Peace and freedom—are there two better objects for which a soldier can fight? Well, these are precisely the objects for which our soldiers are fighting in the Philippines. When there is talk of the cruelties committed in the Philippines, remember always that by far the greater proportion of these cruelties have been committed by the insurgents against their own people—as well as against our soldiers—and that not only the surest but the only effectual way of stopping them is by the progress of the American arms. The victories of the American Army have been the really effective means of putting a stop to cruelty in the Philippines. Wherever these victories have been complete—and such is now the case throughout the greater part of the islands—all cruelties have ceased, and the native is secure in his life, his liberty, and his pursuit of happiness. Where the insurrection still smoulders there is always a chance for cruelty to show itself.
Our soldiers conquer; and what is the object for which they conquer? To establish a military government? No. The laws we are now endeavoring to enact for the government of the Philippines are to increase the power and domain of the civil at the expense of the military authorities, and to render even more difficult than in the past the chance of oppression. The military power is used to secure peace, in order that it may itself be supplanted by the civil power. The progress of the American arms means the abolition of cruelty, the bringing of peace, and the rule of law and order under the civil government. Other nations have conquered to create irresponsible military rule. We conquer to bring just and responsible civil government to the conquered.
But our armies do more than bring peace, do more than bring order. They bring freedom. Remember always that the independence of a tribe or a community may, and often does, have nothing whatever to do with the freedom of the individual in that tribe or community. There are now in Asia and Africa scores of despotic monarchies, each of which is independent, and in no one of which is there the slightest vestige of freedom for the individual man. Scant indeed is the gain to mankind from the “independence” of a blood-stained tyrant who rules over abject and brutalized slaves. But great is the gain to humanity which follows the steady though slow introduction of the orderly liberty, the law-abiding freedom of the individual, which is the only sure foundation upon which national independence can be built. Wherever in the Philippines the insurrection has been definitely and finally put down, there the individual Filipino already enjoys such freedom, such personal liberty under our rule, as he could never even have dreamed of under the rule of an “independent” Aguinaldian oligarchy.
The slowly-learned and difficult art of self-government, an art which our people have taught themselves by the labor of a thousand years, can not be grasped in a day by a people only just emerging from conditions of life which our ancestors left behind them in the dim years before history dawned. We believe that we can rapidly teach the people of the Philippine Islands not only how to enjoy but how to make good use of their freedom; and with their growing knowledge their growth in self-government shall keep steady pace. When they have thus shown their capacity for real freedom by their power of self-government, then, and not till then, will it be possible to decide whether they are to exist independently of us or be knit to us by ties of common friendship and interest. When that day will come it is not in human wisdom now to foretell. All that we can say with certainty is that it would be put back an immeasurable distance if we should yield to the counsels of unmanly weakness and turn loose the islands, to see our victorious foes butcher with revolting cruelty our betrayed friends, and shed the blood of the most humane, the most enlightened, the most peaceful, the wisest and the best of their own number—for these are the classes who have already learned to welcome our rule.
Nor, while fully acknowledging our duties to others, need we wholly forget our duty to ourselves. The Pacific seaboard is as much to us as the Atlantic; as we grow in power and prosperity so our interests will grow in that furthest west which is the immemorial east. The shadow of our destiny has already reached to the shores of Asia. The might of our people already looms large against the world-horizon; and it will loom ever larger as the years go by. No statesman has a right to neglect the interests of our people in the Pacific; interests which are important to all our people, but of most importance to those of our people who have built populous and thriving States to the west of the great watershed of this continent.
This should no more be a party question than the war for the Union should have been a party question. At this moment the man in highest office in the Philippine Islands is the Vice-Governor, General Luke Wright, of Tennessee, who gallantly wore the gray in the Civil War and who is now working hand in hand with the head of our army in the Philippines, Adna Chaffee, who in the Civil War gallantly wore the blue. Those two, and the men under them, from the North and from the South, in civil life and in military life, as teachers, as administrators, as soldiers, are laboring mightily for us who live at home. Here and there black sheep are to be found among them; but taken as a whole they represent as high a standard of public service as this country has ever seen. They are doing a great work for civilization, a great work for the honor and the interest of this nation, and above all for the welfare of the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands. All honor to them; and shame, thrice shame, to us if we fail to uphold their hands!
AT THE OPENING SESSION OF THE MILITARY SURGEONS’ ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C., JUNE 5, 1902
Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen:
I am glad to have the opportunity to bid welcome to the members of this Association and their friends to-day. The men of your Association combine two professions each of which is rightfully held in high honor by all capable of appreciating the real work of men—the profession of the soldier and the profession of the doctor. Conditions in modern civilization tend more and more to make the average life of the community one of great ease, compared to what has been the case in the past. Together with what advantages have come from this softening of life and rendering it more easy there are certain attendant disadvantages. It is a very necessary thing that there should be some professions, some trades, where the same demands are made now as ever in the past upon the heroic qualities. Those demands are made alike upon the soldier and upon the doctor; and more upon those who are both soldiers and doctors, upon the men who have continually to face all the responsibility, all the risk, faced by their brothers in the civilian branch of the profession, and who also, in time of war, must face much the same risks, often exactly the same risks, that are faced by their brothers in arms whose trade is to kill and not to cure! It has been my good fortune, gentlemen, to see some of your body at work in the field, to see them carrying the wounded and the dying from the firing-line, themselves as much exposed to danger as those they were rescuing, and to see them working day and night in the field hospital afterward when even the intensity of the strain could hardly keep them awake, so fagged out were they by having each to do the work of ten.
I welcome you here, and I am glad to have the chance of seeing you, and I wish to say a word of congratulation to you upon this Association. In all our modern life we have found it absolutely indispensable to supplement the work of the individual by the work of the individuals gathered into an association. Without this work of the association you can not give the highest expression to individual endeavor, and it would be a great misfortune if the military members of the surgical and medical profession did not take every advantage of their opportunities in the same way that is taken by the members of the medical and the surgical professions who are not in the army or the navy or the marine hospital service—who are in civilian life outside. I am glad to see you gathered in this association. Just one word of warning: Pay all possible heed to the scientific side of your work; perfect yourselves as scientific men able to work with the best and most delicate apparatus; and never for one moment forget—especially the higher officers among you—that in time of need you will have to do your work with the scantiest possible apparatus! and that then your usefulness will be conditioned not upon the adequacy of the complaint that you did not have apparatus enough, but upon what you have done with the insufficient apparatus you had. Remember that and remember also—and this especially applies to the higher officers—that you must supplement in your calling the work of the surgeon with the work of the administrator. You must be doctors and military men and able administrators.
AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE ESTABLISHMENT OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY ACADEMY, WEST POINT, JUNE 11, 1902
Colonel Mills, graduates of West Point, and you, the Men and Women who are drawn to them by ties of kinship, or by the simple fact that you are Americans, and therefore of necessity drawn to them:
I am glad to have the chance of saying a word to you to-day. There is little need for me to say how well your performance has squared with the prophetic promise made on your behalf by the greatest of Americans, Washington. This institution has completed its first hundred years of life. During that century no other educational institution in the land has contributed as many names as West Point to the honor roll of the nation’s greatest citizens.
Colonel Mills, I claim to be a historian, and I speak simply in the spirit of one, simply as a reciter of facts, when I say what I have said. And more than that; not merely has West Point contributed a greater number of the men who stand highest on the nation’s honor roll, but I think beyond question that, taken as a whole, the average graduate of West Point, during this hundred years, has given a greater sum of service to the country through his life than has the average graduate of any other institution in this broad land. Now, gentlemen, that is not surprising. It is what we had a right to expect from this Military University, founded by the nation. It is what we had a right to expect, but I am glad that the expectation has been made good. And of all the institutions in this country, none is more absolutely American, none, in the proper sense of the word, more absolutely democratic than this.
Here we care nothing for the boy’s birthplace, nor his creed, nor his social standing; here we care nothing save for his worth as he is able to show it. Here you represent with almost mathematical exactness all the country geographically. You are drawn from every walk of life by a method of choice made to ensure, and which in the great majority of cases does ensure, that heed shall be paid to nothing save the boy’s aptitude for the profession into which he seeks entrance. Here you come together as representatives of America in a higher and more peculiar sense than can possibly be true of any other institution in the land, save your sister college that makes similar preparation for the service of the country on the seas.
This morning I have shaken hands with many of you; and I have met the men who stand as representatives of every great struggle, every great forward movement this nation has made for the last fifty-five or sixty years. There are some still left who took part in the Mexican War, a struggle which added to this country a territory vaster than has changed hands in Europe as the result of all the wars of the last two centuries. I meet, when I see any of the older men among you, men who took part in the great Civil War, when this nation was tried as in a furnace; the men who were called upon to do the one deed which had to be done under penalty of making the memory of Washington himself of little account, because if you had failed, then failure would also have been written across the record of his work. Finally, I see the younger men as well as the older ones, the men whom I myself have seen taking part in a little war—a war that was the merest skirmish compared with the struggle in which you fought from ’61 to ’65, and yet a war that has had most far-reaching effects, not merely upon the destiny of this nation, but, therefore, upon the destiny of the world—the war with Spain.
It was my good fortune to see in the campaign in Cuba how the graduates of West Point handled themselves; to see and to endeavor to profit by their example. It is a peculiar pleasure to come here to-day, because I was at that time intimately associated with many of these, your graduates, who are here. On the day before the San Juan fight, when we were marched up into position, the officers with whom I was, lost connection with the baggage and food, and I, for supper that night, had what Colonel Mills gave me. And the next morning Colonel Mills was with another West Pointer, gallant Shipp, of North Carolina. The next morning we breakfasted together. I remember well congratulating myself that my regiment, a raw volunteer regiment, could have, to set it an example, men like Mills and Shipp, whose very presence made the men cool, made them feel collected and at ease. Mills and Shipp went with our regiment into action. Shortly after it began Shipp was killed and Colonel Mills received a wound from which no one of us at the time dreamed that he would recover. I had at that time in my regiment, as acting second lieutenant, a cadet from West Point. He was having his holiday; he took his holiday coming down with us, and just before the assault he was shot, the bullet going, I think, into the stomach, and coming out the other side. He fell, and as we came up I leaned over him, and he said, “All right, Colonel, I am going to get well.” I did not think he was, but I said, “All right, I am sure you will,” and he did; he is all right now. There was never a moment during that time, by day or by night, that I was not an eyewitness to some performance of duty, some bit of duty well done, by a West Pointer, and I never saw a West Pointer failing in his duty. I want to be perfectly frank, gentlemen; I heard of two or three instances; you can not get in any body of men absolute uniformity of good conduct; but I am happy to say that I never was an eyewitness to such misconduct. It was my good fortune to see what is the rule, what is the rule with only the rarest exception; the rule of duty done in a way that makes a man proud to be an American, the fellow-citizen of such Americans.
Your duty here at West Point has been to fit men to do well in war. But it is a noteworthy fact that you also have fitted them to do singularly well in peace. The highest positions in the land have been held, not exceptionally, but again and again by West Pointers. West Pointers have risen to the first rank in all the occupations of civil life. Colonel Mills, I make the answer that a man who answers the question must make when I say that, while we had a right to expect that West Point would do well, we could not have expected that she would do so well as she has done.
I want to say one word to those who are graduating here, and to the undergraduates as well. I was greatly impressed the other day by an article of one of your instructors, himself a West Pointer, in which he dwelt upon the changed conditions of warfare, and the absolute need that the man who was to be a good officer should meet those changed conditions. I think it is going to be a great deal harder to be a first-class officer in the future than it has been in the past. In addition to the courage and steadfastness that have always been the prime requirements in a soldier, you have got to show far greater fertility of resource and far greater power of individual initiative than has ever been necessary before if you are to come up to the highest level of officer-like performance of duty.
As has been well said, the developments of warfare during the last few years have shown that in the future the unit will not be the regiment nor the company nor troop; the unit will be the individual man. The army is to a very great extent going to do well or ill according to the average of that individual man. If he does not know how to shoot, how to shift for himself, how both to obey orders and to accept responsibility when the emergency comes where he will not have any orders to obey, if he is not able to do all of that, and if in addition he has not got the fighting edge, you had better have him out of the army; he will be a damage in it.
In a battle hereafter each man is going to be to a considerable extent alone. The formation will be so open that the youngest officer will have to take much of the responsibility that in former wars fell on his seniors; and many of the enlisted men will have to do most of their work without supervision from any officer whatsoever. The man will have to act largely alone, and if he shows a tendency to huddle up to somebody else his usefulness will be pretty near at an end. He must draw on his own courage and resourcefulness to meet the emergencies as they come up. It will be more difficult in the future than ever before to know your profession, and more essential also; and you officers, and you who are about to become officers, if you are going to do well, have got to learn how to perform the duty which, while become more essential, has become harder to perform.
You want to face the fact and realize more than ever before that the honor or the shame of the country may depend upon the high average of character and capacity of the officers and enlisted men, and that a high average of character and capacity in the enlisted men can to a large degree be obtained only through you, the officers; that you must devote your time in peace to bringing up the standard of fighting efficiency of the men under you, not merely in doing your duty so that you can not be called to account for failure to perform it, but doing it in a way that will make any man under you abler to perform his.
