_Mr. Chairman, and you, Men and Women of San Francisco_:
Before I came to the Pacific Slope I was an expansionist, and after
having been here I fail to understand how any man, convinced of his
country’s greatness and glad that his country should challenge
with proud confidence its mighty future, can be anything but an
expansionist. In the century that is opening the commerce and the
command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the
world’s history.
The seat of power ever shifts from land to land, from sea to sea. The
earliest civilizations, those seated beside the Nile, the Tigris,
and the Euphrates, had little to do with sea traffic. But with the
rise of those people who went down to the sea in ships, with the
rise of the Phœnicians, the men of Tyre and Sidon, the Mediterranean
became the central sea on whose borders lay the great wealthy and
cultivated powers of antiquity. The war navies and the merchant
marines of Carthage, Greece, and Rome strove thereon for military and
industrial supremacy. Its control was the prerequisite to greatness,
and the Roman became lord of the western world only when his fleet
rode unchallenged from the Ægean to the Pillars of Hercules. Then
Rome fell. But for centuries thereafter the wealth and the culture of
Europe were centred on its southern shores, and the control of the
Mediterranean was vital in favoring or checking their growth. It was
at this time that Venice and Genoa flourished in their grandeur and
their might.
But gradually the nations of the north grew beyond barbarism and
developed fleets and commerce of their own. The North Sea, the Baltic,
the Bay of Biscay, saw trading cities rise to become independent
or else to become props of mighty civilized nations. The sea-faring
merchants ventured with ever greater boldness into the Atlantic. The
cities of the Netherlands, the ports of the Hansa, grew and flourished
as once the Italian cities had grown. Holland and England, Spain,
Portugal, and France sent forth mercantile adventurers to strive for
fame and profit on the high seas. The Cape of Good Hope was doubled,
America was discovered, and the Atlantic Ocean became to the greater
modern world what the Mediterranean had been to the lesser world of
antiquity.
Now, men and women of California, in our own day, the greatest of all
the seas and the last to be used on a large scale by civilized man
bids fair to become in its turn the first in point of importance.
The empire that shifted from the Mediterranean will in the lifetime
of those now children bid fair to shift once more westward to the
Pacific. When the 19th century opened the lonely keels of a few
whale ships, a few merchantmen, had begun to furrow the vast expanse
of the Pacific; but as a whole its islands and its shores were not
materially changed from what they had been in the long past ages when
the Phœnician galleys traded in the purple of Tyre, the ivory of
Libya, the gold of Cyprus. The junks of the Orient still crept between
China and Japan and Farther India; and from the woody wilderness
which shrouded the western shores of our own continent the red lords
of the land looked forth upon a waste of waters which only their
own canoes traversed. That was but a century ago; and now at the
opening of the 20th century the change is so vast that it is wellnigh
impossible for us to estimate its importance. In the South Seas the
great commonwealth of Australia has sprung into being. Japan, shaking
off the lethargy of centuries, has taken her rank among civilized,
modern powers. European nations have seated themselves along the
eastern coast of Asia, while China by her misfortunes has given us an
object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting to exist as a nation at
all if both rich and defenceless.
Meanwhile our own mighty Republic has stretched from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, and now in California, Oregon, and Washington,
in Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines, holds an extent of coast
line which makes it of necessity a power of the first class in the
Pacific. The extension in the area of our domain has been immense,
the extension in the area of our influence even greater. America’s
geographical position on the Pacific is such as to ensure our
peaceful domination of its waters in the future if only we grasp with
sufficient resolution the advantages of that position. We are taking
long strides in that direction; witness the cables we are laying down,
the steamship lines we are starting—some of them already containing
steamships larger than any freight carriers that have previously
existed. We have taken the first steps toward digging an Isthmian
canal, to be under our own control, a canal which will make our
Atlantic and Pacific coast lines in effect continuous, which will be
of incalculable benefit to our mercantile navy, and above all to our
military navy in the event of war.
