interests and circumstances. Not only to establish but to alter is the
fundamental principle of self-government.

We are just as much under compulsion to study the particular
circumstances of our own day as the gentlemen were who sat in this hall
and set us precedents, not of what to do but of how to do it. Liberty
inheres in the circumstances of the day. Human happiness consists in the
life which human beings are leading at the time that they live. I can
feed my memory as happily upon the circumstances of the revolutionary
and constitutional period as you can, but I cannot feed all my purposes
with them in Washington now. Every day problems arise which wear some
new phase and aspect, and I must fall back, if I would serve my
conscience, upon those things which are fundamental rather than upon
those things which are superficial, and ask myself this question, How
are you going to assist in some small part to give the American people
and, by example, the peoples of the world more liberty, more happiness,
more substantial prosperity; and how are you going to make that
prosperity a common heritage instead of a selfish possession? I came
here to-day partly in order to feed my own spirit. I did not come in
compliment. When I was asked to come I knew immediately upon the
utterance of the invitation that I had to come, that to be absent would
be as if I refused to drink once more at the original fountains of
inspiration for our own Government.

The men of the day which we now celebrate had a very great advantage
over us, ladies and gentlemen, in this one particular: Life was simple
in America then. All men shared the same circumstances in almost equal
degree. We think of Washington, for example, as an aristocrat, as a man
separated by training, separated by family and neighborhood tradition,
from the ordinary people of the rank and file of the country. Have you
forgotten the personal history of George Washington? Do you not know
that he struggled as poor boys now struggle for a meager and imperfect
education; that he worked at his surveyor's tasks in the lonely forests;
that he knew all the roughness, all the hardships, all the adventure,
all the variety of the common life of that day; and that if he stood a
little stiffly in this place, if he looked a little aloof, it was
because life had dealt hardly with him? All his sinews had been
stiffened by the rough work of making America. He was a man of the
people, whose touch had b