Theodore Roosevelt

“ Now, from the standpoint of the nation as a whole it is preeminently desirable to keep as one of our chief American types the farmer, the farm home maker, of the medium-sized farm. This type of farm home is one of our strongest political and social bulwarks. Such a farm worked by the owner has proved by experience the best place in which to breed vigorous leaders alike for country and city. ”

“ One of the most striking features of the years which saw the downfall of the Roman Republic was the fact that the political life of Rome became split between two camps, one containing the rich who wished to exploit the poor, and the other the poor who wished to plunder the rich. ”

“ I believe so implicitly in the future of our people, because I believe that the average American citizen will no more tolerate government by a mob than he will tolerate government by a plutocracy; that he desires to see justice done to and justice exacted from rich man and poor man alike. We are not trying to [9] favor any man at the expense of his fellows. We are trying to shape things so that as far as possible each man shall have a fair chance in life ”

“ I am a great believer in our railway system; and the fact that I am very firm in my belief as to the necessity of the Government exercising a proper supervision and control over the railroads does not in the least interfere with the other fact that I greatly admire the large majority of the men in all positions, from the top to the bottom, who build and run them. ”

“ You women have even higher and more difficult duties; for I honor no man, not even the soldier who fights for righteousness, quite as much as I honor the good woman who does her full duty as wife and mother. But if she shirks her duty as wife and mother then she stands on a par with the man who refuses to work for himself and his family, for those dependent upon him, and who in [25] time of the nation’s need refuses to fight. The man or woman who shirks his or her duty occupies a contemptible position. ”

“ Each of you fathers and mothers here knows that if your sons are to do well in the world they must know how to master themselves. Every man must have a master; if he is not his own master, then somebody else will be. This is just as true of public life as of private life. If [13] we can not master ourselves, control ourselves, then sooner or later we shall have to submit to outside control; for there must be control somewhere.
One way of exercising such control is through the laws of the land. ”

“ Recently I have been reading the work of the eminent Italian scholar Ferrero on the history of the Roman Republic, when the life of the Roman state had become that of a complex and luxurious industrial civilization. I am happy to say that the differences between that civilization and our own are more striking than the resemblances ”

“ Whenever a serious effort is made to cut out [18] what is evil in our political life, whether the effort takes the shape of warring against the gross and sordid forms of evil in some municipality, or whether it takes the shape of trying to secure the honest enforcement of the law as against very powerful and wealthy people, there are sure to be certain individuals who demand that the movement stop because it may hurt business. ”

“ His theme was that the vital element in judging any man should be his conduct, and neither his position nor his pretensions; and, furthermore, that freedom could only stay with a people which has the habit of self-mastery. As he said, the price of liberty is not only eternal vigilance, but eternal virtue; and I may add, [12] eternal common sense. Each man here knows that he himself has been able to use his freedom to advantage only provided that he could master himself, that he could control his own passions and direct his own faculties. ”

“ At present the ordinary farmer holds his own in the land as against any possible representative of the landlord class of farmer—that is, of the men who would [34] own vast estates—because the ordinary farmer unites his capital, his labor, and his brains with the making of a permanent family home, and thus can afford to hold his land at a value at which it can not be held by the capitalist, who would have to run it by leasing it or by cultivating it at arm’s length with hired labor. ”

“ We have no intention of trying to work for the impossible and undesirable end of giving to the lazy, the thriftless, the weak, and the vicious, the reward that belongs to, and in the long run can only come to, the hard working, the thrifty, the [10] resolute, and the honest. But we do wish to see that the necessary struggle in life shall be carried on under genuinely democratic conditions; that, so far as human action can safely provide it, there shall be an approximately fair start ”

“ In those States there is need of a modification of the land laws that have worked so well in the well-watered fertile regions to the eastward, such as those in which you here dwell. The one object in all our land laws should always be to favor the actual settler, the [44] actual home maker, who comes to dwell on the land and there to bring up his children to inherit it after him. The Government should part with its title to the land only to the actual home-maker—not to the profit-maker, who does not care to make a home. ”

“ We need the organization, the preparation; we need the good general; but we need most the fighting edge in the individual soldier. So it is in private life. We live in a rough, workaday world, and we are yet a long way from the millennium. ”

“ Exactly as it is for the interest of all the country that our great harbors should be fitted to receive in safety the largest vessels of the merchant fleets of the world, so by deepening and otherwise our rivers should be fitted to bear their part in the movement of our merchandise; and this is especially true of the Mississippi and its tributaries, which drain the immense and prosperous region which makes in very fact the heart of our nation ”

“ For instance, the small sheep farmer who [48] has a home and who wishes that home to pass on to his children improved in value will naturally run his flock so that the land will support it, not only to-day, but ten years hence; but a big absentee sheep owner, who has no home on the land at all, but simply owns huge migratory flocks of sheep, may well find it to his profit to drive them over the small sheep farmer’s range and eat it all out. He can then drive his flocks on, whereas the small man can not. ”

