Part 1
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE
Italic text is denoted by _underscores_.
Some minor changes to the text are noted at the end of the book.
The original edition did not include a Table of Contents. For the convenience of the reader one has been created:
Presidential Addresses and State Papers 5
Remarks at the Dinner of the Periodical Publishers’ Association of America. the New Willard, Washington, D. C., April 7, 1904 5
Address at the Prize Day Exercises at Groton School, Groton, Mass., May 24, 1904 8
Address at Gettysburg, Pa., Memorial Day, May 30, 1904 21
Remarks at the Washington Memorial Chapel, Valley Forge, Pa., June 19, 1904 29
Address at Oyster Bay, N. Y., July 27, 1904, in Response to the Committee Appointed to Notify Him of His Nomination For the Presidency 36
Letter Accepting the Republican Nomination For President of the United States 47
Remarks at the White House, Sept. 24, 1904, on the Occasion of the Reception of the Interparliamentary Union 95
Correspondence, November 4, 1904 - Re: Judge Parker 97
Address at the Unveiling of the Statue of Frederick the Great, at Washington, Nov. 19, 1904 101
Remarks at St. Patrick’s Church, Washington, D. C., Nov. 20, 1904 108
Remarks Introducing Rev. Charles Wagner, at the Lafayette Opera House, Washington, D. C., Nov. 22, 1904 112
Message of the President of the United States, Communicated to the Two Houses of Congress at the Beginning of the Third Session of the Fifty-eighth Congress 119
Address to the Forest Congress, Washington, D. C., Jan. 5, 1905 190
Speech at the Dinner of the American Institute of Architects, at the Arlington Hotel, Washington, D. C., Jan. 11, 1905 201
Address at Luther Place Memorial Church, Washington, D. C., Jan. 29, 1905 205
Address to the Graduating Class of the Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, Jan. 30, 1905 209
Address at the Union League Club, Philadelphia, Pa., Jan. 30, 1905 217
Address at the Lincoln Dinner of the Republican Club of the City of New York, Waldorf-astoria Hotel, Feb. 13, 1905 224
Address at the Hungarian Club Dinner, New York City, Feb. 14, 1905 236
Message from the President of the United States, Transmitting a Protocol of an Agreement Between the United States and the Dominican Republic, Providing For the Collection and Disbursement by the United States of the Customs Revenues of the Dominican Republic, Signed on February 4, 1905 241
Address at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa., Feb. 22, 1905 261
Inaugural Address, March 4, 1905 269
Correspondence, March 6, 1905 - To the Senate 273
Address at the Meeting of the American Tract Society, at Grace Reformed Church, Washington, D. C., March 12, 1905 276
Address Before the National Congress of Mothers, Washington, D. C., March 13, 1905 282
Address at the Dinner of the Society of Friendly Sons of St. Patrick, Delmonico’s, New York City, March 17, 1905 292
Address at the Dinner of the Sons of the American Revolution, Hotel Astor, New York City, March 17, 1905 300
Address to the Graduates of the United States Naval Medical School, Washington, D. C., March 25, 1905 309
At Outdoor Meeting at Dallas, Tex., April 5, 1905 314
At the Banquet at Dallas, Tex., April 5, 1905 319
To the Legislature of Texas, Austin, Tex., April 6, 1905 324
Outside of Capitol Building, Austin, Tex., April 6, 1905 330
In Front of the Alamo, San Antonio, Tex., April 7, 1905 334
To the Congregation Assembled at the Blue Schoolhouse on Upper Divide Creek, Colo., Sunday, April 30, 1905 345
At the Banquet of the Chamber of Commerce and Board of Trade, Denver, Colo., May 9, 1905 350
[Illustration: (Image of Theodore Roosevelt seated, June 6th, 1905)]
Homeward Bound Edition
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS
_April 7, 1904, to May 9, 1905_
BY
THEODORE ROOSEVELT
[Illustration: (colophon)]
PUBLISHED WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR THROUGH SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
VOLUME III
NEW YORK
THE REVIEW OF REVIEWS COMPANY
MCMX
The Publishers desire to make clear to the readers that Ex-president Roosevelt retains no pecuniary interest in the sale of the volumes containing these speeches. He feels that the material contained in these addresses has been dedicated to the public, and that it is, therefore, not to be handled as copyrighted material from which Mr. Roosevelt should receive any pecuniary return.
