of the declaration of our independence, peace and amnesty were
promulgated in the Philippine Islands. Some trouble has since from
time to time threatened with the Mohammedan Moros, but with the
late insurrectionary Filipinos the war has entirely ceased. Civil
government has now been introduced. Not only does each Filipino enjoy
such rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness as he has
never before known during the recorded history of the islands, but
the people taken as a whole now enjoy a measure of self-government
greater than that granted to any other Orientals by any foreign power
and greater than that enjoyed by any other Orientals under their own
governments, save the Japanese alone. We have not gone too far in
granting these rights of liberty and self-government; but we have
certainly gone to the limit that in the interests of the Philippine
people themselves it was wise or just to go. To hurry matters, to go
faster than we are now going, would entail calamity on the people of
the islands. No policy ever entered into by the American people has
vindicated itself in more signal manner than the policy of holding
the Philippines. The triumph of our arms, above all the triumph of
our laws and principles, has come sooner than we had any right to
expect. Too much praise can not be given to the army for what it has
done in the Philippines both in warfare and from an administrative
standpoint in preparing the way for civil government; and similar
credit belongs to the civil authorities for the way in which they have
planted the seeds of self-government in the ground thus made ready
for them. The courage, the unflinching endurance, the high soldierly
efficiency, and the general kind-heartedness and humanity of our
troops have been strikingly manifested. There now remain only some
fifteen thousand troops in the islands. All told, over one hundred
thousand have been sent there. Of course, there have been individual
instances of wrongdoing among them. They warred under fearful
difficulties of climate and surroundings; and under the strain of
the terrible provocations which they continually received from their
foes, occasional instances of cruel retaliation occurred. Every effort
has been made to prevent such cruelties, and finally these efforts
have been completely successful. Every effort has also been made to
detect and punish the wrongdoers. After making all allowance for these
misdeeds, it remains true that few indeed have been the instances in
which war has been waged by a civilized power against semi-civilized
or barbarous forces where there has been so little wrongdoing by the
victors as in the Philippine Islands. On the other hand, the amount
of difficult, important, and beneficent work which has been done is
wellnigh incalculable.
Taking the work of the army and the civil authorities together, it may
be questioned whether anywhere else in modern times the world has seen
a better example of real constructive statesmanship than our people
have given in the Philippine Islands. High praise should also be given
those Filipinos, in the aggregate very numerous, who have accepted the
new conditions and joined with our representatives to work with hearty
good-will for the welfare of the islands.
The army has been reduced to the minimum allowed by law. It is very
small for the size of the nation, and most certainly should be kept at
the highest point of efficiency. The senior officers are given scant
chance under ordinary conditions to exercise commands commensurate
with their rank, under circumstances which would fit them to do their
duty in the time of actual war. A system of manœuvring our army in
bodies of some little size has been begun and should be steadily
continued. Without such manœuvres it is folly to expect that in the
event of hostilities with any serious foe even a small army corps
could be handled to advantage. Both our officers and enlisted men are
such that we can take hearty pride in them. No better material can
be found. But they must be thoroughly trained, both as individuals
and in the mass. The marksmanship of the men must receive special
attention. In the circumstances of modern warfare the man must act far
more on his own individual responsibility than ever before, and the
high individual efficiency of the unit is of the utmost importance.
Formerly this unit was the regiment; it is now not the regiment, not
even the troop or company; it is the individual soldier. Every effort
must be made to develop every workmanlike and soldierly quality in
both the officer and the enlisted man.
I urgently call your attention to the need of passing a bill providing
for a general staff and for the reorganization of the supply
departments on the lines of the bill proposed by the Secretary of War
last year. When the young officers enter the army from West Point they
probably stand above their compeers in any other military service.
Every effort should be made, by training, by reward of merit, by
scrutiny into their careers and capacity, to keep them of the same
high relative excellence throughout their careers.
