Chapter VI: Part 6

If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign policy in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that a nation has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or weak, than an individual has to do injustice to another individual; that the same moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we must also remember that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the individual so to do. Within the Nation the individual has now delegated this right to the State, that is, to the representative of all the individuals, and it is a maxim of the law that for every wrong there is a remedy. But in international law we have not advanced by any means as far as we have advanced in municipal law. There is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another, or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrong-doer can be brought. Either it is necessary supinely to acquiesce in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality and aggression, or else it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly to stand up for its rights. Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations, it would be a wicked thing for the most civilized powers, for those with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong, to disarm. If the great civilized nations of the present day should completely disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism in one form or another. Under any circumstances a sufficient armament would have to be kept up to serve the purposes of international police; and until international cohesion and the sense of international duties and rights are far more advanced than at present, a nation desirous both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others must have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as its part of the general world duty. Therefore it follows that a self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand endeavor by every means to aid in the development of the various movements which tend to provide substitutes for war, which tend to render nations in their actions toward one another, and indeed toward their own peoples, more responsive to the general sentiment of humane and civilized mankind; and on the other hand it should keep prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself, to repel any wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a more advanced stage of international relations would come under the head of the exercise of the international police. A great free people owes it to itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the powers of evil.

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We are in every way endeavoring to help on, with cordial goodwill, every movement which will tend to bring us into more friendly relations with the rest of mankind. In pursuance of this policy I shall shortly lay before the Senate treaties of arbitration with all powers which are willing to enter into these treaties with us. It is not possible at this period of the world’s development to agree to arbitrate all matters, but there are many matters of possible difference between us and other nations which can be thus arbitrated. Furthermore, at the request of the Interparliamentary Union, an eminent body composed of practical statesmen from all countries, I have asked the Powers to join with this Government in a second Hague conference, at which it is hoped that the work already so happily begun at The Hague may be carried some steps further toward completion. This carries out the desire expressed by the first Hague conference itself.

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It is not true that the United States feels any land hunger or entertains any projects as regards the other nations of the Western Hemisphere save such as are for their welfare. All that this country desires is to see the neighboring countries stable, orderly, and prosperous. Any country whose people conduct themselves well can count upon our hearty friendship. If a nation shows that it knows how to act with reasonable efficiency and decency in social and political matters, if it keeps order and pays its obligations, it need fear no interference from the United States. Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power. If every country washed by the Caribbean Sea would show the progress in stable and just civilization which with the aid of the Platt amendment Cuba has shown since our troops left the island, and which so many of the republics in both Americas are constantly and brilliantly showing, all question of interference by this Nation with their affairs would be at an end. Our interests and those of our southern neighbors are in reality identical. They have great natural riches, and if within their borders the reign of law and justice obtains, prosperity is sure to come to them. While they thus obey the primary laws of civilized society they may rest assured that they will be treated by us in a spirit of cordial and helpful sympathy. We would interfere with them only in the last resort, and then only if it became evident that their inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations. It is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence, must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.

In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to circumscribe the theatre of war in the Far East, and to secure the open door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which, while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made to our sympathies. Ordinarily it is very much wiser and more useful for us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions about wrongdoing elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed on so vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether it is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother’s eye if we refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not to be expected that a people like ours, which in spite of certain very obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows by its consistent practice its belief in the principles of civil and religious liberty and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even the worst crime, like the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic, so that individuals and not classes are molested in their fundamental rights—it is inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to give expression to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in Kishineff, or when it witnesses such systematic and long-extended cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of which the Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the indignant pity of the civilized world.

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Even where it is not possible to secure in other nations the observance of the principles which we accept as axiomatic, it is necessary for us firmly to insist upon the rights of our own citizens without regard to their creed or race; without regard to whether they were born here or born abroad. It has proved very difficult to secure from Russia the right for our Jewish fellow-citizens to receive passports and travel through Russian territory. Such conduct is not only unjust and irritating toward us, but it is difficult to see its wisdom from Russia’s standpoint. No conceivable good is accomplished by it. If an American Jew or an American Christian misbehaves himself in Russia he can at once be driven out; but the ordinary American Jew, like the ordinary American Christian, would behave just about as he behaves here, that is, behave as any good citizen ought to behave; and where this is the case it is a wrong against which we are entitled to protest to refuse him his passport without regard to his conduct and character, merely on racial and religious grounds. In Turkey our difficulties arise less from the way in which our citizens are sometimes treated than from the indignation inevitably excited in seeing such fearful misrule as has been witnessed both in Armenia and Macedonia.

