Presidential addresses and state papers, Volume 1 (of 7)

by Theodore Roosevelt

You left us a reunited country. You left us the right of brotherhood with the men in gray, who with such courage, and such devotion for what they deemed the right, fought against you. But you left us much more even than your achievement, for you left us the memory of how it was achieved. You, who made good by your valor and patriotism the statesmanship of Lincoln and the soldiership of Grant, have set as the standards for our efforts in the future both the way you did your work in war and the way in which, when the war was over, you turned again to the work of peace. In war and in peace alike your example will stand as the wisest of lessons to us and our children and our children’s children.

Just at this moment the Army of the United States, led by men who served among you in the great war, is carrying to completion a small but peculiarly trying and difficult war in which is involved not only the honor of the flag but the triumph of civilization over forces which stand for the black chaos of savagery and barbarism. The task has not been as difficult or as important as yours, but, oh, my comrades, the men in the uniform of the United States, who have for the last three years patiently and uncomplainingly championed the American cause in the Philippine Islands, are your younger brothers, your sons. They have shown themselves not unworthy of you, and they are entitled to the support of all men who are proud of what you did.

These younger comrades of yours have fought under terrible difficulties and have received terrible provocation from a very cruel and very treacherous enemy. Under the strain of these provocations I deeply deplore to say that some among them have so far forgotten themselves as to counsel and commit, in retaliation, acts of cruelty. The fact that for every guilty act committed by one of our troops a hundred acts of far greater atrocity have been committed by the hostile natives upon our troops, or upon the peaceable and law-abiding natives who are friendly to us, can not be held to excuse any wrongdoers on our side. Determined and unswerving effort must be made, and has been and is being made, to find out every instance of barbarity on the part of our troops, to punish those guilty of it, and to take, if possible, even stronger measures than have already been taken to minimize or prevent the occurrence of all such acts in the future.

Is it only in the army in the Philippines that Americans sometimes commit deeds that cause all other Americans to regret? No! From time to time there occur in our country, to the deep and lasting shame of our people, lynchings carried on under circumstances of inhuman cruelty and barbarity—cruelty infinitely worse than any that has ever been committed by our troops in the Philippines; worse to the victims, and far more brutalizing to those guilty of it. The men who fail to condemn these lynchings, and yet clamor about what has been done in the Philippines, are indeed guilty of neglecting the beam in their own eye while taunting their brother about the mote in his. Understand me. These lynchings afford us no excuse for failure to stop cruelty in the Philippines. But keep in mind that these cruelties in the Philippines have been wholly exceptional, and have been shamelessly exaggerated. We deeply and bitterly regret that they should have been committed, no matter how rarely, no matter under what provocation, by American troops. But they afford far less ground for a general condemnation of our army than these lynchings afford for the condemnation of the communities in which they occur. In each case it is well to condemn the deed, and it is well also to refrain from including both guilty and innocent in the same sweeping condemnation.

In every community there are people who commit acts of wellnigh inconceivable horror and baseness. If we fix our eyes only upon these individuals and upon their acts, and if we forget the far more numerous citizens of upright and honest life and blind ourselves to their countless deeds of wisdom and justice and philanthropy, it is easy enough to condemn the community. There is not a city in this land which we could not thus condemn if we fixed our eyes solely upon its police record and refused to look at what it had accomplished for decency and justice and charity. Yet this is exactly the attitude which has been taken by too many men with reference to our army in the Philippines; and it is an attitude iniquitous in its absurdity and its injustice.

The rules of warfare which have been promulgated by the War Department and accepted as the basis of conduct by our troops in the field are the rules laid down by Abraham Lincoln when you, my hearers, were fighting for the Union. These rules provide, of course, for the just severity necessary in war. The most destructive of all forms of cruelty would be to show weakness where sternness is demanded by iron need. But all cruelty is forbidden, and all harshness beyond what is called for by need. Our enemies in the Philippines have not merely violated every rule of war, but have made of these violations their only method of carrying on the war. Think over that! It is not a rhetorical statement—it is a bald statement of contemporary history. They have been able to prolong the war at all only by recourse to acts each one of which put them beyond the pale of civilized warfare. We would have been justified by Abraham Lincoln’s rules of war in infinitely greater severity than has been shown.

The fact really is that our warfare in the Philippines has been carried on with singular humanity. For every act of cruelty by our men there have been innumerable acts of forbearance, magnanimity, and generous kindness. These are the qualities which have characterized the war as a whole. The cruelties on our part have been wholly exceptional.

The guilty are to be punished; but in punishing them, let those who sit at ease at home, who walk delicately and live in the soft places of the earth, remember also to do them common justice. Let not the effortless and the untempted rail overmuch at strong men who with blood and sweat face years of toil and days of agony, and at need lay down their lives in remote tropic jungles to bring the light of civilization into the world’s dark places. The warfare that has extended the boundaries of civilization at the expense of barbarism and savagery has been for centuries one of the most potent factors in the progress of humanity. Yet from its very nature it has always and everywhere been liable to dark abuses.

It behooves us to keep a vigilant watch to prevent these abuses and to punish those who commit them; but if because of them we flinch from finishing the task on which we have entered, we show ourselves cravens and weaklings, unworthy of the sires from whose loins we sprang. Oh, my comrades, how the men of the present tend to forget not merely what was done but what was spoken in the past! There were abuses and to spare in the Civil War; and slander enough, too, by each side against the other. Your false friends then called Grant a “butcher” and spoke of you who are listening to me as mercenaries, as “Lincoln’s hirelings.” Your open foes—as in the resolution passed by the Confederate Congress in October, 1862—accused you, at great length, and with much particularity, of “contemptuous disregard of the usages of civilized war;” of subjecting women and children to “banishment, imprisonment, and death;” of “murder,” of “rapine,” of “outrages on women,” of “lawless cruelty,” of “perpetrating atrocities which would be disgraceful in savages;” and Abraham Lincoln was singled out for especial attack because of his “spirit of barbarous ferocity.” Verily, these men who thus foully slandered you have their heirs to-day in those who traduce our armies in the Philippines, who fix their eyes on individual deeds of wrong so keenly that at last they become blind to the great work of peace and freedom that has already been accomplished.

Peace and freedom—are there two better objects for which a soldier can fight? Well, these are precisely the objects for which our soldiers are fighting in the Philippines. When there is talk of the cruelties committed in the Philippines, remember always that by far the greater proportion of these cruelties have been committed by the insurgents against their own people—as well as against our soldiers—and that not only the surest but the only effectual way of stopping them is by the progress of the American arms. The victories of the American Army have been the really effective means of putting a stop to cruelty in the Philippines. Wherever these victories have been complete—and such is now the case throughout the greater part of the islands—all cruelties have ceased, and the native is secure in his life, his liberty, and his pursuit of happiness. Where the insurrection still smoulders there is always a chance for cruelty to show itself.