| My
countrymen, there isn't anything the
matter with the world's 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. 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 itself
but we still think straight; and we
mean to act straight; we 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.
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's
one thing to battle successfully
against the world's domination by
a military autocracy because the
infinite God never intended such
a program; but it's quite another
thing to revise human nature and
suspend the fundamental laws of
life and all of life's requirements.
The world
calls for peace. American demands
peace, formal as well as actual,
and means to have it so we may set
our own house in order. We challenge
the proposal that an armed autocrat
should dominate the world, and we
choose for ourselves the claim that
the representative democracy which
made us what we are. This republic
has its ample task 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 the citizenship speaks
what it may do for the government
and country rather than what the
country 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 enactments
and excess of government offer no
substitute for quality of citizenship.
The problems of maintained civilization
are not to be solved by a transfer
of responsibility from citizenship
to government and no eminent page
in history was ever drafted to the
standards of mediocrity. Nor, no
government worthy of the name which
is directed by influence on the
one hand or moved by intimidation
on the other. My best judgement
of America's need 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. We want to
go on, secure and unafraid, holding
fast to the American inheritance,
and confident of the supreme American
fulfillment.
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