Editorial March 18, 1905 Issue

Our Responsibilities

Annie M. Knott

The inaugural address of President Roosevelt has been read with interest in all parts of the world, an interest which attaches not so much to the immediate occasion as to the fact that the ideals of a great and free nation are necessarily expressed at such a time. In referring to present conditions Mr. Roosevelt said,—

"Never before have men tried so vast and formidable an experiment as that of administering the affairs of a continent under the forms of a democratic republic.... Upon the success of our experiment much depends; not only as regards our own welfare, but as regards the welfare of mankind. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations; and, therefore, our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves, to the world as it is to-day, and to the generations yet unborn.

"There is no good reason why we should fear the future, but there is every reason why we should face it seriously, neither hiding from ourselves the gravity of the problems before us, nor fearing to approach these problems with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright.... 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 free men 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 every-day 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."

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