TR Inaugural

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.