Teddy Roosevelt

Such questions must be dealt with on the principle of getting the greatest possible amount of ultimate good, and of surrendering in return whatever must be surrendered in order to attain this good.

They were men of affairs, accustomed to deal with other men; and they understood that few questions of real moment can be decided on their merits alone.

They had high ideals, and they strove to realize them, as near as might be; otherwise they would have been neither patriots nor statesmen.

The foremost statesmen of the Revolution were eminently practical politicians.

They saw that it would have to be decided, as almost all political questions of great importance must be decided, by compromise and concession.

The wisest and coolest leaders saw that the matter could never be determined on a mere consideration of the abstract rights, or even of the equities, of the case.

The direct reverse was the case during and after the Revolution; for the jealousy and distrust which the different States felt for one another were bitter to a degree.

At present no State in the Union fears the growth of a neighbor, or would ever dream of trying to check that growth.

It was the United States and not Georgia that actually won and held the land in dispute; and it was a discredit to Georgia's patriotism that she so long wrangled about it, and ultimately drove so hard a bargain concerning it with the…

The settlement of the Northwest represented the triumph of an intelligent collectivism, which yet allowed to each man a full measure of personal liberty.

The most striking feature in the settlement of the Southwest was the free play given to the workings of extreme individualism.

The borderers are usually as suspicious as they are independent, and their self-sufficiency and self-reliance often degenerate into mere lawlessness and defiance of all restraint.

To this day the very virtues of the pioneers--not to speak of their faults--make it almost impossible for them to get on with an ordinary army officer, accustomed as he is to rule absolutely, though justly and with a sort of severe…

They were much better stuff out of which to make a free, self-governing nation, and they were much better able to hold their own in the world, and to shape their own destiny; but they were far less pleasant people to govern.

It was founded not by individual Americans, but by the United States of America.

The Northwest owes its life and owes its abounding strength and vigorous growth to the action of the nation as a whole.

Here, also, the enterprise, daring, and energy of the individual settlers were of the utmost consequence; the land could never have been won had not the incomers possessed these qualities in a very high degree.

The distinguishing feature in the exploration, settlement, and up-building of Kentucky and Tennessee was the individual initiative of the backwoodsmen.

But the real work was done by the settlers themselves.

The West could neither have been won nor held by the frontiersmen, save for the backing given by the Thirteen States.

They constructed their own governmental systems, on their own motion, without assistance or interference from the parent States, until the settlements were firmly established, and the work of civic organization well under way.

They elected their own military leaders, and waged war on their own account against their Indian foes.

Only the backwoodsmen themselves felt the thirst for exploration of the unknown, the desire to try the untried, which drove them hither and thither through the dim wilderness.

The frontiersmen who chopped the first trails across the Alleghanies, who earliest wandered through the lonely western lands, and who first built stockaded hamlets on the banks of the Watauga, the Kentucky, and the Cumberland, acted each…

Thus Kentucky was saved from the career of ignoble dishonor to which she would have been doomed by the success of the disunion faction.