we rightly expect in any man. Envy a man because he has a
touch of Washington in him, because he has a touch of Abraham Lin-
coln, envy a man because he was in the Civil War, and I am with you ;
but do not envy him for the non-essentials, do not wrong yourselves
by assuming the attitude which amounts to a confession of inferiority.
Walk with your heads erect, too conscious of your own worth to belittle
that worth by paying the tribute of envy, for unworthy reasons, to
others.
[Post Intelligencer, Seattle, Wash., May 24, 1903.]
AT SEATTLE, WASH., MAY 23, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of Seattle:
It is a great pleasure indeed for me to come to this Queen City of
the Sound on its fiftieth anniversary, and to express my cordial appre-
ciation of your greeting. And you, my fellow citizens, the people of
Washington, the people of Seattle, after all I have not got very much
to say to you, except to say that you practice what I have preached.
I try to practice it myself, too. And I greet you here as the very
embodiment of the spirit which makes us proud to be Americans.
How any man can be a citizen of this State, can be a citizen of this
city, and realize what has been done during its fifty years of life;
how any man with that experience can fail to look forward to the future
with eager and confident hope, I cannot imagine. You are good Ameri-
cans, of course. It is not to your credit that you are—you cannot help
being, with your experience.
And you people who live here, confident though you are of your
future, I question if you fully realize how great that future really is.
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 this State; and 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. More than that, this is a State
that looks out as well as in. This is a State whose people will do
much in assuring the dominance of the great republic in the waters of
the Pacific.
I am speaking in the gateway to Alaska, and 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 age whom I am addressing
will not be old men before we see Alaska one of the rich, mighty and
434 Messages and Speeches
populous States of the Union. And 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.
Now, if each person there will stand as still as possible it will be
more comfortable for him and for the rest. And I want you all to
remember, you men, that there are women and children in the crowd.
Stand just as quiet as possible; do not sway; just stand as quiet as
possible. I will only keep you a few minutes.
Alaska contains a territory which will within this century support
as large a population as the combined Scandinavian countries of
Europe—those countries from whom has sprung as wonderful a race as
ever imprinted its characteristics upon the history of civilization. And
exactly as the Scandinavian regions have left their mark we shall see
Alaska, with its varied and great possibilities in agriculture and stock
raising, with its possibilities of commercial command, with the
tremendous development that is going on within it even now—we
shall see Alaska produce as hardy and vigorous a people as any portion
of North America.
I wish to say a special word of greeting to the men of the Grand
Army. Wherever I have been on the Pacific slope—now try to stand
as still as possible; I shall only keep you a minute or two more—but a
minute or two more—wherever I have been in the Pacific Northwest, I
have been greeted by men who wear the button which shows that they
fought for the flag in the times that tried men's souls.
And now, here as elsewhere in Washington and Oregon, I have been
greeted by my comrades of the Spanish War, who sought to show that
they were not wholly unworthy of the men of the great days from '61
to '65. And these men, the men of the Grand Army, have exemplified
in their lives exactly the type of virtue, the type of quality, which has
meant the upbuilding of this Northwest.
You people here by Puget Sound; you people here by the Pacific,
who are sending your sons out now to control Alaska and the sweep of
our coast around the northern rim of the great Ocean; you people who
have conquered this continent, who are turning it into this great and
prosperous commonwealth—you have won by displaying in civic life
the same qualities that were displayed on stricken fields by the men who
followed Grant, and Sherman, and Thomas, and Sheridan, and Farra-
gut.
As a nation we need to show in civic life exactly the qualities
that those men showed in the days of strife. I earnestly hope that
the need for war will never come to our people. If it does I know we
can count with absolute certainty upon the people of the Northwest
doing their duty in a way that shall show that they rise to the standard
set by you, the men who followed Abraham Lincoln's call.
Theodore Roosevelt 435
And in peace there is the same need for these qualities that you
showed in war that there would be in war itself. In peace as you want
to show patriotism, so we have to show the spirit of decency, the
spirit of morality, of fair and square dealing as between man and man;
and, more than that, as it was not enough to be patriotic in the days
of the Civil War, in addition to that you had to show the capacity to
fight well, the capacity to do and dare; so now, in the field of civic
endeavor, it is necessary not only that we shall have deeply imprinted
in us the spirit of decency, that we shall govern our lives in accord-
ance with the immutable law of righteousness, but it is also necessary
that we should show ourselves men, men able to do men's work in the
world. We need to show, now and in the future, in the upbuilding of
this mighty nation, the same qualities of courage, of hardihood, of
resolution and of endeavor that were shown by the men of the great
Civil War.
And, oh, my countrymen, oh, my fellow Americans, as I have trav-
eled from the Atlantic across this continent to the Pacific, the thing that
has struck me most is the reality of the unity of our people which
these men and their fellows achieved by force of arms. And, wherever
I have gone, whatever audience I have addressed, the fact that has
jumped to the eye was the fact that a good American is a good Ameri-
can in any part of this country.
And now, my fellow countrymen, I leave. you. I believe in you, I
am proud of you, and I am absolutely confident of the future, not only
of this State, but of our entire country, because I know and you know
that we have in us as a nation the spirit of youth, joined to the
strength of manhood, and that we are resolute to face all the problems
that confront us, the problems from within and the problems from
without, in the spirit displayed by the men who upheld in the dark days
the statesmanship of Lincoln and by their efforts made good the sol-
diership of Grant. Good-by and good luck.
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
436 Messages and Speeches
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 ref-
erence 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 pen-
insula. It is curious how our fate as a nation has often driven us for-
ward toward greatness in spite of the protests of many of those esteem-
ing themselves in point of training and culture best fitted to shape
the nation's destiny. In 1803, when we acquired the territory stretch-
ing 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 vio-
lation 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 Philip-
pines 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 his-
tory 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 ulti-
*As I read this speech I could not escape remembering that other and most profound
president who, on being presented with a Newfoundland dog, at once descended upon that
reckless admirer who bestowed it with a two thousand word letter wherein he showed the
black impropriety of the chief magistrate receiving any gifts. After which he virtuously
sent back the dog, and arranged, as John Allen would say, “to receive congratulations” as
the modern Spartan.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 437
mately 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 North-
west, 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 is of course
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 cannot 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 chil-
dren; 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
438 Messages and Speeches
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 capi-
talists, 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 admin-
istered 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 legisla-
tion 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 pene-
trated the woody wilderness between the Alleghanies and the Mis-
sissippi, who then steered their way across vast seas of grass from the
Mississippi to the Rockies, who penetrated the passes of the great bar-
ren 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 domi-
nant power in the Pacific. Exactly as with the building of the Isth-
mian Canal we shall make our Atlantic and our Pacific coasts in ef-
fect continuous,” so the possession and peopling of the Alaskan sea-
coast puts us in a position of dominance as regards the Pacific which
no other nations share or can share.
AT ELLENSBURG, WASH., MAY 25, 1903.
Let me greet those whom I know. Others will not grudge my
specially greeting men of the Grand Army and the representatives of
those who did even more than the men of the Civil War—the women.
for, while the man went to battle, to the woman fell the hardest task
of seeing husband or lover, father or brother, going to the war, she
*President Roosevelt believes with Raleigh that the Isthmus of Darien is the key of
the world, and intends with Frelinghuysen that both banks of the Canal when completed
shall be part of the coast line of this country.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 439
herself having to stay behind with the load of doubt, anxiety and
uncertainty, and often the difficulty of making both ends meet in the
household while the bread-winner was away. '
AT WALLA WALLA, WASH., MAY 25, 1903.
Mr. President, and you, my fellow citizens:
I am particularly glad to have the chance of speaking from in front
of this institution of learning, an institution which commemorates
the name and the great deeds of one of America’s worthiest men, of
Whitman, who left his mark deep on the history of the nation. He
was one of the leaders in that movement which settled that the region
now marking the great States of Washington and Oregon was to exist
and flourish under the American flag.
I cannot sufficiently congratulate you, Mr. President, upon what has
been done here with this college. I wish to pay a special tribute here
in Washington to the work done by the educators in Washington.
You have wonderful resources within your borders. I thought I
knew pretty fairly that you had a wonderful State, and my expecta-
tions were high, too, but I do not think I appreciated what a wonder-
ful State it was.
Within the half century now opening Washington will take its
place as among the leading States of the Union in wealth, power,
population—in all that goes to make up greatness. You have won-
derful material resources. They are indispensable as a foundation,
but if you build nothing upon them, then you have only a foundation,
and not a perfect structure. Do not misunderstand me. Every now
and then I hear some one say: “You are slurring material well-
being ; you do not pay proper heed to the architects of industry, to the
captains of industry; you do not pay proper heed to business energy,
business enterprise, which must underlie business success.”
I do pay proper heed to them. You can no more build a great
nation without them than you can build any building whatever with-
out its foundation; but they only make the foundation. On them
you have to build the structure of the higher life—moral, intellectual,
spiritual—or else our civilization is not, and will not, be what it
should be.
I congratulate you, my fellow citizens, upon what you are doing
here, in this great State, in bringing up your children worthily to
continue the work that the pioneers began, and that you are helping
carry to completion. We are a practical people, a business people,
but we are infinitely more than merely a business people.
If you doubt my words, do not believe them. I appeal not to what
I say, but to what the men of '61 to '65 did, to what the men, your
44O Messages and Speeches
brothers and sons, did in the Philippines. You men of the Civil War,
when Abraham Lincoln called you to arms, and your hearts leaped
within you, did you think you were then influenced by merely business
considerations? No. The men before they went to war, and during
the lives they have led since they came back from the war, have been
good, practical, hard-working Americans; but there were four years,
the best four years of their lives, that they rendered a service for
which there could be no adequate pay in gold or pecuniary reward
for they showed themselves at that time willing to lay down all,
life itself, in generous fealty to a lofty ideal.
Our country is great because our people had it in them to show
such loftiness of spirit when the great appeal was made to them.
We never would have built up this country if it had not been for the
business energy, the business enterprise, of our people; but we would
have broken into fifty jangling fragments if our people had only had
that business enterprise, that business energy, when in '61 the guns
of Sumter called to war.
[The Morning Oregonian, Portland, May 26, 1908.]
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 corpora-
tions 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, the State also 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,
Theodore Roosevelt 44I
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 plutoc-
racy 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 acquiesce 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 con-
duct, 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 de-
clares a man a good citizens only if, and always if, he acts in accord-
ance 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.
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's a double pleasure to come here at the invitation of the representa-
*It is the judgment of history that Wealth is generally a fool and always a coward.
—A. H. L.
442 Messages and Speeches
tives 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 pleas-
ant 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 acquies-
cence 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, or creed against creed, or of class against class. There
Theodore Roosevelt 443
are two sides to that. It is a base and an infamous thing for the man
of means to act in 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 particu-
lar 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 oppress-
ing 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 HELENA, MONT., MAY 27, 1903.
It is a great pleasure to come through this State and to see legibly
written for the most unobservant to read assured promise of a future
greatness. I sometimes think that you yourselves do not altogether
*There are a dozen sentences here of which it may be said that each is a sermon in itself.
Every one of them should be planted like some light house of morality on those hard bluff
shores of selfishness and conscienceless rapacity that lie ever to leeward of the best among
men.—A. H. L.
444 Messages and Speeches
realize how great that future will be. Your mines count for much;
your ranches count for much, but most of all is going to be done by
the water, and in two ways. In the first place, thanks to the rapid fall
of the rivers from the mountains, there is a well-nigh inexhaustible
Source of power in your streams, which will certainly be used in the
building up of great manufactures. We are going to see great manu-
facturing centers here in Montana taking advantage of the power of
your waters. In the next place those waters will be used under wise
Schemes of irrigation until you make this whole state blossom like
the rose.
You need first of all to distribute the water in space through the
irrigating ditches, and then to preserve it in time by storage in
reservoirs, so as to keep the floods that run to waste of one season
for use at the season when they are most needed. And Congress, the
National Legislature, has not of recent years put upon the statute
books any law as wise, as beneficent as the National irrigation act of
a year ago. It was the beginning of the scheme of using aright the
waters which have been allowed to go to waste, and, as all of you
know, when irrigation becomes an accomplished fact, and the waters
are used in accordance with the right principles of irrigation, we
always find that rainfall is a very poor substitute for it.
We have passed in irrigation the stage of preliminary experiment.
There is no question of what can be done by it. The question merely
is as to the method, as to the means of making it most effective, and,
in my judgment the greatest development within our borders, the
greatest development not on the sea coast of the United States during
the next half century will be the development of what have been
called the arid and semi-arid lands under the application of the
principles of irrigation. And I say one thing with emphasis, in en-
deavoring to secure the adoption of the irrigation law I was met
with protests from people dwelling in the humid regions, who believed
that the building up of agriculture in an intensified form in the arid
regions through irrigation would be detrimental to them.
AT POCATELLO, IDAHO, MAY 28, 1903.
It is a great pleasure to be here in this city, in this State, and to
greet you this morning. I wish to acknowledge the courtesy of those
who escorted me—the veterans of the great war, my own comrades
of the Spanish-American war, and the men of the National Guard,
and to congratulate Idaho upon what she is doing with her National
Guard; and in greeting all of you I want to say a word in special
recognition of the children. As you all know, I believe in children
and in plenty of them. Much though I congratulate Idaho upon her
Theodore Roosevelt 445
forests and mines in the northern part of the State, upon all her in-
dustrial development, upon her railroads, upon what she will be able
to make out of irrigated agriculture, upon all her products, the product
upon which I congratulate her most is the children. I am glad to
see that you have them all right in point of quality and in point of
quantity. I have only one word to say to them. I believe in play and
I believe in work. Play hard while you play, and when you work
don’t play at all. That is middling good advice for older folks, too.
This is a railroad town. I have been and am now on a trip during
which on every day and during every hour my safety and well-being
depend absolutely upon the vigilance, skill, nerve and fidelity of the
railroad men; and I would like to say a special word to and about
them this morning. The last time that I ever saw General Sherman he
told me that if there ever were a war and he were limited to choosing
men of one occupation he would take all his soldiers from among the
railroad men—that is if he were limited to one occupation, for there
are good men in every occupation, he would take them all if he only
had to choose from One occupation—because a railroad man has to
develop four or five of the qualities most indispensable in a soldier;
in the first place, capacity to face risk undaunted. Railroading is one
of those professions which, like following the deep sea fisheries, neces-
sarily implies the acceptance of risk and danger. In the next place
the man has not only learned to endure risk but to face hardships.
Very few outside of those who have known intimately what railroading
means appreciate what a ride, especially a night ride, in the winter time
is on one of our trains, handling the brakes, doing all the work along
the train. The men have to face risks and hardship. More than that,
they have to face irregular hours. Any one who has ever done any
soldiering knows that one of the difficulties to be overcome by the
average man is to make him understand that he is not to sleep every
night, but just when the chance comes. The railroad man knows that
already. Finally, and most important of all, the railroad man has
learned two things. He has learned how to act on his own responsi-
bility in time of emergency, how to take the lead himself if the need
arises and also how to obey orders, and obey them quickly. There is
not any time for wondering whether or not he will do anything at all;
it’s to be done, and done quickly. These were the reasons which
General Sherman enumerated in talking to me of his preference for
railroad men for army life. The qualities thus developed are of as
good service in the field of citizenship in ordinary civil life as in
military life. In this country we need above all things to show our
power to act on one's own individual responsibility, each to care for
himself, to be able to handle his own life, and yet all of us to act in
co-operation with our fellows, to be able to preserve our independence,
446 Messages and Speeches
Our Self respect, and one of the means of preserving it is to show that
power of living our lives in orderly liberty under the law.
I wish also to say a word of special acknowledgment of the presence
of the men on horseback from the reservation. I was glad to see
them, and, Major Cadwell, I was glad to learn that many of the
Indians under your care are traveling along the white man's road and
beginning not only to send their children to school, but to own cattle
and to own property. The only outcome of the Indian question in this
country is gradually to develop the Indian into a property-owning,
law-abiding, hard-working, educated citizen. In other words, to train
him to travel the path that we are all trying to travel; and I con-
gratulate you upon the progress that you have made. When he is
traveling that path and when he is doing his duty he is entitled to and
he shall receive exactly as square a deal as any one else.
After all, that is the fundamental principle of our government.
In the last analysis what America stands for more than for aught else
is for treating each man on his worth as a man; if he acts well in
whatever walk of life, whatever his ancestry, his creed, his color,
give him a fair chance; if he acts badly let nothing protect him from
the hand of the law.
I congratulate you, the men and women of Idaho, upon what you
have done for your State. Let me congratulate you especially upon
the fact that in addition to the business energy, the thrift, the enterprise
that you have shown in material development, you have taken such
pains in the bringing up of the next generation. I congratulate you
upon your schools and upon your education, both elementary and
higher—the most important things in life and which we are some-
times tempted to regard as the humdrum and commonplace things.
The whole fabric of society rests upon the home. The best citizen is
the man who is a good husband, a good father; the woman who is a
good wife, a good mother. Of course that is so elementary a fact,
like other elementary facts, we occasionally forget its existence, that
the highest type of citizenship is to be found in the home, and nothing
can take the place of the education of the home—the fathers and
mothers who educate their children not merely by precept but by
practice, for in the intimacy of the home it does little good to preach
if that preaching is not backed up by performance. It is of no use
telling the children to tell the truth if they see their elders not telling
the truth, no use trying to teach the child to be unselfish if the father
or mother is selfish. There is no use in trying to teach the small
folks not to shirk their duty if the bigger ones shirk theirs.
Nothing can excuse shirking in the performance of duty toward
the children by the father and mother; but their work has to be sup- .
plemented from the outside; and a special and peculiar debt of grati-
Theodore Roosevelt 447
tude is owing to the men and women who are engaged in teaching,
who are engaged in educating the body, mind and soul of the younger
generation, and to all, Mr. Mayor, who take part in the work of the
School committee in seeing that the educational requirements of any
locality are fully and actually met. I am glad to have seen you. It
has done me good to come here. I believe in the future of your great
State because I believe with all my heart and soul in the quality of
the average man and the average woman who go to make up this
State, and go to make up this entire nation.
[Idaho Daily Statesman, Boise, Idaho, May 29, 1903.]
AT NAMPA, IDAHO, MAY 28, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is a very great pleasure to have the chance of greeting you today.
Let me say a word of special greeting to the members of the National
Guard. For the first time in our history Congress has enacted a
measure to provide for an adequately armed National Guard in each of
the states; and Idaho is the first State to be taking advantage of the
terms of this act. I congratulate Idaho upon this typical instance of
progress.
I wish to say what pleasure it has given me to come here and be
witnessing with my own eyes what you are doing in this State with
irrigation. Idaho will, I firmly believe—and I base it not merely upon
my own observation but upon what I am told by men of judgment
dealing within the State—grow with peculiar rapidity and with a
peculiar stability of growth during the years now immediately opening.
While a great part of the growth will surely be due to the development
of her unexplored mineral resources, I think the most permanent and
the most useful part of the growth will be the development of her
irrigated agriculture.
I do not have to tell you here that when you get irrigation fairly
applied, rain is a poor substitute for it. With irrigation, the wonder-
ful fertility of your soil will be given full play, and we shall see a
development of fruit and grain products in this State which would
have seemed literally incredible even as late as 25 years ago. I
have passed through some of the great grazing regions of the State,
the regions where cattle and sheep flourish. I congratulate you upon
the chances of diversifying your industries, as in the development of
all your other industries, so far as the federal and State laws affect
them, the one great object ever kept in mind will be the building up
of the home-maker, the building up of the man who takes a given
quantity of land—a large quantity if it is unirrigated; a much smaller
quantity if it is irrigable—and out of that makes a home upon which
448 Messages and Speeches
he intends himself to live, and living, to bring up his children. The
citizen who counts in the development of the state is the man or
woman who makes this his or her home; for it is upon the quality of
the average woman that the future of the State really depends.
[Idaho Daily Statesman, Boise, Idaho, May 29, 1903.]
AT GLENN'S FERRY, IDAHO, MAY 28, 1903.
My fellow citizens:
Let me thank you most cordially for your greeting. Tam glad to see
all of you, but I do not know but what I am most pleased to see the
children. It has been a great pleasure to come into Idaho. I know
your State of old, although I have never been out to Boise, but in
the old days I was out in the mountains in the eastern part of your
State.
One thing that has particularly pleased me in making this trip
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, right across the continent, has been
the fact of the fundamental unity of our people. A good American
is a good American in whatever part of this country you find him.
That is the important lesson to learn. I have been here in the west
for six weeks and I think I was a pretty good American when I came,
but I am going away a better American.
I have been struck coming through this State—a State with its
mines and timber in the north, and here the grazing country—with the
wonderful results achieved wherever water has been put upon the soil.
I do not believe that there is any State in this country which will
benefit more through the workings of the irrigation act than this
State of Idaho; and nothing has pleased me more than to have had
my part in getting the national government to aid in the work. Much
can be done by the aid of the government, by the aid of the State;
but, after all, the fundamental thing in bringing success to any com-
munity is the quality of the average man, the average woman, in that
community. I believe in your future; I believe in the future of the
nation of which you and I are a part, because I believe that we have
just that average quality of citizenship in our men and women.
No law that the wit of man has even devised can make or ever
will make a fool wise, or a coward brave, or a weakling strong. All
that the law can do is to try to secure a fair deal, to try to give each
man a chance to show the stuff that is in him ; and if the stuff is not
in him you cannot get it out of him because it is not there.
It is a good thing to have a sound body; it is a better thing to
have a sound mind. Best of all it is to have what counts for, more
than body and more than mind, character—character, into which a
good many different elements enter, but these especially. In the first
Theodore Roosevelt 449
place, the element of honesty, of decency, using it in its widest bearing,
the element that makes a man a good husband, a good father, a good
neighbor, a good man to work alongside of or to deal with ; and then
in addition to that we need courage, hardihood, the qualities that
every railroad man—every man on the engine or firing—has got to
show, the qualities that we speak of when we say of a man that he is
not only a good man, but a man; and, finally, in addition to courage and
honesty, we need the saving grace of common sense, for without that
a man will make but scant headway in the world. I am very glad to
have had the chance of seeing you.
[Idaho Daily Statesman, Boise, Idaho, May 29, 1903.]
AT MOUNTAINHOME, IDAHO, MAY 28, 1903.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It has been a great pleasure to have been traveling in Idaho today;
and now after having traversed a good deal of sage brush, to come
here to see what can be done by a proper mixture of intelligence,
industry and water, in substituting for the sage brush green crops.
I doubt if there is any State which will profit more by the increase
in the application of irrigation to our needs than is the case with the
State of Idaho. Most of our people, especially our people in the
East, have no fair idea how much can be done in the development of
these states here under that irrigation system. I do not believe that
Congress has for many years passed any law relating to our internal
development so wise as the irrigation law of a year ago.
Today, passing by, I noted far to the north the spot where one
of the first experiments under that act is to be tried. I wish to say
that our object in our whole irrigation policy should be to build up
home makers, to build up the people who take each the land that he
himself can attend to and till and who intend to rear their children
on the soil. Our object should be sedulously to provide against letting
great tracts of land go into the hands of any one man or of any one
corporation. On the contrary, we should endeavor to save the land
for its actual occupiers, for the men who will actually build up homes
upon it, homes in which I shall hope to see plenty of healthy children.
I congratulate you upon the output from the mines, next the ranches,
but most of all the children. I am glad that they seem to be all right
in quality and all right in quantity.
It has particularly pleased me in coming through this State to see
the excellent schools you have built, and the care with which you
are training the next generation. I believe in you, and I want to see
the future people like you.
[Idaho Daily Statesman, Boise, Idaho, May 29, 1903.]
450 Messages and Speeches
AT BOISE, IDAHO, MAY 28, 1903.
The forests and the grasses are not to be treated as we properly
treat mining; that is, as material to be used up and nothing left be-
hind. On the contrary, we must recognize the fact that we have
passed the stage when we can afford to tolerate the man whose object
is simply to skin the land and get out. That man is not a valuable
citizen. We do not want the absentee proprietor. It is not for him
that we wish to develop irrigation. It is not for him that we must
shape the grazing lands, or handle our forests. We must handle the
water, the woods and the grasses, so that we will hand them on to our
children, and Our children's children in better, and not worse, shape
than we got them.
I was particularly pleased to be greeted by 2,000 school children.
You know I believe in children. And while there may be a good
many varieties of first-class citizens in the State, I have always
thought that, take it on the average, the citizen I must respect is the
mother of a large family, who brought them up well. And so I am
glad that your children seem to be all right in point of quality and in
quantity, and in traveling through this great country nothing has
pleased me more than to see how, hand in hand with the upbuilding
of its material prosperity, has gone on the preparation for carefully
training the next generation.
I have been greatly struck, as I have come up this beautiful and
fertile valley, by what has been done by the application of industry,
intelligence, and water, to the soil. And, inasmuch as for a number
of years I myself passed a large proportion of my life in the mountains
and on the plains of this great Western country, I feel a peculiar pride
that it was given to me to sign, and thereby make into law, the
act of the National Government, to my mind one of the most important
acts made into law by the National Legislature—the National Irriga-
tion Act of a year ago. Already experimental work has begun
here in your own State. The National Government, in my judgment,
not only should, but must, co-operate with the State governments,
and with individual enterprises, in seeing that we utilize to the fullest
advantage the waters of the Rocky Mountain States, by canals and
great reservoirs, which shall conserve the waters that go to waste
at one season, so they can be used at another season.
I believe with all my heart in the Monroe Doctrine. This Western
hemisphere is not to become a region for conquest, over which for-
eign military powers may acquire control. I think that should be a
cardinal doctrine of our American foreign policy. But I had a great
deal rather never see us announce that policy than for us to announce
it and then lack either the will or the power to make it good.
The one means for making it good is the building up of an adequate
Theodore Roosevelt 45I
navy of first-class battleships, such as those provided for by the last
Congress, one of which is to be called the Idaho, and having pro-
vided the ships, provide the men, and then recollect that the men
and the ships are worthless if they have not had a chance to practice.
I ask that Congress go on with the building up of the navy, and that
it provide the means to make that navy the most effective on the
globe.
I earnestly hope that in our time we shall not see war again, but
it is impossible to say that there will not be any war, because it is
not only necessary that we should want to act rightly toward other
nations, and I think I can say that we do, but it is necessary that
they should, all of them, want to act rightly toward us; and while I
believe that they do, I think it will help them to persevere in their
good intentions if we are well armed. I ask for the navy to be used
not as provocative of war, but to be used to keep the peace. I ask
for the navy as a guarantee and insurance against war, and as a
guarantee that if war does come, it shall end gloriously, as all the wars
undertaken in the past century and a quarter by this Republic have
ended.
[Idaho Daily Statesman, Boise, Idaho, May 29, 1903.]
AT SHOSHONE, IDAHO, MAY 28, 1903.
My fellow citizens, my fellow Americans:
It is a great pleasure to greet you this morning—to greet all of you,
especially the children. Traveling through this country as I have
traveled, from the Atlantic across to the Pacific, and now on my
return, the thing that has struck me most after all is not the diversity
but the essential unity of our people. Wherever I have gone, from
one end of the country to the other, I have dealt with Americans to
whom I could appeal in the name of the same principles.
And you, the men of the great war, the men whom I have met wher-
ever I have stopped on the plains—among the mountains, on the
Pacific slope—you builded even better than you knew when you saved
the country; for not only did you make it possible for an American
President to feel at home throughout this continental republic, but
you left us by your deeds the memory and the lessons of how we were
to handle this government. You fought for real brotherhood, for
the real rights of mankind. You fought to establish here the rule
of liberty under, by and through the law. You established once for
all that the worst enemy of this country is the man who tries to excite
section against section, creed against creed, class against class. This
government is not and never shall be a government either of a plutoc-
racy or of a mob. It shall be a government, as it has been and is, in
452 Messages and Speeches
which all citizens, rich or poor, wherever they live, however they
worship their Maker—mechanics, farmers, miners, ranchmen, bankers,
lawyers, it makes no difference what—if they are decent men, shall
have their say in the government and are guaranteed protection by
it. The line that in the elemental matters we must ever draw is
the line of conduct. The man who behaves well, whatever he does or
wherever he lives, is a good citizen, entitled to the respect of all other
good citizens; and if he does not behave well, at whichever end of the
social scale he stands, he is a bad citizen.
[Idaho Daily Statesman, Boise, Idaho, May 29, 1903.]
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 doc-
trine 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 homemakers, 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
Theodore Roosevelt 453
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 genera-
tion. 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
454 Messages and Speeches
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 is growing up with it.
and raising his children to own it after him. More and more here-
after the stock owners will have the necessity forced upon them of
providing green summer pasturage within the limits of their own
ranges; and so the question of irrigation is well-nigh as important to
the stockmen as to the agriculturist proper.
In the same way our mountain forests must be preserved from the
harm done by over-grazing. Let all the grazing be done in them
that can be done without injury to them, but do not let the mountain
forests be despoiled by the man who will overgraze them and destroy
them for the sake of three years’ use, then go somewhere else, and
leave by so much diminished the heritage of those who remain perma-
mently 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 sympathies—through the enlightenment of their own self-
interest, become the heartiest defenders and the chief beneficaries 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, lumber-
men, 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 agri-
culture, the actual business of lumbering—the closest and most inti-
mate relations, the heartiest co-operation between them and the gov-
ernment 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
*President Roosevelt sets his face like flint against robbery of any sort. He no more
believes in robbing the land than in robbing the citizen, and favors justice not only for every
man but every tree. IIe is an enthusiast for justice, and enthusiasm, according to both Saint
Simon and Emerson, is the foundation of great men.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 455
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 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 crea-
tion 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 be-
lieve 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 of 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 prac-
ticed 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
456 Messages and Speeches
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 appur-
tenant 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 irriga-
tion 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 dis-
tribution. He wants to look well before he leaps. He has learned
from bitter experience that damage can come from well meant changes
hastily made. The government can do a good deal; the government
will do a good deal; but your experience here in Utah has shown that
the greatest results which are accomplishing most spring directly
from the sturdy courage, the self-denial, the willingness with iron
resolution to endure the risk and the suffering, of the pioneers; for
they were the men who sought and found a livelihood in what was
once a desert, and they must be protected in the legitimate fruits of
their toil. One of the tasks that the government must do here in
Utah is to build reservoirs for the storage of the flood waters, to
undertake works too great to be undertaken by private capital. Great
as the task is, and great as its benefits will become, the government
must do still more. Beside the storage of the water there must be
protection of the watersheds; and that is why I ask you to help the
National Government to protect the watersheds by protecting the
forests upon them.
AT OGDEN, UTAH, MAY 29, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, Senator Smoot, and you, my fellow citizens, men and
women of Ogden, of Utah:
It is a great pleasure to come before you this afternoon, and if I
Theodore Roosevelt 457
needed, which I do not, a vindication of what was done in irrigation,
I would appeal to the experience of the people who have made so
marvelous a success of irrigation in this beautiful valley.
What you have succeeded in doing with beet-sugar alone is sufficient
to show the wisdom of trying to develop in every way the irrigated
agriculture of the country; and I was more pleased than I can say
to have been able to render any aid whatsoever in putting upon the
national statute books a law which I consider in beneficence second to
none connected with our internal development since the homestead law
was passed.
I am delighted that the National Irrigation Congress is to be held
here next fall, and I congratulate the State of Utah upon the fact that
its Legislature was the first ever to pass an appropriation for such a
congress. There can be nothing of greater importance to the welfare
and growth of our country during the half-century that is opening than
this question of irrigation. It is of vital consequence to the growth
of all of the States of the Rocky Mountains, and immediately to either
side; and anything that is of such consequence to one portion of our
country is necessarily of consequence to all. I cannot with too much
emphasis say that every wise and patriotic man will favor any scheme
for the betterment of a part of the country, whether it is in his own
section or not, because whatever helps a part of us in the long run
helps all.
Fundamentally, we go up or go down together. Prosperity does
not stop at State lines, and neither does adversity. When prosperity
comes while it may come unequally, yet it comes somewhat to all; and
when adversity comes, while some will suffer more than others, yet all
must suffer somewhat. The greatest lesson which the American body
politic need take to heart, at the beginning of the twentieth century, is
that it is out of the question permanently for our people to progress
save on lines that tell for the progression of all; that you cannot raise
permanently one section by depressing another, one class by depressing
another; and the man is recreant to the principles of our Government
no less than to the welfare of our people who seeks to arouse any
feeling among Americans against their fellow-Americans, whether he
makes his appeal in the fancied interest of a section or in the fancied
interest of a class. We can go up—as we shall go up—only by each
of us keeping in mind not merely his own rights, but his duties to his
neighbors; meaning by neighbor every man living within the limits of
this broad land. The safe motto on which to act is the motto not of
“some men down,” but of “all men”; and therefore I feel that it was
not merely my privilege, but my duty, to ask the National Government
—the Government representing the people of the entire nation—to do
all in its power for the furtherance of the interest of those States whose
458 Messages and Speeches
success is largely dependent upon the application of the principles of
irrigation.
And now you know the proverb “The Lord helps those who help
themselves?” If you throw all the duty of helping you on the Lord he
will throw it back on you. Now, it is the same way with your fellow
men. Providence is not going to do everything for you, and the
National Government cannot. All that the National Government can
do is to try to give you a fair show to help you to the chance of doing
your work under favorable conditions, and then the work has got to be
done by you yourselves.
And as one step toward doing that work I hope most earnestly that
you and all the other States in interest will push forward and will in
every way endeavor to make the meeting of the irrigation congress
here in Ogden a thorough success. And I say that not merely in the
interest of Ogden, not merely in the interest of States which are to
be benefited by irrigation, but in the interest of the Union I want to
see that congress a success; I want to see the work of irrigation made
the greatest possible success.
Here in the audience today at Ogden I am greeted by the one class
of our citizens whom I feel I have the concurrence of all of us in
putting foremost, in giving for all time the right of the line—the men
of the Grand Army of the Republic—and also of greeting the younger
men, my own comrades, who ashore, and I am glad to say here afloat,
both ashore and afloat, did their duty in the war of 1898; and I want
to say just a word to you about them.
When I greet the men and women of the generation that fought the
Civil War—for, mind you, the woman who stayed at home and sent
husband or lover, father or brother to the war; that sent the bread-
winner off and tried to do her best without his aid at home, knowing
that he might never come back, she deserves just as much recognition
as the man who went. In fact, when I speak of good citizenship, I
am just as apt to think of a woman as a man; and in the partnership
between man and woman I am by no means sure that it is the man
that generally has the best of it; and one thing I know, that no other
citizen in the country has the equal claim upon us as the woman who
has brought us up to be honorable men and women, her children, who
has done her duty in the home to husband and to children.
Now, you of the Civil War, and you, my comrades of the lesser
war—for, gentlemen, in our case it wasn’t so much of a job, but we
did it—I want to take just one lesson from what you did. At Salt
Lake I spoke of the lessons to be drawn in our own domestic and civic
life from the conduct of the men who fought in the great Civil War.
We have many problems to face within our boundaries here as a
nation; many new problems have arisen and will arise as incidents in
Theodore Roosevelt 459
the tremendous growth of our complex industrial civilization. We
need to advance new methods of meeting those problems, but the
spirit with which we must approach them, if we are to succeed, is the
spirit shown by the men who in 1861 answered when Abraham Lincoln
called—a spirit of broad brotherhood; a spirit of manliness which will
not endure wrong and will not inflict it. I don’t want to see you
endure wrong and I don’t want to see you inflict it.
And above and in addition a spirit of cool-headed sanity. If there
is one quality which we must try to eradicate from our dealings
with any of the social and industrial problems which arise from time
to time it is the quality of hysterics—hysteria. Banish brutality, envy,
greed, hatred—banish them all; and banish with them all forms of
emotional hysteria. We need cool-headed, sane common sense in
dealing with the problems that confront the nation, just as we need it in
dealing each with the problems that confront him or her in his or her
own household.
So that we need to draw a lesson from the conduct of the men of
the Civil War in conducting our affairs of peace. We need also to
draw a moral from their conduct as to how to handle ourselves in the
great work of the world, which, whether we wish it or not, we must
undertake. Mind you, a nation like ours can’t play a small part. A
small people, a weak people, a people with limited territory of little
wealth and few inhabitants, might play a small part with dignity and
propriety—a big nation like ours can’t. We must play a big part.
We can play it badly or play it well—but play it we have got to, and
as we have to, I know too well the spirit of my countrymen to hesitate
as to the way in which it shall be played.*
Now, in the Civil War, the men who did the business did not boast
of more than they could make good. They did not say what they could
not do. The people who called “On to Richmond,” and demanded that
within three weeks they should go to Richmond, were not the people
with the rifles at the front; they were the people behind. Yes, and
the men in front knew they had quite a job on their hands; they knew
that it would take some time, and were bent on seeing it through, and
the same people who would at one moment shriek for an immediate
victory, a triumph at Richmond, two weeks afterward, when perhaps
that victory had not occurred, would say the war was a failure. After
it had ended they were in error. It did not end for three years and a
half afterward, and then it ended the other way.
*Everywhere in his speeches, and particularly when he speaks of the Monroe Doctrine,
President Roosevelt urges the necessity of the nation's physical strength being ever equal to
the strength of its utterances. He does not believe in bluffing—doesn’t believe in being caught
in a position one is not strong enough to maintain. He may admit that it’s all right for the
cat to play with the mouse; but he will never admit that it’s all right for the mouse to play
with the cat.—A. H. L.
460 Messages and Speeches
Now, this interlude having passed, now in dealing with foreign
affairs, I want our people to copy the attitude of the men who did
not brag but did fight in the Civil War. No good comes of speaking
insultingly of other nations. On the contrary, it is the mark of a
weak man to bluster always. I used to live in the cow country my-
self, and we had a proverb there, which ran : “Don’t draw unless you
mean to shoot.” Now, that is pretty good sense for a nation as well
as for an individual. Don't make claims that we are not prepared to
back up ; don’t talk loosely or loudly as to what we will do to other
nations in a way that will cause them to feel that we are acting in an
insulting and aggressive way. Treat them with courtesy—with ab-
solute courtesy—and that having been done, make up our minds what
the interests and the honor of America require stake it, and make it
good when staked. *
I believe in the Monroe Doctrine with all my heart and soul, and I
intend to see that it is made good. I believe that our interests in
the Pacific are such that we need always to be ready to protect them
in the Atlantic; you can keep this nation in the position she has
attained only by going on with the building up of the United States
navy. When I appeal for the navy I appeal for something which
should meet a response in every American heart, for the navy is as
much the concern of the man who lives upon the Plains or in the
Mississippi Valley as of the man who lives on the coast of either ocean,
because a victory for the navy is a victory for each and all of us; a
defeat could cause each of us to hang his head. No man, therefore,
stands as more typically representative of the interests of all our people
than the man whose duty it is to see to the building up and the render-
ing and keeping efficient of the navy of the United States as far as
Congress gives him that power, and no man of recent years who has
held the position of Secretary of the Navy has done more to render it
efficient than the man I am about to introduce to you—Secretary of
the Navy Moody—who will now speak to you.
[The Salt Lake Tribune, May 30, 1903.]
AT LARAMIE, WYO., MAY 30, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my friends of the Grand Army of the Republic—
men and women of Wyoming:
It is a great pleasure for me to address you upon this beautiful
spring morning. I feel that I am not a stranger among you as I was
engaged for 20 years in the cow-business in this State.
The people of the East express sympathy for you in Wyoming, but
I do not, it is not sympathy I feel for you, but admiration. It pleases
me to be able to address the people of this State from the steps of
Theodore Roosevelt 461
the State university building. Nothing delights me more about the
west than the rapidity with which you have built up great institutions;
have advanced towards your best ideals, and have made opportunities
for leading a higher life.
I wish to say a few special words of greeting upon this Memorial
Day to the veterans of the Grand Army of the Republic. .
We Owe it to them that there is an America today, and we owe it
to them that the President of the United States is able to travel in
safety from one side of the continent to the other, from the hot waters
of the Gulf to the snows of Canada.
Precept is a very good thing, but to my thinking an ounce of prac-
tical energy is worth any amount of precept without action, and the
qualities which I admire most in the west are the qualities displayed
by the Grand Army of the Republic, during the years from '61 to ’65.
The graduates and undergraduates of this college will, if their turn
comes, do as you did when Abraham Lincoln called.
The qualities displayed in that time of trouble by those who fought
for their country were of two types, disinterestedness—in that they
laid their personal welfare and personal advancement on one side when
the call for their country's cause came ; and responsibility, in that they
felt that it was for the good of their fellow men that they lay aside
their own good. These qualities are what is called patriotism or love
of country.
In civil as in military life a man must have the spirit of disinterested-
ness; he must be himself a decent man first of all, or else no amount of
strength or courage will have the power to make his life anything but
an evil one. Loyalty he must have as well—loyalty to himself and
to his associates—or else his strength, courage and skill will avail
nothing to make his life a power for good. In fact, the greater his
strength, the greater his skill, the more influence for evil he will exert.
The foundation of every character, whether that of a man or of a nation,
must be a spirit of decency.
The sum of every nation's character is made up of individual charac-,
ters, and as the stream can rise no higher than its source it follows
that the character of every single individual tends to raise or lower
that of the nation. A man who does a wrongful act sins against the
State as well as against himself.
A soldier upon a campaign needs, besides the qualities of disinter-
estedness and responsibility, some other qualities. You veterans know
that it is the man who is willing to do more than his share of the
disagreeable duties who makes the best fight when the time comes. A
man is no good if he runs away. The man that is needed is the man
who will stay put. Courage and hardihood, the spirit capable of dar-
ing and of doing is what is needed in peace as well as in war.
462 Messages and Speeches
It is the doing of little things well that tends to lift towards loftier
things. The performance of everyday duties makes a man able to
use an occasion should the occasion come to him. If a soldier was
willing to dig kitchen sinks if necessary, the fighting part would take
care of itself. Do, day by day, the work that ought to be done upon
that day and if occasion comes, you will be ready to grasp it. To
but few of us comes the opportunity to do great things, but the oppor-
tunity did come to that generation which sent you to battle, men of the
Grand Army.
One word to the graduates and undergraduates of this university;
I am pleased to have the opportunity to speak to you. Remember that
the greatness of this State depends upon how you play your part.
You have received here, or are receiving here, from the State a training
in practical affairs. That training gives you no special privileges,
but on the contrary adds responsibility.
No man receives a favor but he is in honor bound to repay it or
he is placed in an unpleasant position. So it is with you, the State
has placed the responsibility upon you of giving her the service of
a good citizen, and the State has the right to expect that return for
the service it has rendered to you.
People of Wyoming, I believe in you and in your future. It was a
great pleasure to me to assist in the passage of the National Irrigation
law, which in its application will have an important bearing upon the
future of your State. We have made a beginning, and hope to see
that irrigation as an adjunct to stock raising will be a success.
The Government can only supplement, however, the work of the
individual, and the work of the individual depends upon the character of
the individual. Common sense is a most important part of the indi-
vidual character and no amount of brilliancy can ever atone for the
lack of it. Common sense must be applied in the application of the irri-
gation law as in all other things.
I am glad to have the pleasure of introducing to you a member of
my cabinet, who has deeply at heart all that goes to help that most
ancient and healthy of all Occupations, the tilling of the soil. Ladies
and gentlemen, let me introduce the Secretary of Agriculture, Mr.
Wilson.
[Laramie Boomerang, Laramie, Wyo., May 31, 1903.]
AT CHEYENNE, WYO., MAY 30, 1903.
Governor, Senator, Mr. Mayor, and you, men and women of Wyoming,
my fellow Americans:
It is indeed a great pleasure to be with you this afternoon, to be
greeted by the representatives of the wage workers, by the representa-
Theodore Roosevelt 463
tives of the business interests, by the men of the mine, the ranch, the
men who are building up the industrial fabric of this State. It is
especially pleasant to be greeted by the children. You know I have
strong views about children. And I am delighted that the output in
Wyoming seems to be all right in quality and quantity.
But in greeting all of you with thanks, I know that you expect
me to say that my chief and most heartfelt greeting on this day of all
the year is reserved for the men who in the mighty days proved their
truth by their endeavor, whose metal rang true on war's red blood-
stained fields, the veterans of the great war. The veterans of the
great war from '61 to '65, and with them today I include also, and I
know with their assent, the men, my comrades of the lesser war. Of
that war in which this nation needed to show but the merest fraction
of her giant strength, and yet a contest fraught with immense conse-
quences to the future of our Republic, and of the world as a whole.
And I know also that you, the representatives of the volunteers, will
gladly, most gladly join with me when I say a word of special greet-
ing to the men who make it their life business to preserve untarnished
the honor of the American flag, the officers and enlisted men of the
army and navy of the United States.
It is a fitting thing to be introduced on Decoration Day by a United
States senator, who not only served in the great Civil War, but to
whom it was given to win the highest treasure that can come to
any American soldier, the medal of honor for distinguished gallantry
on stricken fields.
Now we of the present time, we whose lines are cast in pleasant
places, we who are the inheritors of what you of the great war won,
can best show our loyalty to you and to those like you, who fought
victoriously in that war, not by praise from the lips alone, but by
the way we shape our lives, so you need never have cause to feel that
we are unworthy.
You left us lesson after lesson, just as important to be applied in
civil as in military life. You left us a great lesson of brotherhood.
The applied lesson of brotherhood. And of all wars in history this
was one of the strangest. For you the victors by the fact of your
victory left to us the relation of brothers to the gallant vanquished.
You made not only the side for which you fought your debtors for
ever by the victory, but you left us also the right as Americans to
feel pride in the valor shown by every American, whether he wore
the blue or the gray in that struggle, who did his duty as the light was
given him to see it.
One of the things that has always made me feel proudest, proudest
of my countrymen, proudest of you, the men of the great war, is the
fact that in a reunion of the Veterans of the Grand Army, there is
464 Messages and Speeches
the very place where I am sure to meet the most cordial response
when I pay a tribute to the valor of the men who wore the gray.
Each of you as he moved forward into battle was immensely inter-
ested in the man on his right and the man on his left. It is a com-
fortable thing, comrades, if you are going forward, that the man on
each side goes forward too. It is always pleasant to feel when the
order comes to move, he will move the right way. You don't care a
snap of your fingers where that man's birth place has been ; you don't
care a snap of your fingers what was the creed in accordance with
which he worshiped his Maker; you don't care a snap of your fingers
what his social position, whether he was a banker, bricklayer, lawyer
mechanic or farmer. It don’t make any difference so long as he would
“stay put”. That was the important point. Exactly. That was what
you wanted to know.
It is the same thing now in civil life. We can not afford, if we
are to make this republic true to its promise, if we are to make its
mighty future as essentially great as is its past, we cannot, as citizens,
afford to sunder in the deep matters along lines other than the lines
of conduct which separates good citizens from bad citizens. There
are good and bad in every class, in every creed, in every occupation.
And we are false to the principles which Washington and his fellow
patriots sought to crystallize into government; we are false to the
principles of Abraham Lincoln, and to those who held up his hands
during the four dreadful years from '61 to '65, the four dreadful and
ever glorious years from '61 to '65: we are false to those principles
if we substitute any other test for a man's worth as a man—if a man
is a decent citizen, if he does his duty by his neighbor, by his family,
by the state, if he is just and fair in his dealings with his fellow
citizens; and the man who denies it because he believes one creed or
another; because he lives in one section or another; because he comes
in one category of wealth or employment rather than in other, the
man who denies the just treatment to be accorded to the citizen who
himself behaves justly, is himself false to the principles of American
citizenship. And I appeal with whatever force I may have, for the
practical application in civil and social life, of these principles of
brotherhood, for which many of your comrades, you men of the Civil
War, laid down their lives, and for which each of you risked his life
in those days.
I would preach to my countrymen not the life of ease; not the
effortless life of comfort, of avoidance of risk, and avoidance of trouble.
I would ask them not to strive to find out the things that are easiest
to do, but the things that are best worth doing. You in '61, when
Abraham Lincoln called to arms, did you do the easy thing? No, not
a bit. The easy thing was to let some other man go to the war. You
Theodore Roosevelt 465
went yourselves. The easy thing was to stay at home, to live safely
and comfortably, to try to go about your own business, and you chose
the better part. Your choice was for toil and effort and hardship.
You chose to be numbered among those who were struggling upward
and onward over the rugged slopes. You chose to spend your days
in the well-nigh insupportable fatigue of marching under the southern
sun. In the marches, you remember, as recruits you found about
midday the blanket was heavy, you were tempted to throw it away,
and by midnight you wished you had two of them. You remember,
don't you? Yes. You chose the life that meant shivering night after
night through the bleak mid-winter hours, in the frozen mud of the
trenches. You chose the risk of battle, the risk of disease, the risk
of death in the fever cots of the hospital, and you did it and did it
gladly, because you had in you the lift that lifted. Your souls felt
the lift of generous enthusiasm for a high ideal.
It is just so in civil life. Oh my friends and countrymen, we don’t
now have to face the trials faced by those who upheld the statesman-
ship of Lincoln, and made good the generalship of Grant and Sherman,
but each man here and each woman here is brought face to face
continually with the choice, whether he or she will take the easy course
or take the course which leads to hard work worth doing.
If you have in you the lift towards lofty things you will be impelled
into Stony roads, where you stumble, but where you walk upwards
towards greatness, where you walk upwards towards the life that is
worth living.
It is easy enough to avoid trouble for the present. You generally
insure a larger portion of it for the future, but you can generally avoid
it for the present if you build that way.
You men of Wyoming are making of this commonwealth one of
the commonwealths of which all our people will be proud. I believe in
you, I believe in those like you, and I believe in the future greatness of
this country, because I believe that its average citizen—that you here,
with your average citizenship, is such that this country during the
centuries opening, will choose to tread the path of duty, and of
greatness rather than of mere ease.
The nation, for a nation must live its life as an individual lives his,
has great problems which confront it within and without. We are
not to be excused if we blink at them, or if with selfish timidity we
say we don't have to settle it in our day, let those that come after us
attend to it. Each one of us is his brother’s keeper, each one of us
is the keeper of his sons, the son of each one of us is the keeper of
the generations that are to come after us, and we must strive
so to handle ourselves that when those generations arise they will
find that we have taken the right steps in beginning the solution of
466 Messages and Speeches
the problems that will confront them, as they confront us. And we
must attack them in a spirit of courage; in a spirit of love and also in
a spirit of common sense.
This nation in dealing with foreign affairs with other nations should
follow just that which we regard as right for a private citizen. In
my day there was one kind of man who was not respected in the West.
It was a man who talked and boasted and threatened, and when the
pinch came, didn't make good. Just so with our nation.
In other words, act in accordance with a proverb I heard in the old
days when I myself lived in the cow country. The proverb ran :
“Don’t draw unless you mean to shoot.”
I ask that you apply that nationally. I believe for instance in the
Monroe Doctrine, with all my heart. I believe we should be prepared
to back that doctrine up to any extent, if it became necessary, but the
only way it can be done is by building an efficient navy; by keeping
it up by constantly building and keeping in the best condition, afloat
in sea practices, such magnificent battleships as the Wyoming, the ship
named after your own state.
And now, my friends and fellow citizens, I have only to thank you
for your reception, and to say how glad I have been to be here to-
night, and to say good-bye, especially to you, the men of the great
war. And on behalf of all our other citizens I, as one of them, on their
behalf, pledge you that we shall try in the coming years to prize
and live up to the high standard which you set for ever more as the
standard of our national life. Good-bye, and good luck.
[The Cheyenne Leader, June 1, 1903.]
ACCEPTING THE GIFT OF A HORSE AND SADDLE, AT CHEYENNE,
WYO., JUNE 1, 1903.
Senator Warren and friends:
I thank you most cordially. I thank you, my friends of Cheyenne,
for the beautiful saddle you gave me and I thank the citizens of
Douglas for the beautiful horse you have presented to me. I accept
both with the greatest pleasure and I will rechristen the horse “Wyom-
ing” to commemorate this state, and I shall be proud at Washington to
be riding so fine a horse, which comes from the cow country I love so
well and which produces the finest horses in the world.
I have broken the saddle, as you see. I must say that this single-
footer is a rocking chair to ride across even a rough country on his
back. I couldn’t have had a gift that would have pleased me more.
And again I wish to thank you for these splendid gifts which will
Theodore Roosevelt 467
commemorate as pleasant a forty-eight hours as any President ever
spent since the White House was built.
[The Cheyenne Daily Leader, Cheyenne, Wyo., June 1, 1903.]
AT DENISON, IA., JUNE 2, 1903.
Friends:
As I come into your beautiful State there have come calamities
upon Our people here in Iowa, and, to an even greater degree, in
Kansas and Missouri. I see also by today's papers the awful dis-
aster in Georgia. We have Biblical authority, as well as the au-
thority of common sense, for the statement that the rain falls on the
just and the unjust alike. When the hand of the Lord is heavy upon
any body of men, the wisdom of man can do but little. Now and
then in our country, from drought, from floods, from pestilence, trouble
and misfortune will come; but oh, my friends, as I drove through
your city this morning and now as I look at you, the men and women
of this State, I know that all our troubles are temporary; that misfor-
tunes will be met and overcome, because in heart and hand the Amer-
ican citizen is able to win his way in the long run.
When a misfortune, that human wisdom cannot avoid, comes, of
course there will be suffering, there may be misery. Those of us who
are free from it can try and must try to lighten it all we can, but we
cannot help the fact that there will be much suffering. Furthermore,
if through our own folly we do what is wrong, if we act foolishly
in matters of legislation, we shall pay the penalty. If the business
world loses its head it loses what no law can supply, but in spite
of that we shall go forward. We shall keep in the run, not only of
abiding but of increasing prosperity, if as a people we only keep Our
sanity, if we keep the qualities which made us win out in the Civil
War, and which brought us in triumph through other crises so far.
Something, a good deal, can be done by law, a good deal can be
done by the honest and upright administraton of the law. I think you
will do me the justice to say that I do not say what I do not mean.
I never said anything off the stump that I would not say on the stump,
so what I say now you can take as sincere. We have in the persons
of Iowa's representatives in both branches of the national Congress,
in Iowa's representatives in the administrative branch of the national
government, men to whom I can turn as illustrating what I mean
when I say that we are helped greatly by good laws and by intelligent,
fearless, and honest administration of those laws. We need the ability
that you in Iowa have furnished in your public servants. We need
the standard of integrity that you have set in public life. We need
that uprightness and fearlessness in a public servant which makes him
468 Messages and Specches
do his duty, disregarding either the clamor of the many or the snarl-
ing of the few which is directed against a course of conduct demanded
by regard for the immutable law of righteousness.
[Washington Post, July 3, 1903.]
AT BLOOMINGTON, IL.L., JUNE 3, 1903.
Governor, friends and fellow citizens—men and women of Illinois:
It has been a great pleasure for me today to go through your great
and beautiful State, and everywhere that I have been memories of
the great past of the State and nation have been brought before me;
and this evening I have listened to Gen. Stevenson telling of the great
debates between Lincoln and Douglas, and those were giants in the
days of great men. Yet this evening I feel naturally a particular
pleasure in greeting my own comrades of the Spanish-American war;
to see here, as I have seen in every Illinois audience, men who wear
the button which shows that they fought in the great Civil War. Our
war—the Spanish-American war—was comparatively a small job; all
I can say is, we did it; and I hope the veterans of the great war feel
that at least we showed the spirit they would want their sons and
successors to show. If we did not go through the trials and troubles
that they did, we at least did the best we could, and in our case there
was not quite enough war to go around; that is a difficulty from
which the men of the big war were wholly free. And I wish to make
a special appeal in addressing you this evening—I wish to make at
the outset an especial appeal to you to put into practical effort some
of the lessons we learned from the Spanish-American war. As I
was coming through the streets of your city, guarded as they were
by members of your National Guard, to whom I wish to express my
special obligation, I was particularly pleased to see a battalion of our
naval militia. The other day in San Francisco I took part in dedi-
cating a monument to commemorate the gallantry of the seamen of
Dewey's fleet who on the first day of May five years ago, to the sound
of their cannon, turned a new page in the history of this people—
not only this people, but the people of the world. Now my fellow
citizens, I was able to take part in commemorating that victory; and
we here tonight are able to take part in celebrating that victory, be-
cause, and only because, during the dozen years prior to 1898 our
people were preparing the way for winning victories.
The American Navy was able in 1898 to add a new page to the
honor of our republic because it had been built up during the pre-
ceding dozen years. The ships with which Dewey won at Manila
thad been built from three to twelve years before ; the men under him
had been trained by years of actual sea service in handling the delicate
Theodore Roosevelt 469
and formidable weapons of war entrusted to their care; the officers
and the enlisted men, the men in the engine room, the men in the
gun turret, all alike were able to do these things, because they had
been trained in their use.
The Spaniards showed no lack of courage, for they fought hard;
they fired a great deal, but they didn't hit; and we fired good enough
to cut their fleet to pieces, and besides we had the courage in return.
Not because we had the forethought to provide better vessels, but
because we had the forethought to provide men who knew how to use
them. And that habit, that use, could be acquired only in actual prac-
tice.
The honor of the victory on May 1st, 1898, belongs not only to
the Admiral and the officers and the men who took part in the fight;
the honor must be shared with all our people, who had taken part in
the building up of that Navy; who had done their share in seeing to
it that we had a Navy capable of accomplishing such deeds; every
public man who by his vote in Congress, by his action in the executive
branch of the government, added strength to the navy; the men who
had voted for the ships, voted for the guns, had voted for the powder
to be burned in times of peace, that they might know how to burn it
in war. Remember that it is only the shot that hits that counts. You
have to have practice, and practice costs money. Every congressman
who thus voted; every member of the executive branch of the govern-
ment who had done his part in superintending the construction and
providing for the construction of those ships, they all are entitled to
their share of credit. Of course, that means, primarily, that the Amer-
ican citizen, the individual voter, who stood behind those congressmen,
those public servants, and backed them up in their efforts to build
up the navy, have a right to claim their share of the credit for what
they did, Every shipwright who took even the smallest part in build-
ing those vessels of war, if he did his work well, if he didn't skimp it,
is entitled to his share of the credit for the victory of Manila bay.
Every officer and enlisted man in the navy, even though he left the
navy before the battle took place, if while in the navy he had bravely
and zealously done his part in seeing and handling the weapons, in
trying the perfect mechanism, he is entitled to his part of the credit;
and now, you here, I want you to see to it that you are entitled to
your part in the credit for any naval victory in the far future.
It is a nice thing to talk of what our navy and our seamen have
done; but that is in the past; it doesn't amount to anything, if you
are not ready and prepared to match it with equal service in the future;
and if our people are content with the actions of our navy in 1898,
see to it that we go on upbuilding our navy, that we maintain its
47O Messages and Speeches
reputation, for the reputation of the nation will be held responsible for
any failure in the future on the part of the navy.
I ask this audience—I ask the State of Illinois—I ask the entire
Union to see to it, that there is no fault in the upbuilding and the main-
taining of the American navy.
This is not a party question, and never was.” This had been going
On through successive administrations, for a dozen years prior to that
battle, and Our navy was built up by the votes of Congress under the
control of both parties; it was built up under secretaries of the navy
representing both parties. It was built up because the American public
rightly demands that all party lines be obliterated at high water mark
On the ocean; and now you see to it that there is no turning back; that
we go on with what has been done—not only to keep our navy at
what it is, but to make it steadily stronger and better.
I have illimitable faith in the American fighting man, if you give
him a chance; and I ask that the chance be given him; and remember
if at any time this nation sends unfit ships, or untrained crews to battle,
and disaster should follow, the blame would not lie with those who
commanded or manned those ships, but it would lie at the doors of
our own people, for not having seen to it that there was adequate
preparation in advance. That is one of the peculiarities of a government
like ours—you are the sovereigns; you, the men of this nation; and
when you have the power, you cannot escape the responsibility. I
therefore ask you to remember that the responsibility is yours, and to
see that your representatives in public life feel that responsibility, and
always provide Uncle Sam with his right-hand weapon—the navy—
in proper shape.
A great nation such as ours cannot play a small part in the world;
a small nation can play a small part, and still retain its respect, because
it is unfair to ask of it that it should do the impossible. But a great
nation cannot play a small part. We, with our eighty millions of
people, rapidly increasing in population and wealth—a continent grasp-
ing the crest of an Ocean with either hand, cannot play a small part
in the world. We have to play a big part, and it is left with us to
decide whether we will play that big part well or ill. And now it is
left to you, my fellow countrymen. Do you hesitate in your decision,
when you are called upon to play that part, either for weal or for woe?
This nation must treat all fairly, and in that case it behoves us all
that the nation treat all powers worthily and with fairness. We in
the Western Hemisphere for eighty years assumed the position that
our interests and our power demand the exercise of a certain right
of supervision over the different countries in this continent, lying
*President Roosevelt believes in party only as he believes in organized opinion, but party
never rises with him beyond the dignity of a mere method. Party is never the object—the
purpose; the country and the country's good are the object.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 47I
south of us. We have said that no European power, no foreign power
shall acquire territory at the expense of those people; they shall not
acquire control over the land of any American power. We call that
the Monroe Doctrine. I believe in it with all my heart. It is not in-
ternational law, but we can make it just as good as international law
if we have the navy to back it up.
I do not believe any European power has any thought hostile to
us; I think their intentions are good; but I think a good sized navy
will help to keep them in that position. That is in effect the result
of the Spanish war, and the result in the Philippines. We did acquire
certain interests, and now in the century just opened, if we improve
our position, if we take advantage, as we will take advantage, of the
position given to us, our coast line stretching in a huge semicircle,
from the top of Alaska down to the southern portion of California, if
we take advantage of that we must become the dominant power in
the Pacific; we can keep dominance if we have the right type of a navy
to back it up. There is no surer way of inviting disaster than by
going down or backward from the high position we have taken.
I therefore ask all Americans who are interested in the greatness
of our country's future, to see that the country handle itself in the
future as in the past, so that we may hand down to our children an
undimmed heritage. I ask all Americans to see to it that there is no
let-up in the building up of our navy.
I have traveled during the past two months, from the Atlantic across
the continent to the Pacific, and am now more than half way on my
return journey. I have addressed bodies of my fellow countrymen,
in the east, in what is known as the middle west, in the west, and be-
yond the west—in California—and wherever I have spoken to my audi-
ences, the thought that has been most apparent, and always present
with me, is the essential unity of our people everywhere. I have talked
as one American to his fellow Americans. I have found them in every
part of our land, responsive to the same appeals; responsive to the
same ideas which I feel here tonight. Our people are one, and I think
that until one has traveled a little in the country, he would hardly
realize what the terms mean—east and west. I will stop for a moment
and tell you a story: Some years ago I lived in the “cow country.”
I was a cattle man myself, in western North Dakota. I had one of my
men, at the end of the season, come to me, and he asked for his
time; he said, “I am going to spend the winter in the far east.” I
said, “What do you mean by the far east–Norway or Nubia?” and
his answer was, “Duluth.” To him Duluth represented the extreme
easternmost part of the horizon. The terms “east” and “west” are of
no consequence; if a man is a good American that is the important
472 Messages and Speeches
part; and if he is, he will be at home in any part of this country, from
One ocean to the other, from the gulf to the Canadian line.
We have many problems as a nation, to settle in this century. We
have problems from without, and problems from within ; they are dif-
ferent from those which past generations had to settle. Those of the
past were not as formidable as the problems with which the men of
'61 were brought face to face. When Abraham Lincoln called for
men, in the name of the nation, to avert the nation’s death, we needed
then to have qualities which were necessary at that time; but now,
there are different problems for solution. We have new problems com-
ing before us, but we must face them in identically the same spirit in
which our fathers faced the problems of their time, and we must
solve them aright.
There is no patent recipe for good citizenship; yet in applying the
spirit in different ways, we need the same spirit, the same spirit on
the part of the men who are to solve the many perplexing and difficult
questions that will come before us—questions incident to our indus-
tries; the developments of today must be followed in the same spirit
as that of the men who in 1776 founded this government, and who from
1861 to 1865 preserved it; the same qualities which made a good
citizen then, will make a good citizen now, here and everywhere;
whether ingenious or by whatever name it is called, those are of funda-
mental interest. In the average citizen, the same quality which made
the average citizen a tower of strength to Lincoln and Grant. What
we need is a high type of average citizenship. Under another form
of government, it would be possible, I suppose, to win out with the
average citizenship below; but with our form, the average citizenship
must be the man himself.
The stream cannot rise any higher than its source, and our constitu-
tion—our laws—can do no more than to supplement the qualities in
the average American man and woman. In the average man and the
average woman, it is his or her duty to see that we are going onward as
a nation; and what we need is that we have the average man. We
need, then, that the average man shall possess a Sound body—a sound
mind; and that he shall furthermore possess what is more than body,
or more than mind—character. Character, which is in the last analysis
the determining factor in your nation's success, as it is in the indi-
vidual’s success. Character enters mainly into the man and into the
nation, above all. In the first place, it is decency—honesty; the spirit
that makes a man a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor, a
good man to work by the side of, and a good man to deal with ; a good
man in his relations to the State and the nation; and if he lack that
quality, no other can atone for it. As in the days of the Civil War, no
matter how able a man was, no matter how brave he was, if he did not
Theodore Roosevelt 473
have that spirit in him, his courage would render him more dangerous
to the nation; and as it was in the Civil War, so it is essential in the
life of every man. A man may be very strong, and yet he has not got
the root of righteousness in him—the root of decent living; it is his
ability and his strength, to stand and do the right, that make him a
tower of strength to the community and to the nation. It is very
well to have the spirit of honesty and decency, and morality, but it
is not enough. Like it was in our Civil War, it does not make the
patriotic man. He may have the patriotism, but if he would run away
his patriotism would go for naught. So in civil life; stamp it with
the closest virtue, the qualities which go to make up the man in these
particulars which I have just mentioned; and in addition to decency
and honesty we need strength and courage; self-restraint; self-reliance;
self-control, and the spirit that wills and will do what should be done,
the spirit of recognizing the obstacles from which he will not flinch,
but will go forward and trample it under his feet, and make it a step-
ping stone. So in the future we need strength, courage, and the qual-
ities that are necessary to make up the man. Not only to say of a man
that he is a good man, but a man of character; we know that he has
courage as well as honesty; the two together are not enough, but with
those he must have that saving grace of common sense.
In this case we have before us our citizens divided into two camps,
the camp of men who mean well, and cannot accomplish anything,
and the camp of men who do not mean well at all, and who can ac-
complish anything they undertake. With virtue and decency must
go courage and must go sanity and in the sense of the spirit that is
shown forth by Abraham Lincoln's words when he said, “I will strive
to get the best, and if I can't do it I will get the best possible.” We
must not twist those words out of their well-meaning ; we must not
use them as an excuse for accepting less than the very best work we
can get. We must not use them as an excuse for doing ill; but we
must apply them in the spirit in which Lincoln applied them, than
whom no man in his generation had loftier ideas; than whom no man
in his generation sought and realized the ideals in a more practical
fashion.
And now, my fellow countrymen, men and women of this great
State, I believe in you; I believe in the citizens of this country; I be-
lieve in the country's future because I believe that the average man
and the average woman of this nation has just those qualities of
courage, of sanity, of decency, which must lie at the foundation of all
national greatness. Good-night, I thank you.
[The Daily Pantagraph, Bloomington, til., June 4, 1903.]
474 Messages and Speeches
AT JOLIET, IL.L., JUNE 3, 1903.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens, men and women of Illinois:
It is a great pleasure to have a chance of coming here to say a word
to you. In greeting all of you I wish to say a word of special greeting
to the children. As you know, I believe in children. I am very glad
to see that in this city there seems no danger of race suicide. I have
just one word for the children, which applies perhaps particularly to
the boys. A very good motto to adopt in life can be taken from the
football field: “Don’t foul; don’t flinch; and hit the line hard.” That
is a good enough motto for the older folks as well.
I am glad to have the chance of coming through this great State,
of Seeing your marvelous prosperity, what you have done in the
country and the cities alike, what has been accomplished in agriculture,
in transportation, in industrial development. Something of that comes
from the enactment of wise laws and from honest and fearless en-
forcement of those laws. We need good legislation; we need straight
and decent administration; but after all is said and done, back of the
law stands the man as the chief factor. In the success of man now,
as it has been in the past, as it will ever be in the future, must be the
sum of that man's individual qualities.
Nothing can take the place of the lack in any man of industry,
energy, thrift, business enterprise. No law that has ever been devised,
or that ever will be devised, can possibly put the weakling on the same
plane with the strong, the coward on the same plane with the brave,
or the fool on the same plane with the wise. All that the law can do
is to give a fair show to each man to develop the best there is in him,
guarding him against injustice from others, and seeing that he works
no injustice in return. Of course if the law does not do that, it fails
in its duty.
Our modern industrial system is so complex and so delicate that
we need the best and highest trained wisdom upon which we can draw
to secure the continuance of favorable conditions. It is easy enough
to upset them; it is not so easy to build them up again; but having
gotten all that the law can give us, and by law preserved all that the
law can give us, we must still in the last analysis depend upon the
average individual citizenship, upon the thrift, the energy, the power
of work, the power of concentration of mind of the average man, to
take advantage of those conditions.
There are many different types of work, different types of indus-
try; all are honorable so long as they serve a useful purpose in the
community. The prime lesson for all Americans to learn is the lesson
of self-respect joined with respect for others; the lesson that if a man
does his duty well, be he employer or employee, lawyer, merchant,
Theodore Roosevelt 475
farmer, wageworker, if he does his duty well he is a good citizen,
entitled to the regard of every other good citizen. A man who fails
to show such regard for his fellow stamps himself as being unfit to
do his duty in American life.
The line of cleavage between good conduct and bad conduct runs
at right angles to the line of cleavage between class and class, occupa-
tion and occupation, creed and creed, great means and less means.
A man is no true American who pays heed in others to the non-
essential features of our citizenship ; the man is no true American who
either looks down upon another because he is less well off, or hates
and envies him because he is better off; either feeling is a base and
a mean feeling unworthy of the heirs to the greatness of Washington,
to the greatness of Lincoln.
The man who'seeks to inspire one set of Americans to hate another
because of difference of creed, because of difference of locality, dif-
ference of occupation, or of wealth, is a curse to the republic.
I believe, oh, my fellow countrymen, in the future of this republic,
because I believe in you here to-day, and your fellow citizens of this
nation; because I believe that the average American, be he rich or
poor, whether he work in the country or the city, whether he work as
employer or a wageworker, has in him the qualities of courage, of
decency and of common sense, which in the aggregate make up the
type of good citizenship upon which every great and successful nation
must rest.
I have but this moment to address you, for we are running on
schedule time; and there are so many cities in Illinois I want to see
that I have my work cut out for me in trying to see them. Good-
bye and good luck.
[The Joliet News, Joliet, Ill., June 11, 1903.]
AT FREEPORT, IL.L., 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 imme-
diate 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 com-
memoration of the great debate that here took place, should be dedi-
cated by the men whose deeds made good the words of Abraham
Lincoln—the soldiers of the Civil War. The word was mighty. Had
-
476 Messages and Speeches
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 in-
evitably 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 flot 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 con-
ducting 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 states-
manship of Lincoln in the council, 'who made good the soldiership of
Grant in the field.
AT LINCOLN, IL.L., JUNE 4, 1903.
It is a great pleasure to have the chance of coming before you and
saying a word of greeting to you today. I am now closing a trip
that has lasted two months. I have gone across the continent from
one ocean to the other, and am now well on my return ; and of all
things on that trip the thing that has impressed me most is the es-
sential unity of our people. Wherever I have been, on the Atlantic
seaboard, in this great Mississippi valley, on the high plains and among
the mountains to the westward, and further westward still by the shore
of the Pacific, the people whom I have seen are substantially one.
Everywhere I have stopped throughout this State, I have noticed
your schools, and mighty good they are; but what has impressed me
most are the evidences of your wonderful industrial progress. I
hope it will continue, and it lies with you to make it continue. Go
on showing the industry you have shown in the past; that industry
which is the basis of individual success, for the success of the indi-
Theodore Roosevelt 477
vidual is the success of the nation; and you will make this State,
this nation, more glorious, more prosperous in the future than ever
it was in the past; glorious and prosperous as that past has been.
Now I must say good-bye, and I greet you all. I want to say a
special word of greeting to the fathers and mothers who come down
here carrying small children. I believe in children and I like your
stock; I am glad it is being kept up.
[Illinois State Register, Springfield, Ill., June 5, 1903.]
AT THE DEDICATION OF THE JAMES MILLIKEN UNIVERSITY, AT
DECATUR, IL.L., JUNE 4, 1903.
