 CHAPTER XIII. Meanwhile the Governor of Pennsylvania had all the Pennsylvania militia in the anthracite region, although without any effect upon the resumption of mining. The method of action upon which I had determined the last resort was to get the Governor of Pennsylvania to ask me to keep order. Then I would put in the army under the command of some first-rate general. I would instruct this general to keep absolute order, taking any steps whatever that were necessary to prevent interference by the strikers or their sympathizers with the men who wanted to work. I would also instruct him to dispossess the operators and run the mines as a receiver until such time as the Commission might make its report, and until I, as President, might issue further orders in view of this report. I had to find a man who possessed the necessary good sense, judgment, and nerve to act in such an event. He was ready to hand in the person of Major General Schofield. I sent for him, telling him that if I had to make use of him it would be because the crisis was only less serious than that of the Civil War, that the action taken would be practically a war measure, and that if I sent him he must act in a purely military capacity under me as Commander-in-Chief, paying no heed to any authority, judicial or otherwise except mine. He was a fine fellow, a most respectable-looking old boy, with side whiskers and a black skull cap without any of the outward aspect of the conventional military dictator, but in both nerve and judgment he was all right, and he answered quietly that if I gave the order he would take possession of the mines, and would guarantee to open them and to run them without permitting any interference, either by the owners, or the strikers, or anybody else so long as I told him to stay. I then saw Senator Key, who, like every other responsible man in high position, was greatly wrought up over the condition of things. I told him that he need be under no alarm as to the problem not being solved, that I was going to make another effort to get the operators and miners to come together, but that I would solve the problem in any event and get coal. That however I did not wish to tell him anything of the details of my intention, but merely to have him arrange, whenever I gave the word, the Governor of Pennsylvania should request me to intervene, that when this was done I would be responsible for all that followed, and would guarantee that the coal famine would end forthwith. The Senator made no inquiry or comment, and merely told me that he in his turn would guarantee that the Governor would request my intervention the minute I asked that the request be made. These negotiations were concluded with the utmost secrecy, General Schofield being the only man who knew exactly what my plan was, and Senator Key, two members of my cabinet, and ex-President Cleveland, and the other men whom I proposed to put on the commission, the only other men who knew that I had a plan. As I have above outlined, my efforts to bring about an agreement between the operators and minors were finally successful. I was glad not to have to take possession of the mines on my own initiative by means of General Schofield and the regulars. I was all ready to act, and would have done so without the slightest hesitation or a moment's delay if the negotiations had fallen through. And my action would have been entirely effective. But it is never well to take drastic action if the result can be achieved with equal efficiency in less drastic faction. And although this was a minor consideration, I was personally saved a good deal of future trouble by being able to avoid this drastic action. At the time I should have been almost unanimously supported. With the famine upon them the people would not have tolerated any conduct that would have thwarted what I was doing. Probably no man in Congress, and no man in the Pennsylvania State Legislature, would have raised his voice against me. Although there would have been plenty of muttering, nothing would have been done to interfere with the solution of the problem which I had devised, until the solution was accomplished and the problem ceased to be a problem. Once this was done, and when people were no longer afraid of a coal family, and began to forget that they had ever been afraid of it, and to be indifferent as regards the consequences to those who put an end to it, then my enemies would have plucked up heart and begun a campaign against me. I doubt if they could have accomplished much anyway, for the only effective remedy against me would have been impeachment, and that they would not have ventured to try. One of my appointees on the Anthrocyte Strike Commission was Judge George Gray of Delaware, a Democrat who's standing in the country was second only to that of Grover Cleveland. A year later he commented on my action as follows. I have no hesitation in saying that the President of the United States was confronted in October 1902 by the existence of a crisis more grave and threatening than any that had occurred since the Civil War. I mean that the cessation of mining in the Anthrocyte country, brought about by the dispute between miners and those who controlled the greatest natural monopoly in this country, and perhaps in the world, had brought upon more than one half of the American people a condition of deprivation of one of the necessaries of life, and the probable continuance of the dispute threatened not only the comfort and health, but the safety and good order of the nation. He was without legal or constitutional power to interfere, but his position as President of the United States gave him an influence, a leadership, as first citizen of the Republic, that enabled him to appeal to the patriotism and good sense of the parties to the controversy, and to place upon them the moral coercion of public opinion, to agree to an arbitrement of the strike then existing and threatening consequences so direful to the whole country. He acted promptly and courageously, and in so doing averted the dangers to which I have alluded. So far from interfering or infringing upon property rights, the President's actions tended to conserve them. The peculiar situation, as regards the Anthrocyte coal interest, was that they controlled a natural monopoly of a product necessary to the comfort and to the very life of a large portion of the people. A prolonged deprivation of the enjoyment of this necessary of life would have tended to precipitate an attack upon those property rights of which you speak, for after all, it is vain to deny that this property, so peculiar in its conditions, and which is properly spoken of as a natural monopoly, is affected with a public interest. I do not think that any President ever acted more wisely, courageously, or promptly in a national crisis. Mr. Roosevelt deserves unstinted praise for what he did. They would doubtless have acted precisely as they acted as regards the acquisition of the Panama Canal Zone in 1903 and the stoppage of the Panic of 1907 by my action in the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company matter. Nothing could have made the American people surrender the Canal Zone. But after it was an accomplished fact, and the canal was under way, then they settled down to comfortable acceptance of the accomplished fact, and as their own interests were no longer in jeopardy, they paid no heed to the men who attacked me because of what I had done, and also continued to attack me, although they are exceedingly careful not to propose to right the wrong, in the only proper way, if it really was a wrong, by replacing the old Republic of Panama under a tyranny of Columbia and giving Columbia sole or joint ownership of the canal itself. In the case of the Panic of 1907, as in the case of Panama, what I did was not only done openly, but depended for its effect by being done with the whitest advertisement. Nobody in Congress ventured to make an objection at the time. No serious leader, outside, made any objection. The one concern of everybody was to stop the Panic, and everybody was overjoyed that I was willing to take the responsibility of stopping it upon my old soldiers. But a few months afterward, the Panic was a thing of the past. People forgot the frightful condition of alarm in which they had been. They no longer had a personal interest in preventing any interference with the stoppage of the Panic. Then the men who had not dared to raise their voices until all danger was passed came bravely forth from their hiding-places and denounced the action which had saved them. They had kept a hushed silence when there was danger. They made clamorous outcry when there was safety in doing so. Just the same course would have been followed in connection with the anthracite coal strike if I had been obliged to act in the fashion I intended to act, had I failed to secure a voluntary agreement between the miners and the operators. Even as it was, my action was remembered with rancor by the heads of the great-moneyed interests, and as time went by was assailed with constantly increasing vigor by the newspapers these men controlled. Had I been forced to take possession of the mines, these men and the politician's hostile to me would have waited until the popular alarm was over and the popular needs met, just as they waited in the case of the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company, and then they would have attacked me precisely as they did attack me as regards the Tennessee Coal and Iron Company. Of course in labor controversies it was not always possible to champion the cause of the workers, because in many cases strikes were called which were utterly unwarranted and were fought by methods which cannot be too harshly condemned. No straightforward man can believe, and no fearless man will assert, that a trade union is always right. That man is an unworthy public servant, who by speech or silence, by direct statement or cowardly evasion, invariably throws the weight of his influence on the side of the trade union, whether it is right or wrong. It has occasionally been my duty to give utterance to the feelings of all right-thinking men by expressing the most emphatic disapproval of unwise or even immoral notions by representatives of labor. The man is no true Democrat, and if an American is unworthy of the traditions of his country, who, in problems calling for the exercise of a moral judgment, fails to take his stand in conduct and not on class. There are good and bad wage workers just as there are good and bad employers, and good and bad men of small means and of large means alike. But a willingness to do equal and exact justice to all citizens, irrespective of race, creed, section or economic interest and position, does not imply a failure to recognize the enormous economic, political, and moral possibilities of the trade union. Just as democratic government cannot be condemned because of errors and even crimes committed by men democratically elected, so trade unionism must not be condemned because of errors or crimes of occasional trade union leaders. The problem lies deeper. While we must repress all illegalities and discourage all immoralities, whether of labor organizations or of corporations, we must recognize the fact that today the organization of labor into trade unions and federations is necessary, is beneficent, and is one of the greatest possible agencies in the attainment of a true industrial, as well as a true political, democracy in the United States. It is a fact which many well-intentioned people, even today, do not understand. They do not understand that the labor problem is a human and a moral as well as an economic problem, that a fall in wages and increase in hours, a deterioration of labor conditions, mean wholesale moral as well as economic degeneration, and the needless sacrifice of human lives and human happiness, while a rise of wages, a lessening of hours, a bettering of conditions, mean an intellectual, moral, and social uplift of millions of American men and women. There are employers today who, like the great co-operators, speak as though they were lords of these countless armies of Americans who toil in factory, in shop, in mill, and in the dark places under the earth. They fail to see that all these men have the right and the duty to combine to protect themselves and their families from want and degradation. They fail to see that the nation and the government, within the reach of fair play and adjust administration of the law, must inevitably sympathize with the men who have nothing but their wages, with the men who are struggling for a decent life, as opposed to men, however honorable, who are merely fighting for larger profits and in autocratic control of big business. Each man should have all he earns, whether by brain or body, and the dictator, the great industrial leader, is one of the greatest of earners, and should have a proportional reward. But no man should live on the earnings of another, and there should not be too gross inequality between service and reward. There are men of today, men of integrity and intelligence, who honestly believe that we must go back to the labor conditions of half a century ago. They are opposed to trade unions, root, and branch. They note the unworthy conduct of many labor leaders. They find instances of bad work by union men, of a voluntary restriction of output, of vexations and violent strikes, of jurisdictional disputes between unions which often disastrously involve the best-intentioned and fairest of employers. All these things occur and should be repressed. But the same critic of the trade union might find equal causes of complaint against individual employers of labor, or even against great associations of manufacturers. We might find many great instances of an unwarranted cutting of wages, of flagrant violations of factory laws, and tenement house laws, of the deliberate and systematic cheating of employees by means of truck-stores, of the speeding up of work to a point which is fatal to the health of the workmen, of the