FREE SPEECH FREEDOM
citizens indulges in gushing promises to do everything
for foreigners, another class offensively and improperly
reviles them; and it is hard to say which class more
thoroughly misrepresents the sober, self - respecting
judgment of the American people as a whole. (1913.)
Mem. Ed. XXII, 609; Nat. Ed. XX, 523.
FREE SPEECH-ATTEMPT TO LIMIT. The Senate
Judiciary Committee has just recommended the passage
of a law in which, among many excellent propositions
to put down disloyalty, there has been adroitly inserted
a provision that any one who uses " contemptuous or
slurring language about the President" shall be punished
by imprisonment for a long term of years and by a fine
of many thousand dollars. This proposed law is sheer
treason to the United States. Under its terms Abraham
Lincoln would have been sent to prison for what he
repeatedly said of Presidents Polk, Pierce, and
Buchanan. . . . It is a proposal to make Americans
subjects instead of citizens. It is a proposal to put the
President in the position of the Hohenzollerns and
Romanoffs. Government by the people means that the
people have the right to do their own thinking and to do
their own speaking about their public servants. They
must speak truthfully and they must not be disloyal to
the country, and it is their highest duty by truthful
criticism to make and keep the public servants loyal to
the country . . . .
Whenever the need arises I shall in the future
speak truthfully of the President in praise or in blame,
exactly as I have done in the past. . . . I am an American
and a free man. My loyalty is due to the United States,
and therefore it is due to the President, the Senators, the
Congressmen, and all other public servants only and to
the degree in which they loyally and efficiently serve
the United States. (1918.) Mem. Ed. XXI, 325-327; Nat.
Ed. XIX, 297-298.
____________. Thank God I am not a free-trader. In
this country pernicious indulgence in the doctrine of
free trade seems inevitably to produce fatty
degeneration of the moral fibre. (To H. C. Lodge,
December 27, 1895.) Lodge Letters I, 204.
____________. Free trade is one of the laissez-faire
theories that has been abandoned by every serious
student of economics; free trade is one of the laissez-
faire theories the reliance on which has reduced
England to her present position of scrap-heap
industrialism. The English employer and the English
workmen offer as fine natural material as is to be found
anywhere, yet during the last forty years they have
tended to fall behind their brethren in Germany, just
because Germany abandoned laissez-faire doctrines and
has taken decisive action in favor of wise organization,
wise governmental supervision and intelligent
cooperation as between the government and the
individual. Saturday Evening Post, October 26, 1912, p.
4.
FREE TRADE. See also RECIPROCITY; TARIFF.
FREEDOM. Freedom is not a gift which can be
enjoyed save by those who show themselves worthy of
it. In this world no privilege can be permanently
appropriated by men who have not the power and the
will successfully to assume the responsibility of using it
aright. . . . Freedom thus conceived is a constructive
force, which enables an intelligent and good man to do
better things than he could do without it; which is in its
essence the substitution of self-restraint for external
restraint—the substitution of a form of restraint which
promotes progress for the form which retards it. This is
the right view to take of freedom; but it can only be
taken if there is a full recognition of the close
connection between liberty and responsibility in every
domain of human thought and action. (At Gettysburg,
Pa., May 30, 1904.) Mem. Ed. XII, 609; Nat. Ed. XI,
FREE SPEECH. See also CRITICISM; LESE-MAJESTY;
LIBERTY.
FREE TRADE. There is certainly a reaction in public
sentiment against our doctrines, but this should not
encourage cowardice in the ranks. It should rather make
the advocates of free trade more persistent in their
efforts to bring about the desired reform. The first and
most prominent evil to be attacked is the prohibitory
tariff on ships, and after that may be mentioned the
tariff on art, which makes us the laughing stock of the
world. (Before New York Free Trade Club, May 28,
1883.) New York Times, May 29, 1883.
326.
FREEDOM-FOES OF. Exactly as the reactionary is in
the end the worst foe of order; exactly as the
conscienceless and greedy man of wealth is in the end
the worst foe of property and of honest and duty-
performing holders of property, so the Anarchist and
the wild Socialist, whose doctrines when applied
necessarily lead to Anarchy and the I.W.W., and the
crackbrained professional pacifists inevitably
themselves are the worst enemies of freedom, of true
democracy, and of righteousness. (November 26, 1917.)
Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star, 57.
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