President Wilsons Addresses | Page 6

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 achievements, 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 of opportunity, the first essential