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. |
1 |
| 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. |
2 |
| 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. |
3 |
| 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. |
4 |
| 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. |
5 |
| 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. |
6 |
| 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. |
7 |
| 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. |
8 |
| 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. |
9 |
| 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: |
10 |
| 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. |
11 |
| 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. |
12 |
| 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. |
13 |
| 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. |
14 |
| 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. |
15 |
| 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. |
16 |
| 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. |