The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine
Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be
called Providential. Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show
ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we
must go on with the work we have undertaken. I most earnestly hope
that this work will ever be of a peaceful character. We infinitely
desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we
are not afraid of war. We should deal in a spirit of justice and
fairness with weaker nations, and we should show to the strongest
that we are able to maintain our rights. Such showing can not be
made by bluster; for bluster merely invites contempt. Let us speak
courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready. If we
do these things we can count on the peace that comes to the just man
armed, to the just man who neither fears nor inflicts wrong. We must
keep on building and maintaining a thoroughly efficient navy, with
plenty of the best and most formidable ships, with an ample supply of
officers and men, and with those officers and men trained in the most
efficient fashion to perform their duties. Only thus can we assure
our position in the world at large. It behooves all men of lofty soul
fit and proud to belong to a mighty nation to see to it that we keep
our position in the world; for our proper place is with the great
expanding peoples, with the peoples that dare to be great, that
accept with confidence a place of leadership in the world. All our
people should take that position, but especially of California, you
of the Pacific Slope, for much of our expansion must go through the
Golden Gate, and inevitably you who are seated by the Pacific must
take the lead in and must profit by the growth of American influence
along the coasts and among the islands of that mighty ocean, where
east and west finally become one.
The citizen that counts, the man that counts in our life, is the man
who endeavors not to shirk difficulties but to meet and overcome them,
is the man who endeavors not to lead his life in the world’s soft
places, not to walk easily and take his comfort, but the man who goes
out to tread the rugged ways that lead to honor and success, the ways
the treading of which means good work worthily done.
What father or what mother here, if capable of taking the right view,
does not wish to see his or her children grow up trained, not to
flinch but to overcome, trained not to avoid whatever is hard and
rough and difficult, but to go down into the hurly-burly of actual
life and win glory in the arena, heedless of the dust and the sweat
and blood of the contest?
You men of the West, the older among you, came here and hewed out
your own fates for yourselves. The younger among you are the heirs
of the men who did this, and you can not, unless you are false to
your blood, desire to see the Nation, which is but the aggregate of
the individuals, act otherwise than in the way which you esteem as
honorable for the individual.
Our place as a Nation is and must be with the nations that have left
indelibly their impress on the centuries. Men will tell you that the
great expanding nations of antiquity have passed away. So they have;
and so have all others. Those that did not expand passed away and
left not so much as a memory behind them. The Roman expanded, the
Roman passed away, but the Roman has left the print of his law, of
his language, of his masterful ability in administration, deep in the
world’s history, deeply imprinted in the character of the races that
came after him. I ask that this people rise level to the greatness of
its opportunities. I do not ask that it seek for the easiest path.
If our fathers had preferred ease to effort, if they had been content
to say: “Go in peace; we would prefer that the Union were kept, but
we are not willing to pay the price in blood and effort of keeping
it”; if they had done that there is not a man or woman in this hall
who would now walk with head erect, who would now have the right to
feel, as we have the right to feel, that we challenge equality with
the citizens of the proudest country that the world has yet seen. I
ask that this generation and future generations strive in the spirit
of those who strove to found the Republic, of those who strove to
save and perpetuate it. I ask that this Nation shape its policy in
a spirit of justice toward all, a spirit of resolute endeavor to
accept each duty as the duty comes, and to rest ill-content until that
duty is done. I ask that we meet the many problems with which we are
confronted from without and from within, not in the spirit that seeks
to purchase present peace by the certainty of future disaster, but
with a wise, a fearless, and a resolute desire to make of this Nation
in the end, as the centuries go by, the example for all the nations
of the earth, to make of it a nation in which we shall see the spirit
of peace and of justice incarnate, but in which also we shall see
incarnate the spirit of courage, of hardihood, the spirit which while
refusing to wrong the weak is incapable of flinching from the strong.
