edge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action.

This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forwardlooking men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!

ADDRESS.

[Delivered in the chamber of the House of Representatives at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress at the beginning of the First Session (special) of the Sixty-third Congress, April 8, 1913.]

Mr. Speaker, Mr. President, Gentlemen of the Congress:

I am very glad indeed to have this opportunity to address the two Houses directly and to verify for myself the impression that the President of the United States is a person, not a mere department of the Government hailing Congress from some isolated island of jealous power, sending messages, not speaking naturally and with his own voice that he is a human being trying to cooperate with other human beings in a common service. After this pleasant experience I shall feel quite normal in all our dealings with one another.

I have called the Congress together in extraordinary session because a duty was laid upon the party now in power at the recent elections which it ought to perform promptly, in order that the burden carried by the people under existing law may be lightened as soon as possible and in order, also, that the business interests of the country may not be kept too long in suspense as to what the fiscal changes are to be to which they will be required to adjust themselves. It is clear to the whole country that the tariff duties must be altered. They must be changed to meet the radical alteration in the conditions of our economic life which the country has witnessed within the last generation. While

the whole face and method of our industrial and commercial life were being changed beyond recognition the tariff schedules have remained what they were before the change began or have moved in the direction they were given when no large circumstance of our industrial development was what it is to-day. Our task is to square them with the actual facts. The sooner that is done the sooner we shall escape from suffering from the facts and the sooner our men of business will be free to thrive by the law of nature (the nature of free business) instead of by the law of legislation and artificial arrangement.

We have seen tariff legislation wander very far afield in our dayvery far indeed from the field in which our prosperity might have had a normal growth and stimulation. No one who looks the facts squarely in the face or knows anything that lies beneath the surface of action can fail to perceive the principles upon which recent tariff legislation has been based. We long ago passed beyond the modest notion of "protecting" the industries of the country and moved boldly forward to the idea that they were entitled to the direct patronage of the Government. For a long time-a time so long that the men now active in public policy hardly remember the conditions that preceded it—we have sought in our tariff schedules to give each group of manufacturers or producers what they themselves thought that they needed in order to maintain a practically exclusive market as against the rest of the world. Consciously or unconsciously, we have built up a set of privileges and exemptions from competition behind which it was easy by any, even the crudest, forms of combination to organize monopoly; until at last nothing is normal, nothing is obliged to stand the tests of efficiency and economy, in our world of big business, but everything thrives by concerted arrangement. Only new principles of action will save us from a final hard crystallization of monopoly and a complete loss of the influences that quicken enterprise and keep independent energy alive.

It is plain what those principles must be. We must abolish everything that bears even the semblance of privilege or of any kind of artificial advantage, and put our business men and producers under the stimulation of a constant necessity to be efficient, economical, and enterprising, masters of competitive supremacy, better workers and merchants than any in the world. Aside from the duties laid upon articles which we do not, and probably can not, produce, therefore, and the duties laid upon luxuries and merely for the sake of the revenues they yield, the object of the tariff duties henceforth laid must be effective competition, the whetting of American wits by contest with the wits of the rest of the world.

It would be unwise to move toward this end headlong, with reckless haste, or with strokes that cut at the very roots of what has grown

up amongst us by long process and at our own invitation. It does not alter a thing to upset it and break it and deprive it of a chance to change. It destroys it. We must make changes in our fiscal laws, in our fiscal system, whose object is development, a more free and wholesome development, not revolution or upset or confusion. We must build up trade, especially foreign trade. We need the outlet and the enlarged field of energy more than we ever did before. We must build up industry as well, and must adopt freedom in the place of artificial stimulation only so far as it will build, not pull down. In dealing with the tariff the method by which this may be done will be a matter of judgment, exercised item by item. To some not accustomed to the excitements and responsibilities of greater freedom our methods may in some respects and at some points seem heroic, but remedies may be heroic and yet be remedies. It is our business to make sure that they are genuine remedies. Our object is clear. If our motive is above just challenge and only an occasional error of judgment is chargeable against us, we shall be fortunate.

We are called upon to render the country a great service in more matters than one. Our responsibility should be met and our methods should be thorough, as thorough as moderate and well considered, based upon the facts as they are, and not worked out as if we were beginners. We are to deal with the facts of our own day, with the facts of no other, and to make laws which square with those facts. It is best, indeed it is necessary, to begin with the tariff. I will urge nothing upon you now at the opening of your session which can obscure that first object or divert our energies from that clearly defined duty. At a later time I may take the liberty of calling your attention to reforms which should press close upon the heels of the tariff changes, if not accompany them, of which the chief is the reform of our banking and currency laws; but just now I refrain. For the present, I put these matters on one side and think only of this one thing— of the changes in our fiscal system which may best serve to open once more the free channels of prosperity to a great people whom we would serve to the utmost and throughout both rank and file.

I thank you for your courtesy.

CALIFORNIA'S ALIEN LAND LAW.

