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Presidents 1,701 words
The election of 1912 produced a Democratic victory
over the split vote for President Taft's Republican ticket and
Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party. The Governor of New Jersey
and former Princeton University president was accompanied by
President Taft to the Capitol. The oath o foffice was administered on
the East Portico by Chief Justice Edward White.
"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!"
March 4, 1913