anal 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 c