The courts hold a place of peculiar and deserved sanctity under our form of government.

Respect for the law is essential to the permanence of our institutions; and respect for the law is largely conditioned upon respect for the courts.

It is an offense against the Republic to say anything which can weaken this respect, save for the gravest reason and in the most carefully guarded manner.

Our judges should be held in peculiar honor; and the duty of respectful and truthful comment and criticism, which should be binding when we speak of anybody, should be especially binding when we speak of them.

On an average they stand above any other servants of the community, and the greatest judges have reached the high level held by those few greatest patriots whom the whole country delights to honor.

But we must face the fact that there are wise and unwise judges, just as there are wise and unwise executives and legislators.

It is far better, from every standpoint, that the remedy should come from within.

In no other nation in the world do the courts wield such vast and far-reaching power as in the United States.

Let them exercise this great power not only honestly and bravely, but with wise insight into the needs and fixed purposes of the people, so that they may do justice and work equity, so that they may protect all persons in their rights, and…

If there is any one duty which more than another we owe it to our children and our children's children to perform at once, it is to save the forests of this country, for they constitute the first and most important element in the…

Any really civilized nation will so use all of these three great national assets that the nation will have their benefit in the future.

Just as a farmer, after all his life making his living from his farm, will, if he is an expert farmer, leave it as an asset of increased value to his son, so we should leave our national domain to our children, increased in value and not…

There are small sections of our own country, in the East and the West, in the Adriondacks, the White Mountains, and the Appalachians, and in the Rocky Mountains, where we can already see for ourselves the damage in the shape of permanent…

Shortsighted persons, or persons blinded to the future by desire to make money in every way out of the present, sometimes speak as if no great damage would be done by the reckless destruction of our forests.

Thanks to our own recklessness in the use of our splendid forests, we have already crossed the verge of a timber famine in this country, and no measures that we now take can, at least for many years, undo the mischief that has already been…

But we can prevent further mischief being done; and it would be in the highest degree reprehensible to let any consideration of temporary convenience or temporary cost interfere with such action, especially as regards the National Forests…

The dry wells, and the wells with water far below the former watermark, bear testimony to the good days of the past and the evil days of the present.

But there came a time when the forest had shrunk sufficiently to make each year's cutting a serious matter, and from that time on the destruction proceeded with appalling rapidity; for of course each year of destruction rendered the forest…

This is just one of those matters which it is fatal to leave to unsupervised individual control.

The forest can only be protected by the State, by the Nation; and the liberty of action of individuals must be conditioned upon what the State or Nation determines to be necessary for the common safety.

The lesson of deforestation in China is a lesson which mankind should have learned many times already from what has occurred in other places.

When the soil is gone, men must go; and the process does not take long.

Shortsighted man, whether barbaric, semi-civilized, or what he mistakenly regards as fully civilized, when he has destroyed the forests, has rendered certain the ultimate destruction of the land itself.

Not only have the forests been destroyed, but because of their destruction the soil has been washed off the naked rock.

The terrible consequence is that it is impossible now to undo the damage that has been done.