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.
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