but in the everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical
intelligence, of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all
the power of devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who
founded this Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the
men who preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.


***

William Howard Taft
Inaugural Address
Thursday, March 4, 1909

My Fellow-Citizens:

ANYONE who has taken the oath I have just taken must feel a heavy
weight of responsibility. If not, he has no conception of the powers
and duties of the office upon which he is about to enter, or he is
lacking in a proper sense of the obligation which the oath imposes.

The office of an inaugural address is to give a summary outline of the
main policies of the new administration, so far as they can be
anticipated. I have had the honor to be one of the advisers of my
distinguished predecessor, and, as such, to hold up his hands in the
reforms he has initiated. I should be untrue to myself, to my promises,
and to the declarations of the party platform upon which I was elected
to office, if I did not make the maintenance and enforcement of those
reforms a most important feature of my administration. They were
directed to the suppression of the lawlessness and abuses of power of
the great combinations of capital invested in railroads and in