US Presidency
1909

I do not hesitate to repeat that I think it would have been an unwise sacrifice of the business interests of the country, it would have been an unwise sacrifice of the solidarity, efficiency, and promise-performing power of the party, to have projected into the next session another long discussion of the tariff, and to have delayed or probably defeated the legislation needed in the improvement of our interstate commerce regulation, and in making more efficient our antitrust law and the prosecutions under it. Such legislation is needed to clinch the Roosevelt policies, by which corporations and those in control of them shall be limited to a lawful path and shall be prevented from returning to those abuses which a recurrence of prosperity is too apt to bring about unless definite, positive steps of a legislative character are taken to mark the lines of honest and lawful corporate management. Now, there is another provision in the new tariff bill that I regard as of the utmost importance.