Of course, fundamentally each man will yet find that the chief factor in determining his success or failure in life is the sum of his own individual qualities. He can not afford to lose his individual initiative, his individual will and power; but he can best use that power if for certain objects he unites with his fellows. Much can be done by organization, combination, union among the wage-workers;finally something can be done by the direct action of the State. It is not possible empirically to declare when the interference of the State should be deemed legitimate and when illegitimate.
The line of demarcation between unhealthy over-interference 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 employees against the effects of culpable negligence by the employer, are necessary, not merely in the interest of the wage-worker, but in the interest of the honest and humane employer, who should not be penalized for his honesty and humanity by being exposed to unchecked competition with an unscrupulous rival. It is far more difficult to deal with the greed that works through cunning than with the greed that works through violence. But the effort to deal with it must be steadily made.
Very much of our effort in reference to labor matters should be by every device and expedient to try to secure a constantly better understanding between employer and employee. Everything possible should be done to increase the sympathy and fellow-feeling between them, and every chance taken to allow each to look at all questions, especially at questions in dispute, somewhat through the other’s eyes.If met with a sincere desire to act fairly by one another, and if there is, furthermore, power by each to appreciate the other’s standpoint, the chance for trouble is minimized. I suppose every thinking man rejoices when by mediation or arbitration it proves possible to settle troubles in time to avert the suffering and bitterness caused by strikes. Moreover, a conciliation committee can do best work when the trouble is in its beginning, or at least has not come to a head. When the break has actually occurred, damage has been done, and each side feels sore and angry; and it is difficult to get them together—difficult to make either forget its own wrongs and remember the rights of the other. If possible the effort at conciliation or mediation or arbitration should be made in the earlier stages, and should be marked by the wish on the part of both sides to try to come to a common agreement which each shall think in the interests of the other as well as of itself.
When we deal with such a subject we are fortunate in having before us an admirable object-lesson in the work that has just been closed by the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission. This was the Commission which was appointed last fall at the time when the coal strike in the anthracite regions threatened our Nation with a disaster second to none which has befallen us since the days of the Civil War. Their report was made just before the Senate adjourned at the special session; and no Government document of recent years marks a more important piece of work better done, and there is none whichteaches sounder social morality to our people. The commission consisted of seven as good men as were to be found in the country, representing the bench, the church, the army, the professions, the employers, and the employed. They acted as a unit, and the report which they unanimously signed is a masterpiece of sound common-sense and of sound doctrine on the very questions with which our people should most deeply concern themselves. The immediate effect of this commission’s appointment and action was of vast and incalculable benefit to the Nation; but the ultimate effect will be even better, if capitalist, wage-worker, and 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. Washington is not a city of very large industries, but still it has some. Wise labor legislation for the city of Washington would be a good thing in itself, and it would be a far better thing, because a standard would thereby be set for the country as a whole.
In the field of general legislation relating to these subjects the action of Congress is necessarily very limited. Still there are certain ways in which we can act. Thus the Secretary of the Navy has recommended,with my cordial and hearty approval, the enactment of a strong employers’-liability law in the navy yards of the Nation. It should be extended to similar branches of the Government work. Again, sometimes such laws can be enacted as an incident to the Nation’s control over interstate commerce. In my last annual Message to Congress I advocated the passage of a law in reference to car couplings—to strengthen the features of the one already on the statute books so as to minimize the exposure to death and maiming of railway employees. Much opposition had to be overcome. In the end an admirable law was passed “to promote the safety of employees and travelers upon railroads by compelling common carriers engaged in interstate commerce to equip their cars with automatic couplers and continuous brakes and their locomotives with driving-wheel brakes.” This law received my signature a couple of days before Congress adjourned. It represents a real and substantial advance in an admirable kind of legislation.
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 stampedto and fro across the Southern States in the Civil War; but a struggle fraught with consequences to the Nation, and indeed to the world, out of all proportion to the smallness of the effort upon our part.