AT THE CEREMONIES INCIDENT TO THE BREAKING OF SOD FOR THE ERECTION
OF A MONUMENT IN MEMORY OF THE LATE PRESIDENT McKINLEY, SAN
FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 13, 1903
_Friends and Fellow-Americans_:
It is a befitting thing that the first sod turned to prepare for the
monument to commemorate President McKinley should be turned in the
presence of his old comrades of the great war, and in the presence of
the men who in a lesser war strove to show that they were not wholly
unworthy of those who in the dark years of ’61 to ’65 proved their
truth by their endeavor, and with their blood cemented the foundation
of the American Republic. It is a solemn thing to speak in memory of
a man who when young went to war for the honor and the life of the
Nation, who for four years did his part in the camp, on the march,
in battle, rising steadily upward from the ranks, and to whom it was
given in after life to show himself exemplary in public and in private
conduct, to become the ideal of the Nation in peace as he had been a
typical representative of the Nation’s young sons in war.
It is not too much to say that no man since Lincoln was as widely and
as universally beloved in this country as was President McKinley; for
it was given to him not only to rise to the most exalted station but
to typify in his character and conduct those virtues which any citizen
worthy of the name likes to regard as typically American; to typify
the virtues of cleanly and upright living in all relations private and
public, in the most intimate family relations, in the relations of
business, in relations with his neighbors, and finally in his conduct
of the great affairs of state. And exactly as it was given to him to
do his part in settling aright the greatest problem which it has ever
befallen this Nation to settle since it became a Nation—the problem
of the preservation of the Union and the abolition of slavery—exactly
as it was his good fortune to do his part as a man should in his
youth in settling that great problem, so it was his good fortune,
when he became in fact and in name the Nation’s chief, to settle the
problems springing out of the Spanish War; problems less important
only than those which were dealt with by the men who under the lead
of Washington founded our government and the men who, upholding the
statesmanship of Lincoln and following the sword of Grant, or Sherman,
or Thomas, or Sheridan, saved and perpetuated the Republic.
When 1898 came and the war which President McKinley in all honesty and
in all sincerity sought to avoid became inevitable and was pressed
upon him he met it as he and you had met the crisis of 1861. He did
his best to prevent the war coming; once it became evident that it
had to come then he did his best to see that it was ended as quickly
and as thoroughly as possible. It is a good lesson for nations and
individuals to learn never to hit if it can be helped and then never
to hit softly. I think it is getting to be fairly understood that that
is our foreign policy. We do not want to threaten; certainly we do not
desire to wrong any man; we are going to keep out of trouble if we
possibly can keep out; and if it becomes necessary for our honor and
our interest to assert a given position we shall assert it with every
intention of making the assertion good.
The Spanish War came. As its aftermath came trouble in the
Philippines, and it was natural that this State, within whose borders
live and have lived so many of the men who fought in the great war,
should find its sons eagerly volunteering for the chance to prove
their truth in the war that came in their days; and it was to be
expected that California’s sons should do well, as they did do well,
in the Philippines in the new contest.
And now it is eminently fitting that the men of the great war and the
men of the lesser war claiming not only to have been good soldiers
but to be good citizens should come here to assist at laying the
foundation of the monument to him who typified in his career the
virtues of the soldier and exemplified in his high office our ideals
of good citizenship. I am glad that such a monument should have been
erected here in this wonderful State on the shores of the Pacific;
in this city with a great past and with a future so great that the
most sanguine among us can not properly estimate it; this city of the
Occident which looks west to the Orient across the Pacific, westward
to the west that is the hoary east; this city situated upon that giant
ocean which will in a not distant future be commercially the most
important body of water in the entire world.
I thank you for coming here and for giving me the privilege of joining
with you to-day in these solemn ceremonies of commemoration, the
ceremonies of laying the foundation of a monument which is to keep
green in mind the memory of McKinley as a lesson in war and a lesson
in peace, as a lesson to all Americans of what can be done by the
American who in good faith strives to do his whole duty by the mighty
Republic.