WHEN four years ago we met to inaugurate a President, the Republic,
single-minded in anxiety, stood in spirit here. We dedicated ourselves
to the fulfillment of a vision - to speed the time when there would be
for all the people that security and peace essential to the pursuit of
happiness. We of the Republic pledged ourselves to drive from the
temple of our ancient faith those who had profaned it; to end by
action, tireless and unafraid, the stagnation and despair of that day.
We did those first things first.

Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we
recognized a deeper need - the need to find through government the
instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the
ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at
their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and
bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those
moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make
science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do
this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic
forces and blindly selfish men.

We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has
innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered
inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not
admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just
as, after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to
master epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our
common welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes
of disaster.