Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
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 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 can not 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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