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States must always, as a matter of honorable obligation and with scrupulous nicety, live up to every understanding which she has entered into with any foreign Power.
The question that has arisen over the right of this Nation to charge tolls on the Canal vividly illustrates the folly and iniquity of making treaties which cannot and ought not to be kept. As a people there is no lesson we more need to learn than the lesson not in an outburst of emotionalism to make a treaty that ought not to be, and could not be, kept; and the further lesson that, when we do make a treaty, we must soberly live up to it as long as changed conditions do not warrant the serious step of denouncing it. If we had been so unwise as to adopt the general arbitration treaties a few months ago, we would now be bound to arbitrate the question of our right to free our own coastwise traffic from Canal tolls; and at any future time we might have found ourselves obliged to arbitrate the question whether, in the event of war, we could keep the Canal open to our own war vessels and closed to those of our foes. There could be no better illustration of the extreme unwisdom of entering into international agreements without paying heed to the question of keeping them. On the other hand, we deliberately, and with our eyes open, and after ample consideration and discussion, agreed to treat all merchant ships on the same basis; it was partly because of this agreement that there was no question raised by foreign nations as to our digging and fortifying the Canal; and, having given our word, we must keep it. When the American people make a promise, that promise must and will be kept.
CONCLUSION
Now, friends, this is my confession of faith. I have made it rather long because I wish you to know just what my deepest convictions are on the great questions of to-day, so that if you choose to make me your standard-bearer in the fight you shall make your choice understanding exactly how I feel—and if, after hearing me, you think you ought to choose some one else, I shall loyally abide by your choice. The convictions to which I have come have not been arrived at as the result of study in the closet or the library, but from the knowledge I have gained through hard experience during the many years in which, under many and varied conditions, I have striven and toiled with men. I believe in a larger use of the governmental power to help remedy industrial wrongs, because it has been borne in on me by actual experience that without the exercise of such power many of the wrongs will go unremedied. I believe in a larger opportunity for the people themselves directly to participate in government and to control their governmental agents, because long experience has taught me that without such control many of their agents will represent them badly. By actual experience in office I have found that, as a rule, I could secure the triumph of the causes in which I most believed, not from the politicians and the men who claim an exceptional right to speak in business and government, but by going over their heads and appealing directly to the people themselves. I am not under the slightest