Mr. Milliken:
I feel that as an American citizen it is proper for me to
express to you and to those like you, the obligations that good Amer-
icans feel for what you and they have done in this university and in
other educational institutions throughout the land. I am especially
pleased that I am to take part in the dedication of an institution of
learning where so much of the teaching is to be with direct view to
an industrial betterment of the country. Ours is an age of specializa-
tion and the man who is to do industrial work will find himself im-
measurably better prepared for it if he can have the proper kind of
industrial training.
[Illinois State Register, Springfield, Ill, June 5, 1903.]
AT THE DEDICATION OF THE STATE ARSENAL AT SPRINGFIELD,
ILL., JUNE 4, 1903.
Senator Cullom, Governor, and you, my fellow Americans, men and
women of the great State of Illinois:
It is a deep pleasure for me to have the chance of speaking to you
today and above all to speak to you here in Lincoln's home after hav-
ing driven out to see Lincoln's tomb and after driving out in company
with the man who accompanied the body of the great martyred Presi-
dent on its journey to its last resting place, your senior senator,
Senator Cullom. I have met in Illinois many men who knew Lincoln
personally, and at every place that I have stopped, I have seen men
who fought in the army when Lincoln called the country to arms.
All of us now pay our tribute to the greatness that is achieved; all
of us now, looking back over the past forty years, can see the figure
of Lincoln, staid, kindly, patient Lincoln, as it looms above his con-
temporaries, as it will loom ever larger through the centuries to come.
It is a good thing for us, by speech, to pay homage to the memory
of Abraham Lincoln, but it is an infinitely better thing for us in our
lives to pay homage to his memory in the only way in which that
478 Messages and Speeches
homage can be effectively paid, by seeing to it that this republic's life,
Social and political, civic and industrial, is shaped now in accordance
with the ideals which Lincoln preached and which all his life long he
practiced. The greatness of our forefathers must serve not as an ex-
cuse to us for failing to do our duties in return, but as a spur to make
us feel that we are doubly recreant to them as well as to ourselves if
we fail to rise level with the standards they set.*
To the men of Lincoln's generation the supreme gift was given of
being true to themselves in a great national crisis. Theirs was not
the life of ease, the life of comfort. For their good fortune they were
given a duty hard to perform, but supremely well worth performing.
I envy no man a life of ease, and I feel little but contempt for him if
his only ideal is to lead a life of ease, We should reserve our feeling
of admiration for the men who have difficult work to do, but work
eminently worth doing and do it well. The problems that face us as
a nation today are different from the problems which Lincoln and the
men of his generation had to face. Different methods must be devised
for solving them, but the spirit in which we approach them must be
the same as the spirit with which Lincoln and his fellows in council,
his followers in war, approached their problems, or else this nation
will fail. But it will not fail—it will succeed because we still have
in us the spirit of the men of ’61.
Here we are as a nation, with a domain and a population such as
no other republic in the history of the world has even approached.
For weal or for woe we are a great power, a great nation. We cannot
escape playing the part of a great nation. We shall play it ill or well,
but play it we must. A small nation can play a small part, not a great
nation, and upon the success of the experiment of free government
conducted on a spirit of orderly liberty here on this continent, depends
not only the welfare of this nation, but depends the future of free
government in the entire world. And it behoves us, not only to
exult in our privileges, but soberly to realize our responsibilities.
Hitherto republics have failed, and the republics of antiquity failed. The
republics of the middle ages failed although tried on a much smaller
scale than ours, though on account of the smaller scale the experiment
would have seemed less hazardous. And fundamentally the cause of
the failure of those republics was to be found in the fact that ultimately
each tended to become not a government of the whole people, doing
justice to each member of the people, but a government, slipped into
the hands of an oligarchy; sometimes it slipped into the hands of a
mob-in either case the result was the same—it was exactly as fatal to
the lasting welfare of the republic if it was turned into a government
*More than any other book or books President Roosevelt has read and re-read the Life
of Lincoln. Lincoln is his North Star; he steers by him. In those tangles which beset a
president, his first silent inquiry is: “What would Lincoln have done?”—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 479
in which the few oppressed the many, as if it was turned into a gov-
ernment in which the many plundered the few. Either form of perver-
sion of the true governmental principles spelled death and ruin to
the community. It was no use to have escaped one form of ruin
if ruin came at the other end of the pole. And now this government
will succeed because it will be, and it shall be and must be kept true
to the principles for which the men of Lincoln's generation fought.
This is not and never shall be a government of a plutocracy. This
is not and never shall be a government of a mob. It is a government
of liberty, by, under and through the law. A government in which .
no man is to be permitted either to domineer over the less well off
or to plunder the better off. It is a government in which man is
to be guaranteed his rights and in return in which it is to be seen
that he does not wrong his fellows. The supreme safety of our country
is to be found in the fearless and honest administration of the law of
the land. And it makes not the slightest difference whether the offense
against the law takes the form of cunning and greed on the one hand,
or of physical violence on the other. In either case the law breaker
must be held accountable and the law breaking stopped. And when
any executive undertakes to enforce the law, he is entitled to the sup-
port of every decent man, rich or poor, no matter what form the law
breaking has taken, he is entitled to the support of all men in his
efforts. And if he is worth his salt, he will enforce the law whether
he gets the support or not. All men are not merely wicked, but foolish,
if they ask privileges to violate the law. All men are not only wicked
but foolish if they complain because they are forced to obey the law.
But the most foolish man in making such complaints is the rich man;
for the rich man owes his very existence, his prosperity to the fact
that the law throws its mantle around him, and he therefore is twice
over foolish, if in any way he permits reverence for the law to be
broken down in a community like Ours.
And now, my countrymen, remember always that there are two
sides to what I have preached to-day. It is a base and evil thing for
the man of great means to look down upon, to treat with arrogance his
brother who is less well off, and it is no less base, it is no less evil
for any man to view with envy, with hatred, with rancor, his brother
because that brother is better off. The two qualities, envy and ar-
rogance, are the two opposite sides of the same black crystal. The
same attributes which make a man when powerful, tyrannous Over
others, will make him the agitator and the revolutionist if he happens
to be placed at the other end of the social scale. And I ask you to
remember always that the man who preaches it to the men at one end
of the social scale or to the men of the other, is equally a menace
48O Messages and Speeches
to the entire community. In Lincoln's day the men who wore the
blue fought to establish once for all the principles that there was no
place in this country for sectional hatred, and that the career of the
men who sought to stir up one section against another was at an end.
Now let us see to it that there is just as little place in this country
for the man who seeks to stir up creed against creed, class against
class, one body of Americans against another body of Americans, as
for the man who seeks to stir one section against another.
The line of cleavage of good and bad citizenship runs at right angles
to the line of cleavage between locality and locality, creed and creed,
class and class, Occupation and Occupation. If a man is a decent man,
if he acts squarely by his fellows, if he does his duty, if he works at
work which is useful and honorable, he is a good citizen, and he is
entitled to the praise of all other good citizens. And if that is the
case, the other man who refuses or rejects fellowship with him stamps
himself as being a poor citizen of this republic. I ask that as a nation
we approach the new problems in the spirit with which Lincoln and the
men of Lincoln's time approached the problems they solved—a spirit
of courage and resolution, a spirit of the broadest kindliness, a spirit of
genuine brotherhood and love for all men. Not a spirit of weakness.
The men of 1861 had iron in their veins or they could never have won
out in the great contest of that time. They were strong men or they
could not have fought to a successful finish the great Civil War, and
they were good men or they never would have dared to undertake it.
And now, my fellow countrymen, as we read Lincoln's words, as we
think of his deeds, let us in honesty and humility consecrate our-
selves and our lives to treating the problems of to-day as he treated
those great problems in the solution of which he gave his life for
the people.
Let us remember that we cannot win out as a nation if we permit
the black vices of envy or rancor or arrogance to control us in our
dealings with our fellows. Let us remember that we must act in a
spirit of broad charity and kindliness to our fellows and yet with the
clearsightedness that recognizes that there can be no compromise
with the law breaker—that the first essential of civilized government
is obedience to the law. Let us remember here that this must never
be allowed to become a government by any class, that it must be
kept a government such as it was as Washington founded it, such
as it was as Lincoln preserved it—a government of the people as a
whole in which every man is given justice as a man, and is guaranteed
the treatment, social and political, which he can show himself entitled
to receive. We can never make this government a good government
save on the basis of a firm type of individual citizenship. The stream
cannot rise higher than the source. Upon the character of the in-
Theodore Roosevelt 481
dividual man, the individual woman, must depend, in the long run,
the success of our institutions; and I believe in you, I believe in the
future of this country of which you are part, because I believe that
the average American citizen has in him those qualities of honesty, of
courage, of fair dealing as between man and man; that the average
American citizen has in him the spirit of justice which shows in every
deed and in every act of Abraham Lincoln.
[Illinois State Register, June 5, 1903.]
ON RETURN FROM WESTERN TRIP, WASHINGTON, D.C.,
JUNE 5, 1903.
My friends and neighbors:
I thank you very, very much for coming here to greet me this after-
noon, and I have appreciated more than I can say the welcome back
home that I have received to-day. I have been absent over two months
and I have traveled many miles. During that time one thing has
struck me, and that is the substantialness of the American people.
One can travel from Ocean to Ocean and from Canada to the Gulf and
always be at home among one's fellow Americans. I thank you again,
my friends, and now I am going in to my own folks.
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 thanksgiv-
ing, and into His courts with praise. Who shall ascend into the hill
of the Lord? or who shall stand in His holy place? He that hath
clean hands, and a pure heart; who hath not lifted up his soul unto
vanity, nor sworn deceitfully.”
Better lines could surely not be brought into any dedication service
of a church; and it is a happy thing that we should have repeated
them this morning. This church is consecrated to the service of the
Lord ; and we can serve Him by the way we serve our fellow-men.
This church is consecrated to service and duty. It was written of
old that “by their fruits ye shall know them”; and we can show the
faith that is in us, we can show the sincerity of our devotion, by the
fruits we bring forth. The man who is not a tender and considerate
husband, a loving and wise father, is not serving the Lord when he
goes to church; so with the woman; so with all who come here. Our
being in this church, our communion here with one another, our sitting
under the pastor and hearing from him the word of God, must, if we
are sincere, show their effects in our lives outside.
We of the Dutch and German Reformed Churches, like our brethren
482 Messages and Speeches
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, be-
cause 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 Re-
formed 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 com-
mitted in the name of liberty, or 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 brother-
hood 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
Theodore Roosevelt 483
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
1113.11.
ON THE SUBMISSION OF THE MEMORANDUM CONCERNING THE
KISHINEFF MASSACRE, AT WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 15, 1903.
Mr. Chairman:
I need not dwell upon a fact so patent as the widespread indignation
with which the American people heard of the dreadful outrages upon
the Jews in Kishineff. I have never in my experience in this country
known of a more immediate or a deeper expression of sympathy for
the victims and of horror over the appalling calamity that had occurred.
It is natural that while the whole civilized world should express such
a feeling it should yet be most intense and most widespread in the
United States; for of all the great powers I think I may say that
the United States is that country in which from the beginning of its
national career, most has been done in the way of acknowledging the
debt due to the Jewish race and of endeavoring to do justice to those
American citizens who are of Jewish ancestry and faith.
One of the most touching poems of our own great poet, Longfellow,
is that on the Jewish Cemetery in Newport, and any one who goes
through any of the old cemeteries of the cities which preserve the rec-
ords of Colonial times will see the name of many an American of
Jewish race who in war or in peace did his full share in the founding
of this nation. From that day to this, from the day when the Jews
of Charleston, of Philadelphia, of New York, supported the patriot
cause and helped in every way, not only by money but by arms, Wash-
ington and his colleagues, who were founding this republic—from that
day to the present, we have had no struggle, military or civil, in which
there have not been citizens of Jewish faith who played an eminent
part for the honor and the credit of the nation. I remember once
General Howard mentioning to me the fact that two of his brigade
commanders, upon whom he had placed special reliance, were Jews.
Among the meetings of the Grand Army which I have attended one
stands out with peculiar vividness—a meeting held under the auspices
of the men of the Grand Army of Jewish creed in the Temple in
Forty-fourth St.—Temple Emanuel—to welcome the returned vet-
erans of the Spanish-American War of Jewish faith.
When in Santiago, when I was myself in the army, one of the best
colonels among the regular regiments who did so well on the day
and who fought beside me, was a Jew. One of the commanders of
484 Messages and Speeches
the ships which in the blockade of the Cuban coast did so well was
a Jew. In my own regiment I promoted five men from the ranks for
valor and good conduct in battle. It happened by pure accident, for
I knew nothing of the faith of any one of them, that these included
two Protestants, two Catholics and one Jew; and while that was a pure
accident, it was not without its value as an illustration of the ethnic
and religious makeup of our nation, and of the fact that if a man is a
good American that is all we ask, without thinking of his creed or his
birthplace. In the same way when I was Police Commissioner of
New York I had experience after experience of the excellent work
done—an excellent work needing nerve and hardihood, excellent work
of what I might call the Maccabee type—in the Police Department
under me by police officers of Jewish extraction.
Let me give you one little incident with a direct bearing upon this
question of persecution for race or religious reasons. You may pos-
sibly recall, I am sure certain of my New York friends will recall,
that during the time I was Police Commissioner a man came from
abroad, I am sorry to say, a clergyman, to start an anti-Jewish agita-
tion in New York, and announced his intention of holding meetings
to assail the Jews. The matter was brought to my attention. Of
course, I had no power to prevent those meetings. After a good deal
of thought I detailed a Jewish sergeant and forty Jewish policemen to
protect the agitator while he held his meetings; so he made his speech
denouncing the Jews protected exclusively by Jews, which I always
thought was probably the very most effective answer that could pos-
sibly be made to him, and probably the best object lesson we could
give of the spirit in which we Americans manage such matters.
Now let me give you another example dealing with a Russian Jew,
an experience that I had while handling the Police Department, and that
could have occurred, I think, nowhere else than in the United States.
There was a certain man I appointed under the following conditions:
I was attracted to him by being told on a visit to the Bowery branch
of the Young Men's Christian Association, that they had a young fel-
low there, a Jew, who had performed a feat of great note in saving
people from a burning building, and that they thought he was just
the type for a policeman. I had him called up, and told him to take
the examination and see if he could get through. He did and he
passed. He has not only been an excellent policeman, but he at once,
out of his salary, proceeded to educate his younger brothers and sis-
ters, and he got either two or three of his old kinsfolk over from
Russia through the money he had saved and provided homes for
them.
I have given you examples of men who have served under me in my
administration of the Police Department in New York and my regi-
Theodore Roosevelt 485
ment, in addition thereto, some of my nearest social friends, some of
those with whom I have been closest in political life, have been men
of Jewish faith and extraction. Therefore inevitably I have felt a
degree of personal horror over this dreadful tragedy as great as can
exist in the minds of any of you gentlemen yourself. Exactly as I
should claim the same sympathy from any one of you for any tragedy
happening to any Christian people, so I should hold myself unworthy
of my present position if I failed to feel just as deep sympathy, and
just as deep sorrow, and just as deep horror over an outrage like this
done to the Jewish people in any part of the earth. I am confi-
dent that much good has already been done by the manifestations
throughout this country, without regard to creed whatsoever, of horror
and sympathy over what has occurred.
It is gratifying to know, what we would of course assume, that the
government of Russia shows the feelings of horror and indignation with
which the American people look upon the outrages at Kishneff and
is moving vigorously not only to prevent their continuance but to
punish the perpetrators. That government takes the same view of
those outrages that our government takes of the riots and lynchings
which sometimes occur in our country, but do not characterize either
our government or our people.
AT THE SAENGERFEST, BALTIMORE, M.D., 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 his-
tory many different race strains have entered to make up the com-
posite 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
486 Messages and Speeches
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 govern-
ment modeled upon these principles of religious freedom and tolera-
tion 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 com-
monwealth as in the commonwealth of Missouri, by the folk of German
-birth or origin who served so loyally the flag that was theirs by in-
heritance 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 those 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 be-
cause 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 them-
selves fit to rank among the men of all time.
I want to say just one thing more. I feel that the men of this Asso-
ciation 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
Theodore Roosevelt 487
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 en-
joyment 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
aesthetic side of our nature; and especially is that true when we re-
member 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 Re-
public, 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 un-
known to any map maker but a century ago; thence to the Pacific
Ocean, I went through the regions which mark the two greatest terri-
torial 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
488 Messages and Speeches
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 ex-
ample of governmental ability, ability in statecraft and public adminis-
tration, has even been given than 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 constit-
uents 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 gen-
uine 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 listen-
ing 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 association 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 insti-
tution. 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
Theodore Roosevelt 489
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 per-
sonal affection. Finally, when I had to choose an Ambassador to rep-
resent us at the court of Russia, I had to take another graduate of your
University—Mr. McCormick. You will pardon me one personal al-
lusion; 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.
I want to say just one word to you in reference to our foreign
relations, F want the United States to conduct itself in foreign affairs
490 Messages and Speeches
as you of Virginia believe a private gentleman should conduct himself
among his fellows. I ask that we handle ourselves with a view never
to wronging the weak and never to submitting to injury from the
strong. Another thing, a gentleman does not boast, bluster or bully;
he does not insult others. I do not wish us ever as a nation to take a
position from which we have to retreat. Do not let us assume any
position unless we are prepared to say that we have got to keep it.
There is one governmental instrument which is absolutely essential
to our well being from the standpoint of honor as well as from the
standpoint of interest of the United States, and that is the navy of
the United States. I believe that foreign nations wish us well; most
certainly I feel that we should, wherever possible, so carry ourselves
as to make them continue to wish us well; but I think that the posses-
sion of a really first class navy on our part is a powerful aid in helping
them to continue to mean well by us. I ask that there be no halt in the
building up and keeping up of the United States Navy; not because
I wish war, I most earnestly wish and shall strive for peace, but
because such a navy is the surest guarantee of peace, the best insurance
against war, and if, which Heaven forbid, war should come, the
guarantee furthermore that that war shall end leaving undimmed the
record upon which is written the feats of Americans in arms. I ask
you for your aid in continuing to build up that navy.
The navy that won the battle of Manila Bay five years ago had been
built up under successive Congresses of opposite political parties,
under successive Presidents and successive Secretaries of the Navy,
who in the Civil War had worn the blue and another who, in the
Civil War had worn the gray, but each alike an American and nothing
but an American. We won then because the men in Congress, the men
in the Executive Departments, of whichever party, from whatever
section, had acted, when it came to deal with Our foreign relations and
the United States Navy, simply as Americans to whom the honor and
the interest of the whole country was dear above all else.
I hope and believe that we shall not as a nation in our time ever
have to go to war, and the surest way to invite war is to be opulent,
aggressive and unarmed. Now we are Opulent and aggressive. Let
us avoid being unarmed. Let uS SO conduct our government affairs
that it shall never be said that we made a threat which we were
unable to back up. Do not make threats at all, but if it becomes
necessary to say what, in a certain contingency we are going to do,
say it and then do it.
Theodore Roosevelt 49 I
AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF HUN-
TINGTON, L. I., JULY 4, 1903.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow citizens, any old time friends and
neighbors, men and women of Huntington:
I thank you for having given me the chance of saying a few words to
you this afternoon, and in greeting all of you I wish to say a word of
special greeting to those whom none of us will object to my greeting.
First, to the men because of whom we have to-day a country and a
President—and to the men of the National Guard, wearing the uniform
I have worn myself, for having come out to serve as my escort to-day.
And, now, men and women, in speaking to you to-day, I want not
only to join with you in an expression of thankfulness for the nation’s
mighty past, but to join with you in expressing the resolution that
we of to-day will strive in our deeds to rise level to those deeds which
in the past made up the nation's greatness. Each generation so far, in
this country, has been blessed, first, with the chance to resolve, and to
put into effect the resolution so as to conduct itself that the next gen-
eration in turn would have the opportunity to feel a like gratitude.
It is a good thing, on the Fourth of July and on all other occasions of
national thanksgiving, for us to come together, and we have the right
to express our pride in what our forefathers did, and our joy in the
abundant greatness of this people.
We have the right to express those feelings, but we must not treat
greatness achieved in the past as an excuse for Our failing to do decent
work in the present, instead of a spur to make us strive in our turn
to do the work that lies right at hand. If we so treat it we show
ourselves unworthy to come here and celebrate the historic past of the
nation. In 1861, when Lincoln called to arms you men of the great
war, how did you show your loyalty to the men of 1776, to the spirit of
'76? You showed it by the way in which your hearts leaped to the per-
formance of the task that was ready in those days.
You people here in Huntington showed it by the way in which
your young men went to the front. You showed that the spirit of
Nathan Hale still lived in America. No amount of talking of what
had been done in the Revolution would have availed anything if you
had not had it in you to add to these great memories by the deeds
which were to make, in their turn, forever memorable the years
between the firing of Fort Sumter and Appomattox. So we come
here together on the Fourth of July to see what a great people we are;
to see how well the generations of our dead have done their duty.
If we fail to realize that there is before us the obligation of handing
down unimpaired to our children the courage that we have received
from our fathers, then the truth is not in us. We can pay to the great
492 Messages and Speeches
men of the past the only homage really worth paying if we show by
our deeds that their spirit still lives in our souls. Only by so doing
can we show that we have a right to celebrate this day that marks the
birth of a nation.
You, the men of 1861, you, the men of the great war, you left us
more than a reunited nation; for you left to us the undying memory
of the deeds by which it was kept united, and you left examples not
merely for war, but examples for peace. And we can continue to
keep this nation as it was and is only as we so handle ourselves in
meeting the lesser tasks of to-day, as you handled yourselves in the
face of the great crisis of the past. You left us the right of
brotherhood and an example in what brotherhood means; not the
brotherhood. that is merely talked about, but the brotherhood that is
acted and felt. First and foremost you left us, you most fortunate of
victors, the right of brotherhood with the gallant vanquished. Wher-
ever I go, from one end of this country to the other, I find that there
is one body to which I can speak with a certainty of immediate response
when I speak of the courage of the men who wore the gray, and that
is the men who wore the blue. Not another war of recent times left
what those terrible four years of war left this nation—the right to
feel proud of each American who did his duty, as it was given to him
to see his duty, whether he followed Grant or followed Lee.
Having paid the fullest tribute not merely to the valor, but to the
self-devotion and steadfastness of the brother in gray, it yet remains
true that the men in blue fought in the one contest which our history
has seen in which success for the Union, in which success for the flag
of the Republic, meant not merely greatness for this nation, but welfare
for all mankind in the future. To you it was given to fight in the one
contest wherein failure would have meant that all our past history
was meaningless. If when Lincoln called, if when Grant came into the
field, the people of this country had not rallied to uphold the states-
manship of the one and to make good the generalship of the other,
the Declaration of Independence would have rung as an empty plati-
tude, and this nation's history would have counted only because it
would have been another example in the failure of free government.
The men of the great war, the veterans of 1861 and 1865, have a
proprietary interest in this day that we now celebrate. For to them
as much as to the men of '76 we owe the existence of this nation as
a nation.
We do not intend to let slip away from our minds the fact that
everything we now have as a nation, all that we now glory in, would
be non-existent if the men of ’61 had not shown in the supreme hour
those qualities for the lack of which no nation and no individual can
atone, You showed those qualities, Now, what qualities?
Theodore Roosevelt 493
In the first place, power of disinterested loyalty to the idea, the
power of being stirred to lofty emotions, of casting aside considera-
tions of self when the welfare of the people as a whole was at stake.
Patriotism first; the spirit which manifests itself in time of war, in
ability to serve the flag in time of peace, ability to do a citizen's work
Squarely and decently. First that spirit. Now that was not enough,
no matter how patriotic a man was in 1861. If he did not have a
fighting edge, his patriotism did not count. It was absolutely necessary
to have patriotism, but patriotism was of no use if the man ran away.
Exactly. Now so it is in the ordinary workaday tasks of citizen-
ship at the present day. If the man is not decent, in the first place,
then he is not merely useless to the community but a menace to it.
In time of war, if the man did not have in him the power of loyalty
to the flag, loyalty to the nation, loyalty to his regiment, the more
dangerous he was. He had to have that quality first of all. In civil
life we need decency, honesty and the spirit that makes the man a
good husband, a good father, a good neighbor and a good man to
work alongside of or to deal with. That makes a man, consequently,
who does his duty by the State. The worst crime against this nation
which can be committed by any man is the crime of dishonesty, whether
in public life, or whether in private life, and we are not to be excused
as a people if we ever condone such dishonesty, no matter what other
qualities it may be associated with.
TO THE HOLY NAME SOCIETY AT OYSTER BAY, N. Y., AUGUST
I6, 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.
*President Roosevelt belongs to the Dutch Reformed Church. His freedom from religious
prejudice, however, never fails to stick out. He would no more dream of quarreling with a
man because he was a Methodist or a Catholic than he would of quarreling with a man in
the car ahead or the car behind on a railway train because of the car he saw fit to travel in.
There are many churches just as there are many cars in a train; but he is as tolerant of one
as of the other, since they are all going to the same place.—A. H. L.
494 Messages and Speeches
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 cannot retain your self-respect if you are loose and foul of tongue,
that a man who is to lead a clean and honorable life must inevitably
suffer if his speech likewise is not clean and honorable. Every man
here knows the temptations that beset all of us in this world. At times
any man will slip. I do not expect perfection, but I do expect genuine
and sincere effort toward being decent and cleanly in thought, in word,
and in deed. As I said at the outset, I hail the work of this society
as typifying one of those forces which tend to the betterment and
uplifting of our social system. Our whole effort should be toward
securing a combination of the strong qualities with those qualities
which we term virtues. I expect you to be strong. I would not re-
spect 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 re-
Theodore Roosevelt 495
main unseen I ask that every man here constitute himself his brother's
keeper by setting an example to that younger brother which will pre-
vent 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 kinfolk, at least his intimate associates, them-
selves 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 anaemic 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 cleanli-
ness 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 preach-
ing 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 proces-
sions; that you will join in building up such a great and useful asso-
496 Messages and Speeches
ciation 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 re-
membered 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 tell are the shots that hit. 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 men. I do not praise you for being brave; that is ex-
pected. 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 re-
sponsibility 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
Theodore Roosevelt 497
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 mat-
ters 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 better-
ment 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 in-
creased, 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
498 Messages and Speeches
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 af-
fected 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. Un-
fortunately, in this world the innocent frequently find themselves ob-
liged 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 repre-
sent the innermost souls of men.
Theodore Roosevelt 499
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 in-
stead 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 gov-
ernment 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
mediaeval Italy and mediaeval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and
wherever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably
5OO Messages and Speeches
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 citi-
zens, 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 fel-
low-countryman has the same intention and the same power to make
his intention effective. He knows, whether he be business man, pro-
fessional 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 whole-
some 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 dif-
ferent 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, although to a different set of people, but with the
man who wishes to do justice to all people and to wrong none.
Theodore Roosevelt 5OI
The line of cleavage between good and bad citizenship lies, not be-
tween 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 vio-
lence—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
502 Messages and Speeches
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 short-sighted 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 get-
ting 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
Theodore Roosevelt 503
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 stand-
point 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 wrong-
doing 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 imme-
diately 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 lament-
able; 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
504 Messages and Speeches
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 Re-
public. Her burden has been heavy, and she has been able to bear it
worthily only by the possession of resolution, of good sense, of con-
science, 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 today, proud
of your State and still prouder of your Nation, because your fore-
fathers 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 hardi-
hood, of individual initiative and yet of power to combine for a common
*President Roosevelt bclieves not only in work for the individual but work for the
country. He stands for the doctrine that the Present should do the work of the present, and
not leave a legacy of labor to the future the doing of which is the duty of today. He
disagrees with those convenient statesmen who would cheat the future for the present and
make a packhorse of posterity.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 505
f
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, be-
cause 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 be-
cause 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 ap-
plied 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 pretenses
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; but I do not believe in the life that is nothing
but play. I believe that you have a thousand-fold 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 com-
bining 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.
506 Messages and Speeches
AT HAGERSTOWN, MD., SEPT. 17, 1903.
I am on my way to accept on behalf of the United States Govern-
ment the monument erected to the New Jersey troops who fought at
Antietam, but in a larger sense I go to commemorate the valor of
every man who in the day that tried men's souls proved their truth
by their endeavor in the service of the national government.
It is a peculiar pleasure, either to-day or any other day, to see in
the audience the men who wear the button which shows that they
fought in the Grand Army of the Republic. They left to us not only
a reunited country, but a memory of the great deeds by which it was
made united. The times are easy now compared to what they were
in the days from 1861 to 1865, but we need to display just exactly the
same qualities that made you win out under the lead of Abraham
Lincoln.
I want to say how glad I am to see the Grand Army of the Re-
public, and, next to the Grand Army I want to greet the future—I
want to say how glad I am to see the children.
Just one word in closing. As I said, we need to display the same
qualities now that you needed in 1861. A man was not worth any-
thing then if he was not patriotic and decent. That was first and that
was not enough. No matter how patriotic he was, if he ran away he
was no good. In addition to decency he had to have the qualities that
would make the decency effective.
It is just the same way now in civil life. A man must be decent,
honest, upright, or he is a bad citizen; and if he has not the qualities
of honesty and decency in him, then the abler he is the worse he is.
I do not care how able a man is if he has not the root of clean living
in him, if he is not a decent and honest man, if he is a bribe giver or
a bribe taker, if he is a man who defrauds in public or private life,
if he is a bad husband, bad father, bad son, then he is poor stuff out
of which to make a citizen.
You of the Grand Army left us what the victory in no other war
left us. You left us the right of comradeship with the vanquished, you
left us the right of brotherhood with the men who wore the gray,
and nothing pleases me more than the fact that to an audience com-
prising Union veterans one can always make the appeal for apprecia-
tion of the men who fought against you, and whose sons are now as
loyal as we are to the flag of our common country.
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
Theodore Roosevelt 507
Á
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-govern-
ment by a great people on a great scale would have delighted the heart
of every foe of republican institutions. Our country, now so great
508 Messages and Speeches
and so wonderful, would have been split into little jangling rival na-
tionalities, 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 con-
temptuous 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 judg-
ment of history is recorded it will be said that in no other war of
which we have written record was it more vitally essential for the
welfare of mankind that victory should rest where it finally rested.
There have been other wars for individual freedom. There have
been other wars for national greatness. But there has never been
another war in which the issues at stake were so large, looked at from
either standpoint. We take just pride in the great deeds of the men
of 1776, but we must keep in mind that the Revolutionary War would
have been shorn of well-nigh all its results had the side of union and
liberty been defeated in the Civil War. In such case we should merely
have added another to the lamentably long list of cases in which peoples
have shown that after winning their liberty they are wholly unable
to make good use of it.
It now rests with us in civil life to make good by our deeds the
deeds which you who wore the blue did in the great years from '61 to
'65. The patriotism, the courage, the unflinching resolution and stead-
fast endurance of the soldiers whose triumph was crowned at Ap-
pomattox 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 gal-
lant 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 spurn-
ing 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,
Theodore Roosevelt 509
until the soul stands forth revealed, and we know the man only be-
cause 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 ex-
pressions of national character. Leaders will be developed in military
and in civil life alike; and weapons and tactics change from genera-
tion 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 determina-
tion 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 un-
changed. 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 en-
durance. 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 es-
tablishment 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
5IO Messages and Speeches
brilliancy and no genius can atone—and those three are courage, hon-
esty, and common sense.
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE SHERMAN STATUE, WASHINGTON,
D. C., OCTOBER 15, 1903.
General Ddge, 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, farsighted, cool-headed, whose steadfast courage burned ever
highest in the supreme moment of the crisis; McClellan, with his ex-
traordinary 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 Na-
tional 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
Theodore Roosevelt 5II
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
of the men in gray toward what they regarded as right; 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 ex-
cuse 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 sol-
dier 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 to strive after in our own lives, 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 farsighted 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
5I2 Messages and Speeches
be anything but the nucleus around which our volunteer armies must
form themselves, the best army of its size to be found among the
nations.”
So much for our duties in keeping unstained the honor roll our
fathers made in war. It is of even more instant need that we should
show their spirit of patriotism in the affairs of peace. The duties
of peace are with us always; those of war are but occasional; and with
a nation as with a man, the worthiness of life depends upon the way in
which the everyday duties are done. The home duties are the vital
duties. The nation is nothing but the aggregate of the families within
its border; and if the average man is not hard-working, just, and fear-
less 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 re-
sponsibility 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 shrewd-
ness 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 be-
cause 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 wrong-
doing 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 in-
stitutions cast the initial duty of bringing malefactors to the bar of
*One thing that will impress itself most upon the mind of the student of President Roose-
velt, and his speeches may well be studied as the handbook of liberty, is that he always and for-
ever talks of men, and seldom and only occasionally of measures. He is right. To believe in the
measure rather than in the man is like believing in the sword rather than in the swordsman.
President Roosevelt does not make this mistake. He looks to the man and not the measure,
just as he looks to the horse and not the harness to haul the load along.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 5I3
justice must be diligent in its discharge; yet in the last resort the suc-
cess 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 citi-
zenship. 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
514 Messages and Speeches
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 pur-
poses, 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 accom-
plish 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 our-
selves thus to do the work commanded ; and moreover, to do it cheer-
fully. 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, some-
times of all, and sometimes of more than all, its benefits. 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 priv-
ilege. 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
Theodore Roosevelt 5I5
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 responsi-
bility 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 l’’ 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 institu-
tions that the ablest statesmen in the world have ever reduced to prac-
tice 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 ap-
plied 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 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 hon-
esty 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
º
516 Messages and Speeches
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 assume. I ask then that our people feel quick-
ened 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 unut-
terable 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 cour-
age, 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 PRESBY-
TERIAN CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
NOVEMBER 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
wº
Theodore Roosevelt 517
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 pres-
ent 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 sur-
prise 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 deep-
est, 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 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, is 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 asso-
ciations 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 pri-
vate 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
518 Messages and Speeches
gave his life at the end. If ever there was a man who practically ap-
plied what was taught in our churches, it was Abraham Lincoln. The
other day I was re-reading—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 him-
self. 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 bitter-
ness toward any opponent; that all he wishes is that those who opposed
him should join with those who favored him in working toward a com-
mon 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 in-
dividual.
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, and you, General Breckenridge—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.
Theodore Roosevelt 519
TO THE DELEGATES OF THE GERMAN SOCIETIES RECEIVED AT
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C., 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 com-
posite 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 for-
mation 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 An-
tietam, 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 set-
tlement. 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 Ger-
man extraction. In the Civil War it should be difficult to paint in too
strong colors what I may well-nigh call the all-importance of the atti-
tude 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
52O Messages and Speeches
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 ad-
dressing.
BEFORE THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE OF THE ST. LOUIS GOOD
ROADS CONGRESS, AT WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
JANUARY 26, 1904.
\
Mr. Chairman:
I wish to greet you particularly, and I am sure I need
not say how entirely I sympathize with the movement that you are
championing for better means of communication. The road is the
symbol of civilization. Take our great province of Alaska—I doubt if
there is anything more needed for the development of Alaska on per-
manent lines than the building up of a proper system of roads, and,
where is it impossible to make wagon roads, trails. Throughout our
country our citizens will have to turn their energies to improving the
means of intercourse—that is, the roads—between community and com-
munity, because we are a civilized people and we cannot afford to have
barbaric methods of communication.
ON RECEIVING THE MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL REPUBLICAN
EDITORIAL ASSOCIATION AT WHITE HOUSE,
WASHINGTON, D. C., FEBRUARY 5, 1904.
I need hardly say how glad I am to welcome you here to Washington,
and I am sure, also, that it is almost unnecessary for me to express my
realizing sense of the importance of the work that you do. In the proper
sense of the term, no man is more essentially a public servant than the
editor, the man who, in the public press, not merely gives the news, but
exercises so great a control over the thought of our country.
And in speaking to you as my fellow Republicans, I wish you to know
how every man here in Washington who is striving to do what in him
lies to serve his party or make that party serve the country realizes the
dependence on you and those like you throughout this land for making
his purposes effective. It is upon your interpretation of the acts done
here that we must depend for having these acts received at the proper
worth by the people as a whole. I feel very strongly that what we need
is simply to have the exact truth told, to have what we have done set
Theodore Roosevelt 52I
forth as it has been done, and to have our purposes interpreted in the
light not merely of our words but of our deeds; and you know that that
is all that we need, and to meet that need we depend absolutely upon
you.
Feeling this as I do, it is in no perfunctory manner that I greet
you and thank you for coming here.
AT A DINNER OF THE PERIODICAL PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION
OF AMERICA, AT WASHINGTON, D. C., APRIL 7, 1904.
Mr. Chairman and gentlemen:
It is always a pleasure to a man in public life to meet the real gov-
erning classes. I wish to bid you welcome to Washington, and to say
but a word of greeting, and that word shall take the form of a warning
and a hope. I did not speak in justice when I alluded to you as repre-
sentatives of the governing classes. I think that we of the United
States cannot keep too fresh in our minds the fact that the men re-
sponsible for the government are not the representatives of the people,
but the people themselves, and that therefore, heavy is the responsibility
that lies upon the people and upon all those who do most toward shap-
ing the thought of the people.
Now, in the days of my youth I was a literary man. I have recently,
in reading a book, been immensely struck by the thought developed in
it by one of our greatest scholars, who was speaking of freedom and of
the fact that freedom could not exist unless there went with it a sense
of responsibility, and he used a phrase somewhat like this: “That
among all peoples there must be a restraint; if there is no restraint there
is for an inevitable result anarchy, which is the negation of all govern-
ment.”
Therefore there must be restraint. A free people has merely sub-
stituted self restraint for external restraint, and the permanence of our
freedom as a people and our liberty depends on the way in which we
shall exercise that self restraint.
Law—there must be more than good laws to make a good people. A
man whose morality is expressed merely in the non-infringement of the
law is a pretty poor creature. Unless our average citizenship is based
upon a good deal more than mere observance of the laws on the statute
book, then our average citizenship can never produce the kind of gov-
erning which it must and will produce. So far from liberty and the
responsibility of self government being things which come easily and
to any people they are peculiarly things that can come only to the most
highly developed people, capable not only of mastering others, but of
mastering themselves and who can achieve real self government, real
liberty.
522 Messages and Speeches
For that cultivation of the spirit of self-restraint which is the spirit
of self-reliance we must rely in no small degree upon those who furnish
so much of the thought of the great bulk of our people who think most;
and therefore, gentlemen, in greeting you here to-night I wish not
merely to welcome you, but to say that I trust every man of you feels
the weight of the responsibility that rests upon him. The man who
writes, the man who month in and month out, week in and week out, day
in and day out, furnishes the material which is to shape the thoughts
of our people, is essentially the man who more than any other determines
the character of the people and the kind of government this people shall
possess.
I believe in the future of this people. I believe in the growth and
greatness of this country, because I believe that you and those like you
approach their tasks in the proper spirit—not always, but as a rule.
And, gentlemen, it seems to me that because of the very fact that we
are so confident in the greatness of our country and our country's future
we should beware of any undue levity or any spirit of mere boastfulness.
Individual courtesy is a good thing, and national courtesy is quite as
good a thing. If there is any one quality which should be deprecated in
the public man and in the public writer alike it is the use of language
which tends to produce irritation among nations with whom we should
be on friendly terms. Nations are now brought much nearer together
than they formerly were. Steam, electricity, the spread of the press in
all countries, these factors have brought the people closer together than
they formerly were. You can rest assured that no man and no nation
ever think the better of us because we adopt toward them feelings which
we should resent if they were adopted toward us.* We have a very
large field in warring against evil at home. When all is as it ought to
be in nation and state and municipality here at home then we can talk
about reforming the rest of mankind. Let us begin at home.
AT GETTYSBURG, MAY 30, 1904.
The place where we now are has won a double distinction. Here was
fought one of the great battles of all time, and here was spoken one of
the few speeches that shall last through the ages. As long as this
Republic endures or its history is known, so long shall the memory of
the battle of Gettysburg likewise endure and be known; and as long as
the English tongue is understood, so long shall Abraham Lincoln's
Gettysburg speech thrill the hearts of mankind.
The Civil War was a great war for righteousness—a war waged for
*In this connection it is well to remember that a nation never forgives. Injure or offend
a nation and you will find that the wrong can never be atoned, the memory never wiped
out.—A, H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 523
the noblest ideals, but waged also in thoroughgoing, practical fashion.
It is one of the few wars which mean in their successful outcome, a lift
toward better things for the nations of mankind. Some wars have
meant the triumph of order over anarchy and licentiousness masquerad-
ing as liberty; over tyranny masquerading as order; but this victorious
war of ours meant the triumph of both liberty and order, the triumph
Of orderly liberty, the bestowal of civil rights upon the freed slaves, and
at the same time the stern insistence on the supremacy of the national
law throughout the length and breadth of the land. Moreover, this
was one of those rare contests in which it was to the immeasurable
interest of the vanquished that they should lose, while at the same time
the victors acquired the precious privilege of transmitting to those who
came after them, as a heritage of honor forever, not only the memory
of their own valiant deeds, but the memory of the deeds of those who,
no less valiantly and with equal sincerity of purpose, fought against the
stars in their courses. The war left to us all, as fellow countrymen, as
brothers, the right to rejoice that the union has been restored in in-
destructible shape in a country where slavery no longer mocks the
boast of freedom, and also the right to rejoice with exultant pride in the
courage, self-sacrifce and the devotion alike of men who wore the blue
and the men who wore the gray.
He is but a poor American who, looking at this field, does not feel
within himself a deeper reverence for the nation's past and a higher
purpose to make the nation's future rise level to her past. Here fought
the chosen sons of the North and the South, the East and the West.
The armies which on this field contended for the mastery were veteran
armies, hardened by long campaigning and desperate fighting into such
instruments of war as no other nation then possessed. The severity
of the fighting is attested by the proportionate loss, a loss unrivaled in
any battle of similar size since the close of the Napoleonic struggles;
a loss which in certain regiments was from three-fourths to four-fifths
of the men engaged. Every spot on this field has its own associations
of soldierly duty nobly done, of supreme self-sacrifice freely rendered.
The names of the chiefs who served in the two armies form a long honor
roll, and the enlisted men were worthy of those who led them. Every
acre of this ground has its own association. We see where the fight
thundered through and around the village of Gettysburg, where the
artillery formed on the ridges; where the cavalry fought; where the
hills were attacked and defended, and where finally, the great charge
surged up the slope, only to break on the summit in the bloody spray of
gallant failure.
But the soldiers who won at Gettysburg, the soldiers who fought to a
finish the Civil War and thereby made their countrymen forever their
debtors, have left us far more even than the memories of the war itself.
524 Messages and Speeches
They fought for four years in order that on this continent those who
came after them, their children and their children's children, might
enjoy a lasting peace. They took arms not to destroy, but to save
liberty; not to overthrow but to establish the supremacy of the law.
The crisis which they faced was to determine whether or not this people
was fit for self-government, and therefore fit for liberty. Freedom is
not a gift which can be enjoyed save by those who show themselves
worthy of it. In this world no privilege can be permanently appro-
priated by men who have not the power and the will successfully to
assume the responsibility of using it aright.
In his recent admirable little volume on freedom and responsibility
in democratic government, President Hadley of Yale has pointed out
that the freedom which is worth anything is the freedom which means
self-government and not anarchy. Freedom thus conceived is a con-
structive force, which enables any intelligent and good man to do better
things than he could do without it; which is in its essence the substitu-
tion of self-restraint for external restraint—the substitution of a form of
restraint which promotes progress for the form which retards it. This
is the right view of freedom; but it can only be taken if there is a full
recognition of the close connection between liberty and responsibility
in every domain of human thought. It was essentially the view taken
by Abraham Lincoln, and by all those who, when the Civil War broke
out, realized that in a self-governing democracy those who desire to be
considered fit to enjoy liberty must show that they know how to use it
with moderation and justice in peace, and how to fight for it when it is
jeopardized by malice, domestic or foreign.
The lessons they taught us are lessons as applicable in our every day
lives now as in the times of great stress. The men who made this field
forever memorable did so because they combined the power of fealty
to a lofty ideal with the power of showing that fealty in hard, practical,
common sense fashion. They stood for the life of effort, not the life
of ease. They had that love of country, that love of justice, that love
of their fellowmen, without which power and resourceful efficiency but
make a man a danger to his fellows. Yet, in addition thereto, they like-
wise possessed the power and the efficiency, for otherwise their high
purpose would have been barren of result. They knew each how to act
for himself, and yet each how to act with his fellows. They learned,
as all the generation of the Civil War learned, that rare indeed is the
chance to do anything worth doing by one sudden and violent effort.
The men who believed that the Civil War would be ended in ninety
days, the men who cried loudest “On to Richmond,” if they had the
right stuff in them, speedily learned their error; and the war was
actually won by those who settled themselves steadfastly down to fight
for three years, or for as much longer as the war would last, and who
Theodore Roosevelt 525
gradually grew to understand that the triumph would come, not by a
single brilliant victory, but by a hundred painful and tedious campaigns.
In the East and the West the columns advanced and recoiled, swayed
from side to side and again advanced, along the coasts the black ships
stood endlessly off and on before the hostile forts, generals and ad-
mirals emerged into light, each to face his crowded hour of success or
failure, the men in front fought; the men behind supplied and pushed
forward those in front, and the final victory was due to the deeds of all
who played their parts well and manfully in the scores of battles, in the
countless skirmishes, in march, in camp, in reserve as commissioned
officers, or in the ranks—wherever and whenever duty called them.
Just so it must be for us in civil life. We can make and keep this coun-
try worthy of the men who gave their lives to save it only on condition
that the average man among us on the whole does his duty bravely,
loyally and with common sense in whatever position life allots to him.
Exactly as in time of war courage is the cardinal virtue of the soldier,
so in time of peace, honesty, using the word in its deepest and broadest
significance, is the essential basic virtue, without which all else avails
nothing.
National greatness is of slow growth. It cannot be forced and yet be
stable and enduring, for it is based fundamentally upon national char-
acter, and national character is stamped deep in a people by the lives of
many generations. The men who went into the army had to submit to
discipline, had to submit to restraint through the government of the
leaders they had chosen, as the price of winning. So we, the people,
can preserve our liberty and our greatness in time of peace only by our-
selves exercising the virtues of honesty, of self-restraint, and of fair
dealing between man and man. In all ages of the past men have seen
countries lose their liberty, because their people could not restrain and
order themselves, and therefore forfeited the right to what they were not
able to use with wisdom.
It was because you men of the Civil War knew both how to use
liberty temperately and how to defend it at need that we and our child-
ren and our children's children shall hold you in honor forever. Here,
on Memorial Day, on this great battlefield, we commemorate not only
the chiefs who actually won this battle; not only Meade and his lieu-
tenants, Hancock and Reynolds and Howard and Sickles, and the many
others whose names flame in our annals, but also the chiefs who made
the army of the Potomac what it was, and those who afterward led it
in the campaigns which were crowned at Appomattox ; and furthermore,
those who made and used its sister armies—McClellan, with his extra-
ordinary genius for organization; Rosecrans, Buell, Thomas, the un-
yielding, the steadfast; and that great trio, Sherman, Sheridan, and last,
and greatest of all, Grant himself, the silent soldier whose hammerlike
526 Messages and Speeches
blows finally beat down even the prowess of the men who fought against
him. Above all, we meet here to pay homage to the officers and enlisted
men who served and fought and died without having, as their chiefs
had, as their chiefs had the chance to write their names on the tablets
of fame; to the men who marched and fought in the ranks, who were
buried in long trenches on the field of battle, who died in cots marked
only by numbers in the hospitals; who, if they lived when the war was
over, went back each to his task on the farm or in the town, to do his
duty in peace as he had done it in war; to take up the threads of his
working life where he had dropped them when the trumpets of the
nation pealed to arms. To-day, all over this land, our people meet to
pay reverent homage to the dead who died that the nation might live
and we pay homage also to their comrades who are still with us.
All are at one now, the sons of those who wore the blue and the sons
of those who wore the gray, and all can unite in paying respect to the
memory of those who fell, each of them giving his life for his duty as
he saw it; and all should be at one in learning from the deaths of these
men how to live usefully while the times call for the performance of the
countless necessary duties of everyday life, and how to hold ourselves
ready to die nobly should the nation ever again demand of her sons the
ultimate proof of loyalty.
ACCEPTANCE OF NOMINATION FOR PRESIDENT, JULY 27, 1904.
Mr. Speaker and gentlemen of the Notification Committee:
I am deeply sensible of the honor conferred upon me by the repre-
sentatives of the Republican party assembled in convention, and I accept
the nomination for the Presidency with solemn realization of the obliga-
tions I assume. I heartily approve the declaration of principles which
the Republican National Convention has adopted, and at some future
day I shall communicate to you, Mr. Chairman, more at length and in
detail a formal written acceptance of the nomination.
Three years ago I became President because of the death of my
lamented predecessor. I then stated that it was my purpose to carry
out his principles and policies for the honor and the interest of the
country. To the best of my ability I have kept the promise thus made.
If next November my countrymen confirm at the polls the action of the
convention you represent, I shall, under Providence, continue to work
with an eye single to the welfare of all our people.
A party is of worth only in so far as it promotes the national interest,
and every official, high or low, can serve his party best by rendering
to the people the best service of which he is capable. Effective govern-
ment comes only as the result of the loyal co-operation of many different
persons. The members of a legislative majority, the officers in the
Theodore Roosevelt 527
various departments of the administration and the legislative and ex-
ecutive branches as toward each other must work together, with subor-
dination of self to the common end of successful government. We who
have been intrusted with power as public servants during the last seven
years of administration and legislation now come before the people
content to be judged by our record of achievement. In the years that
have gone by we have made the deed square with the word; and if we
are continued in power we shall unswervingly follow out the great lines
of public policy which the Republican party has already laid down; a
public policy to which we are giving, and shall give, a united, and there-
fore an efficient support.
In all of this we are more fortunate than our opponents, who now
appeal for confidence on the ground, which some express and some
seek to have confidentially understood, that, if triumphant, they may be
trusted to prove false to every principle which in the last eight years
they have laid down as vital, and to leave undisturbed those very acts
of the administration because of which they ask that the administration
itself be driven from power. Seemingly, their present attitude as to
their past record is that some of them were mistaken and others in-
sincere. We make our appeal in a wholly different spirit. We are not
constrained to keep silent on any vital question; we are divided on no
vital question; our policy is continuous, and is the same for all sections
and localities. There is nothing experimental about the government
we ask the people to continue in power, for our performance in the past,
our proved governmental efficiency, is a guarantee as to our promises
for the future. Our opponents, either openly or secretly, according to
their several temperaments, now ask the people to trust their present
promises in consideration of the fact that they intend to treat their
past promises as null and void. We know our own minds and we have
kept of the same mind for a sufficient length of time to give to our
policy coherence and sanity. In such a fundamental matter as the en-
forcement of the law we do not have to depend upon promises, but
merely to ask that our record be taken as an earnest of what we shall
continue to do. In dealing with the great organizations known as trusts
we do not have to explain why the laws were not enforced, but point
out that they actually have been enforced and that legislation has been
enacted to increase the effectiveness of their enforcement.
We do not have to propose to “turn the rascals out,” for we have
shown in very deed that whenever by diligent investigation a public
official can be found who has betrayed his trust he will be punished to
the full extent of the law, without regard to whether he was appointed
under a Republican or a Democratic administration. This is the efficient
way to turn the rascals out and to keep them out, and it has the merit
of sincerity. Moreover, the betrayals of trust in the last seven years
528 Messages and Speeches
have been insignificant in number when compared with the extent of the
public service. Never has the administration of the government been
on a cleaner and higher level; never has the public work of the nation
been done more honestly and efficiently.
Assuredly, it is unwise to change the policies which have worked
So well and which are now working so well. Prosperity has come at
home. The national honor and interest have been upheld abroad. We
have placed the finances of the nation upon a sound gold basis. We
have done this with the aid of many who were formerly our opponents,
but who would neither openly support nor silently acquiesce in the
heresy of unsound finance; and we have done it against the convinced
and violent opposition of the mass of our present opponents, who still
refuse to recant the unsound opinions which for the moment they think
it inexpedient to assert. We know what we mean when we speak of an
honest and stable currency. We mean the same thing from year to year.
We do not have to avoid a definite and conclusive committal on the
most important issue which has recently been before the people, and
which may at any time in the near future be before them again. Upon
the principles which underlie the issue the convictions of half of our
number do not clash with those of the other half. So long as the Repub-
lican party is in power the gold standard is settled, not as a matter of
temporary political expediency, not because of shifting conditions in the
production of gold in certain mining centres, but in accordance with
what we regard as the fundamental principles of national morality and
wisdom.
Under the financial legislation which we have enacted there is now
ample circulation for every business need; and every dollar of this cir-
culation is worth a dollar in gold. We have reduced the interest bear-
ing debt, and in still larger measure the interest on that debt. All of
the war taxes imposed during the Spanish war have been removed
with a view to relieve the people and to prevent the accumulation of an
unnecessary surplus. The result is that hardly ever before have the
expenditures and income of the government so closely corresponded.
In the fiscal year that has just closed the excess of income over the
ordinary expenditures was $9,000,000. This does not take account of
the $50,000,000 expended out of the accumulated surplus for the pur-
chase of the Isthmian Canal. It is an extraordinary proof of the sound
financial condition of the nation that instead of following the usual
course in such matters and throwing the burden upon posterity by an
issue of bonds, we were able to make the payment outright, and yet
after it to have in the Treasury a surplus of $161,000,000. Moreover,
we were able to pay this $50,000,000 out of hand without causing the
slightest disturbance to business conditions.
We have enacted a tariff law under which during the last few years
Theodore Roosevelt 529
the country has attained a height of material wellbeing never before
reached. Wages are higher than ever before. That whenever the
need arises there should be a readjustment of the tariff schedules is
undoubted; but such changes can with safety be made only by those
whose devotion to the principle of a protective tariff is beyond question;
for otherwise the changes would amount not to readjustment but to
repeal. The readjustment when made must maintain and not destroy
the protective principle. To the farmer, the merchant, the manufacturer,
this is vital; but perhaps no other man is so much interested as the wage
workers in the maintenance of our present economic system, both as
regards the finances and the tariff. The standard of living of our wage
workers is higher than that of any other country, and it cannot so re-
main unless we have a protective tariff which shall always keep as a
minimum a rate of duty sufficient to cover the difference between the
labor cost here and abroad. Those who, like our opponents, denounce
protection as a robbery thereby commit themselves to the proposi-
tion that if they were to revise the tariff no heed would be paid
to the necessity of meeting this difference between the standards of
living for wage workers here and in other countries; and therefore on
this point their antagonism to our position is fundamental. Here again
we ask that their promises and ours be judged by what has been done
in the immediate past. We ask that sober and sensible men compare
the workings of the present tariff law and the conditions which obtain
under it, with the workings of the preceding tariff law of 1894 and the
conditions which that tariff of 1894 helped to bring about.
We believe in reciprocity with foreign nations on the terms outlined
in President McKinley's last speech, which urged the extension of our
foreign markets by reciprocal agreements whenever they could be made
without injury to American industry and labor. It is a singular fact
that the only great reciprocity treaty recently adopted—that with Cuba—
was finally opposed almost alone by the representatives of the very party
which now states that it favors reciprocity. And here, again, we ask
that the worth of our words be judged by comparing their deeds with
ours. On this Cuban reciprocity treaty there were at the outset grave
differences of opinion among ourselves; and the notable thing in the
negotiation and ratification of the treaty, and the legislation which
carried it into effect, was the highly practical manner in which, without
sacrifice of principle, these differences of opinion were reconciled.
There was no rupture of a great party, but an excellent practical out-
come, the result of the harmonious co-operation of two successive
Presidents and two successive Congresses. This is an illustration of
the governing capacity which entitles us to the confidence of the people,
not only in our purposes, but in our practical ability to achieve those
purposes. Judging by the history of the last twelve years, down to this
530 Messages and Speeches
very month, is there justification for believing that under similar circum-
stances and with similar initial differences of opinion our opponents
would have achieved any practical result?
We have already shown in actual fact that our policy is to do fair
and equal justice to all men, paying no heed to whether a man is rich
or poor; paying no heed to his race, his creed or his birthplace.
We recognize the organization of capital and the organization of
labor as natural outcomes of our industrial system. Each kind of
organization is to be favored so long as it acts in a spirit of justice and
of regard for the rights of others. Each is to be granted the full pro-
tection of the law, and each in turn is to be held to a strict obedience
to the law; for no man is above it and no man below it. The humblest
individual is to have his rights safeguarded as scrupulously as those of
the strongest organization, for each is to receive justice, no more and
no less. The problems with which we have to deal in our modern in-
dustrial and social life are manifold; but the spirit in which it is neces-
sary to approach their solution is simply the spirit of honesty, of courage
and of common sense.
In inaugurating the great work of irrigation in the West, the admin-
istration has been enabled by Congress to take one of the longest strides
ever taken under our government toward utilizing our vast national
domain for the settler, the actual home maker.
Ever since this continent was discovered the need of an isthmian
canal to connect the Pacific and the Atlantic has been recognized, and
ever since the birth of our nation such a canal has been planned. At
last the dream has become a reality. The Isthmian Canal is now being
built by the government of the United States. We conducted the
negotiation for its construction with the nicest and most scrupulous
honor, and in a spirit of the largest generosity toward those through
whose territory it was to run. Every sinister effort which could be
devised by the spirit of faction or the spirit of self-interest was made
in order to defeat the treaty with Panama and thereby prevent the con-
summation of this work. The construction of the canal is now an
assured fact, but most certainly it is unwise to intrust the carrying out
of so momentous a policy to those who have endeavored to defeat the
whole undertaking.
Our foreign policy has been so conducted that, while not one of our
just claims has been sacrificed, our relations with all foreign nations are
now of the most peaceful kind; there is not a cloud on the horizon. The
last cause of irritation between us and any other nation was removed
by the settlement of the Alaskan boundary.
In the Caribbean Sea we have made good our promises of independ-
ence to Cuba, and have proved our assertion that our mission in the
island was one of justice, and not of self-aggrandizement; and thereby
Theodore Roosevelt 53I
no less than by our action in Venezuela and Panama we have shown
that the Monroe Doctrine is a living reality, designed for the hurt of no
nation, but for the protection of civilization on the Western continent
and for the peace of the world. Our steady growth in power has gone
hand in hand with a strengthening disposition to use this power with
strict regard for the rights of others and for the cause of international
justice and good will.
We earnestly desire friendship with all the nations of the New and
Old Worlds; and we endeavor to place our relations with them upon
a basis of reciprocal advantage instead of hostility. We hold that the
prosperity of each nation is an aid and not a hindrance to the prosperity
of other nations. We seek international amity for the reasons that make
us believe in peace within our own borders; and we seek this peace
not because we are afraid or unready, but because we think that peace
is right as well as advantageous.
American interests in the Pacific have rapidly grown. American
enterprise has laid a cable across this, the greatest of oceans. We
have proved in effective fashion that we wish the Chinese Empire well
and desire its integrity and independence.
Our foothold in the Philippines greatly strengthens our position for
trade of the East; but we are governing the Philippines in the interest
of the Philippine people themselves. We have already given them a
share in their government, and our purpose is to increase this share as
rapidly as they give evidence of increasing fitness for the task. The
great majority of the officials of the islands, whether elective or ap-
pointive, are already native Filipinos. We are now providing for a
legislative assembly. This is the first step to be taken in the future and
it would be eminently unwise to declare what our next step will be until
this first step has been taken and the results are manifest. To have
gone faster than we have already gone in giving the islanders a con-
stantly increasing measure of self-government would have been dis-
astrous. At the present moment to give political independence to the
islands would result in the immediate loss of civil rights, personal liberty
and public order as regards the mass of the Filipinos, for the majority
of the islanders have been given these great boons by us, and only keep
them because we vigilantly safeguard and guarantee them. To with-
draw our government from the islands at this time would mean to the
average native the loss of his barely won civil freedom. We have es-
tablished in the islands a government by Americans, assisted by Fili-
pinos. We are steadily striving to transform this into self-government
by the Filipinos, assisted by Americans.”
*The difference between now and then, today and a Spartan day, is for the most part a
difference of coats and hats, bath tubs and bills of fare. The Thought hasn’t changed, the
532 Messages and Speeches
The principles which we uphold should appeal to all our countrymen,
in all portions of Our country. Above all, they should give us strength
with the men and women who are the spiritual heirs of those who up-
held the hands of Abraham Lincoln for we are striving to do our work
in the spirit with which Lincoln approached his. During the seven
years that have just passed, there is no duty, domestic or foreign, which
we have shirked ; no necessary task which we have feared to undertake
or which we have not performed with reasonable efficiency. We have
never pleaded impotence. We have never sought refuge in criticism
and complaint instead of action. We face the future with our past and
our present as guarantors of Our promises, and we are content to stand
or to fall by the record which we have made and are making.
AT. A RECEPTION GIVEN BY PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT WHITE
HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C., TO PORTO RICO SCHOOL
TEACHERS, ON AUGUST 12, 1904.
Ladies and gentlemen:
I wish to greet you with all my heart here at the national capital. It
is my earnest wish as it was the wish of my lamented predecessor, and
as it is the wish of the people of the United States, that only unmixed
good shall come to the people of Porto Rico because of their connection
with this country.
I greet you with peculiar pleasure and interest, because this body
and those like you who are engaged in the work of education in Porto
Rico are doing that work which, more than any other, is vital to the
future of the island. We must have education in its broadest and deep-
est sense—education of the heart and soul as well as the mind—in order
to fit any people to do its duty among the free peoples of progress in the
world. And I trust that you here, you teachers, you men and women
engaged in preparing the next generation to do its work, realize fully
the weight of the responsibility resting upon you. According as you
here in this room and your colleagues do your work well or ill, it de-
pends as to how the next generation of Porto Rico shall do their work
in the world.
I am glad to see you because of the very fact that there is this respon-
sibility upon you. Nothing in this world comes to people who will not
work. Nothing worth having comes to those who do not or are not
willing to make an effort to get it, and I hail you here because you
represent that great body of your fellows in Porto Rico who are making
Thing has changed—a little. It is as true now as it was in the hour of Agesilaus that the
boundaries of a countly ale the points of its spears. That is why we are in the Philippines.
That is why we will build the Panama Canal, and having built it own it. Also, that is why
Europe will say nothing.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 533
every effort to fit themselves, physically, mentally and morally, to do the
best work of which they are capable in this world. I greet you and
welcome you here.
TO THE DELEGATES OF THE INTERPARLIAMENTARY UNION, AT
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C., SEPTEMBER 24, 1904.
Gentlemen of the Interparliamentary Union:
I greet you with profound pleasure as representatives in a special
sense of the great international movement for peace and good will
among the nations of the earth. It is a matter of gratification to all
Americans that we have had the honor of receiving you here as the
nation's guests. You are men skilled in the practical work of govern-
ment in your several countries, and this fact adds weight to your cham-
pionship of the cause of international justice. I thank you for very
kind allusions to what the Government of the United States has accom-
plished for the policies you have at heart, and I assure you that this
government's attitude wil continue unchanged in reference thereto.
We are even now taking steps to secure arbitration treaties with all other
governments which are willing to enter into them with us.
In response to your resolutions, I shall at an early date ask the other
nations to join in a second congress at The Hague. I feel as I am
sure you do, that our efforts should take the shape of pushing forward
toward completion the work already done at The Hague, and that what-
ever is done should appear not as something divergent therefrom, but as
a continuance thereof. At the first conference at The Hague several
questions were left unsettled, and it was expressly provided that there
should be a second conference. A reasonable time has elapsed, and I
feel that your body has shown sound judgment in concluding that a
second conference should now be called to carry some steps further
forward toward completion the work of the first. It would be visionary
to expect too immediate success for the great cause you are champion-
ing; but very substantial progress can be made if we strive with resolu-
tion and good sense toward the goal of securing among the nations of
the earth as among individuals of each nation, a just sense of respon-
sibility in each towards others, and a just recognition in each of the
rights of others. The right and the responsibility must go hand in hand.
Our effort must be unceasing both to secure in each nation full acknowl-
edgment of the rights of others and to bring about in each nation an
ever growing sense of its responsibilities.
At an early date I shall issue the call for the conference you request.
I again greet you and bid you welcome in the name of the American
people, and wish you godspeed in your efforts for the common good
of mankind.
534 Messages and Speeches
IN RESPONSE TO ADDRESS OF PRINCE FUSHIMI, OF JAPAN, AT
THE WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
NOVEMBER 15, 1904.
It gives me unfeigned pleasure to meet your Imperial Highness and
to hear from you the expressions of the friendly sentiments of His
Majesty the Emperor and of the people of Japan toward the United
States of America. I assure you that these sentiments are warmly
reciprocated by me and by the American people.
Ever since the Empire of Japan—at the invitation of this country—
entered upon the career of modern and international progress which
has led to such brilliant results, the relations of the two countries have
been that of unbroken friendship. I pray that those relations may
continue forever, growing always more friendly and more extended,
and I trust that this visit of your Imperial Highness may result in that
increase of good will between this Republic and the Empire of Japan
which will naturally come from more intimate acquaintance and wider
knowledge of each other.
I beg you to convey to His Majesty the Emperor my grateful ap-
preciation of his valued expressions of amity and my best wishes for
his health and happiness, and the prosperity of the Japanese people.
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE STATUE OF FREDERICK THE GREAT,
AT WASHINGTON, D. C., NOVEMBER 19, 1904.
Mr. Ambassador:
Through you I wish, on behalf of the people of the United States,
to thank His Majesty the German Emperor, and the people of
Germany, for the gift to the nation which you have just formally
delivered to me. I accept it with deep appreciation of the regard
which it typifies for the people of this Republic, both on the part
of the Emperor, and on the part of the German people. I accept
it not merely as a statue of one of the half dozen of the greatest
soldiers of all time, and therefore peculiarly appropriate for placing
in this War College, but I accept it as the statue of a great man, whose
life was devoted to the service of a great people, and whose deeds
hastened the approach of the day when a united Germany should spring
into being.
As a soldier, Frederick the Great ranks in that very, very small group
which includes Alexander, Caesar and Hannibal in antiquity, and Napo-
leon and possibly Gustavus Adolphus, in modern times. He belonged
to the ancient and illustrious house of Hohenzollern, which after play-
ing a strong and virile part in the Middle Ages, and after producing
some men, like the Great Elector, who were among the most famous
Theodore Roosevelt 535
princes of their time, founded the royal house of Prussia two centuries
ago, and at last in our own day established the mighty German Empire,
now among the foremost of the world’s powers. We receive this gift
now at the hands of the present Emperor, himself a man who has
markedly added to the luster of his great house and his great nation, a
man who has devoted his life to the welfare of his people, and who,
while keeping ever ready to defend the rights of that people, has also
made it evident in emphatic fashion, that he and they desire friendship
and peace with the other nations of the earth.
It is not my purpose here to discuss at length the career of the
mighty King, and mighty general, whose statue we have just re-
ceived. In all history no other great commander, save only Hannibal,
fought so long against such terrible odds, and while Hannibal finally
failed, Frederick finally triumphed. In almost every battle he fought
against great odds, and he almost always won the victory. When
defeated he rose to an even higher altitude than when victorious.
The memory of the Seven Years' War will last as long as there lives
in mankind the love of heroism, and its operations will be studied to
the minutest detail as long as the world sees a soldier worthy of the
name. It is difficult to know whether to admire most the victories of
Leuthen or Prague, Rossbach or Zorndorf, when the great King,
after having been beaten to the ground by the banded might of Europe,
yet rose again and, by an exhibition of daring such as never before
had been seen united in one person, finally wrested triumph from
defeat.
Not only must the military scholar always turn to the career of
Frederick the Great for lessons in strategy and tactics; not only must
the military administrator always turn to his career for lessons in
organizing success; not only will the lover of heroism read the tales
of his mighty feats as long as mankind cares for heroic deeds; but even
those who are not attracted by the valor of the soldier, must yet, for
the sake of the greatness of the man, ponder and admire the -lessons
taught by his undaunted resolution, his inflexible tenacity of purpose,
his farsighted grasp of lofty possibilities, and his unflinching, unyield-
ing determination in following the path he had marked out.
It is eminently fitting that the statue of this iron soldier, this born
leader of men, should find a place in this War College; for when
soldierly genius and soldierly heroism reach the highest point of
achievement, the man in whom they are displayed has grown to belong
not merely to the nation from which he sprang, but to all nations capable
of showing and therefore capable of appreciating the virile and
masterful virtues which alone make victors in those dread struggles
where resort is at last had to the arbitration of arms.
But, Mr. Ambassador, in accepting the statue given us to-day
536 Messages and Speeches
through you from the German Emperor, I accept it, not merely be-
cause it is the statue of a mighty and terrible soldier, but I accept
it as a symbol of the ties of friendship and good will which I trust
as the years go on will bind ever closer together the American and
German peoples. There is kinship of blood between the two nations.
We of the United States are a mixed stock. In our veins runs
the blood of almost all the people of middle, northern and western
Europe. We already have a history of which we feel that we have
the right to be legitimately proud and yet our nationality is still in
the formative period. Nearly three centuries have elapsed since the
landing of the English at Jamestown marked the beginning of what
has since grown into the United States.
During these three centuries streams of new-comers from many
different countries abroad have in each generation contributed to
swell the increase of our people. Soon after the English settled in
Virginia and New England, the Hollander settled at the mouth of
the Hudson and the Swede at the mouth of the Delaware. Even in
Colonial days the German element had become very strong among
our people in various parts of this country; the Irish element was
predominant in the foothills of the Alleghanies; French Huguenots
were numerous. By the time of the Declaration of Independence, that
process of fusion which has gone on ever since, was well under way.
From the beginning of our national history men of German origin
or German parentage played a distinguished part in the affairs both
of peace and of war. In the Revolutionary War one of the leading
generals was Muhlenburg, an American of German descent just as
among the soldiers from abroad who came to aid us one of the most
prominent was a German, Steuben. Muhlenberg was the first
Speaker of the House of Representatives; and the battle which in
the Revolution saved the valley of the Mohawk to the American cause
was fought under the lead of a German, Herkimer. As all the
different races here tend rapidly to fuse together, it is rarely possible
after one or two generations to draw a sharp line between the various
elements; but there is no student of our national conditions who has
failed to appreciate what a valuable element in our composite stock
is the German. Here on this platform, Mr. Ambassador, among
those present to-day are many men partly of German blood, and among
the officers of the army and navy who have listened to you and who
now join with me in greeting you, there are many whose fathers or
grandfathers were born in Germany, and not a few who themselves
first saw the light there.
Each nation has its allotted tasks to do; each nation has its peculiar
difficulties to encounter;” and as the peoples of the world tend to
*This is true. And yet a nation, with an inborn itch to get busy abroad, ought to be
Theodore Roosevelt 537
become more closely knit together alike for good and for evil, it
becomes ever more important to all that each should prosper; for the
prosperity of one is normally not a sign of menace, but a sign of hope
for the rest. Here on this continent, where it is absolutely essential
that the different peoples coming to our shores should not remain
separate, but should fuse into one, our unceasing effort is to strive to
keep and profit by the good that each race brings to our shores, and
at the same time to do away with all racial and religious animosities
among the various stocks. In both efforts we have met with an
astonishing measure of success. As the years go by it becomes not
harder, but easier, to live in peace and goodwill among ourselves; and
I firmly believe that it will also become not harder, but easier to dwell
in peace and friendship with the other nations of the earth.
A young people, a people of composite stock, we have kinship with
many different nations, but we are identical with none of them, and
are developing a separate national life. We have in our veins the
blood of the Englishman, the Welshman and the Irishman, the German
and the Frenchman, the Scotchman, the Dutchman, the Scandinavian,
the Italian, the Magyar, the Finn, the Slav, so that to each of the
powers of the Old World we can claim a more or less distant kinship
by blood; and to each strain of blood we owe some peculiar quality
in our national life or national character. As such is the case, it is
natural that we should have a peculiar feeling of nearness to each of
many peoples across the water. We most earnestly wish not only to
keep unbroken our friendship for each, but so far as we can without
giving offence by an appearance of meddling, to seek to bring about
a better understanding and a broader spirit of fair dealing and tolera-
tion among all nations. It has been my great pleasure, Mr. Ambas-
sador, in pursuance of this object, recently to take with you the first
steps in the negotiation of a treaty of friendly arbitration between
Germany and the United States.
