The four years which have elapsed since last I stood in this place have
been crowded with counsel and action of the most vital interest and
consequence. Perhaps no equal period in our history has been so fruitful
of important reforms in our economic and industrial life or so full of
significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our political action.
We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order, correct the
grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life, liberate and quicken
the processes of our national genius and energy, and lift our politics
to a broader view of the people's essential interests. It is a record of
singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall not attempt to
review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as
the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time,
rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present and
the immediate future.
Although we have centered counsel and action with such unusual
concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic
legislation to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, other
matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention, matters
lying outside our own life as a nation and over which we had no control,
but which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn us more and
more irresistibly into their own current and influence.
It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of
the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere with a passion and an
apprehension they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve calm
counsel while the thought of our own people swayed this way and that
under their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We
are of the blood of all the nations that are at war. The currents of our
thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run quick at all seasons
back and forth between us and them. The war inevitably set its mark from
the first alike upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, our
politics, and our social action. To be indifferent to it or independent
of it was out of the question.
And yet all the while we have been conscious that we were not part of
it. In that consciousness, despite many divisions, we have drawn closer
together. We have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have not
wished to wrong or injure in return; have retained throughout the
consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest
that transcended the immediate issues of the war itself. As some of the
injuries done us have become intolerable we have still been clear that
we wished nothing for ourselves that we were not ready to demand for all
mankind,--fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live and be at ease
against organized wrong.
It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have grown more and
more aware, more and more certain that the part we wished to play was
the part of those who mean to vindicate and fortify peace. We have been
obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim to a certain minimum of
right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed neutrality since
it seems that in no other way we can demonstrate what it is we insist
upon and cannot forego. We may even be drawn on, by circumstances, not
by our own purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of our rights
as we see them and a more immediate association with the great struggle
itself. But nothing will alter our thought or our purpose. They are too
clear to be obscured. They are too deeply rooted in the principles of
our national life to be altered. We desire neither conquest nor
advantage. We wish nothing that can be had only at the cost of another
people. We have always professed unselfish purpose and we covet the
opportunity to prove that our professions are sincere.
There are many things still to do at home, to clarify our own politics
and give new vitality to the industrial processes of our own life, and
we shall do them as time and opportunity serve; but we realize that the
greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the whole world
for stage and in cooeperation with the wide, and universal forces of
mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those things. They will
follow in the immediate wake of the war itself and will set civilization
up again. We are provincials no longer. The tragical events of the
thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have
made us citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own
fortunes as a nation are involved, whether we would have it so or not.
And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall be the
more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we have
been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a single
continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the
principles of a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the things we
shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:
That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and
in the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for
their maintenance;
That the essential principle of peace is the actual equality of nations
in all matters of right or privilege;
That peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of
power;
That governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common
thought, purpose, or power of the family of nations.
That the seas should be equally free and safe for the use of all
peoples, under rules set up by common agreement and consent, and that,
so far as practicable, they should be accessible to all upon equal
terms;
That national armaments should be limited to the necessities of national
order and domestic safety;
That the community of interest and of power upon which peace must
henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the duty of seeing to it that
all influences proceeding from its own citizens meant to encourage or
assist revolution in other states should be sternly and effectually
suppressed and prevented.
I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow-countrymen: they are
your own, part and parcel of your own thinking and your own motive in
affairs. They spring up native amongst us. Upon this as a platform of
purpose and of action we can stand together.
And it is imperative that we should stand together. We are being forged
into a new unity amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the world.
In their ardent heat we shall, in God's providence, let us hope, be
purged of faction and division, purified of the errant humors of party
and of private interest, and shall stand forth in the days to come with
a new dignity of national pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that
the dedication is in his own heart, the high purpose of the Nation in
his own mind, ruler of his own will and desire.
I stand here and have taken the high and solemn oath to which you have
been audience because the people of the United States have chosen me for
this august delegation of power and have by their gracious judgment
named me their leader in affairs. I know now what the task means. I
realize to the full the responsibility which it involves. I pray God I
may be given the wisdom and the prudence to do my duty in the true
spirit of this great people. I am their servant and can succeed only as
they sustain and guide me by their confidence and their counsel. The
thing I shall count upon, the thing without which neither counsel nor
action will avail, is the unity of America,--an America united in
feeling, in purpose, and in its vision of duty, of opportunity, and of
service. We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the
necessities of the Nation to their own private profit or use them for
the building up of private power; beware that no faction or disloyal
intrigue break the harmony or embarrass the spirit of our people; beware
that our Government be kept pure and incorrupt in all its parts. United
alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to perform
it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great task
to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your tolerance, your
countenance, and your united aid. The shadows that now lie dark upon our
path will soon be dispelled and we shall walk with the light all about
us if we be but true to ourselves,--to ourselves as we have wished to be
known in the counsels of the world and in the thought of all those who
love liberty and justice and the right exalted.