Chapter X: Part 10

All of this represents a great and substantial advance in legislation. But more important even than legislation is the administration of the law, and I ask your attention for a moment to the way in which the law has been administered by the profound jurist and fearless public servant who now occupies the position of Attorney-General, Mr. Knox. The Constitution enjoins upon the President that he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and under this provision the Attorney-General formulated a policy which was in effect nothing but the rigid enforcement, by suits managed with consummate skill and ability, both of the anti-trust law and of the imperfect provisions of the act to regulate commerce. The first step taken was the prosecution of fourteen suits against the principal railroads of the Middle West, restraining them by injunction from further violations of either of the laws in question.

About the same time the case against the Northern Securities Company was initiated. This was a corporation organized under the laws of the State of New Jersey with a capital of four hundred million dollars, the alleged purpose being to control the Great Northern and the Northern Pacific railroad companies, two parallel and competing lines extending across the northern tier of States from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean. Whatever the purpose, its consummation would have resulted in the control of the two great railway systems—upon which the people of the Northwestern States were so largely dependent for their supplies and to get their products to market—being practically merged into the New Jersey corporation. The proposition that these independent systems of railroads should be merged under a single control alarmed the people of the States concerned, lest they be subjected to what they deemed a monopoly of interstate transportation and the suppression of competition. The Governors of the States most deeply affected held a meeting to consider how to prevent the merger becoming effective and passed resolutions calling upon the National Government to enforce the anti-trust laws against the alleged combination. When these resolutions were referred to the Attorney-General for consideration and advice, he reported that in his opinion the Northern Securities Company and its control of the railroads mentioned was a combination in restraint of trade, and was attempting a monopoly in violation of the national anti-trust law. Thereupon a suit in equity, which is now pending, was begun by the Government to test the validity of this transaction under the Sherman law.

At nearly the same time the disclosures respecting the secret rebates enjoyed by the great packing house companies, coupled with the very high price of meats, led the Attorney-General to direct an investigation into the methods of the so-called beef trust. The result was that he filed bills for injunction against six of the principal packing house companies, and restrained them from combining and agreeing upon prices at which they would sell their products in States other than those in which their meats were prepared for market. Writs of injunction were issued accordingly, and since then, after full argument, the United States Circuit Court has made the injunction perpetual.

The cotton interests of the South, including growers, buyers, and shippers, made complaint that they were suffering great injury in their business from the methods of the Southern railroads in the handling and transportation of cotton. They alleged that these railroads, by combined action under a pooling arrangement to support their rate schedules, had denied to the shippers the right to elect over what roads their commodities should be shipped, and that by dividing upon a fixed basis the cotton crop of the South all inducement to compete in rates for the transportation thereof was eliminated. Proceedings were instituted by the Attorney-General under the anti-trust law, which resulted in the destruction of the pool and in restoring to the growers and shippers of the South the right to ship their products over any road they elected, thus removing the restraint upon the freedom of commerce.

In November, 1902, the Attorney-General directed that a bill for an injunction be filed in the United States Circuit Court at San Francisco against the Federal Salt Company—a corporation which had been organized under the laws of an Eastern State, but had its main office and principal place of business in California—and against a number of other companies and persons constituting what was known as the salt trust. These injunctions were to restrain the execution of certain contracts between the Federal Salt Company and the other defendants, by which the latter agreed neither to import nor buy or sell salt, except from and to the Federal Salt Company, and not to engage or assist in the production of salt west of the Mississippi River during the continuance of such contracts. As the result of these agreements the price of salt had been advanced about four hundred per cent. A temporary injunction order was obtained, which the defendants asked the court to modify on the ground that the anti-trust law had no application to contracts for purchases and sales within a State. The Circuit Court overruled this contention and sustained the Government’s position. This practically concluded the case, and it is understood that in consequence the Federal Salt Company is about to be dissolved and that no further contest will be made.

The above is a brief outline of the most important steps, legislative and administrative, taken during the past eighteen months in the direction of solving, so far as at present it seems practicable by national legislation or administration to solve, what we call the trust problem. They represent a sum of very substantial achievement. They represent a successful effort to devise and apply real remedies; an effort which so far succeeded because it was made not only with resolute purpose and determination, but also in a spirit of common-sense and justice, as far removed as possible from rancor, hysteria, and unworthy demagogic appeal. In the same spirit the laws will continue to be enforced. Not only is the legislation recently enacted effective, but in my judgment it was impracticable to attempt more. Nothing of value is to be expected from ceaseless agitation for radical and extreme legislation. The people may wisely, and with confidence, await the results which are reasonably to be expected from the impartial enforcement of the laws which have recently been placed upon the statute books. Legislation of a general and indiscriminate character would be sure to fail, either because it would involve all interests in a common ruin, or because it would not really reach any evil. We have endeavored to provide a discriminating adaptation of the remedy to the real mischief.