sweating of foreign-born workers, of the drafting of feeble little children into dusty workshops, of blacklisting, of putting spies into union meetings, and of the employment in strike times of vicious and desperate ruffians, who are neither better nor worse than are the thugs who are incasionally employed by unions under the sinister name entertainment committees. I believe that the overwhelming majority, both of workmen and of employers, are law-abiding, peaceful, and honorable citizens, and I do not think that it is just to lay up the errors and wrongs of individuals to the entire group to which they belong. I also think, and this is a belief which has been born upon me through many years of practical experience, that the trade union is growing constantly in wisdom as well as in power, and it is becoming one of the most deficient agencies toward the solution of our industrial problems, the elimination of poverty and of industrial disease and accidents, the lessening of employment, the achievement of industrial democracy, and the attainment of a larger measure of social and industrial justice. If I were a factory employee, a workman on the railroads, or a wage earner of any sort, I would undoubtedly join the union of my trade. If I disapproved of its policy, I would join in order to fight that policy. If the union leaders were dishonest, I would join in order to put them out. I believe in the union, and I believe that all men who are benefited by the union are morally bound to help to the extent of their power in the common interests advanced by the union. Nevertheless, irrespective of whether a man should or should not, and does or does not, join the union of his trade, all the rights, privileges, and immunities of that man, as an American, and as a citizen, should be safeguarded and upheld by the law. We dare not make an outlaw of any individual or any group, whatever his or its opinions or professions. The non-unionist, like the unionist, must be protected in all his legal rights by the full weight and power of the law. This question came up before me in the shape of a right of a non-union printer named Miller to hold his position in the government printing office. As I said before, I believe in trade unions. I always prefer to see a union's shop. But any private preferences cannot control my public actions. The government can recognize neither union men nor non-union men as such, and it is bound to treat both exactly alike. In the government printing office, not many months prior to the opening of the presidential campaign of 1904, when I was up for re-election, I discovered that a man had been dismissed because he did not belong to the union. I reinstated him. Mr. Gompers, the President of the American Federation of Labor, with various members of the Executive Council of that body, called upon me to protest on September 29, 1903, and I answered them as follows. I thank you and your committee for your courtesy, and I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you. It will always be a pleasure to see you or any representative of your organizations or of your Federation as a whole. As regards the Miller case, I have little to add to what I've already said. In dealing with it, I ask you to remember that I am dealing purely with the relations of government to its employees. I must govern my action by the laws of the land, which I am sworn to administer, and which differentiate any case in which the government of the United States is a party from all other cases whatsoever. These laws are enacted for the benefit of the whole people, and cannot and must not be construed as permitting the crimination against some of the people. I am President of all the people of the United States, without regard to creed, color, birthplace, occupation, or social condition. My aim is to do equal and exact justice as among them all. In the employment and dismissal of men in the government service, I can no more recognize the fact that a man does or does not belong to a union as being for or against him, than I can recognize the fact that he is a Protestant or Catholic, a Jew or a Gentile, as being for or against him. In the communications sent me by various labor organizations protesting against the retention of Miller in the government printing office, the grounds alleged are twofold, one that he is a non-union man, two that he is not personally fit. The question of his personal fitness is one to be settled in the routine of administrative detail, and cannot be allowed to conflict with or to complicate the larger question of governmental discrimination for or against him or any other man, because he is or is not a member of a union. This is the only question now before me for my decision, and, as to this, my decision is final. Because of things I have done on behalf of justice to the working man, I have often been called a socialist. Usually I have not taken the trouble even to notice the epithet. I am not afraid of names, and I am not one of those who fear to do what is right, because someone else will confound me with partisans with whose principles I am not in accord. Moreover, I know that many American socialists are high-minded and honorable citizens, who in reality are merely radical social reformers. They are oppressed by the brutalities and industrial injustices which we see everywhere about us. When I recall how often I have seen socialists and ardent non-socialists working side by side for some specific measure of social or industrial reform, and how I have found opposed to them on the side of privilege many shrill reactionaries who insist on calling all reformers socialists, I refuse to be panic-stricken by having this title mistakenly applied to me. Nonetheless, without imputing their motives, I do disagree most emphatically with both the fundamental philosophy and the proposed remedies with the Marxian socialists. These socialists are unalterably opposed to our whole industrial system. They believe that the payment of wages means everywhere and inevitably an exploitation of the laborer by the employer, and that this leads inevitably to a class war between those two groups, or as they would say, between the capitalists and proletariat. They assert that this class war is already upon us, and can only be ended when capitalism is entirely destroyed, and all the machines, mills, mines, railroads, and other private property used in production are confiscated, expropriated, or taken over by the workers. They do not as a rule claim, although some of the sinister extremists among them do, that there is and must be a continual struggle between two great classes whose interests are opposed and cannot be reconciled. In this war they insist that the whole government, national, state, and local, is on the side of the employers and is used by them against the workmen, and that our law and even our common morality are class weapons like a policeman's club or a gatling gun. I have never believed, and do not today believe, that such a class war is upon us, or need ever be upon us, nor do I believe that the interests of wage earners and employers cannot be harmonized, compromised, and adjusted. It would be idle to deny that wage earners have certain different economic interests from, let us say, manufacturers or importers, just as farmers have different interests from sailors and fishermen from bankers. There is no reason why any of these economic groups should not consult their group interests by any legitimate means and with due regard to the common, overlying interests of all. I do not even deny that the majority of wage earners, because they have less property and less industrial security than others, and because they do not own the machinery with which they work, as does the farmer, are perhaps in greater need of acting together than are other groups in the community. But I do insist, and I believe that the great majority of wage earners take the same view, that employers and employees have overwhelming interests in common, both as partners in industry and as citizens of the Republic, and that where these interests are a part they can be adjusted by so altering our laws and their interpretation as to secure to all members of the community social and industrial justice. I have always maintained that our worst revolutionaries today are those reactionaries who do not see and will not admit that there is any need for change. Such men seem to believe that the four-and-a-half million progressive voters who in 1912 registered their solemn protest against our social and industrial injustices are anarchists who are not willing to let ill-enough alone. If these reactionaries had lived in an earlier time in our history they would have advocated sedition laws, opposed free speech and free assembly, and voted against free schools, free access by settlers to the public lands, mechanics-lean laws, the prohibition of truck-stores, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. And they are the men who today oppose minimum wage laws, insurance of workmen against the ills of industrial life, and the reform of our legislators and our courts, which can alone render such measures possible. Some of these reactionaries are not bad men, but merely short-sighted and belated. It is these reactionaries, however, who, by standing pat on industrial injustice, incite inevitably to industrial revolt. And it is only we who advocate political and industrial democracy who render possible the progress of our American industry on large constructive lines, with a minimum of friction, because with a maximum of justice. Everything possible should be done to secure the wage worker's fair treatment. There should be an increased wage for the worker of increased productiveness. Everything possible should be done against the capitalist who strives not to reward special efficiency, but to use it as an excuse for reducing the reward of moderate efficiency. The capitalist is an unworthy citizen who pays the efficient man no more than he has been content to pay the average man, and nevertheless reduces the wage of the average man, and effort should be made by the government to check and punish him. When labor-saving machinery is introduced, special care should be taken by the government, if necessary, to see that the wage worker gets his share of the benefit, and that it is not all absorbed by the employer or capitalist. The following case, which has come to my knowledge, illustrates what I mean. A number of new machines were installed in a certain shoe factory, and as a result there was a heavy increase in production even though there was no increase in the labor force. Some of the workmen were instructed in the use of these machines by special demonstrators sent out by the makers of the machines. These men, by reason of their special aptitudes, and the fact that they were not called upon to operate the machines continuously nine hours every day, week in and week out, but only for an hour or so at special times, were naturally able to run the machines at their maximum capacity. When these demonstrators had left the factory and the company's own employees had become used to operating the machines at a fair rate of speed, the foreman of the establishment gradually speeded the machines and demanded a larger and still larger output, constantly endeavoring to drive the men on to greater exertions. Even with a slightly less maximum capacity, the introduction of this machinery resulted in a great increase over former production with the same amount of labor, and so great were the profits from the business in the following two years as to equal the total capitalized stock of the company. But not a cent got into the pay envelope of the workmen beyond what they had formerly been receiving before the introduction of this new machinery, notwithstanding that it had meant an added strain, physical and mental upon their energies, and that they were forced to work harder than ever before. The whole of the increased profits remained with the company. Now this represented an increase of efficiency with a positive decrease of social and industrial justice. The increase of prosperity which came from the increase of production in no way benefited the wage workers. I hold that they were treated with gross injustice and that society, acting if necessary through the government, in such a case should bend its energies to remedy such injustice, and I will support any proper legislation that will aid in securing the desired end. The wage workers should not only receive fair treatment, he should give fair treatment. In order that prosperity may be passed around it is necessary that the prosperity exist. In order that labor shall receive its fair share in the division of reward it is necessary that there be a reward to divide. Any proposal to reduce efficiency by insisting that the most efficient shall be limited in their output to what the least efficient can do is a proposal to limit by so much production, and therefore to impoverish by so much the public, and specifically to reduce the amount that can be divided among the producers. This is all wrong. Our protest must be against unfair division of the reward for production. Every encouragement should be given the businessman, the employer, to make his business prosperous, and therefore to earn more money for himself, and in like fashion every encouragement should be given the efficient workman. We must always keep in mind that to reduce the amount of production serves merely to reduce the amount that is to be divided, is in no way permanently efficient as a protest against unequal distribution, and is permanently detrimental to the entire community. But increased productiveness is not secured by excessive labor amid unhealthy surroundings. The contrary is true. Shorter hours and healthful conditions, and opportunity for the wage worker to make more money, and the chance for enjoyment as well as work, add to efficiency. My contention is that there should be no penalization of efficient productiveness brought about under healthy conditions, but that every increase