PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS (continued 3)

AT GREENSBORO, N. C., OCTOBER 19, 1905

My Fellow-Citizens:

No man could fail to be made a better American by traveling through this great historic State of yours, where, throughout his journey, he sees place after place associated with the historic past, such as this city of yours near the Guilford battleground, commemorating by its name one of Washington’s great generals. North Carolina’s history has ever been high and honorable. It is right that we should remember that the mighty 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 acquainted 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 up him or her to dodge difficulties. The children who will rise up to call their parents blessed are those whom the parents have trained 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—to show the manly quality that allows of this being done.

AT CHARLOTTE, N. C., OCTOBER 19, 1905

My Fellow-Citizens:

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. I have rejoiced in the symptoms of your abounding material prosperity. I am here in a great centre of cotton manufacturing. Within a radius of a hundred miles of this city probably half of the cotton manufacturing of the United States is done. I realize to the full, as every good citizen should realize, that there must be a foundation of material prosperity upon which to build the welfare of State or Nation; but I realize also, as every good citizen should, that material prosperity, material well-being, can never be anything but 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 country to the level to which it shall and will be brought.

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 far from here that the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence was made; the declaration that pointed out the path along which the thirteen united colonies trod but 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 part of the heritage of honor and glory of each American, the renown bought by all 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 by 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. 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—Shipp, of North Carolina. We, who went to war in ’98, had the opportunity only to fight in a small war, and all that we would 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. If there again comes a war I know I can count on the men of the National Guard, like my escort, 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.

In civil life each generation has its problems. The tremendous industrial development of the past half century, the very 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 approach 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 aim should be to strive to keep the reign of justice alive in this country so that we shall above all things avoid the chance of ever dividing on the lines that separate one class from another, one occupation from another. The man who would preach to either wage-worker or capitalist that the other was his foe is a bad citizen and faithless American. We can afford to divide along lines that represent honest difference of opinion, but we can not afford to divide on the fundamental lines of cleavage that separate good citizens from bad citizens. We must remember, if we intend to keep this Republic in its position of headship among the nations of mankind, that we can never afford to deviate from the old American doctrine of treating each man on his worth as a man, of paying heed, not to whether he is rich or poor, but only to whether he acts as a decent citizen.

AT ROSWELL, GA., OCTOBER 20, 1905

Senator Clay; 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 of my mother’s people, and to see the spot which I already know so well from what my mother and my aunt told me. It has been exactly as if I were revisiting some old place of my childhood.

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, she then was) 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 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 we are very apt to learn most when neither we nor the people talking to us intend to teach anything. 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 those stories of the childhood of my mother, my aunts, my uncles, I can understand why the boys and girls of the 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.

It is 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 over 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 32-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 hitherto, my uncle, Irving Bulloch, shifted his gun from one side to the other and fired the last two shots fired from the “Alabama.” The other, the elder, 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 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 strength and soul and mind his duty as it was given him to see his duty.

AT PIEDMONT PARK, ATLANTA, GA., OCTOBER 20, 1905

Governor; Mr. Mayor; and you, My Valued Friend, Senator Clay; and you, Men and Women of Georgia; Men and Women of my Mother’s State; My Fellow-Citizens and Fellow-Americans:

I can not too strongly express the feeling of gratitude I have for the reception given to me to-day. I want to give you a word of explanation as to what the Senator last said. The Senator said quite truly that when I was in doubt as to the capacity or honesty of any man I was seeking to appoint, or the wisdom of any policy, I was in the habit of going to him. I will tell you why: because the Senator does what I hope I try to do and what I have preached. Whenever I go to the Senator I know I get a square deal. As I said once before to-day, the Senator comes in that group of men upon whose advice I, like every other American President who wishes to do what is best for the people, must rely. If you will come down to bed-rock fact, the party differences are mighty small compared to the common interests that all of us have as Americans. On the great majority of questions, on almost all the important questions that come up, what you want in public life is to find the public man who cares for the interests of the people, and who not only cares for them, but has the sense to know how to make that care effective. I have found that I could consult Senator Clay with absolute freedom and absolute confidence in his good faith and sincere desire to do what was best for our people. All I had to do was to convince him that I was right. I was not always successful in convincing him; but if I did convince him I knew he would stand up for what he thought right.

