_Mr. Mayor, and you, my Fellow-Citizens_:
There are two or three things that I should like to say to this
audience, but before beginning what I have to say on some of the
problems of the day, I wish to thank for their greeting, not only all
of you, my fellow-citizens here, but particularly the men of the great
war, and second only to them my comrades of a lesser war, where, I
hope, we showed that we were anxious to do our duty, as you had done
yours, only the need did not come to us.
We have great problems before us as a nation. I will not try to
discuss them at length with you to-day, but I can speak a word
as to the manner in which they must be met if they are to be met
successfully. All great works, though they differ in the method of
doing them, must be solved by substantially the same qualities. You
who upheld the arms of Lincoln, who followed the sword of Grant, were
able to do your duty not because you found some patent device for
doing it, but by going down to the bedrock principles which had made
good soldiers since the world began.
There was no method possible to devise which would have spared you
from heart-breaking fatigue on the marches, from hardships at night,
from danger in battle. The only way to overcome those difficulties and
dangers was by drawing on every ounce of hardihood, of courage, of
loyalty, and of iron resolution. That is how you had to win out. You
had to win as the soldiers of Washington had won before you, as we of
the younger generation must win if ever the call should be made upon
us to face a serious foe. Arms change, tactics change, but the spirit
that makes the real soldier does not change. The spirit that makes for
victory does not change.
It is just so in civic life. The problems change, but fundamentally
the qualities needed to face them in the average citizen are the same.
Our new and highly complex industrial civilization has produced a new
and complicated series of problems. We need to face those problems and
not to run away from them. We need to exercise all our ingenuity in
trying to devise some effective solution, but the only way in which
that solution can be applied is the old way of bringing honesty,
courage, and common-sense to bear upon it. One feature of honesty and
common-sense combined is never to promise what you do not think you
can perform, and then never fail to perform what you have promised.
And that applies in public life just as much as in private life.
If some of those who have seen cause for wonder in what I have said
this summer on the subject of the great corporations, which are
popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as trusts, would
take the trouble to read my messages when I was Governor, what I said
on the stump two years ago, and what I put into my first message
to Congress, I think they would have been less astonished. I said
nothing on the stump that I did not think I could make good, and I
shall not hesitate now to take the position which I then advocated.
I am even more anxious that you who hear what I say should think of it
than that you should applaud it. I am not going to try to define with
technical accuracy what ought to be meant when we speak of a trust.
But if by trust we mean merely a big corporation, then I ask you to
ponder the utter folly of the man who either in a spirit of rancor or
in a spirit of folly says “destroy the trusts,” without giving you
an idea of what he means really to do. I will go with him if he says
destroy the evil in the trusts, gladly. I will try to find out that
evil, I will seek to apply remedies, which I have already outlined
in other speeches; but if his policy, from whatever motive, whether
hatred, fear, panic or just sheer ignorance, is to destroy the trusts
in a way that will destroy all our property—no. Those men who advocate
wild and foolish remedies which would be worse than the disease are
doing all in their power to perpetuate the evils against which they
nominally war, because, if we are brought face to face with the naked
issue of either keeping or totally destroying a prosperity in which
the majority share, but in which some share improperly, why, as
sensible men, we must decide that it is a great deal better that some
people should prosper too much than that no one should prosper enough.
So that the man who advocates destroying the trusts by measures which
would paralyze the industries of the country is at least a quack, and
at worst an enemy to the Republic.
In 1893 there was no trouble about anybody making too much money. The
trusts were down, but the trouble was that we were all of us down.
Nothing but harm to the whole body politic can come from ignorant
agitation, carried on partially against real evils, partially against
imaginary evils, but in a spirit which would substitute for the real
evils evils just as real and infinitely greater. Those men, if they
should succeed, could do nothing to bring about a solution of the
great problems with which we are concerned. If they could destroy
certain of the evils at the cost of overthrowing the well-being of the
entire country, it would mean merely that there would come a reaction
in which they and their remedies would be hopelessly discredited.
