I call attention to the urgent need of prompt action on this matter. We now have a great opportunity to secure peace and stability in the island, without friction or bloodshed, by acting in accordance with the cordial invitation of the governmental authorities themselves. It will be unfortunate from every standpoint if we fail to grasp this opportunity; for such failure will probably mean increasing revolutionary violence in Santo Domingo, and very possibly embarrassing foreign complications in addition. This protocol affords a practical test of the efficiency of the United States Government in maintaining the Monroe Doctrine.
Theodore Roosevelt.
White House,
February 15, 1905.
ADDRESS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, PHILADELPHIA, PA., FEB. 22, 1905
Mr. Provost, Members of the University, and my Fellow-Citizens:
As a Nation we have had our full share of great men, but the two men of pre-eminent greatness who, as the centuries go on, will surely loom above all others are Washington and Lincoln; and it is peculiarly fitting that their birthdays should be celebrated every year and the meaning of their lives brought home close to us.
No other city in the country is so closely identified with Washington’s career as Philadelphia. He served here in 1775 in the Continental Congress. He was here as commander of the Army at the time of the battles of Brandywine and Germantown; and it was near here that with that army he faced the desolate winter at Valley Forge, the winter which marked the turning point of the Revolutionary War. Here he came again as President of the Convention which framed the Constitution, and then as President of the United States, and finally as Lieutenant-General of the Army after he had retired from the Presidency.
One hundred and eight years ago, just before he left the Presidency, he issued his farewell address, and in it he laid down certain principles which he believed should guide the citizens of this Republic for all time to come, his own words being “which appear to me all-important to the permanency of your felicity as a people.”
Washington, though in some ways an even greater man than Lincoln, did not have Lincoln’s wonderful gift of expression—that gift which makes certain speeches of the rail-splitter from Illinois read like the inspired utterances of the great Hebrew seers and prophets. But he had all of Lincoln’s sound common-sense, farsightedness, and devotion to a lofty ideal. Like Lincoln he sought after the noblest objects, and like Lincoln he sought after them by thoroughly practical methods. These two greatest Americans can fairly be called the best among the great men of the world, and greatest among the good men of the world. Each showed in actual practice his capacity to secure under our system the priceless union of individual liberty with governmental strength. Each was as free from the vices of the tyrant as from the vices of the demagogue. To each the empty futility of the mere doctrinaire was as alien as the baseness of the merely self-seeking politician. Each was incapable alike of the wickedness which seeks by force of arms to wrong others and of the no less criminal weakness which fails to provide effectively against being wronged by others.
Among Washington’s maxims which he bequeathed to his countrymen were the two following: “Observe good faith and justice toward all nations,” and “To be prepared for war is the most effective means to promote peace.” These two principles taken together should form the basis of our whole foreign policy. Neither is sufficient taken by itself. It is not merely an idle dream, but a most mischievous dream, to believe that mere refraining from wrongdoing will ensure us against being wronged. Yet, on the other hand, a nation prepared for war is a menace to mankind unless the national purpose is to treat other nations with good faith and justice. In any community it is neither the conscientious man who is a craven at heart, nor yet the bold and strong man without the moral sense, who is of real use to the community; it is the man who to strength and courage adds a realizing sense of the moral obligation resting upon him, the man who has not only the desire but the power to do his full duty by his neighbor and by the State. So, in the world at large, the nation which is of use in the progress of mankind is that nation which combines strength of character, force of character, and insistence upon its own rights, with a full acknowledgment of its own duties toward others. Just at present the best way in which we can show that our loyalty to the teachings of Washington is a loyalty of the heart and not of the lips only is to see to it that the work of building up our Navy goes steadily on, and that at the same time our stand for international righteousness is clear and emphatic.