God grants liberty only to those who love it, and are always ready to guard and defend it. DANIEL Webster. IT Ideals of Liberty and Justice of Good Roads Tis a fine thing to see our cities built up, but The Effect not at the expense of the country districts. The healthy thing to see is the building up of both the country and city go hand in hand. But we cannot expect the ablest, the most eager, the most ambitious young men to stay in the country, to stay on the farm, unless they have certain advantages. If the farm life is a life of isolation, a life in which it is a matter of great and real difficulty for one man to communicate with his neighbor, you can rest assured that there will be a tendency to leave it on the part of those very people whom we should most wish to see stay in it. It is a good thing to encourage in every way any tendency which will tend to check an unhealthy flow from the country to the city. Addresses and Messages. A nation like ours could not long stand the Caution in ruinous policy of readjusting its business to radical changes in the tariff at short inter Changing Tariff Tariff Caution in vals, especially when, as now, owing to the Changing immense extent and variety of our products, the tariff schedules carry rates of duty on thousands of different articles. Sweeping and violent changes in such a tariff, touching so vitally the interests of all of us, embracing agriculture, labor, manufactures, and commerce, would be disastrous in any event, and they would be fatal to our present well-being if approached on the theory that the principle of the protective tariff was to be abandoned. The business world, that is, the entire American world, cannot afford, if it has any regard for its own welfare, even to consider the advisability of abandoning the present system. Ibid. Summing up of the Tariff Question To sum up, then, we must as a people approach a matter of such prime economic importance as the tariff from the standpoint of our business needs. We cannot afford to become fossilized or to fail to recognize the fact that as the needs of the country change it may be necessary to meet these new needs by changing certain features of our tariff laws. Still less can we afford to fail to recognize the further fact that these changes must not be made until the need for them outweighs the disadvantages which may result; and when it becomes necessary to make them they should be made with full recognition of the need of stability in our economic system and of keeping unchanged the principle of that system which has now become a settled policy in our national life. We have prospered marvellously at home. As a nation we stand in the very forefront in the giant international industrial competition of the day. We cannot afford by any freak of folly to forfeit the position to which we have thus triumphantly attained.—Ibid. Summing up of the Tariff Question our Illustrious Dead It is a good thing to pay homage with our Remember lips to the illustrious dead. It is a good thing to keep in mind what we owe to the memories of Washington and his fellows, who founded this mighty Republic, to Abraham Lincoln and Grant and their fellows, who saved it. It is a far better thing to pay the homage that counts the homage of our lives and our deeds. Illustrious memories of the nation's past are but curses if they serve the men of the nation at present as excuses for shirking the problems of the day. They are blessings if they serve to spur on the men of now to see that they act as well in their time as the men of yesterday did in theirs.-Ibid. |