The measure providing for the reorganization of the militia system and
for securing the highest efficiency in the National Guard, which has
already passed the House, should receive prompt attention and action.
It is of great importance that the relation of the National Guard
to the militia and volunteer forces of the United States should be
defined, and that in place of our present obsolete laws a practical
and efficient system should be adopted.
Provision should be made to enable the Secretary of War to keep
cavalry and artillery horses, worn-out in long performance of duty.
Such horses fetch but a trifle when sold; and rather than turn them
out to the misery awaiting them when thus disposed of, it would
be better to employ them at light work around the posts, and when
necessary to put them painlessly to death.
* * * * *
For the first time in our history naval manœuvres on a large scale
are being held under the immediate command of the admiral of the
navy. Constantly increasing attention is being paid to the gunnery
of the navy, but it is yet far from what it should be. I earnestly
urge that the increase asked for by the Secretary of the Navy in the
appropriation for improving the marksmanship be granted. In battle
the only shots that count are the shots that hit. It is necessary to
provide ample funds for practice with the great guns in time of peace.
These funds must provide not only for the purchase of projectiles, but
for allowances for prizes to encourage the gun crews, and especially
the gun pointers, and for perfecting an intelligent system under which
alone it is possible to get good practice.
There should be no halt in the work of building up the navy, providing
every year additional fighting craft. We are a very rich country, vast
in extent of territory and great in population; a country, moreover,
which has an army diminutive indeed when compared with that of any
other first-class power. We have deliberately made our own certain
foreign policies which demand the possession of a first-class navy.
The Isthmian Canal will greatly increase the efficiency of our navy
if the navy is of sufficient size; but if we have an inadequate navy,
then the building of the canal would be merely giving a hostage to
any power of superior strength. The Monroe Doctrine should be treated
as the cardinal feature of American foreign policy; but it would be
worse than idle to assert it unless we intended to back it up, and it
can be backed up only by a thoroughly good navy. A good navy is not a
provocative of war. It is the surest guaranty of peace.
Each individual unit of our navy should be the most efficient of its
kind as regards both material and personnel that is to be found in
the world. I call your special attention to the need of providing
for the manning of the ships. Serious trouble threatens us if we can
not do better than we are now doing as regards securing the services
of a sufficient number of the highest type of sailormen, of sea
mechanics. The veteran seamen of our warships are of as high a type
as can be found in any navy which rides the waters of the world; they
are unsurpassed in daring, in resolution, in readiness, in thorough
knowledge of their profession. They deserve every consideration
that can be shown them. But there are not enough of them. It is no
more possible to improvise a crew than it is possible to improvise
a warship. To build the finest ship, with the deadliest battery,
and to send it afloat with a raw crew, no matter how brave they were
individually, would be to insure disaster if a foe of average capacity
were encountered. Neither ships nor men can be improvised when war has
begun.
We need a thousand additional officers in order to properly man the
ships now provided for and under construction. The classes at the
naval school at Annapolis should be greatly enlarged. At the same time
that we thus add the officers where we need them, we should facilitate
the retirement of those at the head of the list whose usefulness has
become impaired. Promotion must be fostered if the service is to be
kept efficient.
The lamentable scarcity of officers, and the large number of recruits
and of unskilled men necessarily put aboard the new vessels as they
have been commissioned, has thrown upon our officers, and especially
on the lieutenants and junior grades, unusual labor and fatigue and
has gravely strained their powers of endurance. Nor is there sign
of any immediate let-up in this strain. It must continue for some
time longer, until more officers are graduated from Annapolis, and
until the recruits become trained and skilful in their duties. In
these difficulties incident upon the development of our war fleet
the conduct of all our officers has been creditable to the service,
and the lieutenants and junior grades in particular have displayed
an ability and a steadfast cheerfulness which entitles them to the
ungrudging thanks of all who realize the disheartening trials and
fatigues to which they are of necessity subjected.
