Therefore we need wise laws, and we need to have them resolutely administered. We can get such laws and such administration only if the people are alive to their interests. The other day I listened to an admirable sermon by Bishop Johnston, of western Texas. His theme was that the vital element in judging any man should be his conduct, and neither his position nor his pretensions; and, furthermore, that freedom could only stay with a people which has the habit of self-mastery. As he said, the price of liberty is not only eternal vigilance, but eternal virtue; and I may add, eternal common sense. Each man here knows that he himself has been able to use his freedom to advantage only provided that he could master himself, that he could control his own passions and direct his own faculties. Each of you fathers and mothers here knows that if your sons are to do well in the world they must know how to master themselves. Every man must have a master; if he is not his own master, then somebody else will be. This is just as true of public life as of private life. If we can not master ourselves, control ourselves, then sooner or later we shall have to submit to outside control; for there must be control somewhere.
One way of exercising such control is through the laws of the land. Ours is a government of liberty, but it is a government of that orderly liberty which comes by and through the honest enforcement of and obedience to the law. At intervals during the last few months the appeal has been made to me not to enforce the law against certain wrongdoers of great wealth because to do so would interfere with the business prosperity of the country. Under the effects of that kind of fright which when sufficiently acute we call panic, this appeal has been made to me even by men who ordinarily behave as decent citizens. One newspaper which has itself strongly advanced this view gave prominence to the statement of a certain man of great wealth to the effect that the so-called financial weakness “was due entirely to the admitted intention of President Roosevelt to punish the large moneyed interests which had transgressed the laws.” I do not admit that this has been the main cause of any business troubles we have had; but it is possible that it has been a contributory cause. If so, friends, as far as I am concerned it must be accepted as a disagreeable but unavoidable feature in a course of policy which as long as I am President will not be changed. In any great movement for righteousness, where the forces of evil are strongly intrenched, it is unfortunately inevitable that some unoffending people should suffer in company with the real offenders. This is not our fault. It is the fault of those to whose deceptive action these innocent people owe their false position. A year or two ago certain representatives of labor called upon me and in the course of a very pleasant conversation told me that they regarded me as “the friend of labor.” I answered that I certainly was, and that I would do everything in my power for the laboring man except anything that was wrong. I have the same answer to make to the business man. I will do everything I can do to help business conditions, except anything that is wrong. And it would be not merely wrong but infamous to fail to do all that can be done to secure the punishment of those wrongdoers whose deeds are peculiarly reprehensible because they are not committed under the stress of want. Whenever a serious effort is made to cut out what is evil in our political life, whether the effort takes the shape of warring against the gross and sordid forms of evil in some municipality, or whether it takes the shape of trying to secure the honest enforcement of the law as against very powerful and wealthy people, there are sure to be certain individuals who demand that the movement stop because it may hurt business. In each case the answer must be that we earnestly hope and believe that there will be no permanent damage to business from the movement, but that if righteousness conflicts with the fancied needs of business, then the latter must go to the wall. We can not afford to substitute any other test for that of guilt or innocence, of wrongdoing or welldoing, in judging any man. If a man does well, if he acts honestly, he has nothing to fear from this Administration. But so far as in me lies the corrupt politician, great or small, the private citizen who transgresses the law—be he rich or poor—shall be brought before the impartial justice of a court. Perhaps I am most anxious to get at the politician who is corrupt, because he betrays a great trust; but assuredly I shall not spare his brother corruptionist who shows himself a swindler in business life; and, according to our power, crimes of fraud and cunning shall be prosecuted as relentlessly as crimes of brutality and physical violence.
We need good laws and we need above all things the hearty aid of good citizens in supporting and enforcing the laws. Nevertheless, men and women of this great State, men and women of the Middle West, never forget that law and the administration of law, important though they are, must always occupy a wholly secondary place as compared with the character of the average citizen himself. On this trip I shall speak to audiences in each of which there will be many men who fought in the civil war. You who wore the blue and your brothers of the South who wore the gray know that in war no general no matter how good, no organization no matter how perfect, can avail if the average man in the ranks has not got the fighting edge. We need the organization, the preparation; we need the good general; but we need most the fighting edge in the individual soldier. So it is in private life. We live in a rough, workaday world, and we are yet a long way from the millennium. We can not as a nation and we can not as individuals afford to cultivate only the gentler, softer qualities. There must be gentleness and tenderness—the strongest men are gentle and tender—but there must also be courage and strength. I have a hearty sympathy with those who believe in doing all that can be done for peace; but I have no sympathy at all with those who believe that in the world as it now is we can afford to see the average American citizen lose the qualities that in their sum make up a good fighting man. You men must be workers who work with all your heart and strength and mind at your several tasks in life; and you must also be able to fight at need. You women have even higher and more difficult duties; for I honor no man, not even the soldier who fights for righteousness, quite as much as I honor the good woman who does her full duty as wife and mother. But if she shirks her duty as wife and mother then she stands on a par with the man who refuses to work for himself and his family, for those dependent upon him, and who in time of the nation’s need refuses to fight. The man or woman who shirks his or her duty occupies a contemptible position. You here are the sons and daughters of the pioneers. I preach to you no life of ease. I preach to you the life of effort, the life that finds its highest satisfaction in doing well some work that is well worth doing.
So much for what concerns every man and every woman in this country. Now, a word or two as to matters which are of peculiar interest to this region of our country.