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The strong arm of the Government in enforcing respect for its just rights in international matters is the Navy of the United States. I most earnestly recommend that there be no halt in the work of upbuilding the American Navy. There is no more patriotic duty before us as a people than to keep the Navy adequate to the needs of this country’s position. We have undertaken to build the Isthmian Canal. We have undertaken to secure for ourselves our just share in the trade of the Orient. We have undertaken to protect our citizens from improper treatment in foreign lands. We continue steadily to insist on the application of the Monroe Doctrine to the Western Hemisphere. Unless our attitude in these and all similar matters is to be a mere boastful sham we can not afford to abandon our naval programme. Our voice is now potent for peace, and is so potent because we are not afraid of war. But our protestations upon behalf of peace would neither receive nor deserve the slightest attention if we were impotent to make them good.

The war which now unfortunately rages in the Far East has emphasized in striking fashion the new possibilities of naval warfare. The lessons taught are both strategic and tactical, and are political as well as military. The experiences of the war have shown in conclusive fashion that while sea-going and sea-keeping torpedo destroyers are indispensable, and fast lightly armed and armored cruisers very useful, yet that the main reliance, the main standby, in any navy worthy the name must be the great battleships, heavily armored and heavily gunned. Not a Russian or Japanese battleship has been sunk by a torpedo boat, or by gunfire, while among the less protected ships, cruiser after cruiser has been destroyed whenever the hostile squadrons have gotten within range of one another’s weapons. There will always be a large field of usefulness for cruisers, especially of the more formidable type. We need to increase the number of torpedo-boat destroyers, paying less heed to their having a knot or two extra speed than to their capacity to keep the seas for weeks and, if necessary, for months at a time. It is wise to build submarine torpedo boats, as under certain circumstances they might be very useful. But most of all we need to continue building our fleet of battleships, or ships so powerfully armed that they can inflict the maximum of damage upon our opponents, and so well protected that they can suffer a severe hammering in return without fatal impairment of their ability to fight and manœuvre. Of course ample means must be provided for enabling the personnel of the Navy to be brought to the highest point of efficiency. Our great fighting ships and torpedo boats must be ceaselessly trained and manœuvred in squadrons. The officers and men can only learn their trade thoroughly by ceaseless practice on the high seas. In the event of war it would be far better to have no ships at all than to have ships of a poor and ineffective type, or ships which, however good, were yet manned by untrained and unskilful crews. The best officers and men in a poor ship could do nothing against fairly good opponents; and, on the other hand, a modern warship is useless unless the officers and men aboard her have become adepts in their duties. The marksmanship in our Navy has improved in an extraordinary degree during the last three years, and on the whole the types of our battleships are improving; but much remains to be done. Sooner or later we shall have to provide for some method by which there will be promotions for merit as well as for seniority, or else retirement of all those who after a certain age have not advanced beyond a certain grade; while no effort must be spared to make the service attractive to the enlisted men in order that they may be kept as long as possible in it. Reservation public schools should be provided wherever there are navy-yards.

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Within the last three years the United States has set an example in disarmament where disarmament was proper. By law our Army is fixed at a maximum of one hundred thousand and a minimum of sixty thousand men. When there was insurrection in the Philippines we kept the Army at the maximum. Peace came in the Philippines, and now our Army has been reduced to the minimum at which it is possible to keep it with due regard to its efficiency. The guns now mounted require twenty-eight thousand men, if the coast fortifications are to be adequately manned. Relatively to the Nation, it is not now so large as the police force of New York or Chicago, relatively to the population of either city. We need more officers; there are not enough to perform the regular army work. It is very important that the officers of the Army should be accustomed to handle their men in masses, as it is also important that the National Guard of the several States should be accustomed to actual field manœuvring, especially in connection with the regulars. For this reason we are to be congratulated upon the success of the field manœuvres at Manassas last fall, manœuvres in which a larger number of Regulars and National Guard took part than was ever before assembled together in time of peace. No other civilized nation has, relatively to its population, such a diminutive Army as ours; and while the Army is so small we are not to be excused if we fail to keep it at a very high grade of proficiency. It must be incessantly practiced; the standard for the enlisted men should be kept very high, while at the same time the service should be made as attractive as possible; and the standard for the officers should be kept even higher—which, as regards the upper ranks, can best be done by introducing some system of selection and rejection into the promotions. We should be able, in the event of some sudden emergency, to put into the field one first-class army corps, which should be, as a whole, at least the equal of any body of troops of like number belonging to any other nation.

