Speech 69
RIGHT   PRINCIPLES   FOR   THE   SOLUTION OF LABOR PROBLEMS

FROM THE PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE AT THE OPENING OF THE FIRST SESSION OF THE FIFTY NINTH CONGRESS, DECEMBER 5, 1905

THE question of securing a healthy, self respecting, and mutually sympathetic attitude as between employer and employee, capitalist and wage worker, is a difficult one.  All phases of the labor problem prove difficult when approached.  But the underlying principles, the root principles, in accordance with which the problem must be solved are entirely simple.  We can get justice and right dealing only if we put as of paramount importance the principle of treating a man on his worth as a man rather than with reference to his social position, his occupation, or the class to which he belongs.  There are selfish and brutal men in all ranks of life.  If they are capitalists their selfishness and brutality may take the form of hard indifference to suffering, greedy disregard of every moral restraint which interferes with the accumulation of wealth, and cold-blooded exploitation of the weak; or, if they are laborers, the form of laziness, of sullen envy of the more fortunate, and of willingness to perform deeds of murderous violence.  Such conduct is just as reprehensible in one case as in the other, and all honest and far-seeing men should join in warring against it wherever it becomes manifest.  Individual capitalist and individual wage worker, corporation and union, are alike entitled to the protection of the law, and must alike obey the law.  Moreover, in addition to mere obedience to the law, each man, if he be really a good citizen, must show broad sympathy for his neighbor and genuine desire to look at any question arising between them from the standpoint of that neighbor no less than from his own; and to this end it is essential that capitalist and wage worker should consult freely one with the other, should each strive to bring closer the day when both shall realize that they are properly partners and not enemies.  To approach the questions which inevitably arise between them solely from the standpoint which treats each side in the mass as the enemy of the other side in the mass is both wicked and foolish.  In the past the most direful among the influences which have brought about the downfall of republics has ever been the growth of the class spirit, the growth of the spirit which tends to make a man subordinate the welfare of the public as a whole to the welfare of the particular class to which he belongs, the substitution of loyalty to a class for loyalty to the Nation.  This inevitably brings about a tendency to treat each man not on his merits as an individual, but on his position as belonging to a certain class in the community.  If such a spirit grows up in this Republic it will ultimately prove fatal to us, as in the past it has proved fatal to every community in which it has become dominant.  Unless we continue to keep a quick and lively sense of the great fundamental truth that our concern is with the individual worth of the individual man, this Government can not permanently hold the place which it has achieved among the nations.  The vital lines of cleavage among our people do not correspond, and indeed run at right angles, to the lines of cleavage which divide occupation from occupation, which divide wage workers from capitalists, farmers from bankers, men of small means from men of large means, men who live in the towns from men who live in the country; for the vital line of cleavage is the line which divides the honest man who tries to do well by his neighbor from the dishonest man who does ill by his neighbor.  In other words, the standard we should establish is the standard of conduct, not the standard of occupation, of means, or of social position.  It is the man's moral quality, his attitude toward the great questions which concern all humanity, his cleanliness of life, his power to do his duty toward himself and toward others, which really count; and if we substitute for the standard of personal judgment which treats each man according to his merits, another standard in accordance with which all men of one class are favored and all men of another class discriminated against, we shall do irreparable damage to the body politic.  I believe that our people are too sane, too self respecting, too fit for self government, ever to adopt such an attitude.  This Government is not and never shall be government by a plutocracy.  This Government is not and never shall be government by a mob.  It shall continue to be in the future what it has been in the past, a government based on the theory that each man, rich or poor, is to be treated simply and solely on his worth as a man, and that all his personal and property rights are to be safeguarded, and that he is neither to wrong others nor to suffer wrong from others.

The noblest of all forms of government is self government; but it is also the most difficult.  We who possess this priceless boon, and who desire to hand it on to our children and our children's children, should ever bear in mind the thought so finely expressed by Burke: " Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites; in proportion as they are disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good in preference to the flattery of knaves.  Society can not exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there be within the more there must be without.  It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds can not be free.  Their passions forge their fetters."