The Topeka State Journal

President Roosevelt Tells the Interests What to Expect In a Speech Delivered at Provincetown, Mass.

FIGHT IS TO A FINISH.

It Is to Determine Who Shall Rule the Government The People or "A Few Ruthless and Determined Men."

"Once for all, let me say that, as far as I am concerned, and for the eighteen months of my administration that remain, there will be no change in the policy we have steadily pursued, nor let up in the effort to secure the honest observance of the law, for I regard this contest as one to determine who shall rule this government, the people through their governmental agents or a few ruthless and determined men whose wealth makes them particularly formidable because they are behind breastworks of the corporate organization."

"Business can only be done under modern conditions through corporations and our purpose is to heartily favor the corporations that do well. The administration appreciates that liberal but honest profits for liberal capital employed either in founding or continuing an honest business venture are the factors necessary for successful corporate activity and therefore for generally prosperous business conditions. All these are compatible with fair dealing as between man and man and rigid obedience to the law. Our aim is to help every honest man, every honest corporation and our policy means in its ultimate analysis a healthy and prosperous expansion of business activities of honest business men and honest corporations."

President Roosevelt's Provincetown Speech.

Provincetown, Mass., Aug. 20.—President Roosevelt was the chief orator at the celebration of the Landing of the Pilgrims held here today. The president spoke as follows:

It is not too much to say that the event commemorated by the monument which we have come here to dedicate was one of those rare events which can in good faith be called of world importance. The coming hither of the Puritan three centuries ago shaped the destinies of this continent and therefore profoundly affected the destiny of the whole world. Men of other races, the Frenchman and the Spaniard, the Dutchman, the German, the Scotchman, and the Swede, made settlements within what is now the United States, during the colonial period of our history and before the Declaration of Independence; and since then there has been an ever-swelling immigration from Ireland and from the mainland of Europe; but it was the Englishman who settled in Virginia and the Englishman who settled in Massachusetts who did most in shaping the lines of our national development.

We can not as a nation be too profoundly grateful for the fact that the Puritan has stamped his influence so deeply on our national life. We need have but scant patience with the men who now rail at the Puritan's faults. They were evident, of course, for it is a quality of strong natures that their failings, like their virtues, should stand out in bold relief; but there is nothing easier than to belittle the great men of the past by dwelling only on the points where they come short of the universally recognized standards of the present. Men must be judged with reference to the age in which they dwell and the work they have to do. The Puritan's task was to conquer a continent; not merely to overrun it, but to settle it, to till it, to build upon it a high industrial and social life; and, while engaged in the rough work of taming the shaggy wilderness, at that very time also to lay deep the immoveable foundations of our whole American system of civil, political, and religious liberty achieved through the orderly process of law. This was the work allotted him to do; this is the work he did; and only a master spirit among men could have done it.

We have traveled far since his day. That liberty of conscience which he demanded for himself, we now realize must be as freely accorded to others as it is resolutely insisted upon for ourselves. The splendid qualities which he left to his children, we other Americans who are not of Puritan blood also claim as our heritage. You, sons of the Puritans, and we, who are descended from races whom the Puritans would have deemed alien—we are all Americans together. We all feel the same pride in the genesis, in the history, of our people: and therefore this shrine of Puritanism is one at which we all gather to pay homage, no matter from what country our ancestors sprang.

We Have Gained Some Things.

We have gained some things that the Puritan had not—we of this generation, we of the twentieth century, here in this great republic; but we are also in danger of losing certain things which the Puritan had and which we can by no manner of means afford to lose. We have gained a joy of living which he had not, and which it is a good thing for every people to have and to develop. Let us see to it that we do not lose what is more important still; that we do not lose the Puritan's iron sense of duty, his unbending, unflinching will to do the right as it was given him to see the right. It is a good thing that life should gain in sweetness, but only provided that it does not lose in strength. Ease and rest and pleasure are good things, but only if they come as the reward of work well done, of a good fight well won, of strong effort resolutely made and crowned by high achievement. The life of mere pleasure, of mere effortless ease, is as ignoble for a nation as for an individual. The man is but a poor father who teaches his sons that ease and pleasure should be their chief objects in life: the woman who is a mere petted toy, incapable of

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