It is entirely inexcusable, however, to try to combine the unready hand with the unbridled tongue.  It is folly to permit freedom of speech about foreigners as well as ourselves—­and the peace-at-any-price persons are much too feeble a folk to try to interfere with freedom of speech—­and yet to try to shirk the consequences of freedom of speech.  It is folly to try to abolish our navy, and at the same time to insist that we have a right to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, that we have a right to control the Panama Canal which we ourselves dug, that we have a right to retain Hawaii and prevent foreign nations from taking Cuba, and a right to determine what immigrants, Asiatic or European, shall come to our shores, and the terms on which they shall be naturalized and shall hold land and exercise other privileges.  We are a rich people, and an unmilitary people.  In international affairs we are a short-sighted people.  But I know my countrymen.  Down at bottom their temper is such that they will not permanently tolerate injustice done to them.  In the long run they will no more permit affronts to their National honor than injuries to their national interest.  Such being the case, they will do well to remember that the surest of all ways to invite disaster is to be opulent, aggressive and unarmed.

Throughout the seven and a half years that I was President, I pursued without faltering one consistent foreign policy, a policy of genuine international good will and of consideration for the rights of others, and at the same time of steady preparedness.  The weakest nations knew that they, no less than the strongest, were safe from insult and injury at our hands; and the strong and the weak alike also knew that we possessed both the will and the ability to guard ourselves from wrong or insult at the hands of any one.

It was under my administration that the Hague Court was saved from becoming an empty farce.  It had been established by joint international agreement, but no Power had been willing to resort to it.  Those establishing it had grown to realize that it was in danger of becoming a mere paper court, so that it would never really come into being at all.  M. d’Estournelles de Constant had been especially alive to this danger.  By correspondence and in personal interviews he impressed upon me the need not only of making advances by actually applying arbitration—­not merely promising by treaty to apply it—­to questions that were up for settlement, but of using the Hague tribunal for this purpose.  I cordially sympathized with these views.  On the recommendation of John Hay, I succeeded in getting an agreement with Mexico to lay a matter in dispute between the two republics before the Hague Court.  This was the first case ever brought before the Hague Court.  It was followed by numerous others; and it definitely established that court as the great international peace tribunal.  By mutual agreement with Great Britain, through the decision of a joint commission,