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS
APRIL 7, 1904
TO
MAY 9, 1905
PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESSES AND STATE PAPERS
REMARKS AT THE DINNER OF THE PERIODICAL PUBLISHERS’ ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA. THE NEW WILLARD, WASHINGTON, D. C., APRIL 7, 1904
_Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen_:
It is always a pleasure to a man in public life to meet the real governing classes. I wish to bid you welcome to Washington this evening, and to say but one word of greeting to you, and that word shall take the form of a warning. I did not speak in jest when I alluded to you as representatives of the governing classes. I think that we of the United States can not keep too fresh in our minds the fact that the men ultimately responsible for the Government are not the representatives of the people, but the people themselves, and that therefore heavy is the responsibility that lies upon the people and above all upon those who do the most toward shaping the thought of the people. In the days of my youth I was a literary man myself. In reading a book recently, a series of essays, I was immensely struck by one thought developed in it. The writer, one of our greatest scholars, was speaking of the fact that freedom could not exist unless there went with it a thorough appreciation of responsibility, and he used a phrase somewhat like this—that among all peoples there must be restraint; if there is no restraint the result is inevitably anarchy. That means the negation of all government, and the negation of all government of course means the negation of popular government; and that therefore there must be restraint, and that therefore a free people had merely substituted self-restraint for external restraint; and the permanence of our freedom as a people, the permanence of our liberties, depends upon the way in which we show and exercise that self-restraint.
There must be much more than good laws to make a good people. The man whose morality is expressed simply in the non-infringement of the law is a pretty poor creature. Unless our average citizenship is based upon a good deal more than the mere observance of the laws on the statute books—that, of course, is the preliminary—that, of course, is the beginning—but unless it is based on more than that then our average citizenship can never produce the kind of government which it must and will produce. So far from liberty, from freedom, from responsible self-government, being things that come easily and to any peoples, they are peculiarly things that can come only to the highly developed peoples. Only peoples capable, not merely of mastering others, but of mastering themselves, can achieve real liberty, can achieve real self-government; and for that self-mastery, for the cultivation of the spirit of self-restraint which is but another side of the spirit of self-reliance, we must rely to no small degree upon those who furnish us much of the thought of the great bulk of our people who think most. Therefore, gentlemen, in greeting you here to-night I wish not merely to welcome you, but to say that I trust every man of you feels the weight of the responsibility that rests upon him. The man who writes, the man who month in and month out, week in and week out, day in and day out, furnishes the material which is to do its part in shaping the thoughts of our people is fundamentally the man who, more than any other, determines what kind of character, and therefore ultimately what kind of government, this people shall possess. I believe in the future of this people; I believe in the growth and greatness of this country, because I believe that fundamentally you and those like you approach your task in the proper spirit. It seems to me that because of the very fact that we are so confident in the greatness of our country and in our country’s future, we should beware of any undue levity, of any spirit of mere boastfulness, of that most irritating of all qualities, not the most noxious, but the most irritating of all qualities—the tendency to depreciate others and thereby exalt ourselves.
Courtesy among individuals is a good thing, but international courtesy is quite as good a thing. If there is any one quality to be deprecated in a public man and in a public writer alike, it is the using of language which without any corresponding gain to ourselves tends to produce irritation among nations with whom we ought to be on friendly terms. Nations are now brought much nearer together than they formerly were. Steam, electricity, the immense spread of the newspaper press in all countries, the way in which so much of what is written in any country is translated into the language of another country, all of these facts have tended to bring peoples closer together now. That ought to and I think in the future will tell predominantly for good; but it does not help us in the least to be brought closer together with other peoples if they merely find our unamiable traits more strongly marked than they thought. We can rest assured that no man ever thinks better of us because we point out his salient defects; and no nation is ever won to a kindlier feeling toward us if we adopt toward it a tone which we would resent if adopted toward us.