There is not a cloud on the horizon at present. There seems not the
slightest chance of trouble with a foreign power. We most earnestly
hope that this state of things may continue; and the way to insure
its continuance is to provide for a thoroughly efficient navy. The
refusal to maintain such a navy would invite trouble, and if trouble
came would ensure disaster. Fatuous self-complacency or vanity, or
short-sightedness in refusing to prepare for danger, is both foolish
and wicked in such a nation as ours; and past experience has shown
that such fatuity in refusing to recognize or prepare for any crisis
in advance is usually succeeded by a mad panic of hysterical fear once
the crisis has actually arrived.
* * * * *
The striking increase in the revenues of the Post-Office Department
shows clearly the prosperity of our people and the increasing activity
of the business of the country.
The receipts of the Post-Office Department for the fiscal year
ending June 30 last amounted to $121,848,047.26, an increase of
$10,216,853.87 over the preceding year, the largest increase known in
the history of the postal service. The magnitude of this increase will
best appear from the fact that the entire postal receipts for the year
1860 amounted to but $8,518,067.
Rural free-delivery service is no longer in the experimental stage;
it has become a fixed policy. The results following its introduction
have fully justified the Congress in the large appropriations made
for its establishment and extension. The average yearly increase in
post-office receipts in the rural districts of the country is about
two per cent. We are now able, by actual results, to show that where
rural free-delivery service has been established to such an extent as
to enable us to make comparisons the yearly increase has been upward
of ten per cent.
On November 1, 1902, 11,650 rural free-delivery routes had been
established and were in operation, covering about one-third of the
territory of the United States available for rural free-delivery
service. There are now awaiting the action of the Department petitions
and applications for the establishment of 10,748 additional routes.
This shows conclusively the want which the establishment of the
service has met and the need of further extending it as rapidly as
possible. It is justified both by the financial results and by the
practical benefits to our rural population; it brings the men who live
on the soil into close relations with the active business world; it
keeps the farmer in daily touch with the markets; it is a potential
educational force; it enhances the value of farm property, makes farm
life far pleasanter and less isolated, and will do much to check the
undesirable current from country to city.
It is to be hoped that the Congress will make liberal appropriations
for the continuance of the service already established and for its
further extension.
Few subjects of more importance have been taken up by the Congress in
recent years than the inauguration of the system of nationally-aided
irrigation for the arid regions of the far West. A good beginning
therein has been made. Now that this policy of national irrigation has
been adopted, the need of thorough and scientific forest protection
will grow more rapidly than ever throughout the public-land States.
Legislation should be provided for the protection of the game, and
the wild creatures generally, on the forest reserves. The senseless
slaughter of game, which can by judicious protection be permanently
preserved on our national reserves for the people as a whole, should
be stopped at once. It is, for instance, a serious count against our
national good sense to permit the present practice of butchering off
such a stately and beautiful creature as the elk for its antlers or
tusks.
So far as they are available for agriculture, and to whatever extent
they may be reclaimed under the national irrigation law, the remaining
public lands should be held rigidly for the home builder, the settler
who lives on his land, and for no one else. In their actual use the
desert-land law, the timber and stone law, and the commutation clause
of the homestead law have been so perverted from the intention with
which they were enacted as to permit the acquisition of large areas of
the public domain for other than actual settlers and the consequent
prevention of settlement. Moreover, the approaching exhaustion of the
public ranges has of late led to much discussion as to the best manner
of using these public lands in the West which are suitable chiefly or
only for grazing. The sound and steady development of the West depends
upon the building up of homes therein. Much of our prosperity as a
nation has been due to the operation of the homestead law. On the
other hand, we should recognize the fact that in the grazing region
the man who corresponds to the homesteader may be unable to settle
permanently if only allowed to use the same amount of pasture land
that his brother, the homesteader, is allowed to use of arable land.
