|
alleviation of the very unsafe, unjust, and burdensome conditions which now
surround the employment of sailors and render it extremely difficult to
obtain the services of spirited and competent men such as every ship needs
if it is to be safely handled and brought to port.
May I not express the very real pleas-are I have experienced in
co-operating with this Congress and sharing with it the labors of common
service to which it has devoted itself so unreservedly during the past
seven months of uncomplaining concentration upon the business of
legislation? Surely it is a proper and pertinent part of my report on "the
state of the Union" to express my admiration for the diligence, the good
temper, and the full comprehension of public duty which has already been
manifested by both the Houses; and I hope that it may not be deemed an
impertinent intrusion of myself into the picture if I say with how much and
how constant satisfaction I have availed myself of the privilege of putting
my time and energy at their disposal alike in counsel and in action.
***
State of the Union Address
Woodrow Wilson
December 8, 1914
GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS:
The session upon which you are now entering will be the closing session of
the Sixty-third Congress, a Congress, I venture to say, which will long be
remembered for the great body of thoughtful and constructive work which it
has done, in loyal response to the thought and needs of the country. I
should like in this address to review the notable record and try to make
adequate assessment of it; but no doubt we stand too near the work that has
been done and are ourselves too much part of it to play the part of
historians toward it.
Our program of legislation with regard to the regulation of business is now
virtually complete. It has been put forth, as we intended, as a whole, and
leaves no conjecture as to what is to follow. The road at last lies clear
and firm before business. It is a road which it can travel without fear or
embarrassment. It is the road to ungrudged, unclouded success. In it every
honest man, every man who believes that the public interest is part of his
own interest, may walk with perfect confidence.
Moreover, our thoughts are now more of the future than of the past. While
we have worked at our tasks of peace the circumstances of the whole age
have been altered by war. What we have done for our own land and our own
people we did with the best that was in us, whether of character or of
intelligence, with sober enthusiasm and a confidence in the principles upon
which we were acting which sustained us at every step of the difficult
undertaking; but it is done. It has passed from our hands. It is now an
established part of the legislation of the country. Its usefulness, its
effects will disclose themselves in experience. What chiefly strikes us
now, as we look about us during these closing days of a year which will be
forever memorable in the history of the world, is that we face new tasks,
have been facing them these six months, must face them in the months to
come,-face them without partisan feeling, like men who have forgotten
everything but a common duty and the fact that we are representatives of a
great people whose thought is not of us but of what America owes to herself
and to all mankind in such circumstances as these upon which we look amazed
and anxious.
War has interrupted the means of trade not only but also the processes of
production. In Europe it is destroying men and resources wholesale and upon
a scale unprecedented and appalling, There is reason to fear that the time
is near, if it be not already at hand, when several of the countries of
Europe will find it difficult to do for their people what they have
hitherto been always easily able to do,--many essential and fundamental
things. At any rate, they will need our help and our manifold services as
they have never needed them before; and we should be ready, more fit and
|
|