We have a very large field for warring against evil here at home. When we have made things all as they should be in Nation, State, and municipality here at home, then we can talk about reforming the rest of mankind; but meanwhile let us begin at home.
ADDRESS AT THE PRIZE DAY EXERCISES AT GROTON SCHOOL, GROTON, MASS., MAY 24, 1904
_Mr. Rector, and Boys, and Fellow-Parents_:
All I shall have to say to you to-day will be simply in the line of illustrating what the Rector has said, for it seems to me that he has preached just about the right gospel of life as we ought to learn it; and let me at the beginning thank the Rector for what I shall hope was a personal allusion to me, because it is the only time in my life that I have been even indirectly compared to Apollo. When the comparison was made I saw the Bishop look self-conscious, so I wish to put in my claim first.
I want to speak to you first of all as regards your duties as boys; and in the next place as regards your duties as men; and the two things hang together. The same qualities that make a decent boy make a decent man. They have different manifestations, but fundamentally they are the same. If a boy has not got pluck and honesty and common-sense he is a pretty poor creature; and he is a worse creature if he is a man and lacks any one of those three traits.
I was struck, Mr. Peabody, by what you said as to the attitude these boys should have in college. The boys from a school like this—from Groton, from St. Mark’s, from St. Paul’s, from any of these schools—if they are worth their salt, if they have real loyalty and not merely lip-loyalty to their schools, ought to go to Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, with the firm intention of so carrying themselves that Groton, St. Mark’s, St. Paul’s, and the other schools shall not be sneered at because of anything they do. You are not entitled, either in college or in after life, to an ounce of privilege because you have been at Groton—not an ounce; but we are entitled to hold you to an exceptional accountability because you have been at Groton. Because much has been given to you, therefore we have a right to expect much from you; and we have a right to expect that you shall begin to give that much just as soon as you leave school and go to college, so that you shall count when you are there.
I read the other day in a very bright college book a sentence that grated on me because of a sneer it contained at the “shoals of freshmen from church schools,” which implied that they did not so conduct themselves as to add weight for what was best in college life. I do not think such sneers are justified; but you are peculiarly liable to such sneers, and therefore you should be peculiarly careful to walk so as not to be suspected of deserving them. We have a right to expect that you will, from the outset, and without showing yourselves varieties of that most obnoxious of creatures, the prig, handle yourselves decently, so as to be a force for what is decent and right in college.
Another thing: I was glad to hear the Rector, in describing one pitfall that you are to avoid, use just exactly the right word when he asked you to be careful not to turn out snobs. Now, there are in our civic and social life very much worse creatures than snobs, but none more contemptible. (By the way—this is not speaking to the boys, but to the parents—I have had the good luck to have my boys go to the public schools before they came here.) If you have any stuff in you at all, and try to amount to anything in after life, you will not remain snobs even if you start as such. It will be taken out of you very soon and very roughly if you go into any real work. Go into politics—go to your district convention, and try to carry it on the snob basis and see how far you will get. The thing that will strike you in just about a week is that there are a whole lot of able people sliding around this planet. The fact that the individual opposed to you does not wear a cravat, and does wear a saw-edge collar, does not imply that you are going to carry the convention against him! You will soon find that it is not his clothes but his political sense and energy that control. You will find that if you expect to do anything there will be mighty little temptation to try to treat the men with whom you are working on any basis save the fundamental democratic basis of what they amount to, and what you can show you amount to as compared to them. So that if you go into life to do anything, it is perfectly useless for me to tell you to get rid of snobbery, because you will have to. It is just as true in every other field as in politics. Every man who works in philanthropy—and he can do nothing in philanthropy unless he combines a very earnest desire to accomplish what is decent with the determination to accomplish it in practical fashion (I shall speak of that later)—if he goes into philanthropy and tries to do something in a college settlement, tries to do his part in working to disentangle the tangled knot of our social and civic life, he will find just as soon as he gets interested in his work he won’t care and won’t know who the people are who are with him except as he judges them by their fruits. The interest that you take in him is, can a given man accomplish something? If he can not, then let him give place to the man who can.