Before speaking to all of you here together let me say just one word suggested by the generous and unexpected gift presented to me by the representatives of organized labor here in Atlanta. I am speaking in this mighty city, an industrial centre of the Union, in a great agricultural State. It is of course a mere truism to say that if the men who till the soil and the wage-workers are well off the rest of the people will be well off; and it is the part of wise statesmanship to try primarily to do all that can be done for the farmers, the men who live on the land, who work on the land, and for the wage-workers, the men who actually do the work with their hands. It has been my good fortune to be an honorary member of a union of wage-workers. There are few honors that I have ever had of which I am prouder than that. I believe in organized labor; and I will do all that in me lies for the wage-worker, except to do wrong, and if I was willing to do that I would not be his true friend or any one else’s.

Having spoken to the farmer and the wage-worker, let me say just one word to the men of the great Civil War, to the men who fought from ’61 to ’65. I am sure that you would be pleased if you could hear the applause that greets, in any audience in the North, any allusion to the valor, the self-devotion, the fealty to right as God gave them to see the right, of the men who wore the gray in the great contest forty years ago. We are indeed thrice fortunate as a people; because to us it has been given alone among peoples in modern times to pass through one of the most terrible contests of history; and, now that the bitterness has died away, to cherish as our most precious heritage the memories bequeathed to us alike by the men in blue and the men in gray, alike by those who followed Grant and those who followed Lee, because each man showed his readiness to sacrifice all, to sacrifice life itself, upon the altar of duty as he saw it.

It is eminently appropriate that the representatives of organized labor should be called upon to play a part in any ceremonies in a great industrial city like this; and that incident alone would justify my choice of subjects to-day.

Here in this great industrial centre, 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 impossible 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 to-day 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 stationary 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 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 accompaniments 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 accomplished 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 rancorous 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 accountability 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 coextensive with their field of action. But most certainly we should not strive to prevent or limit corporate activity. We should strive to secure such effective supervision over it, such power of regulation over it, as to enable us to guarantee that its activity will be exercised only in ways beneficial to the public. The unwisdom of any well-meaning but misguided 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 interest 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 exceptional 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.

The conscience of our people has been deeply shocked by the revelations 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 dishonest, 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 appetite. Above all we should treat with a peculiarly contemptuous abhorrence 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 discredit. 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 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 community 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 straightforward 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 peculiarly 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 growing 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 entire 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 production 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 manufacturer in the South supplements the work of the planter. It is an advantage to manufacture 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 overproduction 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 boycott. 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 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 recognized 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 excepted 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 essential as between man and man.

AT THE LUNCHEON OF THE PIEDMONT CLUB, ATLANTA, GA., OCTOBER 20, 1905

Mr. Graves, and My Hosts:

Surely it must be almost unnecessary for me to say not alone how I have enjoyed to-day, 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 to-day, 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 afterward. 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 illy 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, of 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’s 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 can not 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 to say anything that could be construed into an attack upon any portion of our common country.

Let me say one word on something entirely different, suggested by our talk here to-day. In speaking over with several of the gentlemen round about me their experiences in the Georgia Legislature and some of my experiences in the New York Legislature, the thing that struck me the 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 expression to the same aspirations toward righteousness, toward honor. In doing this 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 wantonly 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 these 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, as 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 corruption. The minute that there arises 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.

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 man 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 duty if you are thus lenient. Do not be lenient, but do be just. If you dislike 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 accuse him of corruption 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 refuse under any plea of party expediency, under any consideration, to refrain from smiting him with the sword of the Lord and of Gideon.