In closing, let me thank you, and through you, the German Emperor
and the German people, for this statue, which I accept in the name
of the American people, a people claiming blood kinship with your
own, a people owing much to Germany, a people which, though with
a national history far shorter than that of your people, nevertheless,
like your people, is proud of the great deeds of its past, and is confident
in the majesty of its future. I most earnestly pray that in the coming
years these two great nations shall move on toward their several
very sure that whatever business it is about to engage upon is in reality and truth a duty.
Nations are so much like men that they usually pave the way to the transaction of some
piece of pillaging meanness by calling it “their duty.” The word “duty” is commonly
employed when they go about some harsh, cruel, thievish enterprise. The English in South
Africa talked of their “duty” and tore a republic to pieces in the name of liberty.—A. H. L.
538 Messages and Speeches
destinies knit together by ties of the heartiest friendship and good-
will.
AT THE CELEBRATION OF THE IIoTH ANNIVERSARY OF ST.
PATRICK'S ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH, WASH-
INGTON, D. C., NOVEMBER 20, 1904.
Cardinal Gibbons, Father Stafford, and you, my fellow Americans:
It is a great pleasure to me to be present with you to-day to assist
at the dedication of the school, hall and rectory of this parish, a
parish whose one hundred and tenth anniversary we also now cele-
brate. For this parish was founded six years before the National
Capital was placed in the present District of Columbia. I am glad, in-
deed, to have been introduced, Cardinal Gibbons, by you, the spiritual
representative, in a peculiar sense, of that Bishop Carroll who played
so illustrious a part in the affairs of the Church and whose kinsfolk
played so illustrious a part in the affairs of the nation at the dawning
of this government.
In greeting all of you, I wish to say that I am especially glad to see
the children present. You know I believe in children. I want to
see enough of them and of the right kind.
I wish to-day in the very brief remarks that I have to make, to
dwell upon this thought—the thought that ought to be in the minds
of every man and woman here—the thought that while in this country
we need wise laws, honestly and fearlessly executed, and while we
cannot afford to tolerate anything but the highest standard in the
public service of the government, yet in the last analysis the future
of the country must depend upon the quality of the individual man
or woman in the home. The future of this country depends upon
the way in which the average man or the average woman in it does
his or her duty, and that very largely depends upon the way in
which the average boy or girl is brought up. Therefore a peculiar
responsibility rests upon those whose lifework it is to see to the
spiritual welfare of our people and upon those who make it their
lifework to try to train the citizens of the future so that they shall
be worthy of that future.
In wishing you well to-day, I wish you well in doing the most
important work which is allotted to any of our people to do. The
rules of good citizenship are tolerably simple. The trouble is not in
finding them out, the trouble is in living up to them after they have
been found out. I think we all of us know fairly well what qualities
they are which in their sum make up the type of character we like
to see in man or wife, son or daughter. But I am afraid we do not
always see them as well developed as we would like to. I wish to
Theodore Roosevelt 539
see in the average American citizen the development of the two sets
of qualities, which we can roughly indicate as sweetness and strength—
the qualities on the one hand which make the man able to hold his
own, and those which on the other hand make him jealous of the rights
of others just as much as for his own rights.
We must have both sets of qualities. In the first place, the man
must have the power to hold his own. You probably know that I
do not care very much for the coward or the moral weakling. I want
each of you boys and the girls just as much, and each of you young
men and young women, to have the qualities without which people
may be amiable and pleasant while things go well, but without which
they cannot succeed in times of stern trial. I wish to see in the man
manliness, in the woman womanliness. I wish to see courage, per-
severance, the willingness to face work, to face, you men, if it is
necessary, danger, the determination not to shrink back when tem-
porarily beaten in life, as each one will be now and then, but to come
up again and wrest triumph from defeat. I want to see you men
strong men, and brave men, and in addition I wish to see each man
of you feel that his strength and his courage but make him the worse
unless to that strength and courage are joined the qualities of tender-
ness toward those he loves, who are dependent upon him, and right
dealing with all his neighbors.
Finally, I want to congratulate all of us here on certain successes
that we have achieved in the century and a quarter that has gone by
of our American life. We have difficulties forward, and we are a
long way short of perfection. I do not see any immediate danger of
our growing too good. There is ample room for effort yet. But
we have achieved certain results, we have succeeded in measurably
realizing certain ideals. We have grown to accept it as an axiomatic
truth of our American life that the man is to be treated on his worth
as a man, without regard to the accidents of his position ; that this is
not a government designed to favor the rich man as such, or the
poor man as such, but that it is designed to favor every man, rich
or poor, if he is a decent man who acts fairly by his fellows. We have
grown to realize that part of the foundations upon which our liberty
rests is the right of each man to worship his Creator according to the
dictates of his conscience and the duty of each man to respect his fel-
low who so worships him. And, Oh, my countrymen, one of the
best auguries for the future of this country, for the future of this
mighty and majestic nation of ours, lies in the fact that we have
grown to regard one another with a broad and kindly charity, and to
realize that the field for human endeavor is wide, that the field for
charitable, philanthropic, religious work is wide, and that while a
corner of it remains untilled we do a dreadful wrong if we fail to wel-
t
54O Messages and Speeches
come the work done in that field by every man, no matter what his
creed, provided only he works with a lofty sense of his duty to God
and his duty to his neighbor.
INTRODUCING THE REV. CHARLES WAGNER TO AN AUDIENCE
IN LAFAYETTE THEATRE, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
NOVEMBER 22, 1904.
Mr. MacFarland, Mr. Wagner, men and women of Washington:
This is the first and will be the only time during my Presidency
that I shall ever introduce a speaker to an audience; and I am more
than glad to do it in this instance, because if there is one book which
I should like to have read as a tract, and also what is not invariably
true of tracts, as an interesting tract, by all our people, it is “The
Simple Life,” written by Mr. Wagner. There are other books which
he has written from which we can gain great good, but I know of
no other book written in recent years anywhere, here or abroad, which
contains so much that we of America ought to take to our hearts as
is contained in “The Simple Life.”
I like the book because it does not merely preach to the rich and
does not merely preach to the poor. It is a very easy thing to address
a section of the community in reprobation of the forms of vice to which
it is not prone. What we need to have impressed on us is that it is not
usually the root principle of the vice that varies with variation in
social conditions, but that it is the manifestation of the vice that varies;
and Mr. Wagner has well brought out the great fundamental truth
that the brutal arrogance of a rich man who looks down upon a poor
man merely because he is poor, and the envy of the poor man
toward a rich man merely because he is rich, are at bottom twin
manifestations of the same vice. They are simply different sides of
the same shield. The arrogance that looks down in the one case,
the envy that hates in the other are really exhibitions of the same
mean base and unlovely spirit which happens in one case to be in dif-
ferent surroundings from what it is in the other case. The kind of
man who would be arrogant in One case is precisely the kind of man
who would be envious and filled with hatred in the other. The ideal
should be the just, the generous, the broad-minded man who is as in-
capable of arrogance if rich as he is of malignant envy and hatred
if poor.
No republic can permanently exist when it becomes a republic of
classes, where the man feels not the interest of the whole people,
but the interest of the particular class to which he belongs, or fancies
that he belongs, as being of prime importance. In antiquity republics
failed as they did because they tended to become either a republic
Theodore Roosevelt 541
of the few who exploited the many or a republic of the many who
plundered the few, and in either case the end of the republic was
inevitable; just as much in one case as in the other, and no more
so in one case than in the other.
We can keep this republic true to the principles of those who
founded and of those who afterward preserved it, we can keep it a
republic at all, only by remembering that we must live up to the
theory of its founders, to the theory of treating each man on his
worth as a man; holding it neither for nor against him that he occupies
any particular station in life, so long as he does his duty fairly and
well by his fellows and by the nation as a whole. f
So much for the general philosophy taught so admirably in Mr.
Wagner's book—I might say books, but I am thinking especially of
“The Simple Life”, because that has been the book that has appealed
to me particularly. Now a word with special reference to his address
to this audience, to the Young Men's Christian Association. The
profound regard which I have always felt for those responsible for
the work of the Young Men's Christian Association and the Young
Women's Christian Association is largely because they have prac-
tically realized, or at least have striven practically to realize, the ideal
of adherence to the text which reads, “Be ye doers of the word, and not
hearers only.” If you came here to-day with the idea only of passing
a pleasant afternoon and then go home and do not actually practice
somewhat of what Mr. Wagner preaches and practices, then small will
be the use of your coming. It is not of the slightest use to hear the
word, if you do not try to put it into effect afterward. The Young
Men's Christian Associations have accomplished so much because those
who have managed them have tried practically to do their part in
bringing about what is expressed in the phrase “The fatherhood of
God and the brotherhood of man.” We can act individually or we
can act by associations. I intend this afternoon to illustrate by a couple
of examples what I mean by a man acting individually and what I
mean by a man acting in association with his fellows. I hesitated
whether I would use, as I shall use, the names of the people whom
I meant, but I came to the conclusion that I would, because the worth
of an example consists very largely in the knowledge that the example
is a real one.
I have been immensely interested for a number of years in the work-
ing of the Civic Club of New York, which has been started and super-
intended by Norton Goddard. It is a club on the East side of New
York city, the range of whose membership includes a big district of
the city, extending from about Lexington Avenue to the East River.
Mr. Goddard realized that such work can be done to best advantage
only upon condition of there being genuine and hearty sympathy among
542 Messages and Speeches
those doing it. There are a great many people so made in this world
(I think most of us come under the category) that they would resent
being patronized about as much as being wronged. Great good can
never be done if it is attempted in a patronizing spirit. Mr. Goddard
realized that the work could be done efficiently only on condition of
getting into close and hearty touch with the people through whom
and with whom he was to work. In consequence this Civic Club was
founded, and it has gradually extended its operations until now the
entire club membership of three or four thousand men practically form
a committee of betterment in social and civic life—a committee spread
throughout that district, each member keeping a sharp look Out Over
the fortunes of all his immediate neighbors, of all of those of his
neighborhood who do not come within the ken of some other mem-
ber of the club. Any case of great destitution, of great suffering
in the district almost inevitably comes to the attention of some member
of the club, who then reports it at headquarters, so that steps can
be taken to alleviate the misery; and I have reason to believe that
there has been in consequence a very sensible uplifting, a general in-
crease of happiness throughout the district. If we had a sufficient num-
ber of clubs of this kind throughout our cities, while we would not by
any means have solved all the terrible problems that press upon us for
solution in connection with municipal misgovernment and with the
Overcrowding, misery, vice, disease and poverty of great cities, yet we
would have taken a long stride forward in the right direction toward
their solution. So much for the example that I use to illustrate what
I mean by work in combination.
As an example of what can be done, and what should be done, by
the individual citizen, I shall mention something which recently oc-
curred in this city of Washington, a thing that doubtless many of you
know about but which was unknown to me till recently.
A few weeks ago when I was walking back from church on Sunday
I noticed a great fire and found that it was Downey's livery stable—
you recollect it three or four weeks ago, when the livery stable burned.
Through a train of circumstances that I need not mention, my atten-
tion was particularly called to the case, and I looked into it. I had
long known of the very admirable work' done with singular modesty
and self-effacement by Mr. Downey in trying to give homes to the
homeless, and to be himself a friend of those in a peculiar sense friend-
less in this community; and I now, by accident, found out what had
happened in connection with this particular incident. It appears that
last spring Mr. Downey started to build a new livery stable; his stable
is next door to a colored Baptist church. Mr. Downey is a white
man and a Catholic, and these neighbors of his are colored men and
Baptists, and their kinship was simply the kinship of that broad
Theodore Roosevelt 543
humanity that should underlie all our feelings toward one another.
Mr. Downey started to build his stable, and naturally wanted to have
it as big a stable as possible, and build it right up to the limits of his
land. That brought the wall close up against the back of the colored
Baptist Church, cutting out the light and air. The preacher called upon
him and told him that they would like to purchase a strip six feet broad
of the ground of Mr. Downey upon which he was intending to build,
as it would be a great inconvenience to them to lose the light and air;
that they were aware that it was asking a good deal of him to cramp
the building out of which he intended to make his livelihood, but that
they hoped he would do it because of their need. &
After a good deal of thought, Mr. Downey came to the conclusion
that he ought to grant the request, and so he notified them that he
would change his plans, make a somewhat Smaller building, and sell
them the six feet of land, in the strip adjoining their church. After
a little while the preacher came around with the trustees of his church,
and said that they very much appreciated Mr. Downey's courtesy, and
were sorry they had bothered him as they had, because on looking
into the affairs of the church, they found that, as they were already
in debt, they did not feel warranted in incurring any further financial
obligations, and so they had to withdraw their request. They thanked
him for his kindly purpose, and said good-bye.
But Mr. Downey found that he could not get to sleep that night until
finally he made up his mind that, as they could not afford to buy it,
he would give it to them anyway, which he did. But, unfortunately,
we know that the tower of Siloam often falls upon the just and the
unjust alike, and Mr. Downey's livery stable caught fire, and burned
down. It was Sunday morning and the Baptist church was in session
next door to him, and the clergyman stopped, and said, “Now you
women stay here and pray, and you men go straight out and help our
benefactor, Mr. Downey,” and go out they did, and got his horses all
out so that none of them were burned, although he suffered a total
loss.
Now, I call that a practical application of Mr. Wagner's teaching.
Here in Washington we have a right to be proud of a citizen like Mr.
Downey: and if only we can develop enough citizens like that we shall
turn out just the kind of community that does not need to, but will
always be glad to, study “The Simple Life,” the author of which I
now introduce to you.
544 Messages and Speeches
AT THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, ST. LOUIS, MO.,
NOVEMBER 26, 1904.
Mr. Commissioner:
I wish to thank you from my heart for the kind words that you have
just spoken. At this exposition the great Republic of France has a
peculiarly appropriate part; the great nation whose people worked
so much in the past for the discovery and settlement of this continent,
and the people that took this infant nation by the hand to help it up
into the circle of powers. One of your publicists has used the expres-
sion the “peace of justice,” and I am particularly pleased at what
you said as to the efforts of this country to bring about throughout
the world the “peace of justice.”
I wish to propose a toast to President Loubet and the French nation
and may the bonds of friendship that have ever united them with the
United States of America be even tightened in the future.
AT A MEETING OF THE AMERICAN FOREST CONGRESS, AT
WASHINGTON, JANUARY 5, 1905.
It is a pleasure to greet the members of the American Forest Con-
gress. You have made, by your coming, a meeting which is without
parallel in the history of forestry. For the first time the great business
and forest interests of the nation have joined together, through dele-
gates altogether worthy of the organizations they represent, to con-
sider their individual and their common interests in the forest. This
meeting may well be called a congress of forest users, for that you
users of the forest are come together to consider how best to combine
use with conservatism, is to me full of the most hopeful promise possible
for our forests.
The producers, the manufacturers and the great common carriers
of the nation long failed to realize their true and vital relation to
the great forests of the United States, and forests and industries both
suffered from that failure. But the time of indifference and misunder-
standing has gone by. Your coming is a very great step toward the
solution of the forest problem—a problem which cannot be settled
until it is settled right. And it cannot be settled right until the forces
which bring about that settlement come, not from the government, not
even from the newspapers and from public sentiment in general, but
from the active intelligent and effective interest of the men to whom
the forest is important from the business point of view, because they
use it and its products, and whose interest is therefore concrete instead
of general and diffuse. I do not in the least underrate the power
of an awakened public opinion, but in the final test it will be the atti-
tude of the industries of the country which more than anything else
Theodore Roosevelt 545
will determine whether or not our forests are to be preserved. This
is true because by far the greater part of all our forests must pass into
the hands of forest users, whether directly or through the government,
which will continue to hold some of them, but only as trustees. The
forest is for use and its users will decide its future.
The great significance of this congress comes from the fact that
henceforth the movement for the conservative use of the forest is to
come mainly from within, not from without; from the men who are
actively interested in the use of the forest in one way or another, even
more than from those whose interest is philanthropic and general. The
difference means to a large extent the difference between mere agita-
tion and actual accomplishment and the thing done. We believe that
at last forces have been set in motion which will convert the once
distant prospect of the conservation of the forest, by wise use, into the
practical accomplishment of that great end, and of this most hopeful
and significant fact the coming together of this congress is the sufficient
proof.
The place of the forest in the life of any nation is far too large to be
described in the time at my command. This is particularly true of its
place in the United States. The great industries of agriculture, mining,
transportation, grazing, and, of course, lumbering are each one of them
vitally and immediately dependent upon wood, water or grass from
the forest. The manufacturing industries, whether or not wood enters
directly into their finished product, are scarcely, if at all, less dependent
upon the forest than those whose connection with it is obvious and
direct. Wood is an indispensable part of the material structure upon
which civilization rests, and civilized life makes continually greater de-
mands upon the forest. We use not less wood, but more. For ex-
ample, though we consume relatively less wood and relatively more
steel or brick or cement in certain industries than was once the case,
yet, in every instance which I recall, while the relative proportion is
less, the actual increase in the amount of wood used is very great. Thus,
the consumption of wooden shipbuilding is far larger than it was before
the discovery of the art of building iron ships, because vastly more
ships are built. Larger supplies of building lumber are required, di-
rectly or indirectly, for use in the construction of the brick and steel
and stone structures of great modern cities than were consumed by the
comparatively few and comparatively small wooden buildings in the
earlier stages of these same cities. Whatever materials may be sub-
stituted for wood in certain uses, we may confidently expect that the
total demand for wood will not diminish but steadily increase.
It is a fair question, then, whether the vast demands of the future
upon our forests are likely to be met. No man is a true lover of his
country whose confidence in its progress and greatness is limited to
546 Messages and Speeches
the period of his own life, and we cannot afford for one instant to
forget that our country is only at the beginning of its growth. Unless
the forests of the United States can be made ready to meet the vast
demands which this growth will inevitably bring, commercial disaster
is inevitable. The railroads must have ties, and the best opinion of the
experts is that no substitute has yet been discovered which will satis-
factorily replace the wooden tie. This is largely due to the great and
continually increasing speeds at which our trains are run. The miner
must have timber or he cannot operate his mine, and in very many cases
the profit which mining yields is directly proportionate to the cost
of the timber supply. The farmer, East and West, must have timber
for numberless uses on his farm, and he must be protected by forest
cover upon the headwaters of the streams he uses, from floods in the
East, and the lack of water for irrigation in the West. The stockman
must have fence posts and very often he must have summer range for
his stock in the national forest preserve. In a word, both the produc-
tion of the great staples upon which our prosperity depends and their
movement in commerce throughout the United States are inseparably
dependent upon the existence of permanent and suitable supplies from
the forest at a reasonable cost.*
If the present rate of forest destruction is allowed to continue, a
timber famine is inevitable. Fire, wasteful and destructive forms of
lumbering and legitimate use are together destroying our forest re-
sources far more rapidly than they are being replaced. What such a
famine would mean to each of the industries of the United States it is
scarcely possible to imagine. And the period of recovery from the
injuries which a timber famine would entail would be measured by
the slow growth of the trees themselves. Fortunately, the remedy is a
simple one, and your presence here is proof that it is being applied.
It is the great merit of the Department of Agriculture in its forest
work that its efforts have been directed to enlist the sympathy and
co-operation of the users of wood, water and grass, and to show that
forestry will pay and does pay, rather than to exhaust itself in the
futile attempt to introduce conservative methods by any other means.
The department gives advice and assistance, which it will be worth
your while to know more about, and its policy is one of helpfulness
throughout, and never of hostility and coercion toward any legitimate
interest whatsoever. In the very nature of things, it can make little
progress apart from you. Whatever it may be possible for the govern-
*One great cause of President Roosevelt’s success as a statesman is that he believes in
frankness and a full speaking of the truth. He does not subscribe to that statesmanship
which founds itself on mendacity and silence—which never speaks and always lies. He is for
an honesty that not only speaks the truth but never suppresses the truth. He is for an
honesty that deals justly with the future as much as with the present. He no more favors
robbing posterity than robbing the man next door. By the same token he is for protecting
our forests, not for us but for those who shall come after us, LA. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 547
ment to accomplish, its work must ultimately fail unless your interest
and support give it permanence and power. It is only as the pro-
ducing and commercial interests of the country come to realize that
they need to have trees growing up in the forest not less than they
need the product of the trees cut down that we may hope to see the
permanent prosperity of both safely assured.
This statement is true not only as to forests in private ownership but
as to the national forests as well. Unless the men from the West
believe in forest preservation, the Western forests cannot be preserved.
The policy under which the President creates these national forests is
a part of the general policy of the administration to give every part
of the public lands their highest use. That policy can be given effect
in the long run only through the willing assistance of the Western
people, and that such assistance will be given in full measure there can
no longer be any doubt.
I want to add a word as to the creation of a national forest service,
which I have recommended repeatedly to Congress in my messages and
especially in the last. I mean the concentration of all the forest work
of the government in the Department of Agriculture. As I have had
Occasion to say over and over again, the policy which this administra-
tion is trying to carry out through the creation of such a service is
that of making the national forests more actively and more perma-
nently useful to the people of the West, and I am heartily glad to
know that Western sentiment supports more and more vigorously
the policy of setting aside national forests, the policy of creating a
national forest service, and especially the policy of increasing the
permanent usefulness of these forest lands to all those who come in
contact with them. With what is rapidly getting to be the unbroken
sentiment of the West behind this forest policy, and with what is
rapidly getting to be the unbroken support of the great industries be-
hind the general policy of the conservative use of the forest, we have
a right to feel that we have entered on an era of great and lasting
progress. Much, very much, yet remains to be done; but the future
is bright, and the permanence of our timber supplies is far more
nearly assured than at any previous time in our history. To the men
whom this congress contains and represents this great result is due.
In closing, I wish to thank you who are here, not merely for what you
are doing in this particular movement, but for the fact that you are
illustrating what I hope I may call the typically American method of
meeting questions of great and vital importance to the nation—the
method of seeing whether the individuals particularly concerned can-
not, by getting together and co-operating with the government, do
definitely more for themselves than it would be possible for any gov-
ernment under the sun to do for them. .
548 Messages and Speeches
I believe in the future of this movement, because I think you have
the right combination of qualities—the quality of individual initiative,
the quality of individual resourcefulness, combined with the quality
that enables you to come together for mutual help, and having so
come together to work with the government; and I pledge you in the
fullest measure the support of the government in what you are doing.
TO A COMMITTEE OF THE INTER-CHURCH CONFERENCE ON
MARRIAGE AND DIVORCE, AT WHITE HOUSE, WASH-
INGTON, D. C., JANUARY 26, 1905.
Bishop and gentlemen:
It is a very great pleasure to meet you here. There is a certain
tendency to exalt the unessential in dealing with our public questions,
and public men especially are apt to get their attention concentrated on
questions that have an importance, but a wholly ephemeral importance,
compared with the questions that go straight to the root of things.
Questions like the tariff and the currency are literally of no con-
sequence whatsoever, compared with the vital question of having the
unit of our social life, the home, preserved. It is impossible to over-
estimate the importance of the cause you represent. If the average
husband and wife fulfil their duties toward one another and toward
their children as Christianity teaches them, then we may rest abso-
lutely assured that the other problems will solve themselves. But if
we have solved every other problem in the wisest possible way, it shall
profit us nothing if we have lost our own national soul; and we will ,
have lost it if we do not have the question of the relations of the
family put upon the proper basis.
While I do not know exactly what it is you wish me to do, I can
say in advance that so far as in me lies all will be done to co-operate
with you toward the end that you have in view. One of the most
unpleasant and dangerous features of Our American life is the diminish-
ing birth rate and the loosening of the marital tie among the old native
American families. It goes without saying that, for the race as for
the individual, no material prosperity, no business growth, no artistic
or scientific development will count if the race commits suicide. There-
fore, Bishop, I count myself fortunate in having the chance to work
with you in this matter of vital importance to the national welfare.
AT THE REDEDICATION OF THE LUTHER PLACE MEMORIAI,
CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., JANUARY 29, 1905.
Dr. Butler:
It is a great pleasure to meet with you this morning and say a word
of greeting on the occasion of the rededication of this church, coming
Theodore Roosevelt 549
as it does almost simultaneously with the entry of your pastor into his
eightieth year.
From the standpoint from which I am obliged so continuously to
look at matters, there is a peculiar function to be played by the great
Lutheran Church in the United States of America. This is a church
which had its rise to power in and, until it emigrated to this side of
the water, had always had its fullest development in the two great races
of northern and northern middle Europe—the German and the Scandi-
navian. The Lutheran Church came to the territory which is now the
United States very shortly after the first permanent settlements were
made within our limits, for when the earliest settlers came to dwell
around the mouth of the Delaware they brought the Lutheran wor-
ship with them, and so with the earliest German settlers, who came to
Pennsylvania and afterwards to New York, and the mountainous re-
gion in the western part of Virginia and the states south of it. From
that day to this the history of the growth in population of this nation
has consisted largely, in some respects mainly, of the arrival of suc-
cessive waves of newcomers to our shores, and the prime duty of those
already in the land is to see that their own progress and development
are shared by these newcomers.
It is a serious and dangerous thing for any man to tear loose from
the soil, from the region in which he and his forbears have taken root,
and to be transplanted into a new land. He should receive all possible aid
in that new land, and the aid can be tendered him most effectively by
those who can appeal to him on the ground of spiritual kinship. There-
fore the Lutheran Church can do most in helping upward and onward
so many of the newcomers to our shores; and it seems to me that it
should be, I am tempted to say, wellnigh the prime duty of this Church,
to see that the immigrant, especially the immigrant of Lutheran faith
from the Old World, whether he comes from Germany or Scandinavia,
or whether he belongs to one of the Lutheran countries of Finland or
Hungary or Austria, may not be suffered to drift off with no friendly
hand extended to him out of all the Church communion, away from
all the influences that tend to safeguarding and uplifting him, and
that he find ready at hand in this country those eager to bring him into
fellowship with the existing bodies.
The Lutheran Church in this country is of very great power numeri-
cally, and through the intelligence and thrift of its members, but it
will grow steadily to even greater power. It is destined to be one
of the two or three greatest and most important national churches in
the United States; one of two or three churches most distinctly Amer-
ican, most distinctively among the forces that are to tell for making
this great country even greater in the future. Therefore a peculiar
load of responsibility rests upon the members of this church. It is an
55O Messages and Speeches
important thing for the people of this great nation to remember their
rights, but it is an even more important thing for them to remember
their duties. In the last analysis the work of statesmen and soldiers,
the work of public men, shall go for nothing if it is not based on the
spirit of Christianity working in the millions of homes throughout this
country, so that there may be that social, that spiritual, that moral
foundation, without which no country can ever rise to permanent
greatness. For material wellbeing, material prosperity, success in
arts, in letters, great industrial triumphs, all of them and all of the
structure raised thereon will be as evanescent as a dream if they do not
rest on the “righteousness that exalteth a nation.”
Let me congratulate you and let me congratulate all of us that we
live in a land and at a time when we accept it as natural that this
should be an inter-denominational service of thanksgiving, such a cere-
mony as is to take place this afternoon, in which the pastors of other
churches join to congratulate themselves and you upon the rebuilding
of this church. One of the constant problems of life is to try to culti-
vate breadth without shallowness, just as we want to cultivate depth
without narrowness. It seems to me our good fortune that men have
been able to combine fervor in doing the Lord’s work with charity
toward their brethren who do it with certain differences in the non-
essentials. The forces of evil are strong and mighty in this century
and in this country, as they are in other countries; and the people who
sincerely wish to do the Lord’s work will find ample opportunity for
all their labor in fighting the common enemy and in assuming toward
their fellows of a different confession an attitude of generous rivalry
in the effort to see how the most good can be done to our people as a
whole. I thank you for having given me the chance to speak to you
this morning, to say a word of greeting to you and to wish you godspeed
with all my heart.
AT THE FORTY-SECOND ANNIVERSARY BANQUET OF THE
UNION LEAGUE CLUB, PHILADELPHIA,
JANUARY 30, 1905.
This club was founded to uphold the hands of Abraham Lincoln when
he stood as the great leader in the struggle for union and liberty.
We have a right, therefore, to appeal to this club for aid in every gov-
ernmental or social effort made along the lines marked out by Lincoln.
The great President taught many lessons which we who come after
him should learn. Among the most important of these was the lesson
that for weal or for woe we are indissolubly bound together, in what-
ever part of the country we live, whatever our social standing, what-
ever our wealth or our poverty, whatever form of mental or physical
Theodore Roosevelt 55I
activity our life work may assume. Lincoln, who was, more emphati-
cally than any other President we have ever had, the President of
the plain people, was yet as far removed as Washington himself from
the slightest taint of demagogy. With his usual farsighted clearness
of vision he saw that in a republic such as ours permanent prosperity
of any part of our people was conditioned upon the prosperity of all;
and that on the other hand, any effort to raise the general level of
happiness by striking at the well-being of a portion of the people
could not but be, in the end, disastrous to all.
The principles which Lincoln applied to the solution of the problems
of his day are those which we must apply if we expect successfully to
solve the different problems of our own day—problems which are
so largely industrial. Exactly as it is impossible to develop a high
morality unless we have as a foundation those qualities which give
at least a certain minimum of material prosperity, so it is impossible
permanently to keep material prosperity unless there is back of it a
basis of right living and right thinking. In the last analysis, of course,
the dominant factor in obtaining this good conduct must be the indi-
vidual character of the average citizen. If there is not this condition
of individual character in the average citizenship of the country, all
effort to supply its place by the wisest legislation and administration
will in the end prove futile. But given this average of individual
character, then wise laws and the honest administration of the laws
can do much to supplement it.
If either the business world or the world of labor loses its head, then
it has lost something which cannot be made good by any governmental
effort. Our faith in the future of the republic is firm, because we
believe that on the whole and in the long run our people think clearly
and act rightly.
Unquestionably, however, the great development of industrialism
means that there must be an increase in the supervision exercised by
the government over business enterprises. This supervision should
not take the form of violent and ill-advised interference; and assuredly
there is danger lest it take such form if the business leaders of the
business community confine themselves to trying to thwart the effort
at regulation instead of guiding it aright.
Such men as the members of this club should lead in the effort to
secure proper supervision and regulation of corporate activity by the
government, not only because it is for the interest of the community
as a whole that there should be this supervision and regulation, but
because in the long run it will be in the interest above all of the very
people who often betray alarm and anger when the proposition is
first made.
Neither this people nor any other free people will permanently tol-
552 Messages and Speeches
erate the use of the vast power conferred by vast wealth, and espe-
cially by wealth in its corporate form, without lodging somewhere in
the government the still higher power of seeing that this power, in
addition to being used in the interest of the individual or individuals
possessing it, is also used for and not against the interests of the people
as a whole. Our peculiar form of government, a government in
which the nation is supreme throughout the Union in certain respects,
while each of nearly half a hundred States is supreme in its part of
the Union in certain other respects, renders the task of dealing with
these conditions especially difficult.
No finally satisfactory result can be expected from merely State
action. The action must come through the Federal government. The
business of the country is now carried on in a way of which the founders
of our Constitution could by no possibility have had any idea.
All great business concerns are engaged in interstate commerce, and
it was beyond question the intention of the founders of our govern-
ment that interstate commerce in all its branches and aspects should
be under national and not State control. If the courts decide that
this intention was not carried out and made effective in the Constitu-
tion as it now stands, then in the end the Constitution, if not construed
differently, will have to be amended so that the original undoubted
intention may be made effective.” But, of course, a constitutional
amendment is only to be used as a last resort if every effort of legisla-
tion and administration shall have been proved inadequate.
Meanwhile the men in public life and the men who direct the great
business interests of the country should work not in antagonism
but in harmony toward this given end. In entering a field where the
progress must of necessity be so largely experimental it is essential that
the effort to make progress should be tentative and cautious. We
must grow by evolution, not by revolution. There must be no hurry,
but there must also be no halt; and those who are anxious that there
should be no sudden and violent changes must remember that precisely
these sudden and violent changes will be rendered likely if we refuse
to make the needed changes in cautious and moderate manner.
At the present moment the greatest need is for an increase in the
power of the national government to keep the great highways of
*The stalwart modernity of the Roosevelt thought is everywhere evidenced by his readi-
ness to suggest amendment whether it be 1m the morals of the individual or the constitution
of the nation. This genius for amendment and a change that improves, is highly discouraging
to a certain sort of conservative to whom disturbance sounds always like destruction. There
are people so wedded to the past that they are inclined to refuse and turn their backs on the
new moon, because of the respect and veneration in which they hold the old one. To that
sort of citizen, the name “Roosevelt,” standing as it does for transformation and advance,
brings uneasiness vel ging upon terror. They fear him, not because he is wrong but because
he is strong and gifted with a bent for action. Also, the mere fact of stréngth is ever
alarming to weakness, and men who could not shake footstools are born afraid of one who
might shake thrones.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 553
commerce open alike to all on reasonable and equitable terms. Less
than a century ago these highways were still, as they had been since
the dawn of history, either waterways, natural or artificial, or else
ordinary roads for wheel vehicles drawn by animal power. The railroad,
which was utterly unknown when our government was formed and
when the great principles of our jurisprudence were laid down, has
now become almost everywhere the most important, and, in many
large regions, the only form of highway for commerce. The man
who controls its use cannot be permitted to control it in his own in-
terest alone.
It is not only just, but it is in the interest of the public, that this
man should receive the amplest payment for the masterful business
capacity which enables him to benefit himself while benefiting the
public; but in return he must himself recognize his duty to the public.
He will not and cannot do this if our laws are so defective that in the
sharp competition of the business world the conscientious man is put
at a disadvantage by his less scrupulous fellows.
It is in the interest of the conscientious and public-spirited railway
man that there should be such governmental supervision of the railway
traffic of the country as to require from his less scrupulous competitors,
and from unscrupulous big shippers as well, that heed to the public
welfare which he himself would willingly give, and which is of vital
consequence to the small shipper. Every important railroad is en-
gaged in interstate commerce. Therefore, this control over the railroads
must come through the national government.
The control must be exercised by some governmental tribunal, and
it must be real and effective. Doubtless there will be risk that occa-
sionally, if an unfit President is elected, this control will be abused ;
but this is only another way of saying that any adequate governmental
power, from the power of taxation down, can and will be abused if
the wrong men get control of it.
The details must rest with the law-makers of the two Houses of
Congress; but about the principle there can be no doubt. Hasty or
vindictive action would merely work damage; but in temperate, resolute
fashion, there must be lodged in some tribunal the power over rates,
and especially over rebates—whether secured by means of private cars,
or private tracks, in the form of damages, or commissions, or in any
other manner—which will protect alike the railroad and the shipper,
and put the big shipper and the little shipper on an equal footing.
Doubtless no law would accomplish all that enthusiasts hope; there is
always disappointment over the results of such a law among the over-
sanguine; but very real and marked good has come from the legisla-
tion and administration of the last few years; and now, as part of a
coherent plan, it is entirely possible, and, indeed, necessary, to enact
554 Messages and Speeches
an additional law which will mean further progress along the same lines
of definite achievement in the direction of securing fair dealing as
between man and man.
In some such body as the Interstate Commerce Commission there
must be lodged in effective shape the power to see that every shipper
who uses the railroads and every man who owns or manages a rail-
road shall on the one hand be given justice and on the other hand be
required to do justice. Justice—so far as it is humanly possible to
give and to get justice—is the foundation of our government. We
are not trying to strike down the rich man; on the contrary, we
will not tolerate any attack upon his rights. We are not trying to give
an improper advantage to the poor man because he is poor, to the
man of small means because he has not larger means; but we are
striving to see that the man of small means has exactly as good a
chance, so far as we can obtain it for him, as the man of larger means;
that there shall be equality of opportunity for the one as for the other.
We do not intend that this republic shall ever fail as those repub-
lics of olden time failed, in which there finally came to be a govern-
ment by classes, which resulted either in the poor plundering the rich
or in the rich exploiting and in one form or another enslaving the
poor; for either event means the destruction of free institutions and
of individual liberty. Ours is not a government which recognizes
classes. It is based on the recognition of the individual. We are not
for the poor man as such, nor for the rich man as such. We are for
every man, rich or poor, provided he acts justly and fairly by his fel-
lows, and if he so acts the government must do all it can to see that
inasmuch as he does no wrong, so he shall suffer no wrong.
AT THE GRADUATING EXERCISES OF THE UNITED STATES
NAVAL ACADEMY, AT ANNAPOLIS, M.D., JANUARY 30, 1905.
Governor Warfield, Capt. Brownson, members of the graduating class,
midshipmen and your friends and kinsmen here gathered together:
I fail to see how any good American can be other than a better
American when he comes here to Annapolis and sees the academy as it
is, and as it soon will be, thanks to the wise munificence of Congress;
and I am not surprised that you who graduate from this institution
should make the kind of men that as a rule you do make afterward;
should show the qualities of courage, of lofty fidelity to duty, of de-
votion to the flag, and of farsighted preparedness to meet possible
future emergencies; should show the traits which I think, Capt. Brown-
son, I can only say without flattery, characterize the service to which
you belong. I am not surprised that you should show those traits,
for I should be heartily ashamed of you if you did not. More than any
Theodore Roosevelt 555
other people in this country, with the sole exception of those in the
sister service who have had your advantages, you owe a peculiar fealty
to the nation which has trained you, which has given you a career
in after life, a career in which, if you do your duty, you are sure to
lead honorable lives, and to deserve well of the republic; and a career
in which there is always the chance that you may spring into one of
those few places to be occupied by the men of the nation who win
deathless fame for themselves by the way in which they serve the
nation in the hour of the nation’s need. On the one hand we have
the right to expect a peculiar measure of self-sacrificing service from
you. On the other hand, we have the right to expect from the rep-
resentatives of the people a peculiar care for your interests. It is well
that every public man should feel under a peculiar obligation to see to
the welfare of the army and the navy.
Governor Warfield, if you will pardon the personal allusion, I want to
thank you for the way in which you have made evident your feeling
toward this institution, for the reception you gave just the other night
to these very men about to graduate. It is well that they should under-
stand that because of the position they hold the Governor of the great
State in which the institution is situated recognizes their possibilities
of usefulness to the country, the obligations due them, and the obliga-
tions we have a right to feel that they will recognize to the whole nation
in return.
There are a good many baseless alarms which some worthy people
feel from time to time in this country, and which other less worthy
people affect to feel, but of all foolish crimes, of all baseless figments
of a disturbed imagination, the cry of militarism in this country is the
most foolish and the most baseless. Not only there does not exist now,
but there never has existed in recent times, any nation so wholly free
as this is from any danger of excessive militarism, so wholly free from
any danger of an undue growth of the military spirit. The danger is
now, will be, and always has been, the exact reverse; the danger is lest
we do not take sufficient thought in preparing the men and material
which will make our attitude in claiming to be a great nation respected.
I would be sorry to see us content to assume the position of a nation
unwilling and unable to play a great part in the world, unable to hold
its own in the shock of arms, should it be ever necessary, which I
most earnestly hope that in the life time of fio man here present it will
be necessary. Should it ever be necessary, and I hope it will not be,
to appeal to arms, I should be sorry to see us take the position of
avowed weakness, take the position that we did not intend to rank
ourselves among the great powers of the earth. I should be sorry
to see that; but I would a great deal rather see that than see us insist
upon taking such a position and refuse to provide the means which
556 Messages and Specches
would make such a position other than a sham. If this country be-
lieves in the Monroe Doctrine; if this country intends to hold the Philip-
pines; if it intends, besides building, to police the Isthmian Canal; if
it intends to do its duty on the side of civilization, on the side of law
and order, and that duty can be done only by the just man armed—if
this country intends to do that, then it must see to it that it is able to
make good, if the necessity arises to make good.
It is idle to talk of our faith in the Monroe Doctrine if we are not
able to make that faith evident. It is foolish to remain permanently in
the Philippines unless we provide a base of military action for our fleets
and army, should it be necessary to defend the Philippines in time of
war. It is foolish to assert our position as entitled to the respect of other
great nations unless we are willing to build the ships, to build the guns,
and to train the men who are to man the ships and handle the guns, if
the need arises. I should be ashamed to see this nation play the part
of a weakling. But I would rather see it play that part frankly than
see it boast itself a great nation and then so handle itself that if any one
questioned the boast we should have to retreat from the position we
assumed because we lacked the power to make our words good.
I earnestly hope that our foreign policy shall be continued absolutely
without regard to change of administration, to change of party, along
the lines of treating every foreign nation with all possible respect, of
avoiding all provocation for war or trouble of any kind, of taking every
step possible to minimize the chance of trouble occurring; and at the
same time of taking every step possible to see to it that if by any chance
trouble does occur we do not come out second best.
Just at this moment, to illustrate what I mean, we have negotiated
certain arbitration treaties with the great foreign powers. I most ear-
nestly hope that those arbitration treaties will become partofthe supreme
law of the land. Every friend of peace will join heartily in seeing that
those arbitration treaties do become part of the supreme law of the land.
By adopting them we will have taken a step, not a very long step, but
undoubtedly a step in the direction of minimizing the chance for any
trouble that might result in war; we will have in measurable degree
provided for a method of substituting international disputes other than
that of war, as regards certain subjects, and as regards the particular
nations with whom those treaties are negotiated. We can test the sin-
cerity of those people devoted to peace largely by seeing whether this
people does in effective fashion desire to have those treaties ratified, to
have those treaties adopted. I have proceeded upon the assumption
that this nation was sincere when it said that it desired peace, that all
proper steps to provide against the likelihood of war ought to be taken,
and these arbitration treaties represent precisely those steps.
But the adoption of those treaties by themselves would not bring
Theodore Roosevelt 557
peace. We are a good many years short of the millennium yet, and for
the present and the immediate future we can rest assured that the word
of the man who is suspected of desiring peace because he is afraid of
war will count for but little. What we desire is to have it evident that
this nation seeks peace, not because it is afraid, but because it believes
in the eternal and immutable laws of justice and of right living.
Therefore, hand in hand with the negotiation of treaties of that
character; hand in hand with the effort to put our foreign relations
with every nation on a better footing must go the steady upbuilding of
the army and the navy—above all the navy—so that our national honor
may be sure of an adequate safeguard should our national honor ever be
actively menaced.
I want to say a word to you boys here in particular. I am about to
have the good fortune to present a sword to the best gunner, and certain
medals, also for gunnery. The sword is given by the class of ’71, given
annually, so as to put a premium upon markmanship, and, Capt.
Brownson, I would like through you to thank the members of that class
for the patriotic service they have done in making such a gift.
The one thing that you graduates here, and all of the others in this
school, must remember is that you ought to bend your entire energies
to fitting yourselves as you can only be fitted by the most careful train-
ing in advance for the possible supreme day when, upon your success or
your failure, will depend not only whether your own lives will be
crowned with triumph or blasted with ruin, but whether the nation
will write a page of glory or a page of shame on her history.
There is not one of you who is not derelict in his duty to the whole
nation if he fails to prepare himself with all the strength that in him lies
to do his duty should the occasion arise; and one of your great duties
is to see that shots hit. The result is going to largely depend upon
whether you or your adversary hits. I expect you to be brave. I
rather take that for granted. It is not that you are to be com-
mended much for bravery. You would be condemned forever if
you lacked it. If you lacked it in the highest form, courage, physical
and moral, the courage that will assume responsibility, no less than the
courage that without a thought will face death, that we have a right
to expect from every one of you, and I say that you are less to be com-
mended for having it than to be condemned for failure to have it.
But in addition you have got to prepare yourselves in advance. Every
naval action that has taken place within the last twenty years in which
our own ships have been engaged, or in which any foreign ships have
been engaged, has shown, as a rule, that the defeated party has suffered
not from lack of courage, but because it could not make the best use of
its weapons, or had not been given the right weapons. Occasionally, of
course, if the victor happened to be matched against people who did
558 Messages and Speeches
not show courage, the courage counted. But I want every one here to
proceed upon the assumption that any foe he may meet will have the
courage. Of course you have got to show the highest degree of cour-
age yourself or you will be beaten anyhow, and you will deserve to be ;
but in addition to that you must prepare yourselves by careful training
so that you may make the best possible use of the delicate and formid-
able mechanism of a modern warship. The reason that you are trained
here, the reason that you are put through this academy, the reason that
your training goes on in the service is because without that training no
man can hope to do the work that is set before you to do. It is equally
true that the training cannot be given you only from without unless
you actively and earnestly seek to get the best possible benefit from it
yourselves; that the best teachers, the best superiors can not supply
wholly or more than in very small part the lack of that which is within
you.
No other body of men of your age in our country owes so much to
the United States, to the flag that symbolizes this nation, as you do. No
other body of young men has on the average as great a chance as each
of you has to lead a life of honor to himself and of benefit to the country
at large. Deep will be our shame if you fail to rise level to your oppor-
tunities and duties, and great will be the honor that I know you will win
because I know that, judging you by those who have gone before you
in the service, you will rise level to your opportunities and keep untar-
nished the proud fame of the American officer.
AT THE BANQUET OF THE NEW YORK PRESS CLUB, NEW YORK,
FEBRUARY 13, 1905.
As my friend, Congressman Sulzer, will tell you, in Washington
and generally elsewhere, in politics, about 95 per cent. of the really
important work has nothing political in it. That 95 per cent. includes an
immense amount of worrying problems of how to get middling decent
government; and it is part of the creed of all public servants who aspire
to be thought decent public servants that when it comes to a question of
honesty there are no party lines. We can afford to differ widely among
ourselves on questions of the currency, of the tariff, and many other
subjects; we cannot afford to differ on the elemental question of getting
honest and decent service for the public from no matter which party,
from no matter what man happens to be in power.
It is not a matter of credit to be honest, any more than it is a matter
of credit to a soldier to be brave. It is a discredit to be dishonest, just
as it is a discredit to be a coward.” And in our internal affairs the major
*There are men in office who, honest enough themselves, are forever engaged upon dis-
honest acts. They are the Oliver Twists of public life whom some Boss—some Bill Sykes of
Theodore Roosevelt 559
part of the problem after all is seeing that the inefficient man is, if pos-
sible, kept out of office; but if he is put in, that his stay may be as brief
as possible, and that if he is crooked, nothing shall avail. You see, our
internal policy as a nation is a perfectly simple policy.
Now as regards our external policy. I am glad to see that you have
our good friend, the German Ambassador, here to-night. I am glad
that you invited the representatives of the various foreign countries, and
I want to say just a word about the general attitude of our people in
their foreign policy, as to what it should be. Fundamentally, it ought
to be based on just about the principle that ought to govern each private
individual citizen in dealing with his fellow, on the principle of trying
to act squarely by every other nation, and of exacting square treatment
in return. t
And this is another point. Besides acting squarely, talk politely.
Yes, and have the “big stick”, too, but do not brandish it. In private
life not only do we object to being wronged, but we object almost as
much to being insulted. Isn’t that true? Exactly. Now, let us apply it
in public life in the same way. And this applies, gentlemen, not only to
public men, but to writers for the public press. I do wish that every
public man and every public writer could realize the extreme desirability
of speaking courteously and considerately of all foreign nations, of all
Outside powers. To speak discourteously, insultingly, does not do them
any harm; it may irritate them, and therefore, it may do us some harm.
And we all of us know, in private life, that it is not the man who
speaks loudest and who is most prone to disregard the feelings of others,
upon whom we can most rely in the event of a quarrel. Isn’t that so?
On the contrary, while there are exceptions to the rule, it is neverthe-
less the rule that the man who is considerate of the feelings of others,
who does not put them in a position where they feel obliged to resent
an insult, is himself the man who is apt to be most dangerous if insulted
or wronged. And the man we respect is the man who, while perfectly
able to protect his own.rights, is scrupulously careful neither to insult
nor to wrong any one else. Now that is the ideal I want to see set before
us as a nation, and the ideal up to which I hope to see our people live.
If we want to pick out the failings and follies of mankind to assail,
there are plenty of them within our own limits as a nation, and we are
going to do much more good to mankind by striving to uplift ourselves
than by expressing reprehension of and solicitude concerning the morals .
of somebody else who won't care for our feelings except to resent them.
It is the mark, or it should be the mark, of a strong, self-respecting
nation never wantonly to injure the feelings or to infringe upon the
rights of any other people. In a nation such as ours, a nation where the
party—uses to open the door to his crimes. It is this solt of weakling in office who, while
wedded to public virtue, seems to be ever and unaccountably quarreling with his wife.—A. H. L.
560 Messages and Speeches
government is literally a government of the whole people, that idea can
be carried out only if as a people, on the stump and in the press, we
endeavor to speak moderately, fairly, pleasantly of other nations;
and, at the same time, remember to keep our navy built up and in good
fighting trim. I hope to see it made evident by our whole action that
we mean well toward our neighbors, that we not only do not intend to
do them any material damage, to disregard their rights, but that we also
intend to have due and proper respect for their feelings.
AT THE LINCOLN DINNER OF THE REPUBLICAN CLUB, NEW
YORK, FEBRUARY 13, 1905.
In his second inaugural, in a speech which will be read as long as
the memory of this nation endures, Abraham Lincoln closed by saying:
“With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the
right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work
we are in ; * * * to do all which may achieve and cherish a just
and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations.”
Immediately after his re-election he had already spoken thus:
“The strife of the election is but human nature practically applied to
the facts of the case. What has occurred in this case must ever recur in
similar cases. Human nature will not change. In any future great
national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak
and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us, there-
fore, study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from,
and none of them as wrongs to be revenged. * * * May not all
having a common interest reunite in a common effort to serve Our
common country? For my own part, I have striven and shall strive to
avoid placing any obstacle in the way. So long as I have been here I
have not willingly planted a thorn in any man’s bosom. While I am
deeply sensible to the high compliment of a re-election, and duly grate-
ful, as I trust, to Almighty God for having directed my countrymen to
a right conclusion, as I think, for their own good, it adds nothing to my
satisfaction that any other man may be disappointed or pained by the
result. May I ask those who have not differed with me to join with me
in this same spirit toward those who have?”
This is the spirit in which mighty Lincoln sought to bind up the
nation's wounds when its soul was yet seething with fierce hatreds, with
wrath, with rancor, with all the evil and dreadful passions provoked by
civil war. Surely this is the spirit which all Americans should show
now, when there is so little excuse for malice or rancor or hatred, when
there is so little of vital consequence to divide brother from brother.
Lincoln, himself a man of Southern birth, did not hestitate to appeal
to the sword when he became satisfied that in no other way could the
Theodore Roosevelt 561
Union be saved, for high though he put peace he put righteousness still
higher. He warred for the Union; he warred to free the slave; and
when he warred he warred in earnest, for it is a sign of weakness to be
half-hearted when blows must be struck. But he felt only love, a love
as deep as the tenderness of his great and sad heart, for all his country-
men alike in the North and in the South, and he longed above every-
thing for the day when they should once more be knit together in the
unbreakable bonds of eternal friendship.
We of to-day, in dealing with all our fellow-citizens, white or
colored, North or South, should strive to show just the qualities that
Lincoln showed; his steadfastness in striving after the right, and his
infinite patience and forbearance with those who saw that right less
clearly than he did ; his earnest endeavor to do what was best, and yet
his readiness to accept the best that was practicable when the ideal best
was unattainable; his unceasing effort to cure what was evil, coupled
with his refusal to make a bad situation worse by any ill-judged or ill-
timed effort to make it better.
The great Civil War, in which Lincoln towered as the loftiest figure,
left us not only a reunited country, but a country which has the proud
right to claim as its own the glory won alike by those who wore the
blue and by those who wore the gray, by those who followed Grant and
by those who followed Lee; for both fought with equal bravery and
with equal sincerity of conviction, each striving for the light as it was
given him to see the light; though it is now clear to all that the triumph
of the cause of freedom and of the Union was essential to the welfare
of mankind. We are now one people, a people with failings which we
must not blink, but a people with great qualities in which we have the
right to feel just pride.
All good Americans who dwell in the North must, because they are
good Americans, feel the most earnest friendship for their fellow-
countrymen who dwell in the South, a friendship all the greater because
it is in the South that we find in its most acute phase one of the gravest
problems before our people; the problem of so dealing with the man
of one color as to secure him the rights that no one would grudge him
if he were of another color. To solve this problem it is, of cottrse, neces-
sary to educate him to perform the duties, a failure to perform which
will render him a curse to himself and to all around him.
Most certainly all clear-sighted and generous men in the North
appreciate the difficulty and perplexity of this problem, sympathize with
the South in the embarrassment of conditions for which she is not alone
responsible, feel an honest wish to help her where help is practicable,
and have the heartiest respect for those brave and earnest men of the
South who, in the face of fearful difficulties, are doing all that men can
do for the betterment alike of white and of black. The attitude of the
562 Messages and Speeches
North toward the negro is far from what it should be, and there is need
that the North also should act in good faith upon the principle of giving
to each man what is justly due him, of treating him on his worth as a
man, granting him no special favors, but denying him no proper oppor-
tunity for labor and the reward of labor. But the peculiar circumstances
of the South render the problem there far greater and far more acute.
Neither I nor any other man can say that any given way of ap-
proaching that problem will present in our time even an approximately
perfect solution, but we can safely say that there can never be such
solution at all unless we approach it with the effort to do fair and equal
justice among all men; and to demand from them in return just and
fair treatment for others. Our effort should be to secure to each man,
whatever his color, equality of opportunity, equality of treatment before
the law. As a people striving to shape our actions in accordance with
the great law of righteousness, we cannot afford to take part in or be
indifferent to the oppression or maltreatment of any man who, against
crushing disadvantages, has by his own industry, energy, self-respect,
and perseverance struggled upward to a position which would entitle
him to the respect of his fellows, if only his skin were of a different hue.
Every generous impulse in us revolts at the thought of thrusting
down instead of helping up, such a man. To deny any man the fair
treatment granted to others, no better than he, is to commit a wrong
upon him—a wrong sure to react in the long run upon those guilty of
such denial. The only safe principle upon which Americans can act
is that of “all men up,” not that of “some men down.” If in any com-
munity the level of intelligence, morality, and thrift among the colored
men can be raised, it is, humanly speaking, sure that the same level
among the whites will be raised to an even higher degree; and it is no
less sure that the debasement of the blacks will in the end carry with it
an attendant debasement of the whites.
The problem is so to adjust the relations between two races of dif-
ferent ethnic type that the rights of neither be abridged nor jeoparded;
that the backward race be trained so that it may enter into the posses-
sion of true freedom, while the forward race is enabled to preserve un-
harmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers. The work-
ing out of this problem must necessarily be slow; it is not possible in
off-hand fashion to obtain or to confer the priceless boons of freedom,
industrial efficiency, political capacity, and domestic morality. Nor is
it only necessary to train the colored man; it is quite as necessary to
train the white man, for on his shoulders rests a well-nigh unparalleled
sociological responsibility. It is a problem demanding the best thought,
the utmost patience, the most earnest effort, the broadest charity of the
statesman, the student, the philanthropist; of the leaders of thought in
Theodore Roosevelt 563
every department of our national life. The church can be a most im-
portant factor in solving it aright. But above all else we need for its
successful solution the sober, kindly, steadfast, unselfish performance of
duty by the average plain citizen in his everyday dealings with his
fellows.
The ideal of elemental justice meted out to every man is the ideal
we should keep ever before us. It will be many a long day before we
attain to it, and unless we show not only devotion to it, but also wisdom
and self-restraint in the exhibition of that devotion, we shall defer the
time for its realization still further. In striving to attain to so much of
it as concerns dealing with men of different colors, we must remember
two things.
In the first place, it is true of the colored man, as it is true of the
white man, that in the long run his fate must depend far more upon his
own effort than upon the efforts of any outside friend. Every vicious,
venal, or ignorant colored man is an even greater foe to his own race
than to the community as a whole. The colored man's self-respect
entitles him to do that share in the political work of the country which
is warranted by his individual ability and integrity and the position he
has won for himself. But the prime requisite of the race is moral and
industrial uplifting.
Laziness and shiftlessness, these, and above all, vice and criminality
of every kind, are evils more potent for harm to the black race than all
acts of oppression of white men put together. The colored man who
fails to condemn crime in another colored man, who fails to co-operate
in all lawful ways in bringing colored criminals to justice, is the worst
enemy of his own people, as well as an enemy to all the people. Law-
abiding black men should, for the sake of their race, be foremost in re-
lentless and unceasing warfare against law-breaking black men. If
the standards of private morality and industrial efficiency can be raised
high enough among the black race, then its future on this continent is
secure. The stability and purity of the home is vital to the welfare of
the black race, as it is to the welfare of every race.
In the next place the white man who, if only he is willing, can help
the colored man more than all other white men put together, is the white
man who is his neighbor, North or South. Each of us must do his
whole duty without flinching, and if that duty is national it must be done
in accordance with the principles above laid down. But in endeavoring
each to be his brother's keeper it is wise to remember that each can
normally do most for the brother who is his immediate neighbor. If
we are sincere friends of the negro, let us each in his own locality show
it by his action therein, and let us each show it also by upholding the
hands of the white man, in whatever locality, who is striving to do
564 Messages and Speeches
justice to the poor and the helpless, to be a shield to those whose need
for such a shield is great.* #
The heartiest acknowledgments are due to the ministers, the judges,
and law officers, the grand juries, the public men, and the great daily
newspapers in the South, who have recently done such effective work
in leading the crusade against lynching in the South; and I am glad
to say that during the last three months the returns, as far as they can
be gathered, show a smaller number of lynchings than for any other two
months during the last twenty years. Let us uphold in every way the
hands of the men who have led in this work, who are striving to do all
their work in this spirit. I am about to quote from the address of the
Right Rev. Robert Strange, Bishop Coadjutor of North Carolina, as
given in the Southern Churchman of October 8, 1904.
The bishop first enters an emphatic plea against any social inter-
mingling of the races; a question which must, of course, be left to the
people of each community to settle for themselves, as in such a matter
no one community—and, indeed, no one individual—can dictate to any
other; always provided that in each locality men keep in mind the fact
that there must be no confusing of civil privileges with social inter-
course. Civil law can not regulate social practices. Society, as such,
is a law unto itself, and will always regulate its own practices and habits.
Full recognition of the fundamental fact that all men should stand on an
equal footing, as regards civil privileges, in no way interferes with
recognition of the further fact that all reflecting men of both races are
united in feeling that race purity must be maintained. The bishop con-
tinues:
“What should the white men of the South do for the negro? They
must give him a free hand, a fair field, and a cordial godspeed, the
two races working together for their mutual benefit and for the develop-
ment of our common country. He must have liberty, equal opportunity
to make his living, to earn his bread, to build his home. He must have
justice, equal rights, and protection before the law. He must have the
same political privileges; the suffrage should be based on character and
intelligence for white and black alike. He must have the same public
advantages of education; the public schools are for all the people, what-
ever their color or condition. The white men of the South should give
hearty and respectful consideration to the exceptional men of the negro
race, to those who have the character, the ability and the desire to be
lawyers, physicians, teachers, preachers, leaders of thought and conduct
among their own men and women. We should give them cheer and
* There is nothing in the record of President Roosevelt that is more to his credit than his
position on the negro. It is there he shows his immovable courage and the stamina of his
honesty. He has proved that he would sooner displease than deceive, and that he will stand
for the right even when the sure and sole reward is vilification. He is for justice—for a
“square deal.” He does not ask one's color or creed or bank account. Like Diogenes his
whole search is for a Man.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 565
opportunity to gratify every laudable ambition, and to seek every inno-
cent satisfaction among their own people. Finally, the best white men
of the South should have frequent conferences with the best colored
men, where, in frank, earnest, and sympathetic discussion, they might
understand each other better, smooth difficulties, and so guide and en-
courage the weaker race.”
Surely we can all of us join in expressing our substantial agreement
with the principles thus laid down by this North Carolina bishop, this
representative of the Christian thought of the South.
I am speaking on the occasion of the celebration of the birthday of
Abraham Lincoln, and to men who count it their peculiar privilege that
they have the right to hold Lincoln's memory dear, and the duty to strive
to work along the lines that he laid down. We can pay most fitting
homage to his memory by doing the tasks allotted to us in the spirit in
which he did the infinitely greater and more terrible tasks allotted
to him.
Let us be steadfast for the right; but let us err on the side of gen-
erosity rather than on the side of vindictiveness toward those who differ
from us as to the method of attaining the right. Let us never forget
our duty to help in uplifting the lowly, to shield from wrong the humble,
and let us likewise act in a spirit of the broadest and frankest gen-
erosity toward all our brothers, all our fellow-countrymen ; in a spirit
proceeding not from weakness but from strength, a spirit which takes
no more account of locality than it does of class or of creed; a spirit
which is resolutely bent on seeing that the Union which Washington
founded and which Lincoln saved from destruction shall grow nobler
and greater throughout the ages. *
I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I believe that
our people will in the end rise level to every need, will in the end
triumph over every difficulty that rises before them. I could not have
such confident faith in the destiny of this mighty people if I had it
merely as regards one portion of that people. Throughout our land
things on the whole have grown better and not worse, and this is as
true of one part of the country as it is of another. I believe in the
Southerner as I believe in the Northerner. I claim the right to feel
pride in his great qualities and in his great deeds exactly as I feel pride
in the great qualities and deeds of every other American. For weal
or woe we are knit together, and we shall go up or go down together;
and I believe that we shall go up and not down; that we shall go for-
ward instead of halting and falling back, because I ſlave an abiding
faith in the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the common
sense of all my countrymen.
The Southern States face difficult problems, and so do the Northern
States. Some of the problems are the same for the entire country.
566 Messages and Speeches
Others exist in greater intensity in one section; and yet others exist in
greater intensity in another section. But in the end they will all be
solved, for fundamentally our people are the same throughout this land;
the same in the qualities of heart and brain and hand which have made
this republic what it is in the great to-day; which will make it what it
is to be in the infinitely greater to-morrow. I admire and respect and
believe in and have faith in the men and women of the South as I ad-
mire and respect and believe in and have faith in the men and women
of the North. All of us alike, Northerners and Southerners, Easteners
and Westerners, can best prove our fealty to the nation's past by the
way in which we do the nation's work in the present, for only thus can
we be sure that our children’s children shall inherit Abraham Lincoln's
single-hearted devotion to the great unchanged creed that righteousness
exalteth a nation.
AT THE HUNGARIAN REPUBLICAN CLUB DINNER, AT NEW
YORK, FEBRUARY 14, 1905.
Mr. President, and you, my fellow Americans:
It is a peculiar pleasure for me to be with you this evening, and with
greeting my hosts of the Hungarian Republican Club, I give utterance
to the thought of my fellow-guests, Congressman Sulzer and others,
when I say that whatever our differences before our election, once the
election has taken place, all of us, in public life or in private life—
President, Congressmen, Judges, Legislators alike—are American citi-
zens, and nothing else.
It is nearly ten years ago that I first took dinner here in the im-
mediate neighborhood of where I am dining now, and at that time, I
remember perfectly, when I was first brought up here it was by Mr.
Jacob Riis and Mr. Jim Reynolds, and I was told that I would get an
awfully good dinner and hear some very good music, and both proph-
ecies proved true; and it was about that time that I grew to be ac-
quainted with so many of my hosts and fellow-guests of this evening.
The others I had known before. With one of my fellow-guests, General
Grant, I was then working in common, and at different times I spoke
at meetings presided over by or held in the club houses of various of the
gentlemen here present, sometimes on political subjects, much oftencr
On matters of good citizenship affecting us all as good citizens.
I grew in those years, gentlemen, to have a very close feeling of
sympathy and affection and regard for the men and women of the great
East Side of this city, and I needed no urging when I was invited to
come and be a guest at a club of the East Side this evening. President
Braun has described how the preliminary invitation took place. It was
six years ago that this club gave me a dinner after I had been elected
governor, and they then said that they intended to elect me Presidênt
é
Theodore Roosevelt 567
and that then I must come and take dinner with them again. I told them
certainly, that if they would carry out their part of the contract I would
carry out mine. I am not perfectly certain that they anticipated that
their offer would be closed with so soon. But you see, gentlemen, I
closed with them, and tonight I wish to greet you most warmly and to
say that I doubt if we could find a more typically American gathering
than this.
Americanism is not a matter of birthplace, of ancestry, of creed, of
Occupation; Americanism is a matter of the spirit that is within man's
soul. From the time when we first became an independent nation to
the present moment there has never been a generation in which some of
the most distinguished and most useful men were not men who had
been born on the other side of the Atlantic, and it is peculiarly appro-
priate, and to me peculiarly pleasant, that in addressing this club of the
men upon whose efforts so much of the future welfare of this city, of
this State, of this nation, depends I should be addressing men who show
by their actions that they know no difference between Jew and Gentile,
Catholic and Protestant, native-born and foreign-born ; provided only
the man, whatever his creed, whatever his birthplace, strives to live so
as to do his full duty by his neighbor and by the country as a whole.
And, now, gentlemen, I wish to say that we cannot keep too clearly
before our minds the fact that for the success of our civilization what
is needed is not so much brilliant ability, not so much unusual genius,
as the possession by the average man of the plain, homely, work-a-day
virtues, that make that man a good father, a good husband, and good
friend and neighbor—a decent man with whom to deal in all relations
of life.
We need good laws, we need honest administration of the laws, and
we cannot afford to be contented with less; but more than aught else we
need that the average man shall have in him the root of righteous
living; that the average man shall have in him the feeling that will make
him ashamed to do wrong, to submit to wrong, and that will make him
feel it his bounden duty to help those that are weaker, to help those es-
pecially that are in any way dependent upon him ; and while not in any
way losing his power of individual initiative, to cultivate without ceas-
ing the further power of acting in combination with his fellows for a
common end of social uplifting and good government.
I shall not keep you very long this evening. I have come here not
to make you a set speech, but if you will allow me to say so, to speak as
an old friend among his old friends. I have seen a good deal of your
lives. I know the effort, the toil, the happiness, and the success. I have
endeavored when I have been brought in contact with the East Side
in the course of any work in which I have been engaged, so to handle
myself that the East Side might be a little better for it. I do not know
568 Messages and Speeches
whether I succeeded or not, but I do know that I have always been the
better myself for contact with the East Side. *
And now, one word in closing upon success in life, upon the success
that each of us should strive for. It is a great mistake—Oh, such a great
mistake—to measure success merely by that which glitters from with-
out, or to speak of it in terms which will mislead those about us, and
especially the younger people about us, as to what success really is.
There must, of course, be for success a certain material basis. I
should think ill of any man here who did not wish to leave his children
a little better and not a little worse off materially than he was, and I
should not feel that he was doing his duty by them, and if he cannot
do his duty by his own children he is not going to do his duty by any
one else. But after that certain amount of material prosperity has been
gained, then the things that really count most are the things of the soul
rather than the things of money, and I am sure that each of you here, if
he will really think of what it is that made him most happy, of what
it is that made him most respect his neighbors, will agree with me.
Look back in your own lives; see what the things are that you are
proudest of as you look back, and you will, in almost every case, and
on every Occasion, find that those memories of pride are associated, not
with days of ease, but with days of effort, the day when you had to do
all that was in you for some worthy end, and the worthiest of all worthy
ends is to make those that are closest and nearest to you, your wife and
children, and those near you, happy and not sorry that you are alive.
And after that has been done, to be able so to handle yourself that you
can feel when the end comes, on the whole, your community, your
fellow-men, are a little better off and not a little worse off because you
have lived.
This kind of success is open to every one of us. The great prizes
come more or less by accident, and no human being knows that better
than any man who has won any of them. The great prizes come more
or less by accident, but to each man there comes normally the chance
so to lead his life that at the end of his days his children, his wife, those
that are dear to him, shall rise up and call him blessed, and so that his
neighbors and those who have been brought into intimate association
may feel that he has done his part as a man in a world which sadly needs
that each man should play his part well.
Now, gentlemen, I have to say good night, because this has been
such a delightful dinner that I already find I am staying pretty nearly
as late as I can stay and catch the train that is to take me back to my
regular work at Washington; and I have come, as I said, not to make
a set speech, but to thank you for your greeting and to assure you that
not one meeting which I have attended since I have been President
has given me greater pleasure to attend than this dinner here tonight.
Theodore Roosevelt 569
AT THE COMMEMORATION OF WASHINGTON'S BIRTHDAY BY
THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA AND ON
RECEIVING THE DEGREE OF LL. D. FROM
THAT INSTITUTION, AT PHILA-
DELPHIA, FEBRUARY 22, 1905.
As a nation we have had our full share of great men, but the two
men of pre-eminent greatness who, as the centuries go on, will surely
loom above all others are Washington and Lincoln; and it is peculiarly
fitting that their birthdays should be celebrated every year and the
meaning of their lives brought home close to us.
No other city in the country is so closely identified with Washing-
ton's career as Philadelphia. He served here in 1775 in the Continental
Congress. He was here as commander of the army at the time of the
battles of Brandywine and Germantown ; and it was near here that with
that army he faced the desolate winter at Valley Forge, the winter
which marked the turning point of the revolutionary war. Here he
came again as President of the Convention which framed the Constitu-
tion, and then as President of the United States, and finally as lieutenant
general of the army after he had retired from the Presidency.
One hundred and eight years ago, just before he left the Presidency,
he issued his Farewell Address, and in it he laid down certain principles
which he believed should guide the citizens of this republic for all time
to come, his own words being, “which appear to me all-important to the
permanency of your felicity as a people.”
Washington, though in some ways an even greater man than Lincoln,
did not have Lincoln's wonderful gift of expression—that gift which
makes certain speeches of the rail-splitter from Illinois read like the
inspired utterances of the great Hebrew seers and prophets. But he had
all of Lincoln's sound common sense, far-sightedness, and devotion to
a lofty ideal. Like Lincoln he sought after the noblest objects, and like
Lincoln he sought after them by thoroughly practical methods. These
two greatest Americans can fairly be called the best among the great
men of the world, and greatest among the good men of the world.
Each showed in actual practice his capacity to secure under our system
the priceless union of individual liberty with governmental strength.
Each was as free from the vices of the tyrant as from the vices of the
demagogue. To each the empty futility of the mere doctrinaire was as
alien as the baseness of the merely self-seeking politician. Each was
incapable alike of the wickedness which seeks by force of arms to
wrong others and of the no less criminal weakness which fails to pro-
vide effectively against being wronged by others.
Among Washington's maxims which he bequeathed to his country-
men were the two following: “Observe good faith and justice toward
all nations,” and “To be prepared for war is the most effective means to
57O Messages and Speeches
promote peace.” These two principles taken together should form the
basis of our whole foreign policy. Neither is sufficient taken by itself.
It is not merely an idle dream, but a most mischievous dream, to
believe that mere refraining from wrongdoing will insure us against
being wronged. Yet, on the other hand, a nation prepared for war is a
menace to mankind unless the national purpose is to treat other nations
with good faith and justice. In any community it is neither the con-
scientious man who is a craven at heart, nor yet the bold and strong
man without the moral sense, who is of real use to the community; it
is the man who to strength and courage adds a realizing sense of the
moral obligation resting upon him, the man who has not only the desire
but the power to do his full duty by his neighbor and by the state. So,
in the world at large, the nation which is of use in the progress of
mankind is that nation which combines strength of character, force of
character, and insistence upon its own rights, with a full acknowledg-
ment of its own duties toward others. Just at present the best way in
which we can show that our loyalty to the teachings of Washington is
a loyalty of the heart and not of the lips only is to see to it that the work
of building up our navy goes steadily on, and that at the same time our
stand for international righteousness is clear and emphatic.
Never since the beginning of our country's history has the navy
been used in an unjust war. Never has it failed to render great and
sometimes vital service to the republic. It has not been too strong for
our good, though often not strong enough to do all the good it should
have done.
Our possession of the Philippines,” our interest in the trade of the
Orient, our building the Isthmian Canal, our insistence upon the Mon-
roe Doctrine, all demand that our navy shall be of adequate size and
for its size of unsurpassed efficiency. If it is strong enough I believe
it will minimize the chance of our being drawn into foreign war. If
we let it run down it is as certain as the day that sooner or later we
shall have to choose between a probably disastrous foreign war or a
peace kept on terms that imply national humiliation. Our navy is the
surest guaranty of peace and the cheapest insurance against war, and
those who, in whatever capacity, have helped to build it up during the
past twenty years have been in good faith observing and living up to
*Speaking solely for myself and not at all for Plesident Roosevelt, I have never been
able to see the national value of the Philippines. If I were business manager for the country
I should refuse to keep them for precisely the same reason that in my private capacity I
should refuse to keep a St. Bernard dog. They are an expensive nuisance and a trouble-trap.