I noticed throughout the time that we were in Cuba that the orders given and executed were of the simplest kind, and that there was very little manœuvring, practically none of the manœuvring of the parade-ground. Now, I want you to weigh what I say, for if you take only half of it, you will invert it. I found out very soon in my regiment that the best man was the man who had been in the Regular Army in actual service, out in the West, campaigning on the plains; if he had been a good man in the Regular Army in actual service on the plains he was the best man that I could get hold of. On the other hand, if he had merely served in time of peace a couple of years in an Eastern garrison, where he did practically nothing outside of parade grounds and barracks, or if he had been in an ordinary National Guard regiment, then one of two things was true; if he understood that he had only learned five per cent of war, he was five per cent better than any one who had learned none of it, and that was a big advance; but if he thought he had also learned the other ninety-five per cent he was worse than any one else. I recollect perfectly one man who had been a corporal in the Regular Army; this young fellow joined us sure that he knew everything, confident that war consisted in nice parade-ground manœuvres. It was almost impossible to turn his attention from trying the very difficult task of making my cowpunchers keep in a straight line, to the easier task of training them so that they could do the most efficient fighting when the occasion arose. He confused the essentials and the non-essentials. The non-essentials are so pretty and so easy that it is a great temptation to think that your duty lies in perfecting yourself and the men under you in them. You have got to do that, too; but if you only do that you will not be worth your salt when the day of trial comes.
Gentlemen, I do not intend to try here to preach to you upon the performance of your duties. It has been your special business to learn to do that. I do ask you to remember the difference there is in the military profession now from what it has been in past time; to remember that the final test of soldiership is not excellence in parade-ground formation, but efficiency in actual service in the field, and that the usefulness, the real and great usefulness in the parade-ground and barracks work comes from its being used not as an end, but as one of the means to an end. I ask you to remember that. I do not have to ask you to remember what you can not forget—the lessons of loyalty, of courage, of steadfast adherence to the highest standards of honor and uprightness which all men draw in when they breathe the atmosphere of this great institution.
AT THE HARVARD COMMENCEMENT DINNER, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., JUNE 25, 1902
Mr. President; President Eliot; and you, my Fellow Harvard Men:
I am speaking for all of you I am sure—I speak for all Americans to-day, when I say that we watch with the deepest concern the sick-bed of the English king, and that all Americans in tendering their hearty sympathy to the people of Great Britain remember keenly the outburst of genuine grief with which England last fall greeted the calamity that befell us in the death of President McKinley.
President Eliot spoke of the service due and performed by the college graduate to the State. It was my great good fortune five years ago to serve under your President, the then Secretary of the Navy, ex-Governor Long, and by a strange turn of the wheel of fate he served in my Cabinet as long as he would consent to serve, and then I had to replace him by another Harvard man!
I have been fortunate in being associated with Senator Hoar, and I should indeed think ill of myself if I had not learned something from association with a man who possesses that fine and noble belief in mankind, the lack of which forbids healthy effort to do good in a democracy like ours. I shall not speak of his associate, the junior senator, another Harvard man—Cabot Lodge—because it would be difficult for me to discuss in public one who is my closest, stanchest, and most loyal personal friend. I have another fellow Harvard man to speak of to-day, and it is necessary to paraphrase an old saying in order to state the bald truth, that it is indeed a liberal education in high-minded statesmanship to sit at the same council table with John Hay.
In addressing you this afternoon, I want to speak of three other college graduates, because of the service they have done the public. If a college education means anything, it means fitting a man to do better service than he could do without it; if it does not mean that it means nothing, and if a man does not get that out of it, he gets less than nothing out of it. No man has a right to arrogate to himself one particle of superiority or consideration because he has had a college education, but he is bound, if he is in truth a man, to feel that the fact of his having had a college education imposes upon him a heavier burden of responsibility, that it makes it doubly incumbent upon him to do well and nobly in his life, private and public. I wish to speak of three men, who, during the past three or four years have met these requirements—of a graduate of Hamilton College, Elihu Root, of a graduate of Yale, Governor Taft, and of a fellow Harvard man, Leonard Wood—men who did things; did not merely say how they ought to be done, but did them themselves; men who have met that greatest of our national needs, the need for service that can not be bought, the need for service that can only be rendered by the man willing to forego material advantages because it has to be given at the man’s own material cost.
When in England they get a man to do what Lord Cromer did in Egypt, when a man returns as Lord Kitchener will return from South Africa, they give him a peerage, and he receives large and tangible reward. But our Cromers, our men of that stamp, come back to this country, and if they are fortunate, they go back to private life with the privilege of taking up as best they can the strings left loose when they severed their old connections; and if fortune does not favor them they are accused of maladversion in office—not an accusation that hurts them, but an accusation that brands with infamy every man who makes it, and that reflects but ill on the country in which it is made.
Leonard Wood four years ago went down to Cuba, has served there ever since, has rendered her literally invaluable service; a man who through those four years thought of nothing else, did nothing else, save to try to bring up the standard of political and social life in that island, to clean it physically and morally, to make justice even and fair in it, to found a school system which should be akin to our own, to teach the people after four centuries of misrule that there were such things as governmental righteousness and honesty and fair play for all men on their merits as men. He did all this. He is a man of slender means. He did this on his pay as an army officer. As Governor of the island sixty millions of dollars passed through his hands, and he came out having been obliged to draw on his slender capital in order that he might come out even when he left the island. Credit to him? Yes, in a way. In another, no particular credit, because he was built so that he could do nothing else. He devoted himself as disinterestedly to the good of the Cuban people in all their relations as man could. He has come back here, and has been attacked, forsooth, by people who are not merely unworthy of having their names coupled with his but who are incapable of understanding the motives that have spurred him on to bring honor to this republic.
And Taft, Judge Taft, Governor Taft, who has been the head of the Philippine Commission, and who has gone back there—Taft, the most brilliant graduate of his year at Yale, the youngest Yale man upon whom Yale ever conferred a degree of LL.D., a man who, having won high position at the bar, and then served as Solicitor-General at Washington, was appointed to the United States bench. He was then asked to sacrifice himself, to give up his position in order to go to the other side of the world to take up an infinitely difficult, an infinitely dangerous problem, and do his best to solve it. He has done his best. He came back here the other day. The man has always had the honorable ambition to get upon the Supreme Court, and he knew that I had always hoped that he would be put on the Supreme Court, and when he was back here a few months ago, and there was a question of a vacancy arising, I said to him: “Governor, I think I ought to tell you that if a vacancy comes in the Supreme Court” (which I knew would put him for life in a position which he would especially like to have), “I do not see how I could possibly give it to you, for I need you where you are.” He said to me: “Mr. President, it has always been my ambition to be on the Supreme Court, but if you should offer me a justiceship now, and at the same time Congress should take away entirely my salary as Governor, I should go straight back to the Philippines, nevertheless, for those people need me, and expect me back, and believe I will not desert them.” He has gone back, gone back as a strong friend among weaker friends to help that people upward along the difficult path of self-government. He has gone to do his part—and a great part—in making the American name a symbol of honor and good faith in the Philippine Islands; to govern with justice, and with that firmness, that absence of weakness, which is only another side of justice. He has gone back to do all of that because it is his duty as he sees it. We are to be congratulated, we Americans, that we have a fellow-American like Taft.