AT JACKSONVILLE, FLA., OCTOBER 21, 1905

My Fellow-Citizens:

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 of 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 accomplished 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 especial 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 accomplished, and probably at rather less expense than was anticipated. But upon the last point, as well as upon the question of time, no positive statement can be made until the report of the commission of engineers 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. Whenever 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 fibre 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 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 Caribbean 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 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 concerned—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 international police power, if only to avoid seeing some European power forced to exercise it. In short, while we must interfere always cautiously, 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 that 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 believe that they will ever make.

AT THE FLORIDA BAPTIST COLLEGE, JACKSONVILLE, FLA., OCTOBER 21, 1905

Mr. Councilman; Mr. Principal; and you, My Fellow-Citizens:

It is a very great pleasure to be here this afternoon and say a few words of greeting to you. Let me by way of beginning say a word of special greeting to my comrades of the Grand Army. I had a colored cavalry regiment in my brigade at Santiago, and they did well.

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 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. 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 all difficulties, 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 to-day 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 effectively. 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 evidences 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 can not 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 hand; educated so that head and hand can do their several tasks, and so that there shall be behind head and hand also the heart, the conscience, the sense of clean and just living, which make the foundation of all good citizens. This is just as true for the white man as for the colored man. It is true of every man.

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 there is only a limited amount of room in the professions and there is almost an unlimited amount of room in agriculture and in the mechanical trades. Do your very best to develop good teachers, good doctors, to develop good preachers—preachers who shall preach to the colored man as it should be preached to the white man, that “by their 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 of the churches. All honor to the teacher, to the doctor, to the preacher; but remember that it is impossible that the bulk of any people shall be teachers, or doctors, or lawyers, or preachers. The bulk have got to be men engaged in the trades, as mechanics, as wage-workers, as farmers. Every man who is a good farmer, a thrifty, progressive, saving mechanic, who owns his own house, who is free from debt, and able to bring up his children well, and to keep his wife as she should be kept, is not only a first-class citizen, but is doing a mighty work in helping to uplift his race.

AT MOBILE, ALA., OCTOBER 23, 1905

Mr. Mayor; My Fellow-Citizens:

I know that the rest of you will not grudge my saying that most of all I am 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.” The Judge’s sister, the Admiral’s daughter, is the wife of that distinguished ex-Confederate who by his rule as Governor of the Philippines has held aloft the record of American rule for integrity, efficiency, and firmness.

In speaking before the citizens of this great seaport of the Gulf I naturally wish to say a word about the Panama Canal. I hold that as a matter of public policy whatever helps part of our country helps the whole; and I did my best to bring about the construction of the canal in the interest of all our people; but if there is any one section to be most benefited by it, it is the section that includes the Gulf States. Originally I had been for the Nicaragua canal; but when Congress acted I abode by the decision of Congress. It became evident that we should either have no canal or the Panama Canal; and I am for a canal. If we had not acted as we have, all chance of building that canal would have vanished for half a century to come; and as it is we now are assured of having that canal within a comparatively short time. 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 the canal knows that for decades it was opposed and successfully opposed by great commercial interests which did not wish to see it completed, which did not wish to see a canal speedily dug through the Isthmus and communication between the Atlantic and Pacific established. It seems to me evident from certain things I see in a portion of the daily press that those enemies 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 over the digging of that canal. Their weapons will be and are every form of misrepresentation. But, 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. The people who, largely by the circulation of false rumors and by direct misstatement, are seeking to create confusion such as will defer the building 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. Let me point out something of which you here will appreciate the significance: the sanitation of the Isthmus. Do you remember that a couple of years ago men said that you could not dig that canal because yellow fever was epidemic there? 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 information received this very day, I find that those who have just returned from the Isthmus are not only pleased but astonished at the excellent trim in which the project is; that it is going on well, and that it will go along even better in the future.