The California Legislature in 1913 was subjected to much criticism by citizens of other States on account of the introduction of a bill, the principal provisions of which were:

No alien who is ineligible to citizenship shall be permitted to acquire and hold land in California for a period of more than one year after the date of such acquisition.

No corporation, the majority of stock of which is held by aliens who are ineligible to citizenship, shall be permitted to acquire and hold land except for one

year.

Governor Hiram Johnson, in answer to the criticism, said:

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Californians are unable to understand why an act admittedly within the jurisdiction of the California Legislature, like the passage of an alien land bill, creates tumult, confusion, and criticism, and why this local act of undoubted right becomes an international question. Of course, the California Legislature would not attempt to contravene any treaty of the Nation, nor to do more than has been done by the Federal Government itself and many other States.

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Our Legislature is now considering an alien land bill in general language and not discriminatory. If terms are used which are claimed to be discriminatory, those very terms long since were made so by many enactments and by the laws of the Nation itself. Broadly speaking, many States have endeavored to prevent the ownership of land by those ineligible to citizenship.

"The United States by statute provided that no alien or person who is not a citizen of the United States, or who has not declared his intention to become a citizen of the United States, shall acquire title to land, etc., and relative to the District of Columbia the United States statutes contain the same inhibition.

Arizona in 1912 passed an act that no person other than a citizen of the United States, or who had declared his intention to become such, shall hereafter acquire any land, etc.

"The State of Washington prevented the acquisition or holding of lands by those who are incapable of becoming citizens of the United States.'

"Illinois has enacted that an alien may hold title for the period of six years, and then, if he shall not have become a citizen of the United States, proceedings shall be commenced for the sale of the land, and the proceeds shall go to the State.

"Minnesota provides that no person, unless he be a citizen of the United States, or has declared his intention to become a citizen, shall acquire land.

"Missouri has a similar enactment. Kentucky, Oklahoma, and Texas all have laws of like character.

“Japan, until 1910, had an absolute law against alien ownership and in effect has it yet. What the United States Government has done, what has been done by many States of the Union, what has been done by Japan, all of which admittedly has been done in pursuance of unquestioned power and undoubted right— is now attempted to be done by the State of California, and no reason can logically exist for sundering friendly relations with any power, or for offense and threats by any nation.

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The character of the present California Legislature is the guarantee that only legislation deemed absolutely essential for the preservation of the State and the protection of its people-legislation having its precedent in the enactments of the National Government and the various States-will be passed. And such measures as may be enacted will be considered thoroughly, calmly, judicially and without prejudice or discrimination."

Senator Isidor Rayner on December 12, 1906, speaking to a resolution he had introduced declaring it to be the opinion of the Senate that there was no provision in the treaty between the United States and Japan that related to or in any manner interfered with the right of the State of California to conduct and administer its system of public schools in accordance with its own legislation, said:

"I admit that the United States can enter into any treaty with any foreign power in reference to any subject embraced in the Constitution. I deny, how

ever, that it possesses any inherent right to make a treaty, and I claim that the treaty-making power lies in grant and not in sovereignty and must be construed in pari materia with all the other clauses of the instrument that must be governed by the principles of international law, its usages, and its practices, as those principles, usages, and practices appertain to our form of constitutional government. I utterly deny that we have any right to make a treaty that violates the Constitution or deprives the States of their reserved rights to conduct their local affairs, over which the Federal Government has no jurisdiction, and which they alone have the right to administer according to their own constitutions and statutes."

This resolution had particular reference to the exclusion of Japanese from the public schools of California, which gave rise at that time to international complications.

Applying Senator Rayner's argument to the present situation, the contention would be that if the existing treaty between the United States and Japan interferes with the right vested in the State of California to make its own land laws, then that treaty is unconstitutional and cannot be enforced.

The importance of the proposed alien land legislation by the State of California was emphasized by an appeal from the President of the United States to the Governor of California as follows:

LETTER TO GOVERNOR OF CALIFORNIA.

WASHINGTON, D. C., April 22, 1913.

I speak upon the assumption, which I am sure is well founded, that the people of California do not desire their Representatives-and that their Representatives do not wish or intend-in any circumstances to embarrass the Government of the United States in its dealings with a nation with whom it has most earnestly and cordially sought to maintain relations of genuine friendship and good will, and that least of all do they desire to do anything that might impair treaty obligations or cast a doubt upon the honor and good faith of the Nation and its Government.

I therefore appeal with the utmost confidence to the people, the Governor, and the Legislature of California to act in the matter now under consideration in a manner that cannot from any point of view be fairly challenged or called in question. If they deem it necessary to exclude all aliens who have not declared their intentions to become citizens from the privileges of land ownership they can do so along lines already followed in the laws of many of the other States and of many foreign countries, including Japan herself. Insidious discrimination will inevitably draw in question the treaty obligations of the Government of the United States.

I register my very earnest and respectful protest against discrimination in this case, not only because I deem it my duty to do so as the Chief Executive of the Nation, but also, and the more readily, because I believe the people and the legislative authorities of California will generously respond the moment the matter is frankly presented to