s of our
national domain in the rich States of the West, when we should have
acted; and they are still locked up. The key is still turned upon them,
the door shut fast at which thousands of vigorous men, full of
initiative, knock clamorously for admittance. The water power of our
navigable streams outside the national domain also, even in the eastern
States, where we have worked and planned for generations, is still not
used as it might be, because we will and we won't; because the laws we
have made do not intelligently balance encouragement against restraint.
We withhold by regulation.

I have come to ask you to remedy and correct these mistakes and
omissions, even at this short session of a Congress which would
certainly seem to have done all the work that could reasonably be
expected of it. The time and the circumstances are extraordinary, and so
must our efforts be also.

Fortunately, two great measures, finely conceived, the one to unlock,
with proper safeguards, the resources of the national domain, the other
to encourage the use of the navigable waters outside that domain for the
generation of power, have already passed the House of Representatives
and are ready for immediate consideration and action by the Senate. With
the deepest earnestness I urge their prompt passage. In them both we
turn our backs upon hesitation and makeshift and formulate a genuine
policy of use and conservation, in the best sense of those words. We owe
the one measure not only to the people of that great western country for
whose free and systematic development, as it seems to me, our
legislation has done so little, but also to the people of the Nation as
a whole; and we as clearly owe the other in fulfillment of our repeated
promises that the water power of the country should in fact as well as
in name be put at the disposal of great industries which can make
economical and profitable use of it, the rights of the public being
adequately guarded the while, and monopoly in the use prevented. To have
begun such measures and not completed them would indeed mar the record
of this great Congress very seriously. I hope and confidently believe
that they will be completed.

And there is another great piece of legislation which awaits and should
receive the sanction of the Senate: I mean the bill which gives a larger
measure of self-government to the people of the Philippines. How better,
in this time of anxious questioning and perplexed policy