Therefore my counsel to you is this: Let us show ourselves Americans
by showing that we do not want to go off in separate camps or groups
by ourselves, but that we want to co-operate with all other classes
and all other groups in a common enterprise, which is to release the
spirits of the world from bondage. I would be willing to set that up
as the final test of an American. That is the meaning of democracy.
I have been very much distressed, my fellow-citizens, by some of the
things that have happened recently. The mob spirit is displaying
itself here and there in this country. I have no sympathy with what
some men are saying, but I have no sympathy with the men that take
their punishment into their own hands; and I want to say to every man
who does join such a mob that I recognize him as unworthy of the free
institutions of the United States.
There are some organizations in this country whose object is anarchy
and the destruction of the law. I despise and hate their purpose as
much as any man, but I respect the ancient processes of justice, and
I would be too proud not to see them done justice, however wrong they
are. And so I want to utter my earnest protest against any
manifestation of the spirit of lawlessness anywhere or in any cause.
Why, gentlemen, look what it means.
We claim to be the greatest democratic people in the world, and
democracy means, first of all, that we can govern ourselves. If our
men have not self-control, then they are not capable of that great
thing which we call democratic government. A man who takes the law
into his own hands is not the right man to co-operate in any form of
orderly development of law and institutions.
And some of the processes by which the struggle between capital and
labor is carried on are processes that come very near to taking the
law into your own hands. I do not mean for a moment to compare them
with what I have just been speaking of, but I want you to see that
they are mere gradations of the manifestations of the unwillingness
to co-operate. The fundamental lesson of the whole situation is that
we must not only take common counsel, but that we must yield to and
obey common counsel. Not all of the instrumentalities for this are at
hand.