distressing times.  We can afford, in the midst of this day of passion and unrest, to be self-contained and sure.  The instrument of all reform in America is the ballot.  The road to economic and social reform in America is the straight road of justice to all classes and conditions of men.  Men have but to follow this road to realize the full fruition of their objects and purposes.  Let those beware who would take the shorter road of disorder and revolution.  The right road is the road of justice and orderly process.

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State of the Union Address
Woodrow Wilson
December 7, 1920

Gentlemen of the congress: 

When I addressed myself to performing the duty laid upon the President by the Constitution to present to you an annual report on the state of the Union, I found my thought dominated by an immortal sentence of Abraham Lincoln’s—­“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith let us dare to do our duty as we understand it”—­a sentence immortal because it embodies in a form of utter simplicity and purity the essential faith of the nation, the faith in which it was conceived, and the faith in which it has grown to glory and power.  With that faith and the birth of a nation founded upon it came the hope into the world that a new order would prevail throughout the affairs of mankind, an order in which reason and right would take precedence over covetousness and force; and I believe that I express the wish and purpose of every thoughtful American when I say that this sentence marks for us in the plainest manner the part we should play alike in the arrangement of our domestic affairs and in our exercise of influence upon the affairs of the world.

By this faith, and by this faith alone, can the world be lifted out of its present confusion and despair.  It was this faith which prevailed over the wicked force of Germany.  You will remember that the beginning of the end of the war came when the German people found themselves face to face with the conscience of the world and realized that right was everywhere arrayed against the wrong that their government was attempting to perpetrate.  I think, therefore, that it is true to say that this was the faith which won the war.  Certainly this is the faith with which our gallant men went into the field and out upon the seas to make sure of victory.

This is the mission upon which Democracy came into the world.  Democracy is an assertion of the right of the individual to live and to be treated justly as against any attempt on the part of any combination of individuals to make laws which will overburden him or which will destroy his equality among his fellows in the matter of right or privilege; and I think we all realize that the day has come when Democracy is being put upon its final test.  The Old World is just now suffering from a wanton rejection of the principle of democracy and a substitution of the principle of autocracy as asserted in the name, but without the authority and sanction, of the multitude.  This is the time of all others when Democracy should prove its purity and its spiritual power to prevail.  It is surely the manifest destiny of the United States to lead in the attempt to make this spirit prevail.