Three and a half years ago President McKinley spoke in the adjoining State of Minnesota on the occasion of the return of the Thirteenth Minnesota Volunteers from the Philippine Islands, where they had served with your own gallant sons of the North Dakota regiment. After heartily thanking the returned soldiers for their valor and patriotism, and their contemptuous refusal to be daunted or misled by the outcry raised at home by the men of little faith who wished us to abandon the islands, he spoke of the islands themselves as follows:
“That Congress will provide for them a government which will bring them blessings, which will promote their material interests as well as advance their people in the path of civilization and intelligence, I confidently believe. They will not be governed as vassals or serfs or slaves. They will be given a government of liberty, regulated by law, honestly administered, without 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 hasbeen said and compare it with the record of what has actually been done. If promises are violated, if plighted word is not kept, then those who have failed in their duty should be held up to reprobation. If, on the other hand, the promises have been substantially made good; if the achievement has kept pace and more than kept pace with the prophecy, then they who made the one and are responsible for the other are entitled of just right to claim the credit which attaches to those who serve the Nation well. This credit I claim for the men who have managed so admirably the military and the civil affairs of the Philippine Islands, and for those other men who have so heartily backed them in Congress, and without whose aid and support not one thing could have been accomplished.
When President McKinley spoke, the first duty was the restoration of order; and to this end the use of the Army of the United States—an Army composed of regulars and volunteers alike—was necessary. To put down the insurrection and restore peace to the islands was a duty not only to ourselves but to the islanders also. We could not have abandoned the conflict without shirking this duty, without proving ourselves recreants to the memory of our forefathers. Moreover, if we had abandoned it we would have inflicted upon the Filipinos the most cruel wrong and would have doomed them to a bloody jumble of anarchy and tyranny. It seems strange, looking back, that any of our people should have failed to recognize a duty so obvious; but therewas 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 peculiar wrongs from their foes. They fought in dense tropical jungles against enemies who were very treacherous and very cruel, not only toward our own men, but toward the great numbers of friendly natives, the most peaceable and most civilized among whom eagerly welcomed our rule. Under such circumstances, among a hundred thousand hot-blooded and powerful young men serving in small detachments on the other side of the globe, it was impossible that occasional instances of wrongdoing should not occur. The fact that they occurred in retaliation for wellnigh intolerable provocation can not for one moment be admitted in the way of excuse or justification. All good Americans regret and deplore them, and the War Department has taken every step in its power to punish the offenders and to prevent or minimize the chance of repetition of the offence. But these offences were the exception and not the rule. As a whole our troops showed not only signal courage and efficiency, but great humanity and the most sincere desire to promote thewelfare and liberties of the islanders. In a series of exceedingly harassing and difficult campaigns they completely overthrew the enemy, reducing them finally to a condition of mere brigandage; and wherever they conquered they conquered only to make way for the rule of the civil government, for the introduction of law, and of liberty under the law. When, by last July, the last vestige of organized insurrection had disappeared, peace and amnesty were proclaimed.
As rapidly as the military rule was extended over the islands by the defeat of the insurgents, just so rapidly was it replaced by the civil government. At the present time the civil government is supreme and the army in the Philippines has been reduced until it is sufficient merely to provide against the recurrence of trouble. In Governor Taft and his associates we sent to the Filipinos as upright, as conscientious, and as able a group of administrators as ever any country has been blessed with having. With them and under them we have associated the best men among the Filipinos, so that the great majority of the officials, including many of the highest rank, are themselves natives of the islands. The administration is incorruptibly honest; justice is as jealously safeguarded as here at home. The government is conducted purely in the interests of the people of the islands; they are protected in their religious and civil rights; they have been given an excellent and well administered school system, and each of them now enjoys rights to “life, liberty, andthe pursuit of happiness” such as were never before known in all the history of the islands.
The Congress which has just adjourned has passed legislation of high importance and great wisdom in the interests of the Filipino people. First and foremost, they conferred upon them by law the present admirable civil government; in addition they gave them an excellent currency; they passed a measure allowing the organization of a native constabulary; and they provided, in the interests of the islands, for a reduction of twenty-five per cent in the tariff on Filipino articles brought to this country. I asked that a still further reduction should be made. It was not granted by the last Congress, but I think that in some shape it will be granted by the next. And even without it, the record of legislation in the interests of the Filipinos is one with which we have a right to feel great satisfaction.
