Teddy Roosevelt

Some work injustice by granting valuable rights in perpetuity without return.

This country has never made a better investment than the $40,000,000 which it paid to the French Company for work and betterments.

I found the conditions perfect.

The Isthmus had been a by-word for deadly unhealthfulness.

The situation on the open government range is strikingly different.

I am gravely concerned at the extremely unsatisfactory condition of the public land laws and at the prevalence of fraud under their present provisions.

The first great problem to be solved, upon the solution of which the success of the rest of the work depended, was the problem of sanitation.

Now, after two years of our occupation the conditions as regards sickness and the death rate compare favorably with reasonably healthy localities in the United States.

Equal care is taken by the inspectors of the health department to secure cleanliness in the houses and proper hygienic conditions of every kind.

Many of the existing laws affecting rights of way and privileges on public lands and reservations are illogical and unfair.

Actual--not constructive--living at home on the land for three years should be required before commutation.

In the evening I attended a reception, which was also a Government function.

The money value of the national forests now reserved for the use and benefit of the people exceeds considerably the sum of one thousand millions of dollars.

I also examined certain of the schools and saw the school children, both white and colored, speaking with certain of the teachers.

All the patients that I saw, with one or two exceptions, were laborers or other employees on the canal works and railways.

Especial care has been devoted to minimizing the risk due to the presence of those species of mosquitoes which have been found to propagate malarial and yellow fevers.

To have yielded to the natural impatience of ill-informed outsiders and begun all kinds of experiments in work prior to a thorough sanitation of the Isthmus, would have been disastrous.

The timber and stone act has demonstrated conclusively that its effect is to turn over the public timber lands to great corporations.

It has done enormous harm, it is no longer needed, and it should be repealed.

It must be remembered that his work was not mere sanitation as the term is understood in our ordinary municipal work.

I also inspected the receiving hospitals in various settlements.

I inspected the Ancon Hospital, going through various wards both for white patients and for colored patients.

The desert land act results so frequently in fraud and so comparatively seldom in making homes on the land that it demands radical amendment.

Temporary accommodation, even if only such as soldiers use when camped in the field, should have been provided.

The boundaries of the national forest reserves unavoidably include certain valuable timber lands not owned by the government.