The reason we cling to the Philippines is because of the racial instinct for conquest. We have
conquered them, therefore we would keep them. I’ve sometimes thought that if as the fruits
of battle we were to capture cholera we would be instantly inclined to hang on to it, albeit
such hanging on meant sickness and perhaps death. As for the argument commonly advanced
in connection with the Philippine question, I see little or nothing in it. Folk will say that
because we took Louisiana and Florida we should take and kcep the Philippines. Which is
as though one said that because a man bought a house in Hoboken he should buy one in
Tokio.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 57I
One of the most important of the principles which Washington laid
down for the guidance of his countrymen.
Nor was Washington the only one of our great Presidents who
showed farsighted patriotism by support of the navy. When Andrew
Jackson was in Congress he voted for the first warships we ever built
as part of our regular navy; and he voted against the grant of money
to pay our humiliating tribute to the pirates of the Barbary States. Old
Hickory was a patriot through and through, and there was not an ounce
of timidity in his nature, and of course he felt only indignant contempt
for a policy which purchased an ignoble peace by cowardice instead of
exacting a just peace by showing we were as little willing to submit
to as to inflict aggression. Had a majority of Jackson's colleagues and
successors felt as he did about the navy, had it been built up instead of
being brought to a standstill, it would probably never have been neces-
sary to fight the war of 1812.
Again Washington said: “Give to manhood the example of a people
always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.” This feeling can
be shown alike by our dealings within and without our own borders.
Taft and Wright in the Philippines and Wood in Cuba have shown us
exactly how to practice this justice and benevolence in dealing with
Other peoples—a justice and benevolence which can be shown, not by
shirking our duty and abandoning to self-destruction those unfit to
govern themselves, but by doing our duty by staying with them and
teaching them how to govern themselves, by uplifting them spiritually
and materially. Here at home we are obeying this maxim of Wash-
ington just so far as we help in every movement, whether undertaken
by the government, or as is, and should be, more often the case, by
voluntary action among private citizens, for the betterment of our own
people. Observe that Washington speaks both of justice and benevo-
lence, and that he puts justice first. We must be generous, we must
help our poorer brother, but above all we must remember to be just ; and
the first step toward securing justice is to treat every man on his worth
as a man, showing him no special favor, but so far as may be holding
open for him the door of opportunity so that reward may wait upon
honest and intelligent endeavor.
Again Washington said: “Cherish public credit.” Just at the
moment there is no attack on public credit, but if ever the temptation
arises again let our people at the outset remember that the worst be-
cause the most insidious form of the appeal that would make a man a
dishonest debtor is that which would persuade him that it is anything
but dishonest for him to repudiate his debts.
Finally, it is peculiarly appropriate, when I have come to this city as
the guest of the University of Pennsylvania, to quote another of Wash-
ington's maxims: “Promote, as an object of primary importance, in-
572 Messages and Speeches
stitutions for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the
structure of a government gives force to public opinion, it is essential
that public opinion should be enlightened.” Education may not make a
man a good citizen, but most certainly ignorance tends to prevent his
being a good citizen. Washington was far too much of a patriot, had
far too much love for his fellow-citizens, to try to teach them that they
could govern themselves unless they could develop a sound and en-
lightened public opinion. No nation can permanently retain free gov-
ernment unless it can retain a high average of citizenship; and there
can be no such high average of citizenship without a high average of
education, using the word in its broadest and truest sense to include
the things of the soul as well as the things of the mind. School educa-
tion can never supplant or take the place of self-education, still less can
it in any way take the place of those rugged and manly qualities which
we group together under the name of character; but it can be of enor-
mous use in supplementing both. It is a source of just pride to every
American that our people have so consistently acted in accordance with
Washington's principle of promoting institutions for the diffusion of
knowledge. There is nothing dearer to our hearts than our public
school system, by which free primary education is provided for every
one within our borders. The higher education, such as is provided by
the University of Pennsylvania and kindred bodies, not only confers
great benefits to those able to take advantage of it, but entails upon
them corresponding duties.
The men who founded this nation had to deal with theories of gov-
ernment and the fundamental principles of free institutions. We are
now concerned with a different set of questions, for the republic has
been firmly established, its principles thoroughly tested and fully ap-
proved. To merely political issues have succeeded those of grave social
and economic importance, the solution of which demands the best
efforts of the best men. We have a right to expect that a wise and
leading part in the effort to attain this solution will be taken by those
who have been exceptionally blessed in the matter of obtaining an edu-
cation. That college graduate is but a poor creature who does not feel
when he leaves college that he has received something for which he owes
a return. What he thus owes he can as a rule only pay by the way
he bears himself throughout life. It is but occasionally that a college
graduate can do much outright for his alma mater; he can best repay
her by living a life that will reflect credit upon her, by so carrying
himself as a citizen that men shall see that the years spent in training
him have not been wasted. The educated man is entitled to no special
privilege, save the inestimable privilege of trying to show that his edu-
cation enables him to take the lead in striving to guide his fellows aright
in the difficult task which is set to us of the twentieth century. The
Theodore Roosevelt 573
problems before us to-day are very complex, and are widely different
from those which the men of Washington's generation had to face; but
we can overcome them surely, and we can overcome them only if we
approach them in the spirit which Washington and Washington's great
supporters brought to bear upon the problems of their day—the spirit
of sanity and of courage, the spirit which combines hard common sense
with the loftiest idealism.
AT A MEETING OF THE AMERICAN TRACT SOCIETY, IN WASH-
INGTON, MARCH, 12, 1905.
Mr. Justice, Mr. Schick, and you my fellow members of this congre-
gation, and our guests who are with us today:
I am glad, on behalf of this church, to say amen to the appeal that
has been made by Dr. Swift on behalf of the great society to the account
of whose work you have been listening. Mr. Justice, you quoted the
advice of a poet, “To be doers rather than dreamers.” In the Book of
all Books there is a sentence to the same effect, “Be ye doers of the
Word and not hearers only.” Let us show ourselves today doers of the
Word, upholders in fact of what has been preached to us by Dr. Swift.
He has set forth the needs of the society, and he has set forth the
great field over which it works. I wish to touch only on a small
portion of that field, but, after all, the portion that most concerns us
—the need here at home, here in this country of furthering in every way
the work of the society, the work of all kindred societies, both among
the native born and among the thousands who come to these shores from
abroad. And there is a peculiar propriety in such an appeal being
made to this church, for, as I have said here before, this church more
than most others should ever keep before it as part of its duty, as one
of the chief parts of its duty, that of caring in all ways, but especially
in spiritual ways, for the people who come to us from abroad.
The United States government does endeavor to do its duty by the
immigrants who come to these shores, and I was glad, Dr. Swift, to
listen to what you said as to the work that is being done on Ellis
Island, for it is a just tribute to that work. But unless people have
had some experience with the dangers and difficulties surrounding
the newly arrived immigrant they can hardly realize how great they
are. The immigrant comes here almost unprotected; he does not, as a
rule, know our language; he is wholly unfamiliar with our institutions,
our customs, our habits of life and ways of thought; and there are, I
am sorry to say, great numbers of evil and wicked people who hope to
make their livelihood by preying on him. He is exposed to innumera-
ble temptations, innumerable petty oppressions, on almost every hand;
and unless someone is on hand to help him he literally has no idea
574 Messages and Speeches
where to turn. No greater work can be done by a philanthropic or
religious society than to stretch out the helping hand to the man and
the woman who come here to this country to become citizens and the
parents of citizens, and therefore do their part in making up, for weal
or for woe, the future of our land. If we do not take care of them,
if we do not try to uplift them, then as sure as fate our own children
will pay the penalty. If we do not see that the immigrant and the
children of the immigrant are raised up, most assuredly the result will
be that our children and children's children are pulled down. The
level of well-being in this country will be a level for all of us. We can-
not keep that level down for a part and not have it sunk more or less
for the whole. If we raise it for a part we shall raise it to a certain
extent for the whole. Therefore, it means much, not merely to the
immigrants, but to every good American that there should be at Ellis
Island the colporteurs of this society and the representatives of other
religious and philanthropic societies, to try to care for the immigrant's
body, and above all to try to care for the immigrant's soul.
It is, of course, unnecessary to say that the things of the body must
be cared for; that the first duty of any man, especially the man who
has others dependent upon him, is to take care of them and to take
care of himself. Nobody can help others if he begins by being a
burden to others. Each man must be able to pull his own weight, to
carry his own weight, and therefore, each man must show the capacity
to earn for himself and his family enough to secure a certain amount
of material well-being. That must be the foundation. But on that
foundation he must build as a superstructure the spiritual life.
One of the best things done by this society and by kindred religious
and benevolent societies is supplying in our American life of to-day
the proper ideals. It is a good thing to have had the extraordinary
material prosperity which has followed so largely on the extraordinary
scientific discoveries alluded to by Justice Brewer, if we use this
material prosperity aright. It is not a good thing, it is a bad thing, if
we treat it as the be-all and end-all of our life. If we make it the only
ideal before the nation, if we permit the people of this republic to get
before their minds the view that material well-being carried to an ever
higher degree is the one and only thing to be striven for, we are laying
up for ourselves not merely trouble but ruin. I, too, feel the faith and
hope that have been expressed here to-day by the vice-president and
the secretary of the society, but I so feel because I believe we shall not
permit mere material well-being to become the only ideal of this nation,
because I believe that more and more we shall accustom ourselves to
looking at the great fortunes accumulated by certain men as being
nothing in themselves either to admire or envy or to deplore, save as
they are used well or ill. If the great fortune is used well, if the man
Theodore Roosevelt 575
who has accumulated it has the strength necessary to resist the tempta-
tions either to use it wrongfully, or, what is nearly as bad, not to use
it right—for negation may be almost as harmful as positive wrong-
doing—he is entitled to the praise due to whoever employs great powers
for the common good. If the man who accumulates that great fortune
uses it ill or does not use it well, then, so far from being an object of
envy, still less an object of admiration, he should take his place among
those whom we condemn and pity—for usually, if we have the root of
the matter in us, we will pity those we condemn. If he uses it aright,
then he is entitled to our admiration, our respect, exactly as every man
is entitled to it if he has special talents for the welfare of the people as
a whole, for the uplifting of mankind. }
Wonderful changes have come in the last half century. It may well
be, as Mr. Justice Brewer has said, that we tremble on the verge of
still greater changes in the future. The railway, the telegraph, the
telephone, steam, electricity, all the marvelous mechanical inventions
of these last five decades, have changed much in the superficial aspect
of the world, and have, therefore, produced certain great changes in
the world itself. But after all, in glorifying over and wondering at
this extraordinary development, I think that we sometimes forget
that, compared to the deeper things, it is indeed only superficial in
its effect. The qualities that count most in man and woman now are
the qualities that counted most two thousand years ago; and as a nation
we shall achieve success or merit failure accordingly as we do or do
not display those qualities. Among the members of this congregation
is a man who, in his prime, served as the fleet engineer of Farragut
when Farragut went into Mobile Bay. That was forty-one years ago.
The ships and the guns with which Farragut did that mighty feat are
now almost as obsolete as the galleys that fought for the mastery of
the AEgean Sea when Athens waged war on Sparta. They could no
more stand against a modern ship than could the ships that fought
against the invincible Armada in 1588. But if the need ever comes for
this nation to call on its sons to face a foreign foe, the call will or will
not be made in vain, just exactly according to whether we do or do
not still retain the spirit which drove Farragut and the men under him
onward to victory. The gun changes; the ship changes; but the quali-
ties needed in the man behind the gun, in the man who handles the ship,
are just the same as they ever were. So it is in our whole material
civilization of to-day. The railroad, the telegraph, all these wonderful
inventions, produce new problems, confer new benefits and bring about
new dangers. Cities are built up to enormous size, and, of course,
with the upbuilding of the cities comes the growth of the terrible
problems which confront all of us who have to do with city life. Out-
ward circumstances change. New dangers spring up and old dangers
576 Messages and Speeches
vanish. But the spirit necessary to meet the new dangers, the spirit
necessary to insure the triumph that we must and shall win, is the
same now that it has always been. This is the spirit which lies behind
this society and all kindred societies; and we owe to this society all
the help that we can afford to give, for it is itself giving to our people
a service beyond price, a service of love, a service which no money
could buy. '
BEFORE THE MOTHERS' CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D. C.,
MARCH IS, 1905.
In our modern industrial civilization there are many and grave
dangers to counterbalance the splendors and the triumphs. It is not a t
good thing to see cities grow at disproportionate speed relatively to
the country; for the small land owners, the men who own their little
homes, and therefore to a very large extent the men who till farms,
the men of the soil, have hitherto made the foundation of lasting
national life in every State; and, if the foundation becomes either too
weak or too narrow, the superstructure, no matter how attractive, is
in imminent danger of falling.
But far more important than the question of the occupation of our
citizens is the question of how their family life is conducted. No
matter what that occupation may be, as long as there is a real home
and as long as those who make up that home do their duty to one
another, to their neighbors and to the State, it is of minor consequence
whether the man's trade is plied in the country or the city, whether it
calls for the work of the hands or for the work of the head.
But the nation is in a bad way if there is no real home, if the family
is not of the right kind; if the man is not a good husband and father,
if he is brutal or cowardly or selfish, if the woman has lost her sense
of duty, if she is sunk in vapid self-indulgence or has let her nature
be twisted so that she prefers a sterile pseudo-intellectuality to that
great and beautiful development of character which comes only to
, those whose lives know the fullness of duty done, or effort made and
self-sacrifice undergone. wº |
In the last analysis the welfare of the State depends absolutely upon
whether or not the average family, the average man and woman and
their children, represent the kind of citizenship fit for the foundation
of a great nation; and if we fail to appreciate this we fail to appreciate
the root morality upon which all healthy civilization is based.
No piled-up wealth, no splendor of material growth, no brilliance of
artistic development, will permanently avail any people unless its home
life is healthy, unless the average man possesses honesty, courage,
common sense, and decency, unless he works hard and is willing at need
to fight hard; and unless the average woman is a good wife, a good
Theodore Roosevelt 577
mother, able and willing to perform the first and greatest duty of
womanhood, able and willing to bear, and to bring up as they should
be brought up, healthy children, sound in body, mind, and character,
and numerous enough so that the race shall increase and not decrease.
There are certain old truths which will be true as long as this world
endures, and which no amount of progress can alter. One of these is
the truth that the primary duty of the husband is to be the home maker,
the bread-winner for his wife and children, and that the primary duty
of the woman is to be the helpmeet, the housewife, and mother. The
woman should have ample educational advantages; but save in excep-
tional cases the man must be, and she need not be, and generally ought
not to be, trained for a lifelong career as the family breadwinner; and,
therefore, after a certain point the training of the two must normally
be different because the duties of the two are normally different. This
does not mean inequality of function, but it does mean that normally
there must be dissimilarity of function. On the whole, I think the duty
of the woman the more important, the more difficult, and the more
honorable of the two; on the whole I respect the woman who does her
duty even more than I respect the man who does his.
No ordinary work done by a man is either as hard or as responsible
as the work of a woman who is bringing up a family of small children;
for upon her time and strength demands are made not only every hour
of the day, but often every hour of the night. She may have to get
up night after night to take care of a sick child, and yet must by day
continue to do all her household duties as well; and if the family means
are scant she must usually enjoy even her rare holidays taking her
whole brood of children with her. The birth pangs make all men the
debtors of all women. Above all our sympathy and regard are due to
the struggling wives among those whom Abraham Lincoln called the
plain people, and whom he so loved and trusted; for the lives of these
women are often led on the lonely heights of quiet, self-sacrificing
heroism.
Just as the happiest and most honorable and most useful task that
can be set any man is to earn enough for the support of his wife and
family, for the bringing up and starting in life of his children, so the
most important, the most honorable and desirable task which can be
set any woman is to be a good and wise mother in a home marked by
self-respect and mutual forbearance, by willingness to perform duty,
and by refusal to sink into self-indulgence or avoid that which entails
effort and self-sacrifice. Of course there are exceptional men and
exceptional women who can do and ought to do much more than this,
who can lead and ought to lead great careers of outside usefulness in
addition to—not as substitutes for—their home work; but I am not
speaking of exceptions; I am speaking of the primary duties, I am
578 Messages and Speeches
speaking of the average citizens, the average men and women who
make up the nation.
Inasmuch as I am speaking to an assemblage of mothers I shall
have nothing whatever to say in praise of an easy life. Yours is the
work which is never ended. No mother has an easy time, and most
mothers have very hard times, and yet what true mother would barter
her experience of joy and sorrow in exchange for a life of cold selfish-
ness, which insists upon perpetual amusement and the avoidance of
care, and which often finds its fit dwelling place in some flat designed
to furnish with the least possible expenditure of effort the maximum
of comfort and of luxury, but in which there is literallv no place for
children?
The woman who is a good wife, a good mother, is entitled to our
respect as is no one else; but she is entitled to it only because, and
so long as, she is worthy of it. Effort and self-sacrifice are the laws of
worthy life for a man as for the woman; though neither the effort
nor the self-sacrifice may be the same for the one as for the other. I
do not in the least believe in the patient Griselda type of woman, in the
woman who submits to gross and long-continued ill treatment, any
more than I believe in a man who tamely submits to wrongful aggres-
sion. No wrongdoing is so abhorrent as wrongdoing by a man
toward the wife and the children who should arouse every tender
feeling in his nature. Selfishness toward them, the lack of tenderness
toward them, lack of consideration for them, above all, brutality in
any form toward them, should arouse the heartiest scorn and indigna-
tion in every upright soul.
I believe in the woman's keeping her self-respect just as I believe
in the man's doing so. I believe in her rights just as much as I
believe in the man's, and indeed a little more; and I regard marriage
as a partnership, in which each partner is in honor bound to think of
the rights of the other as well as of his or her own. But I think that
the duties are even more important than the rights; and in the long
run I think that the reward is ampler and greater for duty well done,
than for the insistence upon individual rights, necessary though this,
too, must often be. Your duty is hard, your responsibility great; but
greatest of all is your reward. I do not pity you in the least. On
the contrary, I feel respect and admiration for you.
Into the woman's keeping is committed the destiny of the genera-
tions to come after us.* In bringing up your children you mothers
must remember that while it is essential to be loving and tender, it is
no less essential to be wise and firm. Foolishness and affection must
not be treated as interchangeable terms; and besides training your
*President Roosevelt regards woman and especially in her role of mother as the keystone
of the social-political arch, wanting which, and as now arranged, the whole world goes to
Smash.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 579
sons and daughters in the softer and milder virtues you must seek to
give them those stern and hardy qualities which in after life they will
Surely need. Some children will go wrong in spite of the best train-
ing ; and some will go right even when their surroundings are most
unfortunate; nevertheless an immense amount depends upon the family
training. If you mothers through weakness bring up your sons to
be selfish and to think only of themselves, you will be responsible for
much sadness among the women who are to be their wives in the
future. If you let your daughters grow up idle, perhaps under the
mistaken impression that as you yourselves have had to work hard they
shall know only enjoyment, you are preparing them to be useless to
others and burdens to themselves. Teach boys and girls alike that they
are not to look forward to lives spent in avoiding difficulties, but to
lives spent in overcoming difficulties. Teach them that work, for
themselves and also for others, is not a curse, but a blessing; seek to
make them happy, to make them enjoy life, but seek also to make them
face life with the steadfast resolution to wrest success from labor and
adversity, and to do their whole duty before God and to man. Surely
she who can thus train her sons and her daughters is thrice fortunate
among women.
There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of
children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due
to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other
great blessings of life. But the man or woman who deliberately fore-
goes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-
heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the
difference between the all-important and the unimportant—why, such
a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier
who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for
the support of those dependent upon him, and who, though ablebodied,
is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide.
The existence of women of this type forms one of the most unpleasant
and unwholesome features of modern life. If any one is so dim of
vision as to fail to see what a thoroughly unlovely creature such a
woman is, I wish he would read Judge Robert Grant's novel, “Un-
leavened Bread,” ponder seriously the character of Selma, and think
of the fate that would surely overcome any nation which developed
its average and typical woman along such lines. Unfortunately, it
would be untrue to say that this type exists only in American novels.
That it also exists in American life is made unpleasantly evident by
the statistics as to the dwindling families in some localities. It is
made evident in equally sinister fashion by the census statistics as to
divorce, which are fairly appalling; for easy divorce is now, as it ever
has been, a bane to any nation, a curse to society, a menace to the
58o Messages and Speeches
home, an incitement to married unhappiness, and to immorality, an
evil thing for men, and a still more hideous evil for women. These
unpleasant tendencies in our American life are made evident by articles
such as those which I actually read not long ago in a certain paper,
where a clergyman was quoted, seemingly with approval, as expressing
the general American attitude when he said that the ambition of any
save a very rich man should be to rear two children only, so as to
give his children an opportunity “to taste a few of the good things
of life.” ū
This man, whose profession and calling should have made him a
moral teacher, actually set before others the ideal, not of training
children to do their duty, not of sending them forth with stout hearts
and ready minds to win triumphs for themselves and their country,
not of allowing them the opportunity and giving them the privilege
of making their own place in the world, but, forsooth, of keeping the
number of children so limited that they might “taste a few good things!”
The way to give a child a fair chance in life is not to bring it up in
luxury, but to see that it has the kind of training that will give it
strength of character. Even apart from the vital question of national
life, and regarding only the individual interest of the children them-
selves, happiness in the true sense is a hundredfold more apt to come
to any given member of a healthy family of healthy minded children,
well brought up, well educated, but taught that they must shift for
themselves, must win their own way, and by their own exertions make
their own positions of usefulness, than it is apt to come to those whose
parents themselves have acted on and have trained their children to
act on the selfish and sordid theory that the whole end of life is “to
taste a few good things.”
The intelligence of the remark is on a par with its morality, for the
most rudimentary mental process would have shown the speaker that
if the average family in which there are children contained but two
children the nation as a whole would decrease in population so rapidly
that in two or three generations it would very deservedly be on the
point of extinction, so that the people who had acted on this base and
selfish doctrine would be giving place to others with braver and more
robust ideals. Nor would such a result be in any way regrettable;
for a race that practiced such doctrine—that is, a race that practiced
race suicide—would thereby conclusively show that it was unfit to
exist, and that it had better give place to people who had not forgotten
the primary laws of their being.
To sum up, then, the whole matter is simple enough. If either a
race or an individual prefers the pleasures of mere effortless ease, of
self-indulgence, to the infinitely deeper, the infinitely higher pleasures
that come to those who know the toil and the weariness, but also the
Theodore Roosevelt 581
joy, of hard duty well done, why, that race or that individual must
inevitably in the end pay the penalty of leading a life both vapid and
ignoble. No man and no woman really worthy of the name can care
for thé life spent solely or chiefly in the avoidance of risk and trouble
and labor. Save in exceptional cases the prizes worth having in life
must be paid for, and the life worth living must be a life of work for
a worthy end, and ordinarily of work more for others than for one's
self.
. The man is but a poor creature whose effort is not rather for the
betterment of his wife and children than for himself; and as for the
mother, her very name stands for loving unselfishness and self-abnega-
tion, and, in any society fit to exist, is fraught with associations which
render it holy.
The woman's task is not easy—no task worth doing is easy—but in
doing it, and when she has done it, there shall come to her the highest
and holiest joy known to mankind; and having done it, she shall have
the reward prophesied in Scripture; for her husband and her children,
yes, and all people who realize that her work lies at the foundation of
all national happiness and greatness, shall rise up and call her blessed.
AT THE I2IST ANNUAL DINNER OF THE FRIENDLY SONS OF ST.
PATRICK, NEW YORK, MARCH 17, 1905.
Long before the outbreak of the Revolution there had begun on the
soil of the colonies which afterward became the United States that
mixture of races which has been, and still is, one of the most important
features in our history as a people. At the time, early in the eight-
eenth century, when the immigrants from Ireland first began to come
in numbers to this country, the race elements in our population were
still imperfectly fused, and for some time the new Irish strain was
clearly distinguishable from the others. There was a peculiarity about
these immigrants who came from Ireland to the colonies during the
eighteenth century which has never been paralleled in the case of any
• Other immigrants whatsoever. In all other cases, since the very first
settlements, the pushing westward of the frontiers has been due primar-
ily to the men of native birth. But the immigrants from Ireland in
the seventeenth cetnury pushed boldly through the settled districts
and planted themselves as the advance guard of the conquering civiliza-
tion on the borders of the Indian-haunted wilderness. In Maine and
Northern New Hampshire, in Western Pennsylvania, Virginia, and
North Carolina, alike, this was true.
By the time the Revolution broke out these men had begun to mix
with their fellows of other stocks, and they furnished their full share
of leadership in the great struggle which made us a Nation. Among
582 Messages and Speeches
their number was Commodore John Barry, one of the three or four
officers to whom our infant navy owed most. On land they furnished
generals like Montgomery, who fell so gloriously at Quebec, and Sulli-
van, the conqueror of the Iroquois, who came of a New Hampshire
family, which furnished governors to three New England States, while
the Continental troops of the hardest fighter among Washington's
generals, Mad Anthony Wayne, were recruited so largely from this
stock that Light Horse Harry Lee always referred to them as “The
Line of Ireland.” Nor must we forget that of this same stock there
was a boy during the days of the Revolution who afterward became
the chief American general of his time, and as President, one of the
public men who left his impress most deeply upon our nation, old
Andrew Jackson, the victor of New Orleans.
In the second great crisis of our country’s history—the period of the
Civil War—the part played by the men of Irish birth or parentage
was no less striking than it had been in the Revolution. Among the
three or four great generals who led the Northern army in the war
stood Philip Sheridan. Some of those whom I am now addressing
served in that immortal brigade which on that fatal day of Fredericks-
burg left its dead closest to the stone wall which marked the limit that
could not be overpassed even by the highest human valor.
The people who have come to this country from Ireland have con-
tributed to the stock of our common citizenship qualities which are
essential to the welfare of every great nation. They are a masterful
race of rugged character—a race the qualities of whose womanhood
have become proverbial, while its men have the elemental, the indis-
pensable virtues of working hard in time of peace and fighting hard
in time of war. In every walk of life men of this blood have stood,
and now stand, pre-eminent as statesmen and as soldiers, on the bench,
at the bar, and in business. They are doing their full share toward
the artistic and literary development of the country. And right here
let me make a special plea to you. We Americans take a just pride
in the development of our great universities, and more and more we
are seeking to provide for original and creative work in these universi-
ties. I hope that an earnest effort will be made to endow chairs in
American universities for the study of Celtic literature and for research
in Celtic antiquities. It is only of recent years that the extraordinary
wealth and beauty of the old Celtic sages have been fully appreciated,
and we of America, who have so large a Celtic strain in our blood,
cannot afford to be behindhand in the work of adding to modern
scholarship by bringing within its ken the great Celtic literature of
the past.
My fellow-countrymen, I have spoken to-night especially of what
has been done for this Nation of ours by its sons of Irish blood. But,
Theodore Roosevelt 583
after all, in speaking to you or any other body of my fellow-citizens,
no matter from what Old World country they themselves or their fore-
fathers may have come, the great thing to remember is that we are all
of us Americans. Let us keep our pride in the stocks from which we
have sprung; but let us show that pride not by holding aloof one from
another, least of all by preserving the Old World jealousies and bitter-
ness, but by joining in a spirit of generous rivalry to see which can do
most for our great common country. Americanism is not a matter of
creed, or birthplace, or descent. That man is the best American who
has in him the American spirit, the American soul. Such a man fears
not the strong and harms not the weak. He scorns what is base or
cruel or dishonest. He looks beyond the accidents of occupation or
social condition, and hails each of his fellow citizens as his brother,
asking nothing save that each shall treat the other on his worth as
a man, and that they shall join together to do all that in them lies for
the uplifting of this mighty and vigorous people. In our veins runs
the blood of many an Old World nation. We are kin to each of those
nations, and yet identical with none. Our policy should be one of
cordial friendship for all; and yet we should keep ever before our eyes
the fact that we are ourselves a separate people, with our own ideals
and standards, and destined, whether for better or for worse, to work
out a wholly new national type. The fate of the twentieth century will
in no small degree depend upon the quality of citizenship developed on
this continent. Surely such a thought must thrill us with the resolute
purpose so to bear ourselves that the name American shall stand as the
symbol of just, generous, and fearless dealing with all men and all
nations. Let us be true to ourselves, for we cannot then be false to
any man.
AT THE BANQUET OF THE SONS OF THE AMERICAN REVOLU-
TION, NEW YORK, MARCH 17, 1905.
We rank as one of the great naval powers of the earth, and we rank
as a power for peace. The navy is the arm of all others upon which
this nation must depend to defend it against all foreign aggressors.
I want to increase the number of our battleships because they are
preventatives of war with other nations.
It is, to me, a matter of great regret that Congress does not provide
means for field maneuvers, and I earnestly hope that the near future
will see this defect remedied.
We owe to this nation that we have an army that gives as good
service as any in the world, but we cannot achieve this unless we train
men in the mass. War came, and you sent men to the front with
officers who had never handled men in the mass, officers who had
584 Messages and Speeches
only had command over a few hundred men. Could you expect any-
thing but disorder?
I speak in the interests of peace when I ask for an efficient army
and navy.
This nation will not surrender the Isthmian Canal nor the islands of
the sea, and here is an argument for augmented strength.
AT LOUISVILLE, KY, APRIL 4, 1905.
Governor Beckham, and you, my fellow Americans:
Surely any man would indeed be gratified to be greeted in this way
by such an audience, and be introduced as you have introduced me,
Governor Beckham.
As the Governor has so well said, upon all the important questions,
the questions that infinitely transcend mere partisan differences, we are
fundamentally one. For in the question of foreign and internal politics,
the points upon which there can be no proper division on party lines
infinitely exceed in number those upon which there can be such
divisions, and, Governor Beckham, I shall do all that in me lies to
justify the hope to which you have given expression and to try to show
myself the President of all the people of the United States.
And, naturally, I feel particularly gratified at seeing here today,
joined in this procession, the men who wore the blue and the men
who wore the gray. In the dark days—now keep just as quiet as you
can ; you won't be able to do anything more than see me, anyhow—in
the dark days each of you fought for the right as it was given him to
see the right, and each of you has left us the right to feel pride not
Only in your valor, but in our devotion to what you conscientiously
believed your duty.
And now we are all one, and as a united people we have the right
to feel the same pride in the valor of the man who conscientiously
risked his life in the Confederate uniform that we have in the man who
fought in the blue. And as I passed by your ranks, oh, my friends
in gray, to-day, and saluted the flag of our common country, held up
by a man in the gray uniform, I felt that, indeed, we are one, and that
we have been able to show mankind the greatest war of the century
can be followed by the most perfect union that any nation now knows.
And in coming to this great and beautiful city of yours I wish to con-
gratulate you upon the historic spirit that is found here. I am glad, as
I say, of the spirit that makes you wish to dedicate statues like this
of Jefferson, and like the great statue of Clay inside of this court-
house. It is a fine thing to keep to a sense of historic continuity
with the past, and there is one statue that I wish the members in
the National Congress from Kentucky to see is put up by the National
Theodore Roosevelt 585
government, and that is a ſlational statue to Andrew Jackson and
the victors of the battle of New Orleans. The fight at New Orleans
was one in which the whole nation has a care, as far as the glory and
the profit went, and the whole Nation, and not any one State, should
join in putting that statue up.
I want to thank you, the members of the Liedertafels, for coming
here to sing to-day, and I want to say just one thing suggested by
your presence. We, as a people, are composed of men of many dif-
ferent stocks from the Old World. Each stock can contribute some-
thing of great value to our national life. The people of German origin
who have come here have contributed much in many different ways,
and not the least of what they contributed has been the power to know
what the joy of living means. There is one word I wish it were
possible to translate, but, as it is not possible, I wish we could adopt
it absolutely as it is—“gemuethlichkeit”—for gemuethlichkeit is a
mighty valuable asset. I only hope as missionaries you will be able
to teach us what it means and how to practice it all through.
Now, I am going to say good-by, because there is a little movement
there, and it will be better for the women and small people if I let
you get away. Good-by.
AT MILLTOWN, IND., APRIL 4, 1905.
I am very glad to have the pleasure of seeing you and saying a word
of greeting to you. It cannot but be pleasant to any President to have
the chance of going through the country and meeting his fellow country-
men and being greeted as you have greeted me. I am glad to see you
all—the men, the women, and the children. I am glad to see here,
and wherever I go, the type of man and of woman which I believe
makes the future welfare of this country—the man and woman who
believe in doing their duty in facing life, knowing that life has in it
any amount that is hard, but who are going to do their part to make
things right for themselves and for their neighbors. There is not any-
thing very difficult in government. It is simply the applying of cer-
tain common-sense principles that we apply among ourselves. The
man who is a decent man will be a decent husband, a decent father,
a decent neighbor, and in public life he will do the right thing.
AT HUNTINGBURG, IND., APRIL 4, 1905.
Gentlemen and ladies:
It is a great pleasure to catch this glimpse of you and greet you
on my way down to the reunion of my old regiment at San Antonio,
Texas. There is one thing I am always impressed with in going through
586 Messages and Speeches
this country, and that is, down at bottom, east or west, north or South,
wherever you meet the average American, he is a pretty good American.
In greeting all of you, I want to say that while I am particularly glad
to see the men and the women, I think I am even more glad to see
the children. I think the American stock is a middling good One, and
I do not want to see it die out. I see here men who wear the button
that shows that they fought in the great war. They have left us a
legacy not only of how to do our duty in war, but in peace. Let us
of the younger generation try to keep up their standard.
AT MOUNT VERNON, IL.L., APRIL 4, 1905.
My friends and fellow Americans:
I am delighted to be in this great and beautiful State today,
to be passing through Illinois, which I know so well, and to
be greeted by you. I have but a moment and I want to Say
a word of special greeting to two bodies here; in the first
place to the men of the great war, to the men of the Grand Army,
to the men who actually did the deed instead of talking about it; and
in the next place to you young people, the boys and girls; for it is
going to depend upon what you do and the way you are brought
up whether thirty years hence we are as proud of this country as
we are now. One word to the fathers and mothers; in bringing
up the children, do not make the mistake of trying to bring them
up merely so that everything shall be as easy as possible, but so they
will be able to do the best that can be done with life, which is
certain to be a little rough at best. Teach them not to shirk difficulties;
but to overcome them.
AT CADDO, I. T., APRIL 5, 1905.
I have just a moment in which to greet you and wish you well. It
was from Caddo that very many members of my own old regiment came,
and you can hardly imagine what a pleasure it is to me to be here
to-day to see you. All day long I have been traveling through your
beautiful Territory, a Territory that very soon, I not only hope but
earnestly believe, will be a part of a great State in the Union. If your
citizens act as well in peace as those of them I knew in war, it will
be a mighty good State. I want to congratulate you upon the type
of men you have got, and upon the quantity and quality of your
children. I want you to remember now that you are on the verge
of Statehood, that whether you can feel proud or not of your State
in the future is going to depend upon the citizenship of the average man
and average woman,
Theodore Roosevelt 587
AT DURANT, I. T., APRIL 5, 1905.
In thanking all of you for coming here, let me thank first the Union
and Confederate veterans, the men who wore the blue and the gray,
the men who proved their truth by their endeavor; who risked life
itself for their convictions in the great days of the Civil War, and
who left us as a heritage the duty of doing no less should ever the
call to arms come again. Also let me say how glad I am to see the
school children here. You of the Civil War left us the duty to be
true to the standard you set. Let us so live that these children when
they grow up shall feel equally proud of the country we leave to them,
and we have got to do it by the way we do the small duties of life.
The thing to do is each day to do that day’s work. That is what
makes a good soldier in time of war, and it also makes good citizens
in time of peace. Remember, above all things, here in this Territory,
So soon to be a part of a great and mighty State—and I do not
think I have to impress it upon you much—your duty to the generation
that is coming up.
AT SHERMAN, TEX., APRIL 5, 1905.
You can have no idea what a pleasure it is to me to be here again. If
you are half as glad to have me as I am to be here we will call it square.
It is nearly seven years ago that I came here to take part in raising
the regiment, some of my comrades from which are here to escort
me today.* You who wore the blue and gray know how close the tie
is that binds you to the men by whose side you have faced bullets,
with whom you have lain in trenches, with whom you have known
fatigue and hunger and thirst and danger. I know that in greeting
all of you none of the rest of you will object to my saying that
there is a peculiar pleasure to me in being greeted by the veterans
who wore the blue or the gray in the great Civil War.
It was the greatest war of the century, and it left behind the most
perfect peace of the century.
Think of what it means to our country to have the President of
the United States, a man with both Northern and Southern blood
in his veins, come here and drive up between, as a guard of honor,
on the one side of the Union, and the other the Confederate veterans.
I cannot thank you for all that your coming here argues. I want
to say how deeply touched I am by the reception accorded me. Ex-
cepting only the Union and Confederate veterans, the people whom
*President Roosevelt draws half his blood from the South, and throughout his speeches
one will observe how he begins to expand and warm whenever he talks to a Southern
audience. It was a relative of President Roosevelt who aimed the last gun which the Alabama
fired at the Kearsarge.—A. H. L.
588 Messages and Speeches
I have been most pleased to see are the school children and the col-
lege girls. I admire the men and women of Texas, and I am glad to see
the children of the right quantity and quality.
I saw in one of the papers today the statement that they hoped
I would go out of Texas thinking more of it. I do not know that
that is possible, because I think so much of it already; but if I could
have thought more of it I would have thought more within the last half
hour, since coming within its limits.
AT ATOKA, I. T., APRIL 5, 1905.
I have only a moment in which to greet you and to say how glad
I am to be here. I trust that in a short time I shall have the chance
of greeting the Senators and Representatives of a State of a million
and a half people. I wish to say that in greeting all of you I am
especially glad to greet the children. I am glad to see the Indian
Orphan Home children here and your public school children. I wish
you to take care of the children who are going to run the State in about
fifteen or twenty years, and see that they do it in the right shape.
You know that from this Territory I got many of the members
of my regiment, and many of those were of Indian blood. In this
Territory now and when it becomes a State you must see to it that
everything is done to bring the Indians, the original owners of the
soil, up to the highest standard of citizenship, and remember that
your motto should be “all men up and not some men down.” The
easiest way to raise any of us is to raise all of us, and if you de-
press any of us, as sure as fate all of us will more or less feel the effects
of that depression.
I have traveled all today through this beautiful Territory. You
have the climate, the natural resources in agriculture and business that
will make you one of the greatest States of the Union. It rests with
yourselves to take advantage of these natural resources. You have
got to work, and work hard. I do not have to say that to those who
are the descendants of the pioneers themselves, for that is how work on
the frontier has always been done. f
X
AT SOUTH McALESTER, I. T., APRIL 5, 1905.
I am particularly glad to greet everywhere I have been today so
many school children. I need not tell you that what really counts in
any State is the character of the men and women who make up that
State. You have a wonderful climate. You are developing great
industries. But all of that will not avail if you don’t have the right
type of men and women in the State. That is what counts, I
Theodore Roosevelt 589
believe you are getting that type. I believe you are paying heed
to the education of the young people, of these girls and boys that
I see before me, who in ten or fifteen years will be running things.
I do not want to preach, but I do want to say just a word or two
to make you understand the responsibility that rests upon you. Right-
fully, we take the most intense pride in our country. We have
a right to say that this is a pretty big country, because it is. But
even more important than being proud of it now is to see that those
who come after us will have the same right to feel proud of it that
we have. We are proud now of what our fathers did in the days
that tried men's souls, and in time of war or in time of peace we
must so conduct ourselves that those who come after us will have
the same right to be proud of their ancestors as this generation has to be
proud of our ancestors of the Civil War. We *
Q
AT MUSKOGEE, I. T., APRIL 5, 1905.
I cannot saw how impressed I have been, traveling through the
Territory this morning. Your Territory, probably in conjunction with
Oklahoma, will soon be one of the great States of this Union. I
look forward to meeting your Senators and Congressmen not long
hence. I earnestly hope that as you enter Statehood you will realize
the immense responsibility that rests upon you. Statehood is a first-
class thing, if you use it right. It will be a mighty poor thing, if
you don't. Successful self-government, of course, must be based upon
the average quality of the citizenship. If the average citizen does his
duty, you will have a good State, and you will not otherwise.
Nobody can make a good State except you yourselves. You need
just the qualities in government that you need in private life. A man
who is a good neighbor, a good husband, a good father, is the type
of man who makes a good citizen. The person that you want to
have as a neighbor is the man to whom you can tie, on whom you
can count, the man who is a game man in time of trouble, but who
does not seek trouble, the man who does not brag and brawl, but
who makes good; the man who is decent and square in his dealings
with others. That is just the type you have got to have in public
life. You cannot afford to let any man represent you in public life
if he is crooked. I do not care whether he is crooked on your side
or not. If he will do something that is not exactly straight for your
advantage, he will do it quicker for his own advantage.
590 Messages and Speeches
AT WAGONER, I. T., APRIL 5, 1905.
It was here in this Territory that no small part of my regiment
was raised, and you, my comrade there, who fought in the big war,
know it means a good deal to have men with you in the trenches. I
take the most extreme interest in everything that concerns your wel-
fare. It will be but a short time now, probably, when, in conjunction
with Oklahoma, you will become a great State. It is going to rest
with you, upon the way in which you handle yourselves, whether
you will be proud of that State or not. There is not anybody that
can help us do more than start along the right direction. Each one
of us will stumble at times, and shame on any man who will not help
his brother up ; but you can’t carry him. He must walk by him-
self. -9
AT VINETA, I. T., APRIL 5, 1905.
I cannot say what pleasure it is to me to be today in the Indian
Territory, which I earnestly hope will soon be a part of a great State
of Our Union. I have never had the good fortune to be in the Territory
before; but I had the great good fortune to have some of your
Sons in my regiment; and better and braver men never rode a horse
or handled a rifle. All I need say today of them in speaking to
you of the great war, is that we tried in the little war to show that
we had some of the spirit that the men had who fought in the great
Civil War.
You will soon be part of one of the great States of the Union (for
surely we will see Oklahoma and the Indian Territory admitted to
Statehood), and when that takes place you will be at the outset
a great State. Then it will lie with you to see what kind of a State you
make of it.
AT PARSONS, KAN., APRIL 5, 1905.
Friends:
I will just bid you good-morning. I, am so glad to be again
in the Sunflower State. From the beginning I have believed in your
people, and I am more than grateful for the way your people showed
your belief in me last November. It is not possible for any man in
any position to promise that things will seem right. All that he
can promise is that so far as in him lies he will do his part toward
making them right. This I can promise, and do. It is in one stage of
life as it is in another. Right here I see one of the men who fought
in the great war. All that he could do in that war was to do his
part well, to do all that lay in him well. And that is what each one
Theodore Roosevelt 591
of us can do, in whatever position he is called to be. It is because
of what you and the average man and woman of Kansas have done that
Kansas is so great a State; and it is that every man, from the President
right through, has got to do if our country is to be what it should be.
To you people in Kansas, to you in whom I believe so much, there
are just one or two things I could say in this brief moment. There is
nothing peculiar in the qualities you need in government that differ-
entiates those qualities from the qualities you need in having one
private man deal with another. If a man is to be an advantage to
the community in which he lives he must be a decent, square dealing
man, who does fairly by his neighbor and takes care of his family. The
same qualities in another sphere must be applied in public life if he is to
amount to anything—honesty, decency, courage, and common sense.
AT DALLAS, TEX., APRIL 5, 1905. *.
Mr. Mayor, and you, my fellow Americans:
It has been indeed a pleasure for me to come within the limits of
your mighty and beautiful State. This afternoon I have been passing
through a veritable garden of the Lord, and it is only a few weeks
since that I did my part in helping in the growth here when I signed
the bill under which the Trinity River will be improved. And I was
mighty glad to do it, for I think that we Americans have learned the
lesson that whatever is good for some of us is good for all of us.
And I can, in a sense, claim to be, by blood, at least, a typical
President, for I am half Southerner, half Northerner. I was born in
the East, and I have a great deal of the West in my spirit.
The Civil War has left you as a heritage of honor not merely the
memory of mighty deeds done in it, alike by the men of the North
and the men of the South; it has left us as an inspiration the way
in which those men when the war was through returned to the
callings of peace and wrought in peace success exactly as they had
wrought in war.
You of this State of Texas have behind you a history containing
deeds of which not only you, but all the country must be forever
proud. My regiment was raised under the walls of that historic
building of which it was said that Thermopylae had its messenger of
death, but the Alamo had none.
I will ask you men of the Civil War, if it is not a fact that as a
rule the man who was a good soldier was the man who did well
each day the little things of the day; the man that you wanted was
the man who, when his business was to dig kitchen sinks, dug them.
Was not that so?
So another word here: I want you men of Texas, you men of my
592 Messages and Speeches
age, to see today that exactly as you lift your heads here by virtue
of what your fathers have done, so your childen have the right to
hold their heads high because of the way in which you have handled
yourselves. A glorious memory is the best of all things for a nation,
if the purpose of that nation is to try to rise level with that mem-
Ory.
It is a poor thing for a nation if it uses the memory of the past
to excuse it for inaction or failure in the present.* Keep before
yourselves ever that the very fact that you are proud of those who
have gone before makes it incumbent upon you to leave a heritage
of honor to those who are to come after you, and to train up those who
are to come after you, so that they can do their work in the world.
What would you have all been fit for, you men who fought in the
Civil War, if you had been trained up to believe that if you met
a difficulty the proper thing was to lie down or run away; and you
don’t like, do you, for an occasionally foolish father, and I am sorry to
say an occasionally foolish mother, to bring up the boy or the girl on
the theory that all that is necessary is to have an easy time and
to dodge difficulties. I cannot sufficiently thank you for the way you
have greeted me today. I am more touched by it than I can express,
and when I come to the soil of this State, hallowed by the great deeds
of great men, I come knowing your people already and believing in
them.
I shall go away with this feeling. A couple of years ago I went
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The fundamental fact and a mighty
pleasant fact is that wherever you find the average American, the
average American is a pretty good man. It is our unity, not the
divergency, that is the great fundamental fact of our national life.
I shall go away a stronger and a better American for having been
in this mighty Commonwealth of Texas. I thank you.
AT THE STATE UNIVERSITY, AT AUSTIN, TEX, APRIL 6, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to see you. I only wish I had time to go
through the university and see a little more of you intimately. I
believe there should go hand in hand two schemes of education;
first, the education for all, the education that the public schools
give, and then, that higher training, not merely technical, but often
*There are whole towns in New England and Virginia that live in the past. Some revo-
lutionary battle was fought there and they base themselves on that. These towns have no
present, no future, and want none. They have nothing but a past and would feel disgraced
if anything were added to that past. Their backs are turned to coming time; their eyes are
fixed only on what was; and in numbering their grandfathers they forget their grandchildren.
They are proud; but when analyzed, their pride is found to be of a par with the pride of the
dime museum freak whose noblest ambition is fulfilled when he is allowed to sit on a dry.
goods box and sell his photograph.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 593
academic, which, of the utmost concern to the Nation as a whole,
should be enjoyed by a certain portion of its citizens. z
Remember that there is only one way in which the ordinary college
graduate can benefit his alma mater. He can benefit her only by
doing such work in the world at large that a reflected honor will come
upon her. Train yourselves specially in some one direction to do some
bit of technical work better than it can be done by any one who has
not had your training. Most of the students who are going to achieve
success will achieve it by just working out to the best possible advantage
some special course. You must show that you have in you the right
stuff and what your college education has done for you is not to make
you feel excused from effort, but to give you the ability to use your
effort to greater advantage than you could otherwise have used it.
[Houston Daily Post, Houston, Texas, April 7, 1905.]
ON CAPITOL, PLAZA, AT AUSTIN, TEX, APRIL 6, 1905.
Mr. Governor and you, my fellow citizens:
I can not tell you how glad I am to be once more within the
limits of your great and beautiful State. In thanking all of you for
the welcome extended to me and in thanking especially the men of the
National Guard who have escorted me at each stopping place, I know
that you will not grudge my saying a particular word of greeting to
the two sets among you, in the first place to the veterans of the Civil
War; to the men who wore the gray, whom I have seen side by side
mingled with those who wore the blue at every place in Texas where we
have halted.
My fellow-countrymen, think how fortunate we are that the greatest
war of the nineteenth century should have left us the right to feel
pride alike in the deeds of the gallant victors and the gallant van-
quished; alike in the deeds of those who wore the blue and of those who
wore the gray, because each did all that in him lay to show that when
the times came that tried men's souls he was willing to prove his faith
by his endeavor.
It was given to me to have in my regiment many sons of Con-
federate soldiers and many sons of Union soldiers, but they knew
only one thought in reference one to the other, and that was the
generous emulation to show which could stand first when his country
called for his services. So I wish to greet especially the oldest among
you, the veterans, of whom the governor himself is one.
Next I want to go to the other end and say a word of greeting to
the children. I have been particularly pleased to be greeted wherever
I have gone by the great masses of school children, the children from
594 Messages and Speeches
the public schools and the children from the higher institutions of learn-
ing, state and private.
It is a mere truism to say that the prime work of any State should
be to keep up and raise ever higher its standard of citizenship. Texas
has a right to be proud of its industrial development and of its wonder-
ful natural resources, but I will tell you the best crop for any State
to rear after all is the crop of men and women. I believe in the
future of Texas so heartily because I believe that you are steadily
taking measures for the uptraining of the generation that in a very
few years will take our places and rule the destinies of the State.
No State can be great without paying the penalty of responsibility
that comes with greatness. This is true of the Nation. It is true
likewise of the States that go to make up the Nation. You have here
in Texas a commonwealth which in area and diversification of re-
sources already stands unequaled, which in population and wealth will
soon be one of the two or three first in the entire land. That means
that besides feeling exultation about it you ought to have a very
heavy sense of responsibility entailed on you thereby. No man can
do any work worth doing except at the cost of effort, of self-restraint,
or forcing himself to achieve things. No State can do anything except
by possessing just those qualities, because the State is, of course, simply
the aggregate of individuals within it.
If Texas fails in any way the fault will be felt by the entire country,
because its influence and its power are so great.
There is no royal road to good government; and I think all those
interested in managing your public affairs will agree with me that
what we need in our public officials is not genius, not even bril-
liancy, so much as the exercise of the ordinary, rather commonplace
qualities of honesty, courage and common sense—the qualities that
make a man a good husband, a good father, a good neighbor; that
make it advantageous to have dealings with him in business, or make
it worth while having him as a friend. These are the qualities which
are fundamental, which should be shown by the man who has to do with
public life; and do not forget that each one of you here has to do his
share in governing this commonwealth. It is not a figure of speech; it
is the literal fact that in the United States every man is a sovereign.
Remember that the fate of the sovereign who does not do his duty
is to get dethroned, and if the average man who makes the sovereign
does not do his duty he will get ousted from his sovereignty.
If a man can not govern himself he will find a boss or some one
else who can govern him; and then do not blame the boss—blame your-
self for not having the self-control, the resolution, the forethought and
the sense of civic duty which would make you do your full part in the
work of governing this country. You will not lose your birthright of
Theodore Roosevelt 595
citizenship unless by your own fault. If the average man keeps his
head and his wits, and if he takes a little pains, he will not be governed
that way. But do not let him sit down and blame the politicians, let him
blame himself, for it is in his power to get the government that he
seriously desires to have.
My fellow citizens, together with expressing the exultation that we
have a right to express about our country, we need to listen to it when
said and to have impressed upon us a sense of our own responsibility,
and the shortcomings of which we are guilty if we do not rise level to
that responsibility.
It is a very good thing that we should gather on State occasions,
on the Fourth of July, and on public festivals and hear speakers tell
how big a country we have ; but it would be a better thing if we would
go home and think over certain of the shortcomings that all of us
have and make up our minds to remedy them in the future. What I
ask of you and what I most firmly believe you will give is a patriotic
perseverance in doing each his average round of duties, in doing the
duties both of private life and as a citizen in public affairs each
day, without waiting for some special time when heroism will be called
for; but doing the humdrum work that comes to every man. If we do
that, we will find that the affairs of state will be settled as we desire
to have them settled. It is in private life just exactly as it is in
war. Any man who has ever had anything to do with a volunteer
regiment—and I suppose with any other regiment in time of war—
knows that there are any number of fellows bursting with desire to be
heroes but who are a little reluctant to police the camp meanwhile. They
picture war to themselves only as a heroic charge against the foe; not
as digging kitchen sinks and learning how to march so as not to throw
away your blanket at IO a. m. and at 7 p. m. wish you had not done
it. The soldier's life at first is learning to do well the little things
that come up every day, which if he leaves undone will make him pretty
nearly useless.
The same thing is true of the citizen in private life. There is
no use sitting at home finding fault with the way in which public
affairs are handled, and then every four years in a burst of animosity
against some person vote to turn him out. What you need to do,
month in and month out, year in and year out, is your ordinary political
duties as those political duties come up, and only under such conditions
can you get really good public servants.
Let me say one more word of warning. In public life, you will
sometimes encounter a man who will endeavor to lead you to do some-
thing which down at bottom you doubt being right, which he tells you
will be to your advantage to do—usually something that may look like
wronging some one else. But the man who will wrong some one else
596 Messages and Speeches
for your advantage will, when the chance comes, be very apt to wrong
you for his own advantage.
My fellow-citizens, my fellow-Americans, I address you here under
the shadow of your beautiful capitol of this great and wonderful
State with its heroic memories of Austin, of Sam Houston, of Davy
Crockett, of all the men who, in picture or in statue, are commemorated
in these halls, and my strongest feeling is that, proud though you
are of Texas, you can not be prouder of it than I am. One of the
greatest and most splendid features of our American life is that each
American has a right to be proud of the deeds of every other American,
no matter from what part of the country his fellow-American may come.
Your honor, your glory, are the honor and the glory of every man of
our great country.
Two years ago I traveled from the Atlantic to the Pacific; I have
come down to the gulf; I have addressed audience after audience of my
fellow-citizens, and I have come away feeling more and more that the
average American, North or South, East or West, is a pretty good
fellow if once you get to know him.
And all that is necessary for Our people is that they should get
to know one another in order to appreciate how slight are the diver-
gencies and how vitally fundamental is the union among them. Men
and women of Texas, I thank you for the greeting that Texas has given
me; I thank you for the chance that has been offered me to see you
and to talk with you face to face; and I want you to feel that while
I entered Texas a pretty good American I shall leave it an even better
American.
|Houston Daily Post, April 7, 1905.]
BEFORE THE STATE LEGISLATURE, AT AUSTIN, TEX.,
APRIL 6, 1905.
Governor, Mr. Speaker, and gentlemen:
No President of the United States, no good American, proud of
his country, could enter this capitol and stand in this hall without
feeling a certain thrill of pride in his citizenship, and in the history
of the country's past. This building in which we are now is not
Only one of the largest, but one of the most beautiful of its kind
throughout the world. It is eminently fitting that so great a State should
have so fine a capitol.
There are one or two things that I should like particularly to say
in this chamber, and to the members of the Texas legislature. I received
a copy of the resolution passed by your body, introduced, I under-
stand, by former Minister Terrell, in reference to the passage of the
interstate commerce act. I wish to thank you most heartily for what
Theodore Roosevelt 597
you did. I think that the longer our experience in public office is, the
more we realize that at least 95 per cent., if not more, of the work of
importance done by any public officer who is worth his salt has nothing
whatever to do with partisan politics.
The things that concern us all as good citizens are infinitely larger
than the matters concerning which we are divided one from the other
along party lines. Fundamentally, our attitude in our foreign affairs
and in reference to foreign nations, must, in the long run, if we
are to be successful as a people, be based upon certain common sense
rules of conduct; the identical rules upon which every self-respecting
citizen must base his private actions.
This is especially true as regards all questions dealing with capital
and labor ; and especially in dealing with the great aggregations of
capital usually to be found in corporate form through which so much
of our business at the present day is conducted. It is essential in
dealing by legislative action with corporate wealth, or, indeed, with
wealth in any form, that we remember and act upon certain rules simple
enough and common sense enough to state, but not always easy when
it comes to acting upon them. Most emphatically we cannot, as good
Americans, bear hostility to any rich man as such any more than to
any poor man as such. My experience has been that the man who
talks over-loudly of his hostility to corporate wealth cannot be trusted to
act quite to the way he talks.
It is a good thing to have moderation in state affairs, but to make your
deeds bear out absolutely your words.
With that preliminary, I would like to say in brief just what my
position is as regards this particular question, with which I have
had to deal, and as regards which the Texas legislature took the action
I so much appreciated. ---
On the whole, there have been few instruments in the economic
development of the country which have done more for the country
than the railroads. I do not wish in any shape or way to interfere with
the legitimate gain of any of these great men, whose special industrial
capacity enables them to handle the railroads so as to be of profit to
themselves and of advantage to all of us. I should be most reluctant
—I will put it stronger than that—I should absolutely refuse to
be a party to any measure, to any proposition, that interfered with
the proper and legitimate prosperity of those men; and I should feel
that such a measure was aimed not only at them, but all of us, for
an attack upon the legitimate prosperity of any of us is in the long
run sure to turn into an attack upon all.
With that proviso, as to which I ask you to remember that I mean
literally every word, let me further add that the public has a right,
not a privilege, but, in my view, a duty, to see that there is in its
598 Messages and Speeches
behalf exercised such a supervisory and regulatory power over the
railroads as will insure that, while they give fair treatment, they them-
selves get it in return.
The proper exercise of that power is conditioned upon the securing
of proper legislation, which will enable the representatives of - the
public to see to it that any unjust or oppressive or discriminating
rates are altered so as to be a just and fair rate, and are altered im-
mediately.
I know perfectly well that when you give that power there is a
chance of its being occasionally abused. There is no power that
can be given to the representatives of the people which it is not
possible to abuse. As every one knows, the power of taxation,
which must, of course, be given to the representatives of the people,
is the power of death, for it is possible to kill any industry by excessive
taxation. There must be a certain trust placed in the common sense
and the common honesty of those who are to enforce the law. If it
ever falls, and I think it will, to my lot to nominate a board to carry
out such a law, I shall nominate men, as far as I am able, on whose
ability, courage, and integrity I can count; men who will not be swayed
by any influences whatever, direct or indirect, social, political, or
any other, to show improper favoritism for the railroads, and who, on
the other hand, if a railroad is unjustly attacked, no matter if that
attack has behind it the feeling or prejudice of 99 per cent. of the
people, will stand up against that attack. That is my interpretation of
the doctrine of the square deal.”
I want to say just one more word on an entirely different subject.
I have always taken a great interest in the National Guard of this
country. It is our pride that we have the smallest possible regular
army. There is not another first-class power, there is not a second
or third class power in the world that has not got, relatively to its
population and wealth, a very much larger regular army than we
have. We do not need anything but a small regular army. We
need, and must and shall have, the very best regular army of its
size that is to be had anywhere. We do not need a large regular army,
because of the possibilities of Our people in raising volunteer troops.
These possibilities are largely conditioned upon the excellence of the
National Guard. ge
Since I have been in Texas at almost every stopping place there
have been members of the National Guard, companies of the National
Guard, out to do duty in connection with keeping crowds in order, in
preventing any trouble of any kind, in keeping the whole proceedings
orderly and proper. I have been immensely struck with their soldier-
*It is to the honor of President Roosevelt that when he shows one a goal he points out
a path to that goal. He does not believe in taking people into the woods and then leaving
them there.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 599
like efficiency. It is only what I ought to expect. When I was last in
Texas I was engaged with certain others in raising a volunteer regi-
ment, and as I think I know a good thing when I see it, I got just as
many Texans as possible into that regiment.
Your whole history, from the days of Austin and Houston and
Davy Crockett right to the present time, shows what splendid fighting
material the average Texan makes. But I do not care how good
the material, it is not going to amount to much if it is not given a
chance. It is a most important thing for all of us, if we desire to
keep the regular army small, that we shall have the militia, the National
Guard of the several States, kept up to a proper point. Last year, I
am happy to be able to say, at the maneuvers of the regulars, your
Texas troops did admirably. I have been told again and again how
well they did. I want to congratulate you upon the excellent law for
the administration of the National Guard that has been passed by the
Texas legislature. {
I feel very much at home here. I have been governor and I have
served in the legislature, so I have a good deal of fellow-feeling.
I have had for a good many years to grapple with just about the
some problems you are grappling with from time to time here; and
I know, as any man who has taken part in active work must know,
how easy it is for the outsider to say that everything should be
managed perfectly, and how difficult it is to do even fairly decent work.
There is a heap of difference between the critic, the onlooker, and the
doer—the man who does the job.
AT WACO, TEX., APRIL 6, 1905.
Much though you believe in Texas, you cannot believe in it any
more than I do. I have been passing through the North and Middle
States, and it is borne in on me at every stop what a marvelous
heritage you of this great Commonwealth enjoy, and, mind you,
anything that tends to the greatness of a part of the United States
inevitably tends to the greatness of the whole. All the United States
is concerned with the greatness of Texas because every good American
feels that he has some part in the ownership of every square foot
of American soil. Most assuredly all that I can do will, as a matter
of course, be done for the greatness of every portion, South and
North, East and West, of our common country. I cannot pledge it
in advance, but whatever can be properly done for the Trinity and
Brazos rivers, or anything else, shall be done not as a matter of
favor to Texas, but exactly as we do it with all similar rivers in any
section of the country.
Work of that kind is to be done not on a basis of favoritism, but on
6OO Messages and Speeches
a basis of justice to all parts of this republic. Much though I have
been impressed with the natural advantages, the thing that really makes
me proud of Texas is the men and women. That is what counts. I
like your men, and your women even more, and I want to congratulate
you on the children. On the quality and quantity.
I wish to express my special gratitude at the escort given me by
the National Guard of Texas. When I raised my regiment I tried
to get all the Texans in it I could. I had about fifty, and I would have
willingly had four times that number. I know the type of the men
that Texas sends to war if the need arises. I am not sure, however,
that Texas or any other one of our States appreciates to the full
the need of encouraging, as it ought to be encouraged, the National
Guard, and on behalf of the National Guard I bespeak from Texas
this encouragement, so that it shall not only be armed and equipped,
but shall have the chance to practice field maneuvers, marches, and
markmanship so that it may attain the highest standard of effi-
ciency.
One of the things that have gratified me most is that every place
where I have stopped in Texas I have been met by the mingled bands
of those who wore the blue and those who wore the gray in the
great Civil War. Here in your own town I am met by one of my
former comrades, who was in my regiment. He can tell you that in
that regiment we had the sons of the Confederate and sons of the
Union soldier, and we judged each one by the will and power with
which he could serve our common country.
I believe in Texas with all my heart and soul, because I believe
in the United States with all my heart and soul. You must bear in
mind that in performing the duties of citizenship that come to you,
you deal not only with your own concern, but with the concerns of
the entire Nation. In public life there is no peculiar genius or
brilliancy required so much as we require certain humdrum, every-
day, commonplace qualities. You need in the first place the quality
of honesty. Unless not merely the public man, , but the average
private citizen, is honest, and I do not mean merely technically honest,
I do not mean honest to the extent of keeping out of the penitentiary,
I mean genuinely honest—unless he is that, the abler and the more
courageous he is, the more dangerous he is. You must have honesty
first, but that is not enough. The honest man who is a coward is
of no earthly use to himself or any one else. Together with honesty,
hand in hand with it, must go courage. You men of the great war
know that it was not enough that a man should love his country.
You need to have honesty as the first trait, and courage is equally
indispensable, and these two qualities are not enough. In addition
to honesty, in addition to courage, we need the saving grace of
Theodore Roosevelt 6oI
common sense. If we have these qualities combined in the average
man, we can be certain that the problems before our nation will be
settled, as I firmly believe they will be settled, aright for future gen-
erations.
I thank you for having given me this chance to see you, and I thank
from my heart the people of Texas for this magnificent welcome I have
received at their hands.
AT SAN ANTONIO, TEX, APRIL 7, 1905.
I thank you all for the way in which I have been greeted. You can
hardly imagine how much it means to me to come back to San Antonio
in this way and to be received as you have received me. I know that
the rest of you will not grudge my saying a special word of acknowl-
edgment to two sets among your citizens. First, to the men of the
great war, to the men who wore the blue or wore the gray in the
days that tried men's souls. My fellow-citizens, infinitely more im-
portant than any President, infinitely more important even than the
reception to any President, is what is symbolized by seeing the men
who fought in the Union army and the men who fought in the
Confederate army standing mingled together, fellow-Americans, one
in devotion and honor and loyalty to the country, shoulder to shoulder
as fellow-citizens of the mightiest republic upon which the sun has
ever shone. Indeed, the man would have a poor heart, a poor spirit,
who would not be thrilled by such a meeting as this, by such a sight
as you accord me today, you of the gray, you of the blue, all one under
the flag of this reunited country.
I suppose you must know it, but I want to tell you that it was
of course the memory of the valor, the self-sacrifice, the endurance you
displayed in the great war that made us of the younger generation
feel that when the lesser war came we wished to emulate your
course. The regiment which I had the honor to command, which was
raised and organized in this city, took part in what were only skirmishes
compared with the campaigns in which you did your share, and all
that we claim is that while it was not given to us to have the chance
to do great deeds, yet we hope we made you feel that the old spirit
was not altogether lost. This regiment served under men who had
themselves fought in the Civil War, both under Grant and under
Lee. The commander of the cavalry division was that great, gallant
ex-Confederate soldier, Maj. Gen. Joseph Wheeler, and our immediate
commander, our brigadier commander, was a former Union soldier,
who entered the Union army as a private, and to whom, for my
great good fortune, it befell me to sign the commission as lieutenant
general of the army of the United States, Lieut. Gen. Young. After-
6O2 Messages and Speeches
ward at San Juan the cavalry served under Gen. Sumner, from whom I
took my orders:
I am going to tell you just one anecdote of Gen. Young. Before
the war began I told him I was going to do my best to get into it,
and that I wanted to get a chance for some fighting. He said:
“All right; I will have a cavalry brigade and if you come with me
I will guarantee that you shall see the fighting.”
He kept his word, as he always does. I cannot say how much it
meant to me to be able to take part in raising that regiment under
the shadow of the Alamo. My admiration for Texas and Texans is
no new thing. Since I have been a boy and first studied the history
of this country, my veins have thrilled and tingled as I read of the
mighty deeds of Houston, Bowie, Crockett, Travis, of the glorious
men who fell in the fight of the Alamo, of which it was said, “Ther-
mopylae had its messengers of death, but the Alamo had none.”
I remember well seven years ago when we were raising the regiment,
of riding in here one day to see the Alamo, and going away feeling
that come what would I was going to try to handle myself so that
no disgrace should come to the memory of the Americans who died
there. I want you to remember that ours was a volunteer regiment and
a small war, and that we do not claim any credit for what we did
more than falls to the lot of any number of other people. All we ask
of you is to believe that we tried to show the spirit which would have
made us do the kind of a job that you of the Civil War did, if the need
had arisen.
I wish to express my acknowledgments for the greeting which I
have received here in San Antonio, and which I have received through-
out the length and breadth of Texas. This is the third time I have
visited this beautiful city. I wonder if you in yourselves, proud though
you are of it, appreciate the charm it has to an outsider coming
here.
It is fifteen years ago that I first came here, simply passing through
as any number of travelers pass through, and saw your city. Seven
years ago when I came here I was strictly one on business. When
we got back that year from Santiago I said to one of the officers of
the regiment: “Now, we have got to have a reunion of the Rough
Riders in San Antonio.”
All kinds of things happened in between. I have led a middling
busy life myself since, and now at last the chance has come to make
good the promise, and to have those of the regiment who are able to
come together here in the city where the regiment was raised to greet
one another and talk over the past. In a sense, we can claim that that
regiment was a typical American body. The men composing it were
raised chiefly in the Southwest, but some from the North, some from
Theodore Roosevelt 603
the East, so that we had the Northerner and the Southerner, * the East-
erner and the Westerner in that regiment, and almost every religious
body of any size in the United States was represented in our ranks. We
had men who had been born abroad, and men who were born here,
whose ancestors came to what is now the United States at the time of
the landing of the first colonists at the mouth of the James and at Ply-
mouth. We had men who had inherited wealth, and men who all their
lives long had earned each day's bread by that day’s toil. We had men
of every grade socially; men who worked with their heads, men who
worked with their hands; men of all the types that our country pro-
duces; but each of them managed to get in on his worth as a man
only and content to be judged purely by what he could show himself
to be.
It has always seemed to me that one of the greatest lessons taught by
the Civil War was the lesson of brotherhood. You my friends, who
wore the blue; you, my friends, who wore the gray, each of you when
he went forward to battle, what he was concerned with about the man
on his right and the man on his left was not what the man’s ancestry
was, not as to how he worshiped his Maker; not as to what his profes-
sion was or his means; what you wanted to know was whether he would
“stay put”.
If he did, you were for him, and if he did not, you were against him.
The same thing that was true in the great war is true in time of peace.
This government is emphatically a government by the people, for the
people, of the people.
Now besides applauding that sentiment, let us live up to it. It has
two sides. In the first place, it applies in a dozen different directions.
It applies, for instance, in reference to creed. We have a right to ask
that our neighbor do his duty toward God and man; but we have
no business to dictate to him how he shall worship his Maker and no
business to discriminate for or against him because of the way in which
he does it. In the same way a man is a decent citizen, whether he be
rich or poor. To judge from some of the talk you occasionally hear,
a man cannot be a square man if he is rich. Remember always that
*Whenever President Roosevelt gets down south one finds him delicately yet none the
less decisively preaching down sectionalism. He wants the Southerner to quit being a
Southerner and become an American. The southern man, if wise in his day, will listen to him.
A man who would sooner be a Southerner than an American is a man who would sooner be
a Colonel than a General. Also the solid South should get over its solidity. It is being
ruined by the adjective and for its own good should break itself up. It should cease being
“certain” in politics and become “uncertain.” The parties will nominate their candidates for
the White House from New York and their candidates for the vice presidency from Indiana
and West Virginia, because New York and Indiana and West Virginia are “uncertain.” If
the South would cease being solid and certain and become uncertain, it would begin to get
things. No man buys what he has or pays for what he can’t get. The democrats will do
nothing for the South because they can’t lose it. The republicans will do nothing for the
South because they can't win it. Wherefore, speaking to the South, I say again become
uncertain.—A. H. L.
604 Messages and Speeches
you listen at your peril to any man who would seek to inflame you
against your fellow-citizen because he is better off. Again, as in the
Civil War, come back to considerations about your bunkie.
You did not care whether he was a banker or a bricklayer. If he
was a banker he was all right; he was a good fellow if he did his duty
in camp, if he did not straggle on the march, if he did not drop his share
of the joint plunder on the march, and then expect you to share yours
with him at the end of the day. You wanted him to carry his part,
and if he did it you were for him. Now, apply that in civil life. If
the rich man does not do his duty, cinch him, and I will help you
just as far as I can. But don't cinch him because he is a rich man.
If you do you are a mighty mean creature; you are not a good Ameri-
can. Give him a perfectly fair show. If he is a poor man and does
his duty, help him; stand him up. If he whines about it and says he
Ought to be carried, you may just as well make up your mind to drop
him then and there. Every man of us stumbles at times. Every man
of us at times needs a helping hand stretched out to him, and shame to
any man who will not stretch out that helping hand to his brother if
that brother needs it. But if the brother lies down, you can do very
little in carrying him. You can help him up, but he must walk for
himself. The only way in which you can ever really help a man is to
help him to help himself.
That brings me to the second set of people here, whom I am most
especially glad to see and to greet—the children. Judging by the
showing that San Antonio has made to-day, San Antonio is all right
as regards both quality and quantity. I like your stock. I am glad that
it does not seem likely to die out.
In passing through Texas I have been more impressed than by any-
thing else with the evident care you are giving to education, to training
your children, the school facilities, both for preliminary and for higher
education, and the way in which those facilities are being taken ad-
vantage of. Of course, it is a mere truism to say that the care of the
children is the most important task of any generation. You have a
wonderful empire here in Texas. It is literally larger than most Old
World empires. Your diversification of soil and climate, the marvelous
fertility of your soil, your natural advantages, insure you a phenomenal
future, agriculturally and industrially—insure this State a wonderful
growth in population and wealth. All that is essential. You must
have the material basis on which to build a foundation. The material
counts for nothing if you do not build upon it the spiritual, if you do
not build upon it the things of the soul, of the mind.
Let me again take an example from the war. We need arms and
equipment, but the best rifle ever made does not make a soldier if it has
Theodore Roosevelt 605
not got the right man behind it. You may take the finest model
weapon, put it in the hands of a weakling or a coward, and a good man
will beat him with a club.