Many of the alleged remedies advocated are of the unpleasantly drastic type which seeks to destroy the disease by killing the patient. Others are so obviously futile that it is somewhat difficult to treat them seriously or as being advanced in good faith. High among the latter I place the effort to reach the trust question by means of the tariff. You can, of course, put an end to the prosperity of the trusts by putting an end to the prosperity of the Nation; but the price for such action seems high. The alternative is to do exactly what has been done during the life of the Congress which has just closed—that is, to endeavor, not to destroy corporations, but to regulate them with a view of doing away with whatever is of evil in them and of making them subserve the public use. The law is not to be administered in the interest of the poor man as such, nor yet in the interest of the rich man as such, but in the interest of the law-abiding man, rich or poor. We are no more against organizations of capital than against organizations of labor. We welcome both, demanding only that each shall do right and shall remember its duty to the Republic. Such a course we consider not merely a benefit to the poor man, but a benefit to the rich man. We do no man an injustice when we require him to obey the law. On the contrary, if he is a man whose safety and well-being depend in a peculiar degree upon the existence of the spirit of law and order, we are rendering him the greatest service when we require him to be himself an exemplar of that spirit.

BEFORE THE MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE, ST. PAUL, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903

_Mr. Governor, Mr. Lieutenant-Governor, Mr. Speaker, Members of the
Legislative Body, Men and Women of Minnesota_:

I thank you for greeting me and for giving me the chance to say a word or two in welcome and in acknowledgment of your greeting.

To any American capable of any depth of reflection whatever, it should always be a somewhat solemn thing to come into the presence of two bodies—one a legislative body; the other an educational body; the legislative body, which is not only the method but the symbol of our free government; the educational body, which, using educational in its broadest and truest sense, means the body that fits us for self-government. Self-government is not an easy thing. The nations of antiquity, the nations of the middle ages, that tried the experiment of independent self-government which should guarantee freedom to the individual, and yet safety from without and within to the body politic itself, rarely lasted long, never rose to a pitch of greatness such as ours without having suffered some radical and, as it proved ultimately, fatal change of structure. Until our Republic was founded it had proved impossible in the long run to combine freedom for the individual and greatness for the nation. The republics of antiquity and of the middle ages went one of two lines; either proved fatal. Either the individual’s interests were sacrificed, and, while retaining the forms of freedom, the republic became in effect a despotism, or else the freedom of the individual was kept at the cost of utter impotence either to put down disorder at home or to repel aggression from abroad.

It has been given to us during the century and a quarter of our national life so to handle ourselves as a people that we have escaped both dangers. We have been able to escape the leadership of those who feared Scylla so much that they would plunge us into Charybdis, and of those who feared Charybdis so much that they would plunge us into Scylla. We have been able to preserve orderly liberty and strength to grow in greatness among the nations of the earth, while becoming steadily more and more democratic in the truest and broadest sense of the word. I believe with all my heart that we shall continue on the path thus marked out for us; but we shall so continue only if we remember that in the last analysis the safety of the Republic depends upon the high average of individual citizenship.

We can keep all the forms of free government; and every Fourth of July we can talk possibly a little too boastfully of both the past and the present; and yet it shall not avail us if we do not have in our hearts the spirit that makes for decent citizenship, the spirit that alone counts in the formation of a true republic. And that spirit is essentially the same in public life as in private life. The manifestations of it differ, but the spirit is the same. A public man is as much bound to tell the truth on the stump as off the stump. On the other hand, his critics will do well to remember that truth-telling is a virtue for them to practice also. What we need in public life and in private life is not genius so much as the many-sided development of the qualities which in their sum make good citizenship. In a great crisis we shall need a genius; thrice and thrice over fortunate is the nation which then develops a Lincoln to lead it in peace; a Grant to lead it in war; a Washington to lead it in war and peace.

But what we need as a nation, as an individual, at the ordinary times which are so much larger in the aggregate than the extraordinary times, and upon our conduct in which really depends our conduct in extraordinary times, are the commonplace virtues which we all recognize, and which when we were young we wrote about in copybooks, and which, if we practice, will count for a thousand times more in the long run than any brilliance and genius of any kind or sort whatsoever.