Of all the things said about me to-day in the over-kind allusions to me, I was especially 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 they are crooked I do not take any advice at all about removing them. We have Scriptural authority for saying that “offences must come”; but the Good Book adds, “woe to them through whom they come.” I can not guarantee, and no human being can, that there will not be an occasional man of an improper kind appointed, or an occasional well-meaning man who after being appointed 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 full extent of the law.

Here in this seaboard city I want to say another word, and that is about the United States Navy. Again, Judge Semmes, in passing by the monument of your illustrious father I felt the thrill of pride that all Americans must feel that the names of the combatants in that famous ship duel are commemorated in the names of the “Kearsarge” and “Alabama” in the United States Navy now, and that if ever they have to go into action they will go into action side by side, manned by Americans, against a common foe. I know that an audience composed as this audience is of men who either themselves fought 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. We undertook to build the Panama Canal because we said that owing to our position and interest 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 do 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 high point of efficiency that I am glad to say our regular army in its individual units has now attained. In the event of war, however, which I hope will never come, the American people in the future as in the past must on land rely mainly upon its volunteer soldiery. But while it is a comparatively simple task to turn a man of the proper character, physique and intelligence into a good soldier, you can not improvise either a battleship or the crew of a battleship. At sea the battle has to be fought with the ships and the crews that have been prepared before the war begins; and we wish to profit by the lessons of history by 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 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 who will go down with their ships. That is all right; if there is nothing else to be done, go down with the ships rather than surrender. But try to make the other fellow’s ship go down first! I want our 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.

I appreciate immensely this mighty outpouring of people. The Mayor in his most gratifying and touching speech spoke of the fact of our agreement on the fundamental questions, without regard to our differences on what are really matters only of political detail. 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, there are certain basic principles to which we must prove true if we are to make this country what it shall be made. We can perfectly well afford to differ about the currency or the tariff; but we can not afford to differ about such questions as honesty in public life, decency and cleanliness in private life. Those qualities and others like them go to the root of the whole question of citizenship. I believe in the future of this country; I believe that this great self-governing Republic will rise to a height never even 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 virtues of honesty, courage, and common-sense.

AT THE ALABAMA CONFERENCE FEMALE COLLEGE, TUSKEGEE, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

Mr. Mayor; and you, My 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 typically 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 the higher learning, in the presence of these students and of the children of the public schools; while 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 (cotton bales); and finally, I have as a guard of honor members of the National Guard, whom, as I look at, I feel to be 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 we must have, as the foundation of national prosperity, industry, energy, and thrift, and their fruits. There must be devotion to the arts and practices of peace, devotion to civic duty, and yet the readiness of the man who does his duty in civil life to do it in 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 crop is the crop of children; and the one thing that this Nation can not afford to neglect is the education of the nation of the future. The Nation of the future will rise higher or not just as the boys and girls of the present are or are not trained to do their duty as men and as women. So I take a particular pleasure in being here and greeting the children of the public schools and those past childhood who are studying in this college itself. The one all-essential thing in America, the thing that underlies everything else, is to have the average American a good man or a good woman. 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 so 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 the home; that is, the way in which the ordinary man, the ordinary woman, performs his or her ordinary duties of the most sacred and 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 and to do business with, that man is a good citizen. It is just the same with the woman. 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 merely desire to perform heroic feats 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 of you boys here should remember that the way to fit yourself to be of the utmost possible use is so to act that your family likes to have you at home, instead of feeling a relief when you are gone; and 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 daughter shall not have to work.” That 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, not who flinches from a task, but who does the task, who overcomes the obstacle. The boy or girl won’t turn out that kind of a man or woman if not brought up in that spirit from the beginning.

