Now, we would like cooperation of the States, but we would like the Federal Government to retain where it still possesses them those rights of which the people could not be robbed through control of State legislatures or local authorities (applause). You may say, What interest have we, who are not a manufacturing people, in the mines and the water-powers of other States? Why, we are all in a common country. State lines may be changed; they are accidental; they are artificial; but the national boundary is fixed. When we look for coal or iron, or commercial or industrial products which we do not manufacture, we must look, primarily, within the bounds of the United States. It is within the power of the Government and beyond ours practically, through tariff legislation, to exclude the minerals from outside. We have but one open field, we have but one certain route to any natural or manufactured product, and that is within the boundaries of the Union itself; and we do not want, through monopolization of either coal or oil or water-powers, to be hampered in the protection of the country as a whole so that as consumers we shall have to bear the brunt of evils from which the National Government, through the little influence we might have with it, might protect us, and of which our State government, in the past at least, has been very neglectful. Hence we stand for State rights and Federal control in cooperation (applause). But if it is within the power of the Federal Government, through leasing or otherwise, to retain control of its mineral and coal lands and its water-power sites, to put them beyond the possibility of handling by a State and its legislature, to regulate corporations' rights so as to prevent monopolization, and at the same time to prevent the Nation as a whole from being deprived of any productive agency in our midst, we want the benefit of it. (Applause)
Our patriotism on this score may be of that questionable type described by Artemus Ward, who said that during the Civil War, when the stress was great, he listened to a magnificent speech from an orator on the subject of enlistment, and became so enthused that when the call for volunteers came he, with others, went up to sign the roll; but when he observed that the orator had not signed nor was likely to sign, because his province was simply that of speaking while other's would be fighting, his own ardor was somewhat cooled, and when he reflected that the orator's eloquence had carried his hearers where he would not go himself, it became cooler and cooler. Still, his patriotism did not entirely vanish, for when his time came to sign the roll for enlistment, he signed it with the name of his mother-in-law and offered her as a sacrifice to his country (laughter). Yet we are not exactly in that category, though we may seem to view the situation from a local standpoint. But knowing of our own condition, knowing of the rights which the Federal Government conferred upon the school children of our State--the sixteenth section and other lands of which you heard in Senator Nelson's address today,--and remembering how in a great many instances, through local influences, legislative or otherwise, the intended beneficiaries were largely deprived of the benefactions intended for them we really think, What has gone is gone, except as a lesson to us; and so far as we are concerned, we shall stand for the right of the people as a whole for the enjoyment of its great resources of coal, of oil, of water-power and other natural wealth, and we want to be protected in such a way that no State or local influence shall be able to take it from us forever (applause). That is our position on this question.