and these problems faced, if our duty is to be well
done, remains essentially unchanged. We know that self-government is
difficult. We know that no people needs such high traits of character as
that people which seeks to govern its affairs aright through the freely
expressed will of the freemen who compose it. But we have faith that
we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past.
They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy.
We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave
this heritage unwasted and enlarged to our children and our children's
children. To do so we must show, not merely in great crises, but in the
everyday affairs of life, the qualities of practical intelligence,
of courage, of hardihood, and endurance, and above all the power of
devotion to a lofty ideal, which made great the men who founded this
Republic in the days of Washington, which made great the men who
preserved this Republic in the days of Abraham Lincoln.

*****

William Howard Taft Inaugural Address Thursday, March 4, 1909

My Fellow-Citizens:

ANYONE who has taken the oath I have just taken must feel a heavy weight
of responsibility. If not, he has no conception of the powers and duties
of the office upon which he is about to enter, or he is lacking in a
proper sense of the obligation which the oath imposes.

The office of an inaugural address is to give a summary outline of
the main policies of the new administration, so far as they can be
anticipated. I have had the honor to be one of the advisers of my
distinguished predecessor, and, as such, to hold up his hands in the
reforms he has initiated. I should be untrue to myself, to my promises,
and to the declarations of the party platform upon which I was elected
to office, if I did not make the maintenance and enforcement of those
reforms a most important feature of my administration. They were
directed to the suppression of the lawlessness and abuses of power
of the great combinations of capital invested in railroads and in
industrial enterprises carrying on interstate commerce. The steps which
my predecessor took and the legislation passed on his recommendation
have accomplished much, have caused a general halt in the vicious
policies which created popular alarm, and have brought about in the
business affected a much higher regard for existing law.

To render the reforms lasting, however, and to secure a