Great progress has been made in protecting our coasts by adequate fortifications with sufficient guns. We should, however, pay much more heed than at present to the development of an extensive system of floating mines for use in all our more important harbors. These mines have been proved to be a most formidable safeguard against hostile fleets.

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I earnestly call the attention of the Congress to the need of amending the existing law relating to the award of Congressional medals of honor in the Navy so as to provide that they may be awarded to commissioned officers and warrant officers as well as to enlisted men. These justly prized medals are given in the Army alike to the officers and the enlisted men, and it is most unjust that the commissioned officers and warrant officers of the Navy should not in this respect have the same rights as their brethren in the Army and as the enlisted men of the Navy.

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In the Philippine Islands there has been during the past year a continuation of the steady progress which has obtained ever since our troops definitely got the upper hand of the insurgents. The Philippine people, or, to speak more accurately, the many tribes, and even races, sundered from one another more or less sharply, who go to make up the people of the Philippine Islands, contain many elements of good, and some elements which we have a right to hope stand for progress. At present they are utterly incapable of existing in independence at all or of building up a civilization of their own. I firmly believe that we can help them to rise higher and higher in the scale of civilization and of capacity for self-government, and I most earnestly hope that in the end they will be able to stand, if not entirely alone, yet in some such relation to the United States as Cuba now stands. This end is not yet in sight, and it may be indefinitely postponed if our people are foolish enough to turn the attention of the Filipinos away from the problems of achieving moral and material prosperity, of working for a stable, orderly, and just government, and toward foolish and dangerous intrigues for a complete independence for which they are as yet totally unfit.

On the other hand, our people must keep steadily before their minds the fact that the justification for our stay in the Philippines must ultimately rest chiefly upon the good we are able to do in the islands. I do not overlook the fact that in the development of our interests in the Pacific Ocean and along its coasts, the Philippines have played and will play an important part, and that our interests have been served in more than one way by the possession of the islands. But our chief reason for continuing to hold them must be that we ought in good faith to try to do our share of the world’s work, and this particular piece of work has been imposed upon us by the results of the war with Spain. The problem presented to us in the Philippine Islands is akin to, but not exactly like, the problems presented to the other great civilized powers which have possessions in the Orient. There are points of resemblance in our work to the work which is being done by the British in India and Egypt, by the French in Algiers, by the Dutch in Java, by the Russians in Turkestan, by the Japanese in Formosa; but more distinctly than any of these Powers we are endeavoring to develop the natives themselves so that they shall take an ever-increasing share in their own government, and as far as prudent we are already admitting their representatives to a governmental equality with our own. There are commissioners, judges, and governors in the islands who are Filipinos and who have exactly the same share in the government of the islands as have their colleagues who are Americans, while in the lower ranks, of course, the great majority of the public servants are Filipinos. Within two years we shall be trying the experiment of an elective lower house in the Philippine legislature. It may be that the Filipinos will misuse this legislature, and they certainly will misuse it if they are misled by foolish persons here at home into starting an agitation for their own independence or into any factious or improper action. In such case they will do themselves no good, and will stop for the time being all further effort to advance them and give them a greater share in their own government. But if they act with wisdom and self-restraint, if they show that they are capable of electing a legislature which in its turn is capable of taking a sane and efficient part in the actual work of government, they can rest assured that a full and increasing measure of recognition will be given them. Above all they should remember that their prime needs are moral and industrial, not political. It is a good thing to try the experiment of giving them a legislature; but it is a far better thing to give them schools, good roads, railroads which will enable them to get their products to market, honest courts, an honest and efficient constabulary, and all that tends to produce order, peace, fair dealing as between man and man, and habits of intelligent industry and thrift. If they are safeguarded against oppression, and if their wants, material and spiritual, are studied intelligently and in a spirit of friendly sympathy, much more good will be done them than by any effort to give them political power, though this effort may in its own proper time and place be proper enough.

