President Wilsons Addresses | Page 7

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 cannot 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
safeguarding 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
cannot 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 new age of
right and opportunity sweep across our heartstrings like some air out of
God's own presence, where justice and mercy are reconciled and 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 action.
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!

FIRST ADDRESS TO CONGRESS
[Delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress, at the
beginning of the first session of the Sixty-third Congress, April 8,
1913.]
MR. SPEAKER, MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN OF THE
CONGRESS:
I am very glad indeed to have this opportunity to address the two
Houses directly and to verify for myself the impression that the
President of the United States is a person, not a mere department of the
Government hailing Congress from some isolated island of jealous
power, sending messages, not speaking naturally and with his own
voice--that he is a human being trying to coöperate with other human
beings in a common service. After this pleasant experience I shall feel
quite normal in all our dealings with one another.[B]
I have called the Congress together in extraordinary session because a
duty was laid upon the party now in power at the recent elections which
it ought to perform promptly, in order that the burden carried by the
people under existing law may be lightened as soon as possible and in
order, also, that the business interests of the country may not be kept
too long in suspense as to what the fiscal changes are to be to which
they will be required to adjust themselves. It is clear to the whole
country that the tariff duties must be altered. They must be changed to
meet the radical alteration in the conditions of our economic life which
the country has witnessed within the last generation. While the whole
face and method of our industrial and commercial life were being
changed beyond recognition the tariff schedules have remained what
they were before the change began, or have moved in the direction they

were given when no