Moreover, Congress appropriated three million dollars, following the precedent it set when the people of Porto Rico were afflicted by sudden disaster; this money to be used by the Philippine government in order to meet the distress occasioned primarily by the terrible cattle disease which almost annihilated the carabao or water-buffalo, the chief and most important domestic animal in the islands. Coming as this disaster did upon the heels of the havoc wrought by the insurrectionary war, great suffering has been caused; and this misery, for which this Government is in no way responsible, will doubtless in turn increase the difficulties of the Philippinegovernment for the next year or so. In consequence there will doubtless here and there occur sporadic increases of the armed brigandage to which the islands have been habituated from time immemorial, and here and there for their own purposes the bandits may choose to style themselves patriots or insurrectionists; but these local difficulties will be of little consequence save as they give occasion to a few men here at home again to try to mislead our people. Not only has the military problem in the Philippines been worked out quicker and better than we had dared to expect, but the progress socially and in civil government has likewise exceeded our fondest hopes.
The best thing that can be done in handling such a problem as that in the Philippine Islands, so peculiar, so delicate, so difficult and so remote, is to put the best man possible in charge and then give him the heartiest possible support, and the freest possible hand. This is what has been done with Governor Taft. There is not in this Nation a higher or finer type of public servant than Governor Taft. He has rendered literally inestimable service, not only to the people of the Philippine Islands but also to the people of the United States, by what he has done in those islands. He has been able to do it, because from the beginning he has been given 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 Philippinesis now one of the instruments through which Governor Taft does his admirable work. The civil government, of which Governor Taft is the head, is supreme, and will do well in the future as it has in the past, because it will be backed up in the future as it has been in the past.
Remember always that in the Philippines the American Government has tried and is trying to carry out exactly what the greatest genius and most revered patriot ever known in the Philippine Islands—José Rizal—steadfastly advocated. This man shortly before his death, in a message to his countrymen, under date of December 16, 1896, condemned unsparingly the insurrection of Aguinaldo, terminated just before our navy appeared upon the scene, and pointed out the path his people should follow to liberty and enlightenment. Speaking of the insurrection and of the pretence that Filipino independence of a wholesome character could thereby be obtained, he wrote:
“When, in spite of my advice, a movement was begun, I offered of my own accord, not only my services, but my life and even my good name to be used in any way they might believe effective in stifling the rebellion. I thought of the disaster which would follow the success of the revolution, and I deemed myself fortunate if by any sacrifice I could block the progress of such a useless calamity.
“My countrymen, I have given proof that I was one who sought liberty for our country and I still seek it. But as a first step I insisted upon the developmentof the people in order that, by means of education and of labor, they might acquire the proper individual character and force which would make them worthy of it. In my writings I have commended to you study and civic virtue, without which our redemption does not exist.... I can not 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 steadilyreducing the cost at which they are done. The last Congress repealed the law for the war taxes, and the War Department has reduced the Army from the maximum number of one hundred thousand allowed under the law to very nearly the minimum of sixty thousand.
Moreover, the last Congress enacted some admirable legislation affecting the Army, passing first of all the militia bill and then the bill to create a general staff. The militia bill represents the realization of a reform which had been championed ineffectively by Washington, and had been fruitlessly agitated ever since. At last we have taken from the statute books the obsolete militia law of the Revolutionary days and have provided for efficient aid to the National Guard of the States. I believe 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 the Congress marks the first long step ever taken in this direction by the National Government. The general-staff law is of immense importance and benefit to the Regular Army. Individually, I would not admit that the American regular, either officer or enlisted man, is inferior to any other regular soldier in the world. In fact, if it were worth while to boast, I should be tempted to saythat 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 occurs it is easy and natural, but entirely improper, to blame the men who happen to be in office, instead of the system which is really responsible. Under the law just enacted by Congress this system will be changed immensely for the better, and every patriotic American ought to rejoice; for when we come to the Army and the Navy we deal with the honor and interests of all our people; and when such is the case party lines are as nothing, and we all stand shoulder to shoulder as Americans, moved only by pride in and love for our common country.
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, soI 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.
Mr. Chairman and my Fellow-Citizens:
I have only time to develop one thought to you to-day, and that is 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 andthrough 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 fellow. 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 railroads, it is only aimed at 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 decidefor 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 the only way in which they can be helped—to help them to help themselves, 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.
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 protected 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 Montana, 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 forthemselves, but good things for the surrounding 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 perpetuity 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 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 enjoymentof 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 immediate outskirts of the Park, for the way in which you heartily co-operate with the superintendent to prevent acts of vandalism and destruction. 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 minimum 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 fromthe 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 importance 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. Congress 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 protection is not given the forests. Therefore this Park, like the forest reserves 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 their overflow into the surrounding country means that the people of the surrounding country, so long as they see that the laws are observed by all, will be able to ensure 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 adventureand 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 preservation of the scenery, of the forests, of the wilderness life and the wilderness game for the people as a whole, instead of leaving the enjoyment 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 particular 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 successfully 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 because of its furs and fisheries, but because of its agricultural and pastoral possibilities.
