Part 25

Our complex industrial civilization has not only been productive of much benefit, but has also brought us face to face with many puzzling problems; problems that are puzzling, partly because there are men that are wicked, partly because there are good men who are foolish or short-sighted. There are many such to-day—the problems of labor and capital, the problems which we group together rather vaguely when we speak of the problems of the trusts, the problems affecting the farmers on the one hand, the railroads on the other. It would not be possible in any one place to deal with the particular shapes which these problems take at that time and in that place. And yet, there are certain general rules which can be laid down for dealing with them, and those rules are the immutable rules of justice, of sanity, of courage, of common-sense. Six months ago it fell to my lot to appoint a commission to investigate into and conclude about matters connected with the great and menacing strike in the anthracite coal fields of Pennsylvania. On that commission I appointed representatives of the church, of the bench, of the army, a representative of the capitalists of the region, and a representative of organized labor. They published a report which was not only of the utmost moment because of dealing with the great and vital problem with which they were appointed to deal, but also because in its conclusions it initiated certain general rules in so clear and masterful a fashion that I wish most earnestly it could receive the broadest circulation as a tract wherever there exists or threatens to exist trouble in any way akin to that with which those commissioners dealt.

If I might give a word of advice to Omaha, I should like to see your daily press publish in full the concluding portion of that report of the Anthracite Coal Strike Commission, signed by all the members thereof, by those in a special sense the champion of the wage-worker, and by those in a special sense identified with capital, organized or unorganized; because, men and women of Omaha, those people did not speak first as capitalist or as laborer, did not speak first as judge, as army man, as church man, but all of them signed that report as American citizens anxious to see right and justice prevail. No one quality will get us out of any difficulty. We need more than one; we need a good many. We need, as I said, the power first of each man’s honestly trying to look at the problem from his fellow’s standpoint. Capitalist and wage-worker alike should honestly endeavor each to look at any matter from the other’s standpoint, with a freedom on the one hand from the contemptible arrogance which looks down upon the man of less means, and on the other, from the no less contemptible envy, jealousy and rancor, which hates another because he is better off. Each quality is the supplement of the other, and in point of baseness there is not the weight of a finger to choose between them. Look at the report signed by those men; look at it in the spirit in which they wrote it, and if you can only make yourselves, make this community, approach the problems of to-day in the spirit that those men, your fellows, showed in approaching the problem of yesterday, your problems will be solved.

Any man who tries to excite class hatred, sectional hate, hate of creeds, any kind of hatred in our community, though he may affect to do it in the interest of the class he is addressing, is in the long run with absolute certainty that class’s own worst enemy. In the long run, and as a whole, we are going to go up or go down together. Of course there will be individual exceptions, small, local exceptions, exceptions in kind, exceptions in place; but as a whole, if the commonwealth prospers some measure of prosperity comes to all of us. If it is not prosperous, then the adversity, though it may fall unequally upon us, will weigh more or less upon all. It lies with us ourselves to determine our own fate. I can not too often say that the wisest law, the best administration of the law, can do naught more than give us a fair field in which to work out that fate aright. If as individuals, or as a community, we mar our future by our own folly, let us remember that it is upon ourselves that the responsibility must rest.

FROM ADDRESS AT QUINCY, ILL., APRIL 29, 1903

_Mr. Chairman and my Fellow-Citizens_:

There is one matter which I think presses for national legislative attention—the matter of the currency. From your sister State of Iowa I have a Secretary of the Treasury, who, as he showed last fall, can be counted on to act with courage and with wisdom whenever the need arises, and to use fearlessly and coolly whatever the law now allows him to use. Our currency laws have been recently improved by specific declarations intended to secure permanency of values; but this does not imply that these laws may not be further improved and strengthened. It is wellnigh universally admitted, certainly in any business community such as this, that our currency system is wanting in elasticity; that is, the volume does not respond to the varying needs of the country as a whole, nor to the varying needs of the different localities as well as of different times. Our people scarcely need to be reminded that grain-raising communities require a larger volume of currency at harvest time than during the summer months; and the same principle in greater or less extent applies to every community. Our currency laws need such modification as will ensure definitely the parity of every dollar coined or issued by the government, and such expansion or contraction of the currency as will promptly and automatically respond to the varying needs of commerce. Permanent increase would be dangerous, permanent contraction ruinous, but the needed elasticity must be brought about by provisions which will permit both contraction and expansion as the varying needs of the several communities and business interests at different times and in different localities require.

