own wide open.

I turn to a subject which I hope can be handled promptly and without
serious controversy of any kind. I mean the method of selecting nominees
for the Presidency of the United States. I feel confident that I do not
misinterpret the wishes or the expectations of the country when I urge
the prompt enactment of legislation which will provide for primary
elections throughout the country at which the voters of the several
parties may choose their nominees for the Presidency without the
intervention of nominating conventions. I venture the suggestion that
this legislation should provide for the retention of party conventions,
but only for the purpose of declaring and accepting the verdict of the
primaries and formulating the platforms of the parties; and I suggest
that these conventions should consist not of delegates chosen for this
single purpose, but of the nominees for Congress, the nominees for
vacant seats in the Senate of the United States, the Senators whose
terms have not yet closed, the national committees, and the candidates
for the Presidency themselves, in order that platforms may be framed by
those responsible to the people for carrying them into effect.

These are all matters of vital domestic concern, and besides them,
outside the charmed circle of our own national life in which our
affections command us, as well as our consciences, there stand out our
obligations toward our territories over sea. Here we are trustees. Porto
Rico, Hawaii, the Philippines, are ours, indeed, but not ours to do what
we please with. Such territories, once regarded as mere possessions, are
no longer to be selfishly exploited; they are part of the domain of
public conscience and of serviceable and enlightened statesmanship. We
must administer them for the people who live in them and with the same
sense of responsibility to them as toward our own people in our domestic
affairs. No doubt we shall successfully enough bind Porto Rico and the
Hawaiian Islands to ourselves by ties of justice and interest and
affection, but the performance of our duty toward the Philippines is a
more difficult and debatable matter. We can satisfy the obligations of
generous justice toward the people of Porto Rico by giving them the
ample and familiar rights and privileges accorded our own citizens in
our own territories and our obligations toward the people of Hawaii by
perfecting the provisions for self-government already granted them, but