Address at the Auditorium in Charlotte, North Carolina

Governor Kitchin and Ladies and Gentlemen of the Carolinas:

One of the embarrassments that attends the intense pleasure I have in coming into the Southland is the consciousness that I will have to do some

In the first place, I should like to express my sincere gratitude to the Governor of your State, to the Senators of your State, and to the Representatives of your State, who have done me the honor to be present on this occasion, and to give me welcome. I should like to include, too, those members of the Confederate veterans, those members of the Grand Army of the Republic, those members of the Daughters of the Revolution, that distinguished lady, the widow of Stonewall Jackson, and all the other charming and delightful people who exposed themselves to the elements this morning to celebrate this day, and in part, I hope, to give me welcome.

I wish also to express to the committee of arrangements my deep regret that Mrs. Taft was not able to be present to share the welcome which your committee was good enough to tender her. I assure you I do not make nearly so good a show when the better half of my firm is not with me.

We are here to celebrate a declaration of independence. There are some unregenerate persons who live in South Carolina and elsewhere who for various motives have cast a doubt upon the claim. Now anybody that comes to Charlotte who is not willing to admit in the full the declaration of independence made in Mecklenburg, is in the position of a man of whom a Lord Justice of the Court of Appeals of Ireland told me. I met him in Canada. He had a good deal of experience in courts, and he was redolent with Irish stories. He said that he was holding court in the County of Tipperary, and that a man came before him and a jury charged in the indictment with manslaughter, and that the evidence showed that the deceased had come to his death by a blow from a blackthorn stick in the hands of the defendant; but the evidence also showed that the man who died had a "paper skull," as it is called in medical parlance—unduly thin. The verdict brought in was that of "guilty of manslaughter," and his lordship called the man before him and asked him whether he had anything to say why the sentence of the court should not be pronounced upon him. The defendant, turning to his lordship, said: "No, your Lordship, I have nothing to say, but I would like to ask one question." "What, my man, is that?" said he. "I would like to ask: What the divil a man with a head like that was doing in Tipperary." I would like to ask in explanation of my position, what the "divil" a man who does not believe in the declaration at Mecklenburg is doing in this presence.

The claim is that more than twelve months before the members of the Continental Congress declared that it was necessary to have a separate and independent government in this country, free from British control, that declaration was made in the court-house in this town of Charlotte, by a committee of the County, of whom there are now descendants living among you entitled to your respect and to your congratulation on such ancestry. There is a controversy as to what the exact words were that were used in that declaration. I am not going to enter upon any such discussion, but I am going to point out what seems to me to be, whether you take one version or the other, the very important part of that declaration viewed from the standpoint of practical patriotism and practical statesmanship. The general declaration as to the rights of man I do not count nearly so important, looked at from the standpoint of the responsibility of the people who made it, as the practical provision contained in that declaration for a government which was to succeed the British Government, and to accept all the responsibilities, to maintain a government of law and order, and a government which should have a military force to defend itself. My friends, these general declarations unaccompanied by some sense of the responsibility of self-government are worth little or nothing. It is the men who go forward knowing what they are doing when they are cutting off their relation to one government, and understand that the only justification for so doing is the preparation and the practical preparation of a new government. That is what makes Anglo-Saxon liberty; that is what has distinguished our race for a thousand years, that we dealt with what was practical and not with what was poetical and oratorical and rhetorical.