AT ODEON HALL, ST. LOUIS, MO., BEFORE THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL GOOD ROADS CONVENTION, APRIL 29, 1903

_Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen_:

When we wish to use descriptive terms fit to characterize great empires and the men who made those empires great, invariably one of the terms used is to signify that that empire built good roads. When we speak of the Romans, we speak of them as rulers, as conquerors, as administrators, as road builders. There were empires that rose over night and fell over night, empires whose influence was absolutely evanescent, which have passed away without leaving a trace of their former existence; but wherever the Roman established his rule the traces of that rule remain deep to-day, stamped on the language and customs of the people, or stamped in tangible form upon the soil itself. And so passing through Britain fifteen centuries and over after the dominion of Rome passed away, the Roman roads as features still remain; going through Italy, where power after power has risen, and flourished, and vanished since the days when the temporal dominion of the Roman emperors transferred its seat from Rome to Byzantium—going through Italy after the Lombard, the Goth, the Byzantine, and all the people of the Middle Ages that have ruled that country—it is the imperishable Roman road that reappears.

The faculty, the art, the habit of road building marks in a nation those solid, stable qualities which tell for permanent greatness. Merely from the standpoint of historic analogy we should have a right to ask that this people which has tamed a continent, which has built up a country with a continent for its base, which boasts itself, with truth, as the mightiest republic that the world has ever seen, which I firmly believe will in the century now opening rise to a position of headship and leadership such as no other nation has ever yet attained—merely from historic analogy, I say, we should have a right to demand that such a nation build good roads. Much more have we the right to demand it from the practical standpoint. The great difference between the semi-barbarism of the Middle Ages and the civilization which succeeded it was the difference between poor and good means of communication. And we to whom space is less of an obstacle than ever it was in the history of any other nation, we who have spanned a continent, who have thrust our border westward in the course of a century and a quarter until it has gone from the Atlantic to the Alleghanies, from the Alleghanies down into the valley of the Mississippi, across the great plains, over the Rockies to where the Golden Gate lets through the long heaving waters of the Pacific, and finally to Alaska, to the Arctic regions, to the tropic islands of the sea—we who take so little account of mere space must see to it that the best means of nullifying the existence of space are at our command.

Of course, during the last century there has been an altogether phenomenal growth of one kind of road wholly unknown to the people of an earlier period—the iron road. The railroad is, of course, something purely modern. A great many excellent people have proceeded upon the assumption that somehow or other having good railways should be a substitute for having good highways, good ordinary roads. A more untenable position can not be imagined. What the railway does is to develop the country; and of course its development implies that the developed country will need more and better roads.