of production brought about by an increase in efficiency should benefit all the parties to it, including wage workers as well as employers or capitalists, men who work with their hands as well as men who work with their heads. CHAPTER XIII. PART III. OF THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THEATRE ROSEVELT. THIS IS A LIBERVOX RECORDING. ALL LIBERVOX RECORDINGS ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THEATRE ROSEVELT CHAPTER XIII. SOCIAL AND INDUSTRIAL JUSTICE PART III. With the Western Federation of Minors, I more than once had serious trouble. The leaders of this organization had preached anarchy, and certain of them were indicted for having practiced murder in the case of Governor Stoinenberg of Idaho. On one occasion, in a letter or speech, I coupled condemnation of these labor leaders and condemnation of certain big capitalists, describing them all alike as undesirable citizens. This gave great offense to both sides. The open attack upon me was made for the most part either by the New York Papers, which were so frankly representatives of Wall Street, or else by the so-called and miscalled socialists who had anarchistic leanings. Many of the latter sent me open letters of denunciation, and to one of them I responded as follows. THE WHITE HOUSE. Washington, April 22, 1907. DEAR SIR. I have received your letter of the nineteenth instant, in which you enclose the draft of the formal letter which is to follow. I have been notified that several delegations bearing similar requests are on the way hither. In the letter you, on behalf of the Cook County Moyer-Hawood Conference, protest against certain language I used in a recent letter, which you assert to be designed to influence the course of justice in the case of the trial for murder of Messers Moyer and Haywood. I entirely agree with you that it is improper to endeavor to influence the course of justice, whether by threats or in any similar manner. For this reason I have regretted most deeply the actions of such organizations as your own, in undertaking to accomplish this very result, in the very case of which you speak. For instance, your letter is headed, Cook County Moyer-Hawood Pettibone Conference, with the headlines, DEATH CANNOT, WILL NOT, AND SHALL NOT CLAIM OUR BROTHERS. This shows that you and your associates are not demanding a fair trial, or working for a fair trial, but are announcing in advance that the verdict shall only be one way, and that you will not tolerate any other verdict. Such action is flagrant in its impropriety, and I join heartily in condemning it. But it is a simple absurdity to suppose that because any man is on trial for a given offense, he is therefore to be freed from all criticism upon his general conduct and manner of life. In my letter to which you object, I referred to a certain prominent financier, Mr. Harriman, on the one hand, and to Messers Moyer, Haywood, and Debs on the other, as being equally undesirable citizens. It is as foolish to assert that this was designed to influence the trial of Moyer and Haywood as to assert that it was designed to influence the suits that had been brought against Mr. Harriman. I neither expressed nor indicated any opinion as to whether Messers Moyer and Haywood were guilty of the murder of Governor Stoinenberg. If they are guilty, they certainly ought to be punished. If they are not guilty, they certainly ought not to be punished. But no possible outcome, either of the trial or the suits, can affect my judgment as to the undesirability of the type of citizen of those whom I mentioned. Messers Moyer, Haywood, and Debs stand as representatives of those men who have done as much to discredit the labor movement as the worst speculative financiers, or most unscrupulous employers of labor and debauchers of legislatures, have done to discredit honest capitalists and fair-dealing businessmen. They stand as the representatives of those men who, by their public utterances and manifestos, by the utterances of the papers they control or inspire, and by the words and deeds of those associated with or subordinated to them, habitually appear as guilty of incitement, too, or apology for bloodshed and violence. If this does not constitute undesirable citizenship, then there can never be any undesirable citizens. The men whom I denounce represent the men who have abandoned that legitimate movement for the uplifting of labor, with which I have the utmost hearty sympathy. They have adopted practices which cut them off from those who lead this legitimate movement. In every way I shall support the law abiding and upright representatives of labor, and in no way can I better support them than by drawing the sharpest possible line between them on the one hand and, on the other hand, those preachers of violence who are themselves the worst foes of honest, laboring men. Let me repeat my deep regret that any body of men should so far forget their duty to the country as to endeavor, by the formation of societies and in other ways, to influence the course of justice in this matter. I have received many such letters as yours. Accompanying them were newspaper clippings announcing demonstrations, parades, and mass meetings designed to show that the representatives of labor, without regard to the facts, demand the acquittal of Messers Haywood and Moyer. Such meetings can, of course, be designed only to coerce the court or jury in rendering a verdict, and they therefore deserve all the condemnation which you, in your letter, say should be awarded to those who endeavor improperly to influence the course of justice. You would, of course, be entirely within your rights if you merely announced that you thought Messers Moyer and Haywood were desirable citizens. Though in such case I should take frank issue with you and I should say that, wholly and without regard to whether or not they are guilty of the crime for which they are now being tried, they represent as thoroughly undesirable a type of citizenship as can be found in this country, a type which, in the letter to which you so unreasonably take exception, I showed not to be confined to any one class, but to exist among some representatives of great capitalists, as well as among some representatives of wage workers. In that letter I condemned both types. Certain representatives of the great capitalists in turn condemned me for including Mr. Harriman in my condemnation of Messers Moyer and Haywood. Certain of the representatives of labor in their turn condemned me because I included Messers Moyer and Haywood as undesirable citizens together with Mr. Harrison. I am as profoundly indifferent to the condemnation in one case as in the other. I challenge as a right the support of all good Americans, whether wage workers or capitalists, whatever their occupation or creed, or in whatever portion of the country they live, when I condemn both types of bad citizenship which I have held up to reprobation. It seems to be a mark of utter insincerity to fail thus to condemn both, and to apologize for either robs the man thus apologizing of all right to condemn any wrongdoing in any man, rich or poor, in public or in private life. You say you ask for a square deal for Messers Moyer and Haywood. So do I. When I say square deal, I mean a square deal to everyone. It is equally a violation of the policy of the square deal for a capitalist to protest against denunciation of a capitalist who is guilty of wrongdoing, and for a labor leader to protest against the denunciation of a labor leader who has been guilty of wrongdoing. I stand for equal justice to both, and so far as in my power lies I shall uphold justice, whether the man accused of guilt has behind him the wealthiest corporation, the greatest aggregations of riches in the country, or whether he has behind him the most influential labor organization in the country. I treated anarchists and the bomb-throwing and dynamiting gentry precisely as I treated other criminals. Murder is murder. It is not rendered one-wit better by the allegation that it is committed on behalf of a cause. It is true that law and order are not sufficient, but they are essential. Lawlessness and murderous violence must be quelled before any permanence of reform can be obtained. Yet when they have been quelled, the beneficiaries of the enforcement of law must in their turn be taught that law is upheld as a means to the enforcement of justice, and that we will not tolerate its being turned into an engine of injustice and oppression. The fundamental need in dealing with our people, whether laboring men or others, is not charity, but justice. We must all work in common for the common end of helping each and all in a spirit of the sanest, broadest, and deepest brotherhood. It was not always easy to avoid feeling very deep anger with the selfishness and short-sightedness shown by both the representatives of certain employer's organizations and by certain great labor federations or unions. One such employer's association was called the National Association of Manufacturers. Extreme though the attacks sometimes made upon me by the extreme labor organizations were, they were not quite as extreme as the attacks made upon me by the head of the National Association of Manufacturers, and as regards their attitude towards legislation, I came to the conclusion, toward the end of my term, that the latter had actually gone farther the wrong way than did the former, and the former went a good distance also. The opposition of the National Association of Manufacturers to every rational and moderate measure for benefiting the working man, such as measures abolishing child labor or securing workmen's compensation, caused me real and grave concern, for I felt that it was ominous of evil for the whole country to have men who ought to stand high in wisdom and in guiding force take a course and use such language of such reactionary type as directly to incite revolution, for this is what the extreme reactionary always does. Often I was attacked by the two sides at once. In the spring of 1906 I received in the same mail a letter from a very good friend of mine who thought that I had been unduly hard on some labor men, and a letter from another friend, the head of a great corporation, who complained about me for both favoring labor and speaking against large fortunes. My answers ran as follows. April 26, 1906. Personal. My Dear Doctor. In one of my last letters to you I enclosed a copy of a letter of mine in which I quoted from So-and-So's Advocacy of Murder. You may be interested to know that he and his brother socialists, in reality anarchists, of the frankly murderous type, have been violently attacking my speech because of my allusion to the sympathy expressed for murder. In the Socialist of Toledo, Ohio, of April 21st, for instance, the attack on me is based specifically on the following paragraph of my speech, to which he takes violent exception. We can no more and no less afford to condone evil in the man of capital than evil in the man of no capital. The wealthy man who exalts because there is a failure of justice in the effort to bring some trust-magnet to an account for his misdeeds is as bad as, and no worse than, the so-called labor leader who clamorously strives to excite a foul class feeling on behalf of some other labor leader who is implicated in murder. One attitude is as bad as the other, and no worse. In each case the accused is entitled to exact justice, and in neither case is their need of action by others which can be construed into an expression of sympathy for crime. Remember that this crowd of labor leaders have done all in their power to overall the executive in the courts of Idaho on behalf of men accused of murder and beyond question insiders of murder in the past. April 26, 1906. My dear judge. I wish the papers had given more prominence to what I said as to the murder part of my speech. But, oh, my dear sir, I utterly and radically disagree with you in what you say about large fortunes. I wish it were in my power to devise some scheme to make it increasingly difficult to heap them up beyond a certain amount. As the difficulties in the way of such a scheme are very great, let us at least prevent their being bequeathed after death or given during life to any one man in excessive amount. You and other capitalist friends on one side shy off at what I say against them. Have you seen the frantic articles against me by the anarchists and the socialists of the bomb-throwing persuasion on the other side because of what I said in my speech in reference to those who, in effect, advocate murder? On another occasion I was vehemently denounced in certain capitalistic papers because I had a number of labor leaders, including miners from Butte, lunch with me at the White House, and this at the very time that the Western Federation of Miners was most ferocious in its denunciation of me because of what it alleged to be my unfriendly attitude toward labor. To one of my critics I set forth my views in the following letter. November 26, 1903. I have your letter of the twenty-fifth instant with enclosure. These men, not all of whom were miners, by the way, came here and were at lunch with me in company with Mr. Carol D. Wright, Mr. Wayne McVeigh, and Secretary Cortelieu. They are as decent a set of men as can be. They all agreed entirely with me in my denunciation of what had been done in the core Dailene country, and it appeared that some of them were on the platform with me when I denounced this type of outrage three years ago in Butte. There is not one man who was here, who I believe was in any way, shape or form responsible for such outrages. I find that the ultra-socialistic members of the unions in Butte denounced these men for coming here in a manner as violent and I may say as irrational as the denunciation by the capitalistic writer in the article you sent me. Doubtless the gentleman of whom you speak as your general manager is an admirable man. I, of course, was not alluding to him, but I most emphatically was alluding to men who write such articles as that you