And now Elihu Root, who, unlike myself, Mr. President Eliot, but like most of you present, comes of the old New England stock, whose great-grandfather stood beside Leonard Wood’s great-grandfather among the “embattled farmers” at Concord Bridge; Elihu Root, who had worked his way up from being a poor and unknown country boy in New York, to the leadership of the bar of the great city—he gave it up, made the very great pecuniary sacrifice implied in giving it up, and accepted the position of Secretary of War, a position which, for the last three years and at present amounts to being not only the Secretary of War, but the Secretary for the islands, the Secretary for the colonies at the same time. He has done the most exhausting and the most responsible work of any man in the administration, more exhausting and more responsible work than the work of the President, because circumstances have been such that with a man of Root’s wonderful ability, wonderful industry and wonderful conscientiousness, the President could not help but devolve upon him work that made his task one under which almost any other man would have staggered. He has done all this absolutely, disinterestedly. Nothing can come to Root in the way of reward save the reward that is implied in the knowledge that he has done something of incalculable importance which hardly another man in the Union—no other man that I know of—could have done as well as he has done it. He has before him continually questions of the utmost intricacy to decide, questions upon which life and death hang, questions the decision of which will affect our whole future world policy, questions which affect the welfare of the millions of people with whom we have been brought into such intimate contact by the events of the Spanish War, whose welfare must be a prime consideration from now on with every American public man worthy to serve his country. Root has done this work with the certainty of attack, with the certainty of misunderstanding, with the certainty of being hampered by ignorance (and worse than ignorance). And yet he has created, not for himself but for the nation also, a wonderful triumph from all these adverse forces.
Those three men have rendered inestimable service to the American people. I can do nothing for them. I can show my appreciation of them in no way save the wholly insufficient one of standing up for them, and for their work; and that I will do as long as I have tongue to speak!
AT THE COLISEUM, HARTFORD, CONN., AUGUST 22, 1902
Mr. Chairman, and you, my Fellow-Americans, men and women of Hartford:
I thank you, Senator Platt; through you I thank the State of Connecticut; Mayor Sullivan, through you I thank the city of Hartford for the greeting extended to me.
Before beginning the speech that I had intended, and still intend, to make to you to-night, I wish to allude to an incident that happened this afternoon. In being driven around your beautiful city, I was taken through Pope Park, and stopped at a platform where I was presented with a great horseshoe of flowers, the gift of the workingmen of Hartford to the President of the United States. In Father Sullivan’s speech he laid primary stress upon the fact that it was a gift of welcome from the wage-workers, upon whom ultimately this government depends. And he coupled the words of giving with certain sentences in which he expressed his belief that I would do all that I could to show myself a good representative of the wage-workers. I should be utterly unfit for the position that I occupy if I failed to do all that in me lies to act, as light is given me to act, so as to represent the best thought and purpose of the wage-worker of the United States. At the outset of the twentieth century we are facing difficult and complex problems—problems social and economic—which will tax the best energies of all of us to solve aright, and which we can only solve at all if we approach them in a spirit not merely of common-sense, but of generous desire to act each for all and all for each. While there are occasions when through legislative or administrative action the governmental representatives of the people can do especial service to one set of our citizens, yet I think you will agree with me that in the long run the best way in which to serve any one set of our citizens is to try to serve all alike well, to try to act in a spirit of fairness and justice to all—to give to each man his rights—to safeguard each man in his rights; and so far as in me lies, while I hold my present position I will be true to that conception of my duty.
I want to speak to you to-night, not on our internal problems as a nation, but on some of the external problems which we have had to face during the last four years. The internal problems are the most important. Keeping our own household straight is our first duty; but we have other duties. Just exactly as each man who is worth his salt must first of all be a good husband, a good father, a good bread winner, a good man of business, and yet must in addition to that be a good citizen for the State at large—so a nation must first take care to do well its duties within its own borders, but must not make of that fact an excuse for failing to do those of its duties the performance of which lies without its own borders.
The events of the last few years have forced the American Republic to take a larger position in the world than ever before, and therefore more than ever to concern itself with questions of policy coming without its own borders. As a people we have new duties and new opportunities both in the tropical seas and islands south of us and in the furthest Orient. Much depends upon the way in which we meet those duties, the way in which we take advantage of those opportunities. And remember this, you never can meet any duty, and after you have met it say that your action only affected that duty. If you meet it well you face the next duty a stronger man, and if you meet it ill you face your next duty a weaker man.
From the days of Monroe, Clay and the younger Adams, we as a people have always looked with peculiar interest upon the West Indies and the isthmus connecting North and South America, feeling that whatever happened there was of particular moment to this nation; and there is better reason for that feeling now than ever before. The outcome of the Spanish War put us in possession of Porto Rico, and brought us into peculiarly close touch with Cuba; while the successful negotiation of the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, and the legislation following it, at last cleared the way for the construction of the Isthmian Canal. Porto Rico, it is a pleasure to say, may now serve as an example of the best methods of administering our insular possessions. Sometimes we have to learn by experience what to avoid. It is much pleasanter when one can turn to an experience for the purpose of learning what to follow; and the last is true of our experience in Porto Rico. So excellent has been the administration of the island, so excellent the effect of the legislation concerning it, that their very excellence has caused most of us to forget all about it. There is no opportunity for headlines about Porto Rico. You don’t need to use large letters in order to say that Porto Rico continues quiet and prosperous. There is hardly a ripple of failure upon the stream of our success there; and as we don’t have to think of remedies, we follow our usual custom in these matters, and don’t think of it at all.
How have we brought that about? First and foremost, in Porto Rico we have consistently striven to get the very best men to administer the affairs of the island. It is desirable throughout our public service to secure a high standard of efficiency and integrity. But after all, here at home we ourselves always have in our own hands the remedy whereby to supply any deficiency in integrity or capacity among those that govern us. That is a fact that seems to have been forgotten, but it is a fact. In a far-off island things are different. There wrongdoing is more easy and those that suffer from it are more helpless; while there is less efficient check in the way of that public opinion to which public men are sensitive. In consequence, the administration of those islands is beyond all other kinds of administration under our government the one in which the highest standard must be demanded. In making appointments to the insular service, the appointing power must feel all the time that he is acting for the country as a whole, in the interest of the good name of our people as a whole, and any question of mere party expediency must be wholly swept aside, and the matter looked at solely from the standpoint of the honor of our own nation and the welfare of the islands. We have gotten along so well in Porto Rico because we have acted up to that theory in choosing our men down there—governor, treasurer, attorney-general, judges, superintendent of education—every one. You will find among those men all the shades of different political opinion that we have here at home; but you will find them knit together by the purpose of administering the affairs of that island on the highest plane of decency and efficiency.
