At last a vision has been vouchsafed us of our life as a whole. We
see the bad with the good, the debased and decadent with the sound
and vital. With this vision we approach new affairs. Our duty is
to cleanse, to reconsider, to restore, to correct the evil without
impairing the good, to purify and humanize every process of our
common life without weakening or sentimentalizing it. There has
been something crude and heartless and unfeeling in our haste to
succeed and be great. Our thought has been "Let every man look out
for himself, let every generation look out for itself," while we
reared giant machinery which made it impossible that any but those
who stood at the levers of control should have a chance to look
out for themselves. We had not forgotten our morals. We remembered
well enough that we had set up a policy which was meant to serve
the humblest as well as the most powerful, with an eye single to
the standards of justice and fair play, and remembered it with
pride. But we were very heedless and in a hurry to be great.
We have come now to the sober second thought. The scales of
heedlessness have fallen from our eyes. We have made up our minds
to square every process of our national life again with the
standards we so proudly set up at the beginning and have always
carried at our hearts.
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