Teddy Roosevelt

But hand in hand with this purpose must go the purpose which Abraham Lincoln designated as the “amelioration of mankind.” Only by an intelligent effort to realize this joint process of individual and social betterment can we keep our…

A great democratic commonwealth should seek to produce and reward that individual distinction which results in the efficient performance of needed work, for such performance is of high value to the whole community.

Violent excess is sure to provoke violent reaction; and the worst possible policy for our country would be one of violent oscillation between reckless upsetting of property rights, and unscrupulous greed manifested under pretense of…

Property is the fruit of labor; property is desirable; is a positive good in the world.

Capital has its rights which are as worthy of protection as any other rights....

Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

We must always remember that no system of legislation can accomplish anything unless back of it we have the right type of National character; unless we have ideals to which our practice measurably conforms.

We must set the end in view as the goal; and then, instead of making a fetish of some particular kind of means, we should adopt whatever honorable means will best accomplish the end.

We also wish to secure a measurable equality of opportunity, a measurable equality of reward for services of similar value.

We wish to do away with the profit that comes from the illegitimate exercise of cunning and craft.

Moreover, one of the most sinister manifestations of great corporate wealth during recent years has been its tendency to interfere and dominate in politics.

We cannot tolerate anything approaching a monopoly, especially in the necessaries of life, except on terms of such thoroughgoing governmental control as will absolutely safeguard every right of the public.

The complete change in economic conditions means that governmental methods never yet resorted to may have to be employed in order to deal with them.

The greatest evils in our industrial system to-day are those which rise from the abuses of aggregated wealth; and our great problem is to overcome these evils and cut out these abuses.

But in order completely to secure it, there must be whatever legislation is necessary to meet the new conditions caused by the extraordinary industrial change and development that have taken place during the last two generations.

The square deal can be secured in part by honest enforcement of existing laws, by honest application of the principles upon which this Government was founded, by the exercise of an aroused and enlightened public opinion.

In the same way we must apply new political methods to meet the new political needs, or else we shall suffer, and our children also.

If our farmers now used the wasteful methods that served for their great-grandfathers, they would not merely fail in the present, but would work a grave wrong to the American citizens of the future.

We must strive to achieve our ideal by an exercise of governmental power which the conditions did not render necessary a century ago, and of which our forefathers would have felt suspicious.

There must be equal rights for all, and special privileges for none; but we must remember that to achieve this ideal it is necessary to construe rights and privileges very differently from the way they were necessarily construed, by…

We must be true to the spirit of our ancestors, and therefore we must avoid any servility to the letter of what they said and did.

To achieve our purpose we cannot trust merely to haphazard, easy-going methods with complete absence of official Government action and a too exclusively material standard.

Hitherto our efforts towards this end have related to purely political matters; we must now strive to achieve the same end in economic matters.

We believe that it is entirely possible to combine equality of rights and at least an approximate equality in the opportunity to achieve material well-being, with the opportunity for the highest kind of individual distinction.

Yet during this period we have produced, in the persons of Washington and Lincoln, two leaders who on the roll of the world’s worthies stand higher than any other two men ever produced by any other country during a similar length of time.