sent me. These articles are to be paralleled by the similar articles in the populist and socialist papers, when two years ago I had dinner at one time with Pierpont Morgan, and at another time J. J. Hill, and at another Harriman, and at another time Schiff. Furthermore, they could be paralleled by the articles in the same type of paper which at the time of the Miller incident in the printing office were in a condition of nervous anxiety because I met the labor leaders to discuss it. It would have been a great misfortune if I had not met them, and it would have been an even greater misfortune if after meeting them I had yielded to their protests in the matter. You say in your letter that you know I am on record as opposed to violence. Pardon my saying that this seems to me not the right way to put the matter, if by record you mean utterance and not action. Aside from what happened when I was governor in connection, for instance, with the Croton Dam strike riots, all you have to do is turn back to what took place last June in Arizona, and you can find out all about it for Mr. X of New York. The Miners struck, violence followed, and the Arizona territorial authorities notified me that they could not grapple with the situation. Within twenty minutes of the receipt of the telegram, orders were issued to the nearest available troops, and twenty-four hours afterwards General Baldwin and his regulars were on the ground, and twenty-four hours later every vestige of disorder had disappeared. The Miners Federation in their meeting, I think at Denver, a short while afterwards, passed resolutions denouncing me. I do not know whether the Mining and Engineering Journal paid any heed to this incident or know of it. If the journal did, I suppose it can hardly have failed to understand that to put an immediate stop to rioting by the use of the United States Army is a fact of importance besides which the criticism of my having labor leaders to lunch shrinks into the same insignificance as the criticism in a different type of paper about my having trust magnets to lunch. While I am president, I wish the labor man to feel that he has the same right of access to me that the capitalist has, that the doors swing open as easily to the wage worker as to the head of a big corporation and no easier. Anything else seems to be not only un-American, but is symptomatic of an attitude which will cost grave trouble if persevered in. To discriminate against labor men from Butte, because there is a reason to believe that rioting has been excited in other districts by certain labor unions, or individuals in labor unions in Butte, would be to adopt precisely the attitude of those who desire me to discriminate against all capitalists in Wall Street, because there are plenty of capitalists in Wall Street who have been guilty of bad financial practices and who have endeavored to override or evade the laws of the land. In my judgment, the only safe attitude for a private citizen and still more for a public servant, to assume, is that he will draw the line on conduct, discriminating against neither corporation nor union as such, nor in favor of either as such, but endeavoring to make the decent member of the union and the upright capitalists alike feel that they are bound, not only by self-interest, but by every consideration of principle and duty, to stand together on the matters of most moment to the nation. On another of the various occasions when I had labor leaders to dine at the White House, my critics were rather shocked because I had John Morley to meet them. The labor leaders in question included the heads of the various railroad brotherhoods, men like Mr. Morrissey, in whose sound judgment and high standard of citizenship I had peculiar confidence, and I asked Mr. Morley to meet them because they represented the exact type of American citizen with whom I thought he ought to be brought in contact. One of the devices sometimes used by big corporations to break down the law was to treat the passage of laws as an excuse for action on their part, which they knew would be resented by the public, it being their purpose to turn this resentment against law instead of against themselves. The heads of the Louisville and Nashville Road were bitter opponents of everything done by the government towards securing good treatment for their employees. In February 1908 they and various other railways announced that they intended to reduce the wages of their employees. A general strike with all the attendant disorder and trouble was threatened in consequence. I accordingly sent the following open letter to the Interstate Commerce Commission, February 16, 1908, to the Interstate Commerce Commission. I am informed that a number of railroad companies have served notice of a proposed reduction of wages of their employees. One of them, the Louisville and Nashville, in announcing the reduction, states that the drastic laws inimicable to the interests of the railroads that have in the past year or two been enacted by Congress and the state legislatures are largely or chiefly responsible for the conditions requiring the reduction. Under such circumstances it is possible that the public may soon be confronted by serious industrial disputes, and the law provides that in such a case either party may demand the services of your chairman and the commissioner of labor as a board of mediation and conciliation. These reductions and wages may be warranted or they may not. As to this the public, which is a vitally interested party, can form no judgment without a more complete knowledge of the essential facts and real merits of the case, than it has now or that it can possibly obtain from the special pleadings, certain to be put forth by each side in case their dispute should bring about serious interruption to traffic. If the reduction in wages is due to natural causes, the loss of business being such that the burden should be, and is, equitably distributed between capitalist and wage worker, the public should know it. If it is caused by legislation, the public and Congress should know it, and if it is caused by misconduct on the past financial or other operations of any railroad, then everybody should know it, especially if the excuse of unfriendly legislation is advanced as the method of covering up past business misconduct by the railroad managers, or as a justification for failure to treat fairly the wage-earning employees of the company. Moreover, an industrial conflict between a railroad corporation and its employees offers peculiar opportunities to any small number of evil-disposed persons to destroy life and property and foment public disorder. Of course, if life, property, and public order are endangered, prompt and drastic measures for their protection become the first plain duty. All other issues then become subordinate to the preservation of the public peace, and the real merits of the original controversy are necessarily lost from view. This vital consideration should be ever kept in mind by all law-abiding and farsighted members of labor organizations. It is sincerely to be hoped, therefore, that any wage controversy that may arise between the railroads and their employees may find a peaceful solution through the methods of conciliation and arbitration already provided by Congress, which have proven so effective during the last year. To this end, the Commission should be in a position to have available for any board of conciliation or arbitration relevant data pertaining to such carriers as may become involved in industrial disputes. Should conciliation fail to affect a settlement and arbitration be rejected, accurate information should be available in order to develop a properly informed public opinion. I therefore ask you to make such an investigation, both of your records and by other means at your command, as will enable you to furnish data concerning such conditions obtaining on the Louisville and Nashville and any other roads as may relate directly or indirectly to the real merits of the possibly impending controversy. Theodore Roosevelt. This letter achieved its purpose, and the threatened reduction of wages was not made. It was an instance of what could be accomplished by governmental action. Let me add, however, with all the emphasis I possess, that this does not mean any failure on my part to recognize the fact that if governmental action places too heavy burdens on railways, it will be impossible for them to operate without doing injustice to somebody. Railways cannot pay proper wages and render proper service unless they make money. The investors must get a reasonable profit or they will not invest, and the public cannot be well served unless the investors are making reasonable profits. There is every reason why rates should not be too high, but they must be sufficiently high to allow the railways to pay good wages. Moreover, when laws like workmen's compensation laws and the like are passed, it must always be kept in mind by the legislature that the purpose is to distribute over the whole community a burden that should not be borne only by those least able to bear it, that is, by the injured man or the widow and orphans of the dead man. If the railway is already receiving a disproportionate return from the public, then the burden may, with propriety, bear purely on the railway, but if it is not earning a disproportionate return, then the public must bear its share of the burden of the increased service the railway is rendering. Dividends and wages should go up together, and the relation of rates to them should not be forgotten. This, of course, does not apply to dividends based on water, nor does it mean that if foolish people have built a road that renders no service, the public must nevertheless, in some way, guarantee a return on the investment. But it does mean that the interests of the honest investor are entitled to the same protection as the interests of the honest manager, the honest shipper, and the honest wage earner. All these conflicting considerations should be carefully considered by legislatures before passing laws. One of the great objects in creating commissions should be the provision of disinterested, fair-minded experts who will really and wisely consider all these matters, and will shape their actions accordingly. This is one reason why such matters as the regulation of rates, the provision for full crews on roads and the like, should be left for treatment by railway commissions and not be settled off-hand by direct legislative action. CHAPTER XIV PART ONE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF THEODORE ROSEVELT 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 ROSEVELT CHAPTER XIV. THE MONROE DOCTRINE AND THE PANAMAH CANAL, PART ONE. No nation can claim rights without acknowledging the duties that go with the rights. It is a contemptible thing for a great nation to render itself impotent in international action, whether because of cowardice or sloth, or sheer inability or unwillingness to look into the future. It is a very wicked thing for a nation to do wrong to others. But the most contemptible and most wicked course of conduct is for a nation to use offensive language or be guilty of offensive actions toward other people and yet fail to hold its own if the other nation retaliates, and it is almost as bad to undertake responsibilities and then not fulfill them. During the seven and a half years that I was president, this nation behaved in international matters toward all other nations precisely as an honorable man behaves to his fellow men. We made no promise which we could not and did not keep. We made no threat which we did not carry out. We never failed to assert our rights in the face of the strong, and we never failed to treat both strong and weak with courtesy and justice, and against the weak when they misbehaved we were slower to assert our rights, than we were against the strong. As a legacy of the Spanish war we were left with peculiar relations to the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, and with an immensely added interest in Central America and the Caribbean Sea. As regards the Philippines, my belief was that we should train them for self-government as rapidly as possible, and then leave them free to decide their own fate. I did not believe in setting the time limit within which we would give them independence, because I did not believe it wise to try to forecast how soon they would be fit for self-government, and once having made the promise I would have felt that it was imperative to keep it. Within a few months of my assuming office we had stamped out the last armed resistance in the Philippines that was not of merely sporadic character, and as soon as peace was secured we turned our energies to developing the islands in the interest of the natives. We established schools everywhere, we built roads, we administered and even handed justice, we did everything possible to encourage agriculture and industry, and in constantly increasing measure we employed natives to do their own governing, and finally provided a legislative chamber. No higher grade of public officials ever handled the affairs of any colony than the public officials who in succession governed the Philippines. With the possible exception of the Sudan and not even accepting Algiers, I know of no country ruled and administered by men of the white race where that rule and that administration have been exercised so emphatically with an eye single to the welfare of the natives themselves. The English and Dutch administrators of Malaysia have done admirable work, but the profit to the Europeans in those states has always been one of the chief elements considered, whereas in the Philippines our whole attention was concentrated upon the welfare of the Filipinos themselves, if anything, to the neglect of our own interests. I do not believe that America has any special beneficial interest in retaining the Philippines. Our work there has benefited us only as any efficiently done work performed for the benefit of others does incidentally help the