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The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People by Woodrow Wilson
page 48 of 167 (28%)
had begun to sink for fear he never would be consulted again. Therefore,
we have got to organize a government whose sympathies will be open to the
whole body of the people of the United States, a government which will
consult as large a proportion of the people of the United States as
possible before it acts. Because the great problem of government is to
know what the average man is experiencing and is thinking about. Most of
us are average men; very few of us rise, except by fortunate accident,
above the general level of the community about us; and therefore the man
who thinks common thoughts, the man who has had common experiences, is
almost always the man who interprets America aright. Isn't that the reason
that we are proud of such stories as the story of Abraham Lincoln,--a man
who rose out of the ranks and interpreted America better than any man had
interpreted it who had risen out of the privileged classes or the educated
classes of America?

The hope of the United States in the present and in the future is the same
that it has always been: it is the hope and confidence that out of unknown
homes will come men who will constitute themselves the masters of industry
and of politics. The average hopefulness, the average welfare, the average
enterprise, the average initiative, of the United States are the only
things that make it rich. We are not rich because a few gentlemen direct
our industry; we are rich because of our own intelligence and our own
industry. America does not consist of men who get their names into the
newspapers; America does not consist politically of the men who set
themselves up to be political leaders; she does not consist of the men who
do most of her talking,--they are important only so far as they speak for
that great voiceless multitude of men who constitute the great body and
the saving force of the nation. Nobody who cannot speak the common
thought, who does not move by the common impulse, is the man to speak for
America, or for any of her future purposes. Only he is fit to speak who
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