There
has been a change of government. It began two years ago,
when the House of Representatives became Democratic by a
decisive majority. It has now been completed. The Senate
about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices of
President and Vice-President have been put into the hands
of Democrats. What does the change mean? That is the
question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That is
the question I am going to try to answer, in order, if I
may, to interpret the occasion.
It
means much more than the mere success of a party. The
success of a party means little except when the Nation is
using that party for a large and definite purpose. No one
can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks to
use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to interpret
a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old
things with which we had grown familiar, and which had
begun to creep into the very habit of our thought and of
our lives, have altered their aspect as we have latterly
looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes;
have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien
and sinister. Some new things, as we look frankly upon
them, willing to comprehend their real character, have
come to assume the aspect of things long believed in and
familiar, stuff of our own convictions. We have been
refreshed by a new insight into our own life.
We
see that in many things that life is very great. It is
incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body of
wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in the
industries which have been conceived and built up by the
genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise of
groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its moral
force. Nowhere else in the world have noble men and women
exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and the energy
of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their efforts
to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set the weak in
the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover,
a great system of government, which has stood through a
long age as in many respects a model for those who seek to
set liberty upon foundations that will endure against
fortuitous change, against storm and accident. Our life
contains every great thing, and contains it in rich
abundance.
But
the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has
been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We
have squandered a great part of what we might have used,
and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of
nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have
been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful,
shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We
have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we
have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the
human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies
overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual
cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead
weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the
years through. The groans and agony of it all had not yet
reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our
life, coming up out of the mines and factories, and out of
every home where the struggle had its intimate and
familiar seat. With the great Government went many deep
secret things which we too long delayed to look into and
scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes. The great
Government we loved has too often been made use of for
private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had
forgotten the people.
At
last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a
whole. We see the bad with the good, the debased and
decadent with the sound and vital. With this vision we
approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse, to
reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without
impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process
of our common life without weakening or sentimentalizing
it. There has been something crude and heartless and
unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our
thought has been "Let every man look out for himself,
let every generation look out for itself," while we
reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any
but those who stood at the levers of control should have a
chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten
our morals. We remembered well enough that we had set up a
policy which was meant to serve the humblest as well as
the most powerful, with an eye single to the standards of
justice and fair play, and remembered it with pride. But
we were very heedless and in a hurry to be great.
We
have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of
heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up
our minds to square every process of our national life
again with the standards we so proudly set up at the
beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work
is a work of restoration.
We
have itemized with some degree of particularity the things
that ought to be altered and here are some of the chief
items: A tariff which cuts us off from our proper part in
the commerce of the world, violates the just principles of
taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument in
the hand of private interests; a banking and currency
system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell
its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to
concentrating cash and restricting credits; an industrial
system which, take it on all its sides, financial as well
as administrative, holds capital in leading strings,
restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of
labor, and exploits without renewing or conserving the
natural resources of the country; a body of agricultural
activities never yet given the efficiency of great
business undertakings or served as it should be through
the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm,
or afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its
practical needs; watercourses undeveloped, waste places
unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing without
plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps at
every mine. We have studied as perhaps no other nation has
the most effective means of production, but we have not
studied cost or economy as we should either as organizers
of industry, as statesmen, or as individuals.
Nor
have we studied and perfected the means by which
government may be put at the service of humanity, in
safeguarding the health of the Nation, the health of its
men and its women and its children, as well as their
rights in the struggle for existence. This is no
sentimental duty. The firm basis of government is justice,
not pity. These are matters of justice. There can be no
equality or opportunity, the first essential of justice in
the body politic, if men and women and children be not
shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the
consequences of great industrial and social processes
which they can not alter, control, or singly cope with.
Society must see to it that it does not itself crush or
weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty
of law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary
laws, pure food laws, and laws determining conditions of
labor which individuals are powerless to determine for
themselves are intimate parts of the very business of
justice and legal efficiency.
These
are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the
others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected,
fundamental safeguarding of property and of individual
right. This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift
everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light
that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience
and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we
should do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should
do it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind
haste. We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with
our economic system as it is and as it may be modified,
not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to
write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it
should be, in the spirit of those who question their own
wisdom and seek counsel and knowledge, not shallow
self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions whither
they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always
be our motto.
And
yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The Nation
has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion,
stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of
government too often debauched and made an instrument of
evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of
right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like
some air out of God's own presence, where justice and
mercy are reconciled and the judge and the brother are
one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics but a
task which shall search us through and through, whether we
be able to understand our time and the need of our people,
whether we be indeed their spokesmen and interpreters,
whether we have the pure heart to comprehend and the
rectified will to choose our high course of action.
This
is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here
muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of
humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in
the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will
do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail
to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all
forward-looking men, to my side. God helping me, I will
not fail them, if they will but counsel and sustain me!
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