formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a
continent under the forms of a Democratic republic. The conditions
which have told for our marvelous material well-being, which have
developed to a very high degree our energy, self-reliance, and
individual initiative, have also brought the care and anxiety
inseparable from the accumulation of great wealth in industrial
centers. Upon the success of our experiment much depends, not only as
regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we
fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock
to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to
ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet
unborn. There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but
there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding
from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us nor fearing to
approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to
solve them aright.

Yet, after all, though the problems are new, though the tasks set
before us differ from the tasks set before our fathers who founded and
preserved this Republic, the spirit in which these tasks must be
undertaken and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well done,
remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is
difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character
as that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the
freely expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith
that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty
past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now
enjoy. We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able
to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our
children's children. To do so we must show, not merely in great crises,