r good will by acting toward
them in a spirit of just and generous recognition of all their rights.
But justice and generosity in a nation, as in an individual, count most
when shown not by the weak but by the strong. While ever careful to
refrain from wrongdoing others, we must be no less insistent that we are
not wronged ourselves. We wish peace, but we wish the peace of justice,
the peace of righteousness. We wish it because we think it is right and
not because we are afraid. No weak nation that acts manfully and justly
should ever have cause to fear us, and no strong power should ever be
able to single us out as a subject for insolent aggression.

Our relations with the other powers of the world are important; but
still more important are our relations among ourselves. Such growth in
wealth, in population, and in power as this nation has seen during the
century and a quarter of its national life is inevitably accompanied by
a like growth in the problems which are ever before every nation that
rises to greatness. Power invariably means both responsibility and
danger. Our forefathers faced certain perils which we have outgrown. We
now face other perils, the very existence of which it was impossible
that they should foresee. Modern life is both complex and intense, and
the tremendous changes wrought by the extraordinary industrial
development of the last half century are felt in every fiber of our
social and political being. Never before have men tried so vast and
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
u