Meanwhile our own people should remember that there is need for the highest standard of conduct among the Americans sent to the Philippine Islands, not only among the public servants, but among the private individuals who go to them. It is because I feel this so deeply that in the administration of these islands I have positively refused to permit any discrimination whatsoever for political reasons, and have insisted that in choosing the public servants consideration should be paid solely to the worth of the men chosen and to the needs of the islands. There is no higher body of men in our public service than we have in the Philippine Islands under Governor Wright and his associates. So far as possible these men should be given a free hand, and their suggestions should receive the hearty backing both of the Executive and of the Congress. There is need of a vigilant and disinterested support of our public servants in the Philippines by good citizens here in the United States. Unfortunately hitherto those of our people here at home who have specially claimed to be the champions of the Filipinos have in reality been their worst enemies. This will continue to be the case as long as they strive to make the Filipinos independent, and stop all industrial development of the islands by crying out against the laws which would bring it on the ground that capitalists must not “exploit” the islands. Such proceedings are not only unwise, but are most harmful to the Filipinos, who do not need independence at all, but who do need good laws, good public servants, and the industrial development that can only come if the investment of American and foreign capital in the islands is favored in all legitimate ways.

Every measure taken concerning the islands should be taken primarily with a view to their advantage. We should certainly give them lower tariff rates on their exports to the United States; if this is not done it will be a wrong to extend our shipping laws to them. I earnestly hope for the immediate enactment into law of the legislation now pending to encourage American capital to seek investment in the islands in railroads, in factories, in plantations, and in lumbering and mining.

THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

WHITE HOUSE,
_December 6, 1904_.

ADDRESS TO THE FOREST CONGRESS, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 5, 1905

_Mr. Secretary, Gentlemen and Ladies_:

It is a pleasure to greet all of you here this afternoon, but of course especially the members of the American Forest Congress. You have made, by your coming, a meeting which is without parallel in the history of forestry. And, Mr. Secretary, I must take this opportunity of saying to you what you so amply deserve, that no man in this country has done so much as you have done in the last eight years to make it possible to take a business view from the standpoint of all the country of just such questions as this. It is not many years since such a meeting as this would have been regarded as chimerical; the thought of it would have been regarded as absolutely chimerical. In the old pioneer days the American had but one thought about a tree, and that was to cut it down; and the mental attitude of the Nation toward the forests was largely conditioned upon the fact that the life work of the earlier generations of our people had been of necessity to hew down the forests, for they had to make clearings on which to live; and it was not until half a century of our national life had passed that any considerable body of American citizens began to live under conditions where the tree ceased to be something to be cleared off the earth. It always takes time to get the mind of a people accustomed to any change in conditions, and it took a long time to get the mind of our people, as a whole, accustomed to the fact that they had to alter their attitude toward the forests. For the first time the great business and the forest interests of the Nation have joined together, through delegates altogether worthy of the organizations they represent, to consider their individual and their common interests in the forest. This congress may well be called a meeting of forest users, for that the users of the forest come together to consider how best to combine use with preservation is the significant fact of the meeting, the fact full of powerful promise for the forests of the future.

