Wait a moment; I don’t want you to applaud this part unless you are willing to applaud also the part I read first, to which you listened in silence. I want you to understand that I will stand just as straight for the rights of the honest man who wins his fortune by honest methods as I will stand against the dishonest man who wins a fortune by dishonest methods. And I challenge the right to your support in one attitude just as much as in the other. I am glad you applauded when you did, but I want you to go back now and applaud the other statement. I will read a little of it over again. “Every manifestation of ignorant envy and hostility toward honest men who acquire wealth by honest means should be crushed at the outset by the weight of a sensible public opinion.” Thank you. Now I’ll go on.
From the standpoint of our material prosperity there is only one other thing as important as the discouragement of a spirit of envy and hostility toward honest business men, toward honest men of means, and that is the discouragement of dishonest business men, the war upon the chicanery and wrongdoing which are peculiarly repulsive, peculiarly noxious when exhibited by men who have no excuse of want, of poverty, of ignorance for their crimes. My friends, I will wage war against those dishonest men to the utmost extent of my ability, and I will stand no less stoutly in defense of honest men, rich or poor. Men of means and, above all, men of great wealth can exist in safety under the peaceful protection of the state only in orderly societies, where liberty manifests itself through and under the law. That is what you fought for, you veterans. You fought for the supremacy of the national law in every corner of this Republic. It is these men, the men of wealth, who more than any others, should in the interest of the class to which they belong, in the interest of their children and their children’s children, seek in every way, but especially in the conduct of their lives, to insist upon and to build up respect for the law. It is an extraordinary thing, a very extraordinary thing, that it should be necessary for me to utter as simple a truth as that; yet it is necessary. It may not be true from the standpoint of some particular individual of this class of very wealthy men, but in the long run it is preeminently true from the standpoint of the class as a whole, no less than of the country as a whole, that it is a veritable calamity to achieve a temporary triumph by violation or evasion of the law, and we are the best friends of the man of property, we show ourselves the staunchest upholders of the rights of property when we set our faces like flint against those offenders who do wrong in order to acquire great wealth, or who use this wealth as a help to wrongdoing.
I sometimes feel that I have trenched a little on your province, Brother Bristol, and on that of your brethren, by preaching. But whenever I speak of the wrongdoing of a man of wealth or of a man of poverty, poor man or rich man, I always want to try to couple together the fact that wrongdoing is wrong just as much in one case as in the other, with the fact that right is just as much right in one case as in the other. I want the plain people of this country, I want all of us who do not have great wealth, to remember that in our own interest, and because it is right, we must be just as scrupulous in doing justice to the man of great wealth as in exacting justice from him.
Wrongdoing is confined to no class. Good and evil are to be found among both rich and poor, and in drawing the line among our fellows we must draw it on conduct and not on worldly possessions. Woe to this country if we ever get to judging men by anything save their worth as men, without regard to their fortune in life. In other words, my plea is that you draw the line on conduct and not on worldly possessions. In the abstract most of us will admit this. It is a rather more difficult proposition in the concrete. We can act upon such doctrines only if we really have knowledge of, and sympathy with, one another. If both the wage-worker and the capitalist are able to enter each into the other’s life, to meet him so as to get into genuine sympathy with him, most of the misunderstanding between them will disappear and its place will be taken by a judgment broader, juster, more kindly, and more generous; for each will find in the other the same essential human attributes that exist in himself. It was President McKinley’s peculiar glory that in actual practice he realized this as it is given to but few men to realize it; that his broad and deep sympathies made him feel a genuine sense of oneness with all his fellow-Americans, whatever their station or work in life, so that to his soul they were all joined with him in a great brotherly democracy of the spirit. It is not given to many of us in our lives actually to realize this attitude to the extent that he did; but we can at least have it before us as the goal of our endeavor, and by so doing we shall pay honor better than in any other way to the memory of the dead President whose services in life we this day commemorate.
Transcriber’s Notes:
Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
Archaic and variable spelling has been preserved.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.