I want to call your attention in enforcing what I am talking about to the guaranties of life—the guaranties as we know them in the Constitution, of life, liberty and property. They consist not solely in general resolutions, that we believe in liberty, and we believe every man ought to be free, and we believe that he ought to be treated justly, and we believe he ought not to be imprisoned except lawfully. Is that all? No. That is not all we have in our Constitution. If that is all we had, it would not be worth the paper it is written on; it would not be worth more than the hundred constitutions that have been made in various countries, whose names it would be invidious to mention, which constitutions have gone down and haven't made a ripple on the ocean of civilization. What is it in the Constitution of the United States inherited from our British ancestry that makes that instrument and all the instruments of the State constitutions so valuable? It is that each guaranty is a practical method of procedure by which the liberty and the rights of the individual are secured. What are they? The writ of habeas corpus. What is that? That is a method of procedure. It is a method by which a man when he is imprisoned has the right to go to any judge and say to that judge: "I wish you to call my captors here and have them tell you whether I am lawfully imprisoned or not," and if that judge does not do it, he creates a right to action against himself which usually involves imprisonment. That is a practical method. It is a procedure. It is not a general declaration. It is something that everybody can tell about. I am a little more emphatic about this because I have come up against the other kind of declarations in some of my experiences in the Philippines. A gentleman came to see me one morning, the leading counsel in Manila, who had drafted the constitution of the Philippines, and at the same time an old man came in with a petition to me. I was then Chairman of the Philippine Commission, and the petition showed that this old man's son had been six years in Bilibid, imprisoned without a trial, and without knowing what he was there for. I said to the lawyer, "Why don't you get out a writ of habeas corpus?" He said: "What is that writ?" I said: "It is a petition inquiring into the lawfulness of his imprisonment, and General Otis has issued the order granting that writ or the allowance of that writ, and you can have it here." He asked me to draw up a petition, which I did, and he took it into one of the local courts, which happened to be presided over by an American. He went out to Bilibid prison and before he got through that day he had filed ninety petitions for the writ of habeas corpus to release people at Bilibid prison who had been there from four to ten years. When they heard at whose instance he had gotten them out, they wanted to attend in a mass and come and thank me at my house. I expressed my appreciation of their gratitude, but as I was not quite sure but that half of them ought to have been where they were anyhow, I excused them from coming and received an acknowledgment in the form of a table ornament, such as they give in the Philippines, which consists of a bundle of toothpicks.

To go on, the writ of habeas corpus is one thing; an indictment by grand jury is another. That is mere procedure. That is not a general right. It is a mere form of procedure. The right of trial by jury is another form of procedure. Then there is the 14th amendment and the other, the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which accords to every one the right not to be deprived of his property without due process of law. That does not say that you are not to be deprived of your property unjustly. You may be. All that says is that you shall have a hearing before a tribunal, and that if a man is going to rob you he has got to rob you in a regular way. Now, that is practical. The Anglo-Saxon ancestor knew that if he could once get it before court he would have "a show for his white alley," that he would have a day in that court, and that that was the true basis of civil liberty. So it is with the declarations that were made at Mecklenburg. You go over them and see that they create selectmen, they create military guards, they create courts with jurisdiction, they create courts to make collection of debts, and they made every provision which a single community like this could make, together with commitments for felony, to await the decision of courts to be created by the highest authority under the authority of the General Congress. Now, there are things in that declaration that make me thrill with pride that there was a community in this country—and I venture to say this was not the only community, but it seems to have been the one most charged with its sense of responsibility—which knew that self-government was not a mere gift, but it was something which when it is to be enjoyed must be enjoyed with a full sense of the responsibility of those enjoying it, and with the idea that there is a duty imposed on every one who enjoys it of seeing to it that it is carried on for the benefit of all. What makes that instrument and all the instruments of the State constitutions so valuable? It is that each guaranty is a practical method of procedure by which the liberty and the rights of the individual are secured. What are they? The writ of habeas corpus. What is that? That is a method of procedure. It is a method by which a man when he is imprisoned has the right to go to any judge and say to that judge: "I wish you to call my captors here and have them tell you whether I am lawfully imprisoned or not," and if that judge does not do it, he creates a right to action against himself which usually involves imprisonment. That is a practical method. It is a procedure. It is not a general declaration. It is something that everybody can tell about. I am a little more emphatic about this because I have come up against the other kind of declarations in some of my experiences in the Philippines. A gentleman came to see me one morning, the leading counsel in Manila, who had drafted the constitution of the Philippines, and at the same time an old man came in with a petition to me. I was then Chairman of the Philippine Commission, and the petition showed that this old man's son had been six years in Bilibid, imprisoned without a trial, and without knowing what he was there for. I said to the lawyer, "Why don't you get out a writ of habeas corpus?" He said: "What is that writ?" I said: "It is a petition inquiring into the lawfulness of his imprisonment, and General Otis has issued the order granting that writ or the allowance of that writ, and you can have it here." He asked me to draw up a petition, which I did. and he took it into one of the local courts, which happened to be presided over by an American. He went out to Bilibid prison and before he got through that day he had filed ninety petitions for the writ of habeas corpus to release people at Bilibid prison who had been there from four to ten years. When they heard at whose instance he had gotten them out. they wanted to attend in a mass and come and thank me at my house. I expressed my appreciation of their gratitude, but as I was not quite sure but that half of them ought to have been where they were anyhow, I excused them from coming and received an acknowledgment in the form of a table ornament, such as they give in the Philippines, which consists of a bundle of toothpicks.

