Democratic Principles
Performed by Woodrow Wilson
Recorded September 24, 1912
We stand in the presence of
an awakened nation impatient of partisan make-believe.
The nation has awakened to a sense of neglected ideals
and neglected duties to a consciousness that the rank
and file of her people find life very hard to sustain.
That her young men find opportunity embarrassed and
that her older men find business difficult to renew
and maintain because of circumstances of privilege
and private advantage which have interlaced their
subtle threads throughout almost every part of the
framework of our present law. She has awakened to
the knowledge that she has lost certain cherished
liberties and wasted priceless resources which she
had solemnly undertaken to hold in trust for posterity
and for all mankind, and to the conviction that she
stands confronted with an occasion for constructive
statesmanship such as has not arisen since the great
days in which our government was set up. There never
was a time when impatience and suspicion were more
keenly aroused by private powers selfishly employed,
when jealously of everything concealed or touched
with any purpose not linked with the general good
or inconsistent with it, more sharply or immediately
displayed itself. Nor is the country ever more susceptible
to unselfish appeals or to the high arguments of sincere
justice; these are the unmistakable symptoms of an
awakening. There is the more need for wise counsel
because the people are so ready to heed counsel, if
it be given honestly and in their interests. It is
in the broad light of this new day that we stand face
to face with great questions of right and of justice,
questions of national development, of the development
of character and of the standards of action, no less
than of a better business system--more free, more
equitable, more open to ordinary men, practicable
to live under, tolerable to work under--or a better
fiscal system whose taxes shall not come out of the
pockets of the many because of the pockets of the
few, and within whose intricacies special privilege
may not so easily find cover. What is there to do?
There are two great things to do. One is to set up
the rule of justice and of rights in such matters
as the tariff, the correction of the trusts and the
prevention of monopoly, the adaptation of our banking
and currency laws to the very beauties of which our
people must put them, the treatment of those who do
the daily labor in our factories and mines and throughout
all of our great industrial and commercial undertakings
as they should be treated in a civilized politic,
and the political life of the people of the Philippines
for whom we hold governmental power in trust for their
service, not our own. The other thing, the additional
duty, is the great task of protecting our people and
our resources, and of keeping open to the whole people
the doors of opportunity to which they must, generation
by generation, pass if they are to make conquests
of their fortunes in health, in freedom, in peace
and in contentment. In the performance of this second
great duty, we are face to face with questions of
conservation and of development, questions of forests
and water powers, and mines and waterways, and the
building of an adequate merchant marine, of the opening
of every highway and facility, and the setting up
of every safeguard needed by a great industrious expanding
nation.