AT TUSKEGEE INSTITUTE, TUSKEGEE, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

Mr. Washington; Friends, and Pupils of Tuskegee Institute:

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 elsewhere. 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 important to train every available man to be of the utmost use, by developing his intelligence, his skill, and his capacity for conscientious effort. Hence the work of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute is a matter of the highest practical importance to both the white man and the black man, and well worth the support of both 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 standpoint 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 clergymen, 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 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 misunderstanding 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 conference 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 man. Now let you remember 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 taxpayers, 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 everything 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 advancement 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 BUILDING, MONTGOMERY, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

Governor; Colonel Wiley; My Fellow-Citizens:

My friends and fellow-citizens, think what a privilege ours is; think what it means for this nation; that there is no place in this 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 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 he came into it, after being received as I have been received to-day.

In speaking to all of you I know that the younger—those of my own age and younger still—will not grudge my 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 passed through, after forty years finds not only that the flag which had been rent in sunder is once again whole without a seam; finds all the people challenging as theirs the right to claim their part in the heritage of glory bequeathed to every American, alike by the Americans who wore the blue and the Americans who wore the gray in the great Civil War. In coming to your mighty and beautiful State, with its wealth of agriculture, its wealth of manufactures, I am more than ever impressed by the solidarity of our interests as a people. As the Governor pointed out, the greatest and most important single export of our people is the export of cotton; 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. The business of any part of this Nation is the business of the entire Nation; and the National Government is bound to do everything it can in the interest of the cotton growers; to preserve your markets; to do everything that can possibly be done to see that the natural demand for cotton abroad is kept up and is met here under fair conditions by our own people. Perhaps no State in the Union is more interested than this in the performance 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. The canal will of course immensely shorten the water route to Asia. Our influence in the Orient must be kept at such a pitch as will ensure our being able to guarantee fair treatment to our merchants and manufacturers by 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.

Now I want to say a word about the children. Nothing pleases me more than to see the care you are devoting to education in this State; and among the many splendidly heroic deeds credited to the Southern people in peace as well as in war is the fact of 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 successful performance of political duty depends absolutely upon the successful performance of domestic, of social, duty. There never can be, there never will be a good government in which the average citizen is not a decent man in private life. It is a contradiction in terms to speak of a good government if the good government does not rest upon cleanliness and decency in the home, respect of husband and wife for one another, 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 deeds of life are those 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.

AT BIRMINGHAM, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

Mr. Rhodes; and you, My Fellow-Citizens:

I wish to say that I am stirred most deeply by this magnificent reception from what Mr. Rhodes has so well called the Magic City of the South. 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. About the year 1880 the tide turned, and the last quarter of a century has seen in Alabama a progress that would have been absolutely impossible in any other age or in any other nation than ours. The agriculture of the State went upward by leaps and bounds; but even more marvelous was your mechanical and industrial success. You have in this State coal and iron, the two basic elements in modern industrialism, 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 will be what we have seen. But there is something that is ahead of any kind of natural resources, and that is the citizenship of the man on the soil. Proud though I am of your extraordinary industrial prosperity, I am prouder yet of the men who have achieved it.

Think what it means for our nation to have the President of the United States greeted as he has been to-day, with on his right and his left hand as the guard of honor the veterans of the Civil War, the men who wore the blue, the men who wore the gray, united forever.

As I came up the street nothing pleased me as much as the sight of the school-children drawn up alongside the line of march. Remember that we shall leave this country in the hands of the children of to-day, and that the American of to-morrow will be what we train the boy or girl to be. 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 of ’60 to ’65. Honor to us if we treat your great deeds as spurring us onward; and shame to us if we treat your great deeds as excuses for our own idleness or folly. When I speak of education I do not mean only education in intelligence. That counts tremendously; but education in character counts more. It is character that determines the Nation’s progress in the long run.

In the organizations of 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 in the place in which he was. 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 practically in your own 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 the Nation? If he does, be for him, whether he is rich or poor, because if you do not you are recreant in the spirit of Americanism.

