316 PUBLIC PAPERS OF GOVERNOR ROOSEVELT
which it is possible may some day have to be condoned in blood and
destruction, not by him, not by his sons, but by you and your sons. If I
could only make you understand that, on one side, and make you, the
mass of our people, the mass of our voters understand, on the other,
that the worst thing they can do is to choose a representative who shall
say, "I am against corporations; I am against capital," and not a man
who shall say, "I stand by the Ten Commandments; I stand by doing
equal justice to the man of means and the man without means; I stand
by saying that no man shall be stolen from and that no man shall steal
from anyone else; I stand by saying that the corporations shall not be
blackmailed, on the one side, and that the corporations shall not
acquire any improper power by corruption, on the other; that the
corporation shall pay its full share of the public burdens, and that
when it does so it shall be protected in its rights exactly as anyone
else is protected." In other words, if I could only make our people
realize that their one hope and one safety in dealing with this problem
is to send into our public bodies men who shall be honest, who shall
realize their obligations to rich and poor alike, and who shall draw the
line, not between the rich man and the poor man, but between the
honest man and the dishonest man.
Now, gentlemen, I have come about to the end of what I have to
say. I have not any new doctrine to declare to you. The doctrine that I
preach, the doctrine that all men who wish their country well must
preach, is a doctrine that was old when the children of Israel came out
of Egypt; a doctrine as old as our civilization; as old as the
civilizations that died thousands of years before ours was