I want to say just a word on the other side of the two great questions, the legislative and educational questions. Education must be twofold. Of course if we do not have education in the school, the academy, the college, the university, and have it developed in the highest and wisest manner, we shall make but a poor fist of American citizenship. One of the things that is most hopeful in our Republic is the way in which the State has taken charge of elementary education; and the way in which, in the East through private gift, here in the West through the wise liberality of the several States, the higher education has been taken care of, as in your own University of Minnesota. But such education can never be all. It can never be more than half, and sometimes not that. Nothing can take the place of the education of the home; and that education must be largely the unconscious influence of character upon character. There is no use in the father trying to instil wise saws and precepts into the son, if his own character gives the lie to his advice. And unfortunately it is just as true in the education of children as in everything else, that it is almost as harmful to be a virtuous fool as a knave. So often throughout our social structure from the wealthiest down to the poorest you see the queer fatuity of the man or the woman which makes them save their children temporary discomfort, temporary unpleasantness, at the cost of future destruction; you see a great many men, and I am sorry to say a great many women, who say, “I have had to work hard; my boy or my girl shall not do anything.” I have seen it in every rank. I have heard the millionaire say, “I have had to work all my life to make money, let my boy spend it.” It would be better for the boy never to have been born than to be brought up on that principle. On the other hand, I have seen the overworked drudge, the laborer’s wife, who said, “Well, I have had to work my heart out all my days; my daughters shall be ladies”; and her conception of her daughters being ladies was to have them sit around useless and incompetent, unable to do anything, brought up to be discontented cumberers of the earth’s surface. As Abraham Lincoln said: “There is a deal of human nature in mankind.” Fundamentally, virtues and faults are just the same in the millionaire and the day laborer. The man or the woman who seeks to bring up his or her children with the idea that their happiness is secured by teaching them to avoid difficulties is doing them a cruel wrong. To bring up the boy and girl so sheltered that they can not stand any rough knocks, that they shrink from toil, that when they meet an obstacle they feel they ought to go around or back instead of going on over it—the man or the woman who does that is wronging the children to a degree that no other human being can wrong them. If you are worth your salt and want your children to be worth their salt, teach them that the life that is not a life of work and effort is worthless, a curse to the man or woman leading it, a curse to those around him or her. Teach the boys that if they are ever to count in the world they will count not by flinching from difficulties, but by warring with and overcoming them. What utter scorn one feels for those who seek only the life of ease; the life passed in dexterous effort to avoid all angular corners, to avoid being put in the places where a strong man by blood and sweat and toil and risk wins triumph! What a wretched life is the life of the man passed in endeavoring to shirk his share of the burden laid upon him in this world! And it makes no difference whether that man is a man of inherited wealth or one who has to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow; it is equally ignoble in either case. What is true of the individual is true of the nation. The man who counts is not the man who dodges work, but he who goes out into life rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, girding himself for the effort, bound to win and wrest triumph from difficulty and disaster.

So it is with our Nation. No nation which has bound itself only to do easy things ever yet amounted to anything, ever yet came to anything throughout the ages. We have become a great people. At the threshold of this twentieth century we stand with the future looming large before us. We face great problems within and great problems without. We can not if we would refuse to face those problems. All we can decide is whether we will do them well or ill; for the refusal to face them would itself mean that we were doing them ill. We are in the arena into which great nations must come. We must play our part. It rests with us to decide that we shall not play it ignobly; that we shall not flinch from the great problems that there are to do, but that we shall take our place in the forefront of the great nations and face each problem of the day with confident and resolute hope.

IN THE CHAPEL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA, MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903

_Mr. President; Ladies and Gentlemen_:

I am glad to have the chance of greeting you this evening, but I regret that the engagements for me have been so numerous that it will be only a greeting. I wish I could be here to see your beautiful grounds and buildings by daylight, and to see a little of the life of the university.

There are plenty of tendencies for good, and, I am sorry to say, plenty of tendencies for evil in our modern life, and high among the former must be placed the rapid growth of the great institutions of learning in this country. There is a twofold side to the work done in any institution of this kind. In the first place the institution is to turn out scholars and men proficient in the different technical branches for which it trains them. It should be the aim of every university which seeks to develop the liberal side of education to turn out men and women who will add to the sum of productive achievement in scholarship; who will not merely be content to work in the fields that have already been harrowed a thousand times by other workers, but who will strike out for themselves and try to do new work that counts; so in each technical school if the institution is worthy of standing in the front rank, it will turn out those who in that particular specialty stand at the head. But in addition to this merely technical work, to the turning out of the scholar, the professional man, the man or woman trained on some special line, each university worthy the name must endeavor to turn out men and women in the fullest sense of the word, good citizens, men and women who will add by what they do to the sum of noble work in the whole community.