The producers, the manufacturers, and the great common carriers of the Nation had long failed to realize their true and vital relation to the great forests of the United States, and the forests and industries both suffered from that failure. The suffering of the industries in such case comes after the destruction of the forests, but it is just as inevitable as that destruction. If the forest is destroyed it is only a question of a relatively short time before the business interests suffer in consequence. All of you know that there is opportunity in any new country for the development of the type of temporary inhabitant whose idea is to skin the country and go somewhere else. You all know, and especially those of you from the West, the individual whose idea of developing the country is to cut every stick of timber off of it and then leave a barren desert for the homemaker who comes in after him. That man is a curse and not a blessing to the country. The prop of the country must be the business man who intends so to run his business that it will be profitable for his children after him. That is the type of business that it is worth while to develop. The time of indifference and misunderstanding has gone by. Your coming is a very great step toward the solution of the forest problem—a problem which can not be settled until it is settled right. And it can not be settled right until the forces which bring that settlement about come, not from the Government, not even from the newspapers and from public sentiment in general, but from the active, intelligent, and effective interest of the men to whom the forest is important from the business point of view, because they use it and its product and whose interest is therefore concrete instead of general and diffuse. I do not in the least underrate the power of an awakened public opinion; but in the final test it will be the attitude of the industries of the country which more than anything else will determine whether or not our forests are to be preserved. It is because of their recognition of that prime material fact that so much has been accomplished, Mr. Wilson, by those interested under you and in the other departments of the Government in the preservation of the forests. We want the active and zealous help of every man farsighted enough to realize the importance from the standpoint of the Nation’s welfare in the future of preserving the forests; but that help by itself will not avail. It will not even be the main factor in bringing about the result toward which we are striving; the main factor must come from the intelligence of the business interests concerned, so that the manufacturer, the railway man, the miner, the lumberman, the dealer in lumber, shall appreciate that it is of direct interest to them to preserve through use instead of waste, the great resources upon which they depend for the successful development of their business. This is true because by far the greater part of all our forests must pass into the hands of forest users, whether directly or through the Government, which will continue to hold some of them, but only as trustee. The forest is for use, and its users will decide its future. It was only a few years ago that the practical lumberman felt that the forest expert was a man who wished to see the forests preserved as bric-a-brac, and the American business man was not prepared to do much from the bric-a-brac standpoint. Now, I think, we have got a working agreement between the forester and the business man whose business is the use of the forest. We have got them to come together with the understanding that they must work for a common end, work to see the forest preserved for use. The great significance of this congress comes from the fact that henceforth the movement for the conservative use of the forest is to come mainly from within, not from without; from the men who are actively interested in the use of the forest in one way or another, even more than from those whose interest is philanthropic and general. The difference means, as the difference in such a case always does mean, to a large extent the difference between mere agitation and actual execution, between the hope of accomplishment and the thing done. We believe that at last forces have been set in motion which will convert the once distant prospect of the conservation of the forest by wise use into the practical accomplishment of that great end; and of this most hopeful and significant fact the coming together of this congress is the sufficient proof.

I shall not pretend this afternoon to even describe to you the place of the forest in the life of any nation, and especially of its place in the United States. The great industries of agriculture, transportation, mining, grazing, and, of course, lumbering, are each one of them vitally and immediately dependent upon wood, water, or grass from the forest. The manufacturing industries, whether or not wood enters directly into their finished product, are scarcely, if at all, less dependent upon the forest than those whose connection with it is obvious and direct. Wood is an indispensable part of the material structure upon which civilization rests; and it is to be remembered always that the immense increase of the use of iron and substitutes for wood in many structures, while it has meant a relative decrease in the amount of wood used, has been accompanied by an absolute increase in the amount of wood used. More wood is used than ever before in our history. Thus, the consumption of wood in shipbuilding is far larger than it was before the discovery of the art of building iron ships, because vastly more ships are built. Larger supplies of building lumber are required, directly or indirectly, for use in the construction of the brick and stone structures of great modern cities than were consumed by the comparatively few and comparatively small wooden buildings in the earlier stages of these same cities. It is as sure as anything can be that we will see in the future a steadily increasing demand for wood in our manufacturing industries. There is one point I want to speak about in addition to the uses of the forest to which I have already alluded. Those of us who have lived on the great plains, who are acquainted with the conditions in parts of Oklahoma, Nebraska, Kansas, and the Dakotas, know that wood forms an immensely portentous element in helping the farmer on these plains battle against his worst enemy—wind. The use of forests as windbreaks out on the plains, where the tree does not grow unless men help it, is of enormous importance, and, Mr. Wilson, among the many services performed by the public-spirited statesman who once occupied the position that you now hold, none was greater than what the late Secretary of Agriculture, Mr. Morton, did in teaching, by actual example as well as by precept, the people of the treeless regions the immense advantage of the cultivation of trees. When wood, dead or alive, is demanded in so many ways, and when this demand will undoubtedly increase, it is a fair question, then, whether the vast demands of the future upon our forests are likely to be met. You are mighty poor Americans if your care for the well-being of this country is limited to hoping that that well-being will last out your own generation. No man, here or elsewhere, is entitled to call himself a decent citizen if he does not try to do his part toward seeing that our national policies are shaped for the advantage of our children and our children’s children. Our country, we have faith to believe, is only at the beginning of its growth. Unless the forests of the United States can be made ready to meet the vast demands which this growth will inevitably bring, commercial disaster, that means disaster to the whole country, is inevitable. The railroads must have ties, and the general opinion is that no efficient substitute for wood for this purpose has been devised. The miner must have timber or he can not operate his mine, and in very many cases the profit which mining yields is directly proportionate to the cost of timber supply. The farmer, East and West, must have timber for numberless uses on his farm, and he must be protected, by forest cover upon the headwaters of the streams he uses, against floods in the East, and the lack of water for irrigation in the West. The stockman must have fence posts, and very often he must have summer range for his stock in the national forest reserves. In a word, both the production of the great staples upon which our prosperity depends and their movement in commerce throughout the United States are inseparably dependent upon the existence of permanent and suitable supplies from the forest at a reasonable cost.