One hundred and sixty acres of fairly rich and well-watered soil, or
a much smaller amount of irrigated land, may keep a family in plenty,
whereas no one could get a living from one hundred and sixty acres of
dry pasture land capable of supporting at the outside only one head
of cattle to every ten acres. In the past great tracts of the public
domain have been fenced in by persons having no title thereto, in
direct defiance of the law forbidding the maintenance or construction
of any such unlawful inclosure of public land. For various reasons
there has been little interference with such inclosures in the past,
but ample notice has now been given the trespassers, and all the
resources at the command of the Government will hereafter be used to
put a stop to such trespassing.
In view of the capital importance of these matters, I commend them to
the earnest consideration of the Congress, and if the Congress finds
difficulty in dealing with them from lack of thorough knowledge of
the subject, I recommend that provision be made for a commission of
experts specially to investigate and report upon the complicated
questions involved.
* * * * *
I especially urge upon the Congress the need of wise legislation for
Alaska. It is not to our credit as a nation that Alaska, which has
been ours for thirty-five years, should still have as poor a system
of laws as is the case. No country has a more valuable possession—in
mineral wealth, in fisheries, furs, forests, and also in land
available for certain kinds of farming and stock-growing. It is a
territory of great size and varied resources, well fitted to support
a large permanent population. Alaska needs a good land law and such
provisions for homesteads and pre-emptions as will encourage permanent
settlement. We should shape legislation with a view not to the
exploiting and abandoning of the territory, but to the building up of
homes therein. The land laws should be liberal in type, so as to hold
out inducements to the actual settler whom we most desire to see take
possession of the country. The forests of Alaska should be protected,
and, as a secondary but still important matter, the game also, and at
the same time it is imperative that the settlers should be allowed to
cut timber, under proper regulations, for their own use. Laws should
be enacted to protect the Alaskan salmon fisheries against the greed
which would destroy them. They should be preserved as a permanent
industry and food supply. Their management and control should be
turned over to the Commission of Fish and Fisheries. Alaska should
have a Delegate in the Congress. It would be well if a Congressional
committee could visit Alaska and investigate its needs on the ground.
* * * * *
In dealing with the Indians our aim should be their ultimate
absorption into the body of our people. But in many cases this
absorption must and should be very slow. In portions of the Indian
Territory the mixture of blood has gone on at the same time with
progress in wealth and education, so that there are plenty of men
with varying degrees of purity of Indian blood who are absolutely
indistinguishable in point of social, political, and economic ability
from their white associates. There are other tribes which have as yet
made no perceptible advance toward such equality. To try to force such
tribes too fast is to prevent their going forward at all. Moreover,
the tribes live under widely different conditions. Where a tribe has
made considerable advance and lives on fertile farming soil it is
possible to allot the members lands in severalty much as is the case
with white settlers. There are other tribes where such a course is not
desirable. On the arid prairie lands the effort should be to induce
the Indians to lead pastoral rather than agricultural lives, and to
permit them to settle in villages rather than to force them into
isolation.
The large Indian schools situated remote from any Indian reservation
do a special and peculiar work of great importance. But, excellent
though these are, an immense amount of additional work must be done
on the reservations themselves among the old, and above all among the
young, Indians.
The first and most important step toward the absorption of the Indian
is to teach him to earn his living; yet it is not necessarily to
be assumed that in each community all Indians must become either
tillers of the soil or stock-raisers. Their industries may properly
be diversified, and those who show special desire or adaptability for
industrial or even commercial pursuits should be encouraged so far as
practicable to follow out each his own bent.
Every effort should be made to develop the Indian along the lines of
natural aptitude, and to encourage the existing native industries
peculiar to certain tribes, such as the various kinds of basket
weaving, canoe building, smith work, and blanket work. Above all, the
Indian boys and girls should be given confident command of colloquial
English, and should ordinarily be prepared for a vigorous struggle
with the conditions under which their people live, rather than for
immediate absorption into some more highly developed community.