Besides acting in good faith, we have acted with good sense, and that is also important. We have not been frightened or misled into giving to the people of the island a form of government unsuitable to them. While providing that the people should govern themselves as far as possible, we have not hesitated in their own interests to keep the power of shaping their destiny.
In Cuba the problem was larger, more complicated, more difficult. Here again we kept our promise absolutely. After having delivered the island from its oppressors, we refused to turn it loose offhand, with the certainty that it would sink back into chaos and savagery. For over three years we administered it on a plane higher than it had ever reached before during the four hundred years that had elapsed since the Spaniards first landed upon its shores. We brought moral and physical cleanliness into the government. We cleaned the cities for the first time in their existence. We stamped out yellow fever—an inestimable boon not merely to Cuba, but to the people of the Southern States as well. We established a school system. We made life and property secure, so that industry could again begin to thrive. Then when we had laid deep and broad the foundations upon which civil liberty and national independence must rest, we turned the island over to the hands of those whom its people had chosen as the founders of the new republic. It is a republic with which our own great Republic must ever be closely knit by the ties of common interests and common inspirations. Cuba must always be peculiarly related to us in international politics. She must in international affairs be to a degree a part of our political system. In return she must have peculiar relations with us economically. She must be in a sense part of our economic system. We expect her to accept a political attitude toward us which we think wisest both for her and for us. In return we must be prepared to put her in an economic position as regards our tariff system which will give her some measure of the prosperity which we enjoy. We can not, in my judgment, avoid taking this attitude if we are to persevere in the course which we have outlined for ourselves as a nation during the past four years; and therefore I believe that it is only a matter of time—and I trust only a matter of a very short time—before we enter into reciprocal trade relations with Cuba.
The Isthmian Canal is to be one of the greatest, probably the greatest, engineering feat of the 20th century; and I am glad it is to be done by America. We must take care that it is done under the best conditions and by the best Americans. There are certain preliminary matters to settle. When this has been done, the first question will come upon choosing the commission which is to supervise the building of the canal. And but one thought here is permissible—how to get the very best men of the highest engineering and business and administrative skill, who will consent to undertake the work. If possible, I wish to see those men represent different sections and different political parties. But those questions are secondary. The primary aim must be to get men who, though able to control much greater salaries than the nation is able to pay, nevertheless possess the patriotism and the healthy ambition which will make them put their talents at the government’s service.
So much for what has been done in the Occident. In the Orient the labor was more difficult.
It is rare indeed that a great work, a work supremely worth doing, can be done save at the cost not only of labor and toil, but of much puzzling worry during the time of the performance. Normally, the nation that achieves greatness, like the individual who achieves greatness, can do so only at the cost of anxiety and bewilderment and heart-wearing effort. Timid people, people scant of faith and hope, and good people who are not accustomed to the roughness of the life of effort—are almost sure to be disheartened and dismayed by the work and the worry, and overmuch cast down by the shortcomings, actual or seeming, which in real life always accompany the first stages even of what eventually turn out to be the most brilliant victories.
All this is true of what has happened during the last four years in the Philippine Islands. The Spanish War itself was an easy task, but it left us certain other tasks which were much more difficult. One of these tasks was that of dealing with the Philippines. The easy thing to do—the thing which appealed not only to lazy and selfish men, but to very many good men whose thought did not drive down to the root of things—was to leave the islands. Had we done this, a period of wild chaos would have supervened, and then some stronger power would have stepped in and seized the islands and have taken up the task which we in such a case would have flinched from performing. A less easy, but infinitely more absurd course, would have been to leave the islands ourselves, and at the same time to assert that we would not permit any one else to interfere with them. This particular course would have combined all the possible disadvantages of every other course which was advocated. It would have placed us in a humiliating position, because when the actual test came it would have been quite out of the question for us, after some striking deed of savagery had occurred in the islands, to stand by and prevent the re-entry of civilization into them. While the mere fact of our having threatened thus to guarantee the local tyrants and wrongdoers against outside interference by ourselves or others, would have put a premium upon every species of tyranny and anarchy within the islands.
Finally, there was the course which we adopted—not an easy course, and one fraught with danger and difficulty, as is generally the case in this world when some great feat is to be accomplished as an incident to working out national destiny. We made up our minds to stay in the islands—to put down violence—to establish peace and order—and then to introduce a just and wise civil rule accompanied by a measure of self-government which should increase as rapidly as the islanders showed themselves fit for it. It was certainly a formidable task; but think of the marvelously successful way in which it has been accomplished! The first and vitally important feat was the establishment of the supremacy of the American flag; and this had to be done by the effort of these gallant fellow-Americans of ours to whom so great a debt is due—the officers and enlisted men of the United States regular and volunteer forces. In a succession of campaigns, carried on in unknown tropic jungles against an elusive and treacherous foe vastly outnumbering them, under the most adverse conditions of climate, weather, and country, our troops completely broke the power of the insurgents, smashed their armies, and harried the broken robber bands into submission. In its last stages, the war against our rule sank into mere brigandage; and what our troops had to do was to hunt down the parties of ladrones. It was not an easy task which it was humanly possible to accomplish in a month or a year; and therefore after the first month and the first year had elapsed, some excellent people said that it couldn’t be done; but it was done. Month by month, year by year, with unwearied and patient resolution, our army in the Philippines did the task which it found ready at hand until the last vestige of organized insurrection was stamped out. I do not refer to the Moros, with whom we have exercised the utmost forbearance, but who may force us to chastise them if they persist in attacking our troops. We will do everything possible to avoid having trouble with them, but if they insist upon it it will come. Among the Filipinos proper, however, peace has come. Doubtless here and there sporadic outbreaks of brigandage will occur from time to time, but organized warfare against the American flag has ceased, and there is no reason to apprehend its recurrence. Our army in the islands has been reduced until it is not a fourth of what it was at the time the outbreak was at its height.
Step by step as the army conquered, the rule of the military was supplanted by the rule of the civil authorities—the soldier was succeeded by the civilian magistrate. The utmost care has been exercised in choosing the best type of Americans for the high civil positions, and the actual work of administration has been done, so far as possible, by native Filipino officials serving under these Americans. The success of the effort has been wonderful. Never has this country had a more upright or an abler body of public representatives than Governor Taft, Vice-Governor Wright, and their associates and subordinates in the Philippine Islands. It is a very difficult matter, practically, to apply the principles of an orderly free government to an Oriental people struggling upward out of barbarism and subjection. It is a task requiring infinite firmness, patience, tact, broadmindedness. All these qualities, and the countless others necessary, have been found in the civil and military officials who have been sent over to administer the islands. It was, of course, inevitable that there should be occasional failures; but it is astonishing how few these have been. Here and there the civil government which had been established in a given district had to be temporarily withdrawn because of some outbreak. Let me give you an idea of some of the difficulties. We have been trying to put into effect the principle of a popular choice of representative. In one district it proved to be wholly impossible to make the people understand how to vote. Finally they took a little hill, and put two candidates, one on one side and one on the other, and made the people walk up and stand by the candidate they wanted.