character of those who do it. The people of the islands have never developed so rapidly from every standpoint as during the years of the American occupation. The time will come when it will be wise to take their own judgment as to whether they wish to continue their association with America or not. There is, however, one consideration upon which we should insist. Either we should retain complete control of the islands or absolve ourselves from all responsibility for them. Any half-and-half course would be both foolish and disastrous. We are governing and have been governing the islands in the interests of the Filipinos themselves. If after due time the Filipinos themselves decide that they do not wish to be thus governed, then I trust that we will leave. But when we do leave it must be distinctly understood that we retain no protectorate, and above all, that we take no part in joint protectorate over the islands and give them no guarantee of neutrality or otherwise, that in short we are absolutely quit of responsibility for them of every kind and description. The Filipinos were quite incapable of standing by themselves when we took possession of the islands, and we had made no promise concerning them. But we had explicitly promised to leave the island of Cuba, had explicitly promised that Cuba should be independent. Early in my administration that promise was redeemed. When the promise was made I doubt if there was a single ruler or diplomat in Europe who believed that it would be kept. As far as I know the United States was the first power which, having made such a promise, kept it in letter and spirit. England was unwise enough to make such a promise when she took Egypt. It would have been a capital misfortune to have kept the promise, and England has remained in Egypt for over 30 years, and will unquestionably remain indefinitely, but though it is necessary for her to do so, the fact of her doing so has meant the breaking of a positive promise and has been a real evil. Japan made the same guarantee about Korea, but as far as can be seen there was never even any thought of keeping the promise in this case, and Korea, which had shown herself utterly impotent either for self- government or self-defense, was in actual fact almost immediately annexed to Japan. We made the promise to give Cuba independence, and we kept the promise. Leonard Wood was left in as governor for two or three years and devolved order out of chaos, raising the administration of the island to a level, moral and material which it had never before achieved. We also, by treaty, gave the Cubans substantial advantages in our markets. Then we left the island, turning the government over to its own people. After four or five years a revolution broke out, during my administration, and we again had to intervene to restore order. We promptly sent thither a small army of pacification. Under General Barry, order was restored and kept, and absolute justice done. The American troops were then withdrawn, and the Cubans re-established in complete possession of their own beautiful island, and they are in possession of it now. There are plenty of occasions in our history when we have shown weakness or inefficiency, and some occasions when we have not been as scrupulous as we should have been as regards the rights of others. But I know of no action by any other government in relation to a weaker power, which showed such disinterested efficiency in rendering service as was true in connection with our intervention in Cuba. As in the Philippines, and as in Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, and later in Panama, no small part of our success was due to the fact that we put in the highest grade of men as public officials. This practice was inaugurated under President McKinley. I found admirable men in office, and I continued them and appointed men like them as their successors. The way that the Custom Houses in Santo Domingo were administered by Colton definitely established the success of our experiment in securing peace for that island republic, and in Puerto Rico, under the administration of affairs under such officials as Hunt, Winthrop, Post, Ward, and Graham, more substantial progress was achieved in a decade than in any previous century. The Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico came within our own sphere of governmental action. In addition to this, we asserted certain rights in the Western Hemisphere under the Monroe Doctrine. My endeavor was not only to assert these rights, but frankly and fully to acknowledge the duties that went with the rights. The Monroe Doctrine lays down the rule that the Western Hemisphere is not hereafter to be treated as subject to settlement and occupation by old world powers. It is not international law, but it is a cardinal principle of our foreign policy. There is no difficulty at the present day in maintaining this doctrine, save where the American power whose interest is threatened has shown itself in international matters both weak and delinquent. The great and prosperous civilized Commonwealths, such as Argentina, Brazil, and Chile in the southern half of South America, have advanced so far that they no longer stand in any position of tutelage toward the United States. They occupied toward us precisely the position that Canada occupies. Their friendship is the friendship of equals, for equals. My view was that as regards these nations there was no more necessity for asserting the Monroe Doctrine than there was to assert it in regard to Canada. They were competent to assert it for themselves. Of course if one of these nations or if Canada should be overcome by some old world power, which then proceeded to occupy its territory, we would undoubtedly, if the American nation needed our help, give it in order to prevent such occupation from taking place. But the initiative would come from the nation itself and the United States would merely act as a friend whose help was invoked. The case was and is widely different as regards certain not all of the tropical states in the neighborhood of the Caribbean Sea. Where these states are stable and prosperous they stand on a footing of absolute equality with all other communities. But some of them have been prey to such continuous revolutionary misrule as to have grown impotent either to do their duties, to outsiders, or to enforce their rights against outsiders. The United States has not the slightest desire to make aggressions on any one of these states. On the contrary it will submit to much from them without showing resentment. If any great civilized power, Russia or Germany for instance, had behaved toward us as Venezuela under Castro behaved, this country would have gone to war at once. We did not go to war with Venezuela merely because our people declined to be irritated by the actions of a weak opponent and showed a forbearance which probably went beyond the limits of wisdom in refusing to take umbrage at what was done by the weak. Although we would certainly have resented it had it been done by the strong. In the case of two states however affairs reached such a crisis that we had to act. These two states were Santo Domingo and the then owner of the Isthmus of Panama, Colombia. The Santo Domingan case was the less important and yet it possessed a real importance and moreover is instructive because the action they are taken should serve as a precedent for American action in all similar cases. During the early years of my administration Santo Domingo was in its usual condition of chronic revolution. There was always fighting, always plundering and the successful graspers for governmental power were always pawning ports and custom houses or trying to put them up as guarantees for loans. Of course the foreigners who made loans under such conditions demanded exorbitant interest and if they were Europeans expected their governments to stand by them. So utter was the disorder that on one occasion when Admiral Dewey landed to pay a call of ceremony on the President he and his party were shot at by revolutionists in crossing the square and had to return to the ships leaving the call unpaid. There was default on the interest due to the creditors and finally the latter insisted upon their governments intervening. Two or three of the European powers were endeavoring to arrange for concerted action and I was finally notified that these powers intended to take and hold several of the seaports which held custom houses. This meant that unless I acted at once I would find foreign powers in partial possession of Santo Domingo in which event the very individuals who in the actual event deprecated the precaution taken to prevent such action would have advocated extreme and violent measures to undo the effect of their own supineness. Nine tenths of wisdom is to be wise in time and at the right time and my whole foreign policy was based on the exercise of intelligent forethought and of decisive action sufficiently far in advance of any likely crisis to make it improbable that we would run into serious trouble. Santo Domingo had fallen into such chaos that once for some weeks there were two rival governments in it and a revolution was being carried on against each. At one period one government was at sea in a small gunboat but still stoutly maintained that it was in possession of the island and entitled to make loans and declare peace or war. The situation had become intolerable by the time that I interfered. There was a naval commander in the waters whom I directed to prevent any fighting which might menace the custom houses. He carried out his orders both to his and my satisfaction in thoroughgoing fashion. On one occasion when an insurgent force threatened to attack a town in which Americans had interests he notified the commanders on both sides that he would not permit any fighting in the town but that he would appoint a certain place where they could meet and fight it out and that the victors should have the town. They agreed to meet his wishes. The fight came off at the appointed place and the victors who if I remember rightly where the insurgents were given the town. It was the custom houses that caused the trouble for they offered the only means of raising money and the revolutions were carried on to get possession of them. Accordingly I secured an agreement with the governmental authorities who for the moment seemed best able to speak for the country by which these custom houses were placed under American control. The arrangement was that we should keep order and prevent any interference with the custom houses or the places where they stood and should collect the revenues. Forty-five percent of the revenue was then turned over to the Santo Domingan government and fifty-five percent put in a sinking fund in New York for the benefit of the creditors. The arrangement worked in capital style. On the forty-five percent basis the Santo Domingan government received from us a larger sum than it had ever received before when nominally all the revenue went to it. The creditors were entirely satisfied with the arrangement and no excuse for interference by European powers remained. Occasional disturbances occurred in the island, of course, but on the whole there ensued a degree of peace and prosperity which the island had not known before for at least a century. All this was done without the loss of life, with the ascent of all parties in interest and without subjecting the United States to any charge, while practically all of the interference after the naval commander whom I have mentioned had taken the initial steps in preserving order consisted in putting a first-class man trained in our insular service at the head of the Santo Domingan custom service. We secured peace. We protected the people of the islands against foreign foes, and we minimized the chance of domestic trouble. We satisfied the creditors and the foreign nations to which the creditors belonged, and our own part of the work was done with the utmost efficiency and with rigid honesty so that not a particle of scandal was ever so much as hinted at. Under these circumstances those who do not know the nature of the professional international philanthropists would suppose that these apostles of international peace would have been overjoyed with what we had done. As a matter of fact, when they took any notice of it at all, it was to denounce it, and those American newspapers which are fondest of proclaiming themselves the foes of war and the friends of peace violently attacked me for averting war from and bringing peace to the island. They insisted I had no power to make the agreement and demanded the rejection of the treaty which was to perpetuate the agreement. They were, of course, wholly unable to advance a single sound reason of any kind for their attitude. I suppose the real explanation was partly their dislike of me personally, and unwillingness to see peace come through or national honor upheld by me, and in the next place their sheer, simple devotion to prattle and dislike of efficiency. They liked to have people come together and talk about peace, or even sign bits of paper with something about peace or arbitration on them, but they took no interest in whatever the practical achievement of a peace that told for good government and decency and honesty. They were joined by the many moderately well-meaning men who always demand that a thing be done, but also always demand that it be not done in the only way in which it was, as a matter of fact, possible to do it. The men of this kind insisted that, of course, Santo Domingo must be protected and made to behave itself, and that, of course, the Panama Canal must be dug, but they insisted even more strongly that neither feat should be accomplished in the only way in which it was possible to accomplish it at all. The Constitution did not explicitly give me power to bring about the necessary agreement with Santo Domingo, but the Constitution did not forbid my doing what I did. I put the agreement into effect, and I continued its execution for two years before the Senate acted, and