The officials who represent the Government in dealing with the Indians
work under hard conditions, and also under conditions which render
it easy to do wrong and very difficult to detect wrong. Consequently
they should be amply paid on the one hand, and on the other hand a
particularly high standard of conduct should be demanded from them,
and where misconduct can be proved the punishment should be exemplary.
* * * * *
In no department of governmental work in recent years has there
been greater success than in that of giving scientific aid to the
farming population, thereby showing them how most efficiently to help
themselves. There is no need of insisting upon its importance, for the
welfare of the farmer is fundamentally necessary to the welfare of the
Republic as a whole. In addition to such work as quarantine against
animal and vegetable plagues, and warring against them when here
introduced, much efficient help has been rendered to the farmer by the
introduction of new plants specially fitted for cultivation under the
peculiar conditions existing in different portions of the country. New
cereals have been established in the semi-arid West. For instance,
the practicability of producing the best types of macaroni wheats in
regions of an annual rainfall of only ten inches or thereabouts has
been conclusively demonstrated. Through the introduction of new rices
in Louisiana and Texas the production of rice in this country has been
made to about equal the home demand. In the Southwest the possibility
of regrassing over-stocked range lands has been demonstrated; in the
North many new forage crops have been introduced, while in the East
it has been shown that some of our choicest fruits can be stored and
shipped in such a way as to find a profitable market abroad.
I again recommend to the favorable consideration of the Congress the
plans of the Smithsonian Institution for making the Museum under
its charge worthy of the Nation, and for preserving at the National
Capital not only records of the vanishing races of men but of the
animals of this continent which, like the buffalo, will soon become
extinct unless specimens from which their representatives may be
renewed are sought in their native regions and maintained there in
safety.
* * * * *
The District of Columbia is the only part of our territory in which
the National Government exercises local or municipal functions, and
where in consequence the Government has a free hand in reference
to certain types of social and economic legislation which must be
essentially local or municipal in their character. The Government
should see to it, for instance, that the hygienic and sanitary
legislation affecting Washington is of a high character. The evils
of slum dwellings, whether in the shape of crowded and congested
tenement-house districts or of the back-alley type, should never be
permitted to grow up in Washington. The city should be a model in
every respect for all the cities of the country. The charitable and
correctional systems of the District should receive consideration
at the hands of the Congress to the end that they may embody the
results of the most advanced thought in these fields. Moreover, while
Washington is not a great industrial city, there is some industrialism
here, and our labor legislation, while it would not be important in
itself, might be made a model for the rest of the Nation. We should
pass, for instance, a wise employer’s-liability act for the District
of Columbia, and we need such an act in our navy yards. Railroad
companies in the District ought to be required by law to block their
frogs.
* * * * *
The safety-appliance law, for the better protection of the lives and
limbs of railway employees, which was passed in 1893, went into full
effect on August 1, 1901. It has resulted in averting thousands of
casualties. Experience shows, however, the necessity of additional
legislation to perfect this law. A bill to provide for this passed the
Senate at the last session. It is to be hoped that some such measure
may now be enacted into law.
* * * * *
There is a growing tendency to provide for the publication of masses
of documents for which there is no public demand and for the printing
of which there is no real necessity. Large numbers of volumes are
turned out by the Government printing presses for which there is no
justification. Nothing should be printed by any of the Departments
unless it contains something of permanent value, and the Congress
could with advantage cut down very materially on all the printing
which it has now become customary to provide. The excessive cost of
Government printing is a strong argument against the position of those
who are inclined on abstract grounds to advocate the Government’s
doing any work which can with propriety be left in private hands.
* * * * *
Gratifying progress has been made during the year in the extension of
the merit system of making appointments in the Government service. It
should be extended by law to the District of Columbia. It is much to
be desired that our consular system be established by law on a basis
providing for appointment and promotion only in consequence of proved
fitness.
* * * * *