Since I have been President I have traveled in every State of this Union, but my traveling has been almost entirely on railroads, save now and then by wagon or on horseback. Now I have the chance to try traveling by river; to go down the greatest of our rivers, the Father of Waters. A good many years ago when I lived in the Northwest I traveled occasionally on the Upper Missouri and its tributaries; but then we went in a flatboat and did our own rowing and paddling and poling. Now I am to try a steamboat. I am a great believer in our railway system; and the fact that I am very firm in my belief as to the necessity of the Government exercising a proper supervision and control over the railroads does not in the least interfere with the other fact that I greatly admire the large majority of the men in all positions, from the top to the bottom, who build and run them. Yet, while of course I am anxious to see these men, and therefore the corporations they represent or serve, achieve the fullest measure of legitimate prosperity, nevertheless as this country grows I feel that we can not have too many highroads, and that in addition to the iron highroads of our railway system we should also utilize the great river highways which have been given us by nature. From a variety of causes these highways have in many parts of the country been almost abandoned. This is not healthy. Our people, and especially the representatives of the people in the National Congress, should give their most careful attention to this subject. We should be prepared to put the nation collectively back of the movement to improve them for the nation’s use. Our knowledge at this time is not such as to permit me to go into details, or to say definitely just what the nation should do; but most assuredly our great navigable rivers are national assets just as much as our great seacoast harbors. Exactly as it is for the interest of all the country that our great harbors should be fitted to receive in safety the largest vessels of the merchant fleets of the world, so by deepening and otherwise our rivers should be fitted to bear their part in the movement of our merchandise; and this is especially true of the Mississippi and its tributaries, which drain the immense and prosperous region which makes in very fact the heart of our nation; the basin of the Great Lakes being already united with the basin of the Mississippi, and both regions being identical in their products and interests. Waterways are peculiarly fitted for the transportation of the bulky commodities which come from the soil or under the soil; and no other part of our country is as fruitful as is this in such commodities.
You in Iowa have many manufacturing centers, but you remain, and I hope you will always remain, a great agricultural State. I hope that the means of transporting your commodities to market will be steadily improved; but this will be of no use unless you keep producing the commodities, and in the long run this will largely depend upon your being able to keep on the farm a high type of citizenship. The effort must be to make farm life not only remunerative but attractive, so that the best young men and girls will feel inclined to stay on the farm and not to go to the city. Nothing is more important to this country than the perpetuation of our system of medium-sized farms worked by their owners. We do not want to see our farmers sink to the condition of the peasants of the Old World, barely able to live on their small holdings, nor do we want to see their places taken by wealthy men owning enormous estates which they work purely by tenants and hired servants.
At present the ordinary farmer holds his own in the land as against any possible representative of the landlord class of farmer—that is, of the men who would own vast estates—because the ordinary farmer unites his capital, his labor, and his brains with the making of a permanent family home, and thus can afford to hold his land at a value at which it can not be held by the capitalist, who would have to run it by leasing it or by cultivating it at arm’s length with hired labor. In other words, the typical American farmer of to-day gets his remuneration in part in the shape of an independent home for his family, and this gives him an advantage over an absentee landlord. Now, from the standpoint of the nation as a whole it is preeminently desirable to keep as one of our chief American types the farmer, the farm home maker, of the medium-sized farm. This type of farm home is one of our strongest political and social bulwarks. Such a farm worked by the owner has proved by experience the best place in which to breed vigorous leaders alike for country and city. It is a matter of prime economic and civic importance to encourage this type of home-owning farmer.
Therefore, we should strive in every way to aid in the education of the farmer for the farm, and should shape our school system with this end in view; and so vitally important is this that, in my opinion, the Federal Government should cooperate with the State governments to secure the needed change and improvement in our schools. It is significant that both from Minnesota and Georgia there have come proposals in this direction in the appearance of bills introduced into the National Congress. The Congressional land grant act of 1852 accomplished much in establishing the agricultural colleges in the several States, and therefore in preparing to turn the system of educational training for the young into channels at once broader and more practicable—and what I am saying about agricultural training really applies to all industrial training. But the colleges can not reach the masses, and it is essential that the masses should be reached. Such agricultural high schools as those in Minnesota and Nebraska for farm boys and girls, such technical high schools as are to be found, for instance, in both St. Louis and Washington, have by their success shown that it is entirely feasible to carry in practical fashion the fundamentals of industrial training into the realms of our secondary schools. At present there is a gap between our primary schools in country and city and the industrial collegiate courses, which must be closed, and if necessary the Nation must help the State to close it. Too often our present schools tend to put altogether too great a premium upon mere literary education, and therefore to train away from the farm and the shop.
We should reverse this process. Specific training of a practical kind should be given to the boys and girls who when men and women are to make up the backbone of this nation by working in agriculture, in the mechanical industries, in arts and trades; in short, who are to do the duty that should always come first with all of us, the duty of home-making and home-keeping. Too narrow a literary education is, for most men and women, not a real education at all; for a real education should fit people primarily for the industrial and home-making employments in which they must employ the bulk of their activities. Our country offers unparalleled opportunities for domestic and social advancement, for social and economic leadership in the world. Our greatest national asset is to be found in the children. They need to be trained to high ideals of everyday living, and to high efficiency in their respective vocations; we can not afford to have them trained otherwise, and the nation should help the States to achieve this end.
Now, men of Iowa, I want to say just a word on a matter that concerns not the States of the Mississippi Valley itself, but the States west of them, the States of the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains. Unfortunately, I am not able on this present trip to visit those States, or I should speak to their own people on the point to which I now intend to allude; but after all anything that affects a considerable number of Americans who live under one set of conditions, must be of moment to all other Americans, for never forget, friends, that in the long run we shall all go up or go down together.