_Governor Crane, and you, my Friends and Fellow-Citizens_:
It seems to me that in a town like this we not only have but ought
to have a better standard of citizenship and a more thorough
appreciation of the rights and duties of the individual citizen and of
the possibilities of government than in almost any other community.
Here is a town where you have both farming and manufacturing,
where you have on a small scale all the elements that go to make
up the industrial life of the nation as a whole—the capitalist
and wage-earner, the farmer and hired man, merchant, men of the
professions, you have them all; you see the forces that have built up
the nation and that are at work in the nation, in play round about
you in the farms, in the factories, in the houses, right among
your neighbors and friends. When men live in a big city they lose
touch with one another; they tend to lose intimate touch with the
government, and they get to speak of the state, of the government, as
something entirely apart from them. Now the government is us, here,
you and me, and that ought to make us understand on the one hand what
we have a right to expect from the government, and on the other hand
what it is foolish to expect from the government. We have a right to
expect from it that it will secure us against injustice; that so far
as is humanly possible it will secure for each man a fair chance;
that it will do justice as between man and man, and that it will not
respect persons; that in that division of the government dealing with
justice each man shall stand absolutely on his merits, not being
discriminated for or against because of his wealth or his poverty,
because of anything but his own conduct.
The government can take hold of certain functions which are in the
interest of the people as a whole. More than this the government can
not do or else does at the risk of doing it badly. The government
can not supply the lack in any man of the qualities which must
determine in the last resort the man’s success or failure. Instead
of “government” say “the town.” Now what can the town do for you? A
good deal; but not nearly as much as you can do for it, not nearly as
much as you must do for yourself. The government can not make a man
a success in life. If we would remember that and remember that when
we use the large terms of the government and nation, we only mean
the town on a large scale, there would be much less danger in our
thinking that perhaps by some queer patent device or some scheme, the
state, the government, the town, can supply the lack of individual
thrift, energy, enterprise, resolution. It can not supply such lack.
Something can be done by government, that is, by all of us acting
together to protect the rights of all, to accomplish certain things
for all. Something can be accomplished by helping one another. He is
a poor creature who does not give help generously when the chance
comes. But finally in the last resort the man who wins now will be the
man of the type who has won always, the man who can win for himself.
Do not make the mistake of thinking that it is possible ever to call
in any outside force to take the place of the man’s own individual
initiative, the man’s individual capacity to do work worth doing.