If the present rate of forest destruction is allowed to continue, with nothing to offset it, a timber famine in the future is inevitable. Fire, wasteful and destructive forms of lumbering, and the legitimate use, taken together, are destroying our forest resources far more rapidly than they are being replaced. It is difficult to imagine what such a timber famine would mean to our resources. And the period of recovery from the injuries which a timber famine would entail would be measured by the slow growth of the trees themselves. Remember that you can prevent such a timber famine occurring by wise action taken in time, but once the famine occurs there is no possible way of hurrying the growth of the trees necessary to relieve it. You have got to act in time or else the Nation would have to submit to prolonged suffering after it had become too late for forethought to avail. Fortunately, the remedy is a simple one, and your presence here to-day is a most encouraging sign that there will be such forethought. It is the great merit of the Department of Agriculture in the forest work that its efforts have been directed to enlist the sympathy and co-operation of the users of wood, water, and grass, and to show that forestry will and does pay, rather than to exhaust itself in the futile attempt to introduce conservative methods by any other means. I believe most emphatically in sentiment, but I want the sentiment to be put into co-operation with the business interests, and that is what is being done. The policy is one of helpfulness throughout, and never of hostility or coercion toward any legitimate interest whatsoever. In the very nature of things it can make little progress apart from you. Whatever it may be possible for the Government to accomplish, its work must ultimately fail unless your interest and support give it permanence and power. It is only as the producing and commercial interests of the country come to realize that they need to have trees growing up in the forest not less than they need the product of the trees cut down that we may hope to see the permanent prosperity of both safely secured.

This statement is true not only as to forests in private ownership, but as to the national forests as well. Unless the men from the West believe in forest preservation the Western forests can not be preserved. We here at the headquarters of the National Government recognize that absolutely. We believe, we know, that it is essential for the well-being of the people of the States of the great plains, the States of the Rockies, the States of the Pacific Slope, that the forests shall be preserved, and we know also that our belief will count for nothing unless the people of those States themselves wish to preserve the forests. If they do we can help materially; we can direct their efforts, but we can not save the forests unless they wish them to be saved.

