do good. The essential democracy of our Nation and the
safety of our people depend not upon the absence of power, but upon
lodging it with those whom the people can change or continue at
stated intervals through an honest and free system of elections. The
Constitution of 1787 did not make our democracy impotent.

In fact, in these last four years, we have made the exercise of all
power more democratic; for we have begun to bring private autocratic
powers into their proper subordination to the public's government. The
legend that they were invincible--above and beyond the processes of a
democracy--has been shattered. They have been challenged and beaten.

Our progress out of the depression is obvious. But that is not all that
you and I mean by the new order of things. Our pledge was not merely to
do a patchwork job with secondhand materials. By using the new materials
of social justice we have undertaken to erect on the old foundations a
more enduring structure for the better use of future generations.

In that purpose we have been helped by achievements of mind and spirit.
Old truths have been relearned; untruths have been unlearned. We have
always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals; we know now
that it is bad economics. Out of the collapse of a prosperity whose
builders boasted their practicality has come the conviction that in the
long run economic morality pays. We are beginning to wipe out the
line that divides the practical from the ideal; and in so doing we are
fashioning an instrument of unimagined power for the establishment of a
morally better world.

This new understanding undermines the old admiration of worldly success
as such. We are beginning to abandon our tolerance of the abuse of power
by those who betray for profit the elementary decencies of life.

In this process evil things formerly accepted will not be so easily
condoned. Hard-headedness will not so easily excuse hardheartedness. We
are moving toward an era of good feeling. But we realize that there can
be no era of good feeling save among men of good will.

For these reasons I am justified in believing that the greatest change
we have witnessed has been the change in the moral climate of America.

Among men of good will, science and democracy together offer an
ever-richer life and ever-larger satisfaction to the individual. With
this change in our moral climate and our rediscovered ability to improve
our economic order, we hav