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Theodore
Roosevelt's Inaugural Address
Washington, D.C., March 4, 1905 |
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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 responsbilitv 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 by 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
shotfid 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 today 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
before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who
rounded 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 rounded this republic in the days
of Washington, which made great the men who preserved this
republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln. |
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