REMARKS ON BEING PRESENTED WITH TWO CONFEDERATE BADGES, AT BIRMINGHAM, ALA., OCTOBER 24, 1905

Ladies; General:

I accept the two badges in the spirit in which they are offered; for your spirit here is that we are now indeed and forever reunited under the flag of the indissoluble Union; and that henceforth the only rivalry between the man whose father fought in the Union army and the man whose father fought in the Confederate army will be the generous rivalry of seeing who can do most for our common country.

AT CITY PARK, LITTLE ROCK, ARK., OCTOBER 25, 1905

Governor; Judge Trieber, and you, My Fellow-Citizens:

I am fortunate enough to have spoken all over the Union, and I have never said in any State or any section what I would not have said in any other State or in any other section. I am fortunate in being President of a nation where you do not have to praise one State by running down any other State. Arkansas, the New England States, the Western, the Eastern, the Northern, the Southern—they are all good States and I am for them all. The thing that has impressed me most as I have gone through this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Canadian border to the Gulf, has been not the superficial differences of our people, but the essential likenesses of our people. The average American is a pretty good fellow; and all that is necessary, as you men of the honor guard, you men of the blue and gray know, is that he should know the other average American and they will get on all right. That is true as regards locality and locality, and true as regards occupation and occupation. Thank heaven, we are free now from all danger of sectional antagonism! We must now see that there never comes any spirit of class antagonism in this country, any spirit of hostility between capitalist and wage-worker, between employer and employed; and we can avoid the upgrowth of any such feeling by remembering always to treat each man on his worth as a man. Do not hold it for him or against him that he is either rich or poor. If he is a crooked man and rich, hold it against him, not because he is rich, but because he is crooked. If he is not a rich man and crooked, hold it against him, still because he is crooked. If he is a square man, no matter how much or how little money he has, stand by him because he is a square man. Distrust more than any other man in this Republic the man who would try to teach Americans to substitute loyalty to any class for loyalty to the whole American people. Republics have flourished before now, and have fallen; and they have usually fallen because there arose within them parties that represented either the unscrupulous rich or the unscrupulous poor, and that persuaded the majority of the people to substitute loyalty to the one class for loyalty to the people as a whole.

Remember that the rancorous envy that hates the rich is only one side of the shield whose obverse is the insolence and arrogance that looks down on the poor. The two qualities are fundamentally the same. They only differ in their manifestations because it happens that the man showing one is in a different position from the man showing the other. You show me a rich man who is arrogant and insolent in his disregard of the man of less means, and I tell you that same man, if he loses his wealth, will want to plunder every rich man. In the same way the man who preaches the gospel of hate and envy toward his fellows who are better off, if he becomes better off will oppress the men whom he once championed. Distrust the man who would persuade you that he would do you good by trying to do any other man harm. The man who is true to you will ultimately be the man who is true to the great fundamental principles of righteousness. In public life the man who seeks to persuade you that he will benefit you by wronging any one else, if the chance arises, will surely try to benefit himself by wronging you. What as a nation we need is to stand by the eternal, immutable principles of right and decency, the principle of fair dealing as between man and man, the principles that teach us to regard virtue with respect and vice with abhorrence wherever either the virtue or the vice may be found. If we substitute for the line that divides the decent man from the man who is not decent, the line dividing the rich man from the poor man, or the line making any other artificial division, we will have done irreparable wrong to the Nation itself.

