When we have
freed our government, when we have restored freedom of enterprise, when we
have broken up the partnerships between money and power which now block us
at every turn, then we shall see our way to accomplish all the handsome
things which platforms promise in vain if they do not start at the point
where stand the gates of liberty.

I am not afraid of the American people getting up and doing something. I
am only afraid they will not; and when I hear a popular vote spoken of as
mob government, I feel like telling the man who dares so to speak that he
has no right to call himself an American. You cannot make a reckless,
passionate force out of a body of sober people earning their living in a
free country. Just picture to yourselves the voting population of this
great land, from the sea to the far borders in the mountains, going
calmly, man by man, to the polls, expressing its judgment about public
affairs: is that your image of "a mob?"

What is a mob? A mob is a body of men in hot contact with one another,
moved by ungovernable passion to do a hasty thing that they will regret
the next day. Do you see anything resembling a mob in that voting
population of the countryside, men tramping over the mountains, men going
to the general store up in the village, men moving in little talking
groups to the corner grocery to cast their ballots,--is that your notion
of a mob? Or is that your picture of a free, self-governing people? I am
not afraid of the judgments so expressed, if you give men time to think,
if you give them a clear conception of the things they are to vote for;
because the deepest conviction and passion of my heart is that the common
people, by which I mean all of us, are to be absolutely trusted.

So, at this opening of a new age, in this its day of unrest and
discontent, it is our part to clear the air, to bring about common
counsel; to set up the parliament of the people; to demonstrate that we
are fighting no man, that we are trying to bring all men to understand
one another; that we are not the friends of any class against any other
class, but that our duty is to make classes understand one another. Our
part is to lift so high the incomparable standards of the common interest
and the common justice that all men with vision, all men with hope, all
men with the convictions of America in their hearts, will crowd to that
standard and a new day of achievement may come for the liberty which we
love.