Mr. Chairman, and you, my Fellow-Citizens:
It is a great pleasure to come before you this evening. Since Saturday I have been traveling through your great and beautiful State. I know your people; I have been with them; I have worked with them; and it is indeed a joy to come here now and see from one end of your State to the other the signs of your abounding prosperity. I feel that the future of Nebraska is secure. There will be temporary ups and downs, and of course if any of you are guilty of folly, from your own folly nothing can save you but yourselves. But if you act as I believe and trust that you will act, this State has a future before it second to that of no other State in this great Nation.
I address you to-night on the anniversary of the birth of the great silent soldier—Ulysses Grant, and I am glad to have the chance of saying a few words to an audience such as this in this great typical city of the West on the occasion of the birthday of the great Western general, the great American general. It is a good thing to pay homage with our lips to the illustrious dead. It is a good thing to keep in mind what we owe to the memories of Washington and his fellows, who founded this mighty Republic; to Abraham Lincoln and Grant and their fellows, who saved it. It is a far better thing to pay the homage that counts—the homage of our lives and our deeds. Illustrious memories of the Nation’s past are butcurses 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 now to see that they act as well in their time as the men of yesterday did in theirs.
Each generation has its peculiar problems; each generation has certain tasks allotted to it to do. Shame to it if it treats the glorious deeds of a generation that went before as an excuse for its own failure to do the peculiar task it finds ready to hand. Upon the way in which we solve our problems will depend whether our children and our children’s children shall look back or shall not look back to us with the veneration which we feel for the men of the mighty years of the Civil War. Our task is a lighter one than theirs, but it is an important one, and do it we must, if we wish to rise level to the standard set us by our forefathers. You in Nebraska have passed through periods of terrible privation, of misery and hardship. They were evil times. And yet, there is no experience, no evil, that out of it good 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 tendency to feel that somehow by legislation, by the enactment of some law, by thetrying of some patent scheme things can be made permanently better. Now, something can be done by law. A good deal can be done by law. Even more can be done by the honest administration of the law; an administration which knows neither fear nor favor, which treats each man exactly as that man’s record entitles him to be treated; the kind of enforcement of the law which I think I may promise that you will have while Mr. Knox remains Attorney-General. But more 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 rendered in most efficient form not by merely praising them for having dealt with problems which now we do not have to face, but by facing our problems in the same spirit in which they faced theirs. Nothing was more noteworthy in all of Lincoln’s character than the way in which he combined fealty to the loftiest ideal with a thoroughly practical capacity to achieve that ideal by practical methods. He did not war with phantoms; he did not struggleamong the clouds; he faced facts; he endeavored to get the best results he could out of the warring forces with which he had to deal. When he could not get the best he was forced to content himself, and did content himself, with the best possible. What he did in his day we must do in ours. It is not possible to lay down any rule of conduct so specific that it will enable us to meet each particular issue as it arises. All that can be done is to lay down certain general rules, and then to try, each man for himself, to apply those general rules to the specific cases that come up.
Our complex industrial civilization has not only been productive of much benefit, but has also brought us face to face with many puzzling problems; problems that are puzzling, partly because there are men that are wicked, partly because there are good men who are foolish or 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 connectedwith the great and menacing strike in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. On that commission I appointed representatives of the church, of the bench, of the army, a representative of the capitalists of the region, and a representative of organized labor. They published a report which was not only of the utmost moment because of dealing with the great and vital problem with which they were appointed to deal, but also because in its conclusions it initiated certain general rules in so clear and masterful a fashion that I wish most earnestly it could receive the broadest circulation as a tract wherever there exists or threatens to exist trouble in any way akin to that with which those commissioners dealt.
