Theodore Roosevelt

“ Even when the power has been granted it would be most unwise to exercise it too much, to begin by too stringent legislation. The mechanism of modern business is as delicate and complicated as it is vast, and nothing would be more productive of evil to all of us, and especially to those least well off in this world’s goods, than ignorant meddling with this mechanism—above all, meddling in a spirit of class legislation or hatred or rancor. It is eminently necessary that the power should be had, but it is just as necessary that it should be exercised with wisdom and self-restraint. ”

“ We know there are dangers ahead, as we know there are evils to fight and overcome, but we feel to the full the pulse of the prosperity which we enjoy. Stout of heart, we see across the dangers the great future that lies beyond, and we rejoice as a giant refreshed, as a strong man girt for the race; and we go down into the arena where the nations strive for mastery, our hearts lifted with the faith that to us and to our children and our children’s children it shall be given to make this Republic the mightiest among the peoples of mankind. ”

“ I am always sorry whenever I see any reflection that seems to come from America upon any friendly nation. To write or say anything unkind, unjust, or inconsiderate about any foreign nation does not do us any good, and does not help us toward holding our own if ever the need should arise to hold our own. I am sure you will not misunderstand me; I am sure that it is needless for me to say that I do not believe the United States should ever suffer a wrong. I should be the first to ask that we resent a wrong from the strong, just as I should be the first to insist that we do not wrong the weak. ”

“ So now it behooves each of us so to conduct his civil life, so to do his duty as a citizen, that we shall in the most effective way war against the spirit of anarchy in all its forms. You did mighty deeds, and you leave us more than mighty deeds, for you leave us the memory of how you did them. You leave us not only the victory, but the spirit that lay behind it and shone through it. You leave us not only the triumph, but the memory of the patient resolution, of the suffering, of the dogged endurance and heroic daring through which that triumph came to pass. ”

“ If our homage is lip loyalty merely, the great deeds of those who went before us, the great deeds of the times of Washington and of the times of Lincoln, the great deeds of the men who won the Revolution and founded the Nation, and of the men who preserved it, who made it a Union and a free Republic, will simply arise to shame us. We can honor our fathers and our fathers’ fathers only by ourselves striving to rise level to their standard. There are plenty of tendencies for evil in what we see round about us. ”

“ If our fathers were mistaken in that theory, if ever the times become such—not occasionally but persistently—that the mass of the people do what is unwholesome, what is wrong, then the Republic can not stand, I care not how good its laws, I care not what marvelous mechanism its Constitution may embody. Back of the laws, back of the administration, back of the system of government lies the man, lies the average manhood of our people, and in the long run we are going to go up or go down accordingly as the average standard of our citizenship does or does not wax in growth and grace. ”

“ The century that has closed has seen the conquest of this continent by our people. To conquer a continent is rough work. All really great work is rough in the doing, though it seems smooth enough to those who look back upon it, or to the contemporaries who overlook it from afar. We need display but scant patience with those who, sitting at ease in their own homes, delight to exercise a querulous and censorious spirit of judgment upon their brethren who, whatever their shortcomings, are doing strong men’s work as they bring the light of civilization into the world’s dark places. ”

“ I firmly believe in my countrymen, and therefore I believe that the chief thing necessary in order that they shall work together is that they shall know one another—that the Northerner shall know the Southerner, and the man of one occupation know the man of another occupation; the man who works in one walk of life know the man who works in another walk of life, so that we may realize that the things which divide us are superficial, are unimportant, and that we are, and must ever be, knit together into one indissoluble mass by our common American brotherhood. ”

“ 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. ”

“ How can success fail to come to a race of masterful energy and resoluteness, which has a continent for the base of its domain, and which feels within its veins the thrill that comes to generous souls when their strength stirs in them, and they know that the future is theirs? No great destiny ever yet came to a people walking with their eyes on the ground and their faces shrouded in gloom. No great destiny ever yet came to a people who feared the future, who feared failure more than they hoped for success. ”

“ It is no chance that has made Mount Vernon and Arlington, here in the neighborhood of Washington, the two great memorials of the nation’s past. One commemorates the founding and the other the saving of the nation. If it were not for what Arlington symbolizes, Mount Vernon would mean little or nothing. If it were not for what was done by Rosecrans and his fellows, the work of Washington would have crumbled into bloody chaos and the deeds of the founders of this Republic be remembered only because they had begun another of the many failures to make practical the spirit of liberty in this world. ”

“ While material well-being is never all-sufficient to the life of a nation, yet it is the merest truism to say that its absence means ruin. We need to build a higher life upon it as a foundation; but we can build little indeed unless this foundation of prosperity is deep and broad. The well-being which we are now enjoying can be secured only through general business prosperity, and such prosperity is conditioned upon the energy and hard work, the sanity and the mutual respect, of all classes of capitalists, large and small, of wage-workers of every degree. ”

“ Where wrong has been done by any one the wrongdoer shall be punished; but we shall not halt in our great work because some man has happened to do wrong. Honor to the statesmen of the past, and may the statesmen of the present strive to live up to the example they set! Honor to the army and navy of the past! And honor to those gallant Americans wearing the uniform of the American Republic who in the army and the navy of the present day uphold gloriously the most glorious traditions of the past! ”