I ask, with all the intensity that I am capable, that the men of the West will remember the sharp distinction I have just drawn between the man who skins the land and the man who develops the country. I am going to work with, and only with, the man who develops the country. I am against the land skinner every time. Our policy is consistent to give to every portion of the public domain its highest possible amount of use, and of course that can be given only through the hearty co-operation of the Western people. I would like to add one word as to the creation of a national forest service which I have recommended repeatedly in messages to Congress, and especially in my last. I wish to see all the forest work of the Government concentrated in the Department of Agriculture. It is folly to scatter such work, as I have said over and over again, and the policy which this Administration is trying to carry out through the creation of such a service is that of making the national forests more actively and more permanently useful to the people of the West, and I am heartily glad to know that the Western sentiment supports more and more vigorously the policy of setting aside national forests, the creation of a national forest service, and especially the policy of increasing the permanent usefulness of these forest lands to all who come in contact with them. With what is rapidly getting to be a practically unbroken sentiment in the West behind such a forest policy, with what is rapidly getting to be a practically unbroken support by the great stable interests behind the general policy of the conservative use of the forests, we have a right to feel that we have entered on an era of great and lasting progress. Only entered upon it; much, very much, remains to be done; and as in every other department of human activity our debt of gratitude will be due, not to the amiable but shortsighted optimist who thinks you have made a good beginning and the end may take care of itself; still less to the man who sits at one side and says how poorly the work is being done by those who are doing it; but to the men who try, each in his own place, practically to forward this great work. That is the type of man who is going to do the work, and it is because I believe that we have enlisted the active, practical sympathy of just that kind of man in this work that I believe the future of this policy to be bright and the permanence of our timber supplies more nearly assured than at any previous time in our history. To the men represented in this congress this great result is primarily due. In closing, I wish to thank you who are here, not merely for what you are doing in this particular movement, but for the fact that you are illustrating what I hope I may call the typically American method of meeting questions of great and vital importance to the Nation—the method of seeing whether the individuals particularly concerned can not by getting together and co-operating with the Government do infinitely more for themselves than it would be possible for any Government under the sun to do for them. I believe in the future of this movement, because I think you have the right combination of qualities—the quality of individual initiative, the quality of individual resourcefulness, combined with the quality that enables you to come together for mutual help, and having so come, to work with the Government; and I pledge you in the fullest measure the support of the Government in what you are doing.

SPEECH AT THE DINNER OF THE AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS, AT THE ARLINGTON HOTEL, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 11, 1905

_Mr. President, Your Eminence, Gentlemen_:

It is a great pleasure to have the chance of coming here this evening and saying a word of greeting to a body of men who are engaged in doing work for this Republic which is to count, not merely in the present generation, but during the lifetimes of many generations to come. We hear a great deal said about true Americanism. Now the real American, the American whom it is worth while to call such, is the man whose belief in and work for America are not merely for the America of to-day, but for the America of the future.

It is a comparatively easy thing to do work when the reward is to come in the present; but every great nation that has ever existed on this globe has been great because its sons had in them the capacity to work for the well-being of generations yet unborn. Such a spirit is peculiarly necessary when the work that we desire to have done is essentially work of a non-remunerative type, non-remunerative in more than one way; non-remunerative in money, and it may be in fame. We do not know the names of the architects and builders of the great cathedrals whose magnificent beauty is an heirloom to civilization. We do not know the names of the builders of the great majority of the works to which every man with an aspiration after beauty naturally turns when he thinks of the past. We owe that beauty, we owe the elevation of thought, of mind and soul, that come with association and belief in it, to the fact that there were a sufficient number of men who worked in the spirit that Ruskin prayed for—the spirit of doing work not for the sake of the fee, but for the sake of the work itself.

There are things in a nation’s life more important than beauty; but beauty is very important. And in this Nation of ours, while there is very much in which we have succeeded marvelously, I do not think that if we look dispassionately at what we have done we will say that beauty has been exactly the strong point of the Nation. It rests largely with gatherings such as this, with the note that is set by men such as those I am addressing to-night, to determine whether or not this shall be true of the future. A very large percentage of the durable work, the work which is lasting, and therefore the beauty of which, if it exists, is also lasting, must be done by the Government. Many great buildings and beautiful buildings will be created by private effort; but many of the greatest buildings must necessarily be erected by the Government, national, State, or municipal. Those in control of any branch of that Government necessarily have but an ephemeral lease of power. Administration succeeds administration; Congress succeeds Congress; Legislature succeeds Legislature; and even if all of the administrations, all of the Congresses, are actuated (a not necessarily probable supposition) by an artistic spirit, it would still remain true that there could not be coherence in their work if they had to rely on themselves alone. The best thing that any administration, that any executive department of the Government, can do—and if I may venture to make any suggestion to the co-ordinate branch, Senator Cockrell, I would say that the best thing that any elective legislative body could do—is in these matters to surrender itself, within reasonable limits, to the guidance of those who really do know what they are talking about. The only way in which we can hope to have worthy artistic work done for the Nation or for a State or for a municipality, is by having such a growth of popular sentiment as will render it incumbent upon successive administrations, successive legislative bodies, to carry out steadily a plan chosen for them, worked out for them by such a body of men as that gathered here this evening. What I have said does not mean that we shall here in Washington, for instance, go into immediate and extravagant expenditures on public buildings. All that it means is that, whenever hereafter a public building is provided for and erected, it should be erected in accordance with a carefully thought out plan adopted long before; and that it should be not only beautiful in itself, but fitting in its relations to the whole scheme of the public buildings, the parks, the drives of the District.