It is a good thing that so much attention should be given to physical development. I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports. I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal, and if he feels any sympathy for himself I do not like him. I believe thoroughly in the sound and vigorous body. I believe still more in the vigorous mind. And I believe most of all in what count for more than body, for more than mind, and that is character. That is the sum of the forces that make the man or the woman worth knowing, worth revering, worth holding to. Play hard while you play, but do not mistake it for work. If a young fellow is twenty it is a good thing that he should be a crack half-back; but when he is forty I am sorry if he has never been anything else except once at twenty a good half-back. Keep the sense of proportion. Play hard; it will do you good in your work. But work hard and remember that this is the main thing.

Finally, in closing, I think it is a safe thing to take a motto that I heard from the lips of an old football player once: “Don’t flinch, don’t foul, and hit the line hard.”

AT MINNEAPOLIS, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903

_My Fellow-Citizens_:

At the special session of the Senate held in March the Cuban reciprocity treaty was ratified. When this treaty goes into effect, it will confer substantial economic benefits alike upon Cuba, because of the widening of her market in the United States, and upon the United States, because of the equal widening and the progressive control it will give to our people in the Cuban market. This treaty is beneficial to both parties and justifies itself on several grounds. In the first place we offer to Cuba her natural market. We can confer upon her a benefit which no other nation can confer; and for the very reason that we have started her as an independent republic and that we are rich, prosperous, and powerful, it behooves us to stretch out a helping hand to our feebler younger sister. In the next place, it widens the market for our products, both the products of the farm and certain of our manufactures; and it is therefore in the interests of our farmers, manufacturers, merchants, and wage-workers. Finally, the treaty was not merely warranted but demanded, apart from all other considerations, by the enlightened consideration of our foreign policy. More and more in the future we must occupy a preponderant position in the waters and along the coasts in the region south of us; not a position of control over the republics of the south, but of control of the military situation so as to avoid any possible complications in the future. Under the Platt amendment Cuba agreed to give us certain naval stations on her coast. The Navy Department decided that we needed but two, and we have specified where these two are to be. President Palma has concluded an agreement giving them to us—an agreement which the Cuban legislative body will doubtless soon ratify. In other words, the Republic of Cuba has assumed a special relation to our international political system, under which she gives us outposts of defence, and we are morally bound to extend to her in a degree the benefit of our own economic system. From every standpoint of wise and enlightened home and foreign policy the ratification of the Cuban treaty marked a step of substantial progress in the growth of our nation toward greatness at home and abroad.

Equally important was the action on the tariff upon products of the Philippines. We gave them a reduction of twenty-five per cent, and would have given them a reduction of twenty-five per cent more had it not been for the opposition, in the hurried closing days of the last session, of certain gentlemen who, by the way, have been representing themselves both as peculiarly solicitous for the interests of the Philippine people and as special champions of the lowering of tariff duties. There is a distinctly humorous side to the fact that the reduction of duties which would benefit Cuba and the Philippines as well as ourselves was antagonized chiefly by those who in theory have been fond of proclaiming themselves the advanced guardians of the oppressed nationalities in the islands affected and the ardent advocates of the reduction of duties generally, but who instantly took violent ground against the practical steps to accomplish either purpose.

Moreover, a law was enacted putting anthracite on the free list and completely removing the duties on all other kinds of coal for one year.

We are now in a condition of prosperity unparalleled not merely in our own history but in the history of any other nation. This prosperity is deep rooted and stands on a firm basis because it is due to the fact that the average American has in him the stuff out of which victors are made in the great industrial contests of the present day, just as in the great military contests of the past; and because he is now able to use and develop his qualities to best advantage under our well-established economic system. We are winning headship among the nations of the world because our people are able to keep their high average of individual citizenship and to show their mastery in the hard, complex, pushing life of the age. There will be fluctuations from time to time in our prosperity, but it will continue to grow just so long as we keep up this high average of individual citizenship and permit it to work out its own salvation under proper economic legislation.