But at last, on the July 4th that has just passed—on the 126th anniversary of our independence—it was possible at the same time to declare amnesty throughout the islands and definitely to establish civil rule over all of them, excepting the country of the Mohammedan Moros, where the conditions were wholly different. Each inhabitant of the Philippines is now guaranteed his civil and religious rights, his rights to life, personal liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, subject only to not infringing the rights of others. It is worth noting that during these three or four years under us the Philippine people have attained to a greater degree of self-government, that they now have more to say as to how they shall be governed, than is the case with any people in the Orient which is under European rule. Nor is this all. Congress has, with far-seeing wisdom, heartily supported all that has been done by the Executive. Wise laws for the government of the Philippine Islands have been placed upon the statute books, and under those laws provision is made for the introduction into the Philippines of representative government, with only the delay absolutely necessary to allow for the establishment of definite peace, for the taking of a census, and the settling down of the country. In short, we are governing the Filipinos primarily in their interest, and for their very great benefit. And we have acted in practical fashion—not trying to lay down rules as to what should be done in the remote and uncertain future, but turning our attention to the instant need of things and meeting that need in the fullest and amplest way. It would be hard to say whether we owe most to our military or our civil representatives in the Philippines. The soldiers have shown splendid gallantry in the field; and they have done no less admirable work in preparing the provinces for civil government. The civil authorities have shown the utmost wisdom in doing a very difficult and important work, of vast extent. It would be hard to find in modern times a better example of successful constructive statesmanship than the American representatives have given to the Philippine Islands.
In the Philippines, as in Cuba, the instances of wrongdoing among either our civil or military representatives have been astonishingly few; and punishment has been meted with even-handed justice to all offenders.
Nor should it be forgotten that while we have thus acted in the interest of the islanders themselves, we have also helped our own people. Our interests are as great in the Pacific as in the Atlantic. The welfare of California, Oregon, and Washington is as vital to the nation as the welfare of New England, New York, and the South Atlantic States. The awakening of the Orient means very much to all the nations of Christendom, commercially no less than politically; and it would be short-sighted statesmanship on our part to refuse to take the necessary steps for securing a proper share to our people of this commercial future. The possession of the Philippines has helped us, as the securing of the open door in China has helped us. Already the government has taken the necessary steps to provide for the laying of a Pacific cable under conditions which safeguard absolutely the interests of the American public. Our commerce with the East is growing rapidly. Events have abundantly justified, alike from the moral and material standpoint, all that we have done in the Far East as a sequel to our war with Spain.
AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., AUGUST 23, 1902
Mr. Governor, and you, my Fellow-citizens:
We are passing through a period of great commercial prosperity, and such a period is as sure as adversity itself to bring mutterings of discontent. At a time when most men prosper somewhat some men always prosper greatly; and it is as true now as when the tower of Siloam fell upon all alike, that good fortune does not come solely to the just, nor bad fortune solely to the unjust. When the weather is good for crops it is good for weeds. Moreover, not only do the wicked flourish when the times are such that most men flourish, but, what is worse, the spirit of envy and jealousy springs up in the breasts of those who, though they may be doing fairly well themselves, see others no more deserving who do better.
Wise laws and fearless and upright administration of the laws can give the opportunity for such prosperity as we see about us. But that is all that they can do. When the conditions have been created which make prosperity possible, then each individual man must achieve it for himself by his own energy and thrift and business intelligence. If when people wax fat they kick, as they have kicked since the days of Jeshurun, they will speedily destroy their own prosperity. If they go into wild speculation and lose their heads they have lost that which no laws can supply. If in a spirit of sullen envy they insist upon pulling down those who have profited most in the years of fatness, they will bury themselves in the crash of the common disaster. It is difficult to make our material condition better by the best laws, but it is easy enough to ruin it by bad laws.
The upshot of all this is that it is peculiarly incumbent upon us in a time of such material well-being, both collectively as a nation and individually as citizens, to show, each on his own account, that we possess the qualities of prudence, self-knowledge, and self-restraint. In our government we need above all things stability, fixity of economic policy; while remembering that this fixity must not be fossilization, that there must not be inability to shift our laws so as to meet our shifting national needs. There are real and great evils in our social and economic life, and these evils stand out in all their ugly baldness in time of prosperity; for the wicked who prosper are never a pleasant sight. There is every need of striving in all possible ways, individually and collectively, by combinations among ourselves and through the recognized governmental agencies, to cut out those evils. All I ask is to be sure that we do not use the knife with an ignorant zeal which would make it more dangerous to the patient than to the disease.
One of the features of the tremendous industrial development of the last generation has been the very great increase in private, and especially in corporate, fortunes. We may like this or not, just as we choose, but it is a fact nevertheless; and as far as we can see it is an inevitable result of the working of the various causes, prominent among them steam and electricity. Urban population has grown in this country, as in all civilized countries, much faster than the population as a whole during the last century. If it were not for that Rhode Island could not to-day be the State she is. Rhode Island has flourished as she has flourished because of the conditions which have brought about the great increase in urban life. There is evil in these conditions, but you can’t destroy it unless you destroy the civilization they have brought about. Where men are gathered together in great masses it inevitably results that they must work far more largely through combinations than where they live scattered and remote from one another. Many of us prefer the old conditions of life, under which the average man lived more to himself and by himself, where the average community was more self-dependent, and where even though the standard of comfort was lower on the average, yet there was less of the glaring inequality in worldly conditions which we now see about us in our great cities. It is not true that the poor have grown poorer; but some of the rich have grown so very much richer that, where multitudes of men are herded together in a limited space, the contrast strikes the onlooker as more violent than formerly. On the whole, our people earn more and live better than ever before, and the progress of which we are so proud could not have taken place had it not been for the upbuilding of industrial centres, such as this in which I am speaking.
But together with the good there has come a measure of evil. Life is not so simple as it was; and surely, both for the individual and the community, the simple life is normally the healthy life. There is not in the great cities the feeling of brotherhood which there is still in country localities; and the lines of social cleavage are far more deeply marked.
For some of the evils which have attended upon the good of the changed conditions we can at present see no complete remedy. For others the remedy must come by the action of men themselves in their private capacity, whether merely as individuals or by combination. For yet others some remedy can be found in legislative and executive action—national, State, or municipal. Much of the complaint against combinations is entirely unwarranted. Under present day conditions it is as necessary to have corporations in the business world as it is to have organizations, unions, among wage-workers. We have a right to ask in each case only this: that good, and not harm, shall follow. Exactly as labor organizations, when managed intelligently and in a spirit of justice and fair play, are of very great service not only to the wage-workers, but to the whole community, as has been shown again and again in the history of many such organizations; so wealth, not merely individual, but corporate, when used aright is not merely beneficial to the community as a whole, but is absolutely essential to the upbuilding of such a series of communities as those whose citizens I am now addressing. This is so obvious that it ought to be too trite to mention, and yet it is necessary to mention it when we see some of the attacks made upon wealth, as such.
