All of us, no matter from what land our parents came, no matter in
what way we may severally worship our Creator, must stand shoulder to
shoulder in a united America for the elimination of race and religious
prejudice. We must stand for a reign of equal justice to both big and
small. We must insist on the maintenance of the American standard of
living. We must stand for an adequate national control which shall
secure a better training of our young men in time of peace, both
for the work of peace and for the work of war. We must direct every
national resource, material and spiritual, to the task not of shirking
difficulties, but of training our people to overcome difficulties.
Our aim must be, not to make life easy and soft, not to soften soul
and body, but to fit us in virile fashion to do a great work for all
mankind. This great work can only be done by a mighty democracy, with
these qualities of soul, guided by those qualities of mind, which will
both make it refuse to do injustice to any other nation, and also
enable it to hold its own against aggression by any other nation. In
our relations with the outside world, we must abhor wrongdoing, and
disdain to commit it, and we must no less disdain the baseness of
spirit which lamely submits to wrongdoing. Finally and most important
of all, we must strive for the establishment within our own borders
of that stern and lofty standard of personal and public neutrality
which shall guarantee to each man his rights, and which shall insist
in return upon the full performance by each man of his duties both
to his neighbor and to the great nation whose flag must symbolize in
the future as it has symbolized in the past the highest hopes of all
mankind.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s Notes:
――Punctuation and spelling inaccuracies were silently corrected.
――Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.