The committees of the Congress to which legislation of this character is referred have devoted careful and dispassionate study to the means of accomplishing these objects.  They have honored me by consulting me.  They are ready to suggest action.  I have come to you, as the head of the Government and the responsible leader of the party in power, to urge action now, while there is time to serve the country deliberately and as we should, in a clear air of common counsel.  I appeal to you with a deep conviction of duty.  I believe that you share this conviction.  I therefore appeal to you with confidence.  I am at your service without reserve to play my part in any way you may call upon me to play it in this great enterprise of exigent reform which it will dignify and distinguish us to perform and discredit us to neglect.

ADDRESS AT GETTYSBURG

[Delivered in the presence of Union and Confederate veterans, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the battle, July 4, 1913.]

FRIENDS AND FELLOW CITIZENS: 

I need not tell you what the Battle of Gettysburg meant.  These gallant men in blue and gray sit all about us here.[C] Many of them met upon this ground in grim and deadly struggle.  Upon these famous fields and hillsides their comrades died about them.  In their presence it were an impertinence to discourse upon how the battle went, how it ended, what it signified!  But fifty years have gone by since then, and I crave the privilege of speaking to you for a few minutes of what those fifty years have meant.

What have they meant?  They have meant peace and union and vigor, and the maturity and might of a great nation.  How wholesome and healing the peace has been!  We have found one another again as brothers and comrades in arms, enemies no longer, generous friends rather, our battles long past, the quarrel forgotten—­except that we shall not forget the splendid valor, the manly devotion of the men then arrayed against one another, now grasping hands and smiling into each other’s eyes.  How complete the union has become and how dear to all of us, how unquestioned, how benign and majestic, as State after State has been added to this our great family of free men!  How handsome the vigor, the maturity, the might of the great Nation we love with undivided hearts; how full of large and confident promise that a life will be wrought out that will crown its strength with gracious justice and with a happy welfare that will touch all alike with deep contentment!  We are debtors to those fifty crowded years; they have made us heirs to a mighty heritage.

But do we deem the Nation complete and finished?  These venerable men crowding here to this famous field have set us a great example of devotion and utter sacrifice.  They were willing to die that the people might live.  But their task is done.  Their day is turned into evening.  They look to us to perfect what they established.  Their work is handed on to us, to be done in another way, but not in another spirit.  Our day is not over; it is upon us in full tide.