Of course a great fortune if used wrongly is a menace to the community. A man of great wealth who does not use that wealth decently is, in a peculiar sense, a menace to the community, and so is the man who does not use his intellect aright. Each talent—the talent for making money, the talent for showing intellect at the bar, or in any other way—if unaccompanied by character, makes the possessor a menace to the community. But such a fact no more warrants us in attacking wealth than it does in attacking intellect. Every man of power, by the very fact of that power, is capable of doing damage to his neighbors; but we can not afford to discourage the development of such men merely because it is possible they may use their power for wrong ends. If we did so we should leave our history a blank, for we should have no great statesmen, soldiers, merchants, no great men of arts, of letters, of science. Doubtless on the average the most useful citizen to the community as a whole is the man to whom has been granted what the Psalmist asked for—neither poverty nor riches. But the great captain of industry, the man of wealth, who, alone or in combination with his fellows, drives through our great business enterprises, is a factor without whom the civilization that we see round about us here could not have been built up. Good, not harm, normally comes from the upbuilding of such wealth. Probably the greatest harm done by vast wealth is the harm that we of moderate means do ourselves when we let the vices of envy and hatred enter deep into our own natures.
But there is other harm; and it is evident that we should try to do away with that. The great corporations which we have grown to speak of rather loosely as trusts are the creatures of the State, and the State not only has the right to control them, but it is in duty bound to control them wherever the need of such control is shown. There is clearly need of supervision—need to possess the power of regulation of these great corporations through the representatives of the public—wherever, as in our own country at the present time, business corporations become so very powerful alike for beneficent work and for work that is not always beneficent. It is idle to say that there is no need for such supervision. There is, and a sufficient warrant for it is to be found in any one of the admitted evils appertaining to them.
We meet a peculiar difficulty under our system of government, because of the division of governmental power between the Nation and the States. When the industrial conditions were simple, very little control was needed, and the difficulties of exercising such control under our Constitution were not evident. Now the conditions are complicated and we find it hard to frame national legislation which shall be adequate; while as a matter of practical experience it has been shown that the States either can not or will not exercise a sufficient control to meet the needs of the case. Some of our States have excellent laws—laws which it would be well indeed to have enacted by the National Legislature. But the widespread differences in these laws, even between adjacent States, and the uncertainty of the power of enforcement, result practically in altogether insufficient control. I believe that the nation must assume this power of control by legislation; if necessary by constitutional amendment. The immediate necessity in dealing with trusts is to place them under the real, not the nominal, control of some sovereign to which, as its creatures, the trusts shall owe allegiance, and in whose courts the sovereign’s orders may be enforced.
This is not the case with the ordinary so-called “trust” to-day; for the trust nowadays is a large State corporation, which generally does business in other States, often with a tendency toward monopoly. Such a trust is an artificial creature not wholly responsible to or controllable by any legislation, either by State or nation, and not subject to the jurisdiction of any one court. Some governmental sovereign must be given full power over these artificial, and very powerful, corporate beings. In my judgment this sovereign must be the national government. When it has been given full power, then this full power can be used to control any evil influence, exactly as the government is now using the power conferred upon it by the Sherman anti-trust law.
Even when the power has been granted it would be most unwise to exercise it too much, to begin by too stringent legislation. The mechanism of modern business is as delicate and complicated as it is vast, and nothing would be more productive of evil to all of us, and especially to those least well off in this world’s goods, than ignorant meddling with this mechanism—above all, meddling in a spirit of class legislation or hatred or rancor. It is eminently necessary that the power should be had, but it is just as necessary that it should be exercised with wisdom and self-restraint. The first exercise of that power should be the securing of publicity among all great corporations doing an interstate business. The publicity, though non-inquisitorial, should be real and thorough as to all important facts with which the public has concern. Daylight is a powerful discourager of evil. Such publicity would by itself tend to cure the evils of which there is just complaint; it would show us if evils existed, and where the evils are imaginary, and it would show us what next ought to be done.
Above all, let us remember that our success in accomplishing anything depends very much upon our not trying to accomplish everything. Distrust whoever pretends to offer you a patent cure-all for every ill of the body politic, just as you would a man who offers a medicine which would cure every evil of your individual body. A medicine that is recommended to cure both asthma and a broken leg is not good for either. Mankind has moved slowly upward through the ages, sometimes a little faster, sometimes a little slower, but rarely indeed by leaps and bounds. At times a great crisis comes in which a great people, perchance led by a great man, can at white heat strike some mighty blow for the right—make a long stride in advance along the path of justice and of orderly liberty. But normally we must be content if each of us can do something—not all that we wish, but something—for the advancement of those principles of righteousness which underlie all real national greatness, all true civilization and freedom. I see no promise of any immediate and complete solution of all the problems we group together when we speak of the trust question. But we can make a beginning in solving these problems, and a good beginning, if only we approach the subject with a sufficiency of resolution, of honesty, and of that hard common-sense which is one of the most valuable, and not always one of the most common, assets in any nation’s greatness. The existing laws will be fully enforced as they stand on the statute books without regard to persons, and I think good has already come from their enforcement. I think, furthermore, that additional legislation should be had and can be had, which will enable us to accomplish much more along the same lines. No man can promise a perfect solution, at least in the immediate future. But something has already been done, and much more can be done if our people temperately and determinedly will that it shall be done.
In conclusion let me add one word. While we are not to be excused if we fail to do whatever is possible through the agency of government, we must keep ever in mind that no action of the government, no action by combination among ourselves, can take the place of the individual qualities to which in the long run every man must owe the success he can make of life. There never has been devised, and there never will be devised, any law which will enable a man to succeed save by the exercise of those qualities which have always been the prerequisites of success—the qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of unflinching will. Such action can supplement those qualities but it can not take their place. No action by the State can do more than supplement the initiative of the individual; and ordinarily the action of the State can do no more than to secure to each individual the chance to show under as favorable conditions as possible the stuff that there is in him.
AT SYMPHONY HALL, BOSTON, AUGUST 25, 1902
Governor Crane, Mayor Collins, men and women of Boston:
I want to take up this evening the general question of our economic and social relations, with specific reference to that problem with which I think our people are now greatly concerning themselves—the problem of our complex social condition as intensified by the existence of the great corporations which we rather loosely designate as trusts. I have not come here to say that I have discovered a patent cure-all for any evils. When people’s minds are greatly agitated on any subject, and especially when they feel deeply but rather vaguely that conditions are not right, it is far pleasanter in addressing them to be indifferent as to what you promise; but it is much less pleasant afterward when you come to try to carry out what has been promised. Of course the worth of a promise consists purely in the way in which the performance squares with it. That has two sides. In the first place, if a man is an honest man he will try just as hard to keep a promise made on the stump as one made off the stump. In the second place, if the people keep their heads they won’t wish promises to be made which are impossible of performance. You see, one side of that question represents my duty, and the other side yours.
