I firmly believe that by a little wise and generous aid we can help even the most backward of the peoples in these coasts and islands forward along the path of orderly liberty so that they can stand alone. If we decline to give them such help the result will be bad both for them and for us; and will in the end in all probability cause us to face humiliation or bloodshed. The problems that face us abroad are important, but the problems that face us at home are even more important. The extraordinary growth of industrialism during the last half century brings every civilized people face to face with the gravest social and economic questions. This is an age of combination among capitalists and combination among wage-workers. It is idle to try to prevent such combinations. Our efforts should be to see that they work for the good and not for the harm of the body politic. New devices of law are necessary from time to time in order to meet the changed and changing conditions. But after all we will do well to remember that, although the problems to be solved change from generation to generation, the spirit in which their solution must be attempted remains forever the same. It is in peace as it is in war. Tactics change and weapons change. The Continental troops in their blue and buff, who fought under Washington and Greene and Wayne, differed entirely in arms and in training from those who in blue or gray faced one another in the armies of Grant and of Lee, of Sherman and of Johnston. And now the sons of these same Union and Confederate veterans, who serve in our gallant little army of to-day, wear a different uniform, carry a different weapon, and practice different tactics. But the soul of the soldier has remained the same throughout, and the qualities which drove forward to victory or to death the men of ’76 and the men of ’61 are the very qualities which the men of to-day must keep unchanged if in the hour of need the honor of the Nation is to be kept untarnished. So it is in civil life. This Government was formed with as its basic idea the principle of treating each man on his worth as a man, of paying no heed to whether he was rich or poor, no heed to his creed or his social standing, but only to the way in which he performed his duty to himself, to his neighbor, to the state. From this principle we can not afford to vary by so much as a hand’s breadth. Many republics have risen in the past, and some of them flourished long, but sooner or later they fell; and the cause most potent in bringing about their fall was in almost all cases the fact that they grew to be governments in the interest of a class instead of governments in the interest of all. It made no difference as to which class it was that thus wrested to its own advantage the governmental machinery. It was ultimately as fatal to the cause of freedom whether it was the rich who oppressed the poor or the poor who plundered the rich.