“ Nevertheless, men and women of this great State, men and women of the Middle West, never forget that law and the administration of law, important though they are, must always occupy a wholly secondary place as compared with the character of the average citizen himself. ”

“ The men who fenced this land were sometimes rich men, who, by fencing it, kept out actual settlers and thereby worked evil to the country. But in many cases, whether they were large men or [50] small men, their object was not to keep out actual settlers, but to protect themselves and their own industry by preventing overgrazing of the range on the part of reckless stock owners who had no place in the permanent development of the country and who were indifferent to everything except the profits of the moment. ”

“ I hope that the means of transporting [32] your commodities to market will be steadily improved; but this will be of no use unless you keep producing the commodities, and in the long run this will largely depend upon your being able to keep on the farm a high type of citizenship. The effort must be to make farm life not only remunerative but attractive, so that the best young men and girls will feel inclined to stay on the farm and not to go to the city. Nothing is more important to this country than the perpetuation of our system of [33] medium-sized farms worked by their owners. ”

“ Our greatest national asset is to be found in the children. They need to be trained to high ideals of everyday living, and to high efficiency in their respective vocations; we can not afford to have them trained otherwise, and the nation should help the States to achieve this end. ”

“ The land should be sold outright only in quantities sufficient for decent homes—not in huge areas to be held for speculative purposes or used as ranches, where those who do the actual work are merely tenants or hired hands. No temporary [45] prosperity of any class of men could in the slightest degree atone for failure on our part to shape the laws so that they may work for the permanent good of the home-maker. ”

“ In any great movement for righteousness, where the forces of [16] evil are strongly intrenched, it is unfortunately inevitable that some unoffending people should suffer in company with the real offenders. ”

“ On this trip I shall speak to audiences in each of which there will be many men who fought in the civil war. You who wore the blue and your brothers of the South [22] who wore the gray know that in war no general no matter how good, no organization no matter how perfect, can avail if the average man in the ranks has not got the fighting edge. ”

“ In consequence of this fact, homesteaders do not take up the lands in the tracts in question. They are left open for anybody to graze upon that wishes to. The result is that the men who use them moderately and not with a view to exhausting their resources are at the mercy of those who care nothing for the future and simply intend to skin the land in the present. ”

“ We do not want to see our farmers sink to the condition of the peasants of the Old World, barely able to live on their small holdings, nor do we want to see their places taken by wealthy men owning enormous estates which they work purely by tenants and hired servants. ”

“ Too narrow a literary education is, for most men and women, not a real education at all; for a real education should fit people primarily for the industrial and home-making employments in which they must employ the bulk of their activities. ”

“ The Government does not wish to make money out of the range, but simply to provide for the necessary supervision that will prevent its being eaten out or exhausted; that is, that will secure it undamaged as an asset for the next generation, for the children of the present home makers. ”

“ Unfortunately, I am not able on this present trip to visit those States, or I should speak to their own people on the point to which I now intend to allude; but after all anything that affects a considerable number of Americans who live under one set of conditions, must be of moment to all other Americans, for never forget, friends, that in the long run we shall all go up or go down together. ”

“ We should be prepared to put the nation collectively back of the movement to improve them for the nation’s use. Our knowledge at this time is not such as to permit me to go into details, or to say definitely just what the nation should do ”

“ The Congressional land grant act of 1852 accomplished much in establishing the agricultural colleges in the several States, and therefore in preparing to turn the system of educational training for the young into channels at once broader and more practicable—and what I am saying about agricultural training really applies to all industrial training. But the colleges can not reach the masses, [38] and it is essential that the masses should be reached. ”

“ But where irrigation is not applicable and the land can only be used for grazing, it may be that you can not run more than one steer to ten acres, and it is not necessary to be much of a mathematician in order to see that where such is the case a [47] homestead of one hundred and sixty acres will not go far toward the support of a family. ”

“ We can not afford to substitute any other test for that of guilt or innocence, of wrongdoing or welldoing, in judging any man. If a man does well, if he acts honestly, he has nothing to fear from this Administration. ”

“ This is fundamental, gentlemen, and is simply carrying out the idea upon which I dwell in speaking to you of your own farms here in Iowa. Now in many States where the rainfall is light it is a simple absurdity to expect any man to live, still less to bring up a family, on one hundred and sixty acres. ”

“ I wish to find out their needs and desires and then to try to put them into effect. But they must take trouble, must look ahead to their own ultimate and real good, must insist upon being really represented by their public men, if we are to have a good result. ”

“ In each case the answer must be that we earnestly hope and believe that there will be no permanent damage to [19] business from the movement, but that if righteousness conflicts with the fancied needs of business, then the latter must go to the wall. ”