To go on, the writ of habeas corpus is one thing; an indictment by grand jury is another. That is mere procedure. That is not a general right. It is a mere form of procedure. The right of trial by jury is another form of procedure. Then there is the 14th amendment and the other, the 15th amendment to the Constitution, which accords to every one the right not to be deprived of his property without due process of law. That does not say that you are not to be deprived of your property unjustly. You may be. All that says is that you shall have a hearing before a tribunal, and that if a man is going to rob you he has got to rob you in a regular way. Now, that is practical. The Anglo-Saxon ancestor knew that if he could once get it before court he would have "a show for his white alley," that he would have a day in that court, and that that was the true basis of civil liberty. So it is with the declarations that were made at Mecklenburg. You go over them and see that they create selectmen, they create military guards, they create courts with jurisdiction, they create courts to make collection of debts, and they made every provision which a single community like this could make, together with commitments for felony, to await the decision of courts to be created by the highest authority under the authority of the General Congress. Now, there are things in that declaration that make me thrill with pride that there was a community in this country—and I venture to say this was not the only community, but it seems to have been the one most charged with its sense of responsibility—which knew that self-government was not a mere gift, but it was something which when it is to be enjoyed must be enjoyed with a full sense of the responsibility of those enjoying it, and with the idea that there is a duty imposed on every one who enjoys it of seeing to it that it is carried on for the benefit of all.

The Scotch-Irishmen who lived in this community were hard-headed. They were willing to take upon themselves the risk of being strung up as traitors to Great Britain; they were willing to fight it out, as they did so often thereafter in the Hornet's Nest; but they recognized their responsibility as citizens and as individuals, that if they went into the business of self-government, they must make that government worthy of the name. Now, it is a fact that by reason of the lax government which Great Britian was able to give our colonies—I say lax—it was lax, though it was unjust by fits and starts—our ancestors were the best- prepared people for self-government that ever assumed an independent government. They had had two hundred years of independence in the sense of distance from the home government. When brought to mind they were attacked occasionally by such tyranny as Governor Tyrol manifested in North Carolina and as was manifested by other governors at different times throughout the other colonies, but all that time we were gathering experience, we were gathering a sense of responsibility as to our own communities so that when in '75 you declared your independence here, and in '76 we all declared our independence at Philadelphia, we were in a condition with men as great, as able, as full of the knowledge of statecraft as any nation in Europe or any nation that ever lived, to step into the ranks of nations and carry on a government worthy the consideration of the entire world. Now, we have had a great deal of experience since that time. We have been through a number of wars. We watched the institution of slavery grow by unfortunate circumstances until it seemed to be an issue that had to be fought out, and that we could not cure the body politic except by an excision that threatened the whole physical structure of the nation. But we have lived that through. You in the Southland had the troubles, the suffering, the sad losses burned into your hearts with much more emphasis than we in the Northland, because here was the center of the war. And it is entirely natural that in that forty years which have succeeded the war, with the continuance here of the race whose fate was the cause of the war, that their condition, even after the magnanimous spirit shown on both sides at Appomattox was manifested to the world, there should continue a bitterness of feeling that time and long time could only erase; but when we look back I think we must congratulate ourselves that even in that time the feeling has largely disappeared, and that we are now a more united country than ever since—I should say even decades before— the war. One could not stand, as I did, on the platform yesterday, and see 1,200 Union veterans from Pennsylvania who had taken part in the battles about Petersburg, meet and fraternize with five hundred veterans of the Confederacy in their gray, and hear the expressions of mutual esteem and mutual appreciation of the bravery on both sides and the desire to further unite, without being convinced that that is a sincere and a deep-rooted feeling on both sides. It is true that political divisions have continued in such a way as at some times to seem to perpetuate the lines which were made at the time of the war, but even those lines are rapidly disappearing; and it is the duty of all of us with respect to political partisanship to wipe out those lines as far as we can, and to see, so far as we may, that in each State the tolerance of opinion shall continue until there shall be respectable parties on both sides of the line, because it is essential to have a good opposition to have a good government. Now, if there is anything that I can do in my administration to make that feeling of union more close, I shall do it. When I was running for the presidency, I prided myself on having been the first Republican candidate that ever came into North Carolina seeking suffrages for the Republican Party. I did not carry the State, but I had a mighty good time. I am anxious, of course, speaking from a partisan standpoint and leaving my official position for a moment, that the Republican party of North Carolina should be strengthened merely to have a good fight every election, and, of course, in so far as I may legitimately, I should be glad to build up the Republican Party. Now, I understand that some of my Republican friends think that I have lost sight of the Republican Party in putting on the Federal Bench in North Carolina, a gentleman recently upon the Supreme Bench of the State, a lawyer of the highest eminence and learning and integrity, and a Democrat. I promised, after I was President-elect—not before the election—to the South that I would do the best I could to wipe out the feeling that the central Government at Washington was a government alien to the Southland, and I pointed out that the only way by which the Executive could cure that feeling was, in so far as in him lay, to put into office men in whom the community at large, without regard to party, would have the highest confidence.

