President Theodore Roosevelt’s Address to the Joint Convention of the Michigan State Legislature, May 31, 1907, at 10:30 a.m. in the House Chamber:

Mr. Governor, Mr. Speaker, Members of the Michigan Legislature, and you, my friends, all of you: No man could fail to be most deeply touched by such a welcome as you have just given me, by such a welcome as the state of Michigan has been extending to me; and he would be but a poor American, but a poor public official, who did not leave the state, as I shall leave it, with a more resolute hope and purpose than ever to try to do all that in me lies to serve your interests while I am President of the United States. (Applause)

Perhaps I can speak with peculiar ease and freedom to a legislative body of a state, for I have been a member for three terms of my own Legislature in New York, and I know just the kind of work that you have to do. I know the great difficulties, the temptations, the responsibilities, and I know how often very faithful service is not thoroughly appreciated outside. (Laughter and applause.) I am speaking of legislatures and not of presidents (Laughter), because you have greeted me today in a way that showed it was more than a just appreciation of my services and I deeply appreciate and deeply feel it.

There is one thing I would speak about to men in public life, which I cannot sufficiently emphasize, not only for them, but for the people back of them,--on the one hand, let the public man be extremely careful to make no promise that he cannot keep; and on the other hand—and this is just as important—let the public be on its side more than careful not to try to exact a promise that cannot be kept. (Applause) There is not anything easier than to make any kind of temptation to which a strong and just man should be careful not to yield. I want always to have a man judged by the promises he makes before election plus his performances after election. (Laughter and applause.) And also judge a man by whether or not you think it is really possible for him to reduce to legislative and administrative action the things that he says on the “stump.”

Now, take the great questions that we have to grapple with at the present day, the questions of securing proper control of corporations, especially of those great corporations doing an interstate business; we have to deal on the one hand with a group of very wealthy citizens and of those who reflect their ideas, who are just exactly as good citizens as we are, but who, I think, are tempted by their position to take a somewhat erroneous view of the situation. (Laughter and applause.) We have to deal with them on the one side, and on the other we have to deal with the often entirely well-meaning man who promises you the millennium immediately if you will adopt his ways of solving the problem. Now, gentlemen, we are a good many thousand years short of the millennium yet, and if you make the mistake of committing yourselves to a program that promises too much, you will be very apt to find that that is corrected by a performance that does nothing. It is not the man who promises most freely who can be trusted to perform most accurately what he promises. We wish to face the problem with the resolute determination to solve it on the one hand; with the resolute determination not to be daunted, not to be misled by those foolish conservatives, the foolish reactionaries, who fail to see that we are the real conservatives, the real friends of property when we try to do away with the abuse of property. (Loud applause).

We must not be misled by them on the one hand. Nor must we be misled by those—I want to use exactly the right phraseology—by those often well-meaning men who let a vague, general desire to reform everything supplant the place of exact thinking in their minds and who therefore either promise loosely what could not possibly be performed or else indulge in a general declamation against the evils, without pointing out how those evils are to be cut out. Just outside I addressed a crowd of veterans of the Civil War. There are some veterans of the Civil War in here. They will remember how, shortly after Sumpter was fired on, a large number of enthusiastic people who were not themselves going into the army began to shout, “On to Richmond.” and to say that Richmond should fall in sixty or ninety days. It did not fall in sixty or ninety days. It took four long and weary years; and the same people who in 1861 had shouted, “On to Richmond, the war must be ended at once,” in 1862 wished to declare the war a failure and voted to abandon it because it had not been ended at once. Perhaps some of the older gentlemen remember that, don’t you? (Yes! Yes!) Exactly. The hope of the nation then lay, not with the men who expected the immediate impossible, nor yet with the men who were cowed and did not believe that you could put the war through, but with the men who recognized the difficulty of the struggle, who recognized that they had a most stubborn and gallant enemy to fight, and who went in and enlisted for a three years’ war and saw the war through. (Applause)

Now, it is just the same way now; in the war against the abuses of great individuals, and especially of great corporate wealth, we need to show absolute unflinching resolution, and yet to combine that with sanity as well as with courage. We need to show, too, the very reverse of any vindictive spirit. The minute you begin to legislate in a spirit of revenge, or to administer the laws in a spirit of revenge, you are starting to invoke trouble and ultimately a reaction. We need to show the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, his sanity and his broad and kindly charity, and yet his resolute determination that the evil shall be done away with. (Applause)

You have been very kind in alluding to certain things that I have done or tried to do. My power to do them depended entirely upon the support that I have received from the representatives in Congress from Michigan and all our other states. (Applause)

We have taken certain steps, some good long steps, in the line of securing a better administration of justice as between man and man without regard to whether a man is rich or poor and we have taken certain steps, some of them long steps, towards securing better laws for the supervision and control of the great fortunes, especially great corporate fortunes used in business. We are going steadily forward along those lines (Applause), and the only party allusion I shall make today is to say that the Republican party in 90 per cent of its make up and in all its highest thought, is essentially the party of Abraham Lincoln’s plain people, and shall continue to be such (Applause) and there will be not one backward step along the course which we have marked out to follow.

I ask you to judge of present promises by past performances, and to request from your representatives, from your public men, not promises of the impossible, but promises of certain things that can be done, which will not bring about a complete solution of the difficulties that confront us, but which will be another long stride toward that complete solution; and finally, above all things, to approach the problem in a proper spirit, in the Lincoln spirit, not to be misled by the demagogue on one side, or the reactionary on the other. Let us set our faces like flint against predatory wealth, but also against predatory poverty,--put the emphasis on the predatory. We are against the wealthy man when we ought to be against him, not because he is wealthy, but because he has misused his wealth, and we are against any man, rich or poor, if he does wrong. This is an age of great industrial combination, combinations of capital and combinations of labor. Our purpose must be to favor both, so long as they do well, and to set our faces against either if it does ill. (Loud and prolomged applause)