Teddy Roosevelt

There are no two public questions of more vital importance to the future of this country than the problem of Conservation and the problem of the betterment of country life.

Now, Congress can with wisdom act in such matters of prime legislative importance as the tariff and river and harbor improvement, in the same way that the President acts in such matters of prime administrative importance as country life…

But the President of the United States can do his work at all only by delegating the enormous mass of it to his appointees, and by confining his own share of the purely administrative work largely to supervision and direction of these…

What is true of the voters is equally true of legislators and administrators the moment that their tasks become sufficiently complex.

Indeed, in my judgment, there are certain matters, as to which the voters do not at present have the chance of thus acting directly, where it is important that the chance be given them.

The voters, as a whole, for instance, must necessarily declare directly upon all really vital issues, and they should do this when the issue is a man just as much as when the issue is one of legislation.

It is only by such delegation that it is possible to secure the proper consideration of the exceedingly important business which cannot properly be delegated.

As soon as business becomes at all complex—and nothing can be more complex than the business of a Nation of a hundred million people—it can only be performed by delegating to experts the duty of dealing with all that can properly be…

It is only in this way that tariff legislation, river and harbor legislation, and pension legislation can be treated from the standpoint of principle and not from the very low standpoint of privilege and preference.

Even under such conditions of tariff-making errors might be committed, but they would be merely those errors of disinterested judgment incidental to every kind of public or, for the matter of that, private effort, and the work would not be…

Such a commission could work in harmony with the Commissioner of Labor, so as to insure that the laborers for whom the tariff is passed get the full benefit of it; for the major part of the benefit of a protective tariff should…

These men, from the very nature of the case, will be wholly free from the local pressure of special interests so keenly felt by every man who is dependent upon the vote of a particular district every two years for his continuance in public…

Congress has not exercised this power, chiefly because of what I am bound to regard as a very shortsighted and unwise belief that it is beneath its dignity to delegate any of its functions.

Congress has now, and has long had, the power to rid its members of almost all the improper pressure brought to bear upon the individual by special interests—great and small, local and metropolitan—on such subjects as tariff legislation…

The individual Congressman can be excused only by frankly admitting that the fault lies with the Congressmen taken collectively.

On the other hand, it is just as idle for Congressmen to seek to excuse themselves as a body by uttering jeremiads as to the improper way in which their constituents press them to do things that ought not to be done.

It is futile to expect to cure this type of evil merely by solemnly saying that each Congressman ought to be good.

As regards these people, all that can be done is to create a vigorous public opinion—an opinion which shall not only make it uncomfortable for any man to demand such favors, but which shall cordially support the Congressman in refusing…

As with the tariff, so with pensions; the Congressman is urged to obtain local favors without regard to National interests.

Until the American people themselves become more National and less local, until constituencies cease to regard their Congressmen as solicitors at the National Treasury, Congress will continue to enact iniquitous groups of local favors into…

In the case of the Philippines, there were just two things that we could do which would have been worse than leaving them under Spanish rule.

Americans forget, for instance, that we have actually tried this system and found it completely wanting, in the case of Samoa.

Moreover, if there must be interference for the sake of the country itself, to promote its growth in order and civilization, actual experience has shown that such interference can only come efficiently by one nation, and not by many.

Any arrangement which had guaranteed Algeria against the French, or Turkestan against the Russians, or the Sudan against the English, or Panama against the Americans, would have been an arrangement against the interests of humanity and…

There is no analogy at all with what occurs in a community unable to keep elementary order, or to secure elementary justice within its own borders, and unable or unwilling to do justice to foreign nations.