 Chapter 15 Part 1 of Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Stephen Carafit. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. Chapter 15 The Peace of Righteousness. Part 1 There can be no nobler cause for which to work than the peace of righteousness. And high honor is due those serene and lofty souls who with wisdom and courage, with high idealism tempered by sane-facing of the actual facts of life, have striven to bring nearer the day when arms strife between nation and nation, between class and class, between man and man, shall end throughout the world. Because all this is true, it is also true that there are no men more ennoble or more foolish, no men whose actions are fraught with greater possibility of mischief to their country and to mankind than those who exalt unrighteous peace as better than righteous war. The men who have stood highest in our history, as in the history of all countries, are those who scorned in justice, who were incapable of oppressing the weak or of permitting their country with their consent to oppress the weak, but who did not hesitate to draw the sword when to leave it undrawn meant inability to arrest triumphant wrong. All this is so obvious that it ought not be necessary to repeat it. Yet every man in active affairs who also reads about the past grows by bitter experience to realize that there are plenty of men not only among those who mean ill, but among those who mean well, who are ready enough to praise what was done in the past and yet are incapable of profiting by it when faced by the needs of the present. During our generations, this seems to have been peculiarly the case among the men who have become obsessed with the idea of obtaining universal peace by some cheap, patent panacea. There has been a real and substantial growth in the feeling for international responsibility and justice among the great civilized nations during the past three score or four score years. There has been a real growth of recognition of the fact that moral turpitude is involved in the wrong-going of one nation by another, and that in most cases war is an evil method of settling international difficulties. But as yet, there has been only a rudimentary beginning of the development of international tribunals of justice, and there has been no development at all of any international police power. Now, as I have already said, the whole fabric of municipal law, of law within each nation, rests ultimately upon the judge and the policeman, and the complete absence of the policeman and the most complete absence of the judge in international affairs prevents there being as yet any real homology between municipal and international law. Moreover, the questions which sometimes involve nations in war are far more difficult and complex than any questions that affect merely individuals. Almost every great nation has inherited certain questions, either with other nations or with sections of its own people which it is quite impossible in the present state of civilization to decide as matters between private individuals can be decided. During the last century, at least half of the wars that have been fought have been civil and not foreign wars. There are big and powerful nations which habitually commit either upon other nations or upon sections of their own people, wrong so outrageous as to justify even the most peaceful persons in going to war. There are also weak nations so utterly incompetent, either to protect the rights of foreigners against their own citizens, or to protect their own citizens against foreigners, that it becomes a matter of sheer duty for some outside power to interfere in connection with them. As yet in neither case is there any efficient method of getting international action, and if joint action by several powers is secured, the result is usually considerably worse than if only one power interfered. The worst infamies of modern times, such affairs as the massacres of the Armenians by the Turks, for instance, have been perpetuated in a time of nominally profound international peace, when there has been a concert of big powers to prevent the breaking of this peace, although only by breaking it could the outrages be stopped. Be it remembered that the peoples who suffered by these hideous massacres, who saw their women violated and their children tortured, were actually enjoying the benefits of quote disarmament, unquote. Otherwise, they would not have been massacred, for if the Jews in Russia and the Armenians in Turkey had been armed, and had been efficient in the use of their arms, no mob would have meddled with them. Yet, amiable but fatuous persons, with all these facts before their eyes, pass resolutions demanding universal arbitration for everything, and the disarmament of free civilized powers and their abandonment of their armed forces, or else they write well-meaning, solemn little books, or pamphlets or editorials, and articles in magazines or newspapers, to show that it is quote an illusion, unquote, to believe that war ever pays, because it is expensive. This is precisely like arguing that we should disband the police, and devote our sole attention to pursuing criminals that it is quote an illusion, unquote, to suppose that burglary, highway robbery, and wide slavery are profitable. It is almost useless to attempt to argue with these well-intentioned persons, because they are suffering under an obsession, and are not open to reason. They go wrong at the outset, for they lay all the emphasis on peace, and none at all on righteousness. They are not all of them physically timid men, but they are usually men of soft life, and they rarely possess a high sense of honor or keen patriotism. They rarely try to prevent their fellow countrymen from insulting or wronging the people of other nations, but they always ardently advocate that we, in our turn, shall tamely submit to wrong and insult from other nations. As Americans, their folly is peculiarly scandalous, because if the principles they now uphold are right, it means that it would have been better that Americans should never have achieved their independence, and better that, in 1861, they should have peacefully submitted to seeing their country split into half a dozen jangling confederacies, and slavery made perpetual. If unwilling to learn from their own history, let those who think that it is quote an illusion, unquote, to believe that a war never benefits a nation, look at the difference between China and Japan. China has neither a fleet nor an efficient army. It is a huge civilized empire, one of the most populous on the globe, and it has been the helpless prey of outsiders because it does not possess the power to fight. Japan stands on a footing of equality with European and American nations because it does possess this power. China now sees Japan, Russia, Germany, England and France in possession of fragments of her empire, and has twice within the lifetime of the present generation seen her capital in the hands of allied invaders, because she, in very fact, realizes the ideals of the persons who wish the United States to disarm, and then trusts that our helplessness will secure us a contemptuous immunity from attack by outside nations. The chief trouble comes from the entire inability of these worthy people to understand that they are demanding things that are mutually incompatible when they demand peace at any price and also justice and righteousness. I remember one representative of their number, who used to write little sonnets on behalf of the Maudi and the Sudanese, these sonnets setting forth the need that the Sudan should be both independent and peaceful. As a matter of fact, the Sudan valued independence only because it desired to war against all Christians and to carry out an unlimited slave trade. It was quote, independent, unquote, under the Maudi for a dozen years, and during those dozen years, the bigotry, tyranny, and cruel religious intolerance were such as flourished in the seventh century. And in spite of systematic slave raids, the population decreased by nearly two-thirds, and practically all the children died. Peace came, well-being came, freedom from rape and murder and torture and highway robbery, and every brutal gratification of lust and greed came only when the Sudan lost its independence and passed under English rule. Yet, this well-meaning little sonneteer sincerely felt that his verses were issued in the cause of humanity. Looking back from the vantage point of a score of years, probably everyone will agree that he was an absurd person. But he was not one whit more absurd than most of the more prominent persons who advocate disarmament by the United States. The cessation of upbuilding the Navy and the promise to agree to arbitrate all matters, including those affecting our national interests and honor with all foreign nations. These persons would do no harm if they affected only themselves. Many of them are, in the ordinary relations of life, good citizens. They are exactly like the other good citizens who believe that enforced universal vegetarianism or anti-vaccination is the panacea for all ills. But in their particular case they are able to do harm because they affect our relations with foreign powers, so that other men pay the debt which they themselves have really incurred. It is the foolish piece at any price persons who try to persuade our people to make unwise and improper treaties or to stop building up the Navy. But if trouble comes and the treaties are repudiated, or there is a demand for armed intervention, it is not these people who will pay anything. They will stay at home in safety and leave brave men to pay in blood and honest men to pay in shame for their folly. The trouble is that our policy is apt to go in zigzags because different sections of our people exercise at different times unequal pressure on our government. One class of our citizens clamors for treaties impossible of fulfillment and improper to fulfill. Another class has no objection to the passage of these treaties so long as there is no concrete case to which they apply, but instantly oppose a veto on their application when any concrete case does actually arise. One of our cardinal doctrines is freedom of speech, which means freedom of speech about foreigners as well as about ourselves. And insomuch as we exercise this right with complete absence of restraint, we cannot expect other nations to hold us harmless unless in the last resort we are able to make our own words good by our deeds. One class of our citizens indulges in gushing promises to do everything for foreigners. Another class, offensively and improperly, reviles them, and it is hard to say which class more thoroughly misrepresents the sober, self-respecting judgment of the American people as a whole. The only safe rule is to promise little and faithfully to keep every promise, to speak softly and carry a big stick. A prime need for our nation, as of course for every other nation, is to make up its mind definitely what it wishes, and not to try to pursue paths of conduct incompatible with the other. If this nation is content to be the China of the new world, then and only then can it afford to do away with the navy and the army. If it is content to abandon Hawaii and the Panama Canal, to cease to talk of the Monroe Doctrine and to admit the right of any European or Asiatic power to dictate what immigrants shall be sent to and received in America, and whether or not they shall be allowed to become citizens and hold land, why of course, if America is content to have nothing to say on any of these matters and to keep silent in the presence of armed outsiders, then it can abandon its navy and agree to arbitrate