" 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.
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