But the evil has come with the good, and much fine gold has been corroded.  With riches has come inexcusable waste.  We have squandered a great part of what we might have used, and have not stopped to conserve the exceeding bounty of nature, without which our genius for enterprise would have been worthless and impotent, scorning to be careful, shamefully prodigal as well as admirably efficient.  We have been proud of our industrial achievements, but we have not hitherto stopped thoughtfully enough to count the human cost, the cost of lives snuffed out, of energies overtaxed and broken, the fearful physical and spiritual cost to the men and women and children upon whom the dead weight and burden of it all has fallen pitilessly the years through.  The groans and agony of it all had not yet reached our ears, the solemn, moving undertone of our life, coming up out of the mines and factories and out of every home where the struggle had its intimate and familiar seat.  With the great Government went many deep secret things which we too long delayed to look into and scrutinize with candid, fearless eyes.  The great Government we loved has too often been made use of for private and selfish purposes, and those who used it had forgotten the people.

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.  Our work is a work of restoration.