all questions of all kinds with every foreign power. In such event it can afford to pass its spare time in one continuous round of universal peace celebrations, and of smug self-satisfaction in having earned the derision of all the virile peoples of mankind. Those who advocate such a policy do not occupy a lofty position, but at least their position is understandable. It is entirely inexcusable, however, to try to combine the unready hand with the unbridled tongue. It is folly to permit freedom of speech about foreigners as well as ourselves, and the peace at any price persons are much too feeble of folk to try to interfere with freedom of speech and yet try to shirk the consequences of freedom of speech. It is folly to try to abolish our navy, and at the same time to insist that we have a right to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, that we have the right to control the Panama Canal which we ourselves dug, that we have a right to retain Hawaii and prevent nations from taking Cuba, and a right to determine what immigrants, Asiatic or European, shall come to our shores, and the terms on which they shall be naturalized, and shall hold land and exercise other privileges. We are a rich people, and an unmilitary people. In international affairs we are a short-sighted people. But I know, my countrymen, down at bottom, their temper is such that they will not permanently tolerate injustice done to them, and in the long run they will no more permit affronts to their national honor than injuries to their national interests. Such being the case, they will do well to remember that the surest of all ways to invite disaster is to be opulent, aggressive, and unarmed. Throughout the seven and a half years that I was president, I pursued without faltering one consistent foreign policy, a policy of genuine international goodwill, and of consideration for the rights of others, and at the same time of steady preparedness. The weakest nations knew that they, no less than the strongest, were safe from insolent and injury at our hands, and the strong and the weak alike also knew that we possessed both the will and the ability to guard ourselves from wrong or insult at the hands of anyone. It was under my administration that the Hague court was saved from becoming an empty farce. It had been established by joint international agreement, but no power had been willing to resort to it. Those establishing it had grown to realize that it was in danger of becoming a mere paper court, so that it would never really come into being at all. Monsieur de Estronelle's deconstant had been especially alive to this danger. By correspondence and in personal interviews, he impressed upon me the need not only of making advances by actually applying arbitration, not merely promising by treaty to apply it, to the questions that were up for settlement, but of using the Hague Tribunal for this purpose. I cordially sympathize with these views. On the recommendation of John Hay, I succeeded in getting an agreement with Mexico to lay a matter and dispute between the two republics before the Hague court. This was the first case ever brought before the Hague court. It was followed by numerous others, and it definitely established that court as the great international peace tribunal. By mutual agreement with Great Britain, through the decision of a joint commission, of which the American members were Senators Lodge and Turner and Secretary Root, we were able peacefully to settle the Alaska boundary question, the only question remaining between ourselves and the British Empire, which it was not possible to settle by friendly arbitration. This therefore represented the removal of the last obstacle to absolute agreement between the two peoples. We were of substantial service in bringing to a satisfactory conclusion the negotiations at Algeserys concerning Morocco. We concluded with Great Britain, and with most of the other great nations, arbitration treaties specifically agreeing to arbitrate all matters, and especially the interpretation of treaties, save only as regards questions affecting territorial integrity, national honor, and vital national interests. We made with Great Britain a treaty guaranteeing the free use of the Panama Canal on equal terms with the ships of all nations, while reserving to ourselves the right to police and fortify the canal, and therefore to control it in the time of war. Under this treaty we are in honor bound to arbitrate the question of canal tolls for coast-wise traffic between the western and eastern coasts of the United States. I believe that the American position as regards this matter is right. I also believe that under the arbitration treaty, we are in honor bound to submit the matter to arbitration in view of Great Britain's contention, although I hold it to be an unwise contention that our position is unsound. I empathetically disbelieve in making universal arbitration treaties, which neither the makers nor anyone else would for a moment dream of keeping. I no less emphatically insist that it is our duty to keep the limited and sensible arbitration treaties which we have already made. The importance of a promise lies not in making it, but in keeping it. And the poorest of all positions for a nation to occupy in such a matter is readiness to make impossible promises at the same time that there is a failure to keep promises which have been made, which can be kept, and which it is discredible to break. During the early part of the year 1905, the strain on the civilized world caused by the Russo-Japanese War became serious. The losses of life and of treasure were frightful. From all the sources of information at hand, I grew most strongly to believe that a further continuation of the struggle would be a very bad thing for Japan, and an even worse thing for Russia. Japan was already suffering terribly from the drain upon her men, and especially upon her resources, and had nothing further to gain from the continuance of the struggle. Its continuance to her met more loss than gain, even if she were victorious. Russia, in spite of her gigantic strength was, in my judgment, apt to lose even more than she had already lost, if the struggle continued. I deemed it probable that she would no more be able successfully to defend eastern Siberia and northern Manchuria than she had been able to defend southern Manchuria and Korea. If the war went on, I thought it on the whole, likely that Russia would be driven west of Lake Baikal. But it was very far from certain. There is no certainty in such a war. Japan might have met defeat, and defeat to her would have spelt overwhelming disaster. And even if she had continued to win, what she thus won would have been of no value to her, and the cost in blood and money would have left her drained white. I believed, therefore, that the time had come when it was greatly to the interest of both combatants to have peace, and when, therefore, it was possible to get both to agree to peace. I first satisfied myself that each side wished me to act. But that, naturally and properly, each side was exceedingly anxious that the others should not believe that the action was taken on its initiative. I then sent an identical note to the two powers proposing that they should meet through the representatives to see if peace could not be made directly between them, and offered to act as an intermediary in bringing about such a meeting, but not for any other purpose. Each ascended to my proposal in principle. There was difficulty in getting them to agree on a common meeting place, but each finally abandoned its original contention in the matter, and the representatives of the two nations finally met at Portsmouth in New Hampshire. I previously received the two delegations at Oyster Bay on the USS Mayflower, which, together with another naval vessel, I put at their disposal on behalf of the United States government to take them from Oyster Bay to Portsmouth. As is customary, but both unwise and undesirable in such cases, each side advanced claims that the other could not grant. The chief difficulty came because of Japan's demand for a money indemnity. I felt that it would be better for Russia to pay some indemnity than to go on with the war, for there was little chance in my judgment of the war turning out favorably for Russia, and the revolutionary movement already underway bade fair to overthrow the negotiations entirely. I advised the Russian government to this effect, at the same time urging them to abandon their pretensions on certain other points, notably concerning the southern half of the Sagalian which the Japanese had taken. I also, however, and equally strongly advised the Japanese that in my judgment it would have been the gravest mistake on their part to insist on continuing the war for the sake of a money indemnity. And the longer the war continued, the less able she would be to pay. I pointed out that there was no possible analogy between their case and that of Germany in the war with France, which they were fond of quoting. The Germans held Paris in half of France, and gave up much territory in lieu of the indemnity, whereas the Japanese were still many thousands miles from Moscow, and had no territory whatever which they wished to give up. I also pointed out that in my judgment, whereas the Japanese had enjoyed the sympathy of most of the civilized powers at the outset of and during the continuance of the war, they would forfeit it if they turned the war into one merely for getting money. And moreover, they would most certainly fail to get the money and would simply find themselves at the end of a year, even if things prospered with them, in possession of territory they did not want, having spent enormous additional sums of money and lost enormous additional numbers of men, and yet without a penny of remuneration. The Treaty of Peace was finally signed. As is inevitable under such circumstances, each side felt that it ought to have got better terms, and when the danger was well past, each side felt that it had been overreached by the other, and that if the war had gone on it would have gotten more than it actually did get. The Japanese government had been wise throughout, except in the matter of announcing that it would insist on a money indemnity. Neither in national nor in private affairs is it ordinarily advisable to make a bluff which cannot be put through personally. I never believe in doing it under any circumstances. The Japanese people had been misled by this bluff of their government, and the unwisdom of the government's action in the matter was shown by the great resentment the treaty aroused in Japan, although it was so beneficial to Japan. There were various mob outbreaks, especially in the Japanese cities. The police were roughly handled, and several Christian churches were burned, as reported to me by the American minister. In both Russia and Japan, I believe that the net result as regards myself was a feeling of injury, and of dislike of me among the people at large. I had expected this. I regarded it as entirely neutral, and I did not resent it in the least. The governments of both nations behaved towards me not only with correct and entire propriety, but with much courtesy and the fullest acknowledgement of the good effect of what I had done, and in Japan at least, I believe that the leading man sincerely felt I had been their friend. I had certainly tried my best to be the friend not only of the Japanese people, but of the Russian people, and I believe that what I did was for the best interests of both and of the world at large. During the course of the negotiations, I tried to enlist the aid of the governments of one nation which