If I might give a word of advice to Omaha, I should like to see your daily press publish in full the concluding portion of that report of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, signed by all the members thereof, by those in a special sense the champion of the wage-worker, and by those in a special sense identified with capital, organized or unorganized; because, men and women of Omaha, those people did not speak first as capitalist or as laborer, did not speak first as judge, as army man, as church man, but all of them signed that report as American citizens anxious to see right and justice prevail. No one quality 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’sstandpoint. Capitalist and wage-worker alike should honestly endeavor each to look at any matter from the other’s standpoint, with a freedom on the one hand from the contemptible arrogance which looks down upon the man of less means, and on the other, from the no less contemptible envy, jealousy and rancor, which hates another because he is better off. Each quality is the supplement of the other, and in point of baseness there is not the weight of a finger to choose between them. Look at the report signed by those men; look at it in the spirit in which they wrote it, and if you can only make yourselves, make this community, approach the problems of to-day in the spirit that those men, your fellows, showed in approaching the problem of yesterday, your problems will be solved.
Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class’s own worst enemy. In the long run, and as a whole, we are going to go up or go down together. Of course there will be individual exceptions, small, local exceptions, exceptions in kind, exceptions in place; but as a whole, if the commonwealth prospers some measure of prosperity comes to all of us. If it is not prosperous, then the adversity, though it may fall unequally upon us, will weigh more or less upon all. It lies with us ourselves to determine our own fate. I can not too often say that the wisest law, the bestadministration of the law, can do naught more than give us a fair field in which to work out that fate aright. If as individuals, or as a community, we mar our future by our own folly, let us remember that it is upon ourselves that the responsibility must rest.
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 whenever 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, certainly 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 suchmodification 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 commerce. Permanent increase would be dangerous, permanent contraction ruinous, but the needed elasticity must be brought about by 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.
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 conquerors, as administrators, as road builders. There were empires that rose over night and fell over night, empires whose influence was absolutely evanescent, which have passed away without leaving a trace of their former existence; but wherever the Roman established his rule the traces of that rule remain deep to-day, stamped on the language and customs of the people, or stamped in tangible form upon the soil itself. And so passing through Britainfifteen 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 between the semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages and the civilization which succeeded it was the difference between poor and good means of communication. And we to whom space is less of an obstacle than ever it was in the history of any other nation, we who have spanned a continent, who have thrust our borderwestward in the course of a century and a quarter until it has gone from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies, from the Alleghanies down into the valley of the Mississippi, across the great plains, over the Rockies to where the Golden Gate lets through the long heaving waters of the Pacific, and finally to Alaska, to the Arctic regions, to the tropic islands of the sea—we who take so little account of mere space must see to it that the best means of nullifying the existence of space are at our command.
Of course, during the last century there has been an altogether phenomenal growth of one kind of road wholly unknown to the people of an earlier period—the iron road. The railroad is, of course, something purely modern. A great many excellent people have proceeded upon the assumption that somehow or other having good railways should be a substitute for having good highways, good ordinary roads. A more untenable position 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 willingness 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 eminentlyproper work of making the conditions of life easier and better for the people whom of all others we can least afford to see grow discontented with their lot in life—the people who live in the country districts. The extraordinary, the wholly unheard-of, rate of our industrial development during the past seventy-five years, together with the good sides has had some evil sides. It is a fine thing to see our cities built up, but not at the expense of the country districts. The healthy thing to see is the building up of both the country and city go hand in hand. But we 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 transportation tends to a certain degree to exercise a centrifugal force to offset the centripetal force of steam. Exactly as steam and electricity have tended to gather men in masses, so now electricity, as applied to the purposes which steam has so long claimed as exclusively its own, tends again to scatter out the masses. The trolleylines 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 advantages of the town. The telephone is not to be minimized as an instrument with a tendency in the same direction; and rural free delivery is playing its part along the same lines. But no one thing can do more to offset the tendency toward an unhealthy growth from the country into the city than the making and keeping of good roads. They are needed for the sake of their effect upon the industrial conditions of the country districts; and I am almost tempted to say they are needed for the sake of social conditions in the country districts. If winter means to the average farmer the existence of a long line of liquid morasses through which he is to move his goods if bent on business, or to wade and swim if bent on pleasure; if winter means that after an ordinary rain the farmer boy or girl can not use his or her bicycle; if a little heavy weather means a stoppage of all communication not only with industrial centres but with the neighbors, you must expect that there will be a great many young people of both sexes who will not find farm life attractive. It is for this reason that I feel the work you are doing is so pre-eminently one in the interest of the Nation as a whole. I congratulate you upon the fact that you are doing it. In our American life it would be hard to overestimate the amount of good that has been accomplished by associations of individuals who have gathered together to work for a common object which was to be ofbenefit 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 movement in which you are engaged.
