day when upon every man, from the admiral to the lowest in rank, may
rest the responsibility as to whether or not a new page of honor
in American history shall be turned. As I passed the _Olympia_ I
remembered her victory of May 1, 1898, which made her name forever
one of renown in our history. But all aboard her had been equipped
for the work by days and months, usually by years, of what must have
often been irksome duty. In speaking to all of you I want a chance to
say a word of special recognition to the gun pointers. The shots that
hit are the shots that tell. They are what make the navy prove itself
equal to any need. I am happy to say that the American seamen have
never been found deficient in the fighting edge—the first requisite
of the fighting man. I do not praise you for being brave; that is
expected. The coward is to be condemned rather than the brave man to
be praised. I expect every one to show a perfect willingness to die
rather than to see the slightest stain put upon the American flag. But
in addition you must know how to use to the utmost advantage the gear
and the weapons. You must know how to fight as well as know how to
die; only thus can you become the most efficient fighting force in the
world. I again thank you for what you are. A peculiar responsibility
attaches to each and every one of you. It has been a pleasure to see
the ship and the guns, but, above all, the men behind the guns.
ON BOARD THE _OLYMPIA_ DURING THE REVIEW OF THE FLEET, AUGUST 17, 1903
As President of the United States, I wish, on behalf of the entire
country, to greet you as representatives of the officers and enlisted
men of the United States Navy. Every man aboard the _Olympia_ must
feel that on him rests a double duty, to see to it that the ship’s
name shall be for evermore a symbol of victory and of glory to all
the people of our country. Nothing pleases me more than to see
to-day for myself how high is the standard of the enlisted men of
the United States Navy. I do not believe that our navy has ever been
at a higher point of efficiency. Month by month the already high
standard is being raised even higher. All alike share in the duty,
and share in the honor which comes if the duty is well done. Whether
the service is rendered in the conning tower, or in the gun-turrets,
or in the engine-room, it matters not, so long as the service itself
is of the highest possible kind. This ship commemorates forever
the name of Admiral Dewey, as the _Hartford_ commemorates that of
Admiral Farragut. And I ask you all, as Americans proud of your
country, from the admiral down to the last enlisted landsman, or the
youngest apprentice, to appreciate alike the high honor and heavy
responsibility of your positions.
AT THE STATE FAIR, SYRACUSE, N. Y., SEPTEMBER 7, 1903
_Governor Higgins; my Fellow-Citizens_:
In speaking on Labor Day at the annual fair of the New York State
Agricultural Association, it is natural to keep especially in mind
the two bodies who compose the majority of our people and upon whose
welfare depends the welfare of the entire State. If circumstances
are such that thrift, energy, industry, and forethought enable the
farmer, the tiller of the soil, on the one hand, and the wage-worker,
on the other, to keep themselves, their wives, and their children in
reasonable comfort, then the State is well off, and we can be assured
that the other classes in the community will likewise prosper. On the
other hand, if there is in the long run a lack of prosperity among
the two classes named, then all other prosperity is sure to be more
seeming than real. It has been our profound good fortune as a Nation
that hitherto, disregarding exceptional periods of depression and
the normal and inevitable fluctuations, there has been on the whole
from the beginning of our government to the present day a progressive
betterment alike in the condition of the tiller of the soil and in
the condition of the man who, by his manual skill and labor, supports
himself and his family, and endeavors to bring up his children so
that they may be at least as well off as, and if possible better off
than, he himself has been. There are, of course, exceptions, but as
a whole the standard of living among the farmers of our country has
risen from generation to generation, and the wealth represented on the
farms has steadily increased, while the wages of labor have likewise
risen, both as regards the actual money paid and as regards the
purchasing power which that money represents.
Side by side with this increase in the prosperity of the wage-worker
and the tiller of the soil has gone on a great increase in prosperity
among the business men and among certain classes of professional
men; and the prosperity of these men has been partly the cause and
partly the consequence of the prosperity of farmer and wage-worker.
It can not be too often repeated that in this country, in the long
run, we all of us tend to go up or go down together. If the average
of well-being is high, it means that the average wage-worker, the
average farmer, and the average business man are all alike well off.
If the average shrinks, there is not one of these classes which will
not feel the shrinkage. Of course there are always some men who are
not affected by good times, just as there are some men who are not
affected by bad times. But speaking broadly, it is true that if
prosperity comes all of us tend to share more or less therein, and
that if adversity comes each of us, to a greater or less extent, feels
the tension. Unfortunately, in this world the innocent frequently
find themselves obliged to pay some of the penalty for the misdeeds
of the guilty; and so if hard times come, whether they be due to our
own fault or to our misfortune, whether they be due to some burst of
speculative frenzy that has caused a portion of the business world
to lose its head—a loss which no legislation can possibly supply—or
whether they be due to any lack of wisdom in a portion of the world of
labor—in each case the trouble once started is felt more or less in
every walk of life.