The present phenomenal prosperity has been won under a tariff which was made in accordance with certain fixed and definite principles, the most important of which is an avowed determination to protect the interests of the American producer, business man, wage-worker, and farmer alike. The general tariff policy, to which, without regard to changes in detail, I believe this country is irrevocably committed, is fundamentally based upon ample recognition of the difference between the cost of production—that is, the cost of labor—here and abroad, and of the need to see to it that our laws shall in no event afford advantage in our own market to foreign industries over American industries, to foreign capital over American capital, to foreign labor over our own labor. This country has and this country needs better-paid, better-educated, better-fed, and better-clothed workingmen, of a higher type, than are to be found in any foreign country. It has and it needs a higher, more vigorous, and more prosperous type of tillers of the soil than is possessed by any other country. The business men, the merchants and manufacturers, and the managers of the transportation interests show the same superiority when compared with men of their type abroad. The events of the last few years have shown how skilfully the leaders of American industry use in international business competition the mighty industrial weapons forged for them by the resources of our country, the wisdom of our laws, and the skill, the inventive genius, and the administrative capacity of our people.

It is, of course, a mere truism to say that we want to use everything in our power to foster the welfare of our entire body politic. In other words, we need to treat the tariff as a business proposition, from the standpoint of the interests of the country as a whole, and not with reference to the temporary needs of any political party. It is almost as necessary that our policy should be stable as that it should be wise. A nation like ours could not long stand the ruinous policy of readjusting its business to radical changes in the tariff at short intervals, especially when, as now, owing to the immense extent and variety of our products, the tariff schedules carry rates of duty on thousands of different articles. Sweeping and violent changes in such a tariff, touching so vitally the interests of all of us, embracing agriculture, labor, manufactures, and commerce, would be disastrous in any event, and they would be fatal to our present well-being if approached on the theory that the principle of the protective tariff was to be abandoned. The business world, that is, the entire American world, can not afford, if it has any regard for its own welfare, even to consider the advisability of abandoning the present system.

Yet, on the other hand, where the industrial conditions so frequently change, as with us must of necessity be the case, it is a matter of prime importance that we should be able from time to time to adapt our economic policy to the changed conditions. Our aim should be to preserve the policy of a protective tariff, in which the Nation as a whole has acquiesced, and yet wherever and whenever necessary to change the duties in particular paragraphs or schedules as matters of legislative detail, if such change is demanded by the interests of the Nation as a whole.

In making any readjustment there are certain important considerations which can not be disregarded. If a tariff law has on the whole worked well, and if business has prospered under it and is prospering, it may be better to endure some inconveniences and inequalities for a time than by making changes to risk causing disturbance and perhaps paralysis in the industries and business of the country. The fact that the change in a given rate of duty may be thought desirable does not settle the question whether it is advisable to make the change immediately. Every tariff deals with duties on thousands of articles arranged in hundreds of paragraphs and in many schedules. These duties affect a vast number of interests which are often conflicting. If necessary for our welfare, then of course Congress must consider the question of changing the law as a whole or changing any given rates of duty, but we must remember that whenever even a single schedule is considered some interests will appear to demand a change in almost every schedule in the law; and when it comes to upsetting the schedules generally the effect upon the business interests of the country would be ruinous.

One point we must steadily keep in mind. The question of tariff revision, speaking broadly, stands wholly apart from the question of dealing with the trusts. No change in tariff duties can have any substantial effect in solving the so-called trust problem. Certain great trusts or great corporations are wholly unaffected by the tariff. Practically all the others that are of any importance have as a matter of fact numbers of smaller American competitors; and of course a change in the tariff which would work injury to the large corporation would work not merely injury but destruction to its smaller competitors; and equally of course such a change would mean disaster to all the wage-workers connected with either the large or the small corporations. From the standpoint of those interested in the solution of the trust problem such a change would therefore merely mean that the trust was relieved of the competition of its weaker American competitors, and thrown only into competition with foreign competitors; and that the first effort to meet this new competition would be made by cutting down wages, and would therefore be primarily at the cost of labor. In the case of some of our greatest trusts such a change might confer upon them a positive benefit. Speaking broadly, it is evident that the changes in the tariff will affect the trusts for weal or for woe simply as they affect the whole country. The tariff affects trusts only as it affects all other interests. It makes all these interests, large or small, profitable; and its benefits can be taken from the large only under penalty of taking them from the small also.

To sum up, then, we must as a people approach a matter of such prime economic importance as the tariff from the standpoint of our business needs. We can not afford to become fossilized or to fail to recognize the fact that as the needs of the country change it may be necessary to meet these new needs by changing certain features of our tariff laws. Still less can we afford to fail to recognize the further fact that these changes must not be made until the need for them outweighs the disadvantages which may result; and when it becomes necessary to make them they should be made with full recognition of the need of stability in our economic system and of keeping unchanged the principle of that system which has now become a settled policy in our national life. We have prospered marvelously at home. As a nation we stand in the very forefront in the giant international industrial competition of the day. We can not afford by any freak or folly to forfeit the position to which we have thus triumphantly attained.

