,
fast disappearing without plan or prospect of renewal, unregarded waste
heaps at every mine. We have studied as perhaps no other nation has
the most effective means of production, but we have not studied cost or
economy as we should either as organizers of industry, as statesmen, or
as individuals.

Nor have we studied and perfected the means by which government may
be put at the service of humanity, in safeguarding the health of the
Nation, the health of its men and its women and its children, as well as
their rights in the struggle for existence. This is no sentimental duty.
The firm basis of government is justice, not pity. These are matters of
justice. There can be no equality or opportunity, the first essential
of justice in the body politic, if men and women and children be not
shielded in their lives, their very vitality, from the consequences of
great industrial and social processes which they can not alter, control,
or singly cope with. Society must see to it that it does not itself
crush or weaken or damage its own constituent parts. The first duty of
law is to keep sound the society it serves. Sanitary laws, pure food
laws, and laws determining conditions of labor which individuals are
powerless to determine for themselves are intimate parts of the very
business of justice and legal efficiency.

These are some of the things we ought to do, and not leave the
others undone, the old-fashioned, never-to-be-neglected, fundamental
safeguarding of property and of individual right. This is the high
enterprise of the new day: To lift everything that concerns our life
as a Nation to the light that shines from the hearthfire of every man's
conscience and vision of the right. It is inconceivable that we should
do this as partisans; it is inconceivable we should do it in ignorance
of the facts as they are or in blind haste. We shall restore, not
destroy. We shall deal with our economic system as it is and as it may
be modified, not as it might be if we had a clean sheet of paper to
write upon; and step by step we shall make it what it should be, in
the spirit of those who question their own wisdom and seek counsel and
knowledge, not shallow self-satisfaction or the excitement of excursions
whither they can not tell. Justice, and only justice, shall always be
our motto.

And yet it will be no cool process of mere science. The Nation has been
deeply stirred, stirred by a solemn passion, stirred by the knowledge
of wro