Remember always that every man of us must in some shape or other have his passions and appetites governed; and the less of that government there is from within the more there will have to be from without.

You must have at the head the type of ability which can do well; just as you, comrade of the Civil War (turning to an engineer who wore the button of the Grand Army) needed a general who knew his business, or your valor did not avail.

The Union Army could have accomplished nothing if the feeling of the enlisted men had been the wish to down Grant and Sherman instead of supporting them heartily in achieving the common work for which all in common were striving.

I have said again and again that I would not tolerate for one moment any injustice to a railroad any more than I would tolerate any injustice by a railroad.

The valley of the Ohio already belonged to the Americans by right of conquest and of armed possession; it was held by rifle-bearing backwoods farmers, hard and tenacious men, who never lightly yielded what once they had grasped.

But the one great attraction for all classes was the chance of procuring large quantities of fertile land at low prices.

We of this generation were but carrying to completion the work of our fathers and of our fathers' fathers.

It is moreover a matter for just pride that while there was no falling off in the vigor and prowess shown by our fighting men, there was a marked change for the better in the spirit with which the deed was done.

The backwoodsmen had pushed the Spaniards from the Mississippi, had set up a slave-holding republic in Texas, and had conquered the Californian gold-fields, in the sheer masterful exercise of might.

But in 1898 the United States, while having gained in strength, showed that there had likewise been gain in justice, in mercy, in sense of responsibility.

Our people as a whole went into the war, primarily, it is true, to drive out the Spaniard once for all from America; but with the fixed determination to replace his rule by a government of justice and orderly liberty.

It was expansion which made us a great power; and at every stage it has been bitterly antagonized, not only by the short-sighted and the timid, but even by many who were neither one nor the other.

The taking of Texas and of California was complicated by the slave question, but much of the opposition to both was simply the general opposition to expansion--that is, to national growth and national greatness.

In each case, in the end, the believers in the historic American policy of expansion have triumphed.

Hitherto America has gone steadily forward along the path of greatness, and has remained true to the policy of her early leaders who felt within them the lift towards mighty things.

Like every really strong people, ours is stirred by the generous ardor for daring strife and mighty deeds, and now with eyes undimmed looks far into the misty future.

At bottom the question of expansion in 1898 was but a variant of the problem we had to solve at every stage of the great western movement.

The same forces, the same types of men, stood for and against the cause of national growth, of national greatness, at the end of the century as at the beginning.

During the past three centuries the spread of the English-speaking peoples over the world's waste spaces has been not only the most striking feature in the world's history, but also the event of all others most far-reaching in its effects…

The tongue which Bacon feared to use in his writings, lest they should remain forever unknown to all but the inhabitants of a relatively unimportant insular kingdom, is now the speech of two continents.

The Common Law which Coke jealously upheld in the southern half of a single European island, is now the law of the land throughout the vast regions of Australasia, and of America north of the Rio Grande.

The names of the plays that Shakespeare wrote are household words in the mouths of mighty nations, whose wide domains were to him more unreal than the realm of Prester John.

The day when the keels of the low-Dutch sea-thieves first grated on the British coast was big with the doom of many nations.

There sprang up in conquered southern Britain, when its name had been significantly changed to England, that branch of the Germanic stock which was in the end to grasp almost literally world-wide power, and by its overshadowing growth to…

Yet the rule and the race of Goth, Frank, and Burgund have vanished from off the earth; while the sons of the unknown Saxon, Anglian, and Friesic warriors now hold in their hands the fate of the coming years.