AT SIOUX FALLS, S. D., APRIL 6, 1903

_Fellow-Citizens_:

There are many, many lesser problems which go to make up in their entirety the huge and complex problems of our modern industrial life. Each of these problems is, moreover, connected with many of the others. Few indeed are simple or stand only by themselves. The most important are those connected with the relation of the farmers, the stock growers and soil tillers, to the community at large, and those affecting the relations between employer and employed. In a country like ours it is fundamentally true that the well-being of the tiller of the soil and the wage-worker is the well-being of the State. If they are well off, then we need concern ourselves but little as to how other classes stand, for they will inevitably be well off too; and, on the other hand, there can be no real general prosperity unless based on the foundation of the prosperity of the wage-worker and the tiller of the soil.

But the needs of these two classes are often not the same. The tiller of the soil has been of all our citizens the one on the whole the least affected in his ways of life and methods of industry by the giant industrial changes of the last half century. There has been change with him, too, of course. He also can work to best advantage if he keeps in close touch with his fellows; and the success of the national Department of Agriculture has shown how much can be done for him by rational action of the Government. Nor is it only through the Department that the Government can act. One of the greatest and most beneficent measures passed by the last Congress, or indeed by any Congress in recent years, is the Irrigation Act, which will do for the States of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain region at least as much as ever has been done for the States of the humid region by river and harbor improvements. Few measures that have been put upon the statute books of the Nation have done more for the people than this law will, I firmly believe, directly and indirectly accomplish for the States in question.

The Department of Agriculture devotes its whole energy to working for the welfare of farmers and stock growers. In every section of our country it aids them in their constantly increasing search for a better agricultural education. It helps not only them, but all the nation, in seeing that our exports of meats have clean bills of health, and that there is rigid inspection of all meats that enter into interstate commerce. Thirty-eight million carcasses were inspected during the last fiscal year. Our stock growers sell forty-five million dollars’ worth of live stock annually, and these animals must be kept healthy or else our people will lose their trade. Our export of plant products to foreign countries amounts to over six hundred million dollars a year, and there is no branch of its work to which the Department of Agriculture devotes more care. Thus the Department has been successfully introducing a macaroni wheat from the headwaters of the Volga, which grows successfully in ten inches of rainfall, and by this means wheat growing has been successfully extended westward into the semi-arid region. Two million bushels of this wheat were grown last year; and being suited to dry conditions it can be used for forage as well as for food for man.

The Department of Agriculture has been helping our fruit men to establish markets abroad by studying methods of fruit preservation through refrigeration and through methods of handling and packing. On the Gulf coasts of Louisiana and Texas, thanks to the Department of Agriculture, a rice suitable to the region was imported from the Orient and the rice crop is now practically equal to our needs in this country, whereas a few years ago it supplied but one-fourth of them. The most important of our farm products is the grass crop; and to show what has been done with grasses, I need only allude to the striking change made in the entire West by the extended use of alfalfa.

Moreover, the Department has taken the lead in the effort to prevent the deforestation of the country. Where there are forests we seek to preserve them; and on the once treeless plains and the prairies we are doing our best to foster the habit of tree planting among our people. In my own lifetime I have seen wonderful changes brought about by this tree planting here in your own State and in the States immediately around it.

There are a number of very important questions, such as that of good roads, with which the States alone can deal, and where all that the National Government can do is to co-operate with them. The same is true of the education of the American farmer. A number of the States have themselves started to help in this work and the Department of Agriculture does an immense amount which is in the proper sense of the word educational, and educational in the most practical way.

It is therefore clearly true that a great advance has been made in the direction of finding ways by which the Government can help the farmer to help himself—the only kind of help which a self-respecting man will accept, or, I may add, which will in the end do him any good. Much has been done in these ways, and farm life and farm processes continually change for the better. The farmer himself still retains, because of his surroundings and the nature of his work, to a pre-eminent degree the qualities which we like to think of as distinctly American in considering our early history. The man who tills his own farm, whether on the prairie or in the woodland, the man who grows what we eat and the raw material which is worked up into what we wear, still exists more nearly under the conditions which obtained when the “embattled farmers” of ’76 made this country a nation than is true of any others of our people.

But the wage-workers in our cities, like the capitalists in our cities, face totally changed conditions. The development of machinery and the extraordinary change in business conditions have rendered the employment of capital and of persons in large aggregations not merely profitable but often necessary for success, and have specialized the labor of the wage-worker at the same time that they have brought great aggregations of wage-workers together. More and more in our great industrial centres men have come to realize that they can not live as independently of one another as in the old days was the case everywhere, and as is now the case in the country districts.