If the other man is a good man, too, you want a mighty good weapon,
and if you come in contact with one another, each will want all the
good weapons he can get. But the weapon does not in any shape or
way serve as a substitute for the spirit of the soldier. That is what
counts in the last resort. Tactics change, weapons change, but the
Soul that drives a man forward to victory does not change as the ages
go by. We of to-day, we who, if a war should come, will have to fight
under new conditions, with new arms, will win. Assuredly, I believe
we shall win. Only because men still have in them the spirit that made
their forefathers do well in battle. So you must train your children
up so that in addition to having what counts for material prosperity in
a State you must have the things that tell most for greatness, the things
that make for the soul of the State. Here in San Antonio, what is the
building you are proudest of ? Exactly, the Alamo. It is not exactly
up to date. Other buildings are larger. You are proud of it because
it commemorates forever the spirit of those who made its fame im-
mortal. So in the State itself, important though it is to provide for
the industrial welfare of the Commonwealth, the thing that is most
important is to take care of the really most vital crop—the crop of
citizens. The thing which the State most needs to care for is the
welfare, not merely material, but moral and intellectual as well, of
children who are going to make up the State twenty or twenty-five
years hence; and that is why I am so glad to see the care which you
of Texas are taking of the generation now growing up.
The thing that is rather distressing to me to see is that sometimes the
men and the women who have done well in life show a curious in-
ability to train their own children in the way that has resulted success-
fully to them. I think that all of us know people who, because they
have worked hard and triumphed, feel that somehow or other they will
spare their children. They will foolishly spare their children the ac-
quisition of the very qualities which have made the parents triumph.
Too often you see the man, and, I am sorry to say, the woman, who
says, “I have had to work hard ; my sons and daughters shall have an
easy time.” He is preparing ruin for the children about whom he says
it.
Of course you want to give your children all the love possible, but it
is not right to mistake folly for affection. When you spare the child
that which alone will enable it to conquer in after life you are not do-
ing it a blessing; you are doing it the greatest wrong in your power.
Bring up the boy and the girl alike, with the understanding that life
is not generally easy, that there will be plenty of rough times, and that
606 Messages and Speeches
what they have to show is not a spirit that avoids difficulties and flinches
from them, but a spirit which overcomes them.
There is only one of my fellow-citizens to whom I will touch my hat
quicker than to the soldier, and that is the mother, because I think she
has a harder time of it. The mother who has brought up as they should
be brought up a family of young children is entitled to such respect as
no other person in the community is entitled to. When the end of
her life comes, there has been any amount of hardship, the sitting up
by beds of sick children, the taking care of them, and a mother is not
allowed to know the difference between night and day as far as the
ending of the day's task is concerned; but after all, when it is done,
she can look back with a prouder sense of gratification than any one
else can have if she has done her duty, for her children and her hus-
band shall rise up and call her blessed. The worthy life for the nation
for the individual, for the man and for the woman, is the life of effort
for the things worth striving for.
Of course, that is my conception of the life for the nation as well
as for the individual. I am not going to develop my theory about that,
in the first place, because I want to keep clear of anything that you
might think touched in the faintest degree on politics, and, in the next
place, because I believe you know pretty well how I feel, any way. We
have got our duty to ourselves. We must handle ourselves so that no
weak power which is behaving itself shall have cause to fear us, and
no strong power of any kind shall be able to oppress us or wrong us.
We all believe in the Monroe Doctrine. I have a little difficulty in
getting some of my friends to accept my interpretation of it, but they
will in time, because that interpretation has come to stay.
We are building the Panama Canal. While that will be a benefit to
all the country, it will be of most benefit to the Gulf States. We have
duties in connection with the great position we have taken. We can-
not shirk these duties. We can do them well or do them ill, but do
them we must. That is one reason why I want to see a good navy, and
we have a good navy.
I am going to use a simile that I used a few nights ago in Dallas. In
the old days in Texas I understand that there used to be a proverb that
while you would not generally want a gun at all, if you did want it you
wanted it quick and you wanted it very bad. That is just the way I
feel about the navy. I feel that if we have it the chances are that we
will not need it, but that if we do not have it we might need it very
bad. Let me thank you again for the attention you have given me.
AT WICHITA FALLS, TEX, APRIL 8, 1905.
I know this country well. It is just twenty-five years ago that I first
went into the great West, the real West, up beyond the Missouri in
Theodore Roosevelt 607
North Dakota. At that time I saw great stretches of level prairie with-
out a house, where now there are thriving towns, but I do not know that
I have ever seen any greater transformation than from what I am told
has been taking place during the same time in your own country. I
have now been traveling for four days through Texas. I want to
congratulate you on the enterprise and forethought you have shown
in your irrigation scheme here. What you have done is not only of
very great importance to this community, but it is of the utmost im-
portance by way of example to all of our Western people. I have had
the good fortune to spend many years of my life in the Western
country. When I became President, one of the first things to which
I devoted my attention was to try to bring about a fuller plan of irriga-
tion, for the reclamation of agricultural lands in the semi-arid regions.
I naturally take a particular interest in what you have done in that
regard. The welfare of the great Western country, and that means in
its essence the welfare of the United States as a whole, depends upon
the encouragement given to the home maker, that is the crop we want
to grow, the crop of home makers. The men who really can conquer
this continent for the Republic are men like Mr. Burnett and the others
who have come out here when there was a frontier, out into these lands
of the Indian and the Buffalo, and there made ready the way of civi-
lization that we now see before us. Great is our debt of obligation to
those men. I came down to Texas several years ago to help raise my
regiment and when we returned from Santiago I told the men that we
would surely have to have a reunion of the regiment at San Antonio
under the walls of the Alamo, where the regiment had been raised.
At last the time came when I could arrange to have the regimental
reunion and at the same time visit your great and wonderful State.
I admire Texas not only for its wonderful material advantages, for
its agricultural, pastoral and industrial resources, but above and beyond
all of this, for the character of its citizenship, for the character of its
men and women. I have been received in Texas in a manner for which
I can not sufficiently express my gratitude and appreciation. We look
at this country of ours not as something that is to last only for a few
years, but we feel that this great Republic is going to last through
the ages. We are trying here in America on the largest and most com-
plete scale that it has been tried, the experiment of having a free people
govern itself by itself and for itself. We are bound to make a success
of it, not for our sakes, but for the sake of mankind. The cause of free
government throughout this land would be shaken to its foundation if
we fail here. We can succeed only by seeing to it that the children,
the boys and the girls, who in ten or fifteen or twenty years will be the
men and women who will then control affairs, are so trained that they
can do their part well in the work of self-government under free insti-
608 Messages and Speeches
tutions and congratulate you upon what you have done and are doing
in this regard.
[Houston Daily Post, Houston, Texas, April 9, 1905.]
AT FORT WORTH, TEX, APRIL 8, 1905.
|
Mr. Mayor and fellow citizens:
I trust I need not say how profoundly touched and impressed I am
by the greeting I have received today—a greeting which is such as I
have received throughout Texas, and, oh! my friends, while thanking
you from the bottom of my heart for so much of the greeting as affects
me personally, let me say that I appreciate to the full the infinitely
deeper significance of the fact that it is the greeting of the great State
of Texas to the President of the United States.
My friends of the Civil War, the audience wants to know will it be
possible to put the flags down. They have a misguided desire to see me.
And now, fellow Americans, the rest of you, I know, will agree with
me in saying that profoundly as I am touched by the greeting of all
of you, yet the greeting which touches me most, because it argues to us
much toward the welfare of the country, is the greeting of the veterans
of the Civil War, the greeting of the men who wore the blue and the
men who wore the gray.
With sincerity of conviction, each fought for the right as it was given
him to see the right, and they are now united forever and forever in al-
legiance to our common flag and our common country. There are pres-
ent other veterans of the Mexican War, the men who fought to round
out the work done by the pioneers of Texas when they established the
Republic of Texas; the men who completed the work begun under
Thomas Jefferson when the Louisiana purchase added to our domain
the country west of the Mississippi, and made us a mighty continental
nation. - *
And let me thank my comrades of the National Guard for the escort
they have given me, and for their part in doing their duty in keeping
alive the spirit which has always made the sons of Texas the most
formidable of foes, as they are the most faithful of friends.
And, my fellow countrymen, I cannot begin to express to you how
impressed I have been all during my four days’ trip through Texas
with your material growth, not only with the view of material pros-
perity which assuredly looms before you, but with the character of your
men and women, and with the steps that you are taking to educate
the next generation so that they shall be citizens of benefit to Texas,
of benefit to the entire United States.
You have here a territory that is an empire in itself, and you have
what counts for more than all else, the stuff out of which good citizen-
Theodore Roosevelt 609
ship is made. We need in this country good laws, and we need fearless
and honest officers of the law, but what we need most is the right type
of men and women behind the law. If the homes are right, if the
average citizen is all right, there is not much question of our getting
our problems solved successfully, and we are going to have them solved
successfully, because the home is all right, because the average man
is a man and the average woman a woman in the true sense of the
word.
After all, I have come to the conclusion traveling through this great
land of ours from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and over Maine, Wash-
ington, and Montana, and Texas,” that the chief thing we need is to
have Americans know one another. I am willing to bet on the result,
if you will just get them together. Now that is what impressed me
most in going through this country and speaking to the various audi-
ences, not the points of divergence, which are only small, but the points
of fundamental unity. We have got our troubles the same as all nations,
some of them belonging to a given locality, but we are going to solve
all the problems ahead of us, because, as a nation, I think we have the
necessary courage, honesty, and common sense to enable us to work out
our salvation.
And now, here at Fort Worth, I want to say a word of special greet-
ing to the representatives of the great industry in which I have always
felt a peculiar interest, the stockmen. I lived a number of years in a
cow country myself, and always look back not only with keen pleasure
to that time, but with the realization of what it taught me. But things
were a little different from what they were in the East, and it gave
me a chance to realize the immense importance of a matter which con-
cerns Western Texas a little, and which concerns still more the Rocky
Mountain States, and that is the question of irrigation; and there is
nothing that I am prouder of in connection with my administration
than in having done my part in making the movement for irrigation a
national one.
Here in Texas you have rivers and harbors, and we want to improve
them nationally so as to make them navigable; and on the other hand,
you have regions where we want to take care of the head waters of the
stream so that the farmer in security can take care of his crops.
Texas has such an enormous extent of territory, a territory so widely
diversified that almost all the things which culminate in some particular
State come to the front in Texas, and, therefore, we have a right to
expect that, more than almost any other State, Texas shall contribute to
the aggregate of our national wealth; and let me repeat here what I
*There is—and I’ve put in months with them—this peculiarity in the thorough-paced
native of Texas. From his own standpoint he is a man by himself. He is not from the West
or the East, the North or the South, he is from Tewas; he is not an American, he is a
Texan.—A. H. L.
6IO Messages and Speeches
have said to various audiences, and I mean it literally, every word of
it. I did not need to come here in order to be a good citizen, and a
good American, but if I had needed it, I would have got what I needed
here. And, although I came to Texas a pretty good American, I want
you to understand that I feel that no President, no matter who he may
be, while he is President, can afford not to come to Texas, for he will
leave a better American than he was when he came.
AT FREDERICK, OKLA., APRIL 9, 1905.
Fellow citizens: *.
The next time I come to Oklahoma I trust I will come to a State, and
it won't be my fault if this is not so. I greet the veterans of the Civil
War who came here today to greet the President, because we are one
people and one country, and not to be divided forever. I am glad to .
See Qunah Parker, who has done so well with his farm. One thing
of which I am proud is that I have tried to give a fair deal to every
II1211.
Give the red man the same chance as the white. This country is
founded on the doctrine of giving each man a fair show to see what
there is in him. I have traveled four days in Texas, and I am now in
what will soon be a great State of the Union. There is nowhere I feel
more at home than in a town like this. I have confidence in the char-
acter of the men and women who have come here. Ever since the
Revolution we have been making new States. Now we are about at
the close of this period.
I do not feel that I have to explain my policies to the Oklahoma
people. You like to have the American people play a big part in the
world, and play that part well. I know the Western people are with us
when I say we must build the Panama Canal. You do not think I
should be quiet while the American people are being held up. We want
our rights, not as a favor, but as a right. I have had a middling busy
three and a half years. I have liked my job. I enjoyed it and was
thankful to the people for telling me to go on with it.
Now, I want four days’ play. I hear you have plenty of jack rabbits
and coyotes here. I like my citizens, but don't like them on a coyote
hunt. Give me a fair show to have as much fun as even a President is
entitled to have. Good-by, and good luck.
AT TRINIDAD, COLO., APRIL 14, 1905.
My friends of Colorado:
I cannot say what a pleasure it is to be back with you again. You
know how proud I am of your State, how I believe in the whole Western
country, and here I see men of my old regiment who were with me in
the days that will remain most vivid in my mind.
Theodore Roosevelt 6II
I wish to thank the men of the National Guard for coming out as my
escort. It is a pleasure to see them and have them think of us veterans
of the late war. Let me say how glad I am to see the school children's
faces. I was going to say that I believe more in children than I do
in irrigation and you know I am all right on irrigation. It is essential
for the welfare of the State that it should keep up its standard of citi-
zenship and that standard of citizenship can only be kept up as you
are keeping it up here.
Just one word about irrigation. I was immensely interested by the
great work that I passed through just outside of the city. There is no
One thing, possibly excepting Panama, that I feel is more essential in
connection with this administration than the part taken by the national
government in helping the irrigation movement in the West.
I think our own people have but a faint idea of the amount that can
be done with it.
I have come to Colorado this time on a holiday, but I am so glad on
the way to have the chance to say just a few words of greeting to the
people themselves. I am immensely touched and pleased at your com-
ing out to greet me and I only wish I had the chance to discuss with
you at length all the problems of our government, for it seems to me
that—well, I can’t do it now. Good-bye, Good-bye.
[Denver Republican, Denver, Colo., April 15, 1905.]
AT TEXLINE, TEX, APRIL I4, 1905.
I want to say good-bye to all the good people of Texas. Also I want
to say that I appreciate to the limit the kindness with which I have been
treated in Texas. It has been to me the greatest pleasure to go through
this great State. Two years ago I went to the Pacific Slope. I have
been North, South, East and West in this great country of ours, and
while there are slight differences between the people in one place and
those in another, the fundamental thing that strikes me wherever I go
is that down at the bottom the average American is a pretty decent
fellow.
I believe that about all that is necessary is to get one American to
know another to have them get on well in government. There is not
any remarkable genius or remarkable brilliancy needed; what is needed
in governing ourselves is the exercise of just exactly the same qualities
that make a man a decent neighbor, a decent husband, a decent father.
If that is the type we have in our representatives, we are going to have
success. We cannot afford to barter such qualities as honesty, as cour-
age, as common sense for any amount of brilliancy or genius. We need
in public life, as we need in private life, the same qualities that have
been needed since history began.
612 Messages and Speeches
AT CLAYTON, N. M., APRIL I4, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to me to be back in New Mexico and to pass
through Clayton. Right from this neighborhood, some fifteen of your
citizens came into my regiment. Several of them were wounded. I
have the feeling for them that one naturally has for the men with whom
he has been thrown into the intimate relations of life. I am particularly
pleased to see you all here. I am glad to see a first-class exhibit of
New Mexico's children. You do not know what a pleasure it is to me
to get out into this Western country, that I have known so well, where
I have ranched in the other days, and from which I drew the men with
whom I went to Santiago when the war with Spain broke out. I follow
your career with the greatest possible interest. When I get out here
and see the big plains, it makes me feel as if I were at home again.
AT COLORADO SPRINGS, COLO., APRIL I4, 1905.
Let me say one word of special greeting to the veterans of the Grand
Army. To you, my cområdes, I wish to say that I have just come up
from Texas, and it would have done your hearts good, you men who
wore the blue in the great war, to see how, side by side with your com-
rades who wore the blue, stood the men who wore the gray, united
with them now for ever and ever with one flag and one country. De-
lighted though I was with every feature of my reception in Texas, I
think that the feature that pleased me most was that of which I have
just spoken, to see the old Union and Confederate veterans stand to-
gether under the old flag.
Now, I am going to make a request of the people of Colorado. I
am off on a hunt. One thing you cannot do on a hunt, and that is to
carry a brass band. You cannot combine hunting bears with your
Fourth of July celebrations, so I am going to beg the people of Colorado
to treat me on this hunt just as well as the people of Oklahoma treated
me on the wolf hunt. If a lot of newspaper men start to come in after
me, I will have to come home; that's all there is to it. The thing they
can do that will please me best is to let me be on that hunt alone, and
pay no earthly attention to me, or to any of my party, while I am off
in the mountains.
AT NEWCASTLE, COLO., APRIL 15, 1905.
I have always believed in your people. I think that this is going
to be one of the greatest states of the Union, not merely in its material
development, but in its type of citizenship.
Now, I want to pass to the generation that is coming on, and con-
gratulate Colorado upon what she is doing with her public schools, upon
*
Theodore Roosevelt 613
\
her whole force of teachers, and upon the steps that are being taken
to train aright the next generation. I believe in the mines; I believe, as
you know, in the irrigation works; I believe in your stock ranches, in
everything; but the real crop is the crop of children, for if you get that
all straight, the other crops will take care of themselves in the end.
I want to say what a pleasure it has been to see the way in which the
next generation is being started out on its life task here in Colorado.
I thank you very, very much for coming here, and I am glad to see
you.
AT CANYON CITY, COLO, MAY 8, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to greet you here. I cannot say how glad I am
to see you all, men and women of Colorado, and greet especially the
veterans and the school children, and say how pleased I am to go
through your state and see its resources, not only your mines, your
fruit, all its products, but I want to say you have got a wonderful asset
in your scenery, in the natural beauties of this state. *
Passing through your wonderful mountains and canyons, I realize
more and more that this is the playground for the entire republic.
Not only have you serious work to do, but you will have to provide
for a little of the rest of us from the East and West who will come here
to see your magnificent landscapes, to enjoy holidays that can be fully
enjoyed among your mountains.
I have been more and more impressed with that as I have been
through your state, and you will see this, the real Switzerland of Amer-
ica, made as much a holiday place as Switzerland is in Europe.
AT SALIDA, COLO., MAY 8, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to have the chance of greeting you today. I can-
not say how I have enjoyed being in Colorado again. It has been the
first three weeks’ holiday I have had since I have been President, and
I suppose it will be the last, and I have enjoyed it to the full.
In greeting you let me say a word or two of special acknowledgment
to the veterans of the Civil War, and to say how glad I am wherever
I go to be greeted by the men to whom we owe it that we have a country
to be proud of at all. Then let me say a special word of greeting to
those at the other end of the line, to the small people. I have been
particularly pleased coming through Colorado to see the care you are
taking with your schools in the education of the children, who will con-
trol the destiny of this state when we, who are now in our prime, shall
have passed from the stage.
I congratulate you upon your marvelous material prosperity. I con-
614 Messages and Speeches
gratulate you still more on the pains you are taking to educate the citi-
zenship of the future, to educate the boys and girls who will be the men
and women twenty years hence who will be controlling the destiny of
this State. For, important though material prosperity is, there is a
thing that is far more important, and that is the character of the indi-
vidual citizens. That is what counts most. That is what made you
men of the Civil War able to preserve the Union. It was not chiefly
the material wealth of the country; it was the character of the average
citizen who went into the ranks.
It is so in private life, and in civil life. The character of the average
man and average woman is what in the last resort determines the great-
ness of the State, the greatness of the nation. I believe in this people
with all my heart and soul, because I believe in the average of charac-
ter of the people.
Let me say one more word here in this railway town of special greet-
ing to the railway men. It has always seemed to me that the men
engaged in the actual work of handling the railways of the country
possess, by virtue of their work, certain qualities which are especially
necessary to good citizenship. They are accustomed to work hard.
They are accustomed to take risks. They are accustomed both to assume
responsibility and to obey orders quickly, and both qualities are abso-
lutely necessary. You cannot command if you cannot obey.
AT PUEBLO, COLO., MAY 8, 1905.
I cannot say how much impressed I am as I travel through your great
State. I doubt if you yourselves fully realize its future, as I have said
to you before. Your mines, your manufactures, the commerce in which
you are engaged, your stock farming, your grain farming, your
orchards, the development that will surely come of your water power;
above all, the extraordinary strides you are taking in irrigation; all of
that impresses me immensely. But I am impressed by another thing,
in addition to all of those industries. You have got one industry in
your landscape, your scenery. This state is going to be one of the
places to which people from the East and West are going to come, to
see your country, to enjoy it, to make it one of the holiday spots of the
land. This morning we have come over Tennessee Pass, right in the
midst of the snow, right down from the high mountains, through the
valleys, through the great canyons, into your fertile valley. There is
such a marvelous diversification of natural features in your landscape,
you are thrice fortunate in your material resources.
But as I have said everywhere, and as I cannot say too often, the
thing that counts, of course, is the character of the average citizen,
and that is what gives me my supreme faith in the future, not merely
Theodore Roosevelt 615
of Colorado, but of all our nation ; my belief that we are going steadily
on, generation by generation, to train up the average citizen, man and
woman, so that he or she can do the full duty demanded by the republic.
That is one reason why I congratulate you of the West, because your
task is great, and because you have done it well. In life it is not only the
big things that count. It is the things that you are able to do, and the
greatest benefit that can be given to any man is the chance to render
good service to those nearest to him, to his neighbors, to the republic
as a whole. You here and those who went just ahead of you have con-
quered the wilderness and made it blossom like a rose.
AT THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE BANQUET, AT DENVER, COLO.,
MAY 8, 1905.
I want to say a word as to governmental policy in which I feel that
this whole country ought to take a great interest, and which is itself but
part of a general policy into which I think our government must go. I
have spoken of the policy of extending the powers of the Interstate
Commerce Commission and of giving them particularly the power to
fix rates and to have the rates that they fix go into effect practically at
once. As I say, that represents in my mind part of what should be the
general policy of this country.
The policy of giving not to the State but to the National government
an increased supervisory and regulatory power over corporations is the
first step, and to my mind the most important step. In the days of
the fathers of the older among you the highways of commerce for civi-
lized nations were what they had always been—that is, waterways and
roadways. Therefore they were open to all who chose to travel upon
them. Within the last two generations we have seen new systems grow
up, and now the typical highway of commerce is the railroad.
Compared to the railroad, the ordinary road for wheeled vehicles and
the waterways, whether natural or artificial, have lost all their impor-
tance. Here in Colorado, for instance, it is the railroads which are the
only highways that you need take into account in dealing with the
question of commerce in the State or outside of the State. Therefore
under this changed system we see highways of commerce grow up,
each of which is controlled by a single corporation or individual; some-
times several of them being controlled in combination by corporations,
or by a few individuals. When such is the case, in my judgment, it is
absolutely necessary that the nation, for the State cannot possibly do it,
should assume a supervisory and regulatory function over the great cor-
porations which practically control the highways of commerce.
As with everything else mundane, when you get that supervisory and
regulatory power on behalf of the nation you will not have cured all
616 Messages and Speeches
the evils that existed and you will not equal the expectations of the
amiable but ill-regulated enthusiast who thinks that you will have cured
all those evils. A measure of good will come. Some good will be done,
Some injustice will have been prevented, but we shall be a long way
from the millennium. Get that fact clear in your mind, or you will be
laying up for yourselves a store of incalculable disappointment in the
future. That is the first thing.
Now the second step: When you give a nation that power, remember,
that harm and not good will come from giving unless you give it with
the firm determination not only to get justice for yourselves but to
do justice to others; that you will be as zealous to do justice to the
railroads as to exact justice from them. We cannot afford in any shape,
or way in this country to encourage a feeling which would do injustice
to a man of property any more than we would submit to injustice from
a man of property. Whether the man owns the biggest railroad or the
greatest outside corporations in the land, or whether he makes each
day's bread by the sweat of that day's toil, he is entitled to justice and
fair dealing, no more and no less. - z
It is perhaps unnecessary for me to say that I am perfectly aware
that many most admirable gentlemen disagreed with me in my action
toward the Panama Canal, but I am in an unrepentant frame of mind.
The ethical conception upon which I acted was that I did not intend that
Uncle Sam should be held up. But without regard to that, when the
canal comes into operation, I think it will have a very important regu-
latory effect in connection with trans-continental commerce of the rail-
roads.” I think when such is the case, these great railroads will have to
revise their way of looking at the interests of certain inland cities.
As I say, gentlemen, don't misunderstand me, I understand thor-
oughly the argument from their standpoint and see that they can in all
sincerity hold their position, and while I do not think that anything I
can say could have any effect in making them alter that position, I have
considerable hopes for the effect upon the Panama canal. Let me repeat.
I have told you my views as to what I regard to be the most important
matter of international legislation that in the immediate future will be
before this people.
I wish to say again that important though that legislation is, it is
nothing like as important as the spirit in which we approach it. If we
approach it in the spirit of demagoguery, if we permit ourselves as a
people to be deluded into the belief that permanent good will come to
us as a mass, if we attack unjustly the proper rights of others because
they are wealthy, we shall do ourselves just as much damage as if we
*From the year in and year out lobbies maintained about Congress by the trans-conti-
mental railways at an annual expense to them of hundreds of thousands of dollars, it would
appear as though those corporations shared President Roosevelt’s views as to the effect of
the Panama Canal,—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 617
permitted an attack upon those who are poor, because they are poor.
In times past republic after republic has existed in this world and has
gone down to destruction sometimes because the republic was turned
into a government of the poor who plundered the rich, sometimes be-
cause it was turned into a government of the rich who exploited the
poor. It made no difference whatever to the fate of the republic which
form its fall took. That fall was just as certain in one case as in the
other. It was just as certain to follow the election of a class who plun-
dered another class, whether the class thus given mastery was the poor.
who plundered the rich, or the class of the rich who exploited the poor.
The destruction was as inevitable in one instance as in the other.
We have the right to look forward with confident hope to the future
of this republic because it will not and shall not become the republic
of any class either poor or rich, because it will and shall remain as its
founders intended it to be, and its rescuers under Abraham Lincoln
intended it to be, a government where every man, rich or poor, so long
as he did his duty to his neighbor, was given his full rights, was guaran-
teed justice and has had ºustice exacted from him in return.
AT STERLING, COLO., MAY 9, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to have the chance of saying a word or two to
you this morning. For over three weeks I have been in your beautiful
State, and I cannot sufficiently admire the diversification of its industries
and wonder at its great future. Here in the eastern part of the state we
come to the ranch country, not only the cow business, with which I was
acquainted myself once, but here where you are starting this great sugar
beet industry, that being peculiarly an industry that does well under irri-
gation. The eastern part of Colorado, which fifteen years ago was con-
sidered as only a country for sage brush and jack rabbits, has now
come up so that it has relatively as great a future as any other part of
the state, one of the great factors in accomplishing the result being irri-
gation, and no community more than Colorado appreciates the need of
irrigation.
So, gentlemen and ladies, I congratulate you upon the material future
of your State, but most of all upon your type of citizenship. You who
fought in the late war know that what counted was average men, who
went into the ranks, and it is the average man and woman and child of
Colorado that makes its future. *
AT THE BANQUET OF THE IROQUOIS CLUB, CHICAGO, ILL.,
MAY Io, Igoş.
Mr. President, Mr. Toastmaster, and you, my hosts:
I very deeply appreciate the honor of being your guest and guest of
618 Messages and Speeches
the city of Chicago this evening, and in looking at the possibilities of the
future let me add that I have not the least anticipation of Chicago's ever
reversing that most complimentary vote which I so deeply appreciated
last year, because it will never have the chance.
Our country is governed and under existing circumstances can only
be governed, under the party system, and that should mean and that will
mean when we have a sufficient number of people who take the point
of view that Judge Dickinson takes—that will mean that there will be a
frank and manly opposition of party to party, of party man to party
man, combined with an equally frank refusal to conduct a party contest
in any such way as to give good Americans cause for regret because of
what is said before election when compared with what is said after
election.
The frankest opposition to a given man or a given party on questions
of public policy not only can be, but almost always should be combined
with the frankest recognition of the infinitely greater number of points
of agreement than of the points of difference. And I have accepted
your kind and generous invitation to come before you this evening, be-
cause the longer I am in political life the more firmly I am convinced
that the great bulk of the questions of most importance before us as a
people are questions which we can best decide, not from the standpoint
of Republicanism or Democracy, but from the standpoint of the in-
terests of the average American citizen, whether Republican or Demo-
Crat.
Most questions that come up in Washington are questions that go
much deeper than party; are questions that affect the whole country, and
the man would indeed be unfit for the position of President who did not
feel that when he held that office he held it in the most emphatic
as the representative of all the people.
One of the works Uncle Sam has on hand just at present is digging
the Panama Canal, and it is going to be dug. It is going to be dug
honestly and as cheaply as is compatible with efficiency, but with effi-
ciency first. I wanted Congress to give me power to remodel the com-
mission. It did not do it. I remodeled it anyhow, purely in the exer-
cise of my executive functions; and I made up my mind this time I
was not going to make the slightest effort to represent different sections
of the country on that canal; I was going to try to have the whole
country represented and put the best man I could get in any given posi-
tion without the slightest regard to where he came from.
I believe that sooner or later it will be found that the great bulk of
our people agree with what I am about to say. Among the most vital
questions that have come up for solution, because of the extraordinary
industrial development of this country, as of all the modern world, are
the questions of capital and labor, and the questions resulting from the
Theodore Roosevelt 619
effect upon the public of the organization into great masses of both
capital and labor. I believe thoroughly in each kind of organization,
but I recognize that if either kind of organization does what is wrong,
the increase in its power for efficiency that has resulted from the combi-
nation, means the increase in its power to do harm, and that, therefore,
corporation—that is, organized capital—and union—that is, organized
labor—must alike be held to a peculiar responsibility to the public at
large, and that from each alike we have the right to demand not only
Obedience to the law, but service to the public.
Now observe, there are two sides to what I have said, and we are very
apt to hear only insistence upon one side; sometimes the insistence upon
this side, sometimes the insistence upon that, but not as often as we
should, insistence upon both sides of the question.
I will take the first question of organized capital. When this nation
was created such a thing as a modern corporation not only did not exist,
but could not be imagined. That is especially true of the great modern
corporations engaged in interstate commerce. A century ago the high-
ways of commerce were exactly such as they had been from the days of
the dawn of civilization on the banks of the Nile and in Mesopotamia.
We now have the great highways of commerce of an entirely different
kind. For the first time in history we have a highway for the commerce
of all the people under the eontrol of a private individual or a private
corporation.
Now, gentlemen, let me in the first place insist upon this fact, that the
men who have built"up the great railway systems of this country, like
the other men who have built up the great industries of this country,
have, as a rule, made their fortunes as incidents to benefiting and not
to harming the country. As a rule, benefit and not harm has come from
their efforts, and in making fortunes for themselves they have done
good to all of us. We have all benefited by the talents of the great cap-
tains of industry.
All of this that I have said I wish kept in mind steadily in appreciating
what I am going to say; for, while acknowledging in the frankest man-
ner the benefits that have come from the development of these great
industrial enterprises, I also feel that we must recognize that the time
has now come when it is essential, in the interests of the public, that
there should be, and be exercised, a power of supervision and regulation
over them in the interests of the public.
Personally, I believe that the Federal government must take an in-
creasing control over corporations. I trust there will be no halt in
the steady process of assuming such national control, and the first step
toward it should be the adoption of a law conferring upon some execu-
tive body the power of increased supervision and regulation of the
great corporations engaged primarily in interstate commerce of the rail-
62O Messages and Speeches
roads. And my views on that subject could not have been better ex-
pressed that they were expressed yesterday, I think, by Secretary Taft
in Washington, and as they were expressed by the Attorney General in
his communication to the Senate committee a couple of weeks ago.
I believe that the representatives of the nation should lodge in some
executive body the power to establish a maximum rate, the power to
have that rate go into effect practically immediately, and the power to
see that the provisions of the law apply in full to the companies Owning
private cars, just as much as to the railroads themselves. The courts
would retain, no matter what the legislature did, the power to interfere
and upset any action that was confiscatory in its nature. I am well
aware that the action of such a body as I have spoken of may stop far
short of confiscation and yet do great damage. In other words, I am
well aware that to give this power means the possibility that the power
may be abused. That possibility we must face. Any power strong
enough, any power which could be granted sufficiently great to be effi-
cient, would be sufficiently great to be harmful if abused. That is true
of the power of taxation. Nevertheless, the power of taxation must
exist; and so with the power of which I speak, it must exist.
It must be lodged in some body which is to give expression to the
needs of the people as a whole, and the fact that it is possible that power
may be abused is not and cannot be an argument against placing it
where we shall have a right to expect that it will be used fairly toward
all. One thing I wish definitely understood : If the power is granted to
me to create such a board, such a commission, or to continue in power,
if I so desire a commission or board, with increased powers, I shall
strive to appoint and retain men who will do exactly the same justice
to the railroad as they will exact from the railroad.
Now for the other side of the question. There have been a great
many republics before our time, and again and again these republics
have split upon the rock of disaster. The greatest and most dangerous
rock in the course of any republic, the rock of class hatred. Sometimes
the republic becomes a republic in which one class grew to dominate an-
other class, and for loyalty to the republic was substituted loyalty to a
class. The result was in every case the same. It meant disaster, and
ultimately the downfall of the republic and it mattered not one whit
which class it was that became dominant; it mattered not one whit
whether the poor plundered the rich or the rich exploited the poor. In
either case, just as soon as the republic became one in which one class
sought to benefit itself by injuring another class, in which the one class
substituted loyalty to that class for loyalty to the republic, the end of the
republic was at hand.*
*Government everywhere and every time is the natural expression of the people governed,
just as the flower is the natural expression of the roots and stalk. Is your government
rotten ? Then your public to the same comparative extent is rotten. A government is ever
Theodore Roosevelt 621
No true patriot will fail to do everything in his power to prevent the
growth of any such spirit in this country. This government is not, and
never shall be, the government of a plutocracy. This government is not
and never shall be the government of a mob. I believe in corporations.
They are indispensable instruments in our modern industrialism, but I
believe that they should be so supervised and regulated that they should
act for the interest of the community as a whole.
So I believe in unions. I am proud of the fact that I am an honorary
member of one union, but I believe that the union, like the individual,
must be kept to a strict accountability to the power of the law.
Mayor Dunne, as President of the United States, and, therefore, as
the representative of the people of this country, I give you as a matter
of course, my hearty support in upholding the law, in keeping order, in
putting down violence, whether by a mob or by an individual. And
there need not be the slightest apprehension in the hearts of the most
timid that ever the mob spirit will triumph in this country. Those im-
mediately responsible for dealing with the trouble must exhaust every
effort in so dealing with it before call is made upon any outside body.
But if ever the need arises, back of the city stands the State, and back
of the State stands the nation.
And there, gentlemen, is a point upon which all good Americans are
one. They are all one in the conviction, in the firm determination that
this country shall remain in the future as it has been in the past, a coun-
try of liberty and justice under the forms of law. A country in which
the will of the people is supreme, but in which that will finds its expres-
sion through the forces of law and order, through the forms of law ex-
pressed as provided for in the Constitution of the United States and of
the several states that go to make up our nation.
TO THE MEMBERS OF THE HARVARD CLUB, CHICAGO, ILL.,
MAY Io, Igos,
Mr. Greeley and fellow Harvard men:
I need hardly say what a very real pleasure it has been to greet you
this afternoon, but Mr. Greeley spoke of Harvard as winning the West.
My pet theory has been that the very best thing that can happen to
Harvard is to have the West win it, and I hail every Harvard club west
of the Alleghany, even more than I do those east of there, for I feel that
Harvard’s mission in the country can be incalculably furthered if it has
a sufficient amount of the Western blood that does things in it, and for
that reason I am particularly pleased to greet the Harvard Club of Chi-
the public's face reflected in its own hand glass. Its ugliness is the public's ugliness. If you
will but think a moment you will see that this must be so. It is the fiat of nature and nature
is never wrong. A man public will have a man government. A dog public will and should
have a dog government—a collar, a kennel, a chain to clank and a bone to gnaw.-A. H. L.
622 Messages and Speeches
cago again under as pleasant circumstances as I have ever had the pleas-
ure of greeting them before. Good-bye and good luck to you.
AT A RECEPTION GIVEN BY THE HAMILTON CLUB, CHICAGO, ILL.,
MAY Io, 1905.
‘I doubt if any member of the Hamilton Club has longer and pleas-
anter associations with it than I have. I have been your guest again
and again; I have spoken before you again and again, and long before
I had risen to what we will call a position of notoriety. It was before
the Hamilton Club that I made a speech with a title which I had no
idea would attract any attention, but which did, “The Strenuous Life.”
And I mention it now because from that day to this I have never dared
to use the phrase, “the strenuous life,” at all.
It was a delegation from this club that came down to meet me at
Montauk Point when I came back from Santiago. I remember that
that delegation then with an enthusiasm which no human being out-
side of the club could have foreseen to be warranted by after events,
nominated me for President in 1904; which, as it was six years in ad-
vance, I did not at that time look upon very seriously. And a dele-
gation from your club came on to be present at my inauguration as
governor (I have shaken hands with certain members of that dele-
gation to-day), and the members of that delegation will doubtless re-
member that they gave me a bronze inkstand with Abraham Lincoln's
head on it, and it is in my library, and is the inkstand I use now.
So that I have these personal associations with the Hamilton Club
which have established a claim upon me. And, then, what is far more
important, gentlemen, than any question affecting myself, I have had
for the Hamilton Club a real and hearty respect that is due to any
organization which tries to give expression to its belief through deeds
as well as words, and which endeavors steadfastly to be thoroughly
practical and yet to live up to high ideals. I have felt that you have
done your part in establishing a standard of citizenship, of good citizen-
ship in this country.
You, by your name, commemorate a great statesman—Hamilton—
one of the most brilliant and one of the greatest constructive statesmen
of the era of constructive statesmanship; a man to whom this republic
owes a well nigh incalculable debt, and the man who took the chief
part in writing that volume of essays which, collected under the name
of the “Federalist,” is still a guide to honest, efficient, and responsible
government.
Hamilton lacked but one great quality; it was the quality which his
great adversary, Jefferson, possessed in so peculiar a degree—trust and
belief in the people; and with our good fortune, in the second great
Theodore Roosevelt 623
crisis of the republic's life we developed a son of Illinois, a man born
in Kentucky, but by adoption and long life a citizen of Illinois—a man
who combined the strength, the efficiency, the far-sightedness of Ham-
ilton, with Jefferson's intense belief in the people; a man greater than
either—Abraham Lincoln.
I feel that this club not only commemorates the name and the great
Service of Alexander Hamilton, but in all that it has done and is striving
to do, is applying practically and efficiently the principles of Abraham
Lincoln. So, gentlemen, for many different reasons, for reasons of Old
associations, of appreciation of what your attitude has been toward me,
and of appreciation of what you are doing in the life of this great
city, of this great State, and therefore of the nation, I am doubly and
trebly pleased to be to-day once more the guest of the Hamilton Club.
BEFORE THE MERCHANTS’ CLUB, CHICAGO, IL.L., MAY Io, 1905.
It is a great pleasure and a great honor to be the guest of an asso-
ciation like this. This country of ours is pre-eminently a business
country, and we can succeed—and I say this in my turn with entire
Sincerity, gentlemen—only, if as a country we carry on the national
business as the typical member of this association carries on his business
—that is, in an entirely practical spirit; in a spirit which desires and
commands success, but which desires and commands it as an incident
of acting with decency toward all our fellow-citizens. No business
community can permanently succeed if the average member of it does
not possess a certain quantity of high ideals; and, gentlemen, there is
not a business man of large experience here who will not agree with me
when I say that. Permanent success will come to the business com-
munity where the average man's work can be trusted ; where the aver-
age man himself can be trusted in dealing with his fellows.
Just as that is true of the average business community, so it is true
of the nation as a whole. The nation must act in a spirit which gives
full recognition to the national demands; which is not in the least
quixotic; which sees the need of working for the interest of the average
individual of the nation, but in a spirit which recognizes duties as
well as rights; which recognizes that in our internal affairs; which
recognizes that in our external affairs. And that leads me up to a
subject concerning which I wish not merely to congratulate, but on
behalf of the nation, to thank those present upon the part played by
the Merchants’ Club in initiating, and with the aid of the Commercial
Club, in carrying to a successful conclusion the movement which re-
sulted in the establishment of a naval training station here on Lake
Michigan.
I need not say to those of you who know anything of me at all that
I believe in a big navy; and I hope I need not say that I believe in it
624 Messages and Speeches
not as a provocative to war, but as a guarantee of peace. And I want
to say every section of this country realizes that the navy stands for
the whole country, and that the people of the sea coasts are not a
particle more interested in it than the people of the Mississippi Valley.
There were two sides to the establishment of that naval station here
where it was established. In the first place, we get, as perhaps some of
you know, a peculiarly valuable class of recruits for the navy from the
Mississippi Valley and the regions adjoining the Great Lakes. In
the next place, I wanted to see part of the establishment of the navy
have its local habitation here in the great West. And so I feel that
this organization conferred a favor not only upon the city of Chicago,
but an advantage to the whole country in what it did toward securing
the establishment of that station here where it has been established.
I do not think that it is now very necessary to make an argument for
an efficient navy. We are so fortunate that in this country we can get
along with a very small army; an army, which, relative to the popu-
lation of the country, is smaller than the police force of any one of
our great cities. With the navy the case is different. We have not
the choice, gentlemen, as to whether this country will play a great
part in the world; we cannot help playing a great part. All we can
decide is whether we will play it well or ill; we have that to decide."
We can consider whether we will do badly or well, but we cannot decide
whether the parts are to be played; we have got to play them.
We cannot abandon our position on the Monroe Doctrine; we cannot
abandon the Panama Canal; we cannot abandon the duties that have
come to us from the mere fact of our growth as a nation, from the
growth of our commercial interests in the East and in the West, on
the Atlantic and on the Pacific. Now, I earnestly hope that with the
added responsibility will come not merely a growth in power to meet
that responsibility, but a growth in sobriety of mental attitude on our
part toward these new duties. If there is one thing that ought to be
more offensive to every good American than anything else it is the
habit of speaking with a loose tongue offensively about foreign nations,
or of adopting an ill-considered and irritating attitude toward any
one of them.
In private life there is no one to whom we rightly object more than
the man who is continually offending and insulting his neighbors, ex-
cept the man who in addition to that then fails to make good. Now,
I hope to see Our foreign policy conducted always in a spirit not merely
of scrupulous regard for the rights of others, but of scrupulous courtesy
towards others, and at the same time to see us keep prepared so that
there is no position that we take in either hemisphere that once taken
we cannot stand on. In that attitude, not only is it important that the
government officials should behave themselves, but it is important that
Theodore Roosevelt 625
private citizens should. The public speaker, the writer in the press, the
legislator, or public servant, all owe it to this country to behave with
the courtesy toward others which we would like to have extended in re-
turn to us; but behave with that courtesy whether it is extended or not.
The outsiders cannot hurt us by being insolent as long as we behave
ourselves, and what they say is of no consequence to us compared to
what we say of them.
Hard words won’t hurt us if we disregard them. Let them say any-
thing and go on and build up the navy. That will be a much greater
provocative to friendship and respect than any amount of recrimina-
tion; and so I have a right to appeal to the men here before me, to
the men who in so many different walks take the lead in this great
city, to aid in consistently building up just that type of foreign policy—
a foreign policy under which we shall make the name of the United
States government an example on one hand, as it ought to be, for a just
and proper insistence upon its own rights, but also an example for a
disinterested and generous willingness to treat all other nations, all
other powers, with frank courtesy and good will, and to make it evident
that in this country’s foreign policy it recognizes its duty toward the
weak just as much as its responsibility to the strong.
AT DIXON, IL.L., MAY Io, 1905.
It is a great pleasure for me to be with you here in Illinois again,
and to be traveling through what is in very truth one of the garden
spots of the world. I cannot say how impressed I am with the won-
derful beauty and luxuriant fertility of this country of yours here, and
I do not know that it is especially to your credit that you are pretty
good citizens. I would be ashamed of you if you were not. While I
congratulate you upon all your products of the farm and factory, yet
I congratulate you most upon the fact that you seem to be raising
a first-class type of young Illinois citizens here. Illinois is indeed
fortunate in its educational system. I have been more pleased than I
can well express at seeing the type and the number of children that are
brought Out along the stations.
It is a mere truism to say that the most fertile country in the world
will amount to nothing if you do not have the right type of citizenship
in it, and you will not have the right type of citizenship if the proper
care is not given to the bringing up of the boys and girls. Perhaps the
father of a number of children can be excused for saying that of all
the classes of our country I think the School teacher deserves a little
the best of all of us. It is to their patience, their constant care, their
intelligence, and judgment that we have to trust for supplementing—
it can never do more than supplement—the work of the home, and
626 Messages and Speeches
turning out boys and girls who will be the right type of men and
WO111611, J
AT STERLING, IL.L., MAY Io, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to greet you to-day and be once again in this
fertile and beautiful State of Illinois. In greeting all of you I know
that the others will not object to my saying a special word of acknowl-
edgment to the men of the Grand Army over there. It is to them that
we owe the fact that we have a country at all. My comrades of the
Grand Army, I want to say something that I know will please you.
I have just come back from a trip in the course of which I went through
the State of Texas, and you would feel more than justified for your
efforts to have once more made this nation whole if you could see how
completely whole it was, for the veterans who wore the blue and the
veterans of the Confederate army, who had worn the gray, stood there
shoulder to shoulder to greet the President of their common country.
Now let me say a word to those at the other end of the line. I am
awfully glad to see the veterans, and I am very glad to see the chil-
dren. You raise a great many good crops in Illinois, but the best
crop is the Illinois citizen. While prosperity is indispensable as the
basis, as the foundation, it will not amount to anything if you do not
build on that foundation; and what is most essential in any State is to
have the right type of man and woman in that State.
AT DEKALB, IL.L., MAY Io, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to have the chance of saying a word or two
of greeting to you this morning, and to be traveling again through your
great, beautiful, and marvelously fertile State. There are two things
upon which I want to lay emphasis—to congratulate you upon your
material prosperity and to congratulate you upon the use you are mak-
ing of that prosperity. Here in Dekalb I want to congratulate you
upon what is meant by the success of your great manufacturing estab-
lishments. I want to congratulate the county upon the success it has
typified by its agricultural well-being, and, also, I want to congratulate
you upon what is meant by having the State normal school here, be-
cause you are taking care both of the things of the body and the
things of the mind. You have got to take care of both. If there is not a
foundation of material prosperity for the State, as for the individual,
you cannot expect anything but unhappiness; but woe to the State, as
woe to the individual, if material prosperity is all that is sought after.
Our people have risen and will rise because they have taken care of
both sides of the development of the national character, because your
farms and factories prosper, and yet because you take care of the school
Theodore Roosevelt 627
and the library and build on the foundation of material well-being the
superstructure of the higher life. It is just as it is with the individual.
The first thing a man has to do is to earn enough to take care of himself
and his family. There is no use of expecting much of him if he cannot
pull his own weight. He has got to be able to do that first, and, having
done that, then let him also try to be a good neighbor and a good
citizen.
AT THE UNVEILING OF THE STATUE OF GENERAL HENRY W.
SLOCUM, AT BROOKLYN, N. Y., MAY 30, 1905.
Mr. Mayor, Mr. Commissioners, and you, my fellow citizens, and,
above all, you who took part in the great war in which the man whose
statue is raised to-day won for himself and his country renown and
honor:
The day before yesterday I listened to a sermon in which the
preacher, dwelling upon the exercises to be held throughout the Union
to-day, preached on the text which commemorates the altar raised by
command of Moses to commemorate the victory gained by the children
of Israel over the wild tribes of the desert who sought to bar their
march toward the promised land, wherein Amalek came out and Israel
fought all day, and while Aaron and Hur upheld the hands of Moses
until, as night fell, the sun went down on the Israelites and they raised
an altar to Jehovah, to Jehovah who stood as the exponent of the prin-
ciple for which Israel warred; they raised it to the principle of right-
eousness, which alone can justify any war or any struggle, and Mr.
Mayor, that is the thought that you developed in the excellent address
to which we have just listened, that we meet to-day to commemorate
the great victory, the triumph of the cause of union and liberty; not
primarily because it was a victory, but because it was a victory for
righteousness and the peace and the liberty and the eternal spiritual
welfare of mankind.
I see before me here men who won high honor serving as comrades
in arms of Gen. Slocum, and I know that there exist in the Union
no men who will appreciate more the fact that now forty years after
the war, the crowning triumph of what they did is to be found in the
fact that we have a genuine reunited country, a country in which the
man who wore the blue stretches out the hand of loyal friendship to his
erstwhile foe, his now devoted friend and fellow-countryman, the man
who wore the gray.
. A short while ago I passed through the great State of Texas.
Wherever I stopped in that great State I was greeted by representa-
tives of the Grand Army marching side by side with or intermingled
with men clad in the gray uniform that showed that they had fought in
the armies of the Confederacy, men who had tested one another's worth
628 Messages and Speeches
on the stricken fields, men who knew each that the other had been ready
when the hour of supreme appeal came to show his worth by his en-
deavors, and men who now leave to their children and their children's
children as a heritage of honor forever the memory of the great deeds
done alike by those who fought under Grant and by those who fought
under Lee, for we, because of the very fact that the Union triumphed,
now have the right to feel a like pride in the valor and devotion of
those who valiantly fought against the stars in their courses and those
who finally saw their efforts, their sufferings crowned by triumph.
Think of it, my fellow-countrymen Think of what a thrice-blessed
fortune has been ours, that the greatest war that the nineteenth cen-
tury saw after the close of the Napoleonic struggles should have left,
not as most wars inevitably do and must leave, memories of bitterness,
dishonor, and shame to offset the memories of glory, memories which
make the men on one side hang their heads, but should have left to the
victors and vanquished alike, after the temporary Soreness is over,
the same right to feel the proudest satisfaction in the fact that the
Union was saved and the greatest pride in the honor, the gallantry, the
devotion to the right as each side had given it the light to see the
right, done alike by those who overcame as victors and those who finally
went down to defeat.
I congratulate the people of Brooklyn, not primarily upon raising
this statue, because that they ought to do, but upon the opportunity,
upon the chance of having it to raise. I congratulate them upon the
good fortune of having the fellow-citizen who in war and in peace
alike served the people so well as to make it their duty, not so much to
him as to themselves, to erect the statue that it might serve as a lesson
for the generations to come. And, my fellow-citizens, I am sure we
all realize the peculiar appropriateness of having the statue of Gen.
Slocum received on behalf of the city of New York by its chief magis-
trate, whose father was Gen. Slocum's illustrious colleague.
Surely there is need for me to say but little in emphasis of what has
been set forth before I began to speak as to the prime significance of
Gen. Slocum's career. He was a great soldier, a most gallant and able
commander. Once the war was over, he turned as whole-heartedly
to the pursuits of peace as he had during the war turned to the strife
of arms. Gen. Slocum was one of those men on whose career we can
dwell in its entirety. We do not have to dwell with emphasis on part
of it because we don’t care to speak of another part. We are able to
point to Gen. Slocum as the type of what a decent American citizen
should be, as a man who was an example in his family life, an example
in his business relations, honest and upright public servant, no less than
a fearless and able soldier.
Now, I want all you people to remember the two sides of the lesson
Theodore Roosevelt 629
taught by Gen. Slocum’s life. A successful war for unrighteousness is
the most dreadful of all things; it is the thing that sets back more than
aught else the course of civilization. But no people worth preserving
ever existed nor will exist that was not able to fight if the need arose,
and so with the individual. The man who possesses great ability and
great courage unaccompanied by the moral sense, a courage and ability
unguided by the stern purpose to do what is just and upright, that man
is rendered by the fact of having the courage and the ability only so
much the greater menace to the community in which he unfortunately
dwells. We cannot afford as a people ever to forget for one moment
that ability, far-sightedness, iron resolution, perseverance, willingness
to do and dare are qualities to be admired only if they are put at the
Service of the right, at the service of decency and of justice. The man
who possesses those qualities and does not shape his course by a funda-
mental and unwavering moral principle is a menace to each and all
of us, and thrice foolish, thrice wicked is the other man who condones
his moral shortcomings because of his intellectual or physical strength
and prowess. That is one side.
The other side is that no amount of good intention, no amount of
Sweetness in life, no amount of appreciation of decency avails in the
least in the rough work of the world as we find it unless back of the hon-
esty of purpose, back of the decency of life and thought lies the power
that makes a man a man. It is true of the individual and it is true of
the nation. It is to the last degree desirable. I will put it stronger
than that, it is absolutely essential that this nation, if it is to hold the
position in the future that it has held in the past, must act not only
within, but without its own borders in a spirit of justice and of large
generosity toward all other peoples. We owe an obligation to our-
selves, we owe those obligations to all mankind. More and more as
we increase in strength I hope to see a corresponding increase in the
sober sense of responsibility which shall prevent us either injuring or
insulting any other people. You may notice that I said “insulting”
as well as “injuring.” If there is one quality sometimes shown among
us which is not commendable it is a habit of speaking loosely about for-
eign powers, foreign races. You do not need, any of you, to be told
that in private life you will resent an insult quite as much as an injury,
and our public writers need to steadily keep before their minds the
thought that no possible good can come to us by speaking offensively of
any one else, and trouble may come.
The surest way for a nation to invite disaster is to be opulent, aggres-
sive, and unarmed. Now, we are opulent, and I hope we will remain
so. I trust that we shall never be aggressive unless aggression is not
*Doctor Johnson said: “A man has no more right to say an uncivil thing than to act
one; no more right to say a rude thing to another than to knock him down.” The same holds
good of nations.—A, H, L.
630 Messages and Speeches
merely justified, but demanded. Demanded either by our own self-
respect, or by the interests of mankind; and, finally, remember that to
be aggressive above all, to be aggressive in speech and not be armed,
invites not merely disaster, but the contempt of mankind.
Brooklyn not only furnished valiant soldiers to the Civil War, but it
furnished in times of peace a most excellent Secretary of the Navy
to the United States in the person of Gen. Tracy. If our navy
is good enough, we have a long career of peace before us.
And the only likelihood of trouble ever coming to us as a nation will
arise if we let our navy become too small or inefficient. A first-class
navy—first-class in point of size, above all first-class in point of
efficiency of the individual units acting as units and in combination—is
the surest and the cheapest guarantee of peace, and I should think that
any man looking at what is happening and has happened abroad and
in our own history during the past two years, must be indeed blind
if he cannot read that lesson clearly.
And Gen. Slocum did his first great public service when the crisis
called not primarily for the softer and milder, but for the sterner and
harder virtues; and we cannot afford in this day of material luxury,
in this day when civilization tends to make life easy, we cannot afford
to ignore those hard and stern virtues. In the workaday world as it is,
not only in war, but in private life and in public life alike; a man has
to have the strength of fiber or he cannot put into effect even the best
of his efforts, and he cannot afford to let the generation that is coming
on grow up with the feeling that any quality will serve as a substitute
for the old and essential quality of manliness in a man and womanliness
in a woman. Much, very much, has been done in this country by edu-
cation.
No one can overstate the debt that this country is under to the edu-
cators; but in taking advantage of all the improved methods let us
not forget that there are certain qualities which are not new, which
are eternal because they are eternally true, and the failure to develop
which will cause a loss which cannot be offset by any merely intellectual
and mental gain.
A sound body is a first-class thing, a sound mind is an even better
thing, but the thing that counts for most in the individual as in the
nation is the character, the sum of those qualities which make a man
a good man and a woman a good woman. And you men of the Civil
War, you men to whom this country owes more than to any others, no
matter how great the services of those others may be, because to you
this country owes its life, you won the place you did, you won for this
country its salvation, because you had in you those qualities which in
their aggregate we know by the name of character, the qualities which
made you put material gains, material well being, not merely below,
Theodore Roosevelt 631
but insignificant as compared to things that were greater when the
crisis called for showing your manhood.
You went to the war leaving those behind who could make more
money, who could rise in the world, but carrying with you in your
hearts the honor and the future of a mighty nation. You had, in
the first place, the right spirit, and then you had the quality of making
that spirit evident in the time of need. If you had not had patriotism,
devotion to the country and the flag you could have done nothing.
You could not have done much more if your patriotism, your devotion
to the flag had not been backed up by a willingness to stay put in
battle.
You showed in times that tried men souls what this country has a
right to expect from its sons. You had the supreme good fortune of
testing your manhood in one of the two great crises of the nation's
history, the great crisis in which the nation was born in the days of
1776, and the no less great crisis in which the nation was saved by
the men of 1861. You have left us not merely a reunited country, but
you have left us the glorious heritage of the memory of the exploits,
of the qualities by which the country was left reunited.
Our days have fallen, for our good fortune, in times of peace. We
have not had to show the qualities that you showed in the dark years
that closed in the sunburst of Appomattox, but if we are to leave un-
dimmed to our children the heritage that you left to us, we must show
in peace, and should the need ever arise in war also the qualities that
you showed, the qualities that make it now the pleasantest of all tasks
for a public servant who appreciates the greatness of America to come
on an occasion like this and see the people of a great city dedicate a
monument in honor of a great citizen, who, at every point of his career,
illustrated what the name American should be when it is used in the
sense of its highest, its deepest, and its best significance.
AT THE NAVAL YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION,
BROOKLYN, N. Y., MAY 30, 1905.
Officers and enlisted men of the United States Navy, and you, friends
of the navy, for if you are good Americans you can be nothing else:
I made up my mind to-day, since my invitations were extended to me,
that I could not refuse to come to this building and meet you here.
I don't have to tell you that I believe with all my heart in the navy
of the United States, and I believe in what counts most in the navy—
the officers and enlisted men—the man behind the gun, the man in
the engine-room, the man in the conning tower, the man, whoever he
is, who is doing his duty.
I feel we owe a peculiar debt of gratitude to those who have taken
632 Messages and Speeches §
the lead in securing this building. The people of the United States
should make it their special duty to see to the welfare of the men on
whose exertions, on whose skill and prowess, and on whose character
in the time of a crisis the honor of the entire nation will depend, and
all respect is due to those, especially Miss Gould, who have erected
this building, who have given expression to the spirit that lies behind
the building up of everything of this nature.
We are past the period when it was thought a man if he was made
decent could not fight. I have had a good deal of experience in civil
life, and I never found a job in civil life to which, other things being
equal, I would not prefer to appoint a man who had served in the
army or navy of the United States, because such a man, if he is worth
his salt, has learned certain qualities which double and treble his value
in any position in which he may be placed.
Much as I believe in the work of the Young Men's Christian Asso-
ciation, I believe in it most when it takes such shape as this. And now
I say to you men that on you a heavy responsibility rests, because it
depends on the way you do your duty in peace whether, should ever
the need of war arise, our flag shall receive credit or discredit at your
hands or at the hands of your successors.
Nothing has given Americans better cause for satisfaction than the
way target practice has gone up in the navy, until I think we can say
that there are certain gun crews and certain individual gun pointers who
have reached as high a degree of excellence as it is possible to reach.
More and more our people are waking up to the need of a navy, and
in view of events happening all Over the world, I think we can count
on Congress to continue to build up our navy. It certainly will, if I
can persuade it. It is all important to have ships the best in hull, the
best in armor, and the best in armament of any nation in the world.
Lamentable and terrible though the recent accident on the Missouri
was, there were things connected with it to make every American feel a
sense of proud confidence in the officers and enlisted men in whom Uncle
Sam confides his honor. When the accident occurred there were fully
twenty minutes when every man knew that any moment the ship might
sink. Yet there wasn't a touch of nervousness among the men, there
was no sign of any one being rattled. Each man went to his quarters
and stayed there. You had the coolness and the fighting edge.
ON RECEIVING THE DEGREE OF LL.D. FROM CLARK UNIVERSITY,
WORCESTER, MASS, JUNE 21, 1905.
President Wright and President Hall, graduates of the university and
the college, and men and women of Worcester:
I shall do little except by way of illustration of the admirable address
Theodore Roosevelt 633
to which we have just listened from Dr. Mabie. What the speaker said
applies thoroughly to two men because of whom I am here to-day.
Senator Hoar, two years ago, induced me to promise to come here on
this occasion to greet President Wright as the head of this college.
Coming from such a man and for such another man, I could not refuse
the request; for in Senator Hoar is realized, Mr. Mabie, your picture
of the public servant.
I cannot speak of you, President Wright, as I would like to speak
today, and as I hope you may live a long time yet, it may a long time
before I shall be able to say what I would like to say.
You have given to the country the kind of service no money can
possibly buy. It is not merely what you have done at the head of
your department, but it is the way in which you have done it, and the
influence which you have exerted, which makes you so valuable to
the country.
The greatest problem before our people, as before every modern
people, is the problem of getting justice as between man and man,
and this especially in industrial matters, so that the man who works
with his hands and the man who has the capital accumulated by work
with head and hands shall get on better together, each giving justice
to the other, and each having sympathy and regard for the other, for
even justice can be administered in a manner which leaves you with
the heartiest dislike for the person who administers it.
The first duty of each one of you here is to carry your own weight—
to carry yourselves. You are not going to be able to do anything for
anyone else until you can support yourselves and those dependent upon
you. I do not want to see you develop that kind of idealism which
makes you filled with vague thoughts of beneficence for mankind and
an awful drawback to your immediate families. While I think we live
in a pretty good world, I do not think it is all the best possible world,
and I hope we shall have an adjustment of rewards, even those of a
pecuniary or material kind. Altogether there is much in the way of re-
ward that comes to a certain type of financiers and too little comes to
the student, to the scholar, to the teacher, to the man who represents the
scholarly side, the side of thought.
Literary work does not in the least depend upon reward. “Paradise
Lost” brought Milton £IO, if I remember rightly. The price of epic .
has gone down since that day. But it still remains true that Milton
wrote a poem for which a million pounds would have been quite an
inadequate compensation. There is no monetary value that can be put
upon that work, any more than it can be put upon Homer's work, or
upon any of the work of the great masters. Ruskin said that what
counted was the work that was done not for the fees, but for the work’s
sake. If the man works for the fee, he gets what he works for; if he
634 Messages and Speeches
works for the work's sake, he leaves mankind his debtor, if he has done
his work well. While it is incumbent upon every citizen of this country
to do the best that is in him, not only for his own sake and the sake of
those connected with him, but for the sake of the people as a whole, it
is especially incumbent upon the graduates of such an institution of
learning as this. Every man that graduates here has received something,
and something big, for which he has made no return, and for which
he can never make any return to the men giving it.
I have always felt most strongly that it is true of the nation, as of the
individual, that the greatest doer must also be a great dreamer.” Of
course, if the dream is not followed by action, then it is a bubble; it
merely has served to divert the man from doing something. But a
great action, action that is really great, cannot take place if the man
hasn’t it in his brain to think great thoughts, to dream great dreams.
As has been so well pointed out to-day, the marvelous rise of Ger-
many in the world of industry and of commerce, no less than of art and
of letters, has been due to the fact that the German was trained in his
mind, that he had high ideals, and finally shaped these ideals by his
practical way. I feel so cordially, as the president of Amherst has
phrased it, that here in this country, where we are amalgamating into
one people many different people of many different tongues, one of the
great works to which we should devote our attention is trying to keep
what each of these peoples can give of value to our composite national
life.
Each race that comes here, each element, can contribute something
of value, and can contribute very much of value; and it would be a very
good thing for all of our people if we should personally shape our de-
velopment so that it would come as natural to us as it does to the
people of Germany to recognize the incalculable debt of a nation to a
writer, to a scholar, to a man, who has done work for the public, for
the nation, for all mankind, that upon which no price can be put.
From Germany the country has learned much. Germany has con-
tributed a great element to the blood of our people, and it has given
the most marked trend ever given to us along scholastic and university
systems, to the whole system of training students and scholars. In
taking what we should from Germany, I wish that we could take
especially the idealism which renders it natural to them to celebrate
such an event as a scholar's life and writings; and also the keen, prac-
tical common sense which enables them to turn their idealistic spirit
into an instrument for producing the most perfect military and indus-
trial organization that this world has ever seen.
I hope most earnestly for the day when we shall see peace prevail
*Imagination is the pole star of all progress. It is the great separating mark between
men and swine. Nations need it as much as individuals, and the nation that is without an
imagination is without a future.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 635
among the nations of mankind; peace industrial as well as military pre-
Vail within the nations themselves. No man in public position can,
under penalty of having forfeited the right to the respect of those
whose regard he most values, fail as the opportunity comes to do all
that in him lies for peace. But peace of a valuable type comes not to
the man who craves it because he is afraid, but to the man who deems
it but his right. The peace granted contemptuously to the weakling and
the coward is but a poor boon after it has been granted. We must
keep our minds upon the essentials and not upon the non-essentials. In
1861 there were people who cried “Peace, peace,” who said that any
peace, no matter how shameful, was preferable to the worst of all wars,
a fratricidal war, and if those people had had their way we should have
been hanging our heads now. We would now be feeling that the
country founded by Washington, the country that at that time was
perpetuated by Lincoln, had gone down in the wreck of disaster. We
got peace then forever. w
I have no patience with the brawler, the quarreler, the swashbuckler,
and I have a little less for the academy person who believes that a
nation any more than an individual can afford to put peace before
justice. Put justice first; it will generally lead to peace; but follow it
wherever it leads.
In closing let me say just one more thing. The same homely virtues
apply in managing the life of a nation as in managing individual life.
All the statesman needs to do is to exercise common sense, and stick
as close to the Golden Rule as his imperfect human nature will permit.
In other words, he needs to carry himself in public life as he would in
private life, and never permit the mistake being made of divorcing
public or private morality any more than divorcing domestic and busi-
ness morality. The man is a poor citizen, no matter how he stands
in the church, whose allegiance to the teachings of the church are
limited to his home and to Sunday, and is not carried into his work
or his business. The man is a poor citizen who does not do his best
in the affairs of his country, both as that country stands to other nations
and as the country deals with the matters vital to its own citizens when
its departments are managed along the same lines, and those lines are
the perfectly simple, old lines of honesty, courage, and common sense.
AT THE GRADUATING EXERCISES OF HOLY CROSS COLLEGE,
WORCESTER, MASS., JUNE 21, 1905.
Here in Holy Cross College I want to say one word which ought
to be spoken to ears willing to hear it. Here I want to make an appeal
for scholarship in all our universities along certain lines. During the
last three years I have happened by chance to grow peculiarly interested
in the great subject of Celtic literature, and I feel that it is not a credit-
636 Messages and Speeches
able thing to the American republic, which has in its citizenship so
large a Celtic element, that we should leave it to the good Scholars
and citizens to be our instructors in Celtic literature. I want to see
in Holy Cross, in Harvard, and all the other universities where we can
get the chairs endowed, chairs for the study of Celtic literature.
In America we have been given, as a people, exceptional advantages.
We are to be held to an exceptional accountability for the use we make
of those advantages. We are not to be excused if we fail to do our
duty abroad and at home. I want to see this nation not only strong,
but just, and not only just, but strong. I want to see us develop as a
nation those qualities which we prize in the individual man.
We want to see the individual American a decent man, but nothing
but a decent man. I want to see him able to hold his own. I want to
see that he does wrong to no one else, and does not suffer wrong
himself. It is the same way with this nation. The constant effort of
our people should be to see that we do not wrong any other people,
that we are prompt to stretch the helping hand of friendship to any
other power which we are able to befriend, yet that we make it evident
that this attitude springs not from weakness, but from the junction
of strength with a sense of justice.
Among our own people what I most desire to see is the union of
a lofty sense of the rights of others with the power to act efficiently and
effectively. I do not wish in politics two entirely separate groups, one
composed of the men who mean well, and cannot do anything, and
the other of the men who are thoroughly efficient, but do not mean well
at all. I want to see in combination the power of efficient action with
the power of fealty to a lofty ideal. What counts is the spirit which
makes a man decent and yet sends him out into actual life able to hold
his own.
AT ADAMS, MASS., JUNE 22, 1905.
It is a great pleasure to come here and stop for a few minutes at
the place where my predecessor, President McKinley, was so fond of
staying. I have always regretted that it was not within my power to
come here when they dedicated the monument to his memory, but I
am deeply thankful to Mr. Plunkett for the interest he has shown in
being the first mover in the erection of a memorial to Mr. McKinley.
I am very glad to be traveling through Massachusetts, to see your
beautiful country, your landscape and rivers, your factories, and, above
all, your men and women, and I am very glad to see borne out what
President McKinley once said to me. He said that at Adams I would
be gratified by seeing any number of children. And they look like
mighty nice children, too. I am sure there is not a father or mother
that will not agree with me that of all the bodies of men and women
Theodore Roosevelt 637
in this country, that one to which we owe the most because of their
profession is the body of school teachers.
[The Boston Herald, June 23, 1905.]
AT NORTH ADAMS, MASS., JUNE 22, 1905.
I admire a great many of Massachusetts’ products, but I think the
product of the children is the best. I want, through the mayor, to
congratulate you that they seem to be all right in quality and quantity
both. These same children are the men and women who, 15 or 20
years hence, will be shaping the destiny of this nation, and they will
shape it well or ill, accordingly as they are now brought up. You
often see the man who, though he may not say that, thinks he himself
is a hard worker, yet does not train his boys to work hard themselves.
Now, that father and mother think they are being kind to the children.
They are not. That sort of kindness is a curse for those for whom it
is nominally exercised. I ask, if in the past we have accomplished
anything as a nation, if it is not that we have had making up that
nation men and women who did not shrink from work. The same
qualities that count in the army and the navy are what we need and
wish to make the best civilization in the world.
[The Boston Herald, June 23, 1905.]
ON RECEIVING THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF HUMAN LETTERS
FROM WILLIAMS COLLEGE, WILLIAMSTOWN, MASS.,
JUNE 22, 1905.
Mr. President and you of Williams:
It is a high honor that I have received at your hands, and I very
deeply appreciate it.
Before speaking of what I had intended to say here to-day, I want
to say a word just suggested by that address on “Idealism in Politics.”
I wish to see every graduate of this college, and every graduate of
every other college in the land, feel the need of ideals in business and
in law, quite as much as in politics. I want you to have high ideals,
but practical ideals. I do not want you ever to get into a frame of
mind, which we see pretty often in the world at large, which believes
that you can only have either high and fantastic ideals, or else low and
practical ones.
If you have to choose between being noxious and merely harmless,
of course, choose to be harmless. But do not expect a very great
gratitude from any person interested in the country, if you choose
merely to be harmless. If you choose to have high ideals so fantastic
that they are of no use when you try to apply them in practical life, do
638 Messages and Speeches
not for one moment delude yourself into the belief that to have the
fantastic ideals shows that you are more virtuous than the man who
has not. It merely shows that you are more foolish. Have high
ideals but try to realize them in practical shape.
Now with regard to Santo Domingo; I have done everything that in
me lay to prevent the crisis coming. All I asked on behalf of the people
of the United States was that Santo Domingo should be good and happy.
Without entering into the ethical question I shall merely say that it was
not happy. Finally, affairs grew into such shape down there that it was
evident that the bonds of society were on the point of dissolution; and
the government of Santo Domingo made an earnest appeal to the gov-
ernment of the United States, and asked that this nation, out of the
abundance of its strength, should strive to help a weaker brother. In the
interest of the peace of the world, and in the interest of justice we
yielded to Santo Domingo's request, and have started to try to help her
so to carry on her finances that she may be able to pay all that she can of
what she justly owes, individual or national, without impliedly formu-
lating a responsibility and obligation to go with that right.
We say that in our own interest and in the interests of the people of
the western hemisphere we adhere to the Monroe Doctrine. We cannot
say that other peoples shall not do what ought to be done unless we
do it ourselves. People answer that trouble and bother will come if
we do it. Of course, if this nation does not do its duty because it
thinks the duty will necessitate encountering some trouble, some bother,
then let this nation cease to claim to be great. I demand that the nation
do its duty, accept responsibility that must go with greatness. I ask
that the nation dare to be great, and that in daring to be great it
show that it knows how to do justice to the weak no less than to
exact justice from the strong.
In order to take such a position of being a great nation, the one thing
we must not do is to bluff. It is perfectly defensible, although I do not
think it perfectly proper, to say we will not try to be a big nation, will
not try to play the part of a big nation, or act as such in the world. But
the unpardonable thing is to say we will act as a big nation, and then
decline to take all steps to act as a big nation at all. Therefore, gentle-
men, see to it that the navy is built up, and kept built up to the highest
point of efficiency. I ask that, not in the interest of war, but as a
guarantee of peace. I believe in the Monroe Doctrine; I believe in the
building and maintaining as an open highway for the nations of man-
kind the Panama Canal. I had a great deal rather see this country
abandon the Monroe Doctrine, and give up all thought of building the
Panama Canal, than see it attempt to maintain the one and construct
the other, and refuse to provide for itself the means which can alone
render its attitude as a nation worthy of the respect of the other nations
Theodore Roosevelt 639
of mankind. Keep on building and maintaining at the highest point of
efficiency the United States navy, or quit trying to be a big nation.