Mankind goes ahead but slowly, and it goes ahead mainly through each of us trying to do the best that is in him and to do it in the sanest way. We have founded our Republic upon the theory that the average man will as a rule do the right thing, that in the long run the majority will decide for what is sane and wholesome. If our fathers were mistaken in that theory, if ever the times become such—not occasionally but persistently—that the mass of the people do what is unwholesome, what is wrong, then the Republic can not stand, I care not how good its laws, I care not what marvelous mechanism its Constitution may embody. Back of the laws, back of the administration, back of the system of government lies the man, lies the average manhood of our people, and in the long run we are going to go up or go down accordingly as the average standard of our citizenship does or does not wax in growth and grace.
The first requisite of good citizenship is that the man shall do the homely, every-day, humdrum duties well. A man is not a good citizen, I do not care how lofty his thoughts are about citizenship in the abstract, if in the concrete his actions do not bear them out; and it does not make much difference how high his aspirations for mankind at large may be, if he does not behave well in his own family those aspirations do not bear visible fruit. He must be a good bread-winner, he must take care of his wife and his children, he must be a neighbor whom his neighbors can trust, he must act squarely in his business relations,—he must do all those every-day ordinary duties first, or he is not a good citizen. But he must do more. In this country of ours the average citizen must devote a good deal of thought and time to the affairs of the State as a whole or those affairs will go backward; and he must devote that thought and that time steadily and intelligently. If there is any one quality that is not admirable, whether in a nation or in an individual, it is hysterics, either in religion or in anything else. The man or woman who makes up for ten days’ indifference to duty by an eleventh-day morbid repentance about that duty is of scant use in the world. Now in the same way it is of no possible use to decline to go through all the ordinary duties of citizenship for a long space of time and then suddenly to get up and feel very angry about something or somebody, not clearly defined, and demand reform, as if it were a concrete substance to be handed out forthwith.
This is preliminary to what I want to say to you about the whole question of great corporations as affecting the public. There are very many and very difficult problems with which we are faced as the results of the forces which have been in play for more than the lifetime of a generation. It is worse than useless for any of us to rail at or regret the great growth of our industrial civilization during the last half century. Speaking academically, we can, according to our several temperaments, regret that the old days with the old life have vanished, or not, just as we choose; but we are here to-night only because of the play of those great forces. There is but little use in regretting that things have been shaping themselves differently from what we might have preferred. The practical thing to do is to face the conditions as they are and see if we can not get the best there is in them out of them. Now we shall not get a complete or perfect solution for all of the evils attendant upon the development of the trusts by any single action on our part. A good many actions in a good many different ways will be required before we get many of those evils even partially remedied. We must first of all think clearly; we must probably experiment somewhat; we must above all show by our actions that our interest is permanent and not spasmodic; and we must see that all proper steps are taken toward the solution. Now of course all this is perfectly trite. Every one who thinks knows that the only way in which any problem of great importance was ever successfully solved was by consistent and persistent effort toward a given end—effort that did not cease with any one election or with any one year, but was continued steadily, temperately, but resolutely, toward a given end. It is a little difficult to set clearly before us all of the evils attendant upon the working of some of our great corporations, but I think that those gentlemen, and especially those gentlemen of large means, who deny that the evils exist are acting with great folly. So far from being against property when I ask that the question of the trusts be taken up, I am acting in the most conservative sense in property’s interest. When a great corporation is sued for violating the anti-trust law, it is not a move against property, it is a move in favor of property, because when we make it evident that all men, great and small alike, have to obey the law, we put the safeguard of the law around all men. When we make it evident that no man shall be excused for violating the law, we make it evident that every man will be protected from violations of the law.
Now one of the great troubles—I am inclined to think much the greatest trouble—in any immediate handling of the question of the trusts comes from our system of government. Under this system it is difficult to say where the power is lodged to deal with these evils. Remember that I am not saying that even if we had all the power we could completely solve the trust question. If what we read in the papers is true, international trusts are now being planned. It is going to be very difficult for any set of laws on our part to deal completely with a problem which becomes international in its bearings. But a great deal can be done in various ways even now—a great deal is being done—and a great deal more can be done, if we see that the power is lodged somewhere to do it. On the whole, our system of government has worked marvelously well—the system of divided functions of government, of a scheme under which Maine, Louisiana, Oregon, Idaho, New York, Illinois, South Carolina, can all come together for certain purposes, and yet each be allowed to work out its salvation as it desires along certain other lines. On the whole, this has worked well; but in some respects it has worked ill. While I most firmly believe in fixity of policy, I do not believe that that policy should be fossilized, and when conditions change we must change our governmental methods to meet them. I believe with all my heart in the New England town meeting, but you can’t work the New England town meeting in Boston—it is too big. You must devise something else. If you look back in the history of Boston you will find that Boston was very reluctant to admit this particular truth for some time in the first decades of the nineteenth century. When this government was founded there were no great individual or corporate fortunes, and commerce and industry were being carried on very much as they had been carried on in the days when Nineveh and Babylon stood in the Mesopotamian Valley. Sails, oars, wheels—these were the instruments of commerce. The pack train, the wagon train, the rowboat, the sailing craft—these were the methods of commerce. Everything has been revolutionized in the business world since then, and the progress of civilization from being a dribble has become a torrent. There was no particular need at that time of bothering as to whether the nation or the State had control of corporations. They were easy to control. Now, however, the exact reverse is the case. And remember when I say corporations I do not mean merely trusts technically so-called, merely combinations of corporations, or corporations under certain peculiar conditions. For instance, some time ago the Attorney-General took action against a certain trust. There was considerable discussion as to whether the trust aimed at would not seek to get out from under the law by becoming a single corporation. Now, I want laws that will enable us to deal with any evil no matter what shape it takes. I want to see the government able to get at it definitely, so that the action of the government can not be evaded by any turning within or without Federal or State statutes. At present we have really no efficient control over a big corporation which does business in more than one State. Frequently the corporation has nothing whatever to do with the State in which it is incorporated except to get incorporated; and all its business may be done in entirely different communities—communities which may object very much to the methods of incorporation in the State named. I do not believe that you can get any action by any State, I do not believe it practicable to get action by all the States that will give us satisfactory control of the trusts, of big corporations; and the result is at present that we have a great, powerful, artificial creation which has no creator to which it is responsible. The creator creates it and then it goes and operates somewhere else; and there is no interest on the part of the creator to deal with it. It does not do anything where the creator has power; it operates entirely outside of the creator’s jurisdiction.