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.