Do one or the other.
Another question of which I wish to speak is that of a closer super-
vision by the government of great industrial combinations; for, of
course, wealth at present finds its expression through these great in-
dustrial combinations. I think that it has been a great mistake to act
on the theory which has shaped most of our legislation, national and
State, for the last thirty years, that it is possible to turn back the
hands of the clock, to forbid combinations, and to restore business ac-
cording to and under conditions which have absolutely passed away.
That cannot be done. What we can have done is to put an efficient
supervision over the owners of the combinations, so as to see as far
as possible that they are employed in the interest of and not against the
interest of the general public.
I do not believe that such supervision can come effectively through
the State, nor that it can effectively come through the municipality, but
ultimately in the great majority of cases to be effective it must be ex-
ercised by the national government. I trust that in the end means will
be found by which the exercise of such control over all the great indus-
trial corporations, which are really engaged in and doing an interstate
business, will be lodged in the hands of the national government.
As the first step to that I hope to see the passage of legislation which
will give, as an executive not as a judicial function, to the national
government the supervision of the railroads of the United States which
are engaged in interstate commerce, with the power, when a rate is
complained of as improper and unjust, to examine that rate, and, if
they think the rate should be changed, to change it to a given rate and
to have that given rate take practically immediate effect. Now, I am
perfectly well aware that there are objections to the proposed change.
In my judgment they are infinitely outweighed by the objections at-
tendant upon not making the change.
I expect that the commission will be able to pass upon a given rate
brought before it, just as the Supreme Court passes upon a given ques-
tion of law brought before it, and one will prove to be as feasible as
the other has proved feasible. That system should be, and in my
judgment will be, introduced. I believe it will work a measurable bet-
terment for the public. It can only come if the officers intrusted with
the administration of the law remember that it is exactly as much their
duty to protect the railroad from the public as to protect the public
from the railroad; to remember that when we say we want justice from
the railroad we must, if we are honest, add also a pledge to do justice
to the railroad.
I am going to illustrate what I mean by some work now being done
640 Messages and Speeches
in the Department of Justice and in the Bureau of Corporations, at
the head of which stands your fellow-alumnus, James Garfield. Reso-
lutions have been passed by very important bodies demanding the in-
vestigation of what is called the beef trust, and of the Standard Oil
Company. The beef trust had to be investigated partly by the De-
partment of Justice, acting through the district attorney of Chicago.
The Commissioner of Corporations was to report upon the facts of the
case, and the district attorney was to act on the legal evidence he could
obtain. If the district attorney can collect legal evidence which will
show that there has been willful and intentional violation of the law
by any man, no matter how high he stand socially and financially, he
will be indicted, and if possible convicted. If he does not secure such
legal evidence, no amount of popular feeling is to be allowed to be
substituted for the legal evidence.
So in investigating the beef trust and the Standard Oil Company I
have been content to leave it absolutely in the hands of Mr. Garfield,
because I knew that he was as incapable of being swayed by popular
demand on the one hand, as by any sympathy on the other;” that in
conducting his investigations he would do his simple elementary duty
by finding them guilty or not of the specific facts alleged, not with
regard to whether he personally did or did not like the corporation, but
in accordance with the evidence produced before him, and obtained by
him to show the corporations’ acts on the points complained of.
The same spirit must be shown in applying the laws dealing with
all corporations if, as I hope, we get the scope of those laws sufficiently
lodged.
AT THE ALUMNI DINNER OF HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAM-
BRIDGE, MASS., JUNE 28, 1905.
We have just heard from a Harvard man, speaking on behalf of the
class of ’55. I now speak to you on behalf of the class of ’80. Mr.
Choate, you can afford to be generous. A man whose life has been
passed in service such as yours can freely praise those who come after
you. Now, I speak on behalf of the younger men here present when I
say that we will count ourselves more than happy if we can in any
way approach the service of the older men of Harvard to the union.
In Bishop Lawrence's very touching introduction of me he spoke
*Here President Roosevelt exhibits that romantic loyalty to those whom he brings about
him, which is one of his most emphatic characteristics. This bulldog loyalty to friends—it
was a trait of President Grant, by the way—is at once President Roosevelt’s strongest as well
as weakest point. It was just the other way about with a recent President whom we still
have with us. Any tramp of politics could stroll in off the streets, and in a ten minutes’ talk
with him tear your reputation to shreds and rags. One hundred of the best and purest might
come and give their words in your favor. It would prove of no avail. So far as that tenant
of the White House was concerned, your tramp-destroyed reputation was gone forever.
—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 64I
of the effort I am making for peace. Of course I am for peace. Of
course every President who is fit to be President is for peace. But
I am for one thing before peace—I am for righteousness first, and for
peace because normal peace is the instrument of obtaining righteousness.
I am speaking now on behalf of the class of ’80, and as nobody else
has blown our horn for us, I am going to blow it just a little. We
have followed the example so admirably set by the class of ’79 in seeking
to show in practical fashion our desire to do something for the uni-
versity. Acting largely under the lead of Mr. Robert Bacon we have
raised, gentlemen—I am going to ask you to give nine cheers for
Robert Bacon.
We have raised a fund to be used without any conditions at all, for
the benefit of the university, but we hope it will be used in increasing
the salaries of those employed to teach in Harvard University. We
ought to raise salaries for the sake of giving a more adequate reward
to the men. But even if they would go on working at improperly low
salaries we ought to give them decent ones for the sake of our own
self-respect.
A great university like this has two especial functions. The first is
to produce a small number of scholars of the highest rank, a small
number of men who in science and literature, or in art, will do pro-
ductive work of the first class. The second is to send out into the
world a very large number of men who never could achieve, and who
ought not to try to achieve, such a position in the field of scholarship,
but whose energies are to be felt in every other form of activity; and
who should go out from our doors with the balanced development of
body, of mind, and, above all, of character, which shall fit them to do
work both honorable and efficient.
Much of the effort to accomplish the first function, that of developing
men capable of productive scholarship, as distinguished from merely
imitative, annotative, or pedagogic scholarship, must come through the
graduate school. The law school and medical school do admirable
work in fitting men for special professions, but they in no shape or way
supply any shortcomings in the graduate School any more than does
the college proper, the college of the undergraduates. The ideal for the
graduate school and for those undergraduates who are to go into it
must be the ideal of high scholarly production, which is to be distin-
guished in the sharpest fashion from the mere transmittal of ready-
made knowledge without adding to it. If America is to contribute its
full share to the progress not alone of knowledge, but of wisdom, then
we must put ever-increasing emphasis on university work done along
the lines of the graduate school. We can best help the growth of
American scholarship by seeing that as a career it is put more on a
level with the other careers open to our young men.
642 Messages and Speeches
The general opinion of the community is bound to have a very great
effect even upon its most vigorous and independent minds. If in the
public mind the career of the scholar is regarded as of insignificant
value when compared with that of a glorified pawnbroker, then it will
with difficulty be made attractive to the most vigorous and gifted of Our
American young men. Good teachers, excellent institutions, and libraries
are all demanded in a graduate school worthy of the name. But there
is an even more urgent demand for the right sort of student. No first-
class science, no first-class literature or art, can ever be built up with
second-class men. The scholarly career, the career of the man of letters,
the man of arts, the man of science, must be made such as to attract
those strong and virile youths who now feel that they can only turn
to business, law or politics. There is no one thing which will bring
about this desired change, but there is one thing which will materially
help in bringing it about, and that is to secure to scholars the chance
of getting one of a few brilliant positions as prizes if they rise to the
first rank in their chosen career. Every such brilliant position should
have as an accompaniment an added salary, which shall help indicate
how high the position really is; and it must be the efforts of the
alumni which can alone secure such salaries for such positions.
As a people I think we are waking up to the fact that there must
be better pay for the average man and average woman engaged in the
work of education. But I am not speaking of this now ; I am not
speaking of the desirability, great though that is, of giving better pay-
ment to the average educator, I am speaking of the desirability of giving
to the exceptional man the chance of winning an exceptional prize, just
as he has the chance to do in law and business. In business at the
present day nothing could be more healthy than an immense reduction
in the money value of the exceptional prizes thus to be won; but in
scholarship what is needed is the reverse. In this country we rightly
go upon the theory that it is more important to care for the welfare
of the average man than to put a premium upon the exertions of the ex-
ceptional. But we must not forget that the establishment of such a
premium for the exceptional, though of less importance, is nevertheless
of very great importance. It is important even to the devolpment of the
average man, for the average of all of us is raised by the work of
the great masters.
It is, I trust, unnecessary to say that I appreciate to the full the
fact that the highest work of all will never be affected one way or the
other by any question of compensation. And much of the work which
is really best for the nation must from the very nature of things be
non-remunerative as compared with the work of the ordinary indus-
tries and vocations. Nor would it ever be possible or desirable that
the rewards of transcendent success in scholarship should even approxi-
Theodore Roosevelt 643
mate, from a monetary standpoint, the rewards in other vocations. But
it is also true that the effect upon ambitious minds cannot but be bad
if as a people we show our very slight regard for scholarly achievement
by making no provision at all for its reward.
The chief use of the increased money value of the scholar's prize
would be the index thereby afforded of the respect in which it was
popularly held. The American scientist, the American scholar, should
have the chance at least of winning such prizes as are open to his
successful brother in Germany, England, or France, where the rewards
paid for first-class scholarly achievement are as much above those paid
in this country as our rewards for first-class achievement in industry
or law are above those paid abroad.
But, of course, what counts infinitely more than any possible outside
reward is the spirit of the worker himself. The prime need is to instill
into the minds of the scholars themselves a true appreciation of real
as distinguished from sham success. In productive scholarship, in the
scholarship which adds by its work to the sum of substantial achieve-
ment with which the country is to be credited, it is only first-class work
that counts. In this field the smallest amount of really first-class work
is worth all the second-class work that can possibly be produced; and
to have done such work is in itself the fullest and amplest reward to
the man producing it. We outsiders should, according to our ability,
aid him in every way to produce it. Yet all that we can do is but little
compared to what he himself can and must do. The spirit of the
scholar is the vital factor in the productive scholarship of the country.
So much for the first function of the university, the sending forth
of a small number of scholars of the highest rank who will do produc-
tive work of the first class. Now turn to the second, and what may
be called the normal function of the college, the function of turning out
each year many hundreds of men who shall possess the trained intel-
ligence, and especially the character, that will enable them to hold high
the renown of this ancient seat of learning by doing useful service for
the nation. It is not my purpose to discuss at length what should
be done in Harvard to produce the right spirit among the men who
go out of Harvard, but rather to speak of what this spirit should be.
Nor shall I speak of the exceptions, the men to whom college life is
a disadvantage. Randolph of Roanoke, he of the biting tongue, once
remarked of an opponent that he reminded him of certain tracts of land
which were almost worthless by nature, and became entirely so by
cultivation. Of course, if in any individual university training pro-
duces a taste for refined idleness, a distaste for sustained effort, a
barren intellectual arrogance, or a sense of Supercilious aloofness from
the world of real men who do the world’s real work, then it has
harmed that individual; but in such case there remains the abiding
644 Messages and Speeches
comfort that he would not have amounted to much anyway. Neither
a college training nor anything else can do much good to the man of
weak fiber or to the man with a twist in his moral or intellectual
make-up. But the average undergraduate has enough robustness of
nature, enough capacity for enthusiasm and aspiration, to make it
worth while to turn to account the stuff that is in him.
There are, however, two points in the undergraduate life of Harvard
about which I think we have a right to feel some little concern. One
is the growth of luxury in the university. I do not know whether
anything we can say will have much effect on this point, but just
so far as the alumni have weight I hope to see that weight felt in
serious and sustained effort against the growing tendency to luxury
and in favor of all that makes for democratic conditions. One of our
number, the one whom I think the rest us most delight to honor
—Col. Higginson—has given to our alma mater the Harvard Union,
than which no better gift, no gift meeting a more vital need, could
have been given to the university. It is neither possible nor desirable
to try to take away all social differences from the student life; but it
is a good thing to show how unimportant these differences are com-
pared to the differences of real achievement, and compared also to
the bonds which should unite together all the men who are in any
degree capable of such real achievement; bonds, moreover, which should
also knit these capable men to their brethren who need their help.
The second point upon which I wish to speak is the natter of sport.
Now I shall not be suspected of a tendency unduly to minimize the im-
portance of sport. I believe heartily in sport. I believe in outdoor
games, and I do not mind in the least that they are rough games, or
that those who take part in them are occasionally injured. I have no
sympathy whatever with the overwrought sentimentality which would
keep a young man in cotton wool, and I have a hearty contempt for
him if he counts a broken arm or collar bone as of serious consequence,
when balanced against the chance of showing that he possesses hardi-
hood, physical address, and courage. But when these injuries are in-
flicted by others, either wantonly or of set design, we are confronted
by the question not of damage to one man's body, but of damage to
the other man's character. Brutality in playing a game should awaken
the heartiest and most plainly shown contempt for the player guilty
of it, especially if this brutality is coupled with a low cunning in
committing it without getting caught by the umpire. I hope to see
both graduate and undergraduate opinion come to scorn such a man
as one guilty of base and dishonorable action, who has no place in
the regard of gallant and upright men.
It is a bad thing for any college man to grow to regard sport as the
serious business of life. It is a bad thing to permit sensationalism
Theodore Roosevelt 645
and hysteria to shape the development of our sports. And finally it is
a much worse thing to permit college sport to become in any shape
or way tainted by professionalism, or by so much as the slightest sus-
picion of money-making; and this is especially true if the profes-
sionalism is furtive, if the boy or man violates the spirit of the rule
while striving to keep within the letter. Professional sport is all right
in its way.
I am glad to say that among my friends I number professional
boxers and wrestlers, oarsmen and baseball men, whose regard I value,
and whom in turn, I regard as thoroughly good citizens. But the
college undergraduate who, in furtive fashion, becomes a semi-pro-
fessional is an unmitigated curse, and that not alone to university life
and to the cause of amateur sport; for the college graduate ought in
after years to take the lead in putting the business morality of this
country on a proper plane, and he cannot do it if in his own college
career his code of conduct has been warped and twisted. Moreover,
the spirit which puts so excessive a value upon his work as to produce
this semi-professional is itself unhealthy. I wish to see Harvard win
a reasonable proportion of the contests in which it enters, and I should
be heartily ashamed of every Harvard athlete who did not spend every
ounce there was in him in the effort to win, provided only he does it in
honorable and manly fashion. But I think our effort should be to mini-
mize rather than to increase that kind of love of athletics which mani-
fests itself not in joining in the athletic sports, but in crowding by tens
of thousands to see other people indulge in them. It is a far better
thing for our colleges to have the average student interested in some
form of athletics than to have them all gather in a mass to see other
people do their athletics for them.
So much for the undergraduate. Now for the alumni, the men who
are at work out in the great world. Of course, the man's first duty
is to himself and to those immediately dependent upon him. Unless
he can pull his own weight he must be content to remain a passenger
all his life. But we have a right to expect that the men who come out
of Harvard will do something more than merely pull their own weight.
We have a right to expect that they will count as positive forces for the
betterment of their fellow-countrymen, and they can thus count only
if they combine the power of devotion to a lofty ideal with practical
common sense in striving to realize this ideal.
This nation never stood in greater need than now of having among
its leaders men of lofty ideals, which they try to live up to and not
merely to talk of. We need men with these ideals in public life, and
we need them just as much in business and in such a profession as the
law. We can by statute establish only those exceedingly rough lines of
morality, the overpassing of which means that the man is in jeopardy
646 Messuges and Speeches
of the constable or the sheriff. But the nation is badly off if in addition
to this there is not a very much higher standard of conduct, a standard
impossible effectively to establish by statute, but one upon which the
community as a whole, and especially the real leaders of the community,
insist. Take such a question as the enforcement of the law. It is, of
course, elementary to say that this is the first requisite in any civiliza-
tion at all. But a great many people in the ranks of life from which
most college men are drawn seem to forget that they should condemn
with equal severity those men who break the law by committing crimes
of mob violence, and those who evade the law, or who actually break it,
but so cunningly that they cannot be discovered, the crimes they commit
being not those of physical outrage, but those of greed and craft on the
largest scale.
The very rich man who conducts his business as if he believed that
he were a law unto himself thereby immensely increases the difficulty
of the task of upholding order when the disorder is a menace to men
of property; for if the community feels that rich men disregard the
law where it affects themselves, then the community is apt to assume
the dangerous and unwholesome attitude of condoning crimes of vio-
lence committed against the interests which in the popular mind these
rich men represent. This last attitude is wholly evil; but so is the
attitude which produces it. We have a right to appeal to the alumni
of Harvard and to the alumni of every institution of learning in this
land to do their part in creating a public sentiment which shall demand
of all men of means, and especially of the men of vast fortune, that
they set an example to their less fortunate brethren by paying scrupu-
lous heed not only to the letter, but to the spirit of the laws, and by
acknowledging in the heartiest fashion the moral obligations which
cannot be expressed in law, but which stand back of and above all laws.
It is far more important that they should conduct their business affairs
decently than that they should spend the surplus of their fortunes in
philanthropy. Much has been given to these men, and we have a right
to demand much of them in return. Every man of great wealth who
runs his business with cynical contempt for those prohibitions of the
law which by hired cunning he can escape or evade is a menace to our
community, and the community is not to be excused if it does not
develop a spirit which actively frowns on and discountenances him.
The great profession of the law should be that whose members ought
to take the lead in the creation of just such a spirit. We all know that,
as things actually are, many of the most influential and most highly
remunerated members of the bar in every center of wealth make it their
special task to work out bold and ingenious schemes by which their
very wealthy clients, individuals or corporate, can evade the laws
*
Theodore Roosevelt 647
which are made to regulate in the interest of the public the use of great
wealth.
Now, the great lawyer who employs his talent and his learning in the
highly remunerative task of enabling a very wealthy client to override
or circumvent the law is doing all that in him lies to encourage the
growth in this country of a spirit of dumb anger against all laws and
of disbelief in their efficacy. Such a spirit may breed the demand that
laws shall be made even more drastic against the rich, or else it may
manifest itself in hostility of all laws. Surely Harvard has the right
to expect from her sons a high standard of applied morality, whether
their paths lead them into public life, into business, or into the great
profession of the law, whose members are so potent in shaping the
growth of the national soul.
But in addition to having high ideals it cannot too often be said to
a body such as is gathered here to-day that together with devotion to
what is right must go practical efficiency in striving for what is right.
This is a rough, workaday, practical world, and if in it we are to do
the work best worth doing, we must approach that work in a spirit
remote from that of the mere visionary, and above all remote from that
of the visionary whose aspirations after good find expression only in
the shape of scolding and complaining. It shall not help us if we avoid
the Scylla of baseness of motive only to be wrecked on the Charybdis
of wrongheadedness, of feebleness and inefficiency. There can be
nothing worse for the community than to have the men who profess
lofty ideals show themselves so foolish, so narrow, so impractical, as
to cut themselves off from communion with the men who are actually
able to do the work of governing, the work of business, the work of
the professions. It is a sad and evil thing if the men with a moral sense
group themselves as impractical zealots, whole the men of action grad-
ually grow to discard and laugh at all moral sense as an evidence of
impractical weakness.
Macaulay, whose eminently sane and wholesome spirit revolted not
only at weakness, but at the censorious folly which masquerades as
virtue, describes the condition of Scotland at the end of the seventeenth
century in a passage which every sincere reformer should keep con-
stantly before him.
It is a remarkable circumstance that the same country should have
produced in the same age the most wonderful specimens of both ex-
tremes of human nature. Even in things indifferent the Scotch Puritan
would hear of no compromise; and he was but too ready to consider all
who recommended prudence and charity as traitors to the cause of
truth. On the other hand, the Scotchmen of that generation who made
a figure in Parliament were the most dishonest and unblushing time-
servers that the world has ever seen. Perhaps it is natural that the
648 Messages and Speeches
most callous and impudent vice should be found in the near neighbor-
hood of unreasonable and impracticable virtue. Where enthusiasts
are ready to destroy or be destroyed for trifles magnified into impor-
tance by a squeamish conscience, it is not strange that the very name
of conscience should become a byword of contempt to cool and shrewd
men of business.
The men who go out from Harvard into the great world of American
life bear a heavy burden of responsibility. The only way they can show
their gratitude to their alma mater is by doing their full duty to the
nation as a whole, and they can do this full duty only if they combine
the high resolve to work for what is best and most ennobling with the
no less resolute purpose to do their work in such fashion that when the
end of their days comes they shall feel that they have actually achieved
results and not merely talked of achieving them.
AT HARVARD UNION, BOSTON, MASS., JUNE 28, 1905.
Fellow members of Harvard Union:
The only personal request that I made as to the programme of these
two days was that I should be given the chance of saying a word to my
fellow members of the Harvard Union.
I asked that it should take the form of an overflow meeting, or any-
thing of that kind, because I wanted to speak to you as members of
the Harvard Union itself. It seems to me that there is no other
institution which so embodies and typifies the true spirit of Harvard
as this union—the spirit which stands for what is highest, of brother-
hood, of genuine allegiance to the university as such.
I feel that this union is one of the most important elements in
shaping a right Harvard life, and that everything that we alumni can
do should be done to impress upon the undergraduates the importance
of keeping this union up to its highest possible standard of develop-
ment and use.
As something not, perhaps, of the highest importance, but of im-
portance, I want to congratulate you, as I always do when I come here,
upon the delightful physical surroundings of the union. I don’t know
whether the undergraduates realize what a beautiful building, what a
beautiful hall, what beautiful surroundings, these are. A man coming
here from the outside can, perhaps, see more clearly than those who
are all the time enjoying the surroundings and can realize how great
a privilege it is which the generosity of Col. Higginson has allowed
to us of Harvard to enjoy.
And now I am going to ask you to join with me in three times three
for Col. Higginson.
|The Boston Herald, June 29, 1905.]
Theodore Roosevelt 649
BEFORE THE NATIONAL EDUCATIONAL ASSOCIATION, AT OCEAN
GROVE, N. J., JULY 7, 1905.
I am glad to have the chance of greeting the National Educational
Association, for in all this democratic land there is no more genuinely
democratic association than this. It is truly democratic, because here
each member meets every other member as his peer without regard to
whether he is the president of one of the great universities or the
newest recruit to that high and honorable profession which has in its
charge the upbringing and training of those boys and girls who in a
few short years will themselves be settling the destinies of this nation.
It is not too much to say that the most characteristic work of the repub-
lic is done by the educators, for whatever our short-comings as a nation
may be, we have at least firmly grasped the fact that we cannot do our
part in the difficult and all-important work of self-government; that
we cannot rule and govern ourselves unless we approach the task with
developed minds and trained characters. You teachers make the whole
world your debtor. If you did not do your work well this Republic
would not endure beyond the span of the generation. Moreover, as
an incident to your avowed work, you render some well-nigh un-
believable services to the country. For instance, you render to the
Republic the prime, the vital service of amalgamating into one homo-
geneous body the children alike of those who are born here and of
those who come here from so many different lands abroad. You fur-
nish a common training and common ideals for the children of all the
mixed peoples who are here being fused into one nationality. It is
in no small degree due to you and your efforts that we are one people
instead of a group of jarring peoples.
Moreover, where altogether too much prominence is given to the
mere possession of wealth, the country is under heavy obligations to
such a body as this, which substitutes for the ideal of accumulating
money the infinitely loftier, nonmaterialistic ideal of devotion to work
worth doing simply for that work's sake. I do not in the least under-
estimate the need of having material prosperity as the basis of our
civilization, but I most earnestly insist if our civilization does not
build a lofty superstructure on this basis, we can never rank among
the really great peoples. A certain amount of money is, of course, a
necessary thing, as much for the nation as for the individual; and there
are few movements in which I more thoroughly believe than in the
movement to secure better remuneration for Our teachers. But, after
all, the service you render is incalculable, because of the very fact that
by your lives you show that you believe ideals to be worth sacrifice,
and that you are splendidly eager to do nonremunerative work if this
work is of good to your fellow men.
To furnish in your lives such a realized high ideal is to do a great
650 Messages and Speeches
service to the country. The chief harm done by the men of swollen
fortune to the community is not the harm that the demagogue is apt
to depict as springing from their actions, but the fact that their success
sets up a false standard, and so serves as a bad example for the rest of
us. If we did not ourselves attach an exaggerated importance to the
rich man who is distinguished only by his riches, this rich man would
have a most insignificant influence over us. It is generally our own
fault if he does damage to us, for he damages us chiefly by arousing
our envy or by rendering us sour and discontented.
In his actual business relation he is much more apt to benefit than
harm the rest of us; and though it is eminently right to take whatever
steps are necessary in order to prevent the exceptional members of his
class from doing harm, it is wicked folly to let ourselves be drawn
into any attack upon the man of wealth merely as such.* Moreover,
such an attack is in itself an exceptionally crooked and ugly tribute to
wealth, and, therefore, the proof of an exceptionally ugly and crooked
state of mind in the man making the attack. Venomous envy of wealth
is simply another form of the spirit which in one of its manifestations
takes the shape of cringing servility toward wealth, and in another
the shape of brutal arrogance on the part of certain men of wealth. Each
one of these states of mind, whether it be hatred, servility, or arrogance,
is in reality closely akin to the other two; for each of them springs
from a fantastically twisted and exaggerated idea of the importance
of wealth as compared to other things. The clamor of the demagogue
against wealth, the snobbery of the Social columns of the newspapers
which deal with the doings of the wealthy, and the misconduct of those
men of wealth who act with brutal disregard of the rights of others,
seem superficially to have no fundamental relations; yet in reality they
spring from shortcomings which are fundamentally the same; and
one of these shortcomings is the failure to have proper ideals.
This failure must be remedied in large part by the actions of you and
your fellow teachers, your fellow educators throughout this land. By
your lives, no less than by your teachings, you show that while you
regard wealth as a good thing, you regard other things as still better.
It is absolutely necessary to earn a certain amount of money; it is a
man’s first duty to those dependent upon him to earn enough for their
support; but after a certain point has been reached money-making
can never stand on the same plane with other and nobler forms of
effort. The roll of American worthies numbers men like Washington
and Lincoln, Grant and Farragut, Hawthorne and Poe, Fulton and
Morse, St. Gaudens and MacMonnies; it numbers statesmen and
soldiers, men of letters, artists, sculptors, men of science, inventors,
*This is right. While wealth is so much like water that it commonly collects in lowest
places, it is not always true, is not even the rule, that the Rich are ever robbers and the Poor
are ever pure.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 651
explorers, roadmakers, bridge builders, philanthropists, moral leaders
in great reforms; it numbers men who have deserved well in any one
of countless fields of activity; but of rich men it numbers only those
who have used their riches aright, who have treated wealth not as
an end, but as a means, who have shown good conduct in acquiring it,
and not merely lavish generosity in disposing of it.
Thrice fortunate are you to whom it is given to lead lives of resolute
endeavor for the achievement of lofty ideals, and, furthermore, to
instill, both by your lives and by your teachings, these ideals into the
minds of those who in the next generation will, as the men and women
of that generation, determine the position which this nation will hold in
the history of mankind.
In closing I want to speak to you of how certain things, some of
which have happened, and some of which have been suggested to me
by what has happened in the past week, emphasize what I have said
to you as to the importance to this country of having within its limits
men who put the realization of high ideals above any form of money-
making. t
Within a week this country has lost a great statesman, who was also
a great man of letters, a man who occupied a peculiar and unique
position in our country, a man of whose existence we could each of
us be proud, for the United States as a whole was better because
John Hay lived. John Hay entered the public service as a young man
just come of age, as the secretary of President Lincoln. He served in
the war and was a member of the Loyal Legion. He was trusted by and
was intimate with Lincoln as hardly any other man was. He then
went on rendering service after service, and always able—this was
one of his great advantages and great merits—at any moment to go to
private life unless he could continue in public life on his own terms.
He went on rendering service after service to the country until as
the climax of his career he served as Secretary of State under two
successive administrations, and by what he did and by what he was
contributed in no small degree to achieving for this Republic the respect
of the nations of mankind. Such service as that could not have been
rendered save by a man who had before him ideals as far apart as the
poles from those ideals which have in them any taint of what is base
or sordid.
Now, I wished to secure as John Hay's successor the man whom I
regard, of all the men of the country, as the one best fitted to be such
successor. In asking him to accept the position of Secretary of State
I was asking him to submit to a very great pecuniary sacrifice, and I
never even thought of that aspect of the question, for I knew he would
not, either. I knew that whatever other considerations he had to
weigh, for and against taking the position, the consideration of how
652 Messages and Speeches
it would affect his personal fortune would not be taken into account
by Elihu Root, and he has accepted. º
I am not speaking of Hay and Root as solitary exceptions. On the
contrary, I am speaking of them as typical of a large class of men in
public life. {
Even when we hear so much criticism of certain aspects of our public
life and of certain of our public servants, criticism which I regret to
state is in many cases deserved, it is well for us to remember also the
other side of the picture, to remember that here in America we now
have, and always have had at the command of the nation in any crisis,
in any emergency, the very best ability to be found within the nation,
and that ability has been given with the utmost freedom, given lavishly
and generously, although at great pecuniary loss to the man giving it.
There is not in my Cabinet a man to whom it is not a financial
disadvantage to stay in the Cabinet. There is not in my Cabinet one
man who does not have to give up something substantial, often much
that is substantial, sometimes what is a very real hardship for him to
give up, in order that he may continue in the service of the Nation
and have the only reward for which he looks or for which he cares,
the consciousness of having done service that was worth rendering.
I hope more and more throughout this nation to see the spirit grow
which makes such service possible. I hope more and more to see the
Sentiment of the country as a whole become such that each man shall
feel borne in on him, whether he is in public life or in private life—and,
mind you, some of the greatest public services can be best rendered by
those who are not in public life—that the chance to do good work is the
greatest chance that can come to any man or any woman in our genera-
tion or in any other generation, and to feel that if such work can be
well done it is in itself the amplest reward and the amplest prize.
BEFORE THE ASSOCIATED PHYSICIANS OF LONG ISLAND, AT
OYSTER BAY, N. Y., JULY 12, 1905.
Mr. President, members of the Association, friends and neighbors:
I needed no invitation to come before you today. All I needed was
permission. As soon as I learned that this association was to meet
in Our village I felt that I must take advantage of the opportunity to
say a word of greeting to you in person.
Of course, it is most needless to say that ere is not and cannot be
any other lay profession the members of which occupy such a dual
position, each side of which is of such importance, for the doctor has
on the one hand to be the most thoroughly educated man in applied
science that there is in the country, and on the other hand, as every
layman knows, and doubtless many a layman in the circle of acquaint-
ance of each of you would gladly testify, the doctor gradually becomes
Theodore Roosevelt & 653
the closest friend to more different people than would be possible in
other professions. The feelings that a man has toward the one human
being to whom he turns, either in time of sickness for himself, or,
what is far more important, in the time of sickness of those closest
and dearest to him, cannot but be of a peculiar kind. He cannot but
have a feeling for him such as he has for no other man. The doctor
must, therefore, to the greatest degree develop both sides of his nature,
develop his nature along the two sides of his duties, although in the
case of any other man you would call him a mighty good citizen if he
developed only one side.
The scientific man who is really a first-class scientific man has a
claim upon the gratitude of all the country.* The man who is a first-,
class neighbor and is always called in in time of trouble by his neighbors
has an equal claim upon Society at large. But the doctor has both
claims. Yet, in addition to filling both of these functions, he may fill
many other functions. He may have served in the Civil War; he may
have rendered the greatest possible service to the community along a
dozen different lines. Take, for instance, just what is being done in
One of the great works of this country at the present time—digging
the Panama Canal. That is a work that only a big nation could under-
take or that a big nation could do, and it is a work for all mankind.
And the condition precedent upon success in that work is having the
proper type of medical work as a preliminary.
That is the first condition upon the meeting of which depends our
success in solving the engineering and administrative problems of the
work itself. I am happy to say that the work is being admirably done,
and I am particularly glad to have this chance of saying it. Now and
then some alarmist report will come from Panama. Just a couple of
weeks ago there seemed to be a succession of people coming up from
Panama, each one of whom had some tale or other to tell. You will
always find in any battle, even if it is a victorious battle, that in the
rear you meet a number of gentlemen who are glad that they are not
at the front; who, if they have unfortunately gotten at the front have
come away, and who justify their absence from the front by telling
tales of how everything has gone wrong there.
Now, the people who flee from Panama will carry up here just such
stories as the people who flee from the forefront of a battle carry to the
rear with them. The people to whom this country owes and will owe so
much are those who stay down there and do not talk, but do their
work, and do it well.
*Somewhere in these notes I’ve said that science is only the accepted ignorance of today.
This holds good in medicine as in other walks. The other day an eminent New York physi-
cian said to me: “If I practiced medicine today as I did twenty years ago, they’d jail me
for malpractice. Also, if I’d practiced medicine twenty years ago as I do today, they’d have
jailed me for malpractice.”—A. H. L.
654 Messages and Speeches
Of course, in doing a great work like that in the tropics, in a region
which, until this government took hold of it, was accounted to be a
region exceptionally unhealthy, we are going to have trouble, have
some yellow fever, have a good deal of malarial fever, and suffer more
from the latter than from the yellow fever, although we will hear
nothing like the talk about it. We will have every now and then
troubles as regards hygiene, just as we will have trouble in the engineer-
ing problems. Just as occasionally we will have trouble in the admin-
istrative work. Whenever one of these troubles comes there will be a
large number of excellent but timid men who will at once say what an
awful calamity it is, and express the deepest sorrow and concern, and
be rather inclined to the belief that the whole thing is a failure. It
will not be a failure. It will be a success, and it will be a success
because we shall treat every little check not as a reason for abandoning
the work, but as a reason for altering and bettering our plans so as to
make it impossible that that particular check shall happen again.
What is being done in Panama is but a sample of the things that
this country has done during the last few years, of the things in which
your profession has been so prominent a part. Take what we did
in Cuba, where we tried the experiment, which had not been tried for
400 years, of cleaning the cities. One of the most important items of
the work done by our government in Cuba was the work of hygiene,
the work of cleaning and disinfecting the cities so as to minimize the
chance for yellow fever, so as to do away with as many as possible of
the conditions that told for disease.
This country has never done better work, that is, work that reflected
more honor upon the country, or for humanity at large, than the work
done in Cuba. And the man who above all others will be responsible
for doing that work So well was a member of your profession, who,
when the call to arms came, went as a soldier to the field, the present
Maj. Gen. Leonard Wood.
Leonard Wood did in Cuba just the kind of work that, for instance,
Lord Cromer has done in Egypt. We have not been able to reward
Wood in anything like the proportion that services such as his would
have been rewarded in any other country of the first rank in the world;
and there have been no meaner and more unpleasant manifestations in
all our public history than the feelings of envy and jealousy manifested
toward Wood. And the foul assaults and attacks made upon him,
gentlemen, were largely because they grudged the fact that this admira-
ble military officer should have been a doctor.
Theodore Roosevelt 655
ON THE OCCASION OF INTRODUCING THE RUSSIAN AND JAP-
ANESE PEACE ENVOYS, ON BOARD THE MAYFLOWER,
NEAR OYSTER BAY, N. Y., AUGUST 5, 1905.
Gentlemen:
I propose a toast to which there will be no answer, and
to which I ask you to drink in silence standing. I drink to the welfare
and prosperity of the sovereigns and peoples of the two great nations
whose representatives have met one another on this ship. It is my
most earnest hope and prayer, in the interest of not only these two
great powers, but of all mankind, that a just and lasting peace may
be speedily concluded between them.
AT EASTON, PA., AUGUST Io, 1905.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is a great pleasure for me to be again in the State of Pennsylvania.
Passing through to-day along the line of this railway I notice that
everywhere you have decorated the buildings with the American flag.
I hope that each of us when he sees that flag strives to remember that
it not only confers honor upon each of us and is a symbol of the pros-
perity and happiness to which we have attained, but that it also imposes
responsibilities upon each of us. Self-government is not an easy thing,
either for the nation or for the individual; and it works really well
only when you have a high type of average citizenship. Therefore, in
a Republic such as ours we wish to keep ever vividly before us that in
addition to congratulating ourselves, as we have a right to do, upon
how much we have done, it will do us even more good to think of the
things that we have not done and ought to do; and to think of them
not in a spirit of bitterness, but with a resolute purpose, each to do his
share in trying to make things a little bit better. The way to be a good
citizen is to be a good man or woman in your own home; to do your
duty by those closest to you, by those immediately dependent upon you.
But that is not enough. In addition to that, you have got to do your
duty by the State and by your neighbor. { }
AT PHILLIPSBURG, N. J., AUGUST 10, 1905.
I am glad to have the pleasure of saying a word of greeting to you
and of expressing my appreciation of your coming out to see me.
I am glad to see, as I pass by here, as in other States, the care being
spent on the education of the boys and girls who in the next generation
will do their share in deciding the destinies of this Republic. If we
do not take care of the next generation we can guarantee that this
Republic of ours will go down. I believe it will stay up, that it will
656 Messages and Speeches
continue to be a model for the nations of the earth, because I believe
that the fathers and mothers of to-day are alive to the fact that in
taking care of their children they are attending to the citizenship of
the future.
I want to say a special word to the railway men. You men who do
your work in connection with the railways of the country typify to a
peculiar degree the qualities that we need in American citizenship.
We like to think that the average American is a man who is willing to
work hard and to take risks. That is just what a railroad man has to
do, and has to be willing to do. We like to think that the average
American knows how to do work by himself, and yet to work in com-
bination with others. That is just what the average railroad man
has to do. We like to think that the average American citizen knows
how to take responsibilities, and yet how to play his part in our world
as a whole. That is what the railway man must do.
AT BETHLEHEM, PA., AUGUST Io, 1905.
Mr. Mayor, fellow citizens:
It is a great pleasure to be here and to be introduced by your mayor,
who has called my special attention to this wonderful industry typified
by the Bethlehem Steel Works. As I passed by I was greeted with
Salutes from some of the cannon you have made, and I feel about
those cannon that, while I earnestly hope that they may never have to
be used, and while all that in me lies shall be done to see that this
Nation never gives just cause of offense to another nation so as to
warrant their use, yet that if they should be needed, they will come in
mighty handy. If they should be needed, we want the very best, and
we want the best men behind them. In war the ultimate factor is the
man behind the gun. You have got to have not only an AI gun, but
an AI gunner. The shot that counts is the shot that hits.
We need in the interest of peace and so that we can do our duty in
promoting peace of the world to have it understood that we desire
peace not from fear, not from weakness, but because we regard peace
as just and right. My friends, in private life, in the life of peace, in
ordinary civil life, it is true, as it is in time of war, that great though
it is to have these evidences of our material prosperity, the thing that
counts most is the average of our citizenship. Whether this country
goes up or goes down will depend in the last analysis upon the charac-
ter of the average American, and I believe that this country will go
up because I believe that in the future the average character of our
average citizen will be as it has been in the past.
Theodore Roosevelt 657
BEFORE THE CATHOLIC TOTAL ABSTINENCE UNION OF AMERICA
AND THE UNITED MINE WORKERS OF AMERICA,
AT WILKESBARRE, PA., AUGUST Io, 1905.
I am particularly glad to speak to this audience of miners and their
wives and children, and especially to speak under the auspices of this
great temperance society. In our country the happiness of all the rest
of our people depends most of all upon the welfare of the wageworker
and the welfare of the farmer. If we can secure the welfare of these
two classes we can be reasonably certain that the community as a whole
will prosper. And we must never forget that the chief factor in secur-
ing the welfare alike of wage-worker and of farmer, as of everybody
else, must be the man himself.
The only effective way to help anybody is to help him help him-
self. There are exceptional times when any one of us needs outside
help, and then it should be given freely; but normally each one of
us must depend upon his own exertions for his own success. Some-
thing can be done by wise legislation and by wise and honest adminis-
tration of the laws; that is, something can be done by our action taken
in our collective capacity through the State and the nation.
Something more can be done by combination and organization
among ourselves in Our private capacities as citizens, so long as this
combination or Organization is managed with wisdom and integrity,
with insistence upon the rights of those benefited, and yet with just re-
gard for the rights of others.
But in the last analysis the factor most influential in determining
any man's success must ever be the sum of that man's Own qualities,
of his knowledge, foresight, thrift, and courage. Whatever tends to
increase his self-respect, whatever tends to help him overcome the
temptations with which all of us are surrounded, is of benefit not
only to him, but to the whole community.
No one society can do more to help the wage-worker than such
a temperance society as that which I am now addressing. It is of in-
calculable consequence to the man himself that he should be sober
and temperate, and it is of even more consequence to his wife and his
children; for it is a hard and cruel fact that in this life of ours the
sins of the man are often visited most heavily upon those whose wel-
fare should be his one special care.
For the drunkard, for the man who loses his job because he cannot
control or will not control his desire for liquor and for vicious pleasure,
we have a feeling of anger and contempt mixed with our pity; but
for his unfortunate wife and little ones we feel only pity, and that
of the deepest and tenderest kind.
Everything possible should be done to encourage the growth of that
658 Messages and Speeches
spirit of self-respect, self-restraint, self-reliance, which if it only
grows enough is certain to make all those in whom it shows itself
move steadily upward toward the highest standard of American citi-
zenship. It is a proud and responsible privilege to be citizens of this
great self-governing nation; and each of us needs to keep steadily
before his eyes the fact that he is wholly unfit to take part in the
work of governing others unless he can first govern himself. He
must stand up manfully for his own rights; he must respect the rights
of others; he must obey the law, and he must try to live up to those
rules of righteousness which are above and behind all laws.
This applies just as much to the man of great wealth as to the man
of small means; to the capitalist as to the wage-worker. And as one
practical point, let me urge that in the event of any difficulty, especially
if it is what is known as a labor trouble, both sides show themselves
willing to meet, willing to consult, and anxious each to treat the other
reasonably and fairly, each to look at the other's side of the case, and
to do the other justice. If only this course could be generally fol-
lowed, the chance of industrial disaster would be minimized.
Now, my friends, I want to read you an extract from a letter I
have just received from a Catholic priest whom I know well and
whom I know to be as stanch a friend of the laboring man as there
is to be found in this country. Now and then—not too often—it is
a good thing for all of us to hear what is not perhaps altogether
palatable, provided only that the person who tells the truth is our
genuine friend, knows what he is talking about (even though he
may not see all sides of the case), and tells us what he has to say,
not with a desire to hurt our feelings, but with the transparent pur-
pose to do us good. With this foreword, here is a part of the letter:
“I would humbly recommend that you lend your entire weight to
the cause which the Catholic Total Abstinence Union of America
represents, and especially so in its relation to the working classes of
this country, for whom it is doing so much good. You know that the
temperance movement is a potent auxiliary to the institutions of our
country in building up a better manhood and a truer Christianity
among our citizens. It played a very important part in the two coal
strikes of 1900 and 1902, respectively, by keeping the men sober, and
thus removing the danger of riotous and unbecoming conduct. There
is one discouraging feature connected with the upward tendency of
the wage scale among the workmen of this country.
“The higher the wages, the more money they spend in saloons. The
shorter the hours, the more they are inclined to absent themselves
from home. An apparent disregard for family ties is growing among
the poorer classes* which will eventually lead to a disregard for the
*There are symptoms of a similar disregard among the rich.-A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 659
blessings our country affords them. Hence, with an increase of
wages a corresponding movement for better manhood, nobler citizen-
ship, and truer Christianity should be set on foot. The dignity of
labor should be maintained, which can be done only through the love
that a man should have for his work, and through the intelligence
which he puts into it. A steady hand and sober mind are necessary
for this. Hence, the necessity of the temperance cause and of the
efforts which organized abstainers are putting into the movement.”
Now, in what is here written this priest does not mean that the
tendency is to grow worse; but he means that with shorter hours
and increased wages there is a tendency to go wrong, which must be
Offset by movements such as this great temperance movement and
similar efforts for social and civic betterment, or else the increase in
leisure and money will prove a curse instead of a blessing. I strive
never to tell any one what I do not thoroughly believe, and I shall
not say to you that to be honest, and temperate, and hardworking, and
thrifty will always bring success.
The hand of the Lord is sometimes heavy upon the just as well
as upon the unjust, and in the life of labor and effort which we must
lead on this earth it is not always possible either by work, by wisdom,
or by upright behavior to ward off disaster. But it is most em-
phatically true that the chance for leading a happy and prosperous
life is immensely improved if enly the man is decent, sober, indus-
trious, and exercises foresight and judgment. Let him remember above
all that the performance of duty is the first essential to right living,
and that a good type of average family life is, the corner-stone of
national happiness and greatness. No man can be a good citizen, can
deserve the respect of his fellows, unless first of all he is a good
man in his own family, unless he does his duty faithfully by his
wife and children.
I strongly believe in trades unions wisely and justly handled, in
which the rightful purpose to benefit those connected with them is
not accompanied by a desire to do injustice or wrong to others. I
believe in the duty of capitalist and wage-workers to try to seek one
another out, to understand each other's point of view, and to en-
deavor to show broad and kindly human sympathy one with the
other.
I believe in the work of these great temperance organizations, of
all kindred movements like the Young Men's and Young Women's
Christian Associations; in short, in every movement which strives to
help a man by teaching him how to help himself. But most of all I
believe in the efficacy of the man himself striving continually to in-
crease his own self-respect by the way in which he does his duty to
himself and to his neighbor.
66O Messages and Speeches
AT ELMIRA, N. Y., AUGUST II, 1905.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is a very great pleasure to be again in your beautiful city and
to have traveled as I have been traveling to-day through this won-
derful fertile country of southern New York, my own State. In
greeting all of you, I want to say a word of special greeting to the
bodies of Firemen's Associations that have met here within the last
day or two. In our modern industrial life things are sometimes made
so easy that the harder qualities almost tend to atrophy. Therefore
it is a fine thing to see men who have taken up a profession which calls
for the exercise of very ounce of courage and coolness and prowess
a man can have. They are good qualities to develop in a nation and
I am mighty glad to see any of our people who develop them.
There are certain classes of our people, such as firemen, most of
them employed on railroads, and the men in the light-houses and life-
saving services, who, by the very fact of their profession, are called
upon to exercise those qualities of which this nation would have need
should it ever again be called to war. I earnestly hope it never will be
called again, and I will make every effort to see that peace obtains, but
One first-class way to keep peace is to make it evident that you are not
afraid to fight.
I have a great contempt for the brawler, and not merely contempt
but the most active dislike for the man who bullies whomsoever is
weaker, who wrongs the less fortunate. I feel that we should have the
same kind of international morality as of individual, we must not brawl,
but we must let other nations see that we are strong enough to hold
OL11 OW11.
[The Elmira Gazette, Elmira, N. Y., Aug. 12, 1905.]
AT HORNELLSVILLE, N. Y., AUGUST II, 1905.
My friends:
It is a great pleasure to me to be back here again. I have been
more than once to your city and I know this region of the country well.
I always am glad to be traveling through it and now to have the chance
of greeting you while I am President. In passing through Pennsyl-
vania and New York to-day and realizing the happiness and prosperity
of our people, I have felt so much that we ought all of us to realize
that there is one portion of our country now which has been overtaken
by a great disaster.
The city of New Orleans is suffering in its contest with yellow
fever and no one who has not been through an epidemic of that kind
can appreciate the fall horror that it brings. The national govern-
ment is now doing whatever it can do to help New Orleans. As yet
Theodore Roosevelt * 661
that sympathy is limited simply to the action of the medical branch.
We stand ready to help that great city at any time and I know that the
sympathy of every other part of the country goes out to the people
of New Orleans, and all Louisiana as they battle valiantly against the
foe that has come upon them.
[The Elmira Gazette. Elmira, N. Y., Aug. 12, 1905.]
AT CHAUTAUQUA, N. Y., AUGUST II, 1905.
To-day I wish to speak to you on one feature of our national foreign
policy and One feature of our national domestic policy.
The Monroe Doctrine is not a part of international law. But it is the
fundamental feature of our entire foreign policy, so far as the western
hemisphere is concerned, and it has more and more been meeting
with recognition abroad. The reason why it is meeting with this
recognition is because we have not allowed it to become fossilized,
but have adapted our construction of it to meet the growing, changing
needs of this hemisphere. Fossilization, of course, means death,
whether to an individual, a government, or a doctrine.
It is out of the question to claim a right and yet shirk the responsibil-
ity for exercising that right. When we announce a policy such as
the Monroe Doctrine we thereby commit ourselves to accepting the
consequences of the policy, and these consequences from time to time
alter. *
Let us look for a moment at what the Monroe Doctrine really is..
It forbids the territorial encroachment of non-American powers on
American soil. Its purpose is partly to secure this Nation against
seeing great military powers obtain new footholds in the Western
Hemisphere, and partly to secure to our fellow republics south of us
the chance to develop along their own lines without being oppressed
or conquered by non-American powers.
As we have grown more and more powerful, our advocacy of this
doctrine has been received with more and more respect; but what has
tended most to give the doctrine standing among the nations is our
growing willingness to show that we not only mean what we say and
are prepared to back it up, but that we mean to recognize our obliga-
tions to foreign peoples no less than to insist upon our Own rights.
We cannot permanently adhere to the Monroe Doctrine unless we
succeed in making it evident in the first place that we do not intend to
treat it in any shape or way as an excuse for aggrandizement on our
part at the expense of the republics to the south of us; second, that
we do not intend to permit it to be used by any of these republics as
a shield to protect that republic from the consequences of its own
misdeeds against foreign nations; third, that inasmuch as by this
doctrine we prevent other nations from interfering on this side of the
662 Messages and Speeches
water, we shall ourselves in good faith try to help those of our sister
republics which need such help upward toward peace and order.
As regards the first point, we must recognize the fact that in Some
South American countries there has been much suspicion lest we should
interpret the Monroe Doctrine in some way inimical to their interests.
Now let it be understood once for all that no just and orderly govern-
ment on this continent has anything to fear from us. There are certain
of the republics south of us which have already reached such a point
of stability, order, and prosperity that they are themselves, although
as yet hardly consciously, among the guarantors of this doctrine.
No stable and growing American republic wishes to see some great
non-American military power acquire territory in its neighborhood.
It is the interest of all of us on this continent that no such event should
occur, and in addition to our own republic there are now already
republics in the regions south of us which have reached a point of
prosperity and power that enables them to be considerable factors in
maintaining this doctrine which is so much to the advantage of all of
us. It must be understood that under no circumstances will the
United States use the Monroe Doctrine as a cloak for territorial aggres-
sion. Should any of our neighbors, no matter how turbulent, how
disregardful of our right, finally get into such a position that the utmost
limits of our forbearance are reached, all the people south of us may
rest assured that no action will ever be taken save what is absolutely
demanded by our self-respect; that this action will not take the form
of territorial aggrandizement on our part, and that it will only be taken
at all with the most extreme reluctance, and not without having ex-
hausted every effort to avert it.
As to the second point, if a republic to the south of us commits a
tort against a foreign nation, such, for instance, as wrongful action
against the persons of citizens of that nation, then the Monroe Doctrine
does not force us to interfere to prevent punishment of the tort, save
to see that the punishment does not directly or indirectly assume the
form of territorial occupation of the offending country. The case is
more difficult when the trouble comes from the failure to meet contrac-
tual obligations.
Our own government has always refused to enforce such contrac-
tual obligation on behalf of its citizens by the appeal to arms. It is
much to be wished that all foreign governments would take the same
view. But at present this country would certainly not be willing to
go to war to prevent a foreign government from collecting a just debt
or to back up some one of our sister republics in a refusal to pay just
debts; and the alternative may in any case prove to be that we shall
ourselves undertake to bring about some arrangement by which so
much as is possible of the just obligations shall be paid. Personally I
Theodore Roosevelt 663
should always prefer to see this country step in and put through such
an arrangement rather than 1et any foreign country undertake it.
I do not want to see any foreign power take possession permanently
or temporarily of the customs houses of an American republic in order
to enforce its obligations, and the alternative may at any time be that
we shall be forced to do so ourselves.
Finally, and what is in my view really the most important thing of
all, it is our duty, as far as we are able, to try to help upward our
weaker brothers. Just as there has been a gradual growth of the
ethical element in the relations of one individual to another, so that
with all the faults of our Christian civilization it yet remains true that
we are, no matter how slowly, more and more coming to recognize
the duty of bearing one another's burdens, similarly I believe that the
ethical element is by degrees entering into the dealings of one nation
with another.
Under strain of emotions caused by sudden disaster, this feeling is
very evident. A famine or a plague in one country brings much
sympathy and some assistance from other countries. Moreover, we
are now beginning to recognize that weaker peoples have a claim upon
us, even when the appeal is made not to our emotions by some sudden
calamity, but to our consciences by a long continuing condition of
affairs.
I do not mean to say that nations have more than begun to ap-
proach the proper relationship one to another, and I fully recognize
the folly of proceeding upon the assumption that this ideal condition
can now be realized in full—for in order to proceed upon such an as-
sumption we would first require some method of forcing recalcitrant
nations to do their duty, as well as of seeing that they are protected in
their rights.
In the interest of justice, it is as necessary to exercise the police
power as to show charity and helpful generosity. But something can
even now be done toward the end in view. That something, for in-
stance, this nation has already done as regards Cuba and is now trying
to do as regards Santo Domingo. There are few things in our history
in which we should take more genuine pride than the way in which
we liberated Cuba, and then, instead of instantly abandoning it to
chaos, stayed in direction of the affairs of the island until we had put
it on the right path, and finally gave it freedom and helped it as it
started on the life of an independent republic.
Santo Domingo has now made an appeal to us to help it in turn,
and not only every principle of wisdom, but every generous instinct
within us bids us respond to the appeal. The conditions in Santo
Domingo have for a number of years grown from bad to worse until
recently all society was on the verge of dissolution. Fortunately, just
664 Messages and Speeches
at this moment a wise ruler sprang up in Santo Domingo, who, with
his colleagues, saw the dangers threatening their beloved country, and
appealed to the friendship of their great and powerful neighbor to
help them.
The immediate threat came to them in the shape of foreign inter-
vention. The previous rulers of Santo Domingo had recklessly in-
curred debts, and owing to her internal disorders she had ceased to
be able to provide means of paying the debts. The patience of her
foreign creditors had become exhausted, and at least one foreign
nation was on the point of intervention, and was only prevented from
intervening by the unofficial assurance of this government that it would
itself strive to help Santo Domingo in her hour of need. Of the debts
incurred some were just, while some were not of a character which
really renders it obligatory on or proper for Santo Domingo to pay
them in full. But she could not pay any of them at all unless some
stability was assured.
Accordingly the executive department of our government nego-
tiated a treaty under which we are to try to help the Dominican people
to straighten out their finances. This treaty is pending before the
Senate, whose consent to it is necessary. In the meantime, we have
made a temporary arrangement which will last until the Senate has
had time to take action upon the treaty. Under this arrangement we
see to the honest administration of the custom-houses, collecting the
revenues, turning over 45 per cent. to the government for running
expenses, and putting the other 55 per cent. into a safe deposit for
equitable division among the various creditors, whether European or
American, accordingly as, after investigation, their claims seem just.
The custom-houses offer well-nigh the only sources of revenue in
Santo Domingo, and the different revolutions usually have as their
real aim the obtaining possession of these custom-houses. The mere
fact that we are protecting the custom-houses and collecting the rev-
enue with efficiency and honesty has completely discouraged all revo-
lutionary movement, while it has already produced such an increase
in the revenues that the government is actually getting more from
the 45 per cent. that we turn over to it than it got formerly when it
took the entire revenue.
This is enabling the poor, harassed people of Santo Domingo once
more to turn their attention to industry and to be free from the curse
of interminable revolutionary disturbance.* It offers to all bona fide
*The trouble with Santo Domingo is a trouble of race, of color. The negro, left to
himself, lapses. He is like a vine, and his civilization needs the presence and support of the
white man as a trellis whereon to clamber. Take away the white man and the negro falls
to the ground. This has been true wherever and whenever the experiment of the negro by
himself has been tried. Of course there are abstractionists and purblind theorists who can see
no difference between races and hold that what is good for the white man must be good for
all men, black, yellow and red. These will find fault with and contradict these statements.
Theodore Roosevelt 665
creditors, American and European, the only really good chance to
obtain that to which they are justly entitled, while it in return gives
to Santo Domingo the only opportunity of defense against claims
which it ought not to pay—for now if it meets the views of the Senate
we shall ourselves thoroughly examine all these claims, whether Amer-
ican or foreign, and see that none that are improper are paid. Indeed,
the only effective opposition to the treaty will probably come from
dishonest creditors, foreign and American, and from the professional
revolutionists of the island itself. We have already good reason to
believe that some of the creditors, who do not dare expose their claims
to honest scrutiny, are endeavoring to stir up sedition in the island,
and are also endeavoring to stir up opposition to the treaty both in
Santo Domingo and here, trusting that in one place or the other it
may be possible to secure either the rejection of the treaty or else its
amendment in such fashion as to be tantamount to rejection.
Under the course taken, stability and order and all the benefits of
peace are at last coming to Santo Domingo, all danger of foreign in-
tervention has ceased, and there is at last a prospect that all creditors
will get justice, no more and no less.
If the arrangement is terminated chaos will follow, and if chaos fol-
lows, sooner or later this government may be involved in serious diffi-
culties with foreign governments over the island, or else may be forced
itself to intervene in the island in some unpleasant fashion. Under
the present arrangement the independence of the island is scrupulously
respected, the danger of violation of the Monroe Doctrine by the in-
tervention of foreign powers vanishes, and the interference of our gov-
ernment is minimized, so that we only act in conjunction with the
Santo Domingo authorities to secure the proper administration of
the customs, and therefore to secure the payment of just debts and
to secure the Santo Dominican government against demands for un-
just debts. The present method prevents there being any need of our
establishing any kind of protectorate Over the island and gives the
people of Santo Domingo the same chance to move onward and
upward which we have already given to the people of Cuba. It will
be doubly to our discredit as a nation if we fail to take advantage of this
chance, for it will be of damage to ourselves, and, above all, it will
be of incalculable damage to Santo Domingo. Every consideration of
wise policy, and, above all, every consideration of large generosity,
bids us meet the request of Santo Domingo as we are now trying to
meet it.
They may even complain of me as narrow. Let me say to these good people that they should
carry their complaints higher; it was not I who provided the differences between white and
black. Neither, for that matter, are they the first who have regretted—at least by an inference
to be drawn from their attitudes—that the Creator, in the beginning, didn’t take advice.
—A. H. L.
666 Messages and Speeches
So much for one feature of our foreign policy. Now for one feature
of our domestic policy. One of the main features of our national gov-
ernmental policy should be the effort to secure adequate and effective
supervisory and regulatory control over all great corporations doing
an interstate business. Much of the legislation aimed to prevent the
evils connected with the enormous development of these great corpora-
tions has been ineffective, partly because it aimed at doing too much
and partly because it did not confer on the government a really efficient
method of holding any guilty corporation to account. The effort to
prevent all restraint of competition, whether harmful or beneficial, has
been ill judged; what is needed is not so much the effort to prevent
combination as a vigilant and effective control of the combinations
formed, so as to secure just and equitable dealing on their part alike
toward the public generally, toward their smaller competitors, and
toward the wage-workers in their employ.
Under the present laws we have in the last four years accomplished
much that is of substantial value; but the difficulties in the way have
been so great as to prove that further legislation is advisable. Many
corporations show themselves honorably desirous to obey the law, but
unfortunately some corporations, and very wealthy ones at that, ex-
haust every effort which can be suggested by the highest ability, or
secured by the most lavish expenditure of money, to defeat the pur-
poses of the laws on the statute books.
Not only the men in control of these corporations, but the business
world generally, ought to realize that such conduct is in every way
perilous, and constitutes a menace to the nation generally, and espe-
cially to the people of great property.
I earnestly believe that this is true of only a relatively small por-
tion of the very rich men engaged in handling the largest corporations
in the country; but the attitude of these comparatively few men does
undoubtedly harm the country, and above all harm the men of large
means by the just, but sometimes misguided, popular indignation to
which it gives rise. The consolidation in the form of what are popu-
larly called trusts of corporate interests of immense value has tended
to produce unfair restraints of trade of an oppressive character, and
these unfair restraints tend to create great artificial monopolies. The
violations of the law known as the anti-trust law, which was meant to
meet the conditions thus arising, have more and more become confined
to the larger combinations, the very ones against whose policy of
monopoly and oppression the policy of the law was chiefly directed.
Many of these combinations, by secret methods and by protracted liti-
gation, are still unwisely seeking to avoid the consequences of their
illegal action. The government has very properly exercised moderation
in attempting to enforce the criminal provisions of the statute, but it
Theodore Roosevelt 667
has become our conviction that in some cases, such as that of at least
certain of the beef packers recently indicted in Chicago, it is impossible
longer to show leniency. Moreover, if the existing law proves to be
inadequate, so that under established rules of evidence clear violations
may not be readily proved, defiance of the law must inevitably lead to
further legislation. This legislation may be more drastic than I would
prefer. If so, it must be distinctly understood that it will be because
of the stubborn determination of some of the great combinations in
striving to prevent the enforcement of the law as it stands, by every
device, legal and illegal.
Very many of these men seem to think that the alternative is simply
between submitting to the mild kind of governmental control we advo-
cate and the absolute freedom to do whatever they think best. They
are generally in error. Either they will have to submit to reasonable
supervision and regulation by the national authorities, or else they will
ultimately have to submit to governmental action of a far more drastic
type. Personally, I think our people would be most unwise if they let
any exasperation due to the acts of certain great corporations drive
them into drastic action, and I should oppose such action. But the
great corporations are themselves to blame if by their opposition to
what is legal and just they foster the popular feeling which tells for
such drastic action.
Some great corporations resort to every technical expedient to
render enforcement of the law impossible, and their obstructive tactics
and refusal to acquiesce in the policy of law have taxed to the utmost
the machinery of the Department of Justice. In my judgment Con-
gress may well inquire whether it should not seek other means for
carrying into effect the law. I believe that all corporations engaged
in interstate commerce should be under the supervision of the national
government. I do not believe in taking steps hastily or rashly, and
it may be that all that is necessary in the immediate future is to pass
an interstate commerce bill conferring upon some branch of the execu-
tive government the power of effective action to remedy the abuses in
connection with railway transportation. But in the end, and in my
judgment at a time not very far off, we shall have to, or at least we
shall find that we ought to, take further action as regards all corpora-
tions doing interstate business. The enormous increase in interstate
trade, resulting from the industrial devolopment of the last quarter of
a century, makes it proper that the Federal government should, so
far as may be necessary to carry into effect its national policy, assume
a degree of administrative control of these great corporations.
It may well be that we shall find that the only effective way of exer-
cising this supervision is to require all corporations engaged in inter-
state commerce to produce proof satisfactory, say, to the Department
668 Messages and Speeches
of Commerce, that they are not parties to any contract or combination
or engaged in any monopoly in interstate trade in violation of the anti-
trust law, and that their conduct on certain other specified points is
proper; and, moreover, that these corporations shall agree, with a
penalty of forfeiture of their right to engage in such commerce, to
furnish any evidence of any kind as to their trade between the States
whenever so required by the Department of Commerce.
It is the almost universal policy of the several States, provided by
statute, that foreign corporations may lawfully conduct business within
their boundaries only when they produce certificates that they have
complied with the requirements of their respective States; in other
words, that corporations shall not enjoy the privileges and immunities
afforded by the State governments without first complying with the
policy of their laws. Now the benefits which corporations engaged in
interstate trade enjoy under the United States government are in-
calculable; and in respect of such trade the jurisdiction of the Federal
government is supreme when it chooses to exercise it.
When, as is now the case, many of the great corporations consistently
strain the last resources of legal technicality to avoid obedience to a
law for the reasonable regulation of their business, the only way ef-
fectively to meet this attitude on their part is to give to the executive
department of the government a more direct, and, therefore, more
efficient supervision and control of their management.
In speaking against the abuses committed by certain very wealthy
corporations or individuals, and of the necessity of seeking so far as
it can safely be done to remedy these abuses, there is always danger
lest what is said may be misinterpreted as an attack upon men of means
generally. Now it cannot too often be repeated in a republic like ours
that the only way by which it is possible permanently to benefit the
condition of the less able and less fortunate is so to shape our policy
that all industrious and efficient people who act decently may be bene-
fited; and this means, of course, that the benefit will come even more to
the more able and more fortunate. If, under such circumstances, the
less fortunate man is moved by envy of his more fortunate brother to
strike at the conditions under which they have both, though unequally,
prospered, he may rest assured that while the result may be damaging
to the other man, it will be even more damaging to himself. Of course,
I am now speaking of prosperity that comes under normal and proper
conditions.
In Our industrial and social system the interests of all men are so
closely intertwined that in the immense majority of cases the straight-
dealing man who by ingenuity and industry benefits himself must also
benefit others. The man of great productive capacity who gets rich
through guiding the labor of hundreds of thousands of other men does
Theodore Roosevelt 669
2
so, as a rule, by enabling their labor to produce more than it would
without his guidance, and both he and they share in the benefit, so that
even if the share be unequal it must never be forgotten that they, too,
are really benefited by his success.
A vital factor in the success of any enterprise is the guiding intelli-
gence of the man at the top, and there is need in the interest of all of
us to encourage rather than to discourage the activity of the exceptional
men who guide average men so that their labor may result in increased
production of the kind which is demanded at the time. Normally we
help the wage-worker, we help the man of small means, by making
conditions such that the man of exceptional business ability receives an
exceptional reward for the ability.
But while insisting with all emphasis upon this, it is also true that
experience has shown that when there is no governmental restraint or
supervision, some of the exceptional men use their energies not in ways
that are for the common good, but in ways which tell against this
common good, and by So doing they not only wrong Smaller and less
able men—whether wage-workers or small producers and traders—
but force other men of exceptional abilities themselves to do what is
wrong under penalty of falling behind in the keen race for success.
There is need of legislation to strive to meet such abuses. At one time or
in one place this legislation may take the form of factory laws and em-
ployers' liability laws. Under other conditions it may take the form of
dealing with the franchises which derive their value from the grant
of the representatives of the people. It may be aimed at the mani-
fold abuses, far-reaching in their effects, which spring from over-capi-
talization. Or it may be necessary to meet such conditions as those
with which I am now dealing and to strive to procure proper super-
vision and regulation by the national government of all great corpora-
tions engaged in interstate commerce or doing an interstate business.
There are good people who are afraid of each type of legislation;
and much the same kind of argument that is now advanced against
the effort to regulate big corporations has been again and again ad-
vanced against the effort to secure proper employers' liability laws
or proper factory laws with reference to women and children; much
the same kind of argument was advanced but five years ago against
the franchise-tax law enacted in this State while I was governor.
Of course, there is always the danger of abuse if legislation of this
type is approached in a hysterical or sentimental spirit; or, above all,
if it is approached in a spirit of envy and hatred toward men of wealth.*
*The great danger to this country lies in the ignorance of the rich. One of the most
ignorant men I ever met, and I met him at President Roosevelt’s table, was one of the richest.
I heard him talk on the future of the nation, and the perils—as he saw them—that confronted
it. A man just down from the moon would have known more about them. I could account
for his darkened condition only on the assumption—and I still think it a correct one—that he
had been perched for years upon the heaped-up mountain of his millions, miles above what
670 Messages and Speeches
We must not try to go too fast, under penalty of finding that we
may be going in the wrong direction; and, in any event, we ought
always to proceed by evolution and not by revolution. The laws must
be conceived and executed in a spirit of sanity and justice, and with
exactly as much regard for the rights of the big man as for the rights
of the little man—treating big man and little man exactly alike.
Our ideal must be the effort to combine all proper freedom for indi-
vidual effort, with some guarantee that the effort is not exercised in
contravention of the eternal and immutable principles of justice.
TO THE STUDENTS OF RANDOLPH-MACON COLLEGE, AT
ASHLAND, VA., OCT. I8, 1905.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is a pleasure to have the chance of greeting you and to be greeted
by you. I want to say a word here in a place identified with the names
of two of America's greatest statesmen—Patrick Henry and Henry
Clay—in the seat of a college which in the Randolph-Macon system
commemorates the names of two others of that wonderful group of.
statesmen which Virginia gave to the nation. I wish here to say a
word of recognition to those who are doing this great educational
work.
In a republic like ours, it is a mere truism to say that the success
of the republic depends upon the trained intelligence of the citizens.
The republic cannot succeed if we do not take pains in educating the
masters of the republic—that is, the people. Self-government is not
too easy a thing. It is easy enough to live under a despotism. You
do not have to do anything; just let the other man govern. But it is
not easy to live in a republic where each man has to do his part in
the governing, and where he cannot do it if there is not a sound basis
of moral and intellectual training, and that is the basis that such an
institution of learning as that here and its kindred institutions give.
AT RICHMOND, VA., OCT. 18, 1905.
My friends and fellow citizens:
I trust I need hardly say how great is my pleasure at speaking in
this historic capital of your historic State; the State than which no
other has contributed a larger proportion to the leadership of the
nation; for on the honor roll of those American worthies whose great-
ness is not only for the age but for all time, not only for one nation but
might be called informational timber-line, and had probably heard less and seen less of what
was really going forward on this American earth than ten in every eleven on the rolls of our
citizenship.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 671
for all the world, on this honor roll Virginia's name stands above all
others. And in greeting all of you, I know that no one will grudge
my saying a special word of acknowledgment to the veterans of the
Civil War. A man would indeed be but a poor American who could
without a thrill witness the way in which, in city after city in the
North as in the South, on every public occasion, the men who wore the
blue and the men who wore the gray now march and stand shoulder
to shoulder, giving tangible proof that we are all now in fact as well
as in name a reunited people, a people infinitely richer because of the
priceless memories left to all Americans by you men who fought in
the great war. Last Memorial Day I spoke in Brooklyn, at the un-
veiling of the statue of a Northern general, under the auspices of
the Grand Army of the Republic, and that great audience cheered
every allusion to the valor and self-devotion of the men who followed
Lee as heartily as they cheered every allusion to the valor and self-
devotion of the men who followed Grant. The wounds left by the
great Civil War have long healed, but its memories remain. Think of
it, Oh, my countrymen, think of the good fortune that is ours! That
whereas every other war of modern times has left feelings of rancor
and bitterness to keep asunder the combatants, our great war has left
to the sons and daughters of the men who fought, on whichever side
they fought, the same right to feel the keenest pride in the great deeds
alike of the men who fought on one side and of the men who fought
on the other. The proud self-sacrifice, the resolute and daring courage,
the high and steadfast devotion to the right as each man saw it,
whether Northerner or Southerner, these qualities render all Americans
forever the debtors of those who in the dark days from '61 to ’65
proved their truth by their endeavor. Here around Richmond, here
in your own State, there lies battlefield after battlefield, rendered for-
ever memorable by the men who counted death as but a little thing
when weighed in the balance against doing their duty as it was given
them to see it. These men have left us of the younger generation
not merely the memory of what they did in war, but of what they
did in peace. Foreign observers predicted that when such a great
war closed it would be impossible for the hundreds of thousands of
combatants to return to the paths of peace. They predicted ceaseless
disorder, wild turbulence, the alternation of anarchy and despotism.
But the good sense and self-restraint of the average American citizen
falsified these prophecies. The great armies disbanded and the private
in the ranks, like the officer who had commanded him, went back to
take up the threads of his life where he had dropped them when the
call to arms came. It was a wonderful, a marvelous thing, in a country
consecrated to peace with but an infinitesimal regular army, to develop
so quickly the huge hosts which fronted one another between the James
672 Messages and Speeches
and the Potomac and along the Mississippi and its tributaries. But
it was an even more wonderful, an even more marvelous thing, how
these great hosts, once their work done, resolved themselves into the
general fabric of the nation.
Great though the meed of praise is which is due the South for the
soldierly valor her sons displayed during the four years of war, I
think that even greater praise is due to her for what her people have
accomplished in the forty years of peace which followed. For forty
years the South has made not merely a courageous, but at times a
desperate struggle, as she has striven for moral and material well-
being. Her success has been extraordinary, and all citizens of our
common country should feel joy and pride in it; for any great deed
done, or any fine qualities shown by one group of Americans, of neces-
sity reflects credit upon all Americans. Only a heroic people could
have battled successfully against the conditions with which the people
of the South found themselves face to face at the end of the Civil
War. There had been utter déstruction and disaster, and wholly new
business and social problems had to be faced with the scantiest means.
