on and despair of that day. We did
those first things first.

Our covenant with ourselves did not stop there. Instinctively we
recognized a deeper need--the need to find through government the
instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the
ever-rising problems of a complex civilization. Repeated attempts at
their solution without the aid of government had left us baffled and
bewildered. For, without that aid, we had been unable to create those
moral controls over the services of science which are necessary to make
science a useful servant instead of a ruthless master of mankind. To do
this we knew that we must find practical controls over blind economic
forces and blindly selfish men.

We of the Republic sensed the truth that democratic government has
innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered
inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable. We would not
admit that we could not find a way to master economic epidemics just as,
after centuries of fatalistic suffering, we had found a way to master
epidemics of disease. We refused to leave the problems of our common
welfare to be solved by the winds of chance and the hurricanes of
disaster.

In this we Americans were discovering no wholly new truth; we were
writing a new chapter in our book of self-government.

This year marks the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the
Constitutional Convention which made us a nation. At that Convention
our forefathers found the way out of the chaos which followed the
Revolutionary War; they created a strong government with powers of
united action sufficient then and now to solve problems utterly beyond
individual or local solution. A century and a half ago they established
the Federal Government in order to promote the general welfare and
secure the blessings of liberty to the American people.

Today we invoke those same powers of government to achieve the same
objectives.

Four years of new experience have not belied our historic instinct. They
hold out the clear hope that government within communities, government
within the separate States, and government of the United States can do
the things the times require, without yielding its democracy. Our tasks
in the last four years did not force democracy to take a holiday.

Nearly all of us recognize that as intricacies of human relationships
increase, so power to govern them also must increase--power to stop
evil; power to