It has been put forth, as we intended, as a
whole, and leaves no conjecture as to what is to follow. The road at
last lies clear and firm before business. It is a road which it can
travel without fear or embarrassment. It is the road to ungrudged,
unclouded success. In it every honest man, every man who believes that
the public interest is part of his own interest, may walk with perfect
confidence.
Moreover, our thoughts are now more of the future than of the past.
While we have worked at our tasks of peace the circumstances of the
whole age have been altered by war. What we have done for our own land
and our own people we did with the best that was in us, whether of
character or of intelligence, with sober enthusiasm and a confidence in
the principles upon which we were acting which sustained us at every
step of the difficult undertaking; but it is done. It has passed from
our hands. It is now an established part of the legislation of the
country. Its usefulness, its effects will disclose themselves in
experience. What chiefly strikes us now, as we look about us during
these closing days of a year which will be forever memorable in the
history of the world, is that we face new tasks, have been facing them
these six months, must face them in the months to come,--face them
without partisan feeling, like men who have forgotten everything but a
common duty and the fact that we are representatives of a great people
whose thought is not of us but of what America owes to herself and to
all mankind in such circumstances as these upon which we look amazed and
anxious.
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