Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
The existing situation is injurious to the health of our entire body
politic. It stifles in those for whose benefit it is permitted all
patriotic love of country, and substitutes in its place selfish greed and
grasping avarice. Devotion to American citizenship for its own sake and for
what it should accomplish as a motive to our nation's advancement and the
happiness of all our people is displaced by the assumption that the
Government, instead of being the embodiment of equality, is but an
instrumentality through which especial and individual advantages are to be
gained.
The arrogance of this assumption is unconcealed. It appears in the sordid
disregard of all but personal interests, in the refusal to abate for the
benefit of others one iota of selfish advantage, and in combinations to
perpetuate such advantages through efforts to control legislation and
improperly influence the suffrages of the people.
The grievances of those not included within the circle of these
beneficiaries, when fully realized, will surely arouse irritation and
discontent. Our farmers, long suffering and patient, struggling in the race
of life with the hardest and most unremitting toil, will not fail to see,
in spite of misrepresentations and misleading fallacies, that they are
obliged to accept such prices for their products as are fixed in foreign
markets where they compete with the farmers of the world; that their lands
are declining in value while their debts increase, and that without
compensating favor they are forced by the action of the Government to pay
for the benefit of others such enhanced prices for the things they need
that the scanty returns of their labor fail to furnish their support or
leave no margin for accumulation.
Our workingmen, enfranchised from all delusions and no longer frightened by
the cry that their wages are endangered by a just revision of our tariff
laws, will reasonably demand through such revision steadier employment,
cheaper means of living in their homes, freedom for themselves and their
children from the doom of perpetual servitude, and an open door to their
advancement beyond the limits of a laboring class. Others of our citizens,
whose comforts and expenditures are measured by moderate salaries and fixed
incomes, will insist upon the fairness and justice of cheapening the cost
of necessaries for themselves and their families.
When to the selfishness of the beneficiaries of unjust discrimination under
our laws there shall be added the discontent of those who suffer from such
discrimination, we will realize the fact that the beneficent purposes of
our Government, dependent upon the patriotism and contentment of our
people, are endangered.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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