t to be a limit
to that. There is no man who is more interested than I am in carrying
the enterprise of American business men to every quarter of the globe. I
was interested in it long before I was suspected of being a politician.
I have been preaching it year after year as the great thing that lay in
the future for the United States, to show her wit and skill and
enterprise and influence in every country in the world. But observe the
limit to all that which is laid upon us perhaps more than upon any other
nation in the world. We set this Nation up, at any rate we professed to
set it up, to vindicate the rights of men. We did not name any
differences between one race and another. We did not set up any barriers
against any particular people. We opened our gates to all the world and
said, "Let all men who wish to be free come to us and they will be
welcome." We said, "This independence of ours is not a selfish thing for
our own exclusive private use. It is for everybody to whom we can find
the means of extending it." 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 th