Teddy Roosevelt

To provide battleships and cruisers and then lay them up, with the expectation of leaving them unmanned until they are needed in actual war, would be worse than folly; it would be a crime against the nation.

We do not guarantee any state against punishment if it misconducts itself, provided that punishment does not take the form of the acquisition of territory by any non-American power.

The only fear is lest in our overanxiety we give them a degree of independence for which they are unfit, thereby inviting reaction and disaster.

To have taken a single step further or faster in advance would have been folly and weakness, and might well have been crime.

Cuba has in her Constitution affirmed what we desired, that she should stand, in international matters, in closer and more friendly relations with us than with any other power; and we are bound by every consideration of honor and…

I ask the attention of the Congress to the need of legislation concerning the public lands of Porto Rico.

Their material welfare must be as carefully and jealously considered as the welfare of any other portion of our country.

It would be unwise to begin by doing too much, for a great deal will doubtless be learned, both as to what can and what can not be safely attempted, by the early efforts, which must of necessity be partly experimental in character.

The policy of the National Government should be to aid irrigation in the several States and Territories in such manner as will enable the people in the local communities to help themselves, and as will stimulate needed reforms in the State…

The lands reclaimed by them should be reserved by the Government for actual settlers, and the cost of construction should so far as possible be repaid by the land reclaimed.

These irrigation works should be built by the National Government.

There remain, however, vast areas of public land which can be made available for homestead settlement, but only by reservoirs and main-line canals impracticable for private enterprise.

The government should provide in its contracts that all work should be done under “fair” conditions, and in addition to setting a high standard should uphold it by proper inspection, extending if necessary to the subcontractors.

If, however, the judgment of the Congress is that it lacks the constitutional power to pass such an act, then a constitutional amendment should be submitted to confer the power.

I believe that a law can be framed which will enable the National Government to exercise control along the lines above indicated, profiting by the experience gained through the passage and administration of the Interstate Commerce Act.

There is widespread conviction in the minds of the American people that the great corporations known as trusts are in certain of their features and tendencies hurtful to the general welfare.

These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with ignorance, which unfit men for the exercise of cool and steady judgment.

Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as “trusts,” appeal especially to hatred and fear.

Moreover, it can not too often be pointed out that to strike with ignorant violence at the interests of one set of men almost inevitably endangers the interests of all.

Moreover, we should recognize the immense importance to this material development of leaving as unhampered as is compatible with the public good the strong and forceful men upon whom the success of business operations inevitably rests.

The tremendous and highly complex industrial development which went on with ever accelerated rapidity during the latter half of the nineteenth century brings us face to face, at the beginning of the twentieth, with very serious social…

If the risk to the President’s life became great, it would mean that the office would more and more come to be filled by men of a spirit which would make them resolute and merciless in dealing with every friend of disorder.

So far from his deed being committed on behalf of the people against the government, the government was obliged at once to exert its full police power to save him from instant death at the hands of the people.

The people would have torn him limb from limb if it had not been that the law he defied was at once invoked in his behalf.

He is in no sense, in no shape or way, a “product of social conditions,” save as a highwayman is “produced” by the fact that an unarmed man happens to have a purse.