Of course, fundamentally each man will yet find that the chief factor in determining his success or failure in life is the sum of his own individual qualities. He can not afford to lose his individual initiative, his individual will and power; but he can best use that power if for certain objects he unites with his fellows. Much can be done by organization, combination, union among the wage-workers; finally something can be done by the direct action of the State. It is not possible empirically to declare when the interference of the State should be deemed legitimate and when illegitimate.

The line of demarcation between unhealthy over-interference and unhealthy lack of regulation is not always well defined, and shifts with the change in our industrial needs. Most certainly we should never invoke the interference of the State or Nation unless it is absolutely necessary; but it is equally true that when confident of its necessity we should not on academic grounds refuse it. Wise factory laws, laws to forbid the employment of child labor and to safeguard the employees against the effects of culpable negligence by the employer, are necessary, not merely in the interest of the wage-worker, but in the interest of the honest and humane employer, who should not be penalized for his honesty and humanity by being exposed to unchecked competition with an unscrupulous rival. It is far more difficult to deal with the greed that works through cunning than with the greed that works through violence. But the effort to deal with it must be steadily made.

Very much of our effort in reference to labor matters should be by every device and expedient to try to secure a constantly better understanding between employer and employee. Everything possible should be done to increase the sympathy and fellow-feeling between them, and every chance taken to allow each to look at all questions, especially at questions in dispute, somewhat through the other’s eyes. If met with a sincere desire to act fairly by one another, and if there is, furthermore, power by each to appreciate the other’s standpoint, the chance for trouble is minimized. I suppose every thinking man rejoices when by mediation or arbitration it proves possible to settle troubles in time to avert the suffering and bitterness caused by strikes. Moreover, a conciliation committee can do best work when the trouble is in its beginning, or at least has not come to a head. When the break has actually occurred, damage has been done, and each side feels sore and angry; and it is difficult to get them together—difficult to make either forget its own wrongs and remember the rights of the other. If possible the effort at conciliation or mediation or arbitration should be made in the earlier stages, and should be marked by the wish on the part of both sides to try to come to a common agreement which each shall think in the interests of the other as well as of itself.

When we deal with such a subject we are fortunate in having before us an admirable object-lesson in the work that has just been closed by the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission. This was the Commission which was appointed last fall at the time when the coal strike in the anthracite regions threatened our Nation with a disaster second to none which has befallen us since the days of the Civil War. Their report was made just before the Senate adjourned at the special session; and no Government document of recent years marks a more important piece of work better done, and there is none which teaches sounder social morality to our people. The commission consisted of seven as good men as were to be found in the country, representing the bench, the church, the army, the professions, the employers, and the employed. They acted as a unit, and the report which they unanimously signed is a masterpiece of sound common-sense and of sound doctrine on the very questions with which our people should most deeply concern themselves. The immediate effect of this commission’s appointment and action was of vast and incalculable benefit to the Nation; but the ultimate effect will be even better, if capitalist, wage-worker, and law-maker alike will take to heart and act upon the lessons set forth in the report they have made.

Of course the National Government has but a small field in which it can work in labor matters. Something it can do, however, and that something ought to be done. Among other things I should like to see the District of Columbia, which is completely under the control of the National Government, receive a set of model labor laws. Washington is not a city of very large industries, but still it has some. Wise labor legislation for the city of Washington would be a good thing in itself, and it would be a far better thing, because a standard would thereby be set for the country as a whole.

In the field of general legislation relating to these subjects the action of Congress is necessarily very limited. Still there are certain ways in which we can act. Thus the Secretary of the Navy has recommended, with my cordial and hearty approval, the enactment of a strong employers’-liability law in the navy yards of the Nation. It should be extended to similar branches of the Government work. Again, sometimes such laws can be enacted as an incident to the Nation’s control over interstate commerce. In my last annual Message to Congress I advocated the passage of a law in reference to car couplings—to strengthen the features of the one already on the statute books so as to minimize the exposure to death and maiming of railway employees. Much opposition had to be overcome. In the end an admirable law was passed “to promote the safety of employees and travelers upon railroads by compelling common carriers engaged in interstate commerce to equip their cars with automatic couplers and continuous brakes and their locomotives with driving-wheel brakes.” This law received my signature a couple of days before Congress adjourned. It represents a real and substantial advance in an admirable kind of legislation.