The economic and political fabric had to be readjusted in the midst
of dire want, of grinding poverty. The future of the broken, war-
swept South seemed beyond hope, and if her sons and daughters had
been of weaker fiber there would in very truth have been no hope.
But the men and the sons of the men who had faced with unfaltering
front every alternation of good and evil fortune from Manassas to
Appomattox, and the women, their wives and mothers, whose courage
and endurance had reached an even higher heroic level—these men
and these women set themselves undauntedly to the great task before
them. For twenty years the struggle was hard and at times, doubtful.
Then the splendid qualities of your manhood and womanhood told,
as they were bound to tell, and the wealth of your extraordinary
natural resources began to be shown. Now the teeming riches of mine
and field and factory attest the prosperity of those who are all the
stronger because of the trials and struggles through which this pros-
perity has come. You stand loyally to your traditions and memories;
you also stand loyally for our great common country of to-day and
for our common flag, which symbolizes all that is brightest and most
hopeful for the future of mankind; you face the new age in the spirit
of the age. Alike in your material and in your spiritual and intellectual
development you stand abreast of the foremost in the world’s progress.
And now, my fellow-citizens, my fellow-Americans, exactly as all
of us, whether we live in the East or the West, in the North or the
South, have the right merely as Americans to feel pride in every
great deed done by any American in the past, and exactly as we are
knit together by this common heritage of memories, so we are knit to-
Theodore Roosevelt 673
gether by the bond of our common duties in the present, our com-
mon interests in the future. Many and great problems lie before
us. If we treat the mighty memories of the past merely as excuses
for sitting lazily down in the present, or for standing aside from the
rough work of the world, then these memories will prove a curse in-
stead of a blessing. But if we treat them as I believe we shall treat
them, not as excuses for inaction, but as incentives to make us show
that we are worthy of our fathers and of our fathers' fathers, then
in truth the deeds of the past will not have been wasted, for they
shall bring forth fruit a hundred fold in the present generation. We
of this nation, we the citizens of this mighty and wonderful Republic,
stretching across a continent between the two greatest oceans, enjoy
extraordinary privileges, and as our opportunity is great, therefore
our responsibility is great. We have duties to perform both abroad
and at home, and we can not shirk either set of duties and fully retain
our self-respect.
In foreign affairs we must make up our minds that whether we wish
it or not, we are a great people and must play a great part in the world.
It is not open to us to choose whether we will play that great part or
not. We have to play it; all we can decide is whether we shall play
it well or ill. And I have too much confidence in my countrymen to
doubt what the decision will be. Our mission in the world should be
one of peace, but not the peace of cravens, the peace granted con-
temptuously to those who purchase it by surrendering the right. No!
Our voice must be effective for peace because it is raised for righteous-
ness first and for peace only as the handmaiden of righteousness. We
must be scrupulous in respecting the rights of the weak, and no less
careful to make it evident that we do not act through fear of the
strong. We must be scrupulous in doing justice to others and scrupu-
lous in exacting justice for ourselves. We must beware equally of
that sinister and cynical teaching which would persuade us to disregard
ethical standards in international relations, and of the no less hurtful
folly which would stop the whole work of civilization by a well-meant
but silly persistency in trying to apply to peoples unfitted for them
those theories of government and of national action which are only
suited for the most advanced races. In particular we must remember
that in undertaking to build the Panama Canal we have necessarily
undertaken to police the seas at either end of it; and this means that
we have a peculiar interest in the perservation of order in the coasts
and islands of the Caribbean. I firmly believe that by a little wise
and generous aid we can help even the most backward of the peoples
in these coasts and islands forward along the path of orderly liberty
so that they can stand alone. If we decline to give them such help the
674 Messages and Speeches
result will be bad both for them and for us; and will in the end in all
probability cause us to face humiliation or bloodshed.
The problems that face us abroad are important, but the problems
that face us at home are even more important. The extraordinary
growth of industrialism during the last half century brings every
civilized people face to face with the gravest social and economic ques-
tions. This is an age of combination among capitalists and combina-
tion among wage-workers. It is idle to try to prevent such combina-
tions. Our efforts should be to see that they work for the good and
not for the harm of the body politic. New devices of law are neces-
sary from time to time in order to meet the changed and changing
conditions. But after all we will do well to remember that although
the problems to be solved change from generation to generation, the
spirit in which their solution must be attempted remains forever the
same. It is in peace as it is in war. Tactics change and weapons
change. The Continental troops in their blue and buff, who fought
under Washington and Greene and Wayne, differed entirely in arms
and in training from those who in blue or gray faced one another in
the armies of Grant and of Lee, of Sherman and of Johnston. And
now the sons of these same Union and Confederate veterans who serve
in our gallant little army of today, wear a different uniform, carry a
different weapon, and practice different tactics. But the soul of the
soldier has remained the same throughout, and the qualities which
drove forward to victory or to death the men of '76 and the men of
'61, are the very qualities which the men of today must keep unchanged
if in the hour of need the honor of the nation is to be kept untarnished.
So it is in civil life. This Government was formed with as its basic
idea the principle of treating each man on his worth as a man, of paying
no heed to whether he was rich or poor, no heed to his creed or his
social standing, but only to the way in which he performed his duty
to himself, to his neighbor, to the state. From this principle we can
not afford to vary by so much as a hand's breadth. Many republics
have risen in the past, and some of them flourished long, but sooner
or later they fell; and the cause most potent in bringing about their
fall was in almost all cases the fact that they grew to be governments in
the interests of a class instead of governments in the interest of all.
It made no difference as to which class it was that thus wrested to its
own advantage the governmental machinery. It was ultimately as
fatal to the cause of freedom whether it was the rich who oppressed
the poor or the poor who plundered the rich. The crime of brutal dis-
regard of the rights of others is as much a crime when it manifests
itself in the shape of greed and brutal arrogance on the one side, as
when it manifests itself in the shape of envy and lawless violence on
the other. Our aim must be to deal justice to each man; no more and
Theodore Roosevelt 675
no less. This purpose must find its expression and support not merely
in our collective action through the agencies of the Government, but
in our social attitude. Rich man and poor man must alike feel that
on the one hand they are protected by law and that on the other hand
they are responsible to the law; for each is entitled to be fairly dealt
with by his neighbor and by the State; and if we as citizens of this
nation are true to ourselves and to the traditions of our forefathers
such fair measure of justice shall always be dealt to each man; so that
as far as we can bring it about each shall receive his dues, each shall
be given the chance to show the stuff there is in him, shall be secured
against wrong, and in turn prevented from wronging others. More
than this no man is entitled to, and less than this no man shall have.
IN CAPITOL SQUARE, RICHMOND, VA., OCT. 18, 1905.
Mr. Mayor, Governor, and you, my hosts:
One among the very many great Virginians at the time when this
nation was born—and I quote, gentlemen, Patrick Henry—said: “We
are no longer New Yorkers or New Englanders, Pennsylvanians or
Virginians; we are Americans,” and surely, Mr. Mayor, the man would
be put a poor American who was not touched and stirred to the depths
by the reception that I have met with today in this great historic city
of America. Coming today by the statues of Stonewall Jackson, in
the city of Lee, I felt what a privilege it is that I, as an American, have
in claiming that you yourselves have no more right of kinship in
Lee and Jackson than I have. I can claim to be a middling good
American because my ancestry was half Southern and half Northern ;
I was born in the East and I have lived a good while in the West—
so long, in fact, that I do not admit that any man can be a better
Westerner than I am.
There was an uncle of mine, now dead, my mother's brother, who
has always been among all the men I have ever met the man who, it
seemed to me, came nearest to typifying in the flesh that most beautiful
of all characters in fiction, Thackeray's Colonel Newcome—my uncle,
James Dunwoody Bulloch, an admiral in the Confederate navy.
In short, gentlemen, I claim to be neither Northerner nor Southerner,
neither Easterner nor Westerner, nothing but a good American, pure
and simple. \
Next only to a man's having worn the blue comes the fact of the
man's having worn the gray to entitle him to honor in my sight. Last
year I told Gen. Fitzhugh Lee that I wanted to add to my collection
of autograph letters of great Americans—Lincoln, Grant, Clay, Jef-
ferson and, Governor, your namesake, Andrew Jackson—that of Gen-
eral Lee, with his photograph. I got from Gen. Fitzhugh Lee a letter
2.
676 Messages and Speeches
of General Lee's and a photograph of him, handed to me after Gen.
Fitzhugh Lee's death. I was not able to thank my old and valued
friend, the father, but I put the son on my staff, and now I have the
grandson of General Grant and the grandnephew of General Lee and
the son of “Phil” Sheridan on my staff. I think it is a middling good
staff, too.
In my regiment, organized at the beginning of the Spanish-American
War, I think that there were more men whose fathers wore the gray
than there were men whose fathers wore the blue. The only rivalry
that ever entered their heads was rivalry as to which man could show
himself best entitled to the praise of having done all that in him lay
for our country and our flag.
AT FREDERICKSBURG, VA., OCT. 18, 1905.
My friends and fellow citizens:
It is indeed a great pleasure to me to be once more within your
mighty State, the mother of Presidents, the Old Dominion, with its
soil hallowed by so many memories of the mighty men it has produced,
of the mighty deeds it has seen enacted upon it. I know your people
well already. I know your history, of course, or I would not be a good
American. I wish to say to you with all my heart how glad I am to
have the chance of starting through your State to visit the States of
the South Atlantic and the Gulf. When I am through my present trip
I will have been in and spoken in every State in the Union during
my term as President.
There is one thing that has struck me more than anything else in my
journeys from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Canada line to
the Gulf, in meeting the different audiences, and that is that they are
fundamentally alike; that wherever you go in this country the average
American is a pretty decent fellow, and that all that is necessary in
order to make him get on well with the other average American is
that they should know one another. tº
AT RALEIGH, N. C., OCT. 19, 1905.
Fellow citizens, men and women of Raleigh:
I am glad here at the capital of North Carolina to have a chance to
greet so many of the sons and daughters of your great State. North
Carolina's part in our history has ever been high and honorable. It
was in North Carolina that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Inde-
pendence foreshadowed the course taken in a few short months by
the representatives of the thirteen colonies assembled in Philadelphia.
North Carolina can rightfully say that she pointed us the way which
Theodore Roosevelt 677
led to the formation of the new Nation. In the Revolution she did
many memorable deeds; and the battle of King's Mountain marked
the turning point of the Revolutionary war in the South. But I con-
gratulate you not only upon your past, but upon your present. I con-
gratulate you upon the great industrial activity shown in your Com-
monwealth, an industrial activity which, to mention but one thing, has
placed this State second only to one other in the number of its textile
factories. You are showing in practical fashion your realization of
the truth that there must be a foundation of material well-being in
order that any community may make real and rapid progress. And
I am happy to say that you are in addition showing in practical fashion
your understanding of the great truth that this material well-
being, though necessary as a foundation, can only be the foundation,
and that upon it must be raised the superstructure of a higher life,
if the Commonwealth is to stand as it should stand. More and more
you are giving care and attention to education; and education means
the promotion not only of industry, but of that good citizenship which
rests upon individual rights and upon the recognition by each indi-
vidual that he has duties as well as rights—in other words, of that
good citizenship which rests upon moral integrity and intellectual
freedom. The man must be decent in his home life, his private life,
of course; but this is not by itself enough. The man who fails to be
honest and brave both in his political franchise and in his private
business contributes to political and social anarchy. Self-government
is not an easy thing. Only those communities are fit for it in which
the average individual practices the virtue of self-command, of self-
restraint, of wise disinterestedness combined with wise self-interest;
where the individual possesses common sense, honesty and courage.
And now I want to say a word to you on a special subject in which
all the country is concerned, but in which North Carolina has a special
concern. The preservation of the forests is vital to the welfare of
every country. China and the Mediterranean countries offer examples
of the terrible effect of deforestation upon the physical geography, and
therefore ultimately upon the national well-being, of the nations. One
of the most obvious duties which our generation owes to the genera-
tions that are to come after us is to preserve the existing forests. The
prime difference between civilized and uncivilized peoples is that in
civilized peoples each generation works not only for its own well-
being, but for the well-being of the generations yet unborn, and if we
permit the natural resources of this land to be destroyed so that we
hand over to our children a heritage diminished in value we thereby
prove our unfitness to stand in the forefront of civilized peoples. One
of the greatest of these heritages is our forest wealth. It is the upper
altitudes of the forested mountains that are most valuable to the
678 Messages and Speeches
Nation as a whole, especially because of their effects upon the water
supply. Neither State nor Nation can afford to turn these mountains
over to the unrestrained greed of those who would exploit them at the
expense of the future. We can not afford to wait longer before as-
suming control, in the interest of the public, of these forests; for if we
do wait, the vested interests of private parties in them may become so
strongly intrenched that it may be a most serious as well as a most
expensive task to oust them. If the Eastern States are wise, then
from the Bay of Fundy to the Gulf we will see, within the next few
years, a policy set on foot similar to that so fortunately carried out
in the high Sierras of the West by the National Government. All
the higher Appalachians should be reserved, either by the States or by
the Nation. I much prefer that they should be put under National
control, but it is a mere truism to say that they will not be reserved
either by the States or by the Nation unless you people of the South
show a strong interest therein.
Such reserves would be a paying investment, not only in protection
to many interests, but in dollars and cents to the Government. The
importance to the Southern people of protecting the Southern mountain
forests is obvious. These forests are the best defense against the floods
which, in the recent past, have, during a single twelvemonth, destroyed
property officially valued at nearly twice what it would cost to buy
the Southern Appalachian Reserve. The maintenance of your South-
ern water powers is not less important than the prevention of floods,
because if they are injured your manufacturing interests will suffer
with them. The perpetuation of your forests, which have done so
much for the South, should be one of the first objects of your public
men. The two Senators from North Carolina have taken an honorable
part in this movement. But I do not think that the people of North
Carolina, or of any other Southern State, have quite grasped the im-
portance of this movement to the commercial development and pros-
perity of the South.
The position of honor in your parade today is held by the Confed-
erate veterans. They by their deeds reflect credit upon their descend-
ants and upon all Americans, both because they did their duty in war
and because they did their duty in peace. Now if the young men,
their sons, will not only prove that they possess the same power of
fealty to an ideal, but will also show the cfficiency in the ranks of in-
dustrial life that their fathers, the Confederate veterans, showed that
they possessed in the ranks of war, the industrial future of this great
and typically American Commonwealth is assured.
The extraordinary development of industrialism during the last half
century has been due to several causes, but above all to the revolution
Theodore Roosevelt 679
in the methods of transportation and communication; that is, to steam
and to electricity, to the railroad and the telegraph.
When this Government was founded commerce was carried on by
essentially the same instruments that had been in use not only among
civilized, but among barbarian, nations, ever since history dawned;
that is, by wheeled vehicles drawn by animals, by pack trains, and by
sailing ships and rowboats. On land this meant that commerce went
in slow, Cumbrous, and expensive fashion over highways open to all.
Normally these highways could not compete with water transportation,
if such was feasible between the connecting points.
All this has been changed by the development of the railroads. Save
on the ocean or on lakes so large as to be practically inland seas,
transport by water has wholly lost its old position of superiority over
transport by land, while instead of the old highways open to everyone,
there are private ways—railroads—which are owned by private corpora-
tions, and which are practically of unlimited, instead of limited, useful-
ness. The old laws and old customs which are adequate and proper to
meet the old conditions need radical readjustment in order to meet these
new conditions. The cardinal features in these changed conditions are,
first, the fact that the new highway, the railway, is, from the commercial
standpoint, of infinitely greater importance in our industrial life than
was the old highway, the wagon road; and, second, that this new high-
way, the railway, is in the hands of private owners, whereas the old
highway, the wagon road, was in the hands of the State. The manage-
ment of the new highway, the railroad, or rather of the intricate web
of railroad lines which cover the country, is a task infinitely more
difficult, more delicate, and more important than the primitively easy
task of acquiring or keeping in order the old highway; so that there
is properly no analogy whatever between the two cases. I do not be-
lieve in government ownership of anything which can with propriety
be left in private hands, and in particular I should most strenuously
object to government ownership of railroads. But I believe with equal
firmness that it is out of the question for the Government not to
exercise a supervisory and regulatory right over the railroads; for
it is vital to the well-being of the public that they should be managed
in a spirit of fairness and justice toward all the public. Actual expe-
rience has shown that it is not possible to leave the railroads uncon-
trolled. Such a system, or rather such a lack of system, is fertile in
abuses of every kind, and puts a premium upon unscrupulous and ruth-
less cunning in railroad management; for there are some big shippers
and some railroad managers who are always willing to take unfair
advantage of their weaker competitors, and they thereby force other
big shippers and big railroad men who would like to do decently into
similar acts of wrong and injustice, under penalty of being left behind
&
68O Messages and Speeches
in the race for success. Government supervision is needed quite as
much in the interest of the big shipper and of the railroad man who
want to do right as in the interest of the small shipper and the con-
SL11116 I’.
Experience has shown that the present laws are defective and need
amendment. The effort to prohibit all restraint of competition, whether
reasonable or unreasonable, is unwise. What we need is to have some
administrative body with ample power to forbid combination that is
hurtful to the public, and to prevent favoritism to one individual at
the expense of another. In other words, we want an administrative
body with the power to secure fair and just treatment as among all
shippers who use the railroads—and all shippers have a right to use
them. We must not leave the enforcement of such a law merely to the
Department of Justice; it is out of the question for the law department
of the Government to do what should be purely administrative work.
The Department of Justice is to stand behind and co-operate with the
administrative body but the administrative body itself must be given
the power to do the work and then held to a strict accountability for
the exercise of that power. The delays of the law are proverbial, but
what we need in this matter is reasonable quickness of action.*
The abuses of which we have a genuine right to complain take many
shapes. Rebates are not now often given openly. But they can be
given just as effectively in covert form; and private cars, terminal
tracks and the like must be brought under the control of the commis-
*Whenever President Roosevelt speaks of the railroads one finds him speaking with a
most determined temperance. Sometimes I have thought that he is afraid he will do, not
alone railroads but property, an injustice. Not through design, not through ignorance, but
because his natural heart beats so much more warmly for perishing flesh and blood than it
beats for cold insensate dollars and cents collected under the name of capital, that he fears
lest his sympathies run off with his judgment. It is noticeable that when he speaks of men
he doesn’t have to guard himself. On the other hand when he speaks of Capital he manages
his utterances with the utmost care. That is because his bias is ſor humanity, not for money,
and he seeks to so control that bias as to do money no injustice. Politics is natural as an
expression of mankind, and breaks just as naturally into two partics. Politics has always
existed and will always exist; also it never changes. The parties today and the issues today
are the same with those which existed when Moses led his people out of Egypt, or Wat Tyler
brought the men of Kent to London Town. Today as then we see the same two old dogs
fighting over the same old bone. Names have changed; but mankind in its separation hasn’t
changed. Neither has the issue changed. Politics is—what it has been and ever will bo—the
quarrel between those who feel most profoundly for the rights of property and those who feel
most profoundly for the rights of man. It’s as though you called one side Tory and the
other Whig. For example Pharaoh was a Tol y. Moses was a Whig. The difference—and
it's inborn, between Tory and Whig–might be described in this fashion: An utter Tory is
one who, if he were afloat in a leaky ship with a cargo half bullion half babics, would throw
the babies overboard to save the bullion. An utter Whig is one who, if he were at sea under
similar sinking conditions, would throw the bullion overboard to save the babies. President
Roosevelt was born a Whig–he lay in his cradle a Whig. His heart and soul are Whig. He
feels this, knows this, and by reason of that very fact of congenital Whigism is ever followed
in his Presidential goings about by the apprehension that inadvertently and without knowing
it, through sheer stress of native bias, he may do Capital a wrong. Thus you will observe
throughout these speeches that whenever he approaches the question of railroads or any other
manifestation of Capital, however malignant, he goes instantly on guard against himself; being
what one might call a crank for even and exact justice.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 681
sion or administrative body, which is to exercise supervision by the
Government. But in my judgment the most important thing to do
is to give to this administrative body power to make its findings effec-
tive, and this can be done only by giving it power, when complaint is
made of a given rate as being unjust or unreasonable, if it finds the
complaint proper, then itself to fix a maximum rate which it regards as
just and reasonable, this rate to go into effect practically at once, that
is within a reasonable time, and to stay in effect, unless reversed by
the courts. I earnestly hope that we shall see a law giving this power
passed by Congress. Moreover, I hope that by law power will be con-
ferred upon representatives of the Government capable of performing
the duty of public accountants carefully to examine into the books of
railroads, when so ordered by the Interstate Commerce Commission,
which should itself have power to prescribe what books, and what
books only, should be kept by railroads. If there is in the minds of
the Commission any suspicion that a certain railroad is in any shape
or way giving rebates or behaving improperly, I wish the Commis-
sion to have power as a matter of right, not as a matter of favor,
to make a full and exhaustive investigation of the receipts and ex-
penditures of the railroad, so that any violation or evasion of the law
may be detected. This is not a revolutionary proposal on my part, for
I only wish the same power given in reference to railroads that is now
exercised as a matter of course by the national bank examiners as
regards national banks. My object in giving these additional powers
to the administrative body representing the Government—the Inter-
state Commerce Commission, or whatever it may be—is primarily to
secure a real and not a sham control to the Government representatives.
The American people abhor a sham, and with this abhorrence I
cordially sympathize. Nothing is more injurious from every stand-
point than a law which is merely sound and fury, merely pretense, and
not capable of working out tangible results. I hope to see all the power
that I think it ought to have granted to the Government; but I would
far rather see only some of it granted, but really granted, than See a
pretense of granting all, in some shape that really amounts to nothing.
It must be understood, as a matter of course, that if this power is
granted it is to be exercised with wisdom and caution and self-
restraint. The Interstate Commerce Commissioner or other Government
official who failed to protect a railroad that was in the right against
any clamor, no matter how violent, on the part of the public, would
be guilty of as gross a wrong as if he corruptly rendered an improper
service to the railroad at the expense of the public. When I say a
square deal I mean a square deal; exactly as much a square deal for
the rich man as for the poor man; but no more. Let each stand on
682 Messages and Speeches
his merits, receive what is due him, and be judged according to his
deserts. To more he is not entitled, and less he shall not have.
TO THE STUDENTS OF TRINITY COLLEGE, DURHAM, N. C.,
OCT. IQ, Igoš.
Mr. Mayor, people of Durham and undergraduates and graduates of
Trinity College:
I know that the citizens of Durham will not begrudge my making
a special address to the representative of a great typical Southern col-
lege, which because it is a typical Southern college, is a typical Amer-
ican college. In speaking today to you undergraduates and graduates
of Trinity (and when I speak to the graduates of Trinity I speak to
both the United States Senators of North Carolina, a pretty good show-
ing for one college), I speak not only to you but through you to the
college men of the South. I have beeen more impressed than I can
well express by the first article in the Constitution of Trinity; the article
that sets forth the aims of the college. Not for your sake (for you are
familiar with it), but for the sake of all the college men North and
South I am going to read that article: “The aims of Trinity College
are to assert a faith in the eternal union of knowledge and religion
set forth in the teachings and character of Jesus Christ, the Son of
God; to advance learning to all lines of truth; to defend scholarship
against all false notions and ideals; to develop a Christian love of free-
dom and truth; to educate a sincere spirit of tolerance; to discourage
all partisan and sectarian strife; and to render the largest permanent
service to the individual, the State, the Nation and the Church. Unto
these ends shall the affairs of this college always be administered.”
I know of no other college which has so nobly set forth as the ob-
ject of its being the principles to which every college should be de-
voted in whatever portion of this Union it may be placed. You stand
for all these things for which the scholar must stand if he is to render
real and lasting service to the State. You stand for academic free-
dom, for the right of private judgment, for the duty more incumbent
upon the scholar than upon any other man, to tell the truth as he
sees it, to claim for himself and to give to others.
There must be no coercion of opinion if collegiate training is to bring
forth full fruit. You men of this college, you men throughout the
South who have had collegiate training, you men throughout the Union
who have had collegiate training, bear a peculiar burden of responsi-
bility. I want you to have a good time, and I believe you do. I be-
lieve in play with all my heart. Play when you play, but work while
you work, and remember, that your having gone through college does
not so much confer a special privilege as it imposes a special obligation
Theodore Roosevelt 683
on you. We have a right to expect a special quality of leadership from
the men to whom much has been given in the way of a collegiate edu-
cation. You are not entitled to any special privilege, but you are en-
titled to be held to a peculiar accountability; you have earned the right
to be held peculiarly responsible for what you do.
Each one of you, if he is worth his salt, wishes, when he graduates,
to pay some portion of the debt due to his alma mater. You have re-
ceived from her, during your years of attendance in her halls, certain
privileges in the way of scholarship, in the way of companionship,
which makes it incumbent upon you to repay what you have been given.
You cannot repay that to the college save in one way. By the quality
of your citizenship, as displayed in the actual affairs in life, you can
make it an honor to the college to have sent you forth into the great
world. That is the only way in which you can repay to the college
what the college has done for you. I earnestly hope and believe that
you and those like you in all the colleges of this land will make it
evident to the generation that is rising that you are fit to take leader-
ship, that the training has not been wasted, that you are ready to
render to the State the kind of service which is invaluable, because it
cannot be bought, because there is no price that can be put upon it.
We have the right to expect from college men not merely disinter-
ested service, but intelligent service. The few peoples who exercise
self-government always have to war not merely against the knavish
man who deliberately does what he knows to be wrong, but against
the foolish man who may mean very well, but who in actual fact turns
out the ally of the other man who does not mean well; and we must
depend upon you men who have been given special facilities in educa-
tion to guide our people aright so that they shall neither fall into the
pit of folly nor into the pit of knavery.
AT GREENSBORO, N. C., OCT. 19, 1905.
My fellow citizens:
It is inded a great pleasure to be greeted by you today. In saying
how glad I am to see the men and women I do not want to forget the
children. I am glad to say that going through your State the children
seem to be all right in quality and quantity, and I congratulate you on
them. No man could fail to be made a better American by traveling
through this great historic State of yours, and where, throughout his
journey, he sees place after place associated with the historic past,
such as this city of yours here, right near the Guilford battle ground,
commemorating by its name one of Washington's great generals.
North Carolina's history has ever been high and honorable; and
surely, my friends, it is right that we should remember that the mighty
684 Messages and Speeches
deeds of our forefathers are not to serve to us as excuses for inaction
on our part, but as spurs to drive us forward to doing our duty in our
turn. We respect the son of a worthy father if he feels that the fact
that his father did well makes it incumbent upon him to strive to do
better. We despise the boy who treats the fact that his father counted
for something as being an excuse for his counting for nothing.
So I am glad to note the care that you in this State are giving to
education. The greatness of the country in the time immediately to
come will depend upon the way in which the young generation of to-
day is trained to citizenship in the future.
I am sorry to say that there is probably no one here who is not ac-
quainted with some kindly, well-meaning, and most foolish father or
mother who, because life has been hard with him or her in the past,
takes the view that the children are not to have to face any difficulties.
The worst thing that you can do for a child is to bring him or her up
so as to dodge difficulties. The children that will rise up to call their
parents blessed are those to whom the parents have given the in-
estimable privilege of training them to meet difficulties, not to shirk
them; to overcome obstacles, not to get out of the way for them.
Neither the individual nor the community is worth anything if it seeks
after that which is easy. The thing to do is to find out what is worth
doing, and do it. Show the manly quality that allows of this being
done.
In every audience here in the South I see men who fought in the
Confederate Army in the Civil War and men who fought in the Union
Army also. These men as they look back feel that the part of their
career of which they are most proud, the memory of which they wish
to hand on to their children, is not any part that was easy, but the part
when they did the hardest work and the work that was worth doing,
when they proved their fealty to an ideal by the way in which they
did the work allotted them to do.
AT CHARLOTTE, N. C., OCT, 19, 1905.
I have enjoyed more than I can say passing through this great
State to-day. I entered your borders a pretty good American, and I
leave them a better American, and I have rejoiced in the symptoms of
your abounding material prosperity. I am here in a great center of
cotton manufacture. Within a radius of a hundred miles of this city
perhaps half of the cotton manufacturing in the United States is done.
I realize to the full, as does every good citizen, that there must be a
foundation of material prosperity upon which to build the welfare of
State or nation; but I realize, also, as does every good citizen, that
material prosperity, material well-being, can never be anything but
Theodore Roosevelt 685
the foundation. It is the indispensable foundation; but if we do not
raise upon it the superstructure of a higher citizenship, then we fail in
bringing this to the level to which it shall and will be brought.
And so, though I congratulate you upon what you have done in the
way of material growth, I congratulate you even more upon the great
historic memories of your State. It is not so very far from here that
the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was made—the declara-
tion that pointed out the path on which the thirteen united colonies
trod a few months later. *.
As I got off the train here I was greeted by one citizen of North
Carolina (and I know that neither the Governor, the Mayor, nor the
Senators will blame me for what I am going to say) whose greeting
pleased and touched me more than the greeting of any man could have
touched me. I was greeted by the widow of Stonewall Jackson.*
We of this united country have a right to challenge as a part of
the heritage of honor and glory of each American the reunion of one
people—Americans who fought in the Civil War—whether they wore
the blue or whether they wore the gray. The valor shown alike by
the men of the North and the men of the South as they battled for the
right as God gave them to see the right, is now part of what we, all of
us, keep with pride. It was my good fortune to appoint to West Point
the grandson of Stonewall Jackson. .
Here, as I came up your streets, I saw a monument raised to a fellow-
soldier of mine who fell in the Spanish war at Santiago, to Shipp of
North Carolina. The morning of the fight he and I took breakfast to-
gether. It was not much of a breakfast, but it was the only breakfast
that was going, and we were glad to get it. The night before, I had
no supper, and he and his comrades gave me, out of their very small
amount that they had, a sandwich. In the morning they had no material
for breakfast, but by that time my things had come up and I shared
my breakfast with them. That was at dawn. Before noon one of them
was killed, and the other (as we then thought) fatally wounded.
And now, there are here men who fought in the great war. We
who went in in '98 had the opportunity to fight only in a small war,
and all that we claim is that we hope we showed a spirit not entirely
unworthy of the men who faced the mighty and terrible days from '61
to '65.
And now, gentlemen, though we glory in the memories of the past,
*The feature of his stay at Charlotte was his meeting with the widow of Stonewall
Jackson. Mrs. Jackson lives within a stone’s throw of the station, and she was present
there when the train pulled in as the head of a committee of ladies appointed by Mayor
McNinch to receive Mrs. Roosevelt. When the President was introduced, he took her hand
and remained talking to her for fully five minutes.
“Mrs. Jackson,” he said, “you do not know how glad I am to meet you. What! the
widow of the great Stonewall Jackson? Why, it is worth the whole trip down here to have a
chance to shake your hand.”
686 Messages and Speeches
we must remember ever to keep these memories, not as excuses for
failing to do well in the present, but as incentives to spur us on to
action. In life, every victory won inevitably brings us face to face with
a new struggle. The men of one generation have to do their allotted
task. If they fail to do it, they accumulate misfortune upon those who
come after them. If they do it, yet it remains true that the men who
come after them must do their tasks in turn. It is just as it is with
you, my escort, the men of the National Guard, the artillerymen, the
infantrymen. If there comes a war, I know I can count on you and
those like you, because the memory of what your fathers did will make
you ashamed not to rise level to the demands of the new time, as they
rose level to the demands of their time.
So in civil life, each generation has its problems. The tremendous
industrial development of the past half century, the development which
has produced cities such as this, has brought great problems with it—
problems connected with corporations, problems connected with labor,
problems connected with both the accumulation and the distribution of
wealth. The problems are new, but the spirit in which we must ap-
proach their solution is old. We must face the work we have to do,
as our fathers faced their work, if we wish to be successful. This is
an age of organization—the organization of capital, the organization
of labor. Each type of organization should be welcomed when it does
good, and fearlessly opposed when it does evil.
Our main object should be to strive to keep the reign of justice alive
in this country, so that we should above all things avoid the chance of
ever dividing on the lines that separate one class or occupation from
another. The man who would teach either wage worker or capitalist
that the other is his foe is a bad citizen and a faithless American.
We can afford to divide along lines that would represent honest dif-
ference of opinion, but we cannot afford to divide on the fundamental
lines of cleavage that separate good citizens from bad citizens; and
we must remember that if we intend to keep this republic in its position
of headship among the nations of mankind, we can never afford
to deviate from the old American doctrine of treating each man ac-
cording to his worth as a man, of paying heed not to whether he is
rich or poor, but heed only to whether he acts as a decent citizen, or
if he is a decent man in his domestic life, an honest man in business—
a man who in good faith tries to do his duty by his neighbor and by
the State.
And now, my fellow-citizens, remember there is no patent device by
which you can achieve good citizenship. There is no patent device by
which you can achieve good government. The good citizen is the
man who is a good father and a good husband; the man who behaves
himself; the man whom you can trust in a trade and whom you are
Theodore Roosevelt 687
glad to have as a neighbor. He is the good citizen, and the man the
public confides in and who does well in the State is the man who ap-
plies in dealing with his fellows in the mass just those same qualities
that make good citizenship in the individual.
And now I have got to say good-by. I cannot tell you how I enjoyed
my trip through this State, marred though it has been by the
lamentable death that rendered the governor unable to come with me,
and for which I feel profound regret, and sympathize with the gov-
€111OT.
And now, in saying good-by, I want to say to you men and women
that I have been immensely impressed with North Carolina—with her
agriculture, with her industries, but that the crop that I like best is
the crop of children; and I congratulate North Carolina. I congrat-
ulate North Carolina on the fact that, to all appearances, the children
seem to be all right in quality and in quantity.
AT ROSWELL, GA., OCT. 20, 1905.
Senator, and you, my friends, whom it is hard for me not to call my
neighbors, for I feel as if you were:
You can have no idea of how much it means to me to come
back to Roswell, to the home of my mother and my mother's
people, and to see the spot which I already know so well from
what my mother and my aunts told me. It has been exactly as
if I were revisiting some old place of my childhood. It has meant
very much to me to be introduced by Senator Clay. Senator
Clay has been altogether too kind in what he said about me. Now, I
am going to say nothing whatever but the bare facts about Senator
Clay, and these facts amount to this: If the average man I had to
deal with in public life possessed Senator Clay's firm devotion to what
he deems right, my task would be so easy that it would not be worth
mentioning. I have gone to Senator Clay for advice and counsel and
help ever since I have been in Washington, just as I went to Senator
Cockrell, of Missouri, while he was in the Senate, with the certainty
that all I had to do was to convince him that what I wanted done was
right—I could not always convince him—but if I did convince him
that was the end of it—he went that way.
Oh, my friends, I hardly like to say how deeply my heart is moved
by coming back here among you. Among the earliest recollections I
have as a child is hearing from my mother and my aunt—Miss Annie
Bulloch, as she was then—about Roswell; of how the Pratts and Kings
and Dunwoodys and Bullochs came here first to settle; about the old
homestead, the house on the hill; about the Chattahoochee; about all
688 Messages and Speeches
kinds and sorts of incidents that would not interest you, but interested
me a great deal when I was a child. I wish I could spend hours here
to look all through and see the different places about which I have
heard all kinds of incidents. All those anecdotes, looking back now, I
can see, taught me an enormous amount, perhaps all the more because
they were not intended to teach anything. I think, perhaps, we are very
apt to learn most when neither we nor the people talking to us in-
tend to teach us anything. If anybody starts in to teach us something,
we are a little apt to resent it and assume a rather repellent attitude.
All those stories of the life of those days taught me what a real home
life, a real neighbor life was and should be. Looking back now at what
I learned through the stories of the childhood of my mother, my aunts,
my uncles, I can understand why the boys and girls of Roswell of that
time grew up to be men and women who were good servants of the
community, who were good husbands, good fathers, good wives and
mothers; how it was that they learned to do their duty aright in peace
and in war also. e
It has been my very great good fortune to have the right to claim
that my blood is half Southern and half Northern, and I would deny
the right of any man here to feel a greater pride in the deeds of every
Southerner than I feel. Of the children, the brothers and sisters of
my mother, who were born and brought up in that house on the hill
there, my two uncles afterward entered the Confederate service, and
served in the Confederate navy. One, the younger man, served on the
Alabama as the youngest officer aboard her. He was captain of one
of her broadside thirty-two-pounders in her final fight, and when at the
very end the Alabama was sinking and the Kearsarge passed under
her stern and came up along the side that had not been engaged hith-
erto, my uncle, Irving Bulloch, shifted his gun from one side to the
other, and fired the two last shots fired from the Alabama.
James Dunwoody Bulloch was an admiral in the Confederate service.
Of all the people whom I have ever met, he was the one that came
nearest to that beautiful creation of Thackeray—Colonel Newcome.
Men and women, don't you think that I have the ancestral right to
claim a proud kinship with those who showed their devotion to duty
as they saw the duty, whether they wore the gray or whether they
wore the blue? All Americans who are worthy of the name feel an
equal pride in the valor of those who fought on one side or the other,
provided only that each did with all his might and soul and mind his
duty as it was given him to see his duty.
Theodore Roosevelt 689
BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF THE GEORGIA SCHOOL OF
TECHNOLOGY, ATLANTA, GA., OCT. 20, 1905.
Gentlemen and ladies:
President Mathison, I thank you heartily, but I am only the first
citizen of the world in so far as America is the first nation of the world;
and America can be the first nation only by just the kind of training
and effort which is developed and is symbolized in institutions of this
kind.
If America stands for anything it stands for trained intelligence and
effort; and we get such trained intelligence and effort at the best
through instruction of this character. I want each man of you here to
feel that he is getting an education for his own benefit, but not merely
for his own benefit; that he is to do well for himself, but that he is
also to do well for America by the effort he develops. Every triumph
of engineering skill credited to an American is credited to America.
Every triumph of productive science put to the credit of any indi-
vidual American goes to the credit of America as a whole; and I trust
that you will feel that it is incumbent upon you to do well, not only
for your individual sakes, but for the sake of that collective American
citizenship which denominates the American nation.
I believe in play. I believe you are all the better for it. Play just
as hard as you know how, but when you quit playing, quit, and then
work with all your heart, and as hard as you know how.
AT THE FAIR GROUNDS, ATLANTA, GA., OCT. 20, 1905.
Here in this great industrial center, in this city which is a typical
Southern city, and therefore a typical American city, it is natural to
consider certain phases of the many-sided industrial problem which
this generation has to solve. In this world of ours it is practically im-
possible to get success of any, kind on a large Scale without paying
something for it. The exceptions to the rule are too few to warrant
our paying heed to them; and as a rule it may be said that something
must be paid as an offset for everything we get and for everything we
accomplish. This is notably true of our industrial life. The problems
which we of America have to face today are very serious, but we will
do well to remember that after all they are only part of the price
which we have to pay for the triumphs we have won, for the high
position to which we have attained. If we were a backward and sta-
tionary country we would not have to face these problems at all; but
I think that most of us are agreed that to be backward and stationary
would be altogether too heavy a price to pay for the avoidance of the
problems in question. There are no labor troubles where there is no
work to be done by labor. There are no troubles about corporations
690 Messages and Speeches
where the poverty of the community is such that it is not worth while
to form corporations. There is no difficulty in regulating railroads
where the resources of a region are so few that it does not pay to
build railroads. There are many excellent people who shake their
heads over the difficulties that as a nation we now have to face; but
their melancholy is not warranted save in a very partial degree, for
most of the things of which they complain are the inevitable accom-
paniments of the growth and greatness of which we are proud.
Now, I do not wish to be misunderstood. I do not for one moment
mean to say that there are not many and serious evils with which we
have to grapple, or that there are not unhealthy signs in the body
social and politic; but I do mean to say that while we must not show
a foolish optimism we must no less beware of a mere blind pessimism.
There is every reason why we should be vigilant in searching out what
is wrong and unflinchingly resolute in striving to remedy it. But at
the same time we must not blind ourselves to what has been accom-
plished for good, and above all we must not lose our heads and become
either hysterical or rancorous in grappling with what is bad.
Take such a question, for instance, as the question, or rather the
group of questions, connected with the growth of corporations in this
country. This growth has meant, of course, the growth of individual
fortunes. Undoubtedly the growth of wealth in this country has had
some very unfortunate accompaniments, but it seems to me that much
the worst damage that people of wealth can do the rest of us is not
any actual physical harm, but the awakening in our breasts of either
the mean vice of worshiping mere wealth, and the man of mere wealth,
for the wealth’s sake, or the equally mean vice of viewing with rancor-
ous envy and hatred the men of wealth merely because they are men
of wealth. Envy is, of course, merely a kind of crooked admiration;
and we often see the very man who in public is most intemperate in
his denunciation of wealth, in his private life most eager to obtain
wealth, in no matter what fashion, and at no matter what moral cost.
Undoubtedly there is need of regulation by the Government, in the
interest of the public, of these great corporations which in modern
life have shown themselves to be the most efficient business implements,
and which are, therefore, the implements commonly employed by the
owners of large fortunes. The corporation is the creature of the state.
It should always be held accountable to some sovereign, and this ac-
countability should be real and not sham. Therefore, in my judgment,
all corporations doing an interstate business, and this means the great
majority of the largest corporations, should be held accountable to the
Federal Government, because their accountability should be coexten-
sive with their field of action. But most certainly we should not strive
to prevent or limit corporate activity. We should strive to secure such
Theodore Roosevelt 691
effective Supervision over it, such power of regulation over it, as to
enable us to guarantce that its activity will be exercised only in ways
beneficial to the public. The unwisdom of any well-meaning but mis-
guided effort to check corporate activity has been shown in striking
fashion in recent years by our experience in the Philippines and in
Porto Rico. Our national legislators very properly determined that the
islands should not be exploited by adventurers without regard to the
interests of the people of the islands themselves. But unfortunately in
their zeal to prevent the islands from being improperly exploited they
took measures of such severity as to seriously, and in some respects
vitally, to hamper and retard the development of the islands. There
is nothing that the islands need more than to have their great natural
resources developed, and these resources can be developed only by the
abundant use of capital, which, of course, will not be put into them
unless on terms sufficiently advantageous to offer prospects of good
remuneration. We have made the terms not merely hard, but often
prohibitory, with the result that American capital goes into foreign
countries, like Mexico, and is there used with immense advantage to
the country in its development, while it can not go into our own
possessions or be used to develop the lands under our own flag. The
chief sufferers by this state of things are the people of the islands
themselves.
It is impossible too strongly to insist upon what ought to be the
patent fact that it is not only in the interests of the people of wealth
themselves, but in our interest, in the interest of the public as a whole,
that they should be treated fairly and justly; that if they show excep-
tional business ability they should be given exceptional reward for
that ability. The tissues of our industrial fabric are interwoven in
such complex fashion that what strengthens or weakens part also
strengthens or weakens the whole. If we penalize industry we will
ourselves in the end have to pay a considerable part of the penalty.
If we make conditions such that the men of exceptional ability are
able to secure marked benefits by the exercise of that ability, then we
shall ourselves benefit somewhat. It is our interest no less than our
duty to treat them fairly. On the other hand, it is no less their interest
to treat us fairly—by “us” I mean the great body of the people, the
men of moderate or small fortunes, the farmers, the wage-workers, the
smaller business men and professional men. The man of great means
who achieves fortune by crooked methods does wrong to the whole
body politic. But he not merely does wrong to, he becomes a source
of imminent danger to, other men of great means; for his ill-won
success tends to arouse a feeling of resentment, which if it becomes
inflamed fails to differentiate between the men of wealth who have
done decently and the men of wealth who have not done decently
692 Messages and Speeches
The conscience of our people has been deeply shocked by the revela-
tions made of recent years as to the way in which some of the great
fortunes have been obtained and used, and there is, I think, in the
minds of the people at large a strong feeling that a serious effort must
be made to put a stop to the cynical dishonesty and contempt for right
which have thus been revealed.* I believe that something, and I hope
that a good deal, can be done by law to remedy the state of things
complained of. But when all that can be, has thus been done, there
will yet remain much which the law can not touch, and which must
be reached by the force of public opinion. There are men who do not
divide actions merely into those that are honest and those that are not,
but create a third subdivision—that of law honesty; of that kind of
honesty which consists in keeping clear of the penitentiary. It is hard
to reach astute men of this type save by making them feel the weight
of an honest public indignation. But this indignation, if it is to be
effective, must be intelligent. It is, of course, to the great advantage
of dishonest men of wealth if they are denounced, not for being dis-
honest, but for being wealthy, and if they are denounced in terms so
overstrained and hysterical as to invite a reaction in their favor. We
can not afford in this country to draw the distinction as between rich
man and poor man. The distinction upon which we must insist is the
vital, deep-lying, unchangeable distinction between the honest man and
the dishonest man, between the man who acts decently and fairly by
his neighbor and with a quick sense of his obligations, and the man
who acknowledges no internal law save that of his own will and ap-
petite. Above all we should treat with a peculiarly contemptuous ab-
horrence the man who in a spirit of sheer cynicism debauches either
our business life or our political life. There are men who use the
phrase “practical politics” as merely a euphemism for dirty politics,
and it is such men who have brought the word “politician” into dis-
credit. There are other men who use the noxious phrase “business is
business,” as an excuse and justification for every kind of mean and
crooked work; and these men make honest Americans hang their heads
because of some of the things they do. It is the duty of every honest
patriot to rebuke in emphatic fashion alike the politician who does not
*Here in New York, where this is written, the great safety for the Insurance rascals, now
being uncovered in their venality, lies in the fact that privily and at the bottom, public senti-
ment is morally as rotten as themselves. There are scores among the Insurance vultures whom
their own sworn confessions have shown to be due in Sing Sing on a dozen criminal counts,
running from perjury to theft. The whole public knows this. And yet the standing of these
criminals, either socially or commercially, has been in no sense shaken. They are received
in the same polite circles, with the same warmth and respect they were before they stood forth
confessed and admitted criminals. They are bowed to and hand-shaken by the same business
people, courted by the same sycophants, go in and out of the same clubs, sit in the same
church pews, to be respectfully preached at by the same dominies, who give them the same
pleasantly deferential greeting when the services are done—in short nothing has been changed
for the worse. Crime only ceases when the public makes it cost more than it comes to and
profits are less than the losses. As matters stand, these Insurance crimes have paid. The
criminals have got their loot, and so far have lost literally nothing.—A. H. L.
Theodore Roosevelt 693
understand that the only kind of “practical politics” which a nation
can with safety tolerate is that kind which we know as clean politics,
and that we are as severe in our condemnation of the business trickery
which succeeds as of the business trickery which fails. The scoundrel
who fails can never by any possibility be as dangerous to the com-
munity as the scoundrel who succeeds; and of all the men in the
country, the worst citizens, those who should excite in our minds the
most contemptuous abhorrence, are the men who have achieved great
wealth, or any other form of success, in any save a clean and straight-
forward manner.
So much for the general subject of industrialism. Now, just a word
in reference to one of the great staples of this country, which is pe-
culiarly a staple of the Southern States. Of course I mean cotton.
I am glad to see diversifications of industry in the South, the growth
of manufactures as well as the growth of agriculture, and the grow-
ing growth of diversification of crops in agriculture. Nevertheless
it will always be true that in certain of the Southern States cotton will
be the basis of the wealth, the mainstay of prosperity in the future as
in the past. The cotton crop is of enormous consequence to the en-
tire country. It was the cotton crop of the South that brought four
hundred million dollars of foreign gold into the United States last
year, turning the balance of trade in our favor. The soil and climate
of the South are such that she enjoys a practical monopoly in the pro-
duction of raw cotton. No other clothing material can be accepted
as a substitute for cotton. I welcome the action of the planters in
forming a cotton association, and every assistance shall be given them
that can be given them by the National Government. Moreover, we
must not forget that the work of the manufacturers in the South
supplements the work of the planter. It is an advantage to manu-
facture the raw material here and sell to the world the finished goods.
Under proper methods of distribution it may well be doubted whether
there can be such a thing as over-production of cotton. Last year's
crop was nearly fourteen million bales, and yet the price was sufficiently
high to give a handsome profit to the planter. The consumption of
cotton increases each year, and new uses are found for it.
This leads me to a matter of our foreign relations, which directly
concerns the cotton planter. At present our market for cotton is largely
in China. The boycott of our goods in China during the past year was
especially injurious to the cotton manufacturers. This Government
is doing, and will continue to do, all it can to put a stop to the boy-
cott. But there is one measure to be taken toward this end in which
I shall need the assistance of the Congress. We must insist firmly
on our rights; and China must beware of persisting in a course of
conduct to which we can not honorably submit. But we in our turn
694 Messages and Speeches
must recognize our duties exactly as we insist upon our rights. We
can not go into the international court of equity unless we go in with
clean hands. We can not expect China to do us justice unless we do
China justice. The chief cause in bringing about the boycott of our
goods in China was undoubtedly our attitude toward the Chinese who
come to this country. This attitude of ours does not justify the action
of the Chinese in the boycott, and especially some of the forms which
that action has taken. But the fact remains that in the past we have
come short of our duty toward the people of China. It is our clear
duty, in the interest of our own wage-workers, to forbid all Chinese
of the coolie class—that is, laborers, skilled or unskilled—from coming
here. The greatest of all duties is national self-preservation, and the
most important step in national self-preservation is to preserve in every
way the well-being of the wage-worker. I am convinced that the well-
being of our wage-workers demands the exclusion of the Chinese
coolies, and it is therefore our duty to exclude them, just as it would
be the duty of China to exclude American laboring men if they became
in any way a menace to China by entering into her country. The right
is reciprocal, and in our last treaty with China it was explicitly recog-
nized as inhering in both nations. But we should not only operate the
law with as little harshness as possible, but we should show every
courtesy and consideration and every encouragement to all Chinese
who are not of the laboring class to come to this country. Every
Chinese traveler or student, business man or professional man, should
be given the same right of entry to, and the same courteous treatment
in, this country as are accorded to the student or traveler, the business
man or professional man of any other nation. Our laws and treaties
should be so framed as to guarantee to all Chinamen, save of the ex-
cepted coolie class, the same right of entry to this country and the
same treatment while here as is guaranteed to citizens of any other
nation. By executive action I am as rapidly as possible putting a
stop to the abuses which have grown up during many years in the
administration of this law. I can do a good deal, and will do a good
deal, even without the action of the Congress; but I can not do all
that should be done unless such action is taken, and that action I most
earnestly hope will be taken. It is needed in our own interest and
especially in the interest of the Pacific slope and of the South Atlantic
and Gulf States; for it is short-sighted indeed for us to permit foreign
competitors to drive us from the great markets of China. Moreover,
the action I ask is demanded by considerations that are higher than
mere interest, for I ask it in the name of what is just and right.
America should take the lead in establishing international relations on
the same basis of honest and upright dealing which we regard as es-
sential as between man and man.
Theodore Roosevelt 695
AT PIEDMONT CLUB LUNCHEON, ATLANTA, GA., OCT. 20, 1905.
Mr. Graves and my hosts:
It is almost unkind to greet a guest in a speech to which it is im-
possible that any guest should adequately respond. Gentlemen, surely
it must be almost unnecesary for me to say not alone how I have en-
joyed today, but how deeply touched and moved I have been at your
reception of me, at Georgia’s reception of its descendant. I told the
Governor I had a kind of ancestral reversionary right to his chair;
because the first revolutionary president of Georgia was my great-great-
grandfather, Archibald Bulloch, after whom one of my boys is named.
No man could meet with such a reception as you have given me today;
no man could see your city; could see your people, could address such
an audience as I have addressed, and not be a better citizen afterwards.
It means a great deal to me to meet all of you personally, with all that
you gentlemen typify in the world of politics, the world of business,
and that world of ethical effort which can alone render either business
or politics noble.
Now, I am going to very ill repay the courtesy with which I have
been greeted by causing for a minute or two acute discomfort to a man
of whom I am very fond—Uncle Remus. Presidents may come and
Presidents may go, but Uncle Remus stays put. Georgia has done a
great many things for the Union, but she has never done more than
when she gave Mr. Joel Chandler Harris to American literature. I
suppose he is one of those literary people who insist that art should
have nothing to do with morals, and will condemn me as a Philistine
for not agreeing with them, but I want to say that one of the great
reasons why I like what he has written is because after reading it I
rise up with the purpose of being a better man, a man who is bound
to strive to do what is in him for the cause of decency and for the
cause of righteousness. Gentlemen, I feel too strongly to indulge in
any language of mere compliment, or mere flattery. Where Mr. Harris
seems to me to have done one of his greatest services is that he has
written what exalts the South in the mind of every man who reads it,
and yet what has not even a flavor of bitterness toward any other part
of the Union. There is not an American anywhere who can read Mr.
Harris' stories—I am not speaking at the moment of his wonderful
folk tales, but of his stories—who does not rise up a better citizen for
having read them, who does not rise up with a more earnest desire to
do his part in solving American problems aright. I cannot too strongly
express the obligations I am under to Mr. Harris; and one of those
obligations is to feel as a principle that it is my duty (which, if I have
transgressed, I have not transgressed knowingly) never as an American
696 Messages and Speeches
to do anything that could be construed into an attack upon any portion
of our common country.
Now, let me say one word on something entirely different, Sug-
gested by our talk here today. In speaking over with several of the
gentleman round about me their experiences in the Georgia legislature
and some of my experiences in the New York legislature, the thing that
struck me most was the truth of Abraham Lincoln's saying that, “there
is a deal of human nature in mankind”. The enemies we have to fight;
the friends upon whom we have to rely, are substantially the same in
whatever part of the Union we live. We have to war against the
same evil tendencies in our own souls; we have to strive to give ex-
pression to the same aspirations toward righteousness, toward honor.
In doing that there are two things that are necessary above all others.
In the first place, the fearless condemnation of what is wrong; the
standing up for what is decent, for what is straight; the refusing to
palter with the eternal principles of truth; refusing to pardon any man
who for any reason lapses from the law that teaches that the man
who is to be of service must obey the great rule of truth, of courage
and of honor. In the second place, to remember that second only in
iniquity, second only in the injury done to the republic, to the wrong
of the man who acts corruptly, comes the wrong of the man who wan-
tonly accuses the honest man of corruption. Thief is an ugly name,
because it denotes an ugly thing. Liar is as ugly a name as thief and
as little to be desired by any right-thinking man; and either to steal
or to lie marks the man as unfit for association with decent men and
an enemy of all that is best and most upright in our political life. Too
often we have seen public sentiment condoning the acts both of the
thief and the liar (I am using ugly words, gentlemen, and I am using
them because I wish to denote in the sharpest and in the most ugly
fashion ugly attributes), when their acts are shifted a little so that
they can be hidden under other names. The man who in political
life, the man who in business life, by chicanery or by corruption in
any shape or form, does or achieves what could not be done or achieved
save by or through chicanery or corruption, stands on the same level
with the man who in court is convicted of theft. The man who on no
grounds or on insufficient grounds attacks the honest and upright man,
whether in public or private life, is corrupt; who seeks to persuade men
to believe that he is corrupt; who accuses him of corruption, this man
stands on the same evil eminence of infamy with the corruptionist
himself; and he is himself the greatest ally of the corruptionist he
professes to denounce. The republic will go down, our democratic
institutions will be a failure, if the moral sense of the people grows so
blunted that they will accept anything else, whether brilliancy or loyalty
of party service, or any other deed or quality, as an offset to corrup-
Theodore Roosevelt 697
tion. The minute that there comes a question of corruption in public
life, if we have any sense of loyalty to the Union and its institutions,
all political lines vanish at once. We can afford to consider in a public
servant nothing but the question of his honesty or dishonesty when
Once that question is raised. I have been able to deal with Senator
Clay as I have dealt because I knew that...was the principle in which
he consistently acts.
The surest way of blunting the public conscience in dealing with
corruption is to confuse the public mind as to who is corrupt and who
is not. There are plenty of men with whom we differ radically, plenty
of men of whom we radically disapprove, as to whom it is right and
necessary that we should express that disapprobation; but beware of
expressing it in terms that imply moral reprobation. When we express
moral reprobation, let us be sure that we know the facts, and then that
we say only exactly what is true. To accuse an honest man of being
a thief is to gladden the heart of every thief in the nation. In our
legislative bodies, in our national congress, if you find that any mind
is corrupt, you are not to be excused if you do not hunt him out of
public life, whether he is of one party or whether he is of another.
But if you accuse, either specifically, or in loose general declamation,
all men of being corruptionists, you by just so much weaken your own
strength when it becomes necessary to assail the genuine corruptionist.
So far from asking that you be lenient in your judgment of any public
man, I hold that you are recreant to your duty if you are thus lenient.
Do not be lenient, but do be just. If you like a man's policy, say so.
If you think he is acting in a way so misguided that he will bring
ruin to the State or nation, say so. But do not acc ise him of corrup-
tion unless you know that he is corrupt; and if you know that he is
corrupt, if you have good reason to believe that he is corrupt, then re-
fuse under any plea of party expediency or consideration from refrain-
ing from smiting him with the sword of the Lord.
AT THE THIRD BAPTIST ACADEMY, JACKSON VILLE, FL.A.,
OCT. 21, IQ05.
My friends: $
Let me say what a pleasure it has been in driving along the streets
to have the Governor and the Mayor point out to me house after house
owned by colored citizens, who by their own industry, energy and thrift
had accumulated a small fortune, honestly, and were spending it wisely.
Every good American must be interested in seeing every other good
American citizen rise, help himself upward, so as to be better able to
do his duty by himself and those dependent upon him, and by the State
at large.
698 Messages and Speeches
It seems to me that it is true of all of us that our duties are even
more important than our rights. If we do our duties faithfully, in
spite of the difficulties that come, then sooner or later the rights will
take care of themselves. What I say to this body of my colored fellow-
citizens is just exactly what I would say to any body of my white
fellow-citizens. •
What we need in this country is typified by what I have been shown
today as having been done by people of your race. We need education,
morality, industry; we need intelligence, clean living, and the power to
work hard and effectually. No man interested, as every President must
be, in the welfare of all his fellow-Americans could be otherwise than
deeply pleased not only at the evidence of thrift and prosperity among
what must be evidently many hundreds of your number here in this
city, as shown by the homes that I have seen, but interested also in
seeing an educational institute like this carried on as this institute
evidently is carried on. The costliest crop for any community is the
crop of ignorance. It is perfectly true that education in mind alone
won't make a good citizen; but it is equally true that you cannot get
the best citizen without education.
We need to have our people of every race educated, as the principal
said in his words of introduction, in heart, mind and hands; educated
so that heads and hands can do their several tasks and have behind
head and hand also the heart, the conscience, the sense of clean and
just living which makes the foundation of all good citizens. That is
just as true for the white man as for the colored man.
It is true of every man. I was very glad to listen to the singing
today. I liked it all, including the last song. I wish I could have had
a chance to listen to some of your educational exercises. I want to
say a special word of acknowledgment to the school teachers, men and
women alike, who are doing the work of education; and in saying that
word, I also want to point out this—it is absolutely essential that we
should have people do well in the professions, but that there is only
a limited amount of room in the professions, and there is almost an
unlimited amount of room for men in agriculture and in the mechani-
cal trades. -
Do your very best to develop good teachers, to develop good
preachers—preachers who shall preach to the colored man as it should
be preached to the white man, that by your fruits you shall know them
and that the truly religious man is the man who is decent and clean in
his private life, who is orderly and law-abiding; the man who hunts
down the criminal and does all he can to stop crime and wrong-
doing; the man who treats his neighbor well, who is a good man in
his own family, and therefore a good man in the State. That is what
we have a right to expect from the Christian leadership which we see
Theodore Roosevelt 699
in the churches. All honor to the teacher, all honor to the preacher;
but remember, it is perfectly impossible that the bulk of any people
shall be teachers or preachers. The bulk has got to be men engaged
in the trades and mechanics, as wage workers, as farmers. Every man
who is a good farmer, a thrifty, progressive, saving mechanic, who
owns his own house, which is free from debt; who is bringing up his
children well and keeping his wife as she should be kept, is not only a
first-class citizen, but is doing a mighty good work in helping to uplift
his race. º
[From the Washington Post, Oct. 22, 1905.]
AT JACKSON VILLE, FL.A., OCT. 21, 1905.
Governor, Mayor, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a great pleasure to be with you here today, and be
greeted as your Governor and Mayor have greeted me.
Your Governor has said exactly what I and every other faithful
citizen feel when I meet the public, in whatever section of the country
I may be. I have traveled thousands and thousands of miles and met
at least one million people and delivered addresses to them. It is not
the small points of difference but the essential likeness of the people
of all sections that is noticeable. You will always find the average
American a pretty good sort of a fellow when you get to know him.
Now as to the men of the National Guard I see lined up here, and
who acted as my escort today, I wish to say that the last time I was
in Florida I was en route to Tampa to embark with my regiment. In
my regiment, organized at the beginning of the Spanish-American war,
I think that there were more men whose fathers wore the gray than
there were whose fathers wore the blue. The only rivalry that ever
entered their heads was rivalry as to which man could show himself
best entitled to the praise of having done all that in him lay for our
country and our flag.
And now my fellow citizens, my fellow Americans, exactly as all of
us, whether we live in the East or the West, in the North or the
South, have a right merely as Americans to feel pride in the past, and
exactly as we are knit together by this common heritage of memories,
so we are knit together by the bond of our common interests in the
future.
Many and great problems lie before us. If we treat the mighty
heroes of the past merely as excuses for sitting lazily down in the
present, or for standing aside from the rough work of the world, then
these memories will prove a curse instead of a blessing.
But if we treat them as I believe we shall treat them, not as excuses
for inaction, but as incentives to make us show that we are worthy
7OO Messages and Speeches
of our fathers' fathers, then in truth the deeds of the past will not have
been wasted, for they shall bring forth fruit a hundred fold in the
present generation.
We of this nation, we the citizens of this mighty and wonderful
Republic, stretching across a continent between the two great Oceans,
enjoy extraordinary privileges, and as our opportunity is great, there-
fore our responsibility is great. We have duties to perform both
abroad and at home, and we cannot shrink either set of duties and
fully retain our self respect.
Here in Florida, the first of the Gulf States which I have visited
upon this trip, I wish to say a special word about the Panama Canal.
I believe that the canal will be of great benefit to all our people, but
most of all to the States of the South Atlantic, the Gulf and the Pacific
slope. When completed the canal will stand as a monument to this
nation; for it will be the greatest engineering feat ever yet accom-
plished in the world. It will be a good thing for the world as a whole,
and for the people of the Isthmus and of the northern portions of
South America in particular. Because of our especial interest in it,
and because of the position we occupy on this hemisphere, it is a matter
of special pride to us that our nation, the American nation, should
have undertaken the performance of this world duty. A body of the
most eminent engineers in the world, both Americans and foreigners,
has been summoned to advise as to the exact type of canal which should
be built. At no distant date I hope to be able to announce what their
advice is, and also the action taken upon their advice. Meanwhile
the work is already well under way, and has advanced sufficiently far
to enable me to announce with certainty that it can surely be accom-
plished, and probably at rather less expense than was anticipated.
But upon the last point, as well as upon the question of time, no posi-
tive statement can be made until the report of the commission of engi-
neers as to the exact type of canal has been received. The work is as
difficult as it is important; and it is, of course, inevitable that from
time to time difficulties will occur and checks be encountered. When-
ever such is the case the men of little faith at home will lose that little
faith, and the critics who confound hysteria with emphasis will act
after their kind. But our people as a whole possess not only faith, but
resolution, and are of too virile fiber to be swept one way or the other
by mere sensationalism. No check that may come will be of more
than trivial and passing consequence, will inflict any permanent
damage, or cause any serious delay. The work can be done, is being
done, and will be done. What has already been accomplished is a
guaranty as to the future.
When any such work is undertaken there are always many mere
adventurers who flock to where it is going on, and many men who
Theodore Roosev clf 7OI
think they are adventurers, but who are in reality either weak or timid,
follow in their footsteps. Some of the first class will now and then
cause trouble in one way or another. But every care will be taken to
detect any misdeed on their part and to punish them as soon as the
misdeed is detected. As for the second class they will cause trouble
chiefly by losing heart, returning home, or writing home, and raising
a cry that they are not happy and that the conditions of life are not
easy, or that the work is not being done as they think it ought to be
done. Now these men stand just as the stragglers and laggards stand
who are ever to be found in the rear of even a victorious army. The
veterans of the Civil War who are here present will tell you that the
very rear of an army, even when it is victorious, is apt to look and
behave as if the victory were defeat. And just the same thing is true
in any great enterprise in civil life; there are always weaklings who
get trampled down or lose heart, and there are always people who
listen to their complaints. They amount to nothing one way or the
other, so far as achieving results is concerned; and their complaints
and outcries need never detain us.
I call your attention specifically to the matter of health on the
Isthmus. The climate was supposed to be deadly, and yellow fever,
in especial, was supposed to be epidemic. Yet since we have assumed
control there has been far less yellow fever than in our own country.
The administration is steadily becoming better and more effective,
from the hygienic as well as from every other standpoint. The work
of building the canal is a great American work, in which the whole
American people are interested. It has nothing to do with parties or
partisanship, and is being carried on with absolute disregard to all
merely political considerations; with regard only to efficiency, honesty
and economy.
The digging of the canal will, of course, greatly increase our interest
in the Caribbean Sea. It will be our duty to police the canal, both in
the interest of other nations and in our own interest. To do this it is,
of course, indispensable to have an efficient Navy (and I am happy
to say that we are well on our way toward having one), and also to
possess, as we already possess, certain strategic points to control the
approach to the canal. In addition it is urgently necessary that the
insular and continental countries within or bordering upon the Carib-
bean Sea should be able to secure fair dealing and orderly liberty
within their own borders. I need not say that the United States not
only has no purpose of aggression upon any Republic, continental
or insular, to the south of us, but has the friendliest feeling toward
them, and desires nothing save their progress and prosperity. We
do not wish another foot of territory; and I think our conduct toward
Cuba is a guaranty that this is our genuine attitude toward all our
702 Messages and Speeches
sister republics. If ever we should have to interfere in the affairs of
any of our neighbors it would only be when we found it impossible
longer to refrain from doing so without serious damage following ;
and even in such case it would only be with the sincere and effective
purpose to make our interference beneficial to the peoples concerned.
Of course, occupying the position we do, occasions may now and then
arise when we can not refrain from such interference, save under
penalty of seeing some other strong nation undertake the duty which
we neglect; and such neglect would be unfortunate from more than
one standpoint. Wherever possible we should gladly give any aid
we can to a weaker sister republic which is endeavoring to achieve
stability and prosperity. It is an ungenerous thing for us to refuse
such aid; and it is foolish not to give it in a way that will make it
really effective, and therefore of direct benefit to the people con-
cerned—and of indirect benefit to us, simply because it is a benefit to
them. In the last resort, and only in the last resort, it may occasionally
be necessary to interfere by exercising what is virtually an interna-
tional police power, if only to avoid seeing some European power
forced to exercise it. In short, while we must interfere always cau-
tiously, and never wantonly ; yet, on rare occasions, where the need
is great, it may be necessary to interfere, unless we are willing to
confess ourselves too feeble for the task we have undertaken, and to
avow that we are willing to surrender it into stronger hands; and
such confession and avowal I know my countrymen too well to be-
lieve that they will ever make.
AT ST. AUGUSTINE, FL.A., OCT. 21, 1905.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a great pleasure to be in your beautiful and this old
historic city. The last time I was down in Florida it was with my
regiment. We were going to Tampa, and I met your chairman at that
time. He was in the Florida regiment, and, of course, that was strictly
a business trip, and I didn’t have any chance to look about and enjoy
anything. Now I am here for other reasons. I am here now partly
for my own enjoyment and partly that I may have the chance to see
you and greet you.
Since I have been President, when I have finished this trip, I will
have spoken in every State in the Union, during my Presidency. I feel
that every President whose duties permit it should welcome the chance
to go about as often as he can in all the different parts of our country,
because, my friends, the President of the United States, if he is faith-
ful to his oath of office, is President of no party, no class, no section;
me is the President of all the people. During my period of the last
Theodore Roosevelt 703
four years I have been from one end of this country to the other,
across from Ocean to Ocean, from the Canadian line to the Gulf. I
have addressed many audiences and I cannot too often say that the
thing that impresses me most is, not the differences between one
American and another, but the fundamental underlying likeness
amongst all of us. And I think that the average American is a pretty
good man, and the one thing necessary to make him on good terms
with the other average American is that they know each other if they
have a chance of meeting their fellows, and I find that there is very
little difference.
Now fortunately we are past, long past, the time of division, and
there are no sectional lines. We must look to it and see that no other
lines of division of quite as undesirable character be drawn. In our
great 1ndustrial civilization which wealth produces it is inevitable that
there should grow up some men of wealth who use their wealth not
in desirable ways and at the same time some men who do not get any
wealth and would incline to envy those who do. Now this country
of Ours, or any Republic, cannot afford to see grow up within itself
elements or anything in any way approaching to lines drawn as between
class and class, or between caste and caste.
In the past no republics have been born for the rich only, and the
most potent factor in bringing about the downfall of each has almost
always been the growth of a spirit of loyalty to this class instead of
loyalty to the nation as a whole.* The minute that these republics
develop rich men who will look down on the poor, and poor and
envious men who hate and wish for the disposal of the rich ; the minute
that those classes develop in any republic, the day of that republic's
downfall is near at hand, and it makes not the slightest difference in
the end whether it was the rich man who looked down on the poor
man or the poor man who envied the rich man. If either side arose
and by trampling on the rights and perverting the institutions of the
republic and the welfare of the people as a whole, if either class thus
arose, the republic was at an end.
My belief in the destiny of this great nation is strong and fixed be-
cause I believe that our people will never permit such a spirit to grow
up in their hearts. This republic is not, and never shall, be the govern-
ment of a plutocracy. This government is not, and never shall be,
the government of a mob. It shall remain as it was founded in the
beginning, a government of justice, through the forms of law, a gov-
ernment wherein every man, rich or poor, is given justice and equal
rights, where each man is guaranteed in his own rights, and is op-
posed to wrong.
Here in the Southland, in every city throughout this great country,
*The death knell of every republic that ever died was tolled by a golden bell.—A. H. L.
704 Messages and Speeches
I meet men in every audience who have fought in the Civil War, have
fought in the great war. We are fortunate, my friends, in the fact
that now we are in every part so thoroughly reunited, and we have the
right and claim as Our Own, the honor of this country by every man
who in that great trouble did his duty as light was given him to see
his duty, without regard as to whether or not he wore the blue or the
gray. Now, I want to appeal to the experiences of the men of the
Civil War, and their experience in war will tell them the truth of what
I am saying to you should be our proper attitude in time of peace. To
you, my friend, down there, when you were in the war, it was a great
thing to have your “bunkie” a game man, and as long as he did his
duty and went out to fight it didn’t matter if he stood firm. That if
you were ordered up you didn’t have to go looking out for him to see
that he was there, and follow this man up to see that he fought. You
didn’t care the slightest degree how he worshiped his God or whether
he was well off or not, but whether he was a man and a true man.
It is exactly the same thing now in civil life. If we permit ourselves
to draw a line of distinction between men, to judge them harshly or
leniently, because of their social standing and their wealth, or because
they are our favorites, or because of their great influence on outside
circumstances we are false to our principles of American citizens. If
he is a straight man we should be for him, and if he is a crooked man
we should be against him.
Now, about what are the qualities that make good citizenship? They
are not very difficult qualities. It is not always easy to develop the
proper point, but there is nothing wonderful in the way of genius, or
even of cleverness needed to bring out qualities which we all of us
recognize as essential to the man with whom we want to deal in our
ordinary affairs. In the first place, if a man is to be a good citizen he
has got to have as a basis to his character, honesty and decency. The
sort that will make him act fairly by his neighbor, the sort that will
make him do his duty in his community, and to make his name in the
community before he goes to the State.
We cannot afford to accept any other quality as a substitute for
honesty, and one of the least desirable traits sometimes shown among
our people is a tendency to be one that makes gain unaccompanied by
the moral sense, exercised without scruple.
Realize that a man if crooked and not a fool is the worse for
the entire community. We don’t have much difficulty with a crooked
fool. But the crooked man who has got a good deal more than the
average amount of sense will cause a lot of trouble. It is not the
scoundrel who fails, but it is the scoundrel who succeeds who interests
us. There are many very healthy developments in this country and
Theodore Roosevelt 705
there are more that are not so healthy, and among the last of them is the
growth of a spirit which is warped.
Now we can say, I think, that the first thing in a man is that he
should have a courage. I find that it is indispensable for me or almost
anyone that he is able to form his own opinion. I have no use for the
laborer who works solely on a manual ground on his own account. I
want to see the man able to support those dependent upon him and to
educate his children, so that the whole united community are benefited
by it, and we insist upon the applying of the proper amount of success
following men in the community, not merely in what he has made, but
by what he has done.
