id violent hands upon many of our industries, and subjected us to the
shame of divisions of sentiment and purpose in which America was
contemned and forgotten. It is part of the business of this year of
reckoning and settlement to speak plainly and act with unmistakable
purpose in rebuke of these things, in order that they may be forever
hereafter impossible. I am the candidate of a party, but I am above all
things else an American citizen. I neither seek the favor nor fear the
displeasure of that small alien element amongst us which puts loyalty to
any foreign power before loyalty to the United States.

While Europe was at war our own continent, one of our own neighbors, was
shaken by revolution. In that matter, too, principle was plain and it
was imperative that we should live up to it if we were to deserve the
trust of any real partisan of the right as free men see it. We have
professed to believe, and we do believe, that the people of small and
weak states have the right to expect to be dealt with exactly as the
people of big and powerful states would be. We have acted upon that
principle in dealing with the people of Mexico.

Our recent pursuit of bandits into Mexican territory was no violation of
that principle. We ventured to enter Mexican territory only because
there were no military forces in Mexico that could protect our border
from hostile attack and our own people from violence, and we have
committed there no single act of hostility or interference even with the
sovereign authority of the Republic of Mexico herself. It was a plain
case of the violation of our own sovereignty which could not wait to be
vindicated by damages and for which there was no other remedy. The
authorities of Mexico were powerless to prevent it.

Many serious wrongs against the property, many irreparable wrongs
against the persons of Americans have been committed within the
territory of Mexico herself during this confused revolution, wrongs
which could not be effectually checked so long as there was no
constituted power in Mexico which was in a position to check them. We
could not act directly in that matter ourselves without denying Mexicans
the right to any revolution at all which disturbed us and making the
emancipation of her own people await our own interest and convenience.

For it is their emancipation that they are seeking,--blindly, it may be,
and as yet ineffectually, but with profound and passionate purpose and
within the