The Triumphant Life of Theodore Roosevelt edited by J. Martin Miller

SPEECHES OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT 355
generallabor cost here and abroad, so as at least to equalize the conditions arising from
the difference in the standard of labor here and abroad—a difference which it should
be our duty to foster in so far as it represents the needs of better educated, better paid,
better fed, and better clothed workingmen of a higher type than any to be found in
a foreign country. At all hazards, and no matter what else is sought for or accom-
plished by changes of the tariff, the American workingman must be protected in his
standard of wages—that is, in his standard of living, and must be secured the fullest
opportunity of employment. Our laws should in no event afford advantage to
foreign industries over American industries. They should in no event do less than
equalize the difference in conditions at home and abroad. The general tariff policy
to which, without regard to changes in detail, I believe this country to be irrevocably
committed, is fundamentally based upon ample recognition of the difference in labor
cost here and abroad; in other words, the recognition of the need for full develop-
ment of the intelligence, the comfort, the high standard of civilized living and
the inventive genius of the American workingman as compared to the workingman
of any other country in the world.
WE CAN AND WILL WIN
It is pretty simple to go just one way and turn another way, and then go
another way, if somebody tells you how, but if you have got to think for your-
self, then you appreciate the fact that the man on your right hand is thinking
too, and that he will "stay put." We won in the Civil War because we had the
manhood to which to appeal. We are going to win as a nation in the great
industrial contest of the present day, because the average American has in him
the stuff out of which victors are made—victors in the industrial and victors in
the military world. And we can preser\'e the mar\'elous prosperity which we
now enjoy, not by shirking facts, not by being afraid—that was not how you
won from '61 to '65. There were people who said you could not win, but you
did, and the people who won were those who looked up and not those who looked
down. You recollect that before Bull Run there were some excellent people who
denounced Abraham Lincoln because he did not go into Richmond at once; and after
Bull Run they said the war was ended ; but
it was not ended ; it took three years
and nine months to end it, and then it ended the other wa.y. Now, gentlemen, we
can win and we will win as citizens of this republic by showing in the complex, hard,
pushing life of this century, the same qualities that were shown by the men of the
Civil War in that contest; and above all by keeping the high average of individual
citizenship which made the armies that saw Appomattox the finest which the world
has ever seen.