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Woodrow Wilson Speech - First Inaugural Address
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!
Woodrow Wilson
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