State of the Union AddressesHarding, Warren G. (Warren Gamaliel)
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State of the Union Addresses
Harding, Warren G. (Warren Gamaliel)
Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
No one contemplates commercial aloofness nor any other aloofness
contradictory to the best American traditions or loftiest human purposes.
Our fortunate capacity for comparative self-containment affords the firm
foundation on which to build for our own security, and a like foundation on
which to build for a future of influence and importance in world commerce.
Our trade expansion must come of capacity and of policies of righteousness
and reasonableness in till our commercial relations.
Let no one assume that our provision for maintained good fortune at home,
and our unwillingness to assume the correction of all the ills of the
world, means a reluctance to cooperate with other peoples or to assume
every just obligation to promote human advancement anywhere in the world.
War made its a creditor Nation. We did not seek an excess possession of the
world's gold, and we have neither desire to profit Unduly by its possession
nor permanently retain it. We do not seek to become an international
dictator because of its power.
The voice of the United States has a respectful hearing in international
councils, because we have convinced the world that we have no selfish ends
to serve, no old grievances to avenge, no territorial or other greed to
satisfy. But the voice being heard is that of good counsel, not of
dictation. It is the voice of sympathy and fraternity and helpfulness,
seeking to assist but not assume for the United States burdens which
nations must bear for themselves. We would rejoice to help rehabilitate
currency systems and facilitate all commerce which does not drag us to the
very levels of those we seek to lift up.
While I have everlasting faith in our Republic, it would be folly, indeed,
to blind ourselves to our problems at home. Abusing the hospitality of our
shores are the advocates of revolution, finding their deluded followers
among those who take on the habiliments of an American without knowing an
American soul. There is the recrudescence of hyphenated Americanism which
we thought to have been stamped out when we committed the Nation, life and
soul, to the World War.
There is a call to make the alien respect our institutions while he
accepts our hospitality. There is need to magnify the American viewpoint to
the alien who seeks a citizenship among us. There is need to magnify the
national viewpoint to Americans throughout the land. More there is a demand
for every living being in the United States to respect and abide by the
laws of the Republic. Let men who are rending the moral fiber of the
Republic through easy contempt for the prohibition law, because they think
it restricts their personal liberty, remember that they set the example and
breed a contempt for law which will ultimately destroy the Republic.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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