It puts a premium upon knavery untruthfully to attack an honest man, or even with hysterical exaggeration to assail a bad man with untruth. The liar is no whit better than the thief, and if his mendacity takes the form of slander, he may be worse than most thieves. I hail as a benefactor every writer or speaker, every man who, on the platform, or in book, magazine, or newspaper, with merciless severity makes such attack, provided always that he in his turn remembers that the attack is of use only if it is absolutely truthful. There should be relentless exposure of and attack upon every evil man whether politician or business man, every evil practice, whether in politics, in business, or in social life. There are, in the body politic, economic and social, many and grave evils, and there is urgent necessity for the sternest war upon them. But the man who never does anything else, who never thinks or speaks or writes, save of his feats with the muck-rake, speedily becomes, not a help to society, not an incitement to good, but one of the most potent forces for evil. There is filth on the floor, and it must be scraped up with the muck-rake and there are times and places where this service is the most needed of all the services that can be performed. Now, it is very necessary that we should not flinch from seeing what is vile and debasing. Yet he also typifies the man who in this life consistently refuses to see aught that is lofty, and fixes his eyes with solemn intentness only on that which is vile and debasing. In Pilgrim’s Progress the Man with the Muck-rake is set forth as the example of him whose vision is fixed on carnal instead of on spiritual things. In Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress you may recall the description of the Man with the Muck-rake, the man who could look no way but downward, with the muck-rake in his hand who was offered a celestial crown for his muck-rake, but who would neither look up nor regard the crown he was offered, but continued to rake to himself the filth of the floor. It is about some of these that I wish to say a word to-day. Under altered external form we war with the same tendencies toward evil that were evident in Washington’s time, and are helped by the same tendencies for good. The material problems that face us to-day are not such as they were in Washington’s time, but the underlying facts of human nature are the same now as they were then. We now administer the affairs of a nation in which the extraordinary growth of population has been outstripped by the growth of wealth and the growth in complex interests. This growth in the need for the housing of the Government is but a proof and example of the way in which the nation has grown and the sphere of action of the National Government has grown. We now find it necessary to provide by great additional buildings for the business of the Government. Over a century ago Washington laid the corner stone of the Capitol in what was then little more than a tract of wooded wilderness here beside the Potomac. THEODORE ROOSEVELT, “ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT AT THE LAYING OF THE CORNER STONE OF THE OFFICE BUILDING OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES(THE MAN WITH THE MUCK-RAKE)” (14 APRIL 1906)
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