was friendly to Russia, and of another nation which was friendly to Japan, and helping to bring about peace. I got no aid from either. I did, however, receive aid from the Emperor of Germany. His ambassador at St. Petersburg was the one ambassador who helped the American ambassador, Mr. Meyer, at delicate and doubtful points of the negotiations. Mr. Meyer, who was with the exception of Mr. White, the most useful diplomat in the American service, rendered literally invaluable aid by insisting upon himself, seeing the Tsar, at critical periods of the transaction, when it was no longer possible for me to act successfully through the representatives of the Tsar, who were often at cross purposes with one another. As a result of the Portsmouth peace, I was given the Nobel Peace Prize. This consisted of a medal, which I kept, and a sum of $40,000, which I turned over as a foundation of industrial peace to a board of trustees which included Oscar Strauss, Seth Lowe, and John Mitchell. In the present state of the world's development, industrial peace is even more essential than international peace, and it was fitting and appropriate to devote the peace prize to such a purpose. In 1910, while in Europe, one of my most pleasant experiences was my visit to Norway, where I addressed the Nobel Committee, and set forth and full the principles upon which I had acted, not only in this particular case, but throughout my administration. I received another gift which I deeply appreciated, an original copy of Sully's Memoirs of Henry Legrand. Sent me with the following inscription. I translated roughly. Paris, January 1906. The undersigned members of the French Parliamentary Group of International Arbitration and Consolation have decided to tender President Roosevelt, a token of their high esteem and their sympathetic recognition of the persistent and decisive initiative he has taken towards gradually substituting friendly and judicial for violent methods in case of conflict between nations. They believe that the action of President Roosevelt, which has realized the most generous hopes to be found in history, should be classified as a continuance of similar illustrious attempts of former times. Notably, the project for International Concorde, known under the name of the great design of Henry IV, and the memoirs of his Prime Minister, the Duke de Sully. In consequence, they have sought out a copy of the first edition of these memoirs, and they take pleasure in offering it to him with the request that he will keep it among his family papers. The signatures include those of Emily Loubet, A. Carnot, D. Estronales, D. Constant, A. Stride-Briand, Sully-Prote-Home, John Llorez, A. Falierez, R. Poincaré, and two or three hundred others. Of course, what I had done in connection with the Portsmouth piece was misunderstood by some good and sincere people. Just as after the settlement of the coal strike, there were persons who thereupon thought that it was in my power and was in my duty to settle all other strikes. So after the peace of Portsmouth, there were other persons, not only Americans, by the way, who thought it my duty for width to make myself a kind of international, meddlesome matty, and interfere for peace and justice promiscuously over the world. Others, with a delightful non-sequitur, jumped to the conclusion that in so much as I had helped to bring about the beneficent and necessary peace, I must of necessity have changed my mind about war being ever necessary. A couple of days after peace was concluded, I wrote to a friend, quote, Don't you be misled by the fact that just at the moment men are speaking well of me? They will speak ill soon enough. As Loeb remarked to me today, sometime soon, I shall have to spank some little international brigand, and then all the well-meaning idiots will turn and shriek that this is inconsistent with what I did at the peace conference, whereas in reality it will be exactly in line with it, end quote. To one of my political opponents, Mr. Shirts, who wrote me congratulating me upon the outcome at Portsmouth and suggesting that the time was opportune for a move towards disarmament, I answered in a letter, setting forth views which I thought sound then and think sound now. The letter read as follows. Oyster Bay, New York, September 8, 1905. My dear Mr. Shirts, I thank you for your congratulations. As to what you say about disarmament, which I suppose is the rough equivalent of, quote, the gradual diminution of the oppressive burdens opposed upon the world by armed peace, unquote, I am not clear either as to what can be done or what ought to be done. If I had been known as one of the conventional type of peace advocates, I could have done nothing whatever in bringing about peace now. I would be powerless in the future to accomplish anything, and I would not have been able to help counter the boons upon Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Panama brought about by our action therein. If the Japanese had not armed during the last 20 years, this would indeed be a sorrowful century for Japan. If this country had not fought the Spanish war, if we had failed to take the action we did about Panama, all mankind would have been the loser. While the Turks were butchering the Armenians, the European powers kept the peace and thereby added a burden of infamy to the 19th century. For in keeping that peace, a greater number of lives were lost than in any European war since the days of Napoleon, and these lives were those of women and children as well as of men. While the moral degradation, the brutality inflicted and endured, the aggregate of hideous wrong done surpassed that of any war which we have record in modern times. Until people get it firmly fixed in their minds that peace is valuable chiefly as a means to righteousness, and that it can only be considered as an end when it also coincides with righteousness, we can do only a limited amount to advance its coming on this earth. There is of course no analogy at present between international law and private or municipal law, because there is no sanction of force for the former while there is for the latter. Inside our own nation, the law abiding man does not have to arm himself against the lawless, simply because there is some armed force, the police, the sheriff's posse, the national guard, the regulars, which can be called out to enforce the laws. At present there is no similar international force to call on, and I do not as yet see how it could at present be created. Hitherto, peace has often come only because some strong and on the whole just power has by armed force or the threat of armed force put a stop to disorder. In a very interesting French book the other day, I was reading how the Mediterranean was freed from pirates only by the Pax Britannica, established by England's naval force. The hopeless and hideous bloodshed and wickedness of Algiers and Turkestan was stopped, and could only be stopped when civilized nations in the shape of Russia and France took possession of them. The same was true of Burma and the Mele states as well as Egypt, with regard to England, peace has come only as the sequel to armed interference of a civilized power, which relatively to its opponent was a just and beneficent power. If England had disarmed to the point of being unable to conquer the Sudan and protect Egypt, so that the matists had established their supremacy in Northeastern Africa, the result would have been a horrible and bloody calamity to mankind. It was only the growth of the European powers and military efficiency that freed Eastern Europe from the dreadful scourge of the Tartar and partially freed it from the dreadful scourge of the Turk. Unjust war is dreadful. A just war may be the highest duty to have the best nations, the free and civilized nations disarm and leave the despotisms and barbarisms with great military force would be a calamity compared to which the calamities caused by all the wars of the 19th century would be trivial. Yet it is not easy to see how we can by international agreement state exactly which power ceases to be free and civilized and which comes near the line of barbarism or despotism. For example, I suppose it would be very difficult to get Russia and Japan to come to a common agreement on this point, and there are at least some citizens of other nations, not to speak of their governments, whom it would also be hard to get together. This does not in the least mean that it is hopeless to make the effort. It may be that some scheme will be developed. America, fortunately, can cordially assist in such an effort, for no one in his senses would suggest our disarmament, and though we should continue to perfect our small navy and our minute army, I do not think it necessary to increase the number of our ships at any rate as things look now, nor the number of our soldiers. Of course our navy must be kept up to the highest point of efficiency, and the replacing of old and worthless vessels by first class new ones may involve an increase in the personnel, but not enough to interfere with our action along the lines you have suggested. But before I would know how to advocate such action, save in some such way as commending it to the attention of the Hague Tribunal, I would have to have a feasible and rational plan of action presented. It seems to me that a general stop in the increase of the war navies of the world might be a good thing, but I would not like to speak too positively off hand. Of course it is only in continental Europe that the armies are too large, and before advocating action as regards them, I should have to weigh matters carefully, including by the way such a matter as the Turkish army. At any rate, nothing useful can be done unless with the clear recognition that we object to putting peace second to righteousness. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt. Honorable Carl Schertz, Bolton Landing, Lake George, New York. End of Chapter 15, Part 1, Recording by Stephen Carifit in Montezuma, Ohio. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Cameron Conaway. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Chapter 15, The Peace of Righteousness, Part 2. In my own judgment, the most important service that I rendered to peace was the voyage of the battle fleet around the world. I had become convinced that for many reasons it was essential that we should have it clearly understood, by our own people especially, but also by other peoples, that the Pacific was as much our home waters as the Atlantic, and that our fleet could and would at will pass from one to the other of the two great oceans. It seemed to me evident that such a voyage would greatly benefit the navy itself, would arouse popular interest in and enthusiasm for the navy. It would make four nations accept as a matter of course, that our fleet should from time to time be gathered in the Pacific, just as from time to time it was gathered in the Atlantic, and that its presence in one ocean was no more to be accepted as a mark of hostility to any Asiatic power than its presence in the Atlantic was to be accepted as a mark of hostility to any European power. I determined on the move without consulting the cabinet, precisely as I took Panama without consulting the cabinet. A council of war never fights, and in a crisis the duty of a leader is to lead, and not to take refuge behind the generally timid wisdom of a multitude of counselors. At that time, as I happened to know, neither the English nor the German authorities believed it possible to take a fleet of great battleships around the world. They did not believe that their own fleets could perform the feat, and still less did they believe that the American fleet could. I made up my mind that it was time to have a showdown in the matter, because if it was really true that our fleet could not get from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it was much better to know it and be able to shape our policy in view of the knowledge. Many persons publicly and privately protested against the move on the ground that Japan would accept it as a threat. To this I answered nothing in public. In private I said that I did not believe Japan would so regard it, because Japan knew my sincere friendship and admiration for her, and realized that we could not as a nation have any intention of attacking her. And that if there were any such feeling on the part of Japan, as was alleged, that very fact rendered it imperative that that fleet should go. When in the spring of 1910 I was in Europe I was interested to find that high naval authorities in both Germany and Italy had expected that war would come at the time of the voyage. They asked me if I had not been afraid of it, and if I had not expected that hostilities would begin at least by the time that the fleet reached the Straits of Magellan. I answered that I did not expect it, that I believe that Japan would feel as friendly in the matter as we did, but that if my expectations had proved mistaken, it would have been proof positive that we were going to be attacked anyhow, and that in such an event it would have been an enormous gain to have had the three months preliminary preparation which enabled the fleet to start perfectly equipped. In a personal interview before they left I had explained to the officers in command that I believe the trip would be one of absolute peace, but that they were to take exactly the same precautions against sudden attack of any kind, as if we were at war with all the nations of the earth, and that no excuse of any kind would be accepted if there were a sudden attack of any kind and we were taken unawares. My prime purpose was to impress the American people, and this purpose was fully achieved. The crews did make a very deep impression abroad, boasting about what we have done does not impress foreign nations at all, except unfavorably, but positive achievement does, and the two American achievements that really impressed foreign peoples during the first dozen years of this century were the digging of the Panama Canal, and the crews of the battle fleet around the world. But the impression made on our own people was a far greater consequence. No single thing in the history of the new United States Navy has done as much to stimulate popular interest and belief in it as the world crews. This effect was forecast in a well-informed and friendly English periodical, the London Spectator. Writing in October 1907, a month before the fleet sailed from Hampton roads, the Spectator said, all over America, the people will follow the movements of the fleet. They will learn something of the intricate details of the cooling and commissariat work under war-like conditions, and in a word, their attention will be aroused. Next time Mr. Roosevelt or his representatives appeal to the country for new battleships, they will do so to people whose minds have been influenced one way or the other. The naval program will not have stood still. We are sure that, apart from increasing the efficiency of the existing fleet, this is the aim which Mr. Roosevelt had in mind. He has a policy which projects itself far into the future, but it is an entire misreading of it to suppose that it is aimed, narrowly, indefinitely, at any single power. I first directed the fleet of sixteen battleships to go round through the Straits of Magellan to San Francisco. From thence I ordered them to New Zealand and Australia, then to the Philippines, China, and Japan, and home through Suez. They stopped in the Mediterranean to help the sufferers from the earthquake at Messina, by the way, and did this work as effectively as they had done all their other work. Admiral Evans commanded the fleet to San Francisco. There Admiral Sperry took it. Admiral's Thomas, Wainwright, and Schroeder rendered distinguished service under Evans and Sperry. The cooling and other preparations were made in such excellent shape by the department that there was never a hitch. Not so much as the delay of an hour, and keeping every appointment made. All the repairs were made without difficulty. The ship concerned merely falling out of column for a few hours, and when the job was done steaming at speed until she regained her position. Not a ship was left in any port, and there was hardly a desertion. As soon as it was known that the voyage was to be undertaken, men crowded to enlist, just as freely from the Mississippi Valley as from the seaboard. And for the first time since the Spanish war, the ships put to sea over manned. And by a stalwart, a set of men of war's men as ever looked through a porthole, game for a fight or a frolic. But with all so self-respecting and with such a sense of responsibility, that in all the ports in which they landed their conduct was exemplary. The fleet practiced incessantly during the voyage, both with the guns and in battle tactics, and came home a much more efficient fighting instrument than when it started 16 months before. The best men of command rank in our own service were confident that the fleet would go round in safety, in spite of the incredulity of foreign critics. Even they, however, did not believe that it was wise to send the torpedo craft around. I accordingly acquiesced in their views, as it did not occur to me to consult the lieutenants. But shortly before the fleet started, I went in the government yacht, Mayflower, to inspect a target practice off Provincetown. I was accompanied by two torpedo boat destroyers, in charge of a couple of naval lieutenants, Thurrogamecox, and I had the two lieutenants aboard to die in one evening. Towards the end of the dinner, they could not refrain from asking if the torpedo flotilla was to go round with the big ships. I told them no, that the admirals and captains did not believe that the torpedo boats could stand it, and believe that the officers and crews aboard the cockleshells would be worn out by the constant pitching and bouncing and the everlasting need to make repairs. My two guests chorused an eager assurance that the boats could stand it. They assured me that the enlisted men were even more anxious to go than were the officers, mentioning that on one of their boats the terms of enlistment of most of the crew were out, and the men were waiting to see whether or not to re-enlist, as they did not care to do so unless the boats were to go on the crews. I answered that I was only too glad to accept the word of the men who were to do the job, and that they should certainly go, and within half an hour I sent out the order for the flotilla to be got ready. It went round in fine shape, not a boat being laid up. I felt that the feat reflected even more credit upon the navy than did the circumnavigation of the big ships, and I wrote the flotilla, commander, the following letter. May 18th, 1908. My dear Captain Cone, a great deal of attention has been paid to the feet of our battleship fleet in encircling South America and getting to San Francisco, and it would be hard too highly to compliment the officers and enlisted men of that fleet for what they have done. Yet if I should draw any distinction at all, it would be in favor of you and your associates who have taken out the torpedo flotilla. Yours was an even more notable feat, and every officer and every enlisted man in the torpedo boat flotilla has the right to feel that he has rendered distinguished service to the United States Navy, and therefore to the people of the United States. And I wish I could thank each of them personally. Will you have this letter read by the commanding officer of each torpedo boat to his officers and crew? Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt. Lieutenant Commander Hutch, I, Cone, USN, Commanding, Second Torpedo, Flotilla, Caremaster, San Francisco, Cal. There were various amusing features connected with the trip. Most of the wealthy people and leaders of opinion in the eastern cities were panic struck at the proposal to take the fleet away from Atlantic waters. The great New York dailies issued frantic appeals to Congress to stop the fleet from going. The head of the Senate Committee on Naval Affairs announced that the fleet should not and could not go because Congress would refuse to appropriate the money, he being from an eastern seaboard state. However, I announced in response that I had enough money to take the fleet around to the Pacific anyhow, that the fleet would certainly go, and that if Congress did not choose to appropriate enough money to get the fleet back, why, it would stay in the Pacific. There was no further difficulty about the money. It was not originally my intention that the fleet should visit Australia. But the Australian government sent a most cordial invitation, which I gladly accepted. For I have, as every American ought to have, a hearty admiration for and fellow feeling with Australia, and I believe that America should be ready to stand back of Australia in any serious emergency. The reception accorded the fleet in Australia was wonderful, and it showed the fundamental community of feeling between ourselves and the great Commonwealth of the South Seas. The considerate, generous and open-handed hospitality with which the entire Australian people treated our officers and men could not have been surpassed had they been our own countrymen. The fleet first visited Sydney, which has a singularly beautiful harbor. The day after the arrival one of our captains noticed a member of his crew trying to go to sleep on a bench in the park. He had fixed above his head a large paper with some lines evidently designed to forestall any questions from friendly would-be hosts. I am delighted with the Australian people. I think your harbor the finest in the world. I am very tired and would like to go to sleep. The most noteworthy incident of the cruise was the reception given to our fleet in Japan. In courtesy and good-breeding, the Japanese can certainly teach much to the nations of the Western world. I had been very sure that the people of Japan would understand a right to what the cruise meant, and would accept the visit of our fleet as the signal honour which it was meant to be. A proof of the high regard and friendship I felt, and which I was certain the American people felt, for the great island empire. The event even surpassed my expectations. I cannot too strongly express my appreciation of the generous courtesy the Japanese showed the officers and crews of our fleet, and I may add that every man of them came back a friend and admirer of the Japanese. Admiral Sperry wrote me a letter of much interest, dealing not only with the reception in Tokyo, but with the work of our men at sea. I herewith give it almost in full. 28 October 1908. Dear Mr. Roosevelt. My official report of the visit to Japan goes forward in this mail, but there are certain aspects of the affair so successfully concluded which cannot well be included in the report. You are perhaps aware that Mr. Denison of the Japanese Foreign Office was one of my colleagues at the Hague, for whom I have very high regard. Desiring to avoid every possibility of trouble or misunderstanding, I wrote to him last June explaining fully the character of our men, which they have so well lived up to. The desirability of ample landing places, guides, rest houses, and places for changing money in order that there might be no delay in getting the men away from the docks on the excursions in which they