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Teddy Roosevelt Speech - Inaugural address
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 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 good will 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 wrongdoing 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 fiber 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 centers. 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.
Teddy Roosevelt
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