A few years ago it was a matter of humiliation that there should be so little attention paid to our roads; that there should be a willingness not merely to refrain from making good roads, but to let the roads that were in existence become worse. I can not too heartily congratulate our people upon the existence of a body such as this, ramifying into every section of the country, having its connections in every State of the country, and bent upon that eminently proper work of making the conditions of life easier and better for the people whom of all others we can least afford to see grow discontented with their lot in life—the people who live in the country districts. The extraordinary, the wholly unheard-of, rate of our industrial development during the past seventy-five years, together with the good sides has had some evil sides. It is a fine thing to see our cities built up, but not at the expense of the country districts. The healthy thing to see is the building up of both the country and city go hand in hand. But we can not expect the ablest, the most eager, the most ambitious young men to stay in the country, to stay on the farm, unless they have certain advantages. If the farm life is a life of isolation, a life in which it is a matter of great and real difficulty for one man to communicate with his neighbor, you can rest assured that there will be a tendency to leave it on the part of those very people whom we should most wish to see stay in it. It is a good thing to encourage in every way any tendency which will tend to check an unhealthy flow from the country to the city. There are several such tendencies in evidence at present. The growth of electricity as a means of transportation tends to a certain degree to exercise a centrifugal force to offset the centripetal force of steam. Exactly as steam and electricity have tended to gather men in masses, so now electricity, as applied to the purposes which steam has so long claimed as exclusively its own, tends again to scatter out the masses. The trolley lines that go out into the country are doing a great deal to render it more possible to live in the country and yet not to lose wholly the advantages of the town. The telephone is not to be minimized as an instrument with a tendency in the same direction; and rural free delivery is playing its part along the same lines. But no one thing can do more to offset the tendency toward an unhealthy growth from the country into the city than the making and keeping of good roads. They are needed for the sake of their effect upon the industrial conditions of the country districts; and I am almost tempted to say they are needed for the sake of social conditions in the country districts. If winter means to the average farmer the existence of a long line of liquid morasses through which he is to move his goods if bent on business, or to wade and swim if bent on pleasure; if winter means that after an ordinary rain the farmer boy or girl can not use his or her bicycle; if a little heavy weather means a stoppage of all communication not only with industrial centres but with the neighbors, you must expect that there will be a great many young people of both sexes who will not find farm life attractive. It is for this reason that I feel the work you are doing is so pre-eminently one in the interest of the Nation as a whole. I congratulate you upon the fact that you are doing it. In our American life it would be hard to overestimate the amount of good that has been accomplished by associations of individuals who have gathered together to work for a common object which was to be of benefit to the community as a whole; and among all the excellent objects for which men and women combine to work to-day, there are few indeed which have a better right to command the energies of those engaged in the movement, and the hearty sympathy and support of those outside, than this movement in which you are engaged.

AT ST. LOUIS UNIVERSITY, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI, APRIL 29, 1903

_Cardinal Gibbons, Ladies and Gentlemen_:

It is indeed a pleasure to be received here as a guest of the first and oldest university founded in our country west of the Mississippi River in the Louisiana Purchase. I know your work. I have myself been much in the West, and I have come across the traces of your work, both among the communities of our own people and among the Indian tribes.

I thank you personally for your kind allusions to me, and would hold myself recreant to the principles upon which this government was founded did I not strive as Chief Executive to do fair and equal justice to all men without regard to the way in which any man chooses to worship his Maker.

AT THE DEDICATION CEREMONIES OF THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE EXPOSITION, ST. LOUIS, APRIL 30, 1903

_Mr. President, Ladies, and Gentlemen_:

At the outset of my address let me recall to the minds of my hearers that the soil upon which we stand, before it was ours, was successively the possession of two mighty empires, Spain and France, whose sons made a deathless record of heroism in the early annals of the New World. No history of the Western country can be written without paying heed to the wonderful part played therein in the early days by the soldiers, missionaries, explorers, and traders, who did their work for the honor of the proud banners of France and Castile. While the settlers of English-speaking stock, and those of Dutch, German, and Scandinavian origin who were associated with them, were still clinging close to the Eastern seaboard, the pioneers of Spain and of France had penetrated deep into the hitherto unknown wilderness of the West, had wandered far and wide within the boundaries of what is now our mighty country. The very cities themselves—St. Louis, New Orleans, Santa Fe—bear witness by their titles to the nationalities of their founders. It was not until the Revolution had begun that the English-speaking settlers pushed west across the Alleghanies, and not until a century ago that they entered in to possess the land upon which we now stand.

We have met here to-day to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the event which more than any other, after the foundation of the Government and always excepting its preservation, determined the character of our national life—determined that we should be a great expanding Nation instead of relatively a small and stationary one.

Of course it was not with the Louisiana Purchase that our career of expansion began. In the middle of the Revolutionary War the Illinois region, including the present States of Illinois and Indiana, was added to our domain by force of arms, as a sequel to the adventurous expedition of George Rogers Clark and his frontier riflemen. Later the treaties of Jay and Pinckney materially extended our real boundaries to the West. But none of these events was of so striking a character as to fix the popular imagination. The old thirteen colonies had always claimed that their rights stretched westward to the Mississippi, and vague and unreal though these claims were until made good by conquest, settlement, and diplomacy, they still served to give the impression that the earliest westward movements of our people were little more than the filling in of already existing national boundaries.