It is all-essential to the continuance of our healthy national life
that we should recognize this community of interest among our people.
The welfare of each of us is dependent fundamentally upon the welfare
of all of us, and therefore in public life that man is the best
representative of each of us who seeks to do good to each by doing
good to all; in other words, whose endeavor it is, not to represent
any special class and promote merely that class’s selfish interests,
but to represent all true and honest men of all sections and all
classes and to work for their interests by working for our common
country.
We can keep our government on a sane and healthy basis, we can make
and keep our social system what it should be, only on condition of
judging each man, not as a member of a class, but on his worth as a
man. It is an infamous thing in our American life, and fundamentally
treacherous to our institutions, to apply to any man any test save
that of his personal worth, or to draw between two sets of men any
distinction save the distinction of conduct, the distinction that
marks off those who do well and wisely from those who do ill and
foolishly. There are good citizens and bad citizens in every class
as in every locality, and the attitude of decent people toward
great public and social questions should be determined, not by the
accidental questions of employment or locality, but by those deep-set
principles which represent the innermost souls of men.
The failure in public and in private life thus to treat each man on
his own merits, the recognition of this government as being either
for the poor as such or for the rich as such, would prove fatal to
our Republic, as such failure and such recognition have always proved
fatal in the past to other republics. A healthy republican government
must rest upon individuals, not upon classes or sections. As soon as
it becomes government by a class or by a section it departs from the
old American ideal.
It is, of course, the merest truism to say that free institutions
are of avail only to people who possess the high and peculiar
characteristics needed to take advantage of such institutions. The
century that has just closed has witnessed many and lamentable
instances in which people have seized a government free in form, or
have had it bestowed upon them, and yet have permitted it under the
forms of liberty to become some species of despotism or anarchy,
because they did not have in them the power to make this seeming
liberty one of deed instead of one merely of word. Under such
circumstances the seeming liberty may be supplanted by a tyranny or
despotism in the first place, or it may reach the road of despotism
by the path of license and anarchy. It matters but little which
road is taken. In either case the same goal is reached. People show
themselves just as unfit for liberty whether they submit to anarchy
or to tyranny; and class government, whether it be the government of
a plutocracy or the government of a mob, is equally incompatible with
the principles established in the days of Washington and perpetuated
in the days of Lincoln.
Many qualities are needed by a people which would preserve the power
of self-government in fact as well as in name. Among these qualities
are forethought, shrewdness, self-restraint, the courage which refuses
to abandon one’s own rights, and the disinterested and kindly good
sense which enables one to do justice to the rights of others. Lack
of strength and lack of courage unfit men for self-government on the
one hand; and on the other, brutal arrogance, envy, in short, any
manifestation of the spirit of selfish disregard, whether of one’s own
duties or of the rights of others, are equally fatal.
In the history of mankind many republics have risen, have flourished
for a less or greater time, and then have fallen because their
citizens lost the power of governing themselves and thereby of
governing their state; and in no way has this loss of power been so
often and so clearly shown as in the tendency to turn the government
into a government primarily for the benefit of one class instead of a
government for the benefit of the people as a whole.
Again and again in the republics of ancient Greece, in those of
mediæval Italy and mediæval Flanders, this tendency was shown, and
wherever the tendency became a habit it invariably and inevitably
proved fatal to the state. In the final result it mattered not one
whit whether the movement was in favor of one class or of another.
The outcome was equally fatal, whether the country fell into the
hands of a wealthy oligarchy which exploited the poor or whether it
fell under the domination of a turbulent mob which plundered the
rich. In both cases there resulted violent alternations between
tyranny and disorder, and a final complete loss of liberty to all
citizens—destruction in the end overtaking the class which had for
the moment been victorious as well as that which had momentarily been
defeated. The death knell of the Republic had rung as soon as the
active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to
do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to stand for one
special class and for its interests as opposed to the interests of
others.
