_Governor; Judge Trieber, and you, My Fellow-Citizens_:
I am fortunate enough to have spoken all over the Union, and I have
never said in any State or any section what I would not have said
in any other State or in any other section. I am fortunate in being
President of a nation where you do not have to praise one State by
running down any other State. Arkansas, the New England States, the
Western, the Eastern, the Northern, the Southern—they are all good
States and I am for them all. The thing that has impressed me most as
I have gone through this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific,
from the Canadian border to the Gulf, has been not the superficial
differences of our people, but the essential likenesses of our
people. The average American is a pretty good fellow; and all that is
necessary, as you men of the honor guard, you men of the blue and gray
know, is that he should know the other average American and they will
get on all right. That is true as regards locality and locality, and
true as regards occupation and occupation. Thank heaven, we are free
now from all danger of sectional antagonism! We must now see that there
never comes any spirit of class antagonism in this country, any spirit
of hostility between capitalist and wage-worker, between employer
and employed; and we can avoid the upgrowth of any such feeling by
remembering always to treat each man on his worth as a man. Do not hold
it for him or against him that he is either rich or poor. If he is a
crooked man and rich, hold it against him, not because he is rich, but
because he is crooked. If he is not a rich man and crooked, hold it
against him, still because he is crooked. If he is a square man, no
matter how much or how little money he has, stand by him because he is
a square man. Distrust more than any other man in this Republic the man
who would try to teach Americans to substitute loyalty to any class for
loyalty to the whole American people. Republics have flourished before
now, and have fallen; and they have usually fallen because there arose
within them parties that represented either the unscrupulous rich or
the unscrupulous poor, and that persuaded the majority of the people
to substitute loyalty to the one class for loyalty to the people as a
whole.
Remember that the rancorous envy that hates the rich is only one side
of the shield whose obverse is the insolence and arrogance that looks
down on the poor. The two qualities are fundamentally the same. They
only differ in their manifestations because it happens that the man
showing one is in a different position from the man showing the other.
You show me a rich man who is arrogant and insolent in his disregard
of the man of less means, and I tell you that same man, if he loses
his wealth, will want to plunder every rich man. In the same way the
man who preaches the gospel of hate and envy toward his fellows who
are better off, if he becomes better off will oppress the men whom he
once championed. Distrust the man who would persuade you that he would
do you good by trying to do any other man harm. The man who is true to
you will ultimately be the man who is true to the great fundamental
principles of righteousness. In public life the man who seeks to
persuade you that he will benefit you by wronging any one else, if the
chance arises, will surely try to benefit himself by wronging you. What
as a nation we need is to stand by the eternal, immutable principles
of right and decency, the principle of fair dealing as between man and
man, the principles that teach us to regard virtue with respect and
vice with abhorrence wherever either the virtue or the vice may be
found. If we substitute for the line that divides the decent man from
the man who is not decent, the line dividing the rich man from the poor
man, or the line making any other artificial division, we will have
done irreparable wrong to the Nation itself.
Governor, you spoke of a hideous crime that is often hideously avenged.
The worst enemy of the negro race is the negro criminal, and, above
all, the negro criminal of that type; for he has committed not only
an unspeakably dreadful and infamous crime against the victim, but he
has committed a hideous crime against the people of his own color; and
every reputable colored man, every colored man who wishes to see to the
uplifting of his race, owes it as his first duty to himself and to
that race to hunt down that criminal with all his soul and strength.
Now for the side of the white man. To avenge one hideous crime by
another hideous crime is to reduce the man doing it to the bestial
level of the wretch who committed the bestial crime. The horrible
effects of lynch law are shown in the fact that three-fourths of the
lynchings are not for that crime at all, but for other crimes. And
above all other men, Governor, you and I and all who are exponents and
representatives of the law, owe it to our people, owe it to the cause
of civilization and humanity, to do everything in our power, officially
and unofficially, directly and indirectly, to free the United States
from the menace and reproach of lynch law.
We can afford to be divided on questions of mere partisanship; they
do not make any real difference compared to other questions. The
questions of currency or the tariff are of no consequence compared to
the fundamental questions, the questions upon which all good Americans
should be one—the questions of decency in the life of the home and of
honesty in public life. It makes very little difference in the long run
whether it is a Democrat or a Republican who is President, compared
to the importance of honesty and broad patriotism; it makes all the
difference in the world that we shall have all our public officials
honest, clean men, earnest to serve their countrymen wherever they may
live. The candidate is the candidate of a party; but if the President
is worth his salt he is the President of the whole people. Remember,
the stream does not rise any higher than its source. You can not have
good public life unless you have as a basis good private life. The
country is going to be all right if the average man is decent and clean
in his home life; if he is a good husband, a good father, a good son;
if he does his duty by his neighbor; if he is the kind of a man you are
glad to have as a neighbor and glad to do business with. If that man is
the average American, America is going to continue to be all right; and
if the average goes below that you can not make the country right.
I have great respect for a good man. There is only one person I respect
more, and that is a good woman; and if there is any man here who
does not agree with me I do not think much of him. The foundation of
our happiness and well-being lies in the preservation of the typical
American home, the kind of home in which you veterans of the Civil War
were raised, so that when you went to battle, on whichever side you
fought, you had the memory of what your fathers and mothers had taught
you to rest upon and to live up to. We of the younger generation—my
comrades of the National Guard here and all of our time—inherited from
these older men of the heroic days, these men of the great Civil War,
this splendid country of ours; we inherited our position in the world.
Let us see to it that we leave to our children unimpaired and improved
the heritage we received from our fathers. Shame to us if we treat
the great deeds of the men of the past as excuses for laziness, or
idleness, or shirking of duty on our part. Let us treat these great
deeds as an incentive, as a spur; let us feel that we should hang our
heads if we do not prove ourselves worthy representatives of the men
who are before us—you men of the South here, whose heroism and valor
for four years of war have been wellnigh surpassed by the heroism and
valor you have displayed in the forty years of peace following it. Let
us go on with the work of the material upbuilding of this country;
and at the same time remember that, vital though it is to have a good
foundation of material well-being, yet it is only the foundation and
upon it must be built the superstructure of the moral and spiritual
higher life of the Nation. We all honor you men of the Civil War here,
you men of the blue and men of the gray. We honor you because when the
call to arms came you treated material considerations as dross to be
cast aside, not to be for one moment weighed in the balance, compared
to the proud privilege of laying down everything, life itself, on the
altar of your duty as light was given you to see your duty. Let us have
that same spirit deep in our heart.