Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
Our program of legislation with regard to the regulation of business is now
virtually complete. It has been put forth, as we intended, as a whole, and
leaves no conjecture as to what is to follow. The road at last lies clear
and firm before business. It is a road which it can travel without fear or
embarrassment. It is the road to ungrudged, unclouded success. In it every
honest man, every man who believes that the public interest is part of his
own interest, may walk with perfect confidence.
Moreover, our thoughts are now more of the future than of the past. While
we have worked at our tasks of peace the circumstances of the whole age
have been altered by war. What we have done for our own land and our own
people we did with the best that was in us, whether of character or of
intelligence, with sober enthusiasm and a confidence in the principles upon
which we were acting which sustained us at every step of the difficult
undertaking; but it is done. It has passed from our hands. It is now an
established part of the legislation of the country. Its usefulness, its
effects will disclose themselves in experience. What chiefly strikes us
now, as we look about us during these closing days of a year which will be
forever memorable in the history of the world, is that we face new tasks,
have been facing them these six months, must face them in the months to
come,-face them without partisan feeling, like men who have forgotten
everything but a common duty and the fact that we are representatives of a
great people whose thought is not of us but of what America owes to herself
and to all mankind in such circumstances as these upon which we look amazed
and anxious.
War has interrupted the means of trade not only but also the processes of
production. In Europe it is destroying men and resources wholesale and upon
a scale unprecedented and appalling, There is reason to fear that the time
is near, if it be not already at hand, when several of the countries of
Europe will find it difficult to do for their people what they have
hitherto been always easily able to do,--many essential and fundamental
things. At any rate, they will need our help and our manifold services as
they have never needed them before; and we should be ready, more fit and
ready than we have ever been.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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