The reason why our future is assured lies in the fact that our people
are genuinely skilled in and fitted for self-government and therefore
will spurn the leadership of those who seek to excite this ferocious
and foolish class antagonism. The average American knows not only
that he himself intends to do about what is right, but that his
average fellow-countryman has the same intention and the same power
to make his intention effective. He knows, whether he be business
man, professional man, farmer, mechanic, employer, or wage-worker,
that the welfare of each of these men is bound up with the welfare of
all the others; that each is neighbor to the other, is actuated by
the same hopes and fears, has fundamentally the same ideals, and that
all alike have much the same virtues and the same faults. Our average
fellow-citizen is a sane and healthy man, who believes in decency and
has a wholesome mind. He therefore feels an equal scorn alike for the
man of wealth guilty of the mean and base spirit of arrogance toward
those who are less well off, and for the man of small means who in his
turn either feels, or seeks to excite in others the feeling of mean
and base envy for those who are better off. The two feelings, envy and
arrogance, are but opposite sides of the same shield, but different
developments of the same spirit. Fundamentally, the unscrupulous rich
man who seeks to exploit and oppress those who are less well off is
in spirit not opposed to, but identical with, the unscrupulous poor
man who desires to plunder and oppress those who are better off. The
courtier and the demagogue are but developments of the same type
under different conditions, each manifesting the same servile spirit,
the same desire to rise by pandering to base passions; though one
panders to power in the shape of a single man and the other to power
in the shape of a multitude. So likewise the man who wishes to rise
by wronging others must by right be contrasted, not with the man who
likewise wishes to do wrong, though to a different set of people, but
with the man who wishes to do justice to all people and to wrong none.
The line of cleavage between good and bad citizenship lies, not
between the man of wealth who acts squarely by his fellows and the
man who seeks each day’s wage by that day’s work, wronging no one and
doing his duty by his neighbor; nor yet does this line of cleavage
divide the unscrupulous wealthy man who exploits others in his own
interest, from the demagogue, or from the sullen and envious being who
wishes to attack all men of property, whether they do well or ill.
On the contrary, the line of cleavage between good citizenship and
bad citizenship separates the rich man who does well from the rich
man who does ill, the poor man of good conduct from the poor man of
bad conduct. This line of cleavage lies at right angles to any such
arbitrary line of division as that separating one class from another,
one locality from another, or men with a certain degree of property
from those of a less degree of property.
The good citizen is the man who, whatever his wealth or his poverty,
strives manfully to do his duty to himself, to his family, to his
neighbor, to the State; who is incapable of the baseness which
manifests itself either in arrogance or in envy, but who while
demanding justice for himself is no less scrupulous to do justice to
others. It is because the average American citizen, rich or poor, is
of just this type that we have cause for our profound faith in the
future of the Republic.
Ours is a government of liberty, by, through, and under the law.
Lawlessness and connivance at law-breaking—whether the law-breaking
take the form of a crime of greed and cunning or of a crime of
violence—are destructive not only of order, but of the true liberties
which can only come through order. If alive to their true interests
rich and poor alike will set their faces like flint against the spirit
which seeks personal advantage by overriding the laws, without regard
to whether this spirit shows itself in the form of bodily violence by
one set of men or in the form of vulpine cunning by another set of men.
Let the watchwords of all our people be the old familiar watchwords of
honesty, decency, fair dealing and common-sense. The qualities denoted
by these words are essential to all of us, as we deal with the complex
industrial problems of to-day, the problems affecting not merely the
accumulation but even more the wise distribution of wealth. We ask
no man’s permission when we require him to obey the law; neither the
permission of the poor man nor yet of the rich man. Least of all can
the man of great wealth afford to break the law, even for his own
financial advantage; for the law is his prop and support, and it is
both foolish and profoundly unpatriotic for him to fail in giving
hearty support to those who show that there is in very fact one law,
and one law only, alike for the rich and the poor, for the great and
the small.
Men sincerely interested in the due protection of property, and men
sincerely interested in seeing that the just rights of labor are
guaranteed, should alike remember not only that in the long run
neither the capitalist nor the wage-worker can be helped in healthy
fashion save by helping the other; but also that to require either
side to obey the law and do its full duty toward the community is
emphatically to that side’s real interest.
There is no worse enemy of the wage-worker than the man who condones
mob violence in any shape or who preaches class hatred; and surely the
slightest acquaintance with our industrial history should teach even
the most shortsighted that the times of most suffering for our people
as a whole, the times when business is stagnant, and capital suffers
from shrinkage and gets no return from its investments, are exactly
the times of hardship, and want, and grim disaster among the poor.
If all the existing instrumentalities of wealth could be abolished,
the first and severest suffering would come among those of us who are
least well off at present. The wage-worker is well off only when the
rest of the country is well off; and he can best contribute to this
general well-being by showing sanity and a firm purpose to do justice
to others.
