_My Fellow-Citizens_:
I did not expect to have the chance of speaking to any of you of
Virginia on this trip. I only wish it had been my good fortune to
be able to go through your grand and beautiful historic State by
daylight. But you have not escaped me, gentlemen; I am going to come
again.
Yesterday and to-day I spent in Tennessee and North Carolina. I have
enjoyed much those two days. It is a good thing for any American,
and it is an especially good thing for the American who happens to
be President at any time, to go around in the country and meet his
fellow-Americans of different sections and different States. The more
he sees of his fellow-Americans the more he will realize that the
differences which divide them are trivial and that the likenesses
which unite them are fundamental. A good American is a good American
wherever he is, and a bad American is a poor one wherever he is. If
a man is a decent citizen, if he does his duty to his family, to his
neighbors, to the State and the nation, as a decent man ought to, then
he is a man who has a right to claim kinship and comradeship with
every other decent American from one end of this country to the other.
If he is a straight man he is a credit to all of us, and if he is a
crooked man he is a disgrace to all of us. Fundamentally, for weal or
for woe, we are knit together; we shall go up or go down together. If
hard times come they come without much regard to State lines. If good
times come they come without regard to State lines. Wherever a deed is
done by an American which reflects credit upon our country, each of us
can walk with his head a little higher in consequence; and wherever
anything happens through the fault of any of us that is discreditable
it discredits all of us more or less.
Gentlemen and ladies, I thank you greatly for having come down here to
greet me. It is a genuine pleasure to see you. No man of the United
States, proud of the history of the United States, can fail to feel
certain associations of reverence and regard awakened when he treads
the soil of Virginia, which has taken so leading a part in peace and
in war throughout our history.