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.
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