¶What we must do as a Nation is to stand for the immutable principles of decency and virtue, regarding vice with abhorrence. If we make any artificial divisions we have done irreparable injury to the people.[2] ¶Let us be steadfast for the right; but let us err on the side of generosity rather than on the side of vindictiveness toward those who differ from us as to the method of attaining the right. Let us never forget our duty to help in uplifting the lowly, to shield from wrong the humble; and let us likewise act in a spirit of the broadest and frankest generosity toward all our brothers, all our fellow-countrymen; in a spirit proceeding not from weakness but from strength, a spirit which takes no more account of locality than it does of class or creed; a spirit which is resolutely bent on seeing that the Union which Washington founded and which Lincoln saved from destruction shall grow nobler and greater throughout the ages. ¶I believe in this country with all my heart and soul. I believe that our people will in the end rise level to every need, will in the end triumph over every difficulty that rises before them. I could not have such confident faith in the destiny of this mighty people if I had it merely as regards one portion of that people. Throughout our land things on the whole have grown better and not worse, and this is as true of one part of the country as it is of another. ¶For weal or woe we are knit together and we shall go up or go down together; and I believe that we shall go up and not down, that we shall go forward instead of halting and falling back, because I have an abiding faith in the generosity, the courage, the resolution, and the common-sense of all my countrymen. ¶Fundamentally our people are the same throughout this land; the same in qualities of heart and brain and hand which have made this Republic what it is in the great to-day; which will make it what it is to be in the infinitely greater to-morrow. All of us alike, Northerners and Southerners, Easterners and Westerners, can best prove our fealty to the Nation’s past by the way in which we do the Nation’s work in the present; for only thus can we be sure that our children’s children shall inherit Abe Lincoln’s single-hearted devotion to the great unchanging creed that “righteousness exalteth a nation.”[3] A Square Deal and The Dignity of Labor