character and effects life. Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; The but still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in wealth, in population, and in power as this nation has of modern 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 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 Democracy is still an experiment. The spirit in which our problems must be faced. The demands of the times. Change in our relation to world affairs. Attempt of the United States to keep out of the 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. 1 29. Wilson on the dangers of the World War period Not only did the purely domestic problems of American democracy become more numerous and more complex after the opening of the twentieth century, but the attitude of the United States toward world issues became more important. Despite the advice of Washington and Jefferson that we maintain an aloof position in world affairs, the march of progress has made this impossible. The advancing population of the civilized world, the increasing facility of transportation and communication between various sections of the globe, the tendency for modern nations to become more and more interdependent in matters of trade and commerce, these and other developments have forced the United States to realize that European events affect the American people. The outbreak of the World War in the summer of 1914 aroused the interest and sympathies of the American people, but increased, too, their desire to keep out of a struggle which originally had nothing to do with American issues. But the fact that we were no World War. longer an isolated nation made this impossible. Though we attempted to remain aloof, the war reached out and touched us so vitally and with such repeated insistence that by the opening of the year 1917 our entry into the struggle seemed likely, if not inevitable. The following are extracts from the second inaugural address of President Wilson, who early in 1917 realized that the nation faced new issues of a serious and threatening nature: 1 From Woodrow Wilson, Second Inaugural Address, March 5, 1917. of the My Fellow-Citizens: The four years which have elapsed since The record last I stood in this place have been crowded with counsel and action American of the most vital interest and consequence. Perhaps no equal period in people. our history has been so fruitful of important reforms in our economic and industrial life, or so full of significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our political action. We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order, correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life, liberate and quicken the processes of our national genius and energy, and lift our politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests. It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I shall not attempt to review it. . . . This is not the time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present and the immediate future. Although we have centered counsel and action with such unusual concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic legislation, . . . other matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention, matters lying outside our own life as a nation, and over which we had no control. . . . The war inevitably set its mark from the first alike upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, our politics, and our social action. To be indifferent to it or independent of it was out of the question. . . . Effect of the World War upon nature of the situation. There are many things still to do at home, to clarify our own Pressing politics and give new vitality to the industrial processes of our own life, and we shall do them as time and opportunity serve; but we foreign realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done with the whole world for stage and in coöperation with the wide and universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for those things. They will follow in the immediate wake of the war itself and will set civilization up again. We are provincials no longer. The tragical events of the thirty months of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world. of American And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall Principles be the more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we have been bred. . . . I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow-countrymen: life. The call they are your own, part and parcel of your own thinking and your own motive in affairs. And it is imperative that we should stand together. We are being forged into a new unity amidst fires that now blaze throughout the world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God's providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and division, purified of the errant humors of party and of private interest, and shall stand forth in the days to come with a new dignity of national pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that the dedication is in his own heart, the high purpose of the nation in his own mind, ruler of his own will and desire. Effect of the World War upon the problems of American democracy. Status of the Constitution. 1 30. Harding on the issues of the Twentieth Century From the standpoint of the United States, the World War was an abnormal phenomenon which exaggerated and distorted those issues which are purely American. But though the cessation of hostilities on November 11, 1918, purged American life of many issues which had been purely abnormal and transitory, the World War exerted upon our national life many influences which are proving to be both profound and permanent. Just as the American Revolution deeply affected our early national life, and just as the effects of the Civil War can still be traced in current issues, so the World War modified our attitude, not only toward world affairs, but toward purely domestic concerns as well. In January, 1920, this changed viewpoint was the subject of an address by Warren G. Harding, then United States Senator from Ohio. The following are extracts from his address: I have come to think it fundamentally and patriotically American to say there is no room anywhere in these United States for any one who preaches destruction of the government which is within the Constitution. This patriotically, if not divinely, inspired fundamental law fits every real American citizen, and the man who cannot fit himself to it is not fit for American citizenship, nor deserving of our hospitality. It fully covers all classes and masses in its guaran 1 From Warren G. Harding, Address delivered before the Ohio Society of New York, New York City, January 10, 1920. teed liberties, and any class or mass that opposed the Constitution is against the country and the flag. The What needs. What humanity most needs just now is understanding. present-day situation is more acute because we are in the ferment humanity that came of war and war's aftermath. Ours was a fevered world, sometimes flighty, as we used to say in the village, to suggest fever's fancies or delirium. But we are slow getting normal again, and the world needs sanity as it seldom needed it before. . . Normal thinking will help more. And normal living will have the effect of a magician's wand, paradoxical as the statement seems. The world does deeply need to get normal, and liberal doses of mental science freely mixed with resolution will help mightily. I do not mean the old order will be restored. It will never come again. Back to normal. and un changeable. But there is a sane normalcy due under the new conditions, to be Certain reached in deliberation and understanding. And all men must under- principles which are stand and join in reaching it. Certain fundamentals are unchange- fundamental able and everlasting. Life without toil never was and never can be. Ease and competence are not to be seized in frenzied envy; they are the reward of thrift and industry and denial. There can be no excellence without great labor. There is no reward except as it is merited. Lowered cost of living and increased cost of production are an economic fraud. Capital makes possible while labor produces, and neither ever achieved without the other, and both of them together never wrought a success without genius and management. and indus try. It would halt the great procession to time our steps with the Thrift, indolent, the lazy, the incapable, or the sullenly envious. Nor plain living, can we risk the course sometimes suggested by excessive wealth and its ofttimes insolent assumption of power. But we can practice thrift and industry, we can live simply and commend righteous achievement, we can make honest success an inspiration to succeed, and we can march hopefully on to the chorus of liberty, opportunity, and justice. . . ... responsive There can be no liberty without security, and there can be no The security without the supremacy of law and the majesty of just gov- Constitution ernment. In the gleaming Americanism of the Constitution there to public is neither fear nor favor, but there are equal rights to all, equal opinion. opportunities beckoning to every man, and justice untrammeled. . . . |