Working through municipal commissions, very great progress has already been made in rendering more beautiful our cities, from New York to San Francisco. An incredible amount remains to be done. But a beginning has been made, and now I most earnestly hope that in the National Capital a better beginning will be made than anywhere else, and that can be made only by utilizing to the fullest degree the thought and the disinterested effort of the architects, the artists, the men of art, who stand foremost in their professions here in the United States, and who ask no other reward than the reward of feeling that they have done their full part to make as beautiful as it should be the capital city of the great Republic.

ADDRESS AT LUTHER PLACE MEMORIAL CHURCH, WASHINGTON, D. C., JAN. 29, 1905

DR. BUTLER:

It is a great pleasure to meet with you this morning and say a word of greeting on the occasion of the rededication of this church, coming as it does almost simultaneously with the entry of your pastor into his eightieth year.

From the standpoint from which I am obliged so continually to look at matters, there is a peculiar function to be played by the great Lutheran Church in the United States of America. This is a Church which had its rise to power in, and, until it emigrated to this side of the water, had always had its fullest development in the two great races of Northern and Northern Middle Europe—the German and the Scandinavian. The Lutheran Church came to the territory which is now the United States very shortly after the first permanent settlements were made within our limits; for when the earliest settlers came to dwell around the mouth of the Delaware they brought the Lutheran worship with them, and so with the earliest German settlers who came to Pennsylvania and afterward to New York and the mountainous region in the western part of Virginia and the States south of it. From that day to this the history of the growth in population of this Nation has consisted largely, in some respects mainly, of the arrival of successive waves of newcomers to our shores; and the prime duty of those already in the land is to see that their own progress and development are shared by these newcomers. It is a serious and dangerous thing for any man to tear loose from the soil, from the religion in which he and his forbears have taken root, and to be transplanted into a new land. He should receive all possible aid in the new land; and the aid can be tendered him most effectively by those who can appeal to him on the ground of spiritual kinship. Therefore the Lutheran Church can do most in helping upward and onward so many of the newcomers to our shores; and it seems to me that it should be, I am tempted to say, wellnigh the prime duty of this Church to see that the immigrant, especially the immigrant of Lutheran faith from the Old World, whether he comes from Scandinavia or Germany, or whether he belonged to one of the Lutheran countries of Finland, or Hungary, or Austria, may be not suffered to drift off with no friendly hand extended to him out of all the church communion, away from all the influences that tend toward safeguarding and uplifting him, and that he find ready at hand in this country those eager to bring him into fellowship with the existing bodies. The Lutheran Church in this country is of very great power now numerically, and through the intelligence and thrift of its members, but it will grow steadily to even greater power. It is destined to be one of the two or three greatest and most important national churches in the United States; one of the two or three churches most distinctively American, most distinctively among the forces that are to tell for making this great country even greater in the future. Therefore a peculiar load of responsibility rests upon the members of this Church. It is an important thing for the people of this Nation to remember their rights, but it is an even more important thing for them to remember their duties. In the last analysis the work of statesmen and soldiers, the work of the public men, shall go for nothing if it is not based upon the spirit of Christianity working in the millions of homes throughout this country, so that there may be that social, that spiritual, that moral foundation without which no country can ever rise to permanent greatness. For material well-being, material prosperity, success in arts, in letters, great industrial triumphs, all of them and all of the structures raised thereon will be as evanescent as a dream if they do not rest on “the righteousness that exalteth a nation.”