AT FARGO, NORTH DAKOTA, APRIL 7, 1903

_My Fellow-Citizens_:

The Northwest, whose sons in the Civil War added such brilliant pages to the honor roll of the Republic, likewise bore a full share in the struggle of which the war with Spain was the beginning; a struggle slight indeed when compared with the gigantic death wrestle which for four years stamped to and fro across the Southern States in the Civil War; but a struggle fraught with consequences to the Nation, and indeed to the world, out of all proportion to the smallness of the effort upon our part.

Three and a half years ago President McKinley spoke in the adjoining State of Minnesota on the occasion of the return of the Thirteenth Minnesota Volunteers from the Philippine Islands, where they had served with your own gallant sons of the North Dakota regiment. After heartily thanking the returned soldiers for their valor and patriotism, and their contemptuous refusal to be daunted or misled by the outcry raised at home by the men of little faith who wished us to abandon the islands, he spoke of the islands themselves as follows:

“That Congress will provide for them a government which will bring them blessings, which will promote their material interests as well as advance their people in the path of civilization and intelligence, I confidently believe. They will not be governed as vassals or serfs or slaves. They will be given a government of liberty, regulated by law, honestly administered, without oppressing exactions, taxation without tyranny, justice without bribe, education without distinction of social condition, freedom of religious worship, and protection in ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”

What he said then lay in the realm of promise. Now it lies in the realm of positive performance.

It is a good thing to look back upon what has been said and compare it with the record of what has actually been done. If promises are violated, if plighted word is not kept, then those who have failed in their duty should be held up to reprobation. If, on the other hand, the promises have been substantially made good; if the achievement has kept pace and more than kept pace with the prophecy, then they who made the one and are responsible for the other are entitled of just right to claim the credit which attaches to those who serve the Nation well. This credit I claim for the men who have managed so admirably the military and the civil affairs of the Philippine Islands, and for those other men who have so heartily backed them in Congress, and without whose aid and support not one thing could have been accomplished.

When President McKinley spoke, the first duty was the restoration of order; and to this end the use of the Army of the United States—an Army composed of regulars and volunteers alike—was necessary. To put down the insurrection and restore peace to the islands was a duty not only to ourselves but to the islanders also. We could not have abandoned the conflict without shirking this duty, without proving ourselves recreants to the memory of our forefathers. Moreover, if we had abandoned it we would have inflicted upon the Filipinos the most cruel wrong and would have doomed them to a bloody jumble of anarchy and tyranny. It seems strange, looking back, that any of our people should have failed to recognize a duty so obvious; but there was such failure, and the Government at home, the civil authorities in the Philippines, and above all our gallant Army, had to do their work amid a storm of detraction. The Army in especial was attacked in a way which finally did good, for in the end it aroused the hearty resentment of the great body of the American people, not against the Army, but against the Army’s traducers. The circumstances of the war made it one of peculiar difficulty, and our soldiers were exposed to peculiar wrongs from their foes. They fought in dense tropical jungles against enemies who were very treacherous and very cruel, not only toward our own men, but toward the great numbers of friendly natives, the most peaceable and most civilized among whom eagerly welcomed our rule. Under such circumstances, among a hundred thousand hot-blooded and powerful young men serving in small detachments on the other side of the globe, it was impossible that occasional instances of wrongdoing should not occur. The fact that they occurred in retaliation for wellnigh intolerable provocation can not for one moment be admitted in the way of excuse or justification. All good Americans regret and deplore them, and the War Department has taken every step in its power to punish the offenders and to prevent or minimize the chance of repetition of the offence. But these offences were the exception and not the rule. As a whole our troops showed not only signal courage and efficiency, but great humanity and the most sincere desire to promote the welfare and liberties of the islanders. In a series of exceedingly harassing and difficult campaigns they completely overthrew the enemy, reducing them finally to a condition of mere brigandage; and wherever they conquered they conquered only to make way for the rule of the civil government, for the introduction of law, and of liberty under the law. When, by last July, the last vestige of organized insurrection had disappeared, peace and amnesty were proclaimed.

As rapidly as the military rule was extended over the islands by the defeat of the insurgents, just so rapidly was it replaced by the civil government. At the present time the civil government is supreme and the army in the Philippines has been reduced until it is sufficient merely to provide against the recurrence of trouble. In Governor Taft and his associates we sent to the Filipinos as upright, as conscientious, and as able a group of administrators as ever any country has been blessed with having. With them and under them we have associated the best men among the Filipinos, so that the great majority of the officials, including many of the highest rank, are themselves natives of the islands. The administration is incorruptibly honest; justice is as jealously safeguarded as here at home. The government is conducted purely in the interests of the people of the islands; they are protected in their religious and civil rights; they have been given an excellent and well administered school system, and each of them now enjoys rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” such as were never before known in all the history of the islands.