My
Fellow Citizens:
The
four years which have elapsed since last I stood in this
place have been crowded with counsel and action of the
most vital interest and consequence. Perhaps no equal
period in our history has been so fruitful of important
reforms in our economic and industrial life or so full of
significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our
political action. We have sought very thoughtfully to set
our house in order, correct the grosser errors and abuses
of our industrial life, liberate and quicken the processes
of our national genius and energy, and lift our politics
to a broader view of the people's essential interests.
It
is a record of singular variety and singular distinction.
But I shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself
and will be of increasing influence as the years go by.
This is not the time for retrospect. It is time rather to
speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present and
the immediate future.
Although
we have centered counsel and action with such unusual
concentration and success upon the great problems of
domestic legislation to which we addressed ourselves four
years ago, other matters have more and more forced
themselves upon our attention matters lying outside our
own life as a nation and over which we had no control, but
which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn
us more and more irresistibly into their own current and
influence.
It
has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the
life of the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere
with a passion and an apprehension they never knew before.
It has been hard to preserve calm counsel while the
thought of our own people swayed this way and that under
their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan
people. We are of the blood of all the nations that are at
war. The currents of our thoughts as well as the currents
of our trade run quick at all seasons back and forth
between us and them. The war inevitably set its mark from
the first alike upon our minds, our industries, our
commerce, our politics and our social action. To be
indifferent to it, or independent of it, was out of the
question.
And
yet all the while we have been conscious that we were not
part of it. In that consciousness, despite many divisions,
we have drawn closer together. We have been deeply wronged
upon the seas, but we have not wished to wrong or injure
in return; have retained throughout the consciousness of
standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest that
transcended the immediate issues of the war itself.
As
some of the injuries done us have become intolerable we
have still been clear that we wished nothing for ourselves
that we were not ready to demand for all mankind fair
dealing, justice, the freedom to live and to be at ease
against organized wrong.
It
is in this spirit and with this thought that we have grown
more and more aware, more and more certain that the part
we wished to play was the part of those who mean to
vindicate and fortify peace. We have been obliged to arm
ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of
right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed
neutrality since it seems that in no other way we can
demonstrate what it is we insist upon and cannot forget.
We may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own
purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our
rights as we see them and a more immediate association
with the great struggle itself. But nothing will alter our
thought or our purpose. They are too clear to be obscured.
They are too deeply rooted in the principles of our
national life to be altered. We desire neither conquest
nor advantage. We wish nothing that can be had only at the
cost of another people. We always professed unselfish
purpose and we covet the opportunity to prove our
professions are sincere.
There
are many things still to be done at home, to clarify our
own politics and add new vitality to the industrial
processes of our own life, and we shall do them as time
and opportunity serve, but we realize that the greatest
things that remain to be done must be done with the whole
world for stage and in cooperation with the wide and
universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits
ready for those things.
We
are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the thirty
months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed
have made us citizens of the world. There can be no
turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are involved
whether we would have it so or not.
And
yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We
shall be the more American if we but remain true to the
principles in which we have been bred. They are not the
principles of a province or of a single continent. We have
known and boasted all along that they were the principles
of a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the things
we shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:
That
all nations are equally interested in the peace of the
world and in the political stability of free peoples, and
equally responsible for their maintenance; that the
essential principle of peace is the actual equality of
nations in all matters of right or privilege; that peace
cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of
power; that governments derive all their just powers from
the consent of the governed and that no other powers
should be supported by the common thought, purpose or
power of the family of nations; that the seas should be
equally free and safe for the use of all peoples, under
rules set up by common agreement and consent, and that, so
far as practicable, they should be accessible to all upon
equal terms; that national armaments shall be limited to
the necessities of national order and domestic safety;
that the community of interest and of power upon which
peace must henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the
duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding from
its own citizens meant to encourage or assist revolution
in other states should be sternly and effectually
suppressed and prevented.
I
need not argue these principles to you, my fellow
countrymen; they are your own part and parcel of your own
thinking and your own motives in affairs. They spring up
native amongst us. Upon this as a platform of purpose and
of action we can stand together. And it is imperative that
we should stand together. We are being forged into a new
unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the
world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God's Providence,
let us hope, be purged of faction and division, purified
of the errant humors of party and of private interest, and
shall stand forth in the days to come with a new dignity
of national pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that
the dedication is in his own heart, the high purpose of
the nation in his own mind, ruler of his own will and
desire.
I
stand here and have taken the high and solemn oath to
which you have been audience because the people of the
United States have chosen me for this august delegation of
power and have by their gracious judgment named me their
leader in affairs.
I
know now what the task means. I realize to the full the
responsibility which it involves. I pray God I may be
given the wisdom and the prudence to do my duty in the
true spirit of this great people. I am their servant and
can succeed only as they sustain and guide me by their
confidence and their counsel. The thing I shall count
upon, the thing without which neither counsel nor action
will avail, is the unity of America an America united in
feeling, in purpose and in its vision of duty, of
opportunity and of service.
We
are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the
necessities of the nation to their own private profit or
use them for the building up of private power.
United
alike in the conception of our duty and in the high
resolve to perform it in the face of all men, let us
dedicate ourselves to the great task to which we must now
set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your
countenance and your united aid.
The
shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be
dispelled, and we shall walk with the light all about us
if we be but true to ourselves to ourselves as we have
wished to be known in the counsels of the world and in the
thought of all those who love liberty and justice and the
right exalted.
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