delight. Very few of them go into a drinking place, except to get a resting place not to be found elsewhere, paying for it by taking a drink. I also explained our system of landing with liberty men in unarmed patrol, properly officered, to quietly take in charge and send off to their ships any man who showed the slightest trace of disorderly conduct. This letter he showed to the minister of the navy, who highly approved of all our arrangements, including the patrol, of which I feared they might be jealous. Mr. Denison's reply reached me in Manila, with a memorandum from the minister of the navy, which removed all doubts. Three temporary piers were built for our boat landings, each 300 feet long, brilliantly lighted and decorated. The sleeping accommodations did not permit two or three thousand sailors to remain on shore, but the ample landings permitted them to be handled night and day with perfect order and safety. At the landings and railroad station in Yokohama, there were rest houses or booths, reputable money changers, and as many as a thousand English speaking Japanese college students acted as volunteer guides, besides Japanese sailors and petty officers detailed for the purpose. In Tokyo, there were a great many excellent refreshment places, where the men got excellent meals and could rest, smoke, and write letters, and in none of these places would they allow the men to pay anything, though they were more than ready to do so. The arrangements were marvelously perfect. As soon as your telegram of October 18, giving the address to be made to the emperor, was received, I gave copies of it to our ambassador to be sent to the foreign office. It seems that the emperor had already prepared a very cordial address to be forwarded through me to you after delivery at the audience, but your telegram reversed the situation and his reply was prepared. I am convinced that your kind and courteous initiative on this occasion helped cause the pleasant feeling which was so obvious in the emperor's bearing at the luncheon which followed the audience. X, who is reticent and conservative, told me that not only the emperor but all the ministers were profoundly gratified by the course of events. I am confident that not even the most trifling incident has taken place which could in any way mar the general satisfaction, and our ambassador has expressed to me his great satisfaction with all that has taken place. Owing to heavy weather encountered on the passage up from Manila, the fleet was obliged to take about 3,500 tons of coal. The yanked and remained behind to keep up communication for a few days, and yesterday she transmitted the emperor's telegram to you which was sent in reply to your message through our ambassador after the sailing of the fleet. It must be profoundly gratifying to you to have the mission on which you sent the fleet terminate so happily, and I am profoundly thankful that, owing to the confidence which you displayed in giving me this command, my active career draws to a close with such honorable distinction. As for the effect of the crews upon the training, discipline and effectiveness of the fleet, the good cannot be exaggerated. It is a war game in every detail. The wireless communication has been maintained within efficiency hitherto unheard of. Between Honolulu and Auckland, 3,850 miles, we were out of communication with the cable station for only one night, whereas three non-American men of war trying recently to maintain a chain of only 1,250 miles between Auckland and Sydney were only able to do so for a few hours. The officers and men as soon as we put to sea turn to their gunnery and tactical work far more eagerly than they go to functions. Every morning certain ships leave the column and move off 7 or 8,000 yards, as targets for range measuring fire control and battery practice for the others, and at night certain ships do the same thing for night battery practice. I am sorry to say that this practice is unsatisfactory, and in some points misleading, owing to the fact that the ships are painted white. At Portland in 1903, I saw Admiral Barker's white battleships under the searchlights of the enemy at a distance of 14,000 yards, 7 sea miles, without glasses, while the Hartford, a black ship, was never discovered at all, though she passed within a mile and a half. I have for years, while a member of the General Board advocated painting the ships war color at all times, and by this mail I am asking the department to make the necessary change in the regulations and paint the ships properly. I do not know that anyone now descents from my view. Admiral Wayne Wright strongly concurs, and the War College Conference recommended it year after year without a dissenting voice. In the afternoons the fleet has two or three hours practice at battle maneuvers, which excite as keen interest as gunnery exercises. The competition in cool economy goes on automatically and reacts in a hundred ways. It has reduced the waste and the use of electrical light and water, and certain chief engineers are said to keep men ranging over the ships all night, turning out every light not in actual and immediate use. Perhaps the most important effect is the keen hunt for defects and the machinery causing waste of power. The yankton, by resetting valves, increased her speed from 10 to 11 and a half knots on the same expenditure. All this has been done, but the field is widening, the work has only begun. C.S. Sperry. When I left the presidency, I finished seven and a half years of administration, during which not one shot had been fired against a foreign foe. We were at absolute peace, and there was no nation in the world with whom a war cloud threatened, no nation in the world whom we had wronged, or from whom we had anything to fear. The crews of the battle fleet was not the least of the causes which ensured so peaceful in outlook. When the fleet returned after its 16 months voyage around the world, I went down to Hampton Roads to greet it. The day was Washington's birthday, February 22, 1907. Literally on the minute the homing battle craft came into view. On the flagship of the admiral, I spoke to the officers and enlisted men as follows. Admiral Sperry, officers and men of the battle fleet. Over a year has passed since you steamed out of this harbor, and over the world's rim, and this morning the hearts of all who saw you thrilled with pride as the holes of the mighty warships lifted above the horizon. You have been in the northern and the southern hemispheres. Four times you have crossed the line. You have steamed through all the great oceans. You have touched the coast of every continent. Ever your general course has been westward, and now you come back to the port from which you set sail. This is the first battle fleet that has ever circumnavigated the globe. Those who perform the feat again can but follow in your footsteps. The little torpedo flotilla went with you around South America, through the Straits of Magellan, to our own Pacific coast. The armored cruiser squadron met you and left you again when you were halfway around the world. You have falsified every prediction of the profits of failure. In all your long cruise, not an accident worthy of mention has happened to a single battleship, nor yet to the cruisers or torpedo boats. You left this coast in a high state of battle efficiency, and you returned with your efficiency increased, better prepared than when you left, not only in personal, but even in material. During your world cruise, you have taken your regular gunnery practice, and skilled though you were before with the guns, you have grown more skillful still, and through practice you have improved in battle tactics, though here there is more room for improvement than in your gunnery. Incidentally, I suppose I need hardly say that one measure of your fitness must be your clear recognition of the need always steadily to strive to render yourselves more fit. If ever you grow to think that you are fit enough, you can make up your minds that from that moment you will begin to go backward. As a war machine, the fleet comes back in better shape than it went out. In addition, you, the officers and men of this formidable fighting force, have shown yourselves the best of all possible ambassadors and heralds of peace. Wherever you have landed, you have borne yourself so as to make us at home proud of being your countrymen. You have shown that the best type of fighting man of the sea knows how to appear to the utmost possible advantage when his business is to behave himself on shore, and to make a good impression in a foreign land. We are proud of all the ships and all the men in this whole fleet, and we welcome you home to the country whose good repute among nations has been raised by what you have done. End of Chapter 15 Recording by Cameron Conaway For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Appendix A. The Trust, The People, and the Square Deal, Part I Written when Mr. Taft's administration brought suit to dissolve the Steel Corporation, one of the grounds for the suit being the acquisition by the Corporation of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. This action was taken with my acquiescence while I was President, and while Mr. Taft was a member of my Cabinet. At the time he never protested against, and as far as I knew, approved of my action in this case, as in the Harvester Trust case, and all similar cases. The suit against the Steel Trust by the Government has brought vividly before our people the need of reducing to order our Chaotic Government policy as regards business. As President, in messages to Congress, I repeatedly called the attention of that body, and to the public, to the inadequacy of the antitrust law by itself to meet business conditions and secure justice to the people, and to the further fact that it might, if left unsupplemented by additional legislation, work mischief, with no compensating advantage. And I urged, as strongly as I knew how, that the policy followed with relation to railways in connection with the interstate commerce law should be followed by the national government as regards all great business concerns. And therefore that, as a first step, the powers of the Bureau of Corporations should be greatly enlarged, or else that there should be created a governmental board or commission, with powers somewhat similar to those of the interstate commerce commission, but covering the whole field of interstate business, exclusive of transportation, which should by law be kept wholly separate from ordinary industrial business, all common ownership of the industry and the railway being forbidden. In the end I have always believed that it would also be necessary to give the national government complete power over the organization and capitalization of all business concerns engaged in interstate commerce. A member of my cabinet with whom, even more than with the various Attorney Generals, I went over every detail of the trust situation, was the one-time Secretary of the Interior, Mr. James R. Garfield. He writes me as follows concerning the suit against the Steel Corporation. Nothing appeared before the House Committee that made me believe we were deceived by Judge Gary. This, I think, is a case that shows clearly the difference between destructive litigation and constructive legislation. I have not yet seen a full copy of the government's petition, but our papers give nothing that indicates any kind of unfair or dishonest competition, such as existed in both the Standard Oil and Tobacco cases. As I understand it, the competitors of the Steel Company have steadily increased in strength during the last six or seven years. Furthermore, the