_Fellow-Citizens_:
There are many, many lesser problems which go to make up in their
entirety the huge and complex problems of our modern industrial life.
Each of these problems is, moreover, connected with many of the
others. Few indeed are simple or stand only by themselves. The most
important are those connected with the relation of the farmers, the
stock growers and soil tillers, to the community at large, and those
affecting the relations between employer and employed. In a country
like ours it is fundamentally true that the well-being of the tiller
of the soil and the wage-worker is the well-being of the State. If
they are well off, then we need concern ourselves but little as to how
other classes stand, for they will inevitably be well off too; and, on
the other hand, there can be no real general prosperity unless based
on the foundation of the prosperity of the wage-worker and the tiller
of the soil.
But the needs of these two classes are often not the same. The tiller
of the soil has been of all our citizens the one on the whole the
least affected in his ways of life and methods of industry by the
giant industrial changes of the last half century. There has been
change with him, too, of course. He also can work to best advantage
if he keeps in close touch with his fellows; and the success of the
national Department of Agriculture has shown how much can be done for
him by rational action of the Government. Nor is it only through the
Department that the Government can act. One of the greatest and most
beneficent measures passed by the last Congress, or indeed by any
Congress in recent years, is the Irrigation Act, which will do for the
States of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain region at least as
much as ever has been done for the States of the humid region by river
and harbor improvements. Few measures that have been put upon the
statute books of the Nation have done more for the people than this
law will, I firmly believe, directly and indirectly accomplish for the
States in question.
The Department of Agriculture devotes its whole energy to working
for the welfare of farmers and stock growers. In every section of
our country it aids them in their constantly increasing search for
a better agricultural education. It helps not only them, but all
the nation, in seeing that our exports of meats have clean bills
of health, and that there is rigid inspection of all meats that
enter into interstate commerce. Thirty-eight million carcasses
were inspected during the last fiscal year. Our stock growers sell
forty-five million dollars’ worth of live stock annually, and these
animals must be kept healthy or else our people will lose their trade.
Our export of plant products to foreign countries amounts to over six
hundred million dollars a year, and there is no branch of its work
to which the Department of Agriculture devotes more care. Thus the
Department has been successfully introducing a macaroni wheat from
the headwaters of the Volga, which grows successfully in ten inches
of rainfall, and by this means wheat growing has been successfully
extended westward into the semi-arid region. Two million bushels of
this wheat were grown last year; and being suited to dry conditions it
can be used for forage as well as for food for man.
The Department of Agriculture has been helping our fruit men to
establish markets abroad by studying methods of fruit preservation
through refrigeration and through methods of handling and packing.
On the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas, thanks to the Department
of Agriculture, a rice suitable to the region was imported from the
Orient and the rice crop is now practically equal to our needs in this
country, whereas a few years ago it supplied but one-fourth of them.
The most important of our farm products is the grass crop; and to show
what has been done with grasses, I need only allude to the striking
change made in the entire West by the extended use of alfalfa.
Moreover, the Department has taken the lead in the effort to prevent
the deforestation of the country. Where there are forests we seek to
preserve them; and on the once treeless plains and the prairies we are
doing our best to foster the habit of tree planting among our people.
In my own lifetime I have seen wonderful changes brought about by this
tree planting here in your own State and in the States immediately
around it.
There are a number of very important questions, such as that of good
roads, with which the States alone can deal, and where all that the
National Government can do is to co-operate with them. The same is
true of the education of the American farmer. A number of the States
have themselves started to help in this work and the Department of
Agriculture does an immense amount which is in the proper sense of the
word educational, and educational in the most practical way.
It is therefore clearly true that a great advance has been made in the
direction of finding ways by which the Government can help the farmer
to help himself—the only kind of help which a self-respecting man will
accept, or, I may add, which will in the end do him any good. Much has
been done in these ways, and farm life and farm processes continually
change for the better. The farmer himself still retains, because of
his surroundings and the nature of his work, to a pre-eminent degree
the qualities which we like to think of as distinctly American in
considering our early history. The man who tills his own farm, whether
on the prairie or in the woodland, the man who grows what we eat and
the raw material which is worked up into what we wear, still exists
more nearly under the conditions which obtained when the “embattled
farmers” of ’76 made this country a nation than is true of any others
of our people.
But the wage-workers in our cities, like the capitalists in our
cities, face totally changed conditions. The development of machinery
and the extraordinary change in business conditions have rendered the
employment of capital and of persons in large aggregations not merely
profitable but often necessary for success, and have specialized the
labor of the wage-worker at the same time that they have brought
great aggregations of wage-workers together. More and more in our
great industrial centres men have come to realize that they can not
live as independently of one another as in the old days was the case
everywhere, and as is now the case in the country districts.
