_My Fellow-Citizens:_
No people on earth have more cause to be thankful than ours, and this
is said reverently, in no spirit of boastfulness in our own strength,
but with gratitude to the Giver of Good, who has blessed us with the
conditions which have enabled us to achieve so large a measure of
well-being and of happiness. To us as a people it has been granted to
lay the foundations of our national life in a new continent. We are
the heirs of the ages, and yet we have had to pay few of the penalties
which in old countries are exacted by the dead hand of a bygone
civilization. We have not been obliged to fight for our existence
against any alien race; and yet our life has called for the vigor and
effort without which the manlier and hardier virtues wither away. Under
such conditions it would be our own fault if we failed; and the success
which we have had in the past, the success which we confidently believe
the future will bring, should cause in us no feeling of vainglory, but
rather a deep and abiding realization of all which life has offered us;
a full acknowledgment of the responsibility which is ours, and a fixed
determination to show that under a free government a mighty people can
thrive best, alike as regards the things of the body and the things of
the soul.
Much has been given to us, and much will rightfully be expected from
us. We have duties to others and duties to ourselves; and we can shirk
neither. We have become a great Nation, forced by the fact of its
greatness into relations with the other nations of the earth; and we
must behave as beseems a people with such responsibilities. Toward all
other nations, large and small, our attitude must be one of cordial and
sincere friendship. We must show not only in our words but in our deeds
that we are earnestly desirous of securing their goodwill by acting
toward them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their
rights. But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual,
count most when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever
careful to refrain from wronging others, we must be no less insistent
that we are not wronged ourselves. We wish peace; but we wish the peace
of justice, the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think
it is right and not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts
manfully and justly should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong
power should ever be able to single us out as a subject for insolent
aggression.
Our relations with the other Powers of the world are important; but
still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in
wealth, in population, and in power as this Nation has seen during the
century and a quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied
by a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation
that rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility
and danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have
outgrown. We now face other perils the very existence of which it
was impossible that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex
and intense, and the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary
industrial development of the last half century are felt in every
fibre of our social and political being. Never before have men tried
so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the
affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic republic. The
conditions which have told for our marvelous material well-being,
which have developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance,
and individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety
inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial
centres. Upon the success of our experiment much depends; not only as
regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If
we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will
rock to its foundations; and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to
ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet
unborn. There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but
there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding
from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to
approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to
solve them aright.
Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set
before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded
and preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must
be undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well
done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is
difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character
as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the
freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith
that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty
past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now
enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be
able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and
our children’s children. To do so we must show, not merely in great
crises, but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical
intelligence, of courage, of hardihood and endurance, and above all
the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who
founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the
men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.
WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON
_March 6, 1905_
_To the Senate:_
I wish to call the attention of the Senate at this executive session
to the treaty with Santo Domingo. I feel that I ought to state to the
Senate that the condition of affairs in Santo Domingo is such that
it is very much for the interest of that Republic that action on the
treaty should be had at as early a moment as the Senate, after giving
the matter full consideration, may find practicable.