percent of the business done by the Steel Corporation has decreased during that time. As you will remember at our first conference with Judge Gary, the judge stated that it was the desire and purpose of the company to conform to what the government wished, it being the purpose of the company absolutely to obey the law both in spirit and in letter. Throughout the time that I had charged the investigation and while we were in Washington I do not know of a single instance where the Steel Company refused any information requested, but on the contrary aided in every possible way our investigation. The position now taken by the government is absolutely destructive of legitimate business because they outline no rule of conduct for business of any magnitude. It is absurd to say that the courts can lay down such rules. The most the courts can do is to find as legal or illegal the particular transactions brought before them. Hence, after years of tedious litigation there would be no clear-cut rule for future action. This method of procedure is dealing with the device, not the result, and drives business to the elaboration of clever devices, each of which must be tested in the courts. I have yet to find a better method of dealing with the antitrust situation than that suggested by the bill which we agreed upon in the last days of your administration. That bill should be used as a basis for legislation, and there could be incorporated upon it whatever may be determined wise regarding the direct control and supervision of the national government, either through a commission similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission or otherwise. Before taking up the matter in its large aspect, I wish to say one word as to one feature of the government suit against the Steel Corporation. One of the grounds for the suit is the acquisition by the Steel Corporation of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. It has been alleged, on the authority of the government officials engaged in carrying on the suit, that as regards this transaction I was misled by the representatives of the Steel Corporation and that the facts were not accurately or truthfully laid before me. This statement is not correct. I believed at the time that the facts in the case were as represented to me on behalf of the Steel Corporation, and my further knowledge has convinced me that this was true. I believed at the time that the representatives of the Steel Corporation told me the truth as to the change that would be worked in the percentage of the business which the proposed acquisition would give the Steel Corporation, and further inquiry has convinced me that they did so. I was not misled. The representatives of the Steel Corporation told me the truth as to what the effect of the action at that time would be, and any statement that I was misled, or that the representatives of the Steel Corporation did not thus tell me the truth as to the facts of the case. In the outlook of August 19th last, I gave in full the statement I had made to the investigating committee of the House of Representatives on this matter. That statement is accurate, and I reaffirm everything I therein said, not only as to what occurred, but also as to my belief in the wisdom and propriety of my action. Indeed, the action not merely was wise and proper, but it would have been a calamity from every standpoint had I failed to take it. On page 137 of the printed report of the testimony before the committee will be found Judge Gary's account of the meeting between himself and Mr. Frick and Mr. Root and myself. This account states the facts accurately. It has been alleged that the purchase by the Steel Corporation of the property of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company gave the Steel Corporation practically a monopoly of the Southern Iron Ores—that is, of the Iron Ores south of the Potomac and the Ohio. My information, which I have every reason to believe is accurate and not successfully to be challenged, is that of these Southern Iron Ores the Steel Corporation has, including the property gained from the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, less than twenty percent—perhaps not over sixteen percent. This is a very much smaller percentage than the percentage it holds of the Lake Superior Ores, which even after the surrender of the Hill lease will be slightly over fifty percent. According to my view therefore, and unless, which I do not believe possible, these figures can be successfully challenged, the acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company's ores in no way changed the situation as regards making the Steel Corporation a monopoly. The showing as to the percentage of production of all kinds of steel ingots and steel casings in the United States by the Steel Corporation and by all other manufacturers, respectively, makes an even stronger case. It makes the case even stronger than I put it in my testimony before the investigating committee, for I was groupulously careful to make statements that aired, if at all, against my own position. It appears from the figures of production that in 1901 the Steel Corporation had to its credit nearly sixty-six percent of the total production, as against a little over thirty-four percent by all other steel manufacturers. The percentage then shrank steadily until, in 1906, the year before the acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Properties, the percentage was a little under fifty-eight percent. In spite of the acquisition of these properties, the following year, 1907, the total percentage shrank slightly, and this shrinking has continued until, in 1910, the total percentage of the Steel Corporation is but a little over fifty-four percent, and the percentage of all other steel manufacturers but a fraction less than forty-six percent. Of the fifty-four and thirty-one hundredths percent produced by the Steel Corporation, one point nine one percent is produced by the former Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. In other words, these figures show that the acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company did not, in the slightest degree, change the situation, and that during the ten years which include the acquisition of these properties by the Steel Corporation, the percentage of total output of steel manufacturers in this country by the Steel Corporation has shrunk, from nearly sixty-six percent to but a trifle over fifty-four percent. I do not believe that these figures can be successfully controverted, and if not successfully controverted they show clearly not only that the acquisition of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Properties wrought no change in the status of the Steel Corporation, but that the Steel Corporation, during the decade, has lost steadily instead of gained in monopolistic character. My own belief is that our nation should long ago have adopted the policy of merely leasing, for a term of years, mineral-bearing land, but it is the fault of us ourselves, of the people, not of the Steel Corporation, that this policy has not been adopted. So much for the facts in this particular case. Now for the general subject. When my administration took office I found not only that there had been little real enforcement of the antitrust law and but little more effective enforcement of the interstate commerce law, but also that the decisions were so chaotic and the laws themselves so vaguely drawn, or at least interpreted in such widely varying fashions, that the biggest businessmen tended to treat both laws as dead letters. The series of actions by which we succeeded in making the interstate commerce law an efficient and most useful instrument in regulating the transportation of the country and exacting justice from the big railways without doing them injustice, while indeed on the contrary, securing them against injustice, need not be here related. The antitrust law it was also necessary to enforce as it had never hitherto been enforced, both because it was on the statute books and because it was imperative to teach the masters of the biggest corporations in the land that they were not and would not be permitted to regard themselves as above the law. Moreover, where the combination has really been guilty of misconduct, the law serves a useful purpose and in such cases it's those of the standard oil and tobacco trusts. If effectively enforced, the law confers a real and great good. Suits were brought against the most powerful corporations in the land, which we were convinced had clearly and beyond question violated the antitrust law. These suits were brought with great care and only where we felt so sure of our facts that we could be fairly certain that there was a likelihood of success. As a matter of fact, in most of the important suits we were successful. It was imperative that these suits should be brought, and a very real good was achieved by bringing them, for it was only these suits that made the great masters of corporate capital in America fully realize that they were the servants and not the masters of the people, that they were subject to the law and that they would not be permitted to be a law unto themselves, and the corporations against which we proceeded had sinned, not merely by being big, which we did not regard as in itself a sin, but by being guilty of unfair practices towards their competitors and by procuring fair advantages from the railways. But the resulting situation has made it evident that the antitrust law is not adequate to meet the situation that has grown up because of modern business conditions and the accompanying tremendous increase in the business use of vast quantities of corporate wealth. As I have said, this was already evident to my mind when I was president, and in communications to Congress I repeatedly stated the facts. But when I made these communications there were still plenty of people who did not believe that we would succeed in the suits that had been instituted against Standard Oil, the Tobacco, and other corporations, and it was impossible to get the public as a whole to realize what the situation was. Sincerer zealots who believed that all combinations could be destroyed and the old-time conditions of unregulated competition restored, insincere politicians who knew better but made believe they thought whatever their constituents wished them to think, crafty reactionaries who wished to see on the statute books laws which they believed unenforceable, and the almost solid Wall Street crowd, or representatives of big business, who at that time opposed with equal violence both wise and necessary and unwise and improper regulation of business, all fought against the adoption of a sane, effective, and far-reaching policy. It is a vitally necessary thing to have the persons in control of big trusts of the character of the Standard Oil Trust and Tobacco Trust taught that they are under the law, just as it was a necessary thing to have the Sugar Trust taught the same lesson in drastic fashion by Mr. Henry L Stimpson when he was United States district attorney in the city of New York. But to attempt to meet the whole problem not by administrative governmental action, but by a succession of lawsuits, is hopeless from the standpoint of working out a permanently satisfactory solution. Moreover, the results sought to be achieved are achieved only in extremely insufficient and fragmentary measure by breaking up all big corporations, whether they have behaved well or ill, into a number of little corporations which it is perfectly certain will be largely and perhaps altogether under the same control. Such action is harsh and mischievous if the