Speech Transcript:

The four years which have elapsed since last I stood in this place
have been crowded with counsel and action of the most vital interest
and consequence. Perhaps no equal period in 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. It speaks for itself and will be of
increasing influence as the years go by. 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 to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, 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, but which, despite our wish to keep free of
them, have drawn us more and more irresistibly into their own current
and influence.

It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of
the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere with a passion and
an apprehension they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve
calm counsel while the thought of our own people swayed this way and
that under their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan
people. We are of the blood of all the nations that are at war. The
currents of our thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run
quick at all seasons back and forth between us and them. 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.

And yet all the while we have been conscious that we were not part of
it. In that consciousness, despite many divisions, we have drawn
closer together. We have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we
have not wished to wrong or injure in return; have retained
throughout the consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent
upon an interest that transcended the immediate issues of the war
itself.

As some of the injuries done us have become intolerable we have still
been clear that we wished nothing for ourselves that we were not ready
to demand for all mankind--fair dealing, justice, the freedom to live
and to be at ease against organized wrong.

It is in this spirit and with this thought that we have grown more
and more aware, more and more certain that the part we wished to play
was the part of those who mean to vindicate and fortify peace. We have
been obliged to arm ourselves to make good our claim to a certain
minimum of right and of freedom of action. We stand firm in armed
neutrality since it seems that in no other way we can demonstrate
what it is we insist upon and cannot forget. We may even be drawn on,
by circumstances, not by our own purpose or desire, to a more active
assertion of our rights as we see them and a more immediate
association with the great struggle itself. But nothing will alter
our thought or our purpose. They are too clear to be obscured. They
are too deeply rooted in the principles of our national life to be
altered. We desire neither conquest nor advantage. We wish nothing
that can be had only at the cost of another people. We always
professed unselfish purpose and we covet the opportunity to prove our
professions are sincere.

There are many things still to be done at home, to clarify our own
politics and add new vitality to the industrial processes of our own
life, and we shall do them as time and opportunity serve, but we
realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done
with the whole world for stage and in cooperation with the wide and
universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for
those things.

We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the thirty months
of vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us
citizens of the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes
as a nation are involved whether we would have it so or not.

And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall be
the more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we
have been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a
single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were
the principles of a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the
things we shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:

That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and
in the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible
for their maintenance; that the essential principle of peace is the
actual equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege; that
peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of power;
that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common
thought, purpose or power of the family of nations; that the seas
should be equally free and safe for the use of all peoples, under
rules set up by common agreement and consent, and that, so far as
practicable, they should be accessible to all upon equal terms; that
national armaments shall be limited to the necessities of national
order and domestic safety; that the community of interest and of
power upon which peace must henceforth depend imposes upon each
nation the duty of seeing to it that all influences proceeding from
its own citizens meant to encourage or assist revolution in other
states should be sternly and effectually suppressed and prevented.

I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow countrymen; they
are your own part and parcel of your own thinking and your own
motives in affairs. They spring up native amongst us. Upon this as a
platform of purpose and of action we can stand together. And it is
imperative that we should stand together. We are being forged into a
new unity amidst the 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.

I stand here and have taken the high and solemn oath to which you
have been audience because the people of the United States have
chosen me for this august delegation of power and have by their
gracious judgment named me their leader in affairs.

I know now what the task means. I realize to the full the
responsibility which it involves. I pray God I may be given the
wisdom and the prudence to do my duty in the true spirit of this
great people. I am their servant and can succeed only as they sustain
and guide me by their confidence and their counsel. The thing I shall
count upon, the thing without which neither counsel nor action will
avail, is the unity of America--an America united in feeling, in
purpose and in its vision of duty, of opportunity and of service.

We are to beware of all men who would turn the tasks and the
necessities of the nation to their own private profit or use them for
the building up of private power.

United alike in the conception of our duty and in the high resolve to
perform it in the face of all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the
great task to which we must now set our hand. For myself I beg your
tolerance, your countenance and your united aid.

The shadows that now lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled,
and we shall walk with the light all about us if we be but true to
ourselves--to ourselves as we have wished to be known in the counsels
of the world and in the thought of all those who love liberty and
justice and the right exalted.