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 dreadful 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 to 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 another hideous crime is to reduce the man doing it to the bestial level of the wretch 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 representatives of the law, owe it to our people, owe it 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; they do not make any real difference compared to other questions. The questions of currency or the tariff are of no consequence compared to the fundamental questions, the questions upon which all good Americans should be one—the questions of decency in the life of the home and of honesty in public life. It makes very little difference in the long run whether it is a Democrat or a Republican who is President, compared to the importance of honesty and broad patriotism; it makes all the difference in the world that we shall have all our public officials honest, clean men, earnest to serve their countrymen wherever they may live. The candidate is the candidate of a party; but if the President is worth his salt he is the President of the whole people. Remember, the stream does not rise any higher than its source. You can not have good public life unless you have as a basis good private life. The country is going to be all right if the average man is decent and clean in his home life; if he is a good husband, a good father, a good son; if he does his duty by his neighbor; if he is the kind of a man you are glad to have as a neighbor and glad to do business with. If that man is the average American, America is going to continue to be all right; and if the average goes below that you can not make the country right.

I have great respect for a good man. There is only one person I respect more, and that is a good woman; and if there is any man here who does not agree with me I do not think much of him. The foundation of our happiness and well-being lies in the preservation of the typical American home, the kind of home in which you veterans of the Civil War were raised, so that when you went to battle, on whichever side you fought, you had the memory of what your fathers and mothers had taught you to rest upon and to live up to. We of the younger generation—my comrades of the National Guard here and all of our time—inherited from these older men of the heroic days, these men of the great Civil War, this splendid country of ours; we inherited our position in the world. Let us see to it that we leave to our children unimpaired and improved the heritage we received from our fathers. Shame to us if we treat the great deeds of the men of the past as excuses for laziness, or idleness, or shirking of duty on our part. Let us treat these great deeds as an incentive, as a spur; let us feel that we should hang our heads if we do not prove ourselves worthy representatives of the men who are before us—you men of the South here, whose heroism and valor for four years of war have been wellnigh surpassed by the heroism and valor you have displayed in the forty years of peace following it. Let us go on with the work of the material upbuilding of this country; and at the same time remember that, vital though it is to have a good foundation of material well-being, yet it is only the foundation and upon it must be built the superstructure of the moral and spiritual higher life of the Nation. We all honor you men of the Civil War here, you men of the blue and men of the gray. We honor you because when the call to arms came you treated material considerations as dross to be cast aside, not to be for one moment weighed in the balance, compared to the proud privilege of laying down everything, life itself, on the altar of your duty as light was given you to see your duty. Let us have that same spirit deep in our heart.

AT THE LUNCHEON AT LITTLE ROCK, ARK., OCTOBER 25, 1905

Mr. Toastmaster; Judge Rose; My Hosts:

Let me at the outset say a word of thanks to the Arkansas Consistory for its generous hospitality, and say how much I appreciate it.

I want to say just one word suggested by the fact that Judge Rose was President of the American Bar Association and stands to-day as one of that group of eminent American citizens, eminent for their services to the whole country, whom we know as the leaders of the American bar. I want to speak as a layman about certain services 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 profession there come to be men who treat the profession as an end instead of as a means (I am not now speaking from the standpoint of the individual, but from the standpoint of the Nation, of the State). Just as we have a right to judge the man of religious profession 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, a peculiar quantity and quality of service to the public. There are certain abuses in connection with our whole system of law to-day which the laymen can not remedy, but which I earnestly hope that the men of the law will themselves remedy. I speak merely to my fellow laymen and invite correction. 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 government, was all-powerful as compared to the individual; when the government acted as a plaintiff and it was necessary that every possible safeguard 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 comes from a time, if my memory of history is right, when about five per cent of any given number of children born in England were punished by hanging, when people were hanged for the most trivial offences, and when all the machinery 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 law has not changed nearly as rapidly or completely. 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 criminal wrong against the public, has every possible chance secured him; but the public has by no means the chance it ought to have. No greater service is being rendered the American public to-day than by those members of the legal profession whose great 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, as any similar hideous misdeed, where the offence 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 public, in the government. 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; for that will give the public an even chance with the criminal whose offence 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 to ultimately punish a man sufficiently rich or sufficiently influential to command really good legal talent. 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 who profit by interminable delays. 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 a 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 one or two mistrials—gradually the popular interest evaporates and the criminal gets off.