There
isn't anything the matter with world
civilization, except that humanity
is viewing it through a vision impaired
in a cataclysmal war. Poise has been
disturbed and nerves have been racked,
and fever has rendered men irrational;
sometimes there have been draughts
upon the dangerous cup of barbarity
and men have wandered far from safe
paths, but the human procession still
marches in the right direction.
Here in the
United States, we feel the reflex,
rather than the hurting wound, but
we still think straight, and we
mean to act straight, and mean to
hold firmly to all that was ours
when war involved us, and seek the
higher attainments which are the
only compensations that so supreme
a tragedy may give mankind.
[Press
play to hear clip below]
America's
present need is not heroics, but healing;
not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution,
but restoration; not agitation, but
adjustment; not surgery but serenity;
not the dramatic, but the dispassionate;
not experiment but equipoise; not
submergence in internationality, but
sustainment in triumphant nationality.
It is one
thing to battle successfully against
world domination by a military autocracy,
because the infinite God never intended
such a program, but it is quite
another thing to revise human nature
and suspend the fundamental laws
of life and all of life's acquirements.
The world
called for peace, and has its precarious
variety. America demands peace,
formal as well as actual, and means
to have it, regardless of political
exigencies and campaign issues.
If it must be a campaign issue,
we shall have peace and discuss
it afterwards, because the actuality
is imperative, and the theory is
only illusive. Then we may set our
own house in order. We challenged
the proposal that an armed autocrat
should dominate the world, it ill
becomes us to assume that a rhetorical
autocrat shall direct all humanity.
This republic
has its ample tasks. If we put an
end to false economics which lure
humanity to utter chaos, ours will
be the commanding example of world
leadership today. If we can prove
a representative popular government
under which a citizenship seeks
what it may do for the government
rather than what the government
may do for individuals, we shall
do more to make democracy safe for
the world than all armed conflict
ever recorded. The world needs to
be reminded that all human ills
are not curable by legislation,
and that quantity of statutory enactment
and excess of government offer no
substitute for quality of citizenship.
. .
My best judgment
of America's needs is to steady
down, to get squarely on our feet,
to make sure of the right path.
Let's get out of the fevered delirium
of war, with the hallucination that
all the money in the world is to
be made in the madness of war and
the wildness of its aftermath. Let
us stop to consider that tranquility
at home is more precious than peace
abroad, and that both our good fortune
and our eminence are dependent on
the normal forward stride of all
the American people.