corporation is guilty of nothing except its size, and where, as in the case of the Standard Oil and especially the Tobacco Trusts, the corporation has been guilty of immoral and anti-social practices, there is need for far more drastic and thoroughgoing action than any that has been taken, under the recent decree of the Supreme Court. In the case of the Tobacco Trust, for instance, the settlement in the Circuit Court, in which the representatives of the government seem inclined to concur, practically leaves all of the company still substantially under the control of the 29 original defendants. Such a result is lamentable from the standpoint of justice. The decision of the Circuit Court, if allowed to stand, means that the Tobacco Trust has merely been obliged to change its clothes, that none of the real offenders have received any real punishment, while, as the New York Times, a Pro-Trust paper says, the tobacco concerns in their new clothes are in positions of ease and luxury and immune from prosecution under the law. Surely a miscarriage of justice is not too strong a term to apply to such a result, when considered in connection with what the Supreme Court said of this trust. That great court, in its decision, used language which, in spite of its habitual and severe stealth restraint in stigmatizing wrongdoing, yet unhesitatingly condemns the Tobacco Trust for moral turpitude, saying that the case shows an ever-present manifestation of conscious wrongdoing by the trust, whose history is replete with the doing of acts which it was the obvious purpose of the statute to forbid, demonstrative of the existence from the beginning of such a purpose to acquire dominion and control of the tobacco trade, not by the mere exertion of the ordinary right to contract into trade, but by methods devised in order to monopolize the trade by driving competitors out of business, which were ruthlessly carried out upon the assumption that to work upon the fears or play upon the cupidity of competitors would make success possible. The letters from and to various officials of the trust, which were put in evidence, show a literally astounding and horrifying indulgence by the trust in wicked and depraved business methods, such as the endeavor to cause a strike in their rival firm's factory, or the shutting off the market of an independent tobacco firm by taking the necessary steps to give them a warm reception, or forcing importers into a price agreement by causing and continuing a demoralization of the business for such length of time as may be deemed desirable. I quote from the letters, A trust guilty of such conduct should be absolutely disbanded, and the only way to prevent the repetition of such conduct is by strict governmental supervision and not merely by lawsuits. End of Appendix A, Part 1. Appendix A, Part 2 of the Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt, Appendix A. The Trusts, The People, and the Square Deal, Part 2. The antitrust law cannot meet the whole situation, nor can any modification of the principle of the antitrust law avail to meet the whole situation. The fact is that many of the men who have called themselves progressives, and who certainly believe that they are progressives, represent in reality in this matter not progress at all, but a kind of sincere, rural, Toryism. These men believe that it is possible by strengthening the antitrust law to restore business to the competitive conditions of the middle of the last century. Any such effort is foredoomed to end in failure, and if successful would be mischievous to the last degree. Business cannot be successfully conducted in accordance with the practices and theories of sixty years ago unless we abolish steam, electricity, big cities, and in short, not only all modern business and modern industrial conditions, but all the modern conditions of our civilization. The effort to restore competition as it was sixty years ago, and to trust for justice solely to this proposed restoration of competition, is just as foolish as if we should go back to the flintlocks of Washington's Continentals as a substitute for modern weapons of precision. The effort to prohibit all combinations, good or bad, is bound to fail, and ought to fail. When made, it merely means that some of the worst combinations are not checked, and that honest business is checked. Our purpose should be not to strangle business as an incident of strangling combinations, but to regulate big corporations in thoroughgoing and effective fashion, so as to help legitimate business as an incident to thoroughly and completely safeguarding the interests of the people as a whole. Against all such increase of government regulation, the argument is raised that it would amount to a form of socialism. The argument is familiar. It is precisely the same as that which was raised against the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission, and of all the different utility commissions in the different states, as I myself saw thirty years ago when I was a legislator at Albany, and these questions came up in connection with our state government. Nor can action be effectively taken by any one state. Congress alone has power under the Constitution effectively and thoroughly, and at all points, to deal with Interstate Commerce, and where Congress, as it should do, provides laws that will give the nation full jurisdiction over the whole field, then that jurisdiction becomes of necessity exclusive. Although until Congress does act affirmatively and thoroughly, it is idle to expect that the states will or ought to rest content with nonaction on the part of both federal and state authorities. This statement, by the way, applies also to the question of usurpation by any one branch of our government of the rights of another branch. It is contented that in these recent decisions the Supreme Court legislated, so it did, and it had to, because the Congress had signally failed to do its duty by legislating. For the Supreme Court to nullify an act of the legislature as unconstitutional, except on the clearest grounds, is usurpation. To interpret such an act in an obviously wrong sense is usurpation. But where the legislative body persistently leaves open a field, which it is absolutely imperative from the public standpoint to fill, then no possible blame attaches to the official or officials who step in because they have to, and who then do the needed work in the interest of the people. The blame in such cases lies with the body which has been derelict, and not with the body which reluctantly makes good the dereliction. A quarter of a century ago Senator Cushman K. Davis, a statesman who amply deserved the title of statesman, a man of the highest courage, of the sternest adherence to the principles laid down by an exacting sense of duty, an unflinching believer in democracy, who was as little to be cowed by a mob as by a plutocrat, and, moreover, a man who possessed the priceless gift of imagination, a gift as important to a statesman as to a historian, in an address delivered at the annual commencement of the University of Michigan on July 1st, 1886, spoke as follows of corporations. Feudalism, with its domains, its untaxed lords, their retainers, its exemptions and privileges, made war upon the aspiring spirit of humanity, unfell with all its grandeurs. Its spirit walks the earth and haunts the institutions of today, in the great corporations, with the control of the national highways, their occupation of great domains, their power to tax, their cynical contempt for the law, their sorcery to debase most gifted men to the capacity of splendid slaves, their pollution of the ermine of the judge and the robe of the senator, their aggregation in one man of wealth so enormous as to make Croesus seem a copper, their picked, paid and skilled retainers who are summoned by the message of electricity and appear upon the wings of steam. If we look into the origin of feudalism and of the modern corporations, those Dromios of history, we find that the former originated in a strict paternalism, which is scouted by modern economists, and that the latter have grown from an unrestrained freedom of action, aggression and development which they command as the very ideal of political wisdom. L'Azé Faire says the professor, when it often means bind and gag that the strongest may work his will. It is a plea for the survival of the fittest, for the strongest male to take possession of the herd by a process of extermination. If we examine this battle cry of political polemics, we find that it is based upon the conception of the divine right of property, and that the preoccupation by older or more favored or more alert or richer men or nations of territory, of the forces of nature, of machinery, of all the functions of what we call civilization. Some of these men, who are really great, follow these conceptions to their conclusions with dauntless intrepidity. When Senator Davis spoke, few men of great power had the sympathy and the vision necessary to perceive the menace contained in the growth of corporations, and the men who did see the evil were struggling blindly to get rid of it, not by frankly meeting the new situation with new methods, but by insisting upon the entire feudal effort to abolish what modern conditions had rendered absolutely inevitable. Senator Davis was under no such illusion. He realized keenly that it was absolutely impossible to go back to an outworn social status, and that we must abandon definitely the lazé Faire theory of political economy, and fearlessly champion a system of increased governmental control, paying no heed to the cries of the worthy people who denounced this as socialistic. He saw that in order to meet the inevitable increase in the power of corporations produced by modern industrial conditions, it would be necessary to increase in like fashion the activity of the sovereign power, which alone could control such corporations. As has been aptly said, the only way to meet a billion-dollar corporation is by invoking the protection of a hundred billion-dollar government, in other words, of the national government, for no state government is strong enough both to do justice to the corporations and to exact justice from them. Said Senator Davis in this admirable address, which should be reprinted and distributed broadcast, the liberty of the individual has been annihilated by the logical process constructed to maintain it. We have come to a political deification of mammon. Lazé Faire is not otherly blameworthy. It begat modern democracy and made the modern republic possible. There can be no doubt of that. But there it reached its limits of political benefaction, and began to incline toward the point where extremes meet. To every assertion that the people, in their collective capacity of a government, ought to exert their indefeasible right of self-defense, it is said you touched the sacred rights of property. The Senator then goes on to say that we have now to deal with an oligarchy of wealth, and that the government must develop power sufficient enough to enable it to do the task. Few will dispute the fact that the present situation is not satisfactory, and cannot be put on a permanently satisfactory basis unless we put an end to the period of groping and declare for a fixed policy, a policy which shall clearly define and punish wrongdoing, which shall put a stop to the iniquities done in the name of business, but which shall do strict equity to business. We demand that big business give the people a square deal. In return we must insist that when anyone engaged in big business honestly endeavors to do right, he shall himself be given a square deal. And the first and most