I would have continued it until the end of my term, if necessary, without any action by Congress. But it was far preferable that there should be action by Congress, so that we might be proceeding under a treaty which was the law of the land, and not merely by direction of the chief executive which would lapse when that particular executive left office. I therefore did my best to get the Senate to ratify what I had done. There was a good deal of difficulty about it. With the exception of one or two men like Clark of Arkansas, the Democratic Senators acted in that spirit of unworthy partisanship which subordinates national interest to some fancied partisan advantage, and they were cordially backed by all that portion of the press which took its inspiration from Wall Street, and was violently hostile to the administration because of its attitude towards great corporations. Most of the Republican Senators under the lead of Senator Lodge stood by me, but some of them, of the more conservative or reactionary type, who were already growing hostile to me on the trust question, first proceeded to sneer at what had been done, and to raise all kinds of meticulous objections which they themselves finally abandoned, but which furnished an excuse on which the opponents of the treaty could hang adverse action. Unfortunately, the Senators who were the most apt to speak of the dignity of the Senate and to insist upon its importance were the very ones who were also most apt to try to make display of this dignity and importance by thwarting the public business. This case was typical. The Republicans in question spoke against certain provisions of the proposed treaty. They then, having ingeniously provided ammunition for the foes of the treaty, abandoned their position, and the Democrats stepped into the position they had abandoned. Enough Republicans were absent to prevent the securing of a two-thirds vote for the treaty, and the Senate adjourned without any action at all, and with a feeling of entire self-satisfaction at having left the country in the position of assuming a responsibility and then failing to fulfill it. Apparently the Senators in question felt that in some way they had upheld their dignity. All that they had really done was to shirk their duty. Somebody had to do that duty, and accordingly I did it. I went ahead and administered the proposed treaty anyhow, considering it as a simple agreement on the part of the Executive which would be converted into a treaty whenever the Senate acted. After a couple of years the Senate did act, having previously made some utterly unimportant changes which I ratified and persuaded Santo Domingo to ratify. In all its history Santo Domingo has had nothing happen to it as fortunate as this treaty, and the passing of it saved the United States from having to face serious difficulties with one or more foreign powers. It cannot in the long run prove possible for the United States to protect delinquent American nations from punishment for the non-performance of their duties unless she undertakes to make them perform their duties. People may theorize about this as much as they wish, but whenever a sufficiently strong outside nation becomes sufficiently aggrieved, then either that nation will act or the United States government itself will have to act. We were face to face at one period of my administration with this condition of affairs in Venezuela, when Germany, rather feebly backed by England, undertook a blockade against Venezuela to make Venezuela adopt the German and English view about certain agreements. There was real danger that the blockade would finally result in Germany's taking possession of certain cities or custom houses. I succeeded, however, in getting all the parties in interest to submit their cases to the Hague Tribunal. End of Chapter 14 Part 1 Chapter 14 Part 2 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 Autobiography of Theodore Roosevelt Chapter 14 The Monroe Doctrine in the Panama Canal Part 2 By far the most important action I took in foreign affairs during the time I was president related to the Panama Canal. Here again there was much accusation about my having acted in an unconstitutional manner, a position which can be upheld only if Jefferson's action in acquiring Louisiana be treated as unconstitutional, and at different stages of the affair, believers in a do-nothing policy denounced me as having usurped authority, which meant that when nobody else could or would exercise efficient authority, I exercised it. During the nearly 400 years that had elapsed since Balboa crossed the Isthmus, there had been a good deal of talk about building an Isthmus Canal, and there had been various discussions of the subject and negotiations about it in Washington for the previous half-century. So far it had all resulted merely in conversation, and the time had come when, unless somebody was prepared to act with decision, we would have to resign ourselves to at least half a century of further conversation. Under the Hey-Pence-Fault Treaty, signed shortly after I became President, and thanks to our negotiations with the French Panama Company, the United States at last acquired a possession, so far as Europe was concerned, which warranted her in immediately undertaking the task. It remained to decide where the canal should be, whether along the line already pioneered by the French Company in Panama or in Nicaragua. Panama belonged to the Republic of Colombia. Nicaragua bid eagerly for the privilege of having the United States build the canal through her territory. As long as it was doubtful which route we would decide upon, Colombia extended every promise of friendly cooperation. At the Pan-American Congress in Mexico, her delegate joined in the unanimous vote, which requested the United States forthwith build the canal, and at her eager request we negotiated the Hey-Heron Treaty with her, which gave us the right to build the canal across Panama. A board of experts sent to the Isthmus had reported that this route was better than the Nicaragua route, and that it would be well to build the canal over it, provided we could purchase the rights of the French Company for forty million dollars, but that otherwise they would advise taking the Nicaragua route. Ever since 1846 we had had a treaty with the power, then in control of the Isthmus, the Republic of Nugrenada, the predecessor of the Republic of Colombia, and of the present Republic of Panama, by which treaty the United States was guaranteed free and open right of way across the Isthmus of Panama by any mode of communication that might be constructed, while in return our government guaranteed the perfect neutrality of the Isthmus with a view to the preservation of free transit. For nearly fifty years we had asserted the right to prevent the closing of this highway of commerce. Secretary of State Cass in 1858 officially stated the American position as follows. Sovereignty has its duties as well as its rights, and none of these local governments, even if administered with more regard to the just demands of other nations than they have been, would be permitted in a spirit of eastern isolation to close the gates of intercourse of the great highways of the world, and justify the act by the pretension that these avenues of trade and travel belong to them, and that they choose to shut them, or what is almost equivalent to encumber them with such unjust relations as would prevent their general use. We had again and again been forced to intervene to protect the transit across the Isthmus, and the intervention was frequently at the request of Columbia herself. The effort to build a canal by private capital had been made under de lesseps, and had resulted in lamentable failure. Every serious proposal to build the canal in such manner had been abandoned. The United States had repeatedly announced that we would not permit it to be built or controlled by any old world government. Columbia was utterly impotent to build it herself. Under these circumstances it had become a matter of imperative obligation that we should build it ourselves without further delay. I took final action in 1903. During the preceding 53 years the governments of New Granada and of its successor, Columbia, had been in a constant state of flux, and the state of Panama had sometimes been treated as almost independent in a loose federal league, and sometimes as the mere property of the government at Bogota, and there had been innumerable appeals to arms, sometimes of adequate, sometimes for inadequate reasons. The following is a partial list of the disturbances on the Isthmus of Panama during the period in question, as reported to us by our consuls. It is not possible to give a complete list, and some of the reports that speak of revolutions must mean unsuccessful revolutions. May 22, 1850, Outbreak, Two Americans Killed, War Vessel Demanded to Quell Outbreak, October 1850, Revolutionary Plot to Bring About Independence of the Isthmus, July 22, 1851, Revolution in Four Southern Provinces, November 14, 1851, Outbreak at Chagras, Man of War Requested for Chagras, June 27, 1853, Insurrection at Bogota, and Consequent Disturbance on Isthmus, War Vessel Demanded, May 23, 1854, Political Disturbances, War Vessel Requested, June 28, 1854, Attempted Revolution, October 24, 1854, Independence of Isthmus Demanded by Provincial Legislature, April 1856, Riot and Massacre of Americans, May 4, 1856, Riot, May 18, 1856, Riot, June 3, 1856, Riot, October 2, 1856, Conflict between Two Native Parties, United States Force Landed, December 18, 1858, Attempted Secession of Panama, April 1859, Riots, September 1860, Outbreak, October 4, 1860, Landing of United States Forces in Consequence, May 23, 1861, Intervention of the United States Force Required by Intendente, October 2, 1861, Insurrection in Civil War, April 4, 1862, Measures to Prevent Rebels Crossing Isthmus, June 13, 1862, Moscaras Troops Refused Admittance to Panama, March 1865, Revolution and United States Troops Landed, August 1865, Riots, Unsuccessful Attempt to Invade Panama, March 1866, Unsuccessful Revolution, April 1867, Attempt to Overthrow Government, August 1867, Attempt at Revolution, July 5, 1868, Revolution, Provisional Government Inaugurated, August 29, 1868, Revolution, Provisional Government Overthrown, April 1871, Revolution, Followed Apparently by Counterrevolution, April 1873, Revolution in Civil War which Lasted to October 1875, August 1876, Civil War which Lasted until April 1877, July 1878, Rebellion, December 1878, Revolt, April 1879, Revolution, June 1879, Revolution, March 1883, Riot, May 1883, Riot, June 1884, Revolutionary Attempt, December 1884, Revolutionary Attempt, January 1885, Revolutionary Disturbances, March 1885, Revolution, April 1887, Disturbance on Panama Railroad, November 1887, Disturbance on Line of Canal, January 1889, Riot, January 1895, Revolution which Lasted until April, March 1895, Incendiary Attempt, October 1899, Revolution, February 1900 to July 1900, Revolution, January 1901, Revolution, July 1901, Revolutionary Disturbances, September 1901, City of Colon Taken by Rebels, March 1902, Revolutionary Disturbances, July 1902, Revolution, The above is only a partial list of the revolutions, rebellions, insurrections, riots, and other outbreaks that occurred during the period in question, yet they number 53 for the 53 years and they showed a tendency to increase rather than decrease in numbers and intensity. One of them lasted for nearly three years before it was quelled, another for nearly a year. In short, the experience of over half a century had shown Columbia to be utterly incapable of keeping order on the Isthmus. Only the active interference of the United States had enabled her to preserve so much as a semblance of sovereignty. Had it not been for the exercise by the United States of the police power in her interest, her connection with the Isthmus would have been sundered long before it was. In 1856, in 1860, in 1873, in 1885, in 1901, and again in 1902, sailors and marines from United States warships were forced to land in order to patrol the Isthmus to protect life and property and to see that the transit across the Isthmus was kept open. In 1861, in 1862, in 1885, and in 1900, the Colombian government asked that the United States government would land troops to protect Colombian interests and maintain order on the Isthmus. The people of Panama during the preceding twenty years had three times sought to establish their independence by revolution or secession in 1885, in 1895, and in 1899. The peculiar relations of the United States towards the Isthmus and the acquiescence by Columbia in acts which were quite incompatible with the theory of her having an absolute and unconditioned sovereignty on the Isthmus are illustrated by the following three telegrams between two of our naval officers whose ships were at the Isthmus and the secretary of the navy on the occasion of the first outbreak that occurred on the Isthmus after I became president, a year before Panama became independent. September 12, 1902. Ranger, Panama. The United States guarantees perfect neutrality of Isthmus and that a free transit from sea to sea be not interrupted or embarrassed. Any transportation of troops which might contraven these provisions of treaty should not be sanctioned by you, nor should use of road be permitted which might convert the line of transit into a theater of hostility. Moody. Cologne, September 20, 1902. Secretary Navy, Washington. Everything is conceded. The United States guards and guarantees traffic in the line of transit. Today I permitted the exchange of Colombian troops from Panama to Cologne, about one thousand men each way, the troops without in arms guarded by American naval force in the same manner as other passengers. Arms and ammunition in separate train guarded also by naval force in the same manner as other freight. McLean. Panama, October 3, 1902. Secretary Navy, Washington, D.C. Have sent this communication to the American consulate Panama. Inform Governor, while trains running under