Speech 57
EACH  MAN TO BE TREATED ON HIS WORTH AS A MAN

FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT CAPITOL SQUARE, IN   RICHMOND,   VIRGINIA,   OCTOBER   18,

THE problems that face us abroad are important, but the problems that face us at home are even more important.  The extraordinary growth of industrialism during the last half century brings every civilized people face to face with the gravest social and economic questions.  This is an age of combination among capitalists and combination among wage workers.  It is idle to try to prevent such combinations.  Our efforts should be to see that they work for the good and not for the harm of the body politic.  New devices of law are necessary from time to time in order to meet the changed and changing conditions.  But after all we will do well to remember that, although the problems to be solved change from generation to generation, the spirit in which their solution must be attempted remains forever the same.  It is in peace .as it is in war.  Tactics change and weapons change.  The Continental troops in their blue and buff, who fought under Washington and Greene and Wayne, differed entirely in arms and in training from those who in blue or gray faced one another in the armies of Grant and of Lee, of Sherman and of Johnston.  And now the sons of these same Union and Confederate veterans, who serve in our gallant little army of today, wear a different uniform, carry a different weapon, and practice different tactics.  But the soul of the soldier has remained the same throughout, and the qualities which drove forward to victory or to death the men of '76 and the men of '61 are the very qualities which the men of today must keep unchanged if in the hour of need the honor of the Nation is to be kept untarnished.  So it is in civil life.  This Government was formed with as its basic idea the principle of treating each man on his worth as a man, of paying no heed to whether he was rich or poor, no heed to his creed or his social standing, but only to the way in which he performed his duty to himself, to his neighbor, to the state.  From this principle we can not afford to vary by so much as a hand's breadth.  Many republics have risen in the past, and some of them flourished long, but sooner or later they fell; and the cause most potent in bringing about their fall was in almost all cases the fact that they grew to be governments in the interest of a class instead of governments in the interest of all.  It made no difference as to which class it was that thus wrested to its own advantage the governmental machinery.  It was ultimately as fatal to the cause of freedom whether it was the rich who oppressed the poor or the poor who plundered the rich.  The crime of brutal disregard of the rights of others is as much a crime when it manifests itself in the shape of greed and brutal arrogance on the one side, as when it manifests itself in the shape of envy and lawless violence on the other.  Our aim must be to deal justice to each man; no more and no less.  This purpose must find its expression and support not merely in our collective action through the agencies of the Government, but in our social attitude.  Rich man and poor man must alike feel that on the one hand they are protected by law and that on the other hand they are responsible to the law; for each is entitled to be fairly dealt with by his neighbor and by the State; and if we as citizens of this Nation are true to ourselves and to the traditions of OUT forefathers such fair measure of justice shall always be dealt to each man; so that as far as we can bring it about each shall receive his dues, each shall be given the chance to show the stuff there is in him, shall be secured against wrong, and in turn prevented from wronging others.

More than this no man is entitled to, and less than this no man shall have.