But there could be no illusion about the acquisition of the vast territory beyond the Mississippi, stretching westward to the Pacific, which in that day was known as Louisiana. This immense region was admittedly the territory of a foreign power, of a European kingdom. None of our people had ever laid claim to a foot of it. Its acquisition could in no sense be treated as rounding out any existing claims. When we acquired it we made evident once for all that consciously and of set purpose we had embarked on a career of expansion, that we had taken our place among those daring and hardy nations who risk much with the hope and desire of winning high position among the great powers of the earth. As is so often the case in nature, the law of development of a living organism showed itself in its actual workings to be wiser than the wisdom of the wisest.

This work of expansion was by far the greatest work of our people during the years that intervened between the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War. There were other questions of real moment and importance, and there were many which at the time seemed such to those engaged in answering them; but the greatest feat of our forefathers of those generations was the deed of the men who, with pack train or wagon train, on horseback, on foot, or by boat, pushed the frontier ever westward across the continent.

Never before had the world seen the kind of national expansion which gave our people all that part of the American continent lying west of the thirteen original States; the greatest landmark in which was the Louisiana Purchase. Our triumph in this process of expansion was indissolubly bound up with the success of our peculiar kind of federal government; and this success has been so complete that because of its very completeness we now sometimes fail to appreciate not only the all-importance but the tremendous difficulty of the problem with which our Nation was originally faced.

When our forefathers joined to call into being this Nation, they undertook a task for which there was but little encouraging precedent. The development of civilization from the earliest period seemed to show the truth of two propositions: In the first place, it had always proved exceedingly difficult to secure both freedom and strength in any government; and in the second place, it had always proved wellnigh impossible for a nation to expand without either breaking up or becoming a centralized tyranny. With the success of our effort to combine a strong and efficient national union, able to put down disorder at home and to maintain our honor and interest abroad, I have not now to deal. This success was signal and all-important, but it was by no means unprecedented in the same sense that our type of expansion was unprecedented. The history of Rome and of Greece illustrates very well the two types of expansion which had taken place in ancient time and which had been universally accepted as the only possible types up to the period when as a Nation we ourselves began to take possession of this continent. The Grecian States performed remarkable feats of colonization, but each colony as soon as created became entirely independent of the mother State, and in after years was almost as apt to prove its enemy as its friend. Local self-government, local independence, was secured, but only by the absolute sacrifice of anything resembling national unity. In consequence, the Greek world, for all its wonderful brilliancy and the extraordinary artistic, literary, and philosophical development which has made all mankind its debtors for the ages, was yet wholly unable to withstand a formidable foreign foe, save spasmodically. As soon as powerful, permanent empires arose on its outskirts, the Greek states in the neighborhood of such empires fell under their sway. National power and greatness were completely sacrificed to local liberty.

With Rome the exact opposite occurred. The imperial city rose to absolute dominion over all the peoples of Italy and then expanded her rule over the entire civilized world by a process which kept the nation strong and united, but gave no room whatever for local liberty and self-government. All other cities and countries were subject to Rome. In consequence this great and masterful race of warriors, rulers, road-builders, and administrators stamped their indelible impress upon all the after life of our race, and yet let an over-centralization eat out the vitals of their empire until it became an empty shell; so that when the barbarians came they destroyed only what had already become worthless to the world.

The underlying viciousness of each type of expansion was plain enough and the remedy now seems simple enough. But when the fathers of the Republic first formulated the Constitution under which we live this remedy was untried and no one could foretell how it would work. They themselves began the experiment almost immediately by adding new States to the original thirteen. Excellent people in the East viewed this initial expansion of the country with great alarm. Exactly as during the colonial period many good people in the mother-country thought it highly important that settlers should be kept out of the Ohio Valley in the interest of the fur companies, so after we had become a Nation many good people on the Atlantic Coast felt grave apprehension lest they might somehow be hurt by the westward growth of the Nation. These good people shook their heads over the formation of States in the fertile Ohio Valley which now forms part of the heart of our Nation; and they declared that the destruction of the Republic had been accomplished when through the Louisiana Purchase we acquired nearly half of what is now that same Republic’s present territory. Nor was their feeling unnatural. Only the adventurous and the far-seeing can be expected heartily to welcome the process of expansion, for the nation that expands is a nation which is entering upon a great career, and with greatness there must of necessity come perils which daunt all save the most stout-hearted.