You see, all I am doing is to amplify here and there the Rector’s speech. Take what was said about scholarship. I came here intending to speak to you along that same line, although in a slightly different way, approaching it from a slightly different aspect. I believe with all my heart in athletics, in sport, and have always done as much thereof as my limited capacity and my numerous duties would permit; but I believe in bodily vigor chiefly because I believe in the spirit that lies back of it. If a boy can not go into athletics because he is not physically able to, that does not count in the least against him. He may be just as much of a man in after life as if he could, because it is not physical address but the moral quality behind it which really counts. But if he has the physical ability and keeps out because he is afraid, because he is lazy, because he is a mollycoddle, then I haven’t any use for him. If he has not the right spirit, the spirit which makes him scorn self-indulgence, timidity and mere ease, that is if he has not the spirit which normally stands at the base of physical hardihood, physical prowess, then that boy does not amount to much, and he is not ordinarily going to amount to much in after life. Of course, there are people with special abilities so great as to outweigh even defects like timidity and laziness, but the man who makes the Republic what it is, if he has not courage, the capacity to show prowess, the desire for hardihood; if he has not the scorn of mere ease, the scorn of pain, the scorn of discomfort (all of them qualities that go to make a man’s worth on an eleven or a nine or an eight); if he has not something of that sort in him then the lack is so great that it must be amply atoned for, more than amply atoned for, in other ways, or his usefulness to the community will be small. So I believe heartily in physical prowess, in the sports that go to make physical prowess. I believe in them not only because of the amusement and pleasure they bring, but because I think they are useful. Yet I think you had a great deal better never go into them than to go into them with the idea that they are the chief end even of school or college; still more of life. There was an article in one of the “Atlantic” monthlies last year which all parents (even those of the most limited intellectual home development, Mr. Peabody!) should read, by Lawrence Lowell, on the careers in after life of those who have distinguished themselves as scholars and as athletes in college; and the showing for the athletes was not as good, either, as I had hoped or as I had expected that it would have been. I believe that to have been in athletics is an advantage to a man only if he realizes that even when he is in college it is not his chief end, and if he realizes that once out of college it can not be his end at all. It is a mighty good thing to be a halfback on a varsity eleven; but it is a mighty poor thing, when a man reaches the age of forty, only to be able to say that he was once halfback on an eleven. Do not lose the sense of proportion. Remember that in life, and above all in the very active, practical, workaday life on this continent, the man who wins out must be the man who works. He can not play all the time. He can not have play as his principal occupation and win out. Let him play; let him have as good a time as he can have. I have a pity that is akin to contempt for the man who does not have as good a time as he can out of life. But let him work. Let him count in the world. When he comes to the end of his life let him feel he has pulled his weight and a little more. A sound body is good; a sound mind is better; but a strong and clean character is better than either. In college it is not necessary to get into Phi Beta Kappa, though that is desirable; but it is necessary to work hard at your studies. It is necessary to have the habit of application, the habit of subordinating mere pleasure to serious duty, if you are going to do really good work once you are out of school and out of college. And while I would be very sorry to see those who are in control here in Groton lose that personal touch with their students which has made them again and again keep a poor scholar and thereby make in the end a good citizen; while I should be very sorry to see that policy reversed, still I am glad—I do not know that the boys will share my joy on this point—I am glad that the standard of scholarship is to be raised.