In his turn the capitalist who is really a conservative, the man
who has forethought as well as patriotism, should heartily welcome
every effort, legislative or otherwise, which has for its object to
secure fair dealing by capital, corporate or individual, toward the
public and toward the employee. Such laws as the franchise tax law in
this State, which the Court of Appeals recently unanimously decided
constitutional—such a law as that passed in Congress last year for
the purpose of establishing a Department of Commerce and Labor,
under which there should be a bureau to oversee and secure publicity
from the great corporations which do an interstate business—such a
law as that passed at the same time for the regulation of the great
highways of commerce so as to keep these roads clear on fair terms to
all producers in getting their goods to market—these laws are in the
interest not merely of the people as a whole, but of the propertied
classes. For in no way is the stability of property better assured
than by making it patent to our people that property bears its proper
share of the burdens of the State; that property is handled not
only in the interest of the owner, but in the interest of the whole
community.
In other words, legislation to be permanently good for any class must
also be good for the Nation as a whole, and legislation which does
injustice to any class is certain to work harm to the Nation. Take
our currency system for example. This Nation is on a gold basis. The
treasury of the public is in excellent condition. Never before has the
per capita of circulation been as large as it is this day; and this
circulation, moreover, is of money every dollar of which is at par
with gold. Now, our having this sound currency system is of benefit to
banks, of course, but it is of infinitely more benefit to the people
as a whole, because of the healthy effect on business conditions.
In the same way, whatever is advisable in the way of remedial or
corrective currency legislation—and nothing revolutionary is advisable
under present conditions—must be undertaken only from the standpoint
of the business community as a whole, that is, of the American body
politic as a whole. Whatever is done, we can not afford to take any
step backward or to cast any doubt upon the certain redemption in
standard coin of every circulating note.
Among ourselves we differ in many qualities of body, head and heart;
we are unequally developed, mentally as well as physically. But each
of us has the right to ask that he shall be protected from wrongdoing
as he does his work and carries his burden through life. No man needs
sympathy because he has to work, because he has a burden to carry. Far
and away the best prize that life offers is the chance to work hard
at work worth doing; and this is a prize open to every man, for there
can be no work better worth doing than that done to keep in health and
comfort and with reasonable advantages those immediately dependent
upon the husband, the father, or the son.
There is no room in our healthy American life for the mere idler, for
the man or the woman whose object it is throughout life to shirk the
duties which life ought to bring. Life can mean nothing worth meaning,
unless its prime aim is the doing of duty, the achievement of results
worth achieving. A recent writer has finely said: “After all, the
saddest thing that can happen to a man is to carry no burdens. To be
bent under too great a load is bad; to be crushed by it is lamentable;
but even in that there are possibilities that are glorious. But to
carry no load at all—there is nothing in that. No one seems to arrive
at any goal really worth reaching in this world who does not come to
it heavy laden.”
Surely from our own experience each one of us knows that this is
true. From the greatest to the smallest, happiness and usefulness
are largely found in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in
its deepest and truest sense only by those who have not shirked
life’s burdens. The men whom we most delight to honor in all this
land are those who, in the iron years from ’61 to ’65, bore on their
shoulders the burden of saving the Union. They did not choose the
easy task. They did not shirk the difficult duty. Deliberately and
of their own free will they strove for an ideal, upward and onward
across the stony slopes of greatness. They did the hardest work
that was then to be done; they bore the heaviest burden that any
generation of Americans ever had to bear; and because they did this
they have won such proud joy as it has fallen to the lot of no other
men to win, and have written their names for evermore on the golden
honor roll of the Nation. As it is with the soldier, so it is with
the civilian. To win success in the business world, to become a
first-class mechanic, a successful farmer, an able lawyer or doctor,
means that the man has devoted his best energy and power through
long years to the achievement of his ends. So it is in the life of
the family, upon which in the last analysis the whole welfare of the
Nation rests. The man or woman who as bread-winner and home-maker, or
as wife and mother, has done all that he or she can do, patiently and
uncomplainingly, is to be honored; and is to be envied by all those
who have never had the good fortune to feel the need and duty of doing
such work. The woman who has borne, and who has reared as they should
be reared, a family of children, has in the most emphatic manner
deserved well of the Republic. Her burden has been heavy, and she has
been able to bear it worthily only by the possession of resolution,
of good sense, of conscience, and of unselfishness. But if she has
borne it well, then to her shall come the supreme blessing, for in the
words of the oldest and greatest of books, “Her children shall rise
up and call her blessed;” and among the benefactors of the land her
place must be with those who have done the best and the hardest work,
whether as law-givers or as soldiers, whether in public or private
life.