A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents | Page 6

embraces the Constitution in its entirety and the
whole code of laws enacted under it. The evil example of permitting
individuals, corporations, or communities to nullify the laws because
they cross some selfish or local interest or prejudices is full of danger,
not only to the nation at large, but much more to those who use this
pernicious expedient to escape their just obligations or to obtain an
unjust advantage over others. They will presently themselves be
compelled to appeal to the law for protection, and those who would use
the law as a defense must not deny that use of it to others.
If our great corporations would more scrupulously observe their legal
limitations and duties, they would have less cause to complain of the
unlawful limitations of their rights or of violent interference with their
operations. The community that by concert, open or secret, among its
citizens denies to a portion of its members their plain rights under the
law has severed the only safe bond of social order and prosperity. The
evil works from a bad center both ways. It demoralizes those who
practice it and destroys the faith of those who suffer by it in the
efficiency of the law as a safe protector. The man in whose breast that
faith has been darkened is naturally the subject of dangerous and

uncanny suggestions. Those who use unlawful methods, if moved by
no higher motive than the selfishness that prompted them, may well
stop and inquire what is to be the end of this.
An unlawful expedient can not become a permanent condition of
government. If the educated and influential classes in a community
either practice or connive at the systematic violation of laws that seem
to them to cross their convenience, what can they expect when the
lesson that convenience or a supposed class interest is a sufficient cause
for lawlessness has been well learned by the ignorant classes? A
community where law is the rule of conduct and where courts, not
mobs, execute its penalties is the only attractive field for business
investments and honest labor.
Our naturalization laws should be so amended as to make the inquiry
into the character and good disposition of persons applying for
citizenship more careful and searching. Our existing laws have been in
their administration an unimpressive and often an unintelligible form.
We accept the man as a citizen without any knowledge of his fitness,
and he assumes the duties of citizenship without any knowledge as to
what they are. The privileges of American citizenship are so great and
its duties so grave that we may well insist upon a good knowledge of
every person applying for citizenship and a good knowledge by him of
our institutions. We should not cease to be hospitable to immigration,
but we should cease to be careless as to the character of it. There are
men of all races, even the best, whose coming is necessarily a burden
upon our public revenues or a threat to social order. These should be
identified and excluded.
We have happily maintained a policy of avoiding all interference with
European affairs. We have been only interested spectators of their
contentions in diplomacy and in war, ready to use our friendly offices
to promote peace, but never obtruding our advice and never attempting
unfairly to coin the distresses of other powers into commercial
advantage to ourselves. We have a just right to expect that our
European policy will be the American policy of European courts.
It is so manifestly incompatible with those precautions for our peace
and safety which all the great powers habitually observe and enforce in
matters affecting them that a shorter waterway between our eastern and
western seaboards should be dominated by any European Government

that we may confidently expect that such a purpose will not be
entertained by any friendly power.
We shall in the future, as in the past, use every endeavor to maintain
and enlarge our friendly relations with all the great powers, but they
will not expect us to look kindly upon any project that would leave us
subject to the dangers of a hostile observation or environment. We have
not sought to dominate or to absorb any of our weaker neighbors, but
rather to aid and encourage them to establish free and stable
governments resting upon the consent of their own people. We have a
clear right to expect, therefore, that no European Government will seek
to establish colonial dependencies upon the territory of these
independent American States. That which a sense of justice restrains us
from seeking they may be reasonably expected willingly to forego.
It must not be assumed, however, that our interests are so exclusively
American that our entire inattention to any events that may transpire
elsewhere can be