It is part of the business of this year of
reckoning and settlement to speak plainly and act with unmistakable
purpose in rebuke of these things, in order that they may be forever
hereafter impossible. I am the candidate of a party, but I am above all
things else an American citizen. I neither seek the favor nor fear the
displeasure of that small alien element amongst us which puts loyalty to
any foreign power before loyalty to the United States.
While Europe was at war our own continent, one of our own neighbors, was
shaken by revolution. In that matter, too, principle was plain and it
was imperative that we should live up to it if we were to deserve the
trust of any real partisan of the right as free men see it. We have
professed to believe, and we do believe, that the people of small and
weak states have the right to expect to be dealt with exactly as the
people of big and powerful states would be. We have acted upon that
principle in dealing with the people of Mexico.
Our recent pursuit of bandits into Mexican territory was no violation of
that principle. We ventured to enter Mexican territory only because
there were no military forces in Mexico that could protect our border
from hostile attack and our own people from violence, and we have
committed there no single act of hostility or interference even with the
sovereign authority of the Republic of Mexico herself.
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