Now, it does not do anybody any good, and it will do most of us a
great deal of harm, to take steps which will check any proper growth
in a corporation. We wish not to penalize but to reward a great
captain of industry or the men banded together in a corporation who
have the business forethought and energy necessary to build up a great
industrial enterprise. Keep that in mind. A big corporation may be
doing excellent work for the whole country, and you want, above all
things, when striving to get a plan which will prevent wrongdoing
by a corporation which desires to do wrong, not at the same time to
have a scheme which will interfere with a corporation doing well, if
that corporation is handling itself honestly and squarely. What I
am saying ought to be treated as simple, elementary truths. The only
reason it is necessary to say them at all is that apparently some
people forget them.
I believe something can be done by national legislation. When I state
that I ask you to note my words. I say I believe. It is not in my
power to say I know. When I talk to you of my own executive duties I
can tell you definitely what will and what will not be done. When I
speak of the actions of any one else I can only say that I believe
something more can be done by national legislation. I believe it
will be done. I think we can get laws which will increase the power
of the Federal Government over corporations; if we can not, then
there will have to be an amendment to the Constitution of the nation
conferring additional power upon the Federal Government to deal with
corporations. To get that will be a matter of difficulty, and a matter
of time.
Let me interrupt here by way of illustration. You of the great war
recollect that about six weeks after Sumter had been fired on there
began to be loud clamor in the North among people who were not at the
front that you should go to Richmond; and there were any number of
people who told you how to go there. Then came Bull Run, and a lot
of those same people who a fortnight before had been yelling “On to
Richmond at once,” turned around and said the war was over. All the
hysteric brotherhood said so. But you didn’t think so. The war was
not over. It was not over for three years and nine months, and then
it was over the other way. And you got it over by setting your faces
steadily toward the goal, by not relying upon anything impossible,
but by each doing everything possible that came in his line to do, by
each man doing his duty. You did not win by any patent device; you won
by the generalship of Grant and Sherman and Thomas and Sheridan, and,
above all, by the soldiership of the men who carried the muskets and
the sabres. It did not come as soon as you wanted, and the men who
said it would come at once did not help you much either.
In dealing with any great problem in civil life, be it the trusts
or anything else, you are going to get along in just about the same
fashion. There is not any patent remedy for all the ills. All we can
do is to make up our minds definitely that we intend to find some
method by which we shall be able to tell, in the first place, what
are the real evils and what of the alleged evils are imaginary; in
the next place, what of those real evils it is possible to cure by
legislation; and then to cure them by legislation and by an honest
administration of the laws after they have been enacted. That
statement of the problem will never be attractive to the man who
thinks that somehow, by turning your hand, you are going to get a
complete solution at once.
Grant’s plan of fighting it out on that line, if it took all summer,
was not attractive to the men who wanted it done in a week. But it
was the only plan that won. The only way we can ever work out even
an approximately satisfactory solution of these great industrial
problems, of which this so-called problem of the trusts is but one, is
by approaching them in a spirit which shall combine equally sanity and
self-restraint on the one hand and resolute purpose on the other.
It is not given to me or to any one else to promise a perfect
solution. It is not given to me or to any one else to promise you even
an approximately perfect solution in a short time. But I think that
we can work out a very great improvement over the present conditions,
and the steps taken must, I am sure, be along these lines—along the
lines, in the first place, of getting power somewhere so that we shall
be able to say, the nation has power, let it use that power—and not as
it is at present, where it is out of the question to say exactly where
the power is.
We must get power first, then use that power fearlessly, but with
moderation. Let me say that again—with moderation, with sanity, with
self-restraint. The mechanism of modern business is altogether too
delicate and too complicated for us to sanction for one moment any
intermeddling with it in a spirit of ignorance, above all in a spirit
of rancor. Something can be done, something is being done now. Much
more can be done if our people resolutely but temperately will that
it shall be done. But the certain way of bringing great harm upon
ourselves, without in any way furthering the solution of the problem,
but, on the contrary, deferring indefinitely its proper solution,
would be to act in a spirit of ignorance, of violence, of rancor, in a
spirit which would make us tear down the temple of industry in which
we live because we are not satisfied with some of the details of its
management.
I want you to think of what I have said, because it represents all of
the sincerity and earnestness that I have, and I say to you here, from
this platform, nothing that I have not already stated in effect, and
nothing I would not say at a private table with any of the biggest
corporation managers in the land.