United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
Fortunately, two great measures, finely conceived, the one to unlock,
with proper safeguards, the resources of the national domain, the other
to encourage the use of the navigable waters outside that domain for the
generation of power, have already passed the House of Representatives
and are ready for immediate consideration and action by the Senate. With
the deepest earnestness I urge their prompt passage. In them both we
turn our backs upon hesitation and makeshift and formulate a genuine
policy of use and conservation, in the best sense of those words. We owe
the one measure not only to the people of that great western country for
whose free and systematic development, as it seems to me, our
legislation has done so little, but also to the people of the Nation as
a whole; and we as clearly owe the other in fulfillment of our repeated
promises that the water power of the country should in fact as well as
in name be put at the disposal of great industries which can make
economical and profitable use of it, the rights of the public being
adequately guarded the while, and monopoly in the use prevented. To have
begun such measures and not completed them would indeed mar the record
of this great Congress very seriously. I hope and confidently believe
that they will be completed.
And there is another great piece of legislation which awaits and should
receive the sanction of the Senate: I mean the bill which gives a larger
measure of self-government to the people of the Philippines. How better,
in this time of anxious questioning and perplexed policy, could we show
our confidence in the principles of liberty, as the source as well as
the expression of life, how better could we demonstrate our own
self-possession and steadfastness in the courses of justice and
disinterestedness than by thus going calmly forward to fulfill our
promises to a dependent people, who will now look more anxiously than
ever to see whether we have indeed the liberality, the unselfishness,
the courage, the faith we have boasted and professed. I cannot believe
that the Senate will let this great measure of constructive justice
await the action of another Congress. Its passage would nobly crown the
record of these two years of memorable labor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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