It is a very practical matter, a matter of ways and means.  We have the resources, but are we fully ready to use them?  And, if we can make ready what we have, have we the means at hand to distribute it?  We are not fully ready; neither have we the means of distribution.  We are willing, but we are not fully able.  We have the wish to serve and to serve greatly, generously; but we are not prepared as we should be.  We are not ready to mobilize our resources at once.  We are not prepared to use them immediately and at their best, without delay and without waste.

To speak plainly, we have grossly erred in the way in which we have stunted and hindered the development of our merchant marine.  And now, when we need ships, we have not got them.  We have year after year debated, without end or conclusion, the best policy to pursue with regard to the use of the ores and forests and water powers of our national domain in the rich States of the West, when we should have acted; and they are still locked up.  The key is still turned upon them, the door shut fast at which thousands of vigorous men, full of initiative, knock clamorously for admittance.  The water power of our navigable streams outside the national domain also, even in the eastern States, where we have worked and planned for generations, is still not used as it might be, because we will and we won’t; because the laws we have made do not intelligently balance encouragement against restraint.  We withhold by regulation.

I have come to ask you to remedy and correct these mistakes and omissions, even at this short session of a Congress which would certainly seem to have done all the work that could reasonably be expected of it.  The time and the circumstances are extraordinary, and so must our efforts be also.

Fortunately, two great measures, finely conceived, the one to unlock, with proper safeguards, the resources of the national domain, the other to encourage the use of the navigable waters outside that domain for the generation of power, have already passed the House of Representatives and are ready for immediate consideration and action by the Senate.  With the deepest earnestness I urge their prompt passage.  In them both we turn our backs upon hesitation and makeshift and formulate a genuine policy of use and conservation, in the best sense of those words.  We owe the one measure not only to the people of that great western country for whose free and systematic development, as it seems to me, our legislation has done so little, but also to the people of the Nation as a whole; and we as clearly owe the other fulfillment of our repeated promises that the water power of the country should in fact as well as in name be put at the disposal of great industries which can make economical and profitable use of it, the rights of the public being adequately guarded the while, and monopoly in the use prevented.  To have begun such measures and not completed them would indeed mar the record of this great Congress very seriously.  I hope and confidently believe that they will be completed.