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Inaugural Address of Theodore Roosevelt ,th President |
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Inaugural Address of President Theodore Roosevelt
Saturday, March 4, 1905
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.
Visit Mr. Roosevelt's Website
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The U. S. Constitution