United States protection, I must decline transportation any combatants, ammunition, arms which might cause interruption to traffic or convert line of transit into theater hostilities. Casey. When the government in nominal control of the Isthmus continually besought American interference to protect the rights it could not as self-protect and permitted our government to transport Colombian troops unarmed under protection of our own armed men, while the Colombian arms and ammunition came in a separate train, it is obvious that Colombian sovereignty was of such a character as to warrant our instigating that in as much as it only existed because of our protection, there should be in requital a sense of the obligations that the acceptance of this protection implied. Meanwhile, Colombia was under a dictatorship. In 1898, M.A. San Clemente was elected president and J.M. Marroquín vice president of the Republic of Colombia. On July 31, 1900, the vice president, Marroquín, executed a coup d'état by seizing the person of the president, San Clemente, and imprisoning him at a place a few miles out of Bogota. Marroquín, thereupon, declared himself possessed of the executive power because of the absence of the president, a delightful touch of unconscious humor. He then issued a decree that public order was disturbed, and upon that ground, assumed to himself legislative power under another provision of the constitution, that is, having himself disturbed the public order, he alleged that the disturbances as a justification for seizing absolute power. Thenceforth, Marroquín, without the aid of any legislative body, ruled as a dictator, combining the supreme executive, legislative, civil, and military authorities in the so-called Republic of Colombia. The absence of San Clemente from the capital became permanent by his death in prison in the year 1902. When the people of Panama declared their independence in November 1903, no Congress had sat in Colombia since the year 1898, except the special Congress called by Marroquín to reject the Canal Treaty, and which did reject it by a unanimous vote, and adjourned without legislating on any other subject. The constitution of 1886 had taken away from Panama the power of self-government and vested it in Colombia. The coup d'état of Marroquín took away from Colombia herself the power of government and vested it in an irresponsible dictator. Consideration of the above facts ought to be enough to show any human being that we were not dealing with normal conditions on the isthmus and in Colombia. We were dealing with the government of an irresponsible alien dictator and with a condition of affairs on the isthmus itself, which was marked by one uninterrupted series of outbreaks and revolutions. As for the consent of the governed theory, that absolutely justified our action. The people on the isthmus were governed. They were governed by Colombia without their consent, and they unanimously repudiated the Colombian government and demanded that the United States build the Canal. I had done everything possible, personally and through Secretary Hay, to persuade the Colombian government to keep faith. Under the Hay-Ponce vote treaty, it was explicitly provided that the United States should build the Canal, should control, police, and protect it, and keep it open to the vessels of all nations on equal terms. We had assumed the position of guarantor of the Canal, including, of course, the building of the Canal and of its peaceful use by all the world. The Enterprise was recognized everywhere as responding to an international need. It was a mere travesty on justice to treat the government in possession of the isthmus as having the right, which Secretary Cass, forty-five years before had so emphatically repudiated, to close the gates of intercourse on one of the great highways of the world. When we submitted to Colombia the Hay-Haran Treaty, it had been settled at the time for delay, the time for permitting any government of antisocial character, or of imperfect development to bar the work had passed. The United States had assumed, in connection with the Canal, certain responsibilities, not only to its own people, but to the civilized world, which imperatively demanded that there should be no further delay in beginning the work. The Hay-Haran Treaty, if it aired it all, aired in being over-generous toward Colombia. The people of Panama were delighted with the treaty, and the President of Colombia, who embodied in his own person the entire government of Colombia, had authorized the treaty to be made. But after the treaty had been made, the Colombia government thought it had the matter in its own hands, and the further thought, equally wicked and foolish, came into the heads of the people in control at Bogota, that they would seize the French company at the end of another year, and take for themselves the forty million dollars which the United States had agreed to pay the Panama Canal Company. President Marquine, through his minister, had agreed to the Hay-Haran Treaty in January 1903. He had the absolute power of an unconstitutional dictator to keep his promise or break it. He determined to break it. To furnish himself an excuse for breaking it, he devised the plan of summoning a Congress especially called to reject the Canal Treaty. This, the Congress, a Congress of mere puppets, did, without a dissenting vote, and the puppets adjourned forthwith without legislating on any other subject. The fact that this was a mere sham, and that the President had entire power to confirm his own treaty and act on it if he desired, was shown as soon as the revolution took place. For on November 6, General Reyes of Columbia addressed the American minister at Bogota, on behalf of President Marquine, saying that if the government of the United States would land troops and restore the Colombian sovereignty, the Colombian President would declare martial law, and by virtue of vested constitutional authority, when public order is disturbed, would approve by decree the ratification of the Canal Treaty as signed. Or if the government of the United States prefers, would call an extra session of the Congress with new and friendly members next May to approve the treaty. This, of course, is proof positive that the Colombian dictator had used his Congress as a mere shield, and a sham shield at that, and it shows how utterly useless it would have been to further trust his good faith in the matter. When in August 1903, I became convinced that Columbia intended to repudiate the treaty made the preceding January, under cover of securing its rejection by the Colombian legislature, I began carefully to consider what should be done. By my direction, Secretary Hay, personally, and through the minister at Bogota, repeatedly warned Columbia that grave consequences might follow her rejection of the treaty. The possibility of ratification did not wholly pass away until the close of the session of the Colombian Congress on the last day of October. There would then be two possibilities. One was that Panama would remain quiet. In that case I was prepared to recommend to Congress that we should at once occupy the Isthmus. In that case I was prepared to recommend to Congress that we should at once occupy the Isthmus anyhow and proceed to dig the canal, and I had drawn out a draft of my message to this effect. But from the information I received I deemed it likely that there would be a revolution in Panama as soon as the Colombian Congress adjourned without ratifying the treaty, for the entire population of Panama felt that the immediate building of the canal was a vital concern to their well-being. Correspondents of the different newspapers on the Isthmus had sent their respective papers widely published forecasts indicating that there would be a revolution in such an event. Moreover, on October 16th at the request of Lieutenant General Young, Captain Humphrey and Lieutenant Murphy, two Army officers who had returned from the Isthmus saw me and told me that there would unquestionably be a revolution on the Isthmus, that the people were unanimous in their criticism of the Bogota government and their disgust over the failure of that government to ratify the treaty, and that the revolution would probably take place immediately after the adjournment of the Colombian Congress. They did not believe that it would be before October 20th, but they were confident that it would certainly come at the end of October or immediately afterwards when the Colombian Congress had adjourned. Accordingly I directed the Navy Department to station various ships within easy reach of the Isthmus to be ready to act in the event of need arising. These ships were barely in time. On November 3rd the revolution occurred. Practically everybody on the Isthmus, including all the Colombian troops that were already stationed there, joined in the revolution and there was no bloodshed. But on that same day four hundred new Colombian troops were landed at Colón. Fortunately the gunboat, Nashville, under Commander Hubbard, reached Colón almost immediately afterwards, and when the commander of the Colombian forces threatened the lives and property of the American citizens, including women and children in Colón, Commander Hubbard landed a few score sailors and marines to protect them. By a mixture of firmness and tact he not only prevented any assault on our citizens, but persuaded the Colombian commander to re-embark his troops for Cartagena. On the Pacific side a Colombian gunboat shelled the city of Panama with the result of killing one Chinaman, the only life lost in the whole affair. No one connected with the American government had any part in preparing, inciting, or encouraging the revolution, and except for the reports of our military and naval officers, which I forwarded to Congress, no one connected with the government had any previous knowledge concerning the proposed revolution, except such as was accessible to any person who read the newspapers and kept abreast of current questions and current affairs. By the unanimous action of its people, and without the firing of a shot, the State of Panama declared themselves an independent republic. The time for hesitation on our part had passed. My belief then was, and the events that have occurred since have more than justified it, that from the standpoint of the United States it was imperative, not only for civil but for military reasons, that there should be the immediate establishment of easy and speedy communication by sea between the Atlantic and the Pacific. These reasons were not of convenience only, but of vital necessity, and did not admit of indefinite delay. The action of Colombia had shown not only that the delay would be indefinite, but that she intended to confiscate the property and the rights of the French Panama Canal Company. The report of the Panama Canal Committee of the Colombian Senate on October 14, 1903, on the proposed treaty with the United States, proposed that all consideration of the matter should be postponed until October 31, 1904, when the next Colombian Congress would have convened, because by that time the new Congress would be in condition to determine whether, through lapse of time, the French company had not forfeited its property and rights. When that time arrives, the report significantly declared, the republic without any impediment will be able to contract and will be in more clear, more definite, and more advantageous possession, both legally and materially. The naked meaning of this was that Colombia proposed to wait a year and then enforce a forfeiture of the rights and property of the French Panama Canal Company, so as to secure the $40 million our government had authorized as payment to this company. If we had sat supine, this would doubtless have meant that France would have interfered to protect the company, and we should have had, on the isthmus, not the company but France, and the gravest international complications might have ensued. Every consideration of international morality and expediency, of duty to the Panama people, and of satisfaction of our own national interests and honor, bad us take immediate action. I recognized Panama forthwith on behalf of the United States, and practically all the countries of the world immediately followed suit. The State Department immediately negotiated a canal treaty with the New Republic. One of the foremost men in securing the independence of Panama, and the treaty which authorized the United States forthwith to build the canal, was Monsieur Philippe Bonavarie, an eminent French engineer formerly associated with de Lesseps, and then living on the isthmus. His services to civilization were notable and deserved the fullest recognition. From the beginning to the end our course was straightforward and in absolute accord with the highest standards of international morality. Criticism of it can come only from misinformation, or else from a sentimentality which represents both mental weakness and a moral twist. To have acted otherwise than I did would have been, on my part, betrayal of the interests of the United States, indifference to the interests of Panama, and secrecy to the interests of the world at large. Columbia had forfeited every claim to consideration. Indeed, this is not stating the case strongly enough. She had so acted that yielding to her would have meant, on our part, that culpable form of weakness which stands on a level with wickedness. As for me personally, if I had hesitated to act, and had not in advance discounted the clamor of those Americans who have made a fetish of disloyalty to their country, I should have esteemed myself as deserving a place in Dante's Inferno, beside the faint-hearted cleric who was guilty of il gran refito. The facts I have given above are mere bald statements from the record. They show that from the beginning there had been an acceptance of our right to insist on free transit, in whatever form was best across the isthmus, and that towards the end there had been a no less universal feeling that it was our duty to the world to