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.
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 westand, 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 themselves—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 anniversary 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 expandingNation instead of relatively a small and stationary one.
Of course it was not with the Louisiana Purchase that our career of expansion began. In the middle of the Revolutionary War the Illinois region, including the present States of Illinois and Indiana, was added to our domain by force of arms, as a sequel to the adventurous expedition of George Rogers Clark and his frontier riflemen. Later the treaties of Jay and Pinckney materially extended our real boundaries to the West. But none of these events was of so striking a character as to fix the popular imagination. The old thirteen colonies had always claimed that their rights stretched westward to the Mississippi, and vague and unreal though these claims were until made good by conquest, settlement, and diplomacy, they still served to give the impression that the earliest westward movements of our people were little more than the filling in of already existing national boundaries.
But there could be no illusion about the acquisition of the vast territory beyond the Mississippi, stretching westward to the Pacific, which in that day was known as Louisiana. This immense region was admittedly the territory of a foreign power, of a European kingdom. None of our people had ever laid claim to a foot of it. Its acquisition could in no sense be treated as rounding out any existing claims. When we acquired it we made evident once for all that consciously and of set purposewe had embarked on a career of expansion, that we had taken our place among those daring and hardy nations who risk much with the hope and desire of winning high position among the great powers of the earth. As is so often the case in nature, the law of development of a 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 Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War. There were other questions of real moment and importance, and there were many which at the time seemed such to those engaged in answering them; but the greatest feat of our forefathers of those generations was the deed of the men who, with pack train or wagon train, on horseback, on foot, or by boat, pushed the frontier ever westward across the continent.
Never before had the world seen the kind of national expansion which gave our people all that part of the American continent lying west of the thirteen original States; the greatest landmark in which was the Louisiana Purchase. Our triumph in this process of expansion was indissolubly bound up with the success of our peculiar kind of federal government; and this success has been so complete that because of its very completeness we now sometimes fail to appreciate not only the all-importance but the tremendous difficulty of the problem with which our Nation was originally faced.
When our forefathers joined to call into being this Nation, they undertook a task for which there was but littleencouragingprecedent. 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 wellnigh impossible for a nation to expand without either breaking up or becoming a centralized tyranny. With the success of our effort to combine a strong and efficient national union, able to put down disorder at home and to maintain our honor and interest abroad, I have not now to deal. This success was signal 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 possible types up to the period when as a Nation we ourselves began to take possession of this continent. The Grecian States performed remarkable feats of colonization, but each colony as soon as created became entirely independent of the mother State, and in after years was almost as apt to prove its enemy as its friend. Local self-government, local independence, was secured, but only by the absolute sacrifice of anything resembling national unity. In consequence, the Greek world, for all its wonderful brilliancy and the extraordinaryartistic, literary, and philosophical development which has made all mankind its debtors for the ages, was yet wholly unable to withstand a formidable foreign foe, save spasmodically. As soon as powerful, permanent empires arose on its outskirts, the Greek states in the neighborhood of such empires fell under their sway. National power and greatness were completely sacrificed to local liberty.
With Rome the exact opposite occurred. The imperial city rose to absolute dominion over all the peoples of Italy and then expanded her rule over the entire civilized world by a process which kept the nation strong and united, but gave no room whatever for local liberty and self-government. All other cities and countries were subject to Rome. In consequence this great and masterful race of warriors, rulers, road-builders, and administrators stamped their indelible impress upon all the after life of our race, and yet let an over-centralization eat out the vitals of their empire until it became an empty shell; so that when the barbarians came they destroyed only what had already become worthless to the world.
The underlying viciousness of each type of expansion 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 newStates to the original thirteen. Excellent people in the East viewed this initial expansion of the country with great alarm. Exactly as during the colonial period many good people in the mother-country thought it highly important that settlers should be kept out of the Ohio Valley in the interest of the fur companies, so after we had become a Nation many good people on the Atlantic Coast felt grave apprehension lest they might somehow be hurt by the westward growth of the Nation. These good people shook their heads over the formation of States in the fertile Ohio Valley which now forms part of the heart of our Nation; and they declared that the destruction of the Republic had been accomplished when through the Louisiana Purchase we acquired nearly half of what is now that same Republic’s present territory. Nor was their feeling unnatural. Only the adventurous and the far-seeing can be expected heartily to welcome the process of expansion, for the nation that expands is a nation which is entering upon a great career, and with greatness there must of necessity come perils which daunt all save the most stout-hearted.
