Speech 61
THE SPIRIT OF CLASS ANTAGONISM

FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED IN CITY PARK, LITTLE ROCK, ARKANSAS, OCTOBER 25,
I AM fortunate enough to have spoken all over the Union, and I have never said in any State or any section what I would not have said in any other State or in any other section.  I am fortunate in being President of a nation where you do not have to praise one State by running down any other State.  Arkansas, the New England States, the Western, the Eastern, the Northern, the Southern — they are all good States and I am for them all.  The thing that has impressed me most as I have gone through this country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Canadian border to the Gulf, has been not the superficial differences of our people, but the essential likenesses of our people.  The average American is a pretty good fellow; and all that is necessary, as you men of the honor guard, you men of the blue and gray, know, is that he should know the other average American and they will get on all right.  That is true as regards locality and locality, and true as regards occupation and occupation.  Thank heaven, we are free now from all danger of sectional antagonism! We must now see that there never comes any spirit of class antagonism in this country, any spirit of hostility between capitalist and wage worker, between employer and employed; and we can avoid the upgrowth of any such feeling by remembering always to treat each man on his worth as a man.  Do not hold it for him or against him that he is either rich or poor.  If he is a crooked man and rich, hold it against him, not because he is rich, but because he is crooked.  If he is not a rich man and crooked, hold it against him, still because he is crooked.  If he is a square man, no matter how much or how little money he has, stand by him because he is a square man.  Distrust more than any other man in this Republic the man who would try to teach Americans to substitute loyalty to any class for loyalty to the whole American people.  Republics have flourished before now, and have fallen; and they have usually fallen because there arose within them parties that represented either the unscrupulous rich or the unscrupulous poor, and that persuaded the majority of the people to substitute loyalty to the one class for loyalty to the people as a whole.

Remember that the rancorous envy that hates the rich is only one side of the shield whose obverse is the insolence and arrogance that looks down on the poor.  The two qualities are fundamentally the same.  They only differ in their manifestations because it happens that the man showing one is in a different position from the man showing the other.  You show me a rich man who is arrogant and insolent in his disregard of the man of less means, and I tell you that same man, if he loses his wealth, will want to plunder every rich man.  In the same way the man who preaches the gospel of hate and envy toward his fellows who are better off, if he becomes better off will oppress the men whom he once championed.  Distrust the man who would persuade you that he would do you good by trying to do any other man harm.  The man who is true to you will ultimately be the man who is true to the great fundamental principles of righteousness.  In public life the man who seeks to persuade you that he will benefit you by wronging any one else, if the chance arises, will surely try to benefit himself by wronging you.  What as a nation we need is to stand by the eternal, immutable principles of right and decency, the principle of fair dealing as between man and man, the principles that teach us to regard virtue with respect and vice with abhorrence wherever either the virtue or the vice may be found.  If we substitute for the line that divides the decent man .from the man who is not decent, the line dividing the rich man from the poor man, or the line making any other artificial division, we will have done irreparable wrong to the Nation itself.