And State Papers 465



ON BOARD THE OLYMPIA DURING THE RE-
VIEW OF THE FLEET, AUGUST 17, 1903

AS President of the United States, I wish, on be-
half of the entire country, to greet you as rep-
resentatives of the officers and eriHsted men of the
United States Navy. Every man aboard the Olym-
pia 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 ren-
dered in the conning tower, or in the gun-turrets, or
in the engine-room, it matters not, so long as the ser-
vice itself is of the highest possible kind. This ship
commemorates forever the name of Admiral Dewey,
as the Hartford commemorates that of Admiral Far-
ragut. And I ask you all, as Americans proud of

your country, from the admiral down to the last en-
listed landsman, or the youngest apprentice, to ap-
preciate alike the high honor and heavy responsibility
of your positions.



466 Presidential Addresses



AT THE STATE FAIR, SYRACUSE, N. Y., SEP-
TEMBER 7, 1903

Governor Higgins; my Fellozv-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 de-
pression and the normal and inevitable fluctuations,
there has been on the whole from the beginning of
our government to the present day a progressive bet-
terment 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



And State Papers 467

endeavors to bring up his children so that the}^ 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 livinn-
among the farmers of our country has risen from
generation to generation, and the wealth repre-
sented on the farms has steadily increased, while
the wages of labor have likewise risen, both as re-
gards the actual money paid and as regards the pur-
chasing 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 busi-
ness 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 pros-
perity 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 to-
gether. 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 inno-



468 Presidential Addresses

cent 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 trou-
ble 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 com-
munity 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 sys-
tem 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



And State Papers 469

of men any distinction save the distinction of con-
duct, 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 ques-
tions 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 Re-
public, as such failure and such recognition have al-
ways proved fatal in the past to other republics. A
healthy republican government must rest upon indi-
viduals, 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 riierest truism to say that free
institutions are of avail only to people who pos-
sess the high and peculiar characteristics needed to
take advantage of such institutions. The century
that has just closed has witnessed many and lam-
entable 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 in-



470 Presidential Addresses

stead of one merely of word. Under such circum-
stances 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. Peo-
ple 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 daj^s 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 fore-
thought, 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, bru-
tal 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



And State Papers 471

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 mediaeval Italy and mediaeval Flanders,
this tendency was shown, and wherever the ten-
dency became a habit it invariably and inevitably
proved fatal to the state. In the final result it mat-
tered 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 tyr-
anny and disorder, and a final complete loss of lib-
erty 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
leader.ship of those who seek to excite this ferocious
and foolish class antagonism. The average Ameri-
can knows not only that he himself intends to do



472 Presidential Addresses

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 oppo-
site sides of the same shield, but different develop-
ments of the same spirit. Fundamentally, the un-
scrupulous rich man who seeks to exploit and op-
press those who are less well off is in spirit not op-
posed 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 pas-
sions ; though one panders to power in the shape of
a single man and the other to power in the shape of



And State Papers 473

a multitude. So likewise the man who wishes to rise
by wronging others must by right be contrasted, not
with the man who hkewise 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 citizen-
ship 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 ejoploits 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 citizen-
ship separates the rich man who does well from the
rich man who does ill, the poor man of good con-
duct 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 an-
other, one locality from another, or men with a
certain degree of property from those of a less de-
gree 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

4^W)Ia' XIV



474 Presidential Addresses

scrupulous to do justice to others. It is 1>ecause 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 RepubHc.

Ours is a government of Hberty, 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-deal-
ing 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 prob-
lems 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 unpa-
triotic for him to fail in giving hearty support to



And State Papers 475

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 short-sighted 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 abol-
ished, the first and severest suffering would come
among those of us who are least well off at pres-
ent. The wage-worker is well off only when the
rest of the country is well off; and he can best con-
tribute 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 con-
servative, the man who has forethought as well



47^ Presidential Addresses

as patriotism, should heartily welcome every effort,
legislative or otherwise, which has for its object
to secure fair dealing by capital, corporate or in-
dividual, toward the public and toward the em-
ployee. Such laws as the franchise-tax law in this
State, which the Court of Appeals recently unani-
mously decided constitutional — such a law as that
passed in Congress last year for the purpose of
establishing a Department of Commerce and La-
bor, under which there should be a bureau to over-
see 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 get-
ting 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 Na-
tion as a whole, and legislation which does injus-
tice 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



And State Papers 477

it is this day; and this circulation, moreover, is of
money every dohar 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 cer-
tain redemption in standard coin of every circu-
lating 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 be-
cause 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.



47^ Presidential Addresses

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 re-
cent 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 '6i 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 on-
ward 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



And State Papers 479

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 hon-
or roll of the Nation. As it is with the soldier, so
it is with the civilian. To win success in the busi-
ness world, to become a first-class mechanic, a suc-
cessful 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 uncom-
plainingly, 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 Repub-
lic. 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 un-
selfishness. 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 hard-
est work, whether as law-givers or as soldiers,
whether in public or private life.



480 Presidential Addresses

This is not a soft and easy creed to preach. It
is a creed wilhngly learned only by men and women
who, together with the softer virtues, possess also
the stronger; who can do, and dare, and die at
need, but who while life lasts will never flinch from
their allotted task. You farmers, and wage-workers,
and business men of this great State, of this mighty
and wonderful Nation, are gathered together to-day,
proud of your State and still prouder of your Na-
tion, because your forefathers and predecessors have
lived up to just this creed. You have received from
their hands a great inheritance, and you will leave
an even greater inheritance to your children, and
your childrens' children, provided only that you
practice alike in your private and your public
lives the strong virtues that have given us as a
people greatness in the past. It is not enough
to be well-meaning and kindly, but weak; neither
is it enough to be strong, unless morality and
decency go hand in hand with strength. We
must possess the qualities which make us do our
duty in our homes and among our neighbors, and in
addition we must possess the qualities which are
indispensable to the make-up of every great and
masterful nation — the qualities of courage and
hardihood, of individual initiative and yet of power
to combine for a common end, and above all, the
resolute determination to permit no man and no set
of men to sunder us one from the other by lines of
caste or creed or section. We must act upon the
motto of all for each and each for all. There must



And State Papers 481