We expanded by carving the wilderness into Territories and out of these Territories building new States when once they had received as permanent settlers a sufficient number of our own people. Being a practical Nation we have never tried to force on any section of our new territory an unsuitable form of government merely because it was suitable for another section under different conditions. Of theterritory covered by the Louisiana Purchase a portion was given Statehood within a few years. Another portion has not been admitted to Statehood, although a century has elapsed—although doubtless it soon will be. In each case we showed the practical governmental genius of our race by devising methods suitable to meet the actual existing needs; not by insisting upon the application of some abstract shibboleth to all our new possessions alike, no matter how incongruous this application might sometimes be.
Over by far the major part of the territory, however, our people spread in such numbers during the course of the nineteenth century that we were able to build up State after State, each with exactly the same complete local independence in all matters affecting purely its own domestic interests as in any of the original thirteen States—each owing the same absolute fealty to the Union of all the States which each of the original thirteen States also owes—and finally each having the same proportional right to its share in shaping and directing the common policy of the Union which is possessed by any other State, whether of the original thirteen or not.
This process now seems to us part of the natural order of things, but it was wholly unknown until our own people devised it. It seems to us a mere matter of course, a matter of elementary right and justice, that in the deliberations of the national representative bodies the representatives of a State which came into the Union but yesterday stand ona footing of exact and entire equality with those of the Commonwealths whose sons once signed the Declaration of Independence. But this way of looking at the matter is purely modern, and in its origin purely American. When Washington during his Presidency saw new States come into the Union on a footing of complete equality with the old, every European nation which had colonies still administered them as dependencies, and every other mother-country treated the colonist not as a self-governing equal but as a subject.
The process which we began has since been followed by all the great peoples who were capable both of expansion and self-government, and now the world accepts it as the natural process, as the rule; but a century and a quarter ago it was not merely exceptional; it was unknown.
This, then, is the great historical significance of the movement of continental expansion in which the Louisiana Purchase was the most striking single achievement. It stands out in marked relief even among the feats of a nation of pioneers, a nation whose people have from the beginning been picked out by process of natural selection from among the most enterprising individuals of the nations of western Europe. The acquisition of the territory is a credit to the broad and far-sighted statesmanship of the great statesmen to whom it was immediately due, and above all to the aggressive and the masterful character of the hardy pioneer folk to whose restless energy these statesmen gave expressionand direction, whom they followed rather than led. The history of the land comprised within the limits of the Purchase is the 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 themselves mighty in war with their fellow-man, and mighty in strength to tame the rugged wilderness. They could not thus have conquered the forest and the prairie, the mountain and the desert, had they not possessed the great fighting virtues, the qualities which enable a people to overcome the forces of hostile men and hostile nature. On the other hand, they could not have used aright their conquest had they not in addition possessed the qualities of self-mastery and self-restraint, the power of acting in combination with their fellows, the power of yielding obedience to the law and of building up an orderly civilization. Courage and hardihood are indispensable virtues in a people; but the people which possesses no others can never rise high in the scale either of power or of culture. Great peoples must have in addition the governmental capacity which comes only when individuals fully recognize their duties to one another and to the whole body politic, and are able to join together in feats of constructive statesmanship and of honest and effective administration.
The old pioneer days are gone, with their roughness and their hardship, their incredible toil and their wild half-savage romance. But the need for the pioneer virtues remains the same as ever. The peculiar frontier conditions have vanished; but the manliness and stalwart hardihood of the frontiersmen can be given even freer scope under the conditions surrounding the complex industrialism of the present day. In this great region acquired for our people under the Presidency of Jefferson, this region stretching from the Gulf to the Canadian border, from the Mississippi to the Rockies, the material and social progress has been so vast that alike for weal and for woe its people now share the opportunities and bear the burdens common to the entire civilized world. The problems before us are fundamentally the same east and west of the Mississippi, in the new States and in the old, and exactly the same qualities are required for their successful solution.
We meet here to-day to commemorate a great event, an event which marks an era in statesmanship no less than in pioneering. It is fitting that we should pay our homage in words; but we must in honor make our words good by deeds. We have every right to take a just pride in the great deeds of our forefathers; but we show ourselves unworthy to be their descendants if we make what 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 ofcity, 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 develop these qualities in the futureto 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.