elementary kind of square deal is to give him in advance full information as to just what he can and what he cannot legally and properly do. It is absurd and much worse than absurd to treat the deliberate lawbreaker as on an exact par with the man eager to obey the law, whose only desire is to find out from some competent government authority what the law is and then to live up to it. Moreover it is absurd to treat the size of a corporation as in itself a crime. As Judge Hook says in his opinion on the standard oil case, magnitude of business does not alone constitute a monopoly. The genius and industry of man would kept to ethical standards still have full play, and what he achieves is his. Success and magnitude of business, the rewards of fair and honorable endeavor, are not forbidden. The public welfare is threatened only when success is attained by wrongful or unlawful methods. Size may, and in my opinion does, make a corporation fraught with potential menace to the community, and may, and in my opinion should, therefore make it incumbent upon the community to exercise, through its administrative, not merely through its judicial officers, a strict supervision over that corporation in order to see that it does not go wrong. But the size in itself does not signify wrongdoing, and should not be held to signify wrongdoing. Not only should any huge corporation which has gained its position by unfair methods and by interference with the rights of others, by demoralizing and corrupt practices, in short, by sheer baseness in wrongdoing be broken up, but it should be made the business of some administrative governmental body by constant supervision to see that it does not come together again. Save under such strict control as shall ensure the community against all repetition of the bad conduct, and it should never be permitted thus to assemble its parts as long as these parts are under the control of the original offenders. For actual experience has shown that these men are, from the standpoint of the public at large, unfit to be trusted with the power implied in the management of a large corporation. But nothing of importance is gained by breaking up a huge interstate and international industrial organization which has not offended otherwise than by its size, into a number of small concerns without any attempt to regulate the way in which those concerns as a whole shall do business. Nothing is gained by depriving the American nation of good weapons wherewith to fight in the great field of international industrial competition. Those who would seek to restore the days of unlimited and uncontrolled competition, and who believe that a panacea for our industrial and economic ills is to be found in the mere breaking up of all big corporations, simply because they are big, are attempting not only the impossible, but what if possible would be undesirable. They are acting as we should act if we try to dam the Mississippi, to stop its flow outright. The effort would be certain to result in failure and disaster. We would have attempted the impossible, and so would have achieved nothing, or worse than nothing. But by building levies along the Mississippi, not seeking to dam the stream, but to control it, we are able to achieve our object and to confer inestimable good in the course of doing so. This nation should definitely adopt the policy of attacking, not the mere fact of combination, but the evils and wrongdoing which so frequently accompany combination. The fact that a combination is very big is ample reason for exercising a close and jealous supervision over it, because its size renders it potent for mischief, but it should not be punished unless it actually does the mischief. It should merely be so supervised and controlled as to guarantee us, the people, against its doing mischief. We should not strive for a policy of unregulated competition and of the destruction of all big corporations, that is, of all the most efficient business industries in the land. Nor should we persevere in the hopeless experiment of trying to regulate these industries by means only of lawsuits, each lasting several years and of uncertain result. We should enter upon a course of supervision, control, and regulation of these great corporations, a regulation which we should not fear, if necessary, to bring to the point of the control of monopoly prices, just as in exceptional cases railway rates are now regulated. Either the Bureau of Corporations should be authorized, or some other governmental body similar to the Interstate Commerce Commission should be created, to exercise this supervision, this authoritative control. When once immoral business practices have been eliminated by such control, competition will thereby be again revived as a healthy factor, although not as formally an all sufficient factor in keeping the general business situation sound. Wherever immoral business practices still obtain, as they obtained in the cases of the Standard Oil Trust and Tobacco Trust, the Anti-Trust Law can be invoked, and wherever such a prosecution is successful, and the courts declare a corporation to possess a monopolistic character, then that corporation should be completely dissolved, and the parts ought never to be assembled again save on whatever terms and under whatever conditions may be imposed by the governmental body in which is vested the regulatory power. Methods can be readily devised by which corporations sincerely desiring to act fairly and honestly can, on their own initiative, come under this thoroughgoing administrative control by the government, and thereby be free from the working of the Anti-Trust Law. But the law will remain to be invoked against wrongdoers, and under such conditions it could be invoked far more vigorously and successfully than at present. It is not necessary, in an article like this, to attempt to work out such a plan in detail. It can assuredly be worked out. Moreover, in my opinion, substantially some plan must be worked out, or business chaos will continue. Wrongdoings, such as was perpetrated by the Standard Oil Trust, and especially by the Tobacco Trust, should not only be punished, but if possible punished in the persons of the chief authors and beneficiaries of the wrong, far more severely than at present. But punishment should not be the only, or indeed the main, end in view. Our aim should be a policy of construction and not one of destruction. Our aim should not be to punish the men who have made a big corporation successful merely because they have made it big and successful, but to exercise such thorough-growing supervision and control over them as to ensure their business skill being exercised in the interest of the public and not against the public interest. Ultimately, I believe that this control should undoubtedly, indirectly or directly, extend to dealing with all questions connected with their treatment of their employees, including the wages, the hours of labor, and the like. Not only is the proper treatment of corporation, from the standpoint of the managers, shareholders, and employees, compatible with securing from that corporation the best standard of public service, but when the effort is wisely made it results in benefit both to the corporation and to the public. The success of Wisconsin in dealing with the corporations within her borders so as both to do them justice and to exact justice in return from them toward the public has been signal, and this nation should adopt a progressive policy and substance akin to the progressive policy not merely formulated in theory, but reduced to actual practice which such striking success in Wisconsin. To sum up, then, it is practically impossible, and if possible, it would be mischievous and undesirable to try to break up all combinations merely because they are large and successful, and to put the business of the country back into the middle of the eighteenth century conditions of intense and unregulated competition between small and weak business concerns. Such an effort represents not progressiveness but an unintelligent, though doubtless, entirely well-meaning, tourism. Moreover, the effort to administer a law merely by lawsuits and court decisions is bound to end in signal failure and, meanwhile, to be attended with delays and uncertainties and to put a premium upon legal, sharp practice. Such an effort does not adequately punish the guilty, and yet works great harm to the innocent. Moreover, it entirely fails to give the publicity which is one of the best byproducts of the system of control by administrative officials. Publicity, which is not only good in itself, but furnishes the data for whatever further action may be necessary. We need to formulate immediate and definitely a policy, which, in dealing with big corporations that behave themselves and which contain no menace, save what is necessarily potential in any corporation, which is of great size and very well managed, shall aim not at their destruction but at their regulation and supervision, so that the government shall control them in such fashion as to amply safeguard the interests of the whole public, including producers, consumers, and wage workers. This control should, if necessary, be pushed in extreme cases to the point of exercising control over monopoly prices, as rates on railways are now controlled, although this is not a power that should be used when it is possible to avoid it. The law should be clear, unambiguous, certain, so that honest men may not find that unwittingly they have violated it. In short, our aim should be, not to destroy, but effectively, and in thoroughgoing fashion to regulate and control, in the public interest, the great instrumentalities of modern business, which it is destructive of the general welfare of the community to destroy, and which, nevertheless, it is vitally necessary to that general welfare to regulate and control. Competition will remain as a very important factor when once we have destroyed the unfair business methods, the criminal interference with the rights of others, which alone enabled certain swollen combinations to crush out their competitors, and, incidentally, the conservatives will do well to remember that these unfair and iniquitous methods by great masters of corporate capital have done more to cause popular discontent with the property classes than all the orations of the socialist orators in the country put together. I have spoken above of Senator Davis's admirable address delivered a quarter of a century ago. Senator Davis's one-time partner, Frank B. Kellogg, the government council who did so much to win success for the government in its prosecutions of the trust, has recently delivered before the Palimpsist Club of Omaha an excellent address on the subject. Mr. Prouty, of the Interstate Commerce Commission, has recently, in his speech before the Congregational Club of Brooklyn, dealt with the subject from the constructive side, and in the proceedings of the American Bar Association for 1904 there is an admirable paper on the need of a thoroughgoing federal control over corporations doing an interstate business by Professor Horace L. Wilgus of the University of Michigan. The national government exercises control over interstate commerce railways, and it can in similar fashion, through an appropriate governmental body, exercise control over all industrial organizations engaged in interstate commerce. This control should be exercised not by the courts, but by an administrative bureau or board such as the Bureau of Corporations or the Interstate Commerce Commission, for the courts cannot, with advantage, permanently perform executive and administrative functions. End of Appendix A, Part 2.