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

by Theodore Roosevelt

In November, 1902, the Attorney-General directed that a bill for an injunction be filed in the United States Circuit Court at San Francisco against the Federal Salt Company—a corporation which had been organized under the laws of an Eastern State, but had its main office and principal place of business in California—and against a number of other companies and persons constituting what was known as the salt trust. These injunctions were to restrain the execution of certain contracts between the Federal Salt Company and the other defendants, by which the latter agreed neither to import nor buy or sell salt, except from and to the Federal Salt Company, and not to engage or assist in the production of salt west of the Mississippi River during the continuance of such contracts. As the result of these agreements the price of salt had been advanced about four hundred per cent. A temporary injunction order was obtained, which the defendants asked the court to modify on the ground that the anti-trust law had no application to contracts for purchases and sales within a State. The Circuit Court overruled this contention and sustained the Government’s position. This practically concluded the case, and it is understood that in consequence the Federal Salt Company is about to be dissolved and that no further contest will be made.

The above is a brief outline of the most important steps, legislative and administrative, taken during the past eighteen months in the direction of solving, so far as at present it seems practicable by national legislation or administration to solve, what we call the trust problem. They represent a sum of very substantial achievement. They represent a successful effort to devise and apply real remedies; an effort which so far succeeded because it was made not only with resolute purpose and determination, but also in a spirit of common-sense and justice, as far removed as possible from rancor, hysteria, and unworthy demagogic appeal. In the same spirit the laws will continue to be enforced. Not only is the legislation recently enacted effective, but in my judgment it was impracticable to attempt more. Nothing of value is to be expected from ceaseless agitation for radical and extreme legislation. The people may wisely, and with confidence, await the results which are reasonably to be expected from the impartial enforcement of the laws which have recently been placed upon the statute books. Legislation of a general and indiscriminate character would be sure to fail, either because it would involve all interests in a common ruin, or because it would not really reach any evil. We have endeavored to provide a discriminating adaptation of the remedy to the real mischief.

Many of the alleged remedies advocated are of the unpleasantly drastic type which seeks to destroy the disease by killing the patient. Others are so obviously futile that it is somewhat difficult to treat them seriously or as being advanced in good faith. High among the latter I place the effort to reach the trust question by means of the tariff. You can, of course, put an end to the prosperity of the trusts by putting an end to the prosperity of the Nation; but the price for such action seems high. The alternative is to do exactly what has been done during the life of the Congress which has just closed—that is, to endeavor, not to destroy corporations, but to regulate them with a view of doing away with whatever is of evil in them and of making them subserve the public use. The law is not to be administered in the interest of the poor man as such, nor yet in the interest of the rich man as such, but in the interest of the law-abiding man, rich or poor. We are no more against organizations of capital than against organizations of labor. We welcome both, demanding only that each shall do right and shall remember its duty to the Republic. Such a course we consider not merely a benefit to the poor man, but a benefit to the rich man. We do no man an injustice when we require him to obey the law. On the contrary, if he is a man whose safety and well-being depend in a peculiar degree upon the existence of the spirit of law and order, we are rendering him the greatest service when we require him to be himself an exemplar of that spirit.

BEFORE THE MINNESOTA LEGISLATURE, ST. PAUL, MINN., APRIL 4, 1903

Mr. Governor, Mr. Lieutenant-Governor, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Legislative Body, Men and Women of Minnesota:

I thank you for greeting me and for giving me the chance to say a word or two in welcome and in acknowledgment of your greeting.

To any American capable of any depth of reflection whatever, it should always be a somewhat solemn thing to come into the presence of two bodies—one a legislative body; the other an educational body; the legislative body, which is not only the method but the symbol of our free government; the educational body, which, using educational in its broadest and truest sense, means the body that fits us for self-government. Self-government is not an easy thing. The nations of antiquity, the nations of the middle ages, that tried the experiment of independent self-government which should guarantee freedom to the individual, and yet safety from without and within to the body politic itself, rarely lasted long, never rose to a pitch of greatness such as ours without having suffered some radical and, as it proved ultimately, fatal change of structure. Until our Republic was founded it had proved impossible in the long run to combine freedom for the individual and greatness for the nation. The republics of antiquity and of the middle ages went one of two lines; either proved fatal. Either the individual’s interests were sacrificed, and, while retaining the forms of freedom, the republic became in effect a despotism, or else the freedom of the individual was kept at the cost of utter impotence either to put down disorder at home or to repel aggression from abroad.

It has been given to us during the century and a quarter of our national life so to handle ourselves as a people that we have escaped both dangers. We have been able to escape the leadership of those who feared Scylla so much that they would plunge us into Charybdis, and of those who feared Charybdis so much that they would plunge us into Scylla. We have been able to preserve orderly liberty and strength to grow in greatness among the nations of the earth, while becoming steadily more and more democratic in the truest and broadest sense of the word. I believe with all my heart that we shall continue on the path thus marked out for us; but we shall so continue only if we remember that in the last analysis the safety of the Republic depends upon the high average of individual citizenship.

We can keep all the forms of free government; and every Fourth of July we can talk possibly a little too boastfully of both the past and the present; and yet it shall not avail us if we do not have in our hearts the spirit that makes for decent citizenship, the spirit that alone counts in the formation of a true republic. And that spirit is essentially the same in public life as in private life. The manifestations of it differ, but the spirit is the same. A public man is as much bound to tell the truth on the stump as off the stump. On the other hand, his critics will do well to remember that truth-telling is a virtue for them to practice also. What we need in public life and in private life is not genius so much as the many-sided development of the qualities which in their sum make good citizenship. In a great crisis we shall need a genius; thrice and thrice over fortunate is the nation which then develops a Lincoln to lead it in peace; a Grant to lead it in war; a Washington to lead it in war and peace.

But what we need as a nation, as an individual, at the ordinary times which are so much larger in the aggregate than the extraordinary times, and upon our conduct in which really depends our conduct in extraordinary times, are the commonplace virtues which we all recognize, and which when we were young we wrote about in copybooks, and which, if we practice, will count for a thousand times more in the long run than any brilliance and genius of any kind or sort whatsoever.