THERE has been a change of government. It began two years ago, when the
House of Representatives became Democratic by a decisive majority.
It has now been completed. The Senate about to assemble will also be
Democratic. The offices of President and Vice-President have been put
into the hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? That is the
question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That is the question
I am going to try to answer, in order, if I may, to interpret the
occasion.
It means much more than the mere success of a party. The success of
a party means little except when the Nation is using that party for a
large and definite purpose. No one can mistake the purpose for which
the Nation now seeks to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to
interpret a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things
with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to creep into the
very habit of our thought and of our lives, have altered their aspect as
we have latterly looked critically upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes;
have dropped their disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister.
Some new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to comprehend
their real character, have come to assume the aspect of things long
believed in and familiar, stuff of our own convictions. We have been
refreshed by a new insight into our own life.
We see that in many things that life is very great. It is incomparably
great in its material aspects, in its body of wealth, in the diversity
and sweep of its energy, in the industries which have been conceived and
built up by the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise
of groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its moral force.
Nowhere else in the world have noble men and women exhibited in more
striking forms the beauty and the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and
counsel in their efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set
the weak in the way of strength and hope. We have built up, moreover,
a great system of government, which has stood through a long age as in
many respects a model for those who seek to set liberty upon foundations
that will endure against fortuitous change, against storm and accident.
Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in rich abundance.
But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been
corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste. We have squandered a
great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve
the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise
would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful,
shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We have been
proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped
thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed
out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and
spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead
weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.
The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn,
moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories,
and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar
seat. With the great Government went many deep secret things which we
too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes.
The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private
and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.
At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We
see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound and
vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is to cleanse,
to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without impairing the
good, to purify and humanize every process of our common life without
weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something crude and
heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed and be great. Our
thought has been "Let every man look out for himself, let every
generation look out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which
made it impossible that any but those who stood at the levers of control
should have a chance to look out for themselves. We had not forgotten
our morals. We remembered well enough that we had set up a policy which
was meant to serve the humblest as well as the most powerful, with an
eye single to the standards of justice and fair play, and remembered it
with pride. But we were very heedless and in a hurry to be great.
We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of heedlessness
have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every
process of our national life again with the standards we so proudly set
up at the beginning and have always carried at our hearts. Our work is a
work of restoration.
We have itemized with some degree of particularity the things that ought
to be altered and here are some of the chief items: A tariff which cuts
us off from our proper part in the commerce of the world, violates
the just principles of taxation, and makes the Government a facile
instrument in the hand of private interests; a banking and currency
system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell its bonds
fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating cash and
restricting credits; an industrial system which, take it on all its
sides, financial as well as administrative, holds capital in leading
strings, restricts the liberties and limits the opportunities of labor,
and exploits without renewing or conserving the natural resources of
the country; a body of agricultural activities never yet given the
efficiency of great business undertakings or served as it should be
through the instrumentality of science taken directly to the farm, or
afforded the facilities of credit best suited to its practical needs;
watercourses undeveloped, waste places unreclaimed, forests untended,
fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste
heaps at every mine. We have studied as perhaps no other nation has
the most effective means of production, but we have not studied cost or
economy as we should either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or
as individuals.
Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may
be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the
Nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as
their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty.
The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of
justice. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential
of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not
shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of
great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control,
or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself
crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of
law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food
laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are
powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very
business of justice and legal efficiency.
These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the
others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental
safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high
enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life
as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's
conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should
do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance
of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not
destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may
be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to
write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in
the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and
knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions
whither they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be
our motto.
And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The Nation has been
deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge
of wrong, of ideals lost, of government too often debauched and made
an instrument of evil. The feelings with which we face this new age of
right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of
God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and the judge
and the brother are one. We know our task to be no mere task of politics
but a task which shall search us through and through, whether we be able
to understand our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed
their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure heart to
comprehend and the rectified will to choose our high course of action.
This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication. Here muster,
not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait
upon us; men's lives hang in the balance; men's hopes call upon us to
say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares
fail to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking
men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them, if they will but
counsel and sustain me!
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