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US Presidential Inaugural Addresses by Various
page 272 of 440 (61%)
been crowded with counsel and action of the most vital interest and
consequence. Perhaps no equal period in our history has been so
fruitful of important reforms in our economic and industrial life or so
full of significant changes in the spirit and purpose of our political
action. We have sought very thoughtfully to set our house in order,
correct the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial life, liberate
and quicken the processes of our national genius and energy, and lift
our politics to a broader view of the people's essential interests.

It is a record of singular variety and singular distinction. But I
shall not attempt to review it. It speaks for itself and will be of
increasing influence as the years go by. This is not the time for
retrospect. It is time rather to speak our thoughts and purposes
concerning the present and the immediate future.

Although we have centered counsel and action with such unusual
concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic
legislation to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, other
matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention -
matters lying outside our own life as a nation and over which we had no
control, but which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn
us more and more irresistibly into their own current and influence.

It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of
the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere with a passion and an
apprehension they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve calm
counsel while the thought of our own people swayed this way and that
under their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We
are of the blood of all the nations that are at war. The currents of
our thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run quick at all
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