“ The hideous infamy of the deed shocked the Nation to its depths, for the man thus struck at was in a peculiar sense the champion of the plain people, in a peculiar sense the representative and the exponent of those ideals which, if we live up to them, will make, as they have largely made, our country a blessed refuge for all who strive to do right and to live their lives simply and well as light is given them. The Nation was stunned, and the people mourned with a sense of bitter bereavement because they had lost a man whose heart beat for them as the heart of Lincoln once had beaten. ”

“ You belong to a country mighty in war and mighty in peace—a country of a great past, whose great present is but an earnest of an even greater future. The world has never seen more marvelous prosperity than that which we now enjoy, and this prosperity is not ephemeral. We shall have our ups and downs. The waves at times will recede, but the tide will go steadily higher. This country has never yet been called upon to meet a crisis in war or a crisis in peace to which it did not eventually prove equal. ”

“ When the conditions have been created which make prosperity possible, then each individual man must achieve it for himself by his own energy and thrift and business intelligence. If when people wax fat they kick, as they have kicked since the days of Jeshurun, they will speedily destroy their own prosperity. If they go into wild speculation and lose their heads they have lost that which no laws can supply. If in a spirit of sullen envy they insist upon pulling down those who have profited most in the years of fatness, they will bury themselves in the crash of the common disaster. ”

“ Honor, thrice honor to those who for three generations, during the period of this people’s great expansion, have seen that the force of the living truth expanded as the nation expanded! They bore the burden and heat of the day, they toiled obscurely and died unknown, that we might come into a glorious heritage. Let us prove the sincerity of our homage to their faith and their works by the way in which we manfully carry toward completion the work they so well began. ”

“ I pity the creature who doesn’t work, at whichever end of the social scale he may regard himself as being. The law of worthy work well done is the law of successful American life. I believe in play, too—play, and play hard while you play; but don’t make the mistake of thinking that that is the main thing. The work is what counts, and if a man does his work well and it is worth doing, then it matters but little in which line that work is done; the man is a good American citizen. If he does his work in slip-shod fashion, then no matter what kind of work it is, he is a poor American citizen. ”

“ There is no proper place in our society either for the rich man who uses the power conferred by his riches to enable him to oppress and wrong his neighbors, nor yet for the demagogic agitator who, instead of attacking abuses as all abuses should be attacked wherever found, attacks property, attacks prosperity, attacks men of wealth, as such, whether they be good or bad, attacks corporations whether they do well or ill, and seeks, in a spirit of ignorant rancor, to overthrow the very foundations upon which rests our national well-being. ”

“ But we must remember that each victory only opens the chance for a new struggle; that the remembrance of triumphs achieved in the past is of use chiefly if it spurs us to fresh effort in the present. No nation has ever prospered as we are prospering now, and we must see to it that by our own folly we do not mar this prosperity. Yet we must see to it also that wherever wrong flourishes it be repressed. It is not the habit of our people to shirk issues, but squarely to face them. ”

“ While we are not to be excused if we fail to do whatever is possible through the agency of government, we must keep ever in mind that no action of the government, no action by combination among ourselves, can take the place of the individual qualities to which in the long run every man must owe the success he can make of life. There never has been devised, and there never will be devised, any law which will enable a man to succeed save by the exercise of those qualities which have always been the prerequisites of success—the qualities of hard work, of keen intelligence, of unflinching will. ”

“ It is the homage we should pay to the memory of Lincoln, the homage we should pay to all of our fellow-countrymen who have at any time rendered great service to the Republic, and it can be rendered in most efficient form not by merely praising them for having dealt with problems which now we do not have to face, but by facing our problems in the same spirit in which they faced theirs. Nothing was more noteworthy in all of Lincoln’s character than the way in which he combined fealty to the loftiest ideal with a thoroughly practical capacity to achieve that ideal by practical methods. ”

“ Keep our navy up to the highest point of efficiency; have good ships, and enough of them; have the officers and the enlisted men on them trained to handle them, so that in the future the American navy shall rise level, whenever the need comes, to the standard it has set in the past. Keep in our own hearts the rugged, manly virtues, which have made our people formidable as foes, and valuable as friends throughout the century and a quarter of our national life. ”

“ You will have created a new profession; a profession of the highest importance; a profession of the highest usefulness toward the State; and you are in honor bound to yourselves and to the people to make your profession stand as high as the profession of law, as the profession of medicine, as any other profession most intimately connected with our highest and finest development as a nation. You are engaged in pioneer work in a calling whose opportunities for public service are very great. ”

“ We believe that the century of free government which the American people have enjoyed has not rendered them irresolute and faithless, but has fitted them for the great task of lifting up and assisting to better conditions and larger liberty those distant peoples who through the issue of battle have become our wards. Let us fear not. There is no occasion for faint hearts, no excuse for regrets. Nations do not grow in strength, the cause of liberty and law is not advanced by the doing of easy things. The harder the task the greater will be the result, the benefit, and the honor. ”