Now then, as I was saying, the first quality needed in good citizen-
ship is honesty. Just exactly as in the war, the men in your regiment
had to be men devoted to the cause, devoted to right and men willing to
give their lives or their devotion if need be. The men possessed with the
idea of patriotism. But honesty by itself is not enough, no one quality is
enough. It does not make any difference how honest he is if he is stingy.
That man is not much use in a democratic community. No use here.
Our community is a rough-and-tumble community. So, in addition to
honesty, we must have another virtue, courage. The courage that in
time of need will show up our honesty. We must have that courage
that will do right even if sneered at or laughed at, the courage that
will refuse to be bought and that will refuse to be bullied. The
courage that will never betray the people's cause and the courage that
will refuse to go with popular clamor if that popular clamor is wrong.
I want to say, remember this, that if you go to a man and he says
that if the people want it he will do something that is wrong in their
interests, you can make up your minds you have got a man who, if he
takes up his own interests, will do something wrong to the people in
his own interests.
Some years ago I lived out in the West, out in the cow country, on
a cattle ranch, in a land where there were no fences; where we had
cowboys and branding irons to supply these fences. Each cow was
branded with the owner's mark, an unwritten law of the West, and if
you had an unbranded yearling you put the brand of your own ranch
on. I told my cowboy to put an owner's brand on one of his calves,
and he said he didn’t have his branding iron, but he would put mine on.
I said, “You go back and get your time.” He said, “Why, that is your
iron.” “Yes,” I said, “that is my iron, but if you will steal for me
you will steal from me.”
If you get any man who is willing to do wrong for you, if it is to
his interests, he will do wrong to you. So that you need honest and
courageous men, both in order that a man may make a good citizen.
And those two are not enough. We do not care how honest a man
706 Messages and Speeches
is and how brave he is, if he is a natural-born fool you can’t do any-
thing with him. Honesty and courage you will need, with the saving
grace of common sense.
If you have got those qualities in the average man, self-government
is a success. If the average man does not have them then no device
will supply their place.
And men and women of Florida, I believe in the future of this
country, in your future, in our future, because I believe that the average
American has got exactly those three qualities of honesty, courage and
COIT1111011 SenSe,
[St. Augustine Evening Record, Oct. 23, 1905.]
ATA BANQUET GIVEN BY THE ST. AUGUSTINE BOARD OF TRADE,
AT ST. AUGUSTINE, FL.A., OCT. 21, 1905.
I shall say but one word of thanks to you tonight. I have a very
deep appreciation of the courtesies you have shown me. I do
indeed appreciate the reception you have given me in this, the oldest
historic city in the United States, and the hospitality with which
you have followed it. I thank the gentlemen who have spoken tonight
for their kind personal allusions. And I do want to say one thing in
conclusion; if I have ever been able to accomplish anything at all in
regard to peace or whatever else it may be, it has been done only
to this end, to give fit expression to the thoughts and aspirations of
the mighty people whose representative I, at the present time, happen
to be. Good night.
[St. Augustine Evening Record, Oct. 23, 1905.]
AT FLOMATON, AL.A., OCT. 23, 1905.
My fellow citizens:
I wish to thank you most heartily for coming to greet me today. The
last time I came through your great and beautiful State I was with my
regiment on the way to the Spanish War. In that regiment I had more
men whose fathers had worn the gray than I had whose fathers had
worn the blue; but they united in the generous rivalry to know no
difference and in the emulation of seeing whether or not each could
do all that was in him for the flag of your common country.
Gentlemen, think how fortunate we are as a people that, whereas,
most great wars leave memories of rancor and bitterness, we now have
the right of Americans all over this country to claim as part of the
glory of all Americans all that was done alike by the ex-Union and
ex-Confederate men, provided only that man did all that in him lay;
acted as he should act in the times that tried men's souls.
There are surely here in the audience men who are veterans of the
Theodore Roosevelt 707
Civil War; and they have given us a lesson, not merely by what they
did in war, but by what they did in peace. The same spirit that made
them valiant in battle made them, when they came home from battle,
take up the strings of their lives where they had dropped them when
the appeal to arms came, and do their best in walks of peace. It is
because of that quality that we as a people have such a right to glory
in the progress made in our land.
In greeting the people, in greeting the veterans of the Civil War,
I now want to get down to the other end of the line, and say just a
word about the children. Children of to-day are going to decide what
Our country shall be in the immediate future, and accordingly as they
are brought up well or ill our country will go forward or backward
in the years that are now open. While much can be done by schools,
do not forget that most, after all, must be done in the home itself.
There is nothing unusual, nothing out of the way, demanded in making
a good citizen. What we need is not genius, not brilliancy, but the
Ordinary commonplace virtues that every man or woman can have, if
only he or she will. The man who is decent in his home relations, who
is kind to those dependent upon him, who is a good husband, father, and
son, is a good citizen; and an even better citizen is his wife. What we
need in the average man in his relation to the State is that he shall
have the three qualities—courage, honesty, and common sense.
AT MOBILE, AL.A., OCT. 23, 1905.
Mr. Mayor, gentlemen, and you, my fellow Americans:
I cannot sufficiently express my appreciation of the magnificent
greeting that you have given me to-day, and a man would be but a
poor American who could meet you here, my fellow citizens, without
being, stirred to feel that he must, even more than before, strive to do
all that in him lies for our common country, and I know that the rest
of you will not grudge my saying that most of all am I touched by
the sight of the men who wore the gray in the great war parading
here to-day. I have just been presented by Judge Semmes with this
beautiful badge. I passed by the statue of Admiral Semmes as we
drove up hither. Admiral Semmes had under him on the “Alabama”
one of my uncles, and it was another uncle that built the “Alabama,”
and now the judge's sister, the admiral's daughter, is the wife of that
distinguished ex-Confederate who, as governor of the Philippines, has
held aloft the record of the American role for integrity, efficiency and
firmness. The last time I came through this beautiful, historic city
of yours, I was going with my own regiment to the Spanish War, and
in that regiment I think there were more men whose fathers wore
the gray than there were men whose fathers wore the blue. But,
708 Messages and Speeches
gentlemen, they marched in that spirit symbolized by your march to-
day, carrying the American flag.
In speaking before the citizens of this great seaport of the gulf, I
naturally wish to say a word about the Panama Canal. Now, I hold
that as a matter of public policy, whatever helps a part of Our country
helps the whole, and I did my best to bring about the construction of
that canal in the interest of all our people, but if there was any one
section to be most benefited by it, it was the section that includes the
gulf states. Originally I had been for the Nicaraguan Canal, but when
Congress acted, I abode by the decision of Congress. It became evi-
dent that we should either have no canal at all or a Panama canal, and
I am for a canal. If we had not acted as we then did, our chance of
building that canal would have vanished for a century to come, and as
it is, we now are assured of having that canal within a comparatively
short time, and gentlemen, I want to warn you not to be misled by
interested clamor. Every man who had to do with bringing about the
construction of that canal knows that for decades it was opposed, and
successfully opposed, by the great commercial interests which did not
wish to see it completed. By the great commercial interests which did
not wish, and do not wish, to see a canal speedily dug through the
isthmus; to see communication between the Pacific and the Atlantic by
water speedily begun. No! It seems to me evident from certain
things that I see in a portion of the daily press that those interests are
still active, and that they are going to try to becloud the issue, with the
hope of putting off for ten or fifteen years or longer the digging of
that canal, and their weapons will be every form of misrepresentation,
and, gentlemen, they will fail! You need not have the slightest alarm.
Uncle Sam has started to dig that canal, and it will be dug, and soon.
And the people who are, largely by the circulation of false rumors and
misstatements, seeking to create confusion such as will defer the build-
ing of the canal, will be disappointed. We have, as a people, the right
to feel genuine satisfaction with the progress that has already been
made; and, gentlemen, let me add something that you here will appre-
ciate the significance of: the sanitation of the isthmus. Do you re-
member that a couple of years ago men said you could not dig that
canal because yellow fever was epidemic always there; and yet we are
digging it, and with a cleaner bill of mortality than the isthmus has
ever known before. I am happy to be able to tell you that from informa-
tion received this very day, I find that those who have just returned
from the isthmus are not only pleased, but astonished by the excellent
trim in which the project is, and that it is going on well, and that it
will go along even better in the future.
Now, of all the things that were said about me to-day, in the more
than kind, the over-kind allusions to me, perhaps I was especially
Theodore Roosevelt 709
pleased by what the colonel said as to my attitude toward crooked
public servants. I will take advice about appointing men, but if I find
them crooked I do not take any advice at all about removing them.
We have scriptural authority for the saying that offenses must come,
but the Good Book adds, “Woe to them through whom they come.” I
cannot guarantee, and no human being can, and there will not be an
Occasional man, or an improper man appointed, of an occasional well-
meaning man, who after appointed, being tempted, goes wrong, but I
can say that every effort within the power of the government will be
made to hunt such a man out of the public service and to punish him
to the fullest extent of the law.
And now, gentlemen, in this great seaport city, I want to say another
word, and that is about the United States navy. Judge Semmes, in
passing by the monument of your illustrious father, I felt the thrill of
pride every American must feel, that the names of the combatants in
that famous ship duel are commemorated in the name of the “Kear-
Sarge” and the “Alabama” in our United States navy now, and that if
ever they have to go into action, they go into action side by side, manned
by Americans against a common foe. Now, gentlemen, I know that
an audience composed as this audience is, of men who either them-
selves, or whose fathers fought in the Civil War, appreciate to the
full the sound national policy, if I may use the vernacular, of never
“bluffing unless you mean to make good.” Now, we undertook to
build the Panama Canal because we said that owing to our position and
interests and standing, we were the only nation that could or should do
it. That means that we have got to protect it and police it ourselves.
We did not ask anybody else to help us do the work we have allotted
to ourselves. We must, therefore, bring up and keep up our navy to
the highest point of efficiency. We can afford to have a small army,
although we must insist upon its being kept up to the highest point of
efficiency. That, I am glad to say, our regular army in its individual
units has now done. But in the event of war, a war which I hope
will never come, but if it does come, the American people in the future
as in the past must on land rely upon the volunteer soldiery; upon such
men as those who have been my escort to-day, and I want to say that
I had the very strongest fellow-feeling when I saw you; I felt as if
my own regiment was along. But while it is a simple task to turn
a man of the proper temper, physique and training into a good soldier,
you cannot improvise either a battleship or crew of a battleship. At
sea, the war has to be fought with the ships and crews that have been
prepared before the war begins, and we wish to profit by the lessons
of our own country and the lessons of other countries, in seeing that
our navy is always kept adequate to our needs. It is not necessary to
have a very large navy, but it is necessary that, ship for ship, it should
7Io Messages and Speeches
be just a little the most efficient navy in the world. In battle the shots
that count are the shots that hit. There are plenty of gallant fellows—
we saw them in the Spanish war—who will go down with their ships.
That is all right. If there is nothing else to do, better go down with
the ship rather than surrender, but try to make the other fellow's ship
go down first. And I want the people to feel that in assuming to dig
the Isthmian Canal, in assuming the position we have assumed as
regards this western hemisphere, and in the oriental seas, we bind
ourselves to keep our navy at such a point of efficiency that there
shall be no chance of humiliation at the hands of any foreign foe.
And finally, my friends, I want to say just one word in conclusion.
I shall not keep you more than three minutes. I appreciate immensely
this mighty outpouring. I wish I could be heard by all of you, and I
only hope you do not hurt one another while trying to listen. But
let us never forget that the American nation depends, in the last
analysis, upon the quality of its individual citizenship, upon the quality
of the average man and average woman that go to make it, and next
only to the veterans, the people I think I was most pleased to see today
were the children, those who were carried in the arms of their fathers
and mothers, or walked beside them, and those who were gathered in
groups under their teachers. The nation is going to be all right
surely, if the average man is a decent husband and father and the
average woman a good wife and mother.
While I congratulate you with all my heart upon your cotton crop,
upon your great resources, the best crop you have got, or any one else
can have, is the crop of children. They are the raw material of the
country as it will be a generation hence, and, father, mother, teacher,
must see to it that that raw material is turned out as a finished product,
fit to do the very best work in American life. My friends, self govern-
ment is not an easy thing. It is easy enough to be governed by some-
body else. People do not need any great qualities to live under a
despotism, but it needs great qualities in order to achieve successful
self government, for the average man must be straight, must be clean,
must be brave, and must have common sense, and, therefore, infinitely
more important than any of the things which sometimes loom out
before us, is that group of things connected with home and family
life. The things that count are the things upon which we are all
agreed, and must be all agreed, in our civic life, whether president,
governor, mayor, congressman, or state legislator, or councilman.
There are certain basic principles to which we must prove true if we
are to make this country what she shall be made in the future. If this
country rises level in the future to the standard set by the men of her
glorious past, we cannot, any of us, afford to differ about the question
of honesty in public life, decency and cleanliness in private life. Those
Theodore Roosevelt 7II
qualities go to the root of the whole question of citizenship, and I
believe that this great self-governing republic will rise to a height
in this century never before dreamed of by any other nation, because I
believe that the average American citizen, North or South, East or
West, has the right stuff in him, that the average American citizen
has the three fundamental principles of honesty, courage and common
SCI1S62.
[Mobile Weekly Register, Oct. 28, 1905.]
AT TUSKEGEE, AL.A., OCT. 24, 1905.
Mr. Mayor and friends and fellow Americans:
It is indeed a peculiar pleasure to be here this morning and be greeted
as you have greeted me. Mr. Mayor, I feel that those gathered here to
greet me symbolize what we most like to think of as a typical American
in our national life. When you brought me here, Mr. Mayor, I was
met on the platform by the pastors of the Methodist and Baptist
churches in the shade of an institution of higher learning, in the
presence of these students and children of the public schools. At the
same time I see the industries of the nation typified both by cotton
being picked as I came up and also by the fact that I am speaking on
the most valuable platform I have ever spoken on, and finally I have
as a guard of honor members of the National Guard, who, as I look
at them I feel that they are my own comrades, for they are just the
type I had in my own regiment in the Spanish war.
These elements, as I say, typify what we hope and believe are the
elements representing what is most vital in American life; the deep
religious feeling of our people, the understanding of our people that
material prosperity amounts to nothing if behind it and under it there
is not the spiritual sense, the sense of moral obligation, the fealty to
an ideal, the realization that in addition to that, you must have as the
foundation of national prosperity industry, energy and thrift, and the
fruits of that industry, energy and thrift, devotion to arts and prac-
tices of peace, devotion to civic duty and yet the readiness of the man
who does his duty in civil life to do it in a military life if ever the
need arises, and, finally, the recognition of the fact that though a great
many crops are important, the most important is the crop of children.
The one thing this nation cannot afford to neglect is the education
of the nation of the future. You, Mr. Mayor, I, all of us here, will
pass away and the nation of the future will rise higher and higher or
not, just as the boys and girls of the present are or are not trained to
do their duty as men and women. So I take a particular pleasure in
being here and greeting the children of the public schools and those
past childhood studying in this college itself. The one all-essential
7I2 Messages and Speeches
thing in America, the thing that underlies everything else, is to have
the average American a good man or a good woman; and if there is
any one thing that I respect more than a good man, it is a good woman.
I think she is just a trifle more useful, and she has a harder time in
life and she is a little more entitled to our respect than even the best
man. And there is not a man here who is worth his salt who does
not agree with me.
Of course, it is a mere truism to say that the ultimate factor in
determining the welfare of the nation is the life of home; that is, the
way it is the ordinary man and ordinary woman performs his or her
ordinary duties of the most sacred, intimate kind. If the man is a
good father, a good husband; if he is decent and clean in his domestic
life; if he does his duty by his neighbor; if he is the kind of a man
whom we are glad to have as a neighbor, that man is all right; he is
going to be a good citizen. It is just the same with women; if the
woman is a good wife and mother, she is a good citizen, and not
merely a good citizen, but she is the very best kind of citizen that this
country can produce.
What we need is not the desire to perform the heroic duties under
altogether exceptional circumstances, but the steadfast determination
to perform the rather commonplace duties of every day, day by day,
as they arise; speaking broadly, the man who does that is the man
whom you can trust if the need for heroism arises. Each boy here
should remember that the way to fit yourself to be of the utmost
possible use is to act so that your family likes to have you at home
instead of feeling a relief when you are gone; it is the same way with
the girl. We all of us know an occasional foolish mother who says:
“I have had to work hard ; I have had a pretty hard time, my daughters
shall not have to work.” This is not kindness to the daughter. It is
doing the very worst thing that can be done for her. Do not bring
up your boys and girls to be useless, to avoid trouble, to get around
trouble, to shirk work. The man or the woman who counts in life is
the man or the woman who does not flinch from a task, but who does
the task, who overcomes the obstacle. The boy or girl won't turn out
that kind of man or woman if they are not brought up in that spirit
from the beginning.
I want to say that nothing could have pleased me more or touched
me more than just this kind of reception today, coming, as I have,
through your beautiful town with the roomy, spacious streets, and the
great trees and being greeted by this assemblage of those whom I am
proud to honor as my fellow American citizens.
Theodore Roosevelt 7I3
AT TUSKEGEE NORMAL INDUSTRIAL INSTITUTE, TUSKEGEE,
AL.A., OCT. 24, 1905.
Mr. Washington and each student and graduate of Tuskegee:
You can't be as much inspired by anything I may say, as I have
been inspired by what I have seen here. Mr. Washington, it is a liberal
education in itself just to come here and see this great focus of
civilization. Now, I had read a good deal of your work, and I believe
in it with all my heart. I would not call myself a good American if
I did not. I was prepared to see what would impress me and please
me, but I had no idea that I would be so deeply impressed, so deeply
pleased as I have been. I did not realize the extent of your work. I
did not realize how much you were doing.
I wish I had the time not merely to go around to see the buildings
and the grounds, but to see the finished product outside. I would like
to go around and see the houses that are being built up by those who
leave this institution. I would like to see the effect in actual life of
the training here, and wish that some man with the gift of description
would come here and go from here out where the graduates go and
visit them in their homes and follow out what they are doing and
describe it all. I think there could not be anything better than that
so as to show what is being done, and, Mr. Washington, while I have
always stood for this institution, now that I have seen it and realize
as I had never realized by the descriptions of it, all it means, I will
stand for it more than ever.
To the white population as well as to the black, it is of the utmost
importance that the negro be encouraged to make himself a citizen of
the highest type of usefulness. It is to the interest of the white people
that this policy be conscientiously pursued, and to the interest of the
colored people that they clearly realize that they have opportunities
for economic development here in the South not now offered else-
where. Within the last twenty years the industrial operations of the
South have increased so tremendously that there is a scarcity of labor
almost everywhere; so that it is the part of wisdom for all who wish
the prosperity of the South to help the negro to become in the highest
degree useful to himself, and therefore to the community in which he
lives. The South has always depended, and now depends, chiefly upon
her native population for her work. Therefore in view of the scarcity
not only of common labor, but of skilled labor, it becomes doubly im-
portant to train every available man to be of the utmost use, by de-
veloping his intelligence, his skill, and his capacity for conscientious
effort. Hence the work of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial In-
stitute is a matter of the highest practical importance to both the
white man and the black man, and well worth the support of both
7I4 Messages and Speeches
races alike in the South and in the North. Your fifteen hundred
students are not only being educated in head and heart, but also
trained to industrial efficiency, for from the beginning Tuskegee has
placed especial emphasis upon the training of men and women in
agriculture, mechanics and household duties. Training in these three
fundamental directions does not embrace all that the negro, or any
other race, needs, but it does cover in a very large degree the field in
which the negro can at present do most for himself and be most
helpful to his white neighbors. Every black man who leaves this
institute better able to do mechanical or industrial work adds by so
much to the wealth of the whole community and benefits all people in
the community. The professional and mercantile avenues to success
are overcrowded; for the present the best chance of success awaits
the intelligent worker at some mechanical trade or on a farm; for this
man will almost certainly achieve industrial independence. I am
pleased, but not in the least surprised, to learn that many among the
men and women trained at Tuskegee find immediate employment as
leaders and workers among their own people, and that their services
are eagerly sought by white people for various kinds of industrial
work, the demand being much greater than the supply. Viewed from
any angle, ignorance is the costliest crop that can be raised in any
part of this Union. Every dollar put into the education of either
white man or black man, in head, in hand, and in heart, yields rich
dividends to the entire community. Merely from the economic stand-
point it is of the utmost consequence to all our citizens that institutions
such as this at Tuskegee should be a success. But there are other and
even higher reasons that entitle it to our support. In the interest of
humanity, of justice, and of self-protection, every white man in
America, no matter where he lives, should try to help the negro to
help himself. It is in the interest, and for the protection, of the white
man to see that the negro is educated. It is not only the duty of the
white man, but it is to his interest, to see that the negro is protected
in property, in life, and in all his legal rights. Every time a law is
broken every individual in the community has the moral tone of his
life lowered. Lawlessness in the United States is not confined to any
One section; lynching is not confined to any one section; and there is
perhaps no body of American citizens who have deserved so well of
the entire American people as the public men, the publicists, the clergy-
men, the countless thousands of high-minded private citizens, who
have done such heroic work in the South in arousing public opinion
against lawlessness in all its forms, and especially against lynching.
I very earnestly hope that their example will count in the North as
well as in the South, for there are just as great evils to be warred
against in one region of our country as in another, though they are
y
Theodore Roosevelt 7I5
not in all places the same evils. And when any body of men in any
community stands bravely for what is right, these men not merely
serve a useful purpose in doing the particular task to which they set
themselves, but give a lift to the cause of good citizenship throughout
the Union. I heartily appreciate what you have done at Tuskegee:
and I am sure you will not grudge my saying that it could not possibly
have been done save for the loyal support you have received from the
white people round about; for during the twenty-five years of effort
to educate the black man here in the midst of a white community of
intelligence and culture, there has never been an outbreak between the
races, or any difficulty of any kind. All honor is due to the white men
of Alabama, to the white men of Tuskegee, for what they have done.
And right here, let me say that if in any community a misunderstand-
ing between the races arises, over any matter, infinitely the best way
out is to have a prompt, frank and full conference and consultation
between representatives of the wise, decent, cool-headed men among the
whites and the wise, decent, cool-headed colored men. Such a confer-
ence will always tend to bring about a better understanding, and will
be a great help all round.
Hitherto I have spoken chiefly of the obligations existing on the
part of the white men. Now let you rémember on the other hand that
no help can permanently avail you save as you yourselves develop
capacity for self-help. You young colored men and women educated
at Tuskegee must by precept and example lead your fellows toward
sober, industrious, law-abiding lives. You are in honor bound to join
hands in favor of law and order and to war against all crime, and
especially against all crime by men of your own race; for the heaviest
wrong done by the criminal is the wrong to his own race. You must
teach the people of your race that they must scrupulously observe any
contract into which they in good faith enter, no matter whether it is
hard to keep or not. If you save money, secure homes, become tax-
payers, and lead clean, decent, modest lives, you will win the respect
of your neighbors of both races. Let each man strive to excel his
fellows only by rendering substantial service to the community in
which he lives. The colored people have many difficulties to pass
through, but these difficulties will be surmounted if only the policy
of reason and common sense is pursued. You have made real and great
progress. According to the census the colored people of this country
own and pay taxes upon something like three hundred million dollars'
worth of property, and have blotted out over fifty per cent of their
illiteracy. What you have done in the past is an indication of what
you will be able to accomplish in the future under wise leadership.
Moral and industrial education is what is most needed, in order that
this progress may continue. The race can not expect to get every-
716 Messages and Speeches
thing at once. It must learn to wait and bide its time; to prove itself
worthy by showing its possession of perseverance, of thrift, of self-
control. The destiny of the race is chiefly in its own hands, and must
be worked out patiently and persistently along these lines. Remember
also that the white man who can be of most use to the colored man
is that colored man's neighbor. It is the Southern people themselves
who must and can solve the difficulties that exist in the South ; of
course what help the people of the rest of the Union can give them,
must and will be gladly and cheerfully given. The hope of advance-
ment for the colored man in the South lies in his steady, common-
sense effort to improve his moral and material condition, and to work
in harmony with the white man in upbuilding the Commonwealth.
The future of the South now depends upon the people of both races
living up to the spirit and letter of the laws of their several States
and working out the destinies of both races, not as races, but as law-
abiding American citizens.
AT THE CAPITOL AT MONTGOMERY, ALA, OCT. 24, 1905.
Governor, Col. Wiley, and you, fellow Americans and fellow citizens:
I cannot sufficiently express the pleasure I feel in being here and
in being greeted with more than a lavish warmth of hospitality as
you have greeted me and, oh, my friends, oh, my fellow citizens, think
what a privilege is ours, think what it means for this nation, that there
is no place in the Union where the President of the Union can feel
more at home, can feel more that he is indeed the President of all the
Union, of a reunited and indissoluble Union, than speaking here under
the shadow of the first capitol of the Confederacy. Poor, indeed, would
be the soul of the man who did not leave Montgomery a better American
than when he came into it after being received in it as I have been
received.
In speaking to all of age, and younger still, you will not grudge
me saying a special word of greeting to the veterans of the great war.
Here, again, think how fortunate we are. There is no other people of
which history tells which, having passed through such a war as we
have passed through, now, after forty years, finds not only that the
flag which had been rent asunder is once again whole, without a seam,
but finds all her people challenging as theirs the right to claim their
part in the heritage of glory bequeathed to every American alike by
the American who wore the blue and the American who wore the
gray in the great Civil War.
Here I have come to your mighty and beautiful State, with its wealth
of agriculture, its wealth of manufactures, and, more than ever, I am
impressed with the solidarity of our interests as a people. As the
Theodore Roosevelt 717
Governor pointed, the greatest and most important single export of our
people is the export of cotton, that is the most important crop among
our exports, and the whole nation is concerned in the welfare of the
cotton growers. It is not only important for Alabama and the rest
of the Gulf States, it is important for the entire Union, because it is
the cotton crop which determines the balance of trade as being in favor
of this nation. Whatever is the business of any part of this nation,
the trade of the entire nation and the national government are bound
to do everything possible in the interest of the cotton growers to pre-
serve your markets, to do everything that can possibly be done to see
that the demand for cotton, the natural demand for cotton abroad,
is kept up, and is met here under fair conditions by our own people.
Probably no State in this Union is more interested in the building
of what is to be the greatest engineering feat the world has yet seen,
the building of the Isthmian Canal. The cotton crop largely goes to
Asia, and, of course, the canal greatly shortens the route. Our in-
fluence in the Orient must be kept at such a pitch as will insure our
being able to guarantee fair treatment to our merchants and manu-
factures in the markets of China. We must insist upon having fair
treatment, and as a step toward getting it we must give fair treatment
in return. I would demand that on ethical grounds alone. I would
demand it also on grounds of self-interest.
And now, in greeting all of you to-day, having paid first of all special
tribute to the veterans, I want to go to the other end of the procession
and say a word about the children. As you know, I believe in children.
I like your stock, and I want to see it kept up. Nothing pleases me
more than to see the care that you are devoting to education in this
State, and among the many splendid heroic deeds to be credited to
the Southern people in peace as well as in war, is the fact that having
to face as they did the future in the midst of a broken and war-swept
country they not only built up their industrial prosperity, but they have
provided steadily for the education of the coming generation.
The prime factor in the growth of any nation is the factor of in-
dividual citizenship. The nation is going to be all right if the average
man and average woman are all right. If the average man is a good
father, a good husband, is a decent man in his own home, if he does
his duty by his neighbors, if he does his duty in peace and yet has
the stuff in him to enable him to do his duty in war, if the time comes,
then the average man is all right; and if the average woman is a good
wife and a good mother, then I think she is just a little bit better
fellow than the average man, and I guess all of us think so too—don't
you? If anybody does not, I do not think much of him, that is all.
What you want in this nation is not brilliancy, not genius, but the fair
performance of the average duties, the common duties of life.
718 Messages and Speeches
Now, as I passed up here, I was awfully glad to see the men of the
National Guard. The men in troops on horseback and the men on foot,
they all know, and the veterans could tell them if it were necessary,
that the man who is a good soldier is not the man who is always wait-
ing until the chance comes to do something great and spectacular. It
is the man who does each day's duty in passing, as they do on the
march and in battle as that day's duty arises. Isn't that so, friends?
Those here who have been in the big war know it. You who were in
the Civil War know the man who wanted next to you in rank was the
man whom you could count on doing his share, whatever the work.
You did not want him to drop his blanket at IO o'clock because it was
too hot, and then want to share yours at midnight when it was cold.
If you had to dig a kitchen sink you wanted him to do his share of the
work, and not derive the profits if you did the work. You wanted the
man to do his duty as that day's duty arose—that is the important point.
It is just so in the affairs of civil life. It is given to mighty few
men ever to have the chance of doing anything heroic, and to those
few men that chance, if it comes at all, comes but once or twice in a
lifetime, and you do not judge a life by any two or three minutes in
it. You judge it by the sum of days, the sum of years. What we
need is the performance of duty, of the ordinary duty that the ordinary
man or woman has to meet as he or she lives his or her life, and in
One way it is a great comfort to think so.
Gentlemen, if you only think of it, the essential point in our lives is
the likenesses in our lives, not the dissimilarities. Some people lead
their lives in positions of more prominence than others, but if they are
decent people, if they are good people, they show just the same kind of
quality, just the same kind of virtue in one place as the other, and the
good citizen, the man who has done good to his country, is the man
who, whether he is a very wealthy man or whether he has but a day's
bread by that day’s toil, whether he is an officer or private in the ranks
of life, has done his duty as the Lord gives him light to see his duty
in the position he occupies. It is not the President or the Senators or
the Congressmen, or even the Governors, who make up our nation, who
make the greatness of our nation. The man that counts is the average
private citizen; he is the man that counts.
I am not saying that to compliment you, but so that you may realize
your responsibility. It is not a bit important that you should feel
flattered at the thought, but it is very important that you should realize
the weight of responsibility that thought implies; it very important
that you should realize what self-government is. Anybody can be
governed by somebody else. It is the easiest thing in the world to be
the subject of a despotism. Just sit still and take it—no trouble about
that at all. But to be a member of a self-governing community means
Theodore Roosevelt 719
that if you are to do your part in that community, you must possess
the powers of self-restraint, of self-rule, of courage, of honesty, clean
living, and decent thinking. Those are the qualities needed if it is to
be true that the average citizen is in our country the man that counts.
It is just as it was in the Civil War, you men, the veterans of the Civil
War here, know. A great thing that we should have developed mighty
leaders of men, the great generals who have left their names as mem-
ories and heritages of honor and glory to our people forever, but, after
all, the prime factor alike in the Union and Confederate armies was the
man with the musket, the man behind the gun. The best officers in the
world could not have done anything with the army if the army did
not do the right thing; if the army had not been of the right kind. You
had to have the right stuff in them, or else nobody could have got it
out of them.
Now, it is just so in citizenship. I don’t care how wise the leaders
are, self-government won’t work unless you have the right type of man
in the ranks, unless you have the right type of private citizen, and it
has worked and will work in this country because we have got the
right kind of citizens, because we have the right type of private citizen.
But, he is not going to make himself the right type merely by applaud-
ing the sentiment. He is going to make himself the right type by
understanding that it is hard work taking part in self-government.
There has got to be some principle in control somewhere in every one,
and the less of it there is within any man, the more of it there is with-
out him, the less a man is able to govern himself, the more somebody
else will have to govern, and if a man cannot govern his own appetites
and passions, somebody else will have to do the governing for him in
the long run.
People can govern themselves only by practicing the virtues of
moderation, self-restraint, of understanding that the simple homely
virtues of honesty, courage and common sense are essential to the full
development of citizenship in a free land, and, gentlemen, the success-
ful performance of political duty depends absolutely upon the success-
ful performance of domestic, of social duty. There can never be,
there never will be, a good government of which the average citizen is
not a decent man in private life.
It is a contradiction in terms to speak of good government if the
government does not rest upon clean lives and decency in the home,
respect of husband and wife for each other, tenderness of the man
for those dependent upon him; performance of duty by woman and by
man, and the proper education of the children who are to make the
next generation. The vital things in life are the things that foolish
people look upon as commonplace; the vital things in life are those
720 Messages and Speeches
things which it lies within the reach of each of us to do and the failure
to perform which means the destruction of the state.
I shall not keep you longer. Let me just say once more that though
I came into this State, I hope, a good American and proud of my
country, I shall leave this State just a little better American and a little
bit prouder of my country.
[Washington Post.]
AT CAPITOL PARK, BIRMINGHAM, AL.A., OCT. 24, 1905.
I wish to say that I am stirred most deeply by this magnificent re-
ception from what Mr. Rhodes has so well called the Magic City
of the South. No American worthy of the name would fail to be
stirred with patriotism as he comes into your magnificent State, into
this magnificent city. Alabama has made a wonderful record. At the
close of the war, shattered, war swept, it seemed that it was impossible
for her people, in the grip of poverty as they were, to rally; and any
people less strong than you of Alabama would have failed, but you had
the stuff in you and you succeeded. z
About the year 1880 the tide turned, and the last quarter of a cen-
tury has seen in Alabama a progress that would have been absolutely
impossible in any other age or in any other nation than ours. The agri-
culture of the State went upward by leaps and bounds; but even more
marvelous was your mechanical and industrial progress. You have
here in your State coal and iron, the two basic elements in modern in-
dustrialism, and you have also a wealth of water power only partially
used, and given that amount of natural resources and the right type of
man to use them the result is what we have seen. But, my friends,
there is something that is ahead of any kind of natural resources, and
that is the citizenship of the men on the soil, and I want to say that,
proud though I am of your extraordinary industrial prosperity, I am
prouder yet of the men who have achieved it.
Now, think what it means to have the President of the United
States greeted as he has been today, with, on his right and his left
hand, as a guard of honor, the veterans of the Civil War—the men
who wore the blue, the men who wore the gray—united to honor me.
Old men of the great war, I have some of my comrades of the lesser
war here to greet me also.
Our war was not a very big war, but it was all the war there was,
and we had to do the best we could with it, and all we hope is that we
showed ourselves not altogether unworthy of you of the mighty days.
For instance, in my regiment (the last time we passed through this
State I was with my regiment), in that regiment I had, I believe, more
men whose fathers wore the gray than I had of those whose fathers
i Theodore Roosevelt 721
wore the blue, and almost all the fathers wore one or the other. And
those men were united together with but one rivalry to see which could
do best for the flag of our common country.
And what a heritage is ours! Here, after one of the greatest wars
of all time, we are left, what was left by no other war, the right for
the children of those who fought on both sides to feel the keenest
pride alike in the deeds of the men who followed Grant and in the
deeds of the men who followed Lee, so long as each man did all that
in him lay to prove the truth by his endeavor, to show that at the call
of the nation, at the call of duty, he was willing to lay down every-
thing—life itself—for the right as God gave him to see the right.
I have said a word now of special greeting to the veterans—the men
in blue and gray are entitled to the right of the line. Now I want to
travel down to the other end and say a word to the children. I ap-
preciate all of Alabama's progress, appreciate all of Alabama's crops,
but the best Alabama crop is the crop of Alabama children.
As I said once before today, I like your stock and am glad it is not
dying out. As I came up the street nothing pleased me so much as
the school children drawn up alongside the line of march. We must
remember that we leave this country in the hands of the children of
today, and that the American of tomorrow will be what we train the
boy or girl to be.
Of course, gentlemen, it is a mere truism to say that the state, in
the last analysis, depends upon the quality of its average citizenship.
If the average man is a straight and decent man, a man of clean
private life—a good husband, a good father—tender to those dependent
upon him; able to do his civic duty, able if the need should arise to do
his duty in war also ; if the average woman is sweet and true, and wise
and tender—a good wife, a good mother—that states goes up, and if
we haven’t got that quality of private citizenship, no material welfare,
no glitter of material wealth, will amount to anything.
I believe in the future of America, because I believe that the average
American man, and the average American woman, is sound at heart
and that therefore we can count with safety upon ultimately solving
aright the many and difficult problems with which we are brought
face to face.
Now, it is equally a truism to say that if the children are not well
educated, if they are not brought up as they should be, the state will
go down. We of this generation have received a splendid heritage
from you men of the years from '61 to ’65. Honor will not endure
with us if we treat your great deeds as excuses for our own idleness
or folly,
I will be through now in just two minutes more. I would like to
722 Messages and Speeches
stay here indefinitely, but the trouble is I am having such a good time
everywhere that I want to stay longer than I can anywhere.
And therefore, the future of the state depends upon the kind of child
that today is being trained up to be the man of the future. When I
speak of education, I do not mean education in intelligence. That
counts tremendously; but I tell you what counts more, and that is
education in character. It is character that determines the nation's
progress in the long run. You know that—you of the Civil War—
that was what counted. When the time of trial came, with the man
On your right hand, or on your left, you were not so much concerned
with how much he knew, as you were with whether he had the right
stuff in him. Isn’t that so? You wanted to be sure that when the
order was given to move forward he moved in the right direction.
Isn't that so? Now, let us be sure the child moves in the right di-
rection. You cannot put it all off on the teacher; if the father and
mother neglect their duties the teacher can only partially make the
loss good.
Finally, and in closing, my friends, let me draw one more lesson
from the Civil War; from the experience of the men of the Civil War.
In Our growing industrialism, there are certain to be some people who
grow wealthy and arrogant, and other people who become envious
because they do not grow wealthy. Now, I ask each American citizen
in civil life to take example by the organizations of Union and Con-
federate veterans. Each man in the Civil War, when men's souls were
really tried, found that in reference to his comrade, he could say but
One thing, and that was that comrade's worth as a man; that’s what
concerned him, and nothing else. And now in the organization of the
veterans after the Civil War each hails the other as comrade. It makes
no difference whether the man was a lieutenant general or whether he
was the youngest recruit that served at the very end of the war. All
that is asked is, Did he do his duty P If he did, you are for him. If he
did not, you have no comradeship with him.
I ask that the same lesson that you of the Civil War applied prac-
tically in your persons during and since that war be applied by the
rest of us in civil life. I ask that we scorn alike the base arrogance of
the rich man who would look down on his poorer brother, and the
equally base envy of the poor man who would hate his richer brother;
and that you apply to every citizen of this republic just this one test,
the test that gauges his worth as a man. Does he do his duty fairly
by himself, his family, his neighbor, and the State and nation ? If he
does, be for him, whether he is rich or poor, because if you are not
you are recreant to the spirit of Americanism.
Theodore Roosevelt * 723
AT THE FAIR GROUNDS, BIRMINGHAM, ALA, Oct. 24, 1905.
Mr. President, and you, my fellow citizens:
It is indeed a great pleasure to have a chance of saying a few words
to this wonderful outpouring of people. I have traveled yesterday
and today, through your mighty and beautiful State, and I cannot say
how impressed I have been by its natural resources, and above all by
the quality of its citizenship.
Of course, I have been profoundly moved by the way in which, at
every place we stopped, I have been greeted by the veterans of the Civil
War. And here in Birmingham not only by the veterans who wore
the gray, but also by those who wore the blue. And, oh, my fellow
countrymen, think what good fortune is ours, that we are the heritors
of the one great war in history which, now that the bitterness has died
away, has left the memory of men in the Confederate uniform and
of men in the Union uniform as a common heritage of glory to our
entire people.
I want to say a special word to those of my escort, the men of the
National Guard here, to whom I feel a big sense of comradeship, for
they are just the type of the men of my own regiment; and I want to
say to the men of the earlier generation—to the veterans of the great
and troubled years from '61 to '65, that we, their sons, if ever the time
of trial should come to this nation, will spring to the defense of our
common flag, and endeavor to show the same spirit our fathers showed
in the Civil War.
Now, gentlemen and ladies, I have but a moment. I have been put
through a pretty active day, and in order that I may keep my engage-
ment in Arkansas tomorrow, the train must leave nearly on time. It
cannot leave quite on time because it is the time now, and I shall say but
one word in closing.
During the time that I have been President, I have gone through
the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the Canadian
line down to the Gulf. I have met our people by the hundreds of
thousands, and the thing that has impressed me most in the audiences
that I have addressed has been the essential likeness of our people.
The differences are slight and superficial. The likenesses are funda-
mental, and I feel that the average American is a pretty good fellow,
and that all that is necessary is that he should meet the other average
American in order to get on all right; and that applies, gentlemen, not
only as between those who live in one locality and those who live
in another, but as between those who earn their livelihood in one way
and those who earn it in another; whether wage-worker or capitalist;
whether farmer or townsman; whether we live East or West, North or
724 Messages and Speeches
South, in the great fundamentals which must underlie all good citizen-
ship, our people are alike,
And, after all, we need to keep steadily in mind that what is needed
to make a good man a good citizen is not genius, but humdrum work-
a-day qualities. In the first place, honesty. Using the word in its
widest and deepest significance, honesty, the quality that makes a man
a square man to deal with, a decent man in his own family, a man you
are glad to have as a neighbor, and glad to do business with, one who
does his duty by those nearest to him and the State. Honesty is the
first requisite, and remember always that the greater a man is, if he is
not honest, the more dangerous he is. What we have to fear in this
country is not the crooked man who fails—we put him in jail—it is the
crooked man who succeeds. This is the man who is dangerous to the
community. º
Honesty is the first requisite, but honesty is not enough. I do not
care how honest a man is, if he is afraid he is no good. It is just as it
was in the Civil War. It didn’t make any difference how patriotic a
man was, if he ran away you could do nothing with him. In addition
to honesty you must have courage, civil courage, and the courage that
will show itself, if need be, in war; moral courage and physical courage,
for we can do nothing toward the salvation of this country with the
hands of the timid man. We need a good man, but he must be a game
Iman too.
And, gentlemen, honesty and courage are not enough. I do not
care how honest a man is and how brave he is, if he is a natural-born
fool you can’t do anything with him. We have got to have honesty,
courage, and the saving grace of common sense. I believe in the
boundless and limitless future of this mighty republic of ours, because I
believe that the average American has in him precisely those three
virtues of honesty, courage and common sense.
[Birmingham (Ala.) News.]
|
AT THE CITY PARK, LITTLE ROCK, ARK., OCT. 25, 1905.
Governor, and my fellow Americans:
I cannot sufficient express my gratitude and appreciation for the
magnificent greeting you have given me today, and in greeting all of
you I wish to say especial words of greeting to those who wore the
gray, and those who wore the blue in the Civil War, and I wish
to emphasize this on behalf of my comrades of the National Guard,
forming the guard of honor here today, with whom I myself went to
war in 1898. There could be no better augury than that the escort of
an American President should be those who once were enemies walk-
ing shoulder to shoulder.
Theodore Roosevelt 725
What a joy it is to think of the services of the men who wore the
blue and the men who wore the gray, a glorious record for the North
and South. Allusion has been made to the war of '98, in which I had
the good fortune to command a regiment. Of that regiment the fathers
of more of them wore the gray than wore the blue, but the only rivalry
was to see who could do the most for their common country. I have
spoken all over the country, but I would not make a remark here that
I would not make anywhere else. I am fortunate in being President of
a country where to praise one State you do not have to run down
any other. I am for all of them. I have been impressed not by the
Superficial differences of the people, but by the positive likenesses.
The average American is a pretty good fellow. All that is necessary
for the average Americans of all sections to get along well is that they
should know each other.
What is true of sections is true of occupations and positions. Thank
heaven, we are free now from all danger of territorial antagonisms.
Now we must see that there shall never come any antagonisms of the
classes or antagonisms between capital and labor. Treat each man
according to his worth as a man. Hold it not against him that he is
either rich or poor. But if he is rich and crooked hold it against him;
if not rich but is crooked, then hold it against him. But if he is a square
man, stand by him. Distrust all who would have any one class placed
before any other. Other republics have fallen because of unscrupulous
rich or the unscrupulous poor who gained ascendancy, who substituted
loyalty to class for loyalty to the people as a whole.
Abolish the insolence and arrogance of the rich who look down upon
the poor; if they lost their wealth, they would be ready to plunder the
rich, and the unscrupulous poor man who becomes rich would op-
press the poor. The poor man who is true to you is the ultimately
righteous, and the man who will steal for you will steal from you. The
man who will seek to persuade you that he will benefit you by wronging
any one else will wrong you when it will benefit him. What we must
do as a nation is to stand for the immutable principles of decency and
virtue, regarding vice with abhorrence. If we make any artificial di-
visions we have done irreparable injury to the people.
Governor, you spoke of a hideous crime that is often hideously
avenged. The worst enemy of the negro race is the negro criminal,
and above all the negro criminal of that type; for he has committed not
only an unspeakably hideous and infamous crime against the victim, but
he has committed a hideous crime against the people of his own color;
and every reputable colored man, every colored man who wishes to
see the uplifting of his race, owes it as his first duty to himself and to
that race to hunt down that criminal with all his soul and strength.
Now for the side of the white man. To avenge one hideous crime by
726 Messages and Speeches
another hideous crime is to reduce the man doing it to the bestial level
of the man who committed the bestial crime. The horrible effects of
lynch law are shown in the fact that three-fourths of the lynchings
are not for that crime at all, but for other crimes. And above all other
men, Governor, you and I and all who are exponents and representa-
tives of the law owe it to our law, owe it to our people, to the cause
of civilization and humanity to do everything in our power, officially
and unofficially, directly and indirectly, to free the United States from
the menace and reproach of lynch law.
We can afford to be divided on questions of mere partisanship, for
comparatively the differences of tariff and the currency are of no
consequence. After all the real question is that of decency in the life
of the home and honesty in public life. It makes little difference in
the long run whether a Democratic or a Republican is President, but
it makes every difference to have all our public officials honest and
clean. The candidate is the candidate of his party, but the President,
if he is worth his salt, is the President of the whole people.
You cannot have good public life unless you have good private life.
The country will be all right if the average man is decent and clean
in his home life, but if it goes below that average you can’t make the
country right. I have a great respect for a good man, and the only one
I have greater respect for is a good woman and if there is any one
here who does not agree with me I don’t think much of him.
We young men have a great heritage in this free country of ours
and let us see that we transmit it unimpaired to our children. Let
their valor and heroism in war and in peace be an incentive to greater
efforts.
The only people I feel as glad to see as the veterans are the fathers
and mothers with babies in their arms. Arkansas has cause to feel
proud of its natural resources and its great crop is the crop of babies,
and those of Arkansas seem to be all right in quantity and quality. I
like to see the children, for I have a few myself. See that the children
are educated for citizenship in intellect so that when they grow up they
may have the three cardinal virtues of American citizenship—courage,
honesty and common sense.
[Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser.]
AT A LUNCHEON AT ARKANSAS CONSISTORY, LITTLE ROCK,
ARK., OCT. 25, 1905.
Mr. Chairman, my hosts, and you, my fellow guests:
I want to say just one word suggested by the fact that Judge Rose
was President of the American Bar Association and stands today as
one of that group of eminent American citizens, eminent for their ser-
Theodore Roosevelt 727
vices to the whole country, whom we know as the leaders of the
American bar. I want to speak as a layman again about certain ser-
vices that the learned profession of which Judge Rose is so eminent
a member can render to an even greater degree than they now render
to the American people. I know that there is a good deal of distrust,
rightly, for the layman who speaks of law or of theology.
But I am going to say just a few words on a matter that concerns
good citizenship, in which the layman has a right to expect leadership
both from lawyer and from theologian. Very naturally in any profes-
sion there come to be men who treat the profession as an end instead
of as a means. I am not speaking from the standpoint of the indi-
vidual; but from the standpoint of the Nation, of the State. Just as
in Christianity we have a right to say, by their fruits shall ye know
them—just as we have a right to judge the man of religious profes-
sion by the output that comes as a result of that profession—so we
have a right to expect from the great profession of the law, from that
which is perhaps the leading among the liberal lay professions, we have
a right to expect a peculiar quantity and quality of the service to the
public.
There are certain abuses in connection with our whole system of
law today which the laymen cannot remedy, but which I earnestly hope
that the men of the law will themselves remedy. Now here I have got
to speak merely to my fellow laymen and shall have to invite correc-
tion. I am speaking before Gamaliel and shall expect correction from
Gamaliel if I go wrong.
But our law comes down from the time when the state, the govern-
ment, was all powerful as compared to the individual; when the govern-
ment acted as a plaintiff and it was necessary that every possible safe-
guard should be thrown around the defendant, that he should be given
every chance, and the fear of injustice was a synonym for fear of
injustice to the private citizen against whom the state proceeded.
It came from a time, if my memory of history is right, when about
five per cent (I am speaking now of the common law) of any given
rumber of children born in England were punished by hanging—when
people were hung for the most trivial offenses and when all the machin-
ery of the law was in the hands of the government and directed against
the individual; so that the one thing that had to be done was to
protect the individual.
Circumstances in the past three or four centuries have wholly
changed, but the pressure of the law has not changed nearly as rapidly.
At present there is not the slightest question as to the individual’s
rights being preserved. They are amply guarded. Of course, there
is the possibility of error in every human affair; but speaking generally,
the man accused of criminal wrong, especially the man accused of
728 Messages and Speeches
criminal wrong against the public, has every possible chance secured
him; but the public has not got every chance in regard to it.
No greater service is being rendered the American public today than
by those members of the leading profession whose good fortune it has
been to stand forth as prominently identified with the prosecution of
crimes against the State. When I say crimes against the State I not
only refer to crimes like those of bribery and corruption committed by
any public official; but I mean such a crime as murder or any similar
hideous misdeed, where the offense is not merely against the individual,
but against the entire community. It is right to remember the interests
of the individual; but it is right also to remember the interests of
that great mass of individuals embodied in the Dublic, in the govern-
ment.
It is unfortunate that we have permitted practices that were necessary
three hundred years ago for the protection of innocent people to be
elaborated, to be perverted, so that they become a means for allowing
criminals to escape the punishment of their criminality. We urgently
need in this country methods for expediting punishment, methods for
doing away with delay, methods which will secure to the public an
even chance with the criminal—I do not ask any more. If we can get
an average of just fifty per cent of the criminals, we will be pretty
nearly all right, and we will give the public an even chance with the
criminal whose offense is against the public.”
At present the right of appeal is in certain cases so abused as to make
it a matter of the utmost difficulty ultimately to punish a man sufficient-
ly rich or sufficiently influential to command really good legal talent.
Now I am speaking of what I know, for I am speaking with very
keenly in my mind experiences during the past three years in trying to
get at certain public offenders who have been indicted, and some of
whom it has been almost impossible to get into the jurisdiction of the
courts in Washington in order to try them. There are others whose
cases are still on appeal.
I feel that the man who offends against the State occupies a position
rather worse than that of any other criminal, from the very fact that he
is the man who attacks everybody instead of just one person; so that it
is not the special business of any one to get at him. In consequence,
if he can keep the forces of justice at bay long enough; if he can secure
*The trouble isn’t in the law, it lies in the backward character of officials who should
enforce the law and don’t. In New York City, crime is fostered and criminals protected—even
murder and murderers—by the politicians. The power of the politician overshadows the
courts, the police, and extends to bar and bench and jury box. It is always used to protect
crime and never to punish or prevent it. The criminals, the politicians and the police—I speak
of New York City—are as three links of steel; and the middle link, connecting the other two,
liolding them together while keeping them apart, is forged of politics and politicians. It isn’t
the law but the morals of men that asks amendment.—A. H. L.
\ Theodore Roosevelt 729
one or two mistrials, gradually the popular interest evaporates and the
criminal gets off.
Now, as the judge has so well said, the minute that a man becomes
President he ceases being the President of a party and is the President
of every man, woman and child within the confines of the nation. But
I permit myself one particular bit of personal discrimination. I am
just a trifle more intent on punishing the Republican offender than the
Democrat, because he is my own scoundrel. I feel a certain sense of
peculiar responsibility for him, and I am going to unload that respon-
sibility if I can. Of course, as we all know, offenses must come, but I
have endeavored to carry out the Scriptural injunction and to make it a
matter of woe unto him by whom they come.
I am happy to say that we have a reasonable proportion of the
offenders in question with stripes on ; about up to the 50 per cent aver-
age that I would like, and I want to go a little further than we have yet
gone.
Then, too, if the law is reasonably speedy and reasonably sure it takes
away one great excuse for lawlessness. If some horrible crime is
committed and the people feel that under the best circumstances there
will be an indefinite delay even when the time for administering it
comes, then a premium is put upon that kind of law breaking which
more than any other is a menace to the law.
We ought to stand against all forms of putting that premium on ; the
long delays of justice, the abuses of the pardoning power; the sluggish-
ness with which either court or attorney moves; all of those things
count in bringing about the condition of affairs against which all of us
must protest.
Now, a layman can do but little more than to give utterance to the
feeling that so many laymen have. I earnestly hope that the bench and
the bar of the United States will in all proper ways seek to see to it
that the loose customs—for some of these things of which I complain
are merely customs and not laws—inherited from the past when con-
ditions were totally different, shall not be perverted so as to harm the
whole public by giving the criminal an advantage to which he is not
entitled, and that some substantial improvement shall be made in the
direction of securing greater expedition and greater certainty in the
administration of justice, especially in the administration of criminal
justice.
[Montgomery (Ala.) Advertiser.]
730 Messages and Speeches
AT MEMPHIS, TENN., OCT. 25, 1905.
Bishop and fellow citizens:
I have but little time, and can say only a few words to you, but I
cannot resist the chance to come out here and greet you and thank you
from the bottom of my heart for your kindness in coming to welcome
111C.
I have been for a week traveling through the South, and by to-
morrow, when I have reached Louisiana, I shall have been in every
State of these United States during my term as President.
The thing that struck me most in going from the Atlantic to the
Pacific, from the Canada line to the Gulf, O my fellow citizens, is how
slight and superficial are the points of dissimilarity between our people
and how deep and underlying are the points of likeness between them.
Gentlemen, the average American is a pretty decent kind of a fellow,
and all that is necessary to have him get along with the other average
American is that they simply know one another. That is a fact. The
difference, I would say, is perfectly trivial; the likeness goes deep down.
The man that is a good citizen in Maine is a good citizen in Louisiana.
If he is a good citizen in Memphis, take him to San Francisco and he
will be a good citizen there.
What we need in the nation is not genius or brilliancy; it is the pos-
session of humdrum, everyday, work-a-day living. We need decent
men in private life. If a man is a decent man in private life, if he is a
good husband, a good neighbor, a man you would like to do business
with, he is a good citizen. These qualities are in reach of every man.
I believe the average American has them. If the average American
has these qualities the nation is going up, and if he does not have them
nothing on the face of the earth can save the nation.
I believe in this country with such unfaltering faith because I know
my countrymen, and I know the average American, the ordinary citizen
—North, South, East or West—has the three cardinal virtues of
citizenship—commonplace virtues, mind you, or necessary honesty.
This country has nothing to fear from a crooked man who fails. We
put him in jail. It is the crooked man that succeeds that is a threat to
this country. The timid good man is not of any use. If a man is
honest, but afraid, you cannot do anything with him.
In addition to honesty we need courage—civic courage, a courage
that can be displayed, if need be, in battle, moral courage and civic
courage, both. I don't care how, brave a man is and how honest he is,
if he is natural born fool you can’t do anything with him.
We also need to have the saving grace of common sense.
I believe in the future of this country because I believe that the
average American is a pretty good fellow, and his wife is a better fel-
Theodore Roosevelt 73 I
low, and that the average citizen has got those three cardinal virtues of
courage. honesty and common sense.
[Memphis Commercial Appeal, Oct. 26, 1905.]
AT HAMMOND, L.A., OCT. 26, 1905.
My fellow citizens and residents of Louisiana:
I am glad of this opportunity of telling you how proud I am to be
within the borders of the great State of Louisiana, so rich in glorious
traditions. It has been my intention to pay you a visit for a long time,
but it would seem that circumstances have only lately been so as to
make my visit possible. I wanted to come long ago, and indeed I
would have come if I could have been of any use, but you have done
all that was necessary.
Let me express to you my pleasure at knowing that you have worked
conscientiously through the long summer months, for which such
splendid results show today. Louisiana was never found wanting when
the time came to act. You have followed traditions of earlier years,
such as were set down by the men, some of whom I see before me now,
who wore the blue. I am glad to be able to look into your faces and to
feel that you have done your duty.
AT A LUNCHEON IN NEW ORLEANS, LA., OCT. 26, 1905.
Governor, Mr. Mayor, and fellow citizens:
Let me at the outset express to you my profound gratitude, my deep
appreciation of the way in which the people of New Orleans and
Louisiana have greeted me today. Gentlemen, no President of the
United States could have been greeted as I have been greeted today and
not go back to take up the duties of his office with a stronger and more
earnest purpose to try to represent all the splendid people whom he
serves. And, Governor, as you have so well said, when a man is Presi-
dent, when he holds any public office, questions of merely partisan
character sink into absolute insignificance compared with the mighty
questions upon which all good Americans are united.
And now, gentlemen, as you have greeted me so well, you have given
me the opportunity to indulge myself in a luxury. There have been
moments in the past when I was afraid of saying how well I thought
of the Senators and Representatives in the National Congress from
Louisiana, for fear I might damage them. I did not know but that,
may be, the best service I could do them was to keep still. Now I am
emboldened by your generous kindness and confidence to say that it
has been indeed a pleasure to deal with Louisiana's representatives in
732 Messages and Speeches
the Senate and in the lower House of Congress, because whenever I
had to do with a great question of national importance I could go to
them convinced that if I could show them it was really for the good
of the nation they would stand for it.
Now that’s all I ask. Sometimes I couldn’t make them look at things
my way; that was my misfortune. But all I had to do was to be able
to show them that any measure was for the country's good and I knew
they would stand for it; I don't want any Senator or Congressman to
vote for anything I favor just because I favor it, but I don’t want him
to vote against it just because I favor it. And there were certain very
worthy men in both Houses of Congress who insistently went against
the realization of their most cherished objects in the past, as soon as I
took them up. Now, from the Representatives of Louisiana I was sure
of support, whether it was a question of building up and keeping at a
high point of efficiency the United States navy, or whether it was a
question of building the Panama Canal. And, mind you, gentlemer
the two questions go together.
One thing that, as President of this country, I won’t do, is to make
a bluff that I can’t make good. I don’t intend on behalf of the nation
to take any position until I have carefully thought out whether that
position will be advantageous to the nation, but if I take it, I am
going to keep it, and I am going to keep it no matter what outsider
goes the other way.
And I am sure that you, gentlemen, know it has been an utter mistake
to think of me as a man desirous of seeing this nation quarrelsome, this
nation eager to get into trouble. I have no respect either for the nation
or for the individual that brawls, that invites trouble, and I want to
see this nation do as the individual men in the nation who would
respect themselves, should do, scrupulously regardful of the rights of
others and honestly endeavoring to avoid all cause of difficulty. But
I want, on behalf of this nation, the peace that comes not to the coward,
who cringes for it, but the peace of the just man armed, who asks it
as a right.
And now, listening to the greeting of the Governor and the Mayor,
this afternoon, I felt at once very proud and very humble. I have been
greeted with words far above my worth, far above what is merited by
what I have done. I didn't say that for the purpose of asking your
dissent from it. I don’t say anything unless I mean it.
I came down to see this body of men this afternoon with a heart full
of gratitude to them for having displayed, through the trials of the hard
summer that has past, those qualities of heroism which we like to
think of as distinctly American. And, gentlemen, in coming among
you this afternoon I have the feeling of a man who, having been at
Theodore Roosevelt 733
headquarters, but not in action, goes to see a regiment that has been
in action.
I know that you gentlemen, Governor, and Mayor, at any time during
the past summer had but to request my presence and I would have
come down here at once, at any time when I could have been of the
slightest assistance to you in the magnificent struggle you were waging.
And I wish to express the profound appreciation and gratitude of all
Americans toward you, our fellow Americans, who have borne the
heat and burden of the contest during the long day that has been
passing. And I want to say that in actual war there can be no greater
and more effective heroism than was shown by those who stayed here
at their posts, and by those who, being away, came back to aid in the
fight of their fellows in distress. You have had your martyrs, among
them my dear, lamented friend, Archbishop Chapelle, but you have your
proud memories of service rendered, and the thrill that comes with the
victory you have already won, and I have been both amused and irri-
tated at the comments sometimes made by people who live in other
communities that were not in danger.
As to your shortcomings: Among the younger men are some who,
when younger still, have played football, and they will remember how
very much easier it was to play the game from the side lines than on the
field. Now, Louisiana and New Orleans this summer did what, so
far as I remember, has never been done before in the case of a similar
epidemic of yellow fever in the United States. They took told of
it after it had started, and when it had got well under way, and they
controlled and conquered it without waiting for frost to come. The
highest gratitude is due to the officials of the State, to the officials of
the city, and to the private individuals, clergymen, educators, and
business men who spent their time and money and risked their lives
freely in that work, and who achieved much success in that work. It
was the greatest privilege to me to contribute what I was able to the
work.
Mr. Mayor, Governor, you can hardly realize the pleasure I felt when
a request was made upon me that gave the chance to do something for
you, and I am glad to find how well you think of the work that was
done by the United States Public Health and Marine Hospital Service
under Dr. White.
Now, just a word; it is getting late. Just a word on a couple of
subjects. The Governor spoke of the Panama Canal. It’s a very big
work, and it’s a very big nation that can do that kind of work. I
expect soon to have a report from the engineers as to the exact shape
the work will take. I will then be able to make more definite forecasts
as to time, but of this I can assure you, the work will be done well; it
734 Messages and Speeches
will be done as speedily as possible and will absolutely and surely be
done.
One more point. New Orleans and Louisiana are vitally interested
in the levee system. The Mississippi, which flows through this State,
drains portions of twenty-odd other States, and the control of that
river must, in my opinion, be in good part a national object. The
national government now does something toward the erection and care
of the levees. In my judgment it should do not only more, but very
much more.
And, finally, my friends, let me say a word of special duty to some
of those who have greeted me today, because of what their greeting
symbolized. I was greeted by your school children, who stood around
the monument erected to that pure and upright man and that mighty
general, Robert E. Lee. And as we drove away from the square in
which that statué stands, we passed by a house in this old Confederate
city in which there was prominently displayed a picture of Abraham
Lincoln and underneath it the words, “With Malice Toward None,
With Charity Toward All.”
I was greeted by a special guard of honor, composed of men who in
the great war had worn the Confederate uniform. I was also greeted
by men who in that war had worn the blue. I saw among them many
of my comrades of the lesser war, and I had in my own regiment, as
well as from many other States, men whose fathers had worn the blue,
all united forever in loyalty to one indissoluble Union, and separated
only by the rivalry of trying to see which could do the most for the
flag of Our common country.
Oh, my fellow countrymen, think what a fortune is ours, that we
belong to this nation, which, having fought one of the mightiest wars
of all times, is now united and claimed by the whole people as their
Own; claimed as their heritage of honor and glory, and exulting in
every deed of valor performed by the very man who stood on which-
ever side in that contest, provided only that when the days came which
tried men's souls he did all that was in him, did his duty according to
the light that was given him.
TO MEMBERS OF THE G. A. R. ON BEING PRESENTED TO THE
PRESIDENT AT NEW ORLEANS, LA., OCT. 26, 1905.
Comrades:
I wanted to thank you for coming here to greet me. I can not say
how much it means to me to be greeted as I have been greeted by the
men who wore the blue and the men who wore the gray in this trip
through the Southland.
Theodore Roosevelt 735
At Little Rock my escort was composed of Union and Confederate
soldiers, riding side by side, in pairs.
As I said at Richmond, second only to the man who wore the blue,
I hold the man who wore the gray, and we should indeed consider
ourselves fortunate as a nation that, forty years after the Civil War, we
find all of our people can challenge as the possession of all every mem-
ory of valor left by both sides in the great contest.
Now we know but one rivalry—the rivalry to see which of us can do
the most for the flag of a united country.
ON BEING PRESENTED WITH A WATCH CHARM BY A DELEGA-
TION OF CONFEDERATE VETERANS AT NEW
ORLEANS, LA., OCT. 26, 1905.
Gentlemen:
Rather, if you will allow one who took part in a very small war to
call you so—Comrades, I accept it with pleasure. Although some-
times we have difficulties in this country that we have to battle against,
and sometimes things that we are not quite satisfied with, yet we are
pretty good people.
I have felt this almost as never before during the past weeks. Now
think what it means in a nation for the President of that nation, forty
years after one of the greatest wars of all time, to be able to come
and speak as I spoke in the capital of the Southern Confederacy,
and to feel that I was addressing a people as loyal to the flag of our
reunited country as can be found in this broad land of ours.
I passed in the shadow of the monument to Admiral Semmes in
Mobile—under whom one of my uncles fired the last gun that was
discharged from the Alabama, which another uncle built. The sister of
that Admiral is now the wife of our Governor in the Philippines.
Gentlemen, this is an hour I appreciate. I thank you not only for
the words which accompany it, but for the spirit which lies behind the
words.
[New Orleans Times-Democrat, Oct. 27, 1905.]
AT SEA ON BOARD THE WEST VIRGINIA, EN ROUTE TO
WASHINGTON, SUNDAY, OCT. 29, 1905.
Admiral, Captain, Officers, and Ship's Company of the West Virginia:
It is a privilege for any President to come aboard a squadron of
American warships such as these, not alone to see the ships, but to see
the men who handle them. From the admiral down through the entire
ship's company every American should be proud of what I have seen
aboard this ship; the discipline, the ready subordination of each man,
whether officer or enlisted man, to duty, the care taken of the men and
736 Messages and Speeches
in return the eager, intelligent, self-respecting zeal of each man in
doing his work. What must impress especially any observer is how
essential it is that every individual on a ship like this should do his
whole duty, and in any crisis more than his duty. The result as I
see it in this ship is a triumph not only of organization and discipline,
but of the ready zeal with which each indivdual performs his allotted
task. At any time some emergency may arise in which the safety of
the entire ship will depend upon the vigilance, intelligence, and cool
courage of some one man among you, perhaps an officer, perhaps an
enlisted man.
Any man in the whole ship's company who does his full duty can
claim as his own the honor and repute of the ship and has a right to
feel a personal pride in all she does. You and your fellows in the navy
and in its sister service, the army, Occupy a position different from that
of any other set of men in your country. Going through the ship yes-
terday, in the engine rooms, storerooms, turrets, everywhere, the
thing that impressed me most was the all-importance of each man in
his place; the all-importance of the man, both knowing his work and
feeling it a matter of keen personal pride to do it as well as it could
possibly be done. All through the ship I have seen the same purpose,
the purpose to learn exactly what the duty to be done was and then to
do it; and the power to do presupposes the possession by each of you of
intelligence, courage, and physical address.
I believe that this attitude of yours is typical of the attitude of the
men of the navy generally, and of the army also. Now, on the one
hand, this should make our country feel toward Uncle Sam's men in the
army and in the navy a sense of obligation and gratitude such as they
feel toward no others; and on the other hand it should make you feel
that no other Americans rest under so great an obligation to do their
duty well; for in your hands lie the credit, the honor, and the interest
of the entire nation. You are doing your duty well and faithfully in
peace. Remember that if ever, which may heaven forbid, war comes,
it will depend upon you and those like you, whether the people of this
country are to hold their heads even higher or to hang them in shame.
I hope that no such crisis shall ever occur, but I have entire faith that
if it ever does occur, you will rise to any demand that may be made
upon you, and that by the way you train yourselves and are trained
in time of peace, you will fit yourselves to do well should war arise.
Now, a special word to the officers. Capt. Arnold, as a boy you wit-
nessed a great fight of the Merrimac, when she came out of Hampton
Roads, sunk the Congress and the Cumberland, and the next day met
her match in the Monitor. That was a fight fraught with great honor
for our people. The Cumberland sank with her flags flying and her
guns firing while her decks were awash, and as the water was shallow,
Theodore Roosevelt 737
her flag still floated from the mast above them after she had gone down.
The captain of the Congress met his death in the fight, winning an
epitaph which deserves to be remembered forever in the American
navy. His name was Joe Smith, and his father, an old naval Officer,
was in Washington. When word was brought to him that his son's
ship had surrendered, he answered simply, “Then Joe is dead.” To
have earned the right to have his death assumed as a matter of course
in such conditions is of itself enough to crown any life, and every
American officer should keep ever before him all that is implied therein.
Let each of you officers remember, in the event of war, that while a
surrender may sometimes be justifiable, yet that surrender must always
be explained, while it is never necesary to explain the fact that you
don’t surrender, no matter what the conditions may be.
A tragedy occurred this morning. A man was lost from the
Colorado. Such cases are from time to time inevitable in a service
like ours. Under such circumstances, everything must always be done,
as in this instance everything was done, for the rescue of the man. But
you men are fitted for fighting because you have the fighting edge.
This means that you are willing at all times to face death in the per-
formance of your duty. The man who died this morning was an ex-
cellent seaman, who had done his duty faithfully, and who died in the
performance of that duty. Therefore, he died in the service of his
country exactly as much as if he had died in battle, and deserves as
much honor.
What I have said so far applies to the whole navy. Now a word
especially to this Squadron and to this ship. No other nation can boast
of a better Squadron, a squadron composed of more formidable vessels.
In the matter of the officers and men, we have no cause to shrink from
comparison with any other nation. So far, the Colorado has been the
One ship that has had the chance to show what she could do in gunnery
practice, and her record has been so astonishingly good that the other
ships of the squadron will have to do their level best if they expect
even to equal it. I need not tell you to remember that battles are decided
by gun-fire, and that the only shots that count are the shots that hit.
Men, I am glad to have seen you, and I don’t think that anywhere
under our flag there could be found a better set of clean-cut, vigorous,
self-respecting American citizens of the very type that makes one
proudest to be an American.
738 Messages and Speeches
LETTER TO JACOB H. SCHIFF, READ AT THE CELEBRATION
COMMEMORATING THE 250TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE LAND-
ING OF THE JEWS IN THIS COUNTRY, HELD AT CAR-
NEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, NOV. 30, 1905.
WHITE HOUSE, Washington, Nov. I6, 1905.
MY DEAR SIR: I am forced to make a rule not to write letters on
the occasion of any celebration, no matter how important, simply be-
cause I cannot write one without either committing myself to write
hundreds of others or else running the risk of giving offense to worthy
persons.
I make an exception in this case because the lamentable and terrible
suffering to which so many of the Jewish people in other lands have
been subjected makes me feel it my duty, as the head of the American
people, not only to express my deep sympathy for them, as I now do,
but at the same time to point out what fine qualities of citizenship have
been displayed by the men of Jewish faith and race, who, having come
to this country, enjoy the benefits of free institutions and equal treat-
ment before the law.
I feel very strongly that if any people are oppressed anywhere the
wrong inevitably reacts in the end on those who oppress them; for it
is an immutable law in the spiritual world that no one can wrong others
and yet in the end himself escape unhurt.
The celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
settlement of the Jews in the United States properly emphasizes a series
of historical facts of more than merely national significance. Even in
our colonial period the Jews participated in the upbuilding of this
country, acquired citizenship, and took an active part in the develop-
ment of foreign and domestic commerce. During the Revolutionary
period they aided the cause of liberty by serving in the Continental
army and by substantial contributions to the empty treasury of the
infant republic. During the Civil War thousands served in the armies
and mingled their blood with the soil for which they fought.
I am glad to be able to say, in addressing you on this occasion, that
while the Jews of the United States, who now number more than a
million, have remained loyal to their faith and their race traditions,
they have become indissolubly incorporated in the great army of Ameri-
can citizenship, prepared to make all sacrifices for the country, either
in war or peace, and striving for the perpetuation of good government
and for the maintenance of the principles embodied in our Constitution.
They are honorably distinguished by their industry, their obedience
to law, and their devotion to the national welfare. They are engaged
in generous rivalry with their fellow-citizens of other denominations in
advancing the interests of our common country. This is true not only
Theodore Roosevelt 739
of the descendants of the early settlers and those of American birth,
but of a great and constantly increasing proportion of those who have
come to our shores within the last twenty-five years as refugees reduced
to the direst straits of penury and misery.
All Americans may well be proud of the extraordinary illustration of
the wisdom and strength of our governmental system thus afforded.
In a few years, men and women hitherto utterly unaccustomed to any of
the privileges of citizenship have moved mightily upward toward the
standard of loyal, self-respecting American citizenship; of that citizen-
ship which not merely insists upon its rights, but also eagerly recog-
nizes its duty to do its full share in the material, social and moral
advancement of the nation. &
With all good wishes, believe me, sincerely yours,
THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
[The World, New York, Dec 1, 1905.]
THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN
GRADUATE LIBRARY
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