Of course, fundamentally each man will yet find that the chief factor
in determining his success or failure in life is the sum of his
own individual qualities. He can not afford to lose his individual
initiative, his individual will and power; but he can best use that
power if for certain objects he unites with his fellows. Much can be
done by organization, combination, union among the wage-workers;
finally something can be done by the direct action of the State. It is
not possible empirically to declare when the interference of the State
should be deemed legitimate and when illegitimate.
The line of demarcation between unhealthy over-interference and
unhealthy lack of regulation is not always well defined, and shifts
with the change in our industrial needs. Most certainly we should
never invoke the interference of the State or Nation unless it is
absolutely necessary; but it is equally true that when confident
of its necessity we should not on academic grounds refuse it. Wise
factory laws, laws to forbid the employment of child labor and to
safeguard the employees against the effects of culpable negligence
by the employer, are necessary, not merely in the interest of the
wage-worker, but in the interest of the honest and humane employer,
who should not be penalized for his honesty and humanity by being
exposed to unchecked competition with an unscrupulous rival. It is far
more difficult to deal with the greed that works through cunning than
with the greed that works through violence. But the effort to deal
with it must be steadily made.
Very much of our effort in reference to labor matters should be by
every device and expedient to try to secure a constantly better
understanding between employer and employee. Everything possible
should be done to increase the sympathy and fellow-feeling between
them, and every chance taken to allow each to look at all questions,
especially at questions in dispute, somewhat through the other’s
eyes. If met with a sincere desire to act fairly by one another, and
if there is, furthermore, power by each to appreciate the other’s
standpoint, the chance for trouble is minimized. I suppose every
thinking man rejoices when by mediation or arbitration it proves
possible to settle troubles in time to avert the suffering and
bitterness caused by strikes. Moreover, a conciliation committee can
do best work when the trouble is in its beginning, or at least has
not come to a head. When the break has actually occurred, damage has
been done, and each side feels sore and angry; and it is difficult
to get them together—difficult to make either forget its own wrongs
and remember the rights of the other. If possible the effort at
conciliation or mediation or arbitration should be made in the earlier
stages, and should be marked by the wish on the part of both sides
to try to come to a common agreement which each shall think in the
interests of the other as well as of itself.
When we deal with such a subject we are fortunate in having before
us an admirable object-lesson in the work that has just been closed
by the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission. This was the Commission
which was appointed last fall at the time when the coal strike in
the anthracite regions threatened our Nation with a disaster second
to none which has befallen us since the days of the Civil War. Their
report was made just before the Senate adjourned at the special
session; and no Government document of recent years marks a more
important piece of work better done, and there is none which teaches
sounder social morality to our people. The commission consisted of
seven as good men as were to be found in the country, representing the
bench, the church, the army, the professions, the employers, and the
employed. They acted as a unit, and the report which they unanimously
signed is a masterpiece of sound common-sense and of sound doctrine on
the very questions with which our people should most deeply concern
themselves. The immediate effect of this commission’s appointment and
action was of vast and incalculable benefit to the Nation; but the
ultimate effect will be even better, if capitalist, wage-worker, and
law-maker alike will take to heart and act upon the lessons set forth
in the report they have made.
Of course the National Government has but a small field in which it
can work in labor matters. Something it can do, however, and that
something ought to be done. Among other things I should like to see
the District of Columbia, which is completely under the control of the
National Government, receive a set of model labor laws. Washington
is not a city of very large industries, but still it has some. Wise
labor legislation for the city of Washington would be a good thing in
itself, and it would be a far better thing, because a standard would
thereby be set for the country as a whole.
In the field of general legislation relating to these subjects the
action of Congress is necessarily very limited. Still there are
certain ways in which we can act. Thus the Secretary of the Navy has
recommended, with my cordial and hearty approval, the enactment of
a strong employers’-liability law in the navy yards of the Nation.
It should be extended to similar branches of the Government work.
Again, sometimes such laws can be enacted as an incident to the
Nation’s control over interstate commerce. In my last annual Message
to Congress I advocated the passage of a law in reference to car
couplings—to strengthen the features of the one already on the statute
books so as to minimize the exposure to death and maiming of railway
employees. Much opposition had to be overcome. In the end an admirable
law was passed “to promote the safety of employees and travelers upon
railroads by compelling common carriers engaged in interstate commerce
to equip their cars with automatic couplers and continuous brakes and
their locomotives with driving-wheel brakes.” This law received my
signature a couple of days before Congress adjourned. It represents a
real and substantial advance in an admirable kind of legislation.