Infinite are the possibilities for usefulness that lie before such a body as that I am addressing. Work? Of course you will have to work. I should be sorry for you if you did not have to work. Of course you will have to work, and I envy you the fact that before you, before the graduates of this university, lies the chance of lives to be spent in hard labor for great and glorious and useful causes, hard labor for the uplifting of your States of the Union, of all mankind.
AT MECHANICS’ PAVILION, SAN FRANCISCO, CAL., MAY 13, 1903
Mr. Chairman, and you, Men and Women of San Francisco:
Before I came to the Pacific Slope I was an expansionist, and after having been here I fail to understand how any man, convinced of his country’s greatness and glad that his country should challenge with proud confidence its mighty future, can be anything but an expansionist. In the century that is opening the commerce and the command of the Pacific will be factors of incalculable moment in the world’s history.
The seat of power ever shifts from land to land, from sea to sea. The earliest civilizations, those seated beside the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates, had little to do with sea traffic. But with the rise of those people who went down to the sea in ships, with the rise of the Phœnicians, the men of Tyre and Sidon, the Mediterranean became the central sea on whose borders lay the great wealthy and cultivated powers of antiquity. The war navies and the merchant marines of Carthage, Greece, and Rome strove thereon for military and industrial supremacy. Its control was the prerequisite to greatness, and the Roman became lord of the western world only when his fleet rode unchallenged from the Ægean to the Pillars of Hercules. Then Rome fell. But for centuries thereafter the wealth and the culture of Europe were centred on its southern shores, and the control of the Mediterranean was vital in favoring or checking their growth. It was at this time that Venice and Genoa flourished in their grandeur and their might.
But gradually the nations of the north grew beyond barbarism and developed fleets and commerce of their own. The North Sea, the Baltic, the Bay of Biscay, saw trading cities rise to become independent or else to become props of mighty civilized nations. The sea-faring merchants ventured with ever greater boldness into the Atlantic. The cities of the Netherlands, the ports of the Hansa, grew and flourished as once the Italian cities had grown. Holland and England, Spain, Portugal, and France sent forth mercantile adventurers to strive for fame and profit on the high seas. The Cape of Good Hope was doubled, America was discovered, and the Atlantic Ocean became to the greater modern world what the Mediterranean had been to the lesser world of antiquity.
Now, men and women of California, in our own day, the greatest of all the seas and the last to be used on a large scale by civilized man bids fair to become in its turn the first in point of importance. The empire that shifted from the Mediterranean will in the lifetime of those now children bid fair to shift once more westward to the Pacific. When the 19th century opened the lonely keels of a few whale ships, a few merchantmen, had begun to furrow the vast expanse of the Pacific; but as a whole its islands and its shores were not materially changed from what they had been in the long past ages when the Phœnician galleys traded in the purple of Tyre, the ivory of Libya, the gold of Cyprus. The junks of the Orient still crept between China and Japan and Farther India; and from the woody wilderness which shrouded the western shores of our own continent the red lords of the land looked forth upon a waste of waters which only their own canoes traversed. That was but a century ago; and now at the opening of the 20th century the change is so vast that it is wellnigh impossible for us to estimate its importance. In the South Seas the great commonwealth of Australia has sprung into being. Japan, shaking off the lethargy of centuries, has taken her rank among civilized, modern powers. European nations have seated themselves along the eastern coast of Asia, while China by her misfortunes has given us an object-lesson in the utter folly of attempting to exist as a nation at all if both rich and defenceless.
Meanwhile our own mighty Republic has stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and now in California, Oregon, and Washington, in Alaska, Hawaii and the Philippines, holds an extent of coast line which makes it of necessity a power of the first class in the Pacific. The extension in the area of our domain has been immense, the extension in the area of our influence even greater. America’s geographical position on the Pacific is such as to ensure our peaceful domination of its waters in the future if only we grasp with sufficient resolution the advantages of that position. We are taking long strides in that direction; witness the cables we are laying down, the steamship lines we are starting—some of them already containing steamships larger than any freight carriers that have previously existed. We have taken the first steps toward digging an Isthmian canal, to be under our own control, a canal which will make our Atlantic and Pacific coast lines in effect continuous, which will be of incalculable benefit to our mercantile navy, and above all to our military navy in the event of war.
The inevitable march of events gave us the control of the Philippine Islands at a time so opportune that it may without irreverence be called Providential. Unless we show ourselves weak, unless we show ourselves degenerate sons of the sires from whose loins we sprang, we must go on with the work we have undertaken. I most earnestly hope that this work will ever be of a peaceful character. We infinitely desire peace, and the surest way of obtaining it is to show that we are not afraid of war. We should deal in a spirit of justice and fairness with weaker nations, and we should show to the strongest that we are able to maintain our rights. Such showing can not be made by bluster; for bluster merely invites contempt. Let us speak courteously, deal fairly, and keep ourselves armed and ready. If we do these things we can count on the peace that comes to the just man armed, to the just man who neither fears nor inflicts wrong. We must keep on building and maintaining a thoroughly efficient navy, with plenty of the best and most formidable ships, with an ample supply of officers and men, and with those officers and men trained in the most efficient fashion to perform their duties. Only thus can we assure our position in the world at large. It behooves all men of lofty soul fit and proud to belong to a mighty nation to see to it that we keep our position in the world; for our proper place is with the great expanding peoples, with the peoples that dare to be great, that accept with confidence a place of leadership in the world. All our people should take that position, but especially of California, you of the Pacific Slope, for much of our expansion must go through the Golden Gate, and inevitably you who are seated by the Pacific must take the lead in and must profit by the growth of American influence along the coasts and among the islands of that mighty ocean, where east and west finally become one.
The citizen that counts, the man that counts in our life, is the man who endeavors not to shirk difficulties but to meet and overcome them, is the man who endeavors not to lead his life in the world’s soft places, not to walk easily and take his comfort, but the man who goes out to tread the rugged ways that lead to honor and success, the ways the treading of which means good work worthily done.