There is another matter in which imperative considerations of justice and fair play suggest thoughtful remedial action.  Not only do many of the combinations effected or sought to be effected in the industrial world work an injustice upon the public in general; they also directly and seriously injure the individuals who are put out of business in one unfair way or another by the many dislodging and exterminating forces of combination.  I hope that we shall agree in giving private individuals who claim to have been injured by these processes the right to found their suits for redress upon the facts and judgments proved and entered in suits by the Government where the Government has upon its own initiative sued the combinations complained of and won its suit, and that the statute of limitations shall be suffered to run against such litigants only from the date of the conclusion of the Government’s action.  It is not fair that the private litigant should be obliged to set up and establish again the facts which the Government has proved.  He cannot afford, he has not the power, to make use of such processes of inquiry as the Government has command of.  Thus shall individual justice be done while the processes of business are rectified and squared with the general conscience.

I have laid the case before you, no doubt as it lies in your own mind, as it lies in the thought of the country.  What must every candid man say of the suggestions I have laid before you, of the plain obligations of which I have reminded you?  That these are new things for which the country is not prepared?  No; but that they are old things, now familiar, and must of course be undertaken if we are to square our laws with the thought and desire of the country.  Until these things are done, conscientious business men the country over will be unsatisfied.  They are in these things our mentors and colleagues.  We are now about to write the additional articles of our constitution of peace, the peace that is honor and freedom and prosperity.

PANAMA CANAL TOLLS

[Address delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress, March 5, 1914.]

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS: 

I have come to you upon an errand which can be very briefly performed, but I beg that you will not measure its importance by the number of sentences in which I state it.  No communication I have addressed to the Congress carried with it graver or more far-reaching implications as to the interest of the country, and I come now to speak upon a matter with regard to which I am charged in a peculiar degree, by the Constitution itself, with personal responsibility.

I have come to ask you for the repeal of that provision of the Panama Canal Act of August 24, 1912, which exempts vessels engaged in the coastwise trade of the United States from payment of tolls, and to urge upon you the justice, the wisdom, and the large policy of such a repeal with the utmost earnestness of which I am capable.