HISTORIC SPEECHES
WOODROW WILSON
First Inaugural
Address
March 4, 1913
There has been a change of government. It began two years
ago, when the House of Representatives became Democratic
by a decisive majority. It has now been completed. The
Senate about to assemble will also be Democratic. The offices
of President and Vice President have been put into the
hands of Democrats. What does the change mean? That is
the question that is uppermost in our minds to-day. That
is the question I am going to try to answer, in order,
if I may, to interpret the occasion.
It means much more than the mere success of a party. The
success of a party means little except when the Nation
is using that party for a large and definite purpose. No
one can mistake the purpose for which the Nation now seeks
to use the Democratic Party. It seeks to use it to interpret
a change in its own plans and point of view. Some old things
with which we had grown familiar, and which had begun to
creep into the very habit of our thought and of our lives,
have altered their aspect as we have latterly looked critically
upon them, with fresh, awakened eyes; have dropped their
disguises and shown themselves alien and sinister. Some
new things, as we look frankly upon them, willing to comprehend
their real character, have come to assume the aspect of
thing long believed in and familiar, stuff of our own convictions.
We have been refreshed by a new insight into our own life.
We see that in many things that life is very great. It
is incomparably great in its material aspects, in its body
of wealth, in the diversity and sweep of its energy, in
the industries which have been conceived and built up by
the genius of individual men and the limitless enterprise
of groups of men. It is great, also, very great, in its
moral force. No where else in the world have noble men
and women exhibited in more striking forms the beauty and
the energy of sympathy and helpfulness and counsel in their
efforts to rectify wrong, alleviate suffering, and set
the weak in the way of strength and hope. We have built
up, moreover, a great system of government, which has stood
through a long age as in many respects a model for those
who seek to set liberty upon foundations that will endure
against fortuitous change, against storm and accident.
Our life contains every great thing, and contains it in
rich abundance.
But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold
has been corroded. With riches has come inexcusable waste.
We have squandered a great part of what we might have used,
and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of
nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have
been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully
prodigal as well as admirably efficient. We have been proud
of our industrial achievement, but we have not hitherto
stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the
cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken,
the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and
women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden
of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through. The
groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears,
the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out
of the mines and factories and; out of every home where
the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat. With the
great Government went many deep secret things which we
too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid,
fearless eyes. The great Government we loved has too often
been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and
those who used it had forgotten the people.
At last a vision has
been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We see the
bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the
sound and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs.
Our duty is to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to
correct the evil without impairing the good, to purify
and humanize every process of our common life without
weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has been something
crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to succeed
and be great. Our thought has been "Let
every man look out for himself, let every generation look
out for itself," while we reared giant machinery which
made it impossible that any but those who stood at the
levers of control should have a chance to look out for
themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. We remembered
well enough that we had set up a policy which was meant
to serve the humblest as well as the most powerful, with
an eye single to the standards of justice and fair play,
and remembered it with pride. But we were very heedless
and in a hurry to be great. We have come now to the sober
second thought. The scales of heedlessness have fallen
from our eyes. We have made up our minds to square every
process of our national life again with the standards we
so proudly set up at the beginning and have always carried
at our hearts. Our work is a work of restoration.
We have itemized with some degree of particularity the
things that ought to be altered and here are some of the
chief items: A tariff which cuts us off from our proper
part in the commerce of the world, violates the just principles
of taxation, and makes the Government a facile instrument
in the hands of private interests; a banking and currency
system based upon the necessity of the Government to sell
its bonds fifty years ago and perfectly adapted to concentrating
cash and restricting credits; an industrial system which,
take it on all its sides, financial as well as administrative,
holds capital in leading strings, restricts the liberties
and limits the opportunities of labor, and exploits without
renewing or conserving the natural resources of the country;
a body of agricultural activities never yet given the efficiency
of great business undertakings or served as it should be
through the instrumentality of science taken directly to
the farm, or afforded the facilities of credit best suited
to its practical needs; watercourses undeveloped, waste
places unreclaimed, forests untended, fast disappearing
without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste heaps
at every mine. We have studied as perhaps no other nation
has the most effective means of production, but we have
not studied cost or economy as we should either as organizers
of industry, as statesmen, or as individuals.
Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government
may be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding
the health of the Nation, the health of its men and its
women and its children, as well as their rights in the
struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty. The
firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are
matters of justice. There can be no equality or opportunity,
the first essential of justice in the body politic, if
men and women and children be not shielded in their lives,
their very vitality, from the consequences of great industrial
and social processes which they can not alter, control,
or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does
not itself crush or weaken or damage its own constituent
parts. The first duty of law is to keep sound the society
it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food laws, and laws determining
conditions of labor which individuals are powerless to
determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very
business of justice and legal efficiency.
These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave
the others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected,
fundamental safe guarding of property and of individual
right. This is the high enterprise of the new day: To lift
everything that concerns our life as a Nation to the light
that shines from the hearthfire of every man's conscience
and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should
do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do
it in ignorance of the facts as they are or in blind haste.
We shall restore, not destroy. We shall deal with our economic
system as it is and as it may be modified, not as it might
be if we had a clean sheet of paper to write upon; and
step by step we shall make it what it should be, in the
spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek
counsel and knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or
the excitement of excursions whither they can not tell.
Justice, and only justice, shall always be our motto.
And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The
Nation has been deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion,
stirred by the knowledge of wrong, of ideals lost, of government
too often debauched and made an instrument of evil. The
feelings with which we face this net age of right and opportunity
sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of God's
own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled an
the judge and the brother are one. We know our task to
be no mere task of politics but a task which shall search
us through and through, whether we be able to understand
our time and the need of our people, whether we be indeed
their spokesmen and interpreters, whether we have the pure
heart to comprehend and the rectified will to choose our
high course of act ion.
This is not a day of triumph; it is a day of dedication.
Here muster, not, the forces of party, but the forces of
humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us; men's lives hang in
the balance; men's hopes call upon us to say what we will
do. Who shall live up to the great trust? Who dares fail
to try? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking
men, to my side. God helping me, I will not fail them,
if they will but counsel and sustain me!
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