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