United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
We ought both to husband and to develop our natural resources, our
mines, our forests, our water power. I wish we could have made more
progress than we have made in this vital matter; and I call once more,
with the deepest earnestness and solicitude, upon the advocates of a
careful and provident conservation, on the one hand, and the advocates
of a free and inviting field for private capital, on the other, to get
together in a spirit of genuine accommodation and agreement and set this
great policy forward at once.
We must hearten and quicken the spirit and efficiency of labor
throughout our whole industrial system by everywhere and in all
occupations doing justice to the laborer, not only by paying a living
wage but also by making all the conditions that surround labor what they
ought to be. And we must do more than justice. We must safeguard life
and promote health and safety in every occupation in which they are
threatened or imperilled. That is more than justice, and better, because
it is humanity and economy.
We must cooerdinate the railway systems of the country for national use,
and must facilitate and promote their development with a view to that
cooerdination and to their better adaptation as a whole to the life and
trade and defense of the nation. The life and industry of the country
can be free and unhampered only if these arteries are open, efficient,
and complete.
Thus shall we stand ready to meet the future as circumstance and
international policy effect their unfolding, whether the changes come
slowly or come fast and without preface.
I have not spoken explicitly, Gentlemen, of the platform adopted at St.
Louis; but it has been implicit in all that I have said. I have sought
to interpret its spirit and meaning. The people of the United States do
not need to be assured now that that platform is a definite pledge, a
practical program. We have proved to them that our promises are made to
be kept.
We hold very definite ideals. We believe that the energy and initiative
of our people have been too narrowly coached and superintended; that
they should be set free, as we have set them free, to disperse
themselves throughout the nation; that they should not be concentrated
in the hands of a few powerful guides and guardians, as our opponents
have again and again, in effect if not in purpose, sought to concentrate
them. We believe, moreover,--who that looks about him now with
comprehending eye can fail to believe?--that the day of Little
Americanism, with its narrow horizons, when methods of "protection" and
industrial nursing were the chief study of our provincial statesmen, are
past and gone and that a day of enterprise has at last dawned for the
United States whose field is the wide world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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