My
fellow-citizens, no people on earth have more cause to be
thankful than ours, and this is said reverently, in no
spirit of boastfulness in our own strength, but with
gratitude to the Giver of Good who has blessed us with the
conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a
measure of well-being and of happiness. To us as a people
it has been granted to lay the foundations of our national
life in a new continent. We are the heirs of the ages, and
yet we have had to pay few of the penalties which in old
countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone
civilization. We have not been obliged to fight for our
existence against any alien race; and yet our life has
called for the vigor and effort without which the manlier
and hardier virtues wither away. Under such conditions it
would be our own fault if we failed; and the success which
we have had in the past, the success which we confidently
believe the future will bring, should cause in us no
feeling of vainglory, but rather a deep and abiding
realization of all which life has offered us; a full
acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours; and a
fixed determination to show that under a free government a
mighty people can thrive best, alike as regards the things
of the body and the things of the soul.
Much
has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected
from us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves;
and we can shirk neither. We have become a great nation,
forced by the fact of its greatness into relations with
the other nations of the earth, and we must behave as
beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all
other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one
of cordial and sincere friendship. We must show not only
in our words, but in our deeds, that we are earnestly
desirous of securing their good will by acting toward them
in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their
rights. But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an
individual, count most when shown not by the weak but by
the strong. While ever careful to refrain from wrongdoing
others, we must be no less insistent that we are not
wronged ourselves. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of
justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we
think it is right and not because we are afraid. No weak
nation that acts manfully and justly should ever have
cause to fear us, and no strong power should ever be able
to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression.
Our
relations with the other powers of the world are
important; but still more important are our relations
among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and
in power as this nation has seen during the century and a
quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied by
a like growth in the problems which are ever before every
nation that rises to greatness. Power invariably means
both responsibility and danger. Our forefathers faced
certain perils which we have outgrown. We now face other
perils, the very existence of which it was impossible that
they should foresee. Modern life is both complex and
intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the
extraordinary industrial development of the last half
century are felt in every fiber of our social and
political being. Never before have men tried so vast and
formidable an experiment as that of administering the
affairs of a continent under the forms of a Democratic
republic. The conditions which have told for our marvelous
material well-being, which have developed to a very high
degree our energy, self-reliance, and individual
initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety
inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in
industrial centers. Upon the success of our experiment
much depends, not only as regards our own welfare, but as
regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of
free self-government throughout the world will rock to its
foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to
ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the
generations yet unborn. There is no good reason why we
should fear the future, but there is every reason why we
should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves
the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to
approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching
purpose to solve them aright.
Yet,
after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks
set before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers
who founded and preserved this Republic, the spirit in
which these tasks must be undertaken and these problems
faced, if our duty is to be well done, remains essentially
unchanged. We know that self-government is difficult. We
know that no people needs such high traits of character as
that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright
through the freely expressed will of the freemen who
compose it. But we have faith that we shall not prove
false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They
did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now
enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we
shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged
to our children and our children's children. To do so we
must show, not merely in great crises, but in the everyday
affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence,
of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the
power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the
men who founded this Republic in the days of Washington,
which made great the men who preserved this Republic in
the days of Abraham Lincoln.
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