I was suspected of being a politician.  I have been preaching it year after year as the great thing that lay in the future for the United States, to show her wit and skill and enterprise and influence in every country in the world.  But observe the limit to all that which is laid upon us perhaps more than upon any other nation in the world.  We set this Nation up, at any rate we professed to set it up, to vindicate the rights of men.  We did not name any differences between one race and another.  We did not set up any barriers against any particular people.  We opened our gates to all the world and said, “Let all men who wish to be free come to us and they will be welcome.”  We said, “This independence of ours is not a selfish thing for our own exclusive private use.  It is for everybody to whom we can find the means of extending it.”  We cannot with that oath taken in our youth, we cannot with that great ideal set before us when we were a young people and numbered only a scant 3,000,000, take upon ourselves, now that we are 100,000,000 strong, any other conception of duty than we then entertained.  If American enterprise in foreign countries, particularly in those foreign countries which are not strong enough to resist us, takes the shape of imposing upon and exploiting the mass of the people of that country it ought to be checked and not encouraged.  I am willing to get anything for an American that money and enterprise can obtain except the suppression of the rights of other men.  I will not help any man buy a power which he ought not to exercise over his fellow-beings.

You know, my fellow-countrymen, what a big question there is in Mexico.  Eighty-five per cent of the Mexican people have never been allowed to have any genuine participation in their own Government or to exercise any substantial rights with regard to the very land they live upon.  All the rights that men most desire have been exercised by the other fifteen per cent.  Do you suppose that that circumstance is not sometimes in my thought?  I know that the American people have a heart that will beat just as strong for those millions in Mexico as it will beat, or has beaten, for any other millions elsewhere in the world, and that when once they conceive what is at stake in Mexico they will know what ought to be done in Mexico.  I hear a great deal said about the loss of property in Mexico and the loss of the lives of foreigners, and I deplore these things with all my heart.  Undoubtedly, upon the conclusion of the present disturbed conditions in Mexico those who have been unjustly deprived of their property or in any wise unjustly put upon ought to be compensated.  Men’s individual rights have no doubt been invaded, and the invasion of those rights has been attended by many deplorable circumstances which ought sometime, in the proper way, to be accounted for.  But back of it all is the struggle of a people to come into its own, and while we look upon the incidents in the foreground let us not forget the great tragic reality in the background which towers above the whole picture.