Now, I am trying to do that, and I am going to appoint Republicans and I am going to appoint Democrats, striving in each case to get a man who will commend himself to the community in which he lives. It is suggested that it is an insult to the Republicans of a district to appoint a Democrat a Judge because from that is to be inferred that there is no Republican worthy of the appointment, and I understand that there are some gentlemen in the Democratic party who are willing to make that inference as strong as possible, in order to stir up Republican dissatisfaction. But I venture to say that when the whole account is added up, that spirit will have disappeared and the Democrats who seek to utter it will find that it is not such a popular method of attacking the Republican Administration after all.

I plead to my Republican friends as a vindication and justification for my course, the course of as orthodox a Republican as ever filled the executive chair, and a man than whom there never was a President who did so much to maintain the standard of the Federal Judiciary, Benjamin Harrison, for he deemed it his duty to put one Democrat on the Supreme Bench and two on the Circuit Court of Appeals. The Federal Judiciary, my dear friends, to my mind is the strongest bulwark that we have in all this country to protect ultimately our institutions of civil liberty. It is the guaranties of civil liberty in the Federal Constitution that we must love and must hug to our bosom if we continue this civilization. Therefore there is no more sacred duty that the Executive has than in the selection of men whose appointment and service on the Bench will strengthen it with all the people at large; and therefore ordinary considerations of political partisanship have much less application to the appointment of judges than they do to other and temporary offices. The Federal Judiciary should be as much appreciated in the South as it is in the North, and if I have an opportunity to make any appointments in the South, it will continue to be the chief duty I have to make such appointments as shall appeal to all the people whether they be Republican or Democrat, and I urge all citizens whether they be Republicans or Democrats, to accept the appointments made as men, if they are men, who will carry on their high duties with a single eye to the administration of justice, to accept them, and congratulate the people on their appointment, and not to make use of them for any partisan argument or partisan appeal.

But now, my dear friends, I have got to the end of my speech, I believe. I think not that we are at a point where there is to be political revolution in the South. I never had such a dream, but I believe we are on the eve of such a condition in the South that there shall be complete tolerance of opinion, and that there shall grow into respectable power an opposition in each State which shall tend to the betterment of the Government as it exists in the State, which shall give us occasionally, as you have already given us in North Carolina, a Republican in a crowd of Democrats, in order that we may have represented in the Congress at Washington your views without regard to some past issue, without regard to the ghost of an issue that really ought not to influence you in enforcing those particular economic views that you really entertain. Let me again say to you how my heart has been aroused by the cordiality of your reception, by the nonpartisan welcome of your distinguished Governor and your Congressmen and your Senators, whether Republicans or Democrats, and to say to you that I haven't spoken here consciously a word to influence you in a partisan way, but it is impossible to discuss the conditions without mentioning the parties. I hope you will, therefore, forgive me for an apparent reference to political conditions when I am really only extending to you the right hand of fellowship as Americans, explaining possibly by inference some of the difficulties of conducting this Government as its Chief Executive. I thank you!