provide this transit in the shape of a canal. The resolution of the Pan-American Congress was practically a mandate to this effect. Columbia was then under a one-man government, a dictatorship founded on usurpation of absolute and irresponsible power. She eagerly pressed us to enter into an agreement with her, as long as there was any chance of our going to the alternative route through Nicaragua. When she thought we were committed, she refused to fulfill the agreement, with the avowed hope of seizing the French company's property for nothing, and thereby holding us up. This was a bit of pure bandit morality. It would have achieved its purpose had I possessed as weak a moral fiber as those of my critics who announced that I ought to have confined my action to feeble scolding and temporizing until the opportunity for action passed. I did not lift my finger to incite the revolutionists. The right simile to use is totally different. I simply ceased to stamp out the different revolutionary fuses that were already burning. When Columbia committed flagrant wrong against us, I considered it no part of my duty to aid and abet her in her wrongdoing at our expense, and also at the expense of Panama, of the French company, and of the world generally. There had been fifty years of continuous bloodshed and civil strife in Panama because of my action Panama has now known ten years of such peace and prosperity as she never before saw during the four centuries of her existence. For in Panama, as in Cuba and Santo Domingo, it was the action of the American people against the outcries of the professed apostles of peace, which alone brought peace. We gave to the people of Panama self-government and freed them from subjection to alien oppressors. We did our best to get Columbia to let us treat her with a more than generous justice. We exercised patience to beyond the verge of proper forbearance. When we did act and recognize Panama, Columbia at once acknowledged her own guilt by promptly offering to do what we had demanded, and what she protested it was not in her power to do. But the offer came too late. What we would have gladly done before, it had by that time become impossible for us honorably to do, for it would have necessitated our abandoning the people of Panama, our friends, and turning them over to their and our foes, who would have wrecked vengeance on them precisely because they had shown friendship to us. Columbia was solely responsible for her own humiliation, and she had not then, and has not now, one shadow of claim upon us, moral or legal, all the wrong that was done was done by her. If, as representing the American people, I had not acted precisely as I did, I would have been an unfaithful or incompetent representative, and in action at that crisis would have meant not only indefinite delay in building the canal, but also practical admission on our part that we were not fit to play the part on the isthmus which we had irrigated to ourselves. I acted on my own responsibility in the Panama matter. John Hayes spoke of this action as follows. The action of the President in the Panama matter is not only in the strictest accordance with the principles of justice and equity, and in line with all the best precedents of our public policy, but it was the only course he could have taken in compliance with our treaty rights and obligations. I deeply regretted, and now deeply regret, the fact that the Colombian government rendered an imperative for me to take the action I took, but I had no alternative, consistent with the full performance of my duty to my own people and to the nations of mankind. For, be it remembered, that certain other nations, Chile, for example, will probably benefit even more by our action than will the United States itself. I am well aware that the Colombian people have many fine traits, that there is among them a circle of high-bred men and women which would reflect honor on the social life of any country, and that there has been an intellectual and literary development within this small circle which partially atones for the stagnation and illiteracy of the mass of the people. And I also know that even the illiterate mass possesses many sterling qualities. But unfortunately in international matters every nation must be judged by the action of its government. The good people in Colombia apparently made no effort, certainly no successful effort, to cause the government to act with reasonable good faith towards the United States, and Colombia had to take the consequences. If Brazil or the Argentine or Chile had been in possession of the isthmus, doubtless the canal would have been built under the governmental control of the nation, thus controlling the isthmus, with the hardy acquiescence of the United States and of all other powers. But in the actual fact the canal would not have been built at all save for the action I took. If men choose to say that it would have been better not to build it, than to build it as the result of such an action, their position, although foolish, is compatible with belief in their wrong-headed sincerity. But it is hypocrisy, alike odious and contemptible, for any man to say both that we ought to have built the canal, and that we ought not to have acted in the way we did. After a sufficient period of wrangling, the Senate ratified the treaty with Panama, and work on the canal was begun. The first thing that was necessary was to decide the type of canal. I summoned a board of engineering experts, foreign and native. They divided on their report. The majority of the members, including all the foreign members, approved a sea-level canal. The minority, including most of the American members, approved a lot canal. Studying these conclusions I came to the belief that the minority was right. The two great traffic canals of the world were the Suez and the Sue. The Suez canal is a sea-level canal, and it was the one best known to European engineers. The Sue canal, through which an even greater volume of traffic passes every year, is a lot canal, and the American engineers were thoroughly familiar with it. Whereas in my judgment the European engineers had failed to pay proper heed to the lessons taught by its operation and management. Moreover, the engineers, who were to do the work at Panama, all favored a lot canal. I came to the conclusion that a sea-level canal would be slightly less exposed to damage in the event of war, that the running expenses, apart from the heavy cost of interest on the amount necessary to build it, would be less, and that for small ships the time of transit would be less. But I also came to the conclusion that the lot canal, at the proposed level, would only cost about half as much to build and would be built in half the time, with much less risk, that for large ships the transit would be quicker, and that taking into account the interest saved, the cost of maintenance would be less. Accordingly, I recommended to Congress, on February 19, 1906, that a lot canal should be built, and my recommendation was adopted. Congress insisted upon having it built by a commission of several men. I tried faithfully to get good work out of the commission and found it quite impossible, for a many-headed commission is an extremely poor executive instrument. At last I put Colonel Goetels in as head of the commission. Then, when Congress still refused to make the commission single-headed, I solved the difficulty by an executive order of January 6, 1908, which practically accomplished the object by enlarging the powers of the chairman, making all the other members of the commission dependent upon him, and thereby placing the work under one-man control. Dr. Gorgas had already performed an inestimable service by caring for the sanitary condition so thoroughly as to make the isthmus as safe as a health resort. Colonel Goetels proved to be the man of all others to do the job. It would be impossible to overstate what he has done. It is the greatest task of any kind that any man in the world has accomplished during the years that Colonel Goetels has been at work. It is the greatest task of its kind that has ever been performed in the world at all. Colonel Goetels has succeeded in instilling into the men under him a spirit which elsewhere has been found only in a few victorious armies. It is proper and appropriate that, like the soldiers of such armies, they should receive medals which are allotted to each man who has served for a sufficient length of time. A finer body of men has never been gathered by any nation than the men who have done the work of building the Panama Canal. The conditions under which they have lived and have done their work have been better than in any similar work ever undertaken in the tropics. They have all felt an eager pride in their work, and they have made not only America, but the whole world their debtors by what they have accomplished. Appendix. Columbia. The proposed message to Congress. The rough draft of the message I had proposed to send Congress ran as follows. The Colombian government, through its representative here and directly in communication with our representative at Columbia, has refused to come to any agreement with us, and has delayed action so as to make it evident that it intends to make extortionate and improper terms with us. The Ismanian Canal bill was, of course, passed upon the assumption that whatever route was used the benefit to the particular section of the isthmus through which it passed would be so great that the country controlling this part would be eager to facilitate the building of the canal. It is out of the question to submit to extortion on the part of a beneficiary of the scheme. All the labor, all the expense, all the risk are to be assumed by us and the skill shown by us. Those controlling the ground through which the canal is to be put are wholly incapable of building it. Yet the interest of international commerce generally and the interest of this country generally demands that the canal should be begun with no needless delay. The refusal of Columbia properly to respond to our sincere and earnest efforts to come to an agreement, or to pay heed to the many concessions we have made, renders it, in my judgment, necessary that the United States should take immediate action on one of two lines. Either we should drop the Panama Canal project and immediately begin work on the Nicaraguan canal, or else we should purchase all the rights of the French company and, without any further parley with Columbia, enter upon the completion of the canal which the French company has begun. I feel that the latter course is the one demanded by the interests of this nation, and therefore I bring the matter to your attention for such action in the premises as you may deem wise. If in your judgment it is better not to take such action, then I shall proceed at once with the Nicaraguan canal. The reason that I advocate the action above outlined in regard to the Panama Canal is, in the first place, the strong testimony of the experts that this route is the most feasible, and in the next place, the impropriety from an international standpoint of permitting such conduct as that to which Columbia seems to incline. The testimony of the experts is very strong. Not only that the Panama route is feasible, but that in the Nicaragua route we may encounter some unpleasant surprises, and that it is far more difficult to forecast the result with any certainty as regards this latter route. As for Columbia's attitude, it is incomprehensible upon any theory of desire to see the canal built upon the basis of mutual advantage, alike to those building it and to Columbia herself. All we desire to do is to take up the work begun by the French government and to finish it. Obviously it is Columbia's duty to help towards such a completion. We are most anxious to come to an agreement with her in which most scrupulous care should be taken to guard her interests and ours. But we cannot consent to permit her to block the performance of the work, which it is so greatly to our interest immediately to begin and carry through. Shortly after this rough draft was dictated the Panama Revolution came, and I never thought of the rough draft again until I was accused of having instigated the Revolution. This accusation is preposterous in the eyes of anyone who knows the actual conditions at Panama. Only the menace of action by us in the interest of Columbia kept down Revolution. As soon as Columbia's own conduct removed such menace, all check on the various revolutionary movements, there were at least three from entirely separate sources ceased, and then an explosion was inevitable. For the French company knew that all their property would be confiscated if Columbia put through her plans, and the entire people of Panama felt that, if in disgust with Columbia's extortions the United States turned to Nicaragua, they, the people of Panama, would be ruined. Knowing the character of those then in charge of the Colombian government, I was not surprised at their bad faith, but I was surprised at their folly. They apparently had no idea either of the power of France or the power of the United States, and expected to be permitted to commit wrong with impunity, just as Castro and Venezuela had done. The difference was that, unless we acted in self-defense, Columbia had it in her power to do a serious harm, and Venezuela did not have such power. Columbia's wrongdoing, therefore, recoiled on her own head. There was no new lesson taught. It ought already to have been known to everyone that wickedness, weakness, and folly combined rarely fail to meet punishment, and that the intent to do wrong, when joined to the inability to carry the evil purpose to a successful conclusion, inevitably reacts on the wrongdoer. For the full history of the acquisition and building of the canal, see the Panama Gateway by Joseph Bucklin Bishop, Scribner's sons. Mr. Bishop has been for eight years Secretary of the Commission and is one of the most efficient of the many efficient men to whose work on the isthmus America owes so much.