So, keep the air clear with constant discussion. Make every public servant
feel that he is acting in the open and under scrutiny; and, above all things
else, take these great fundamental questions of your lives with which
political platforms concern themselves and search them through and through by
every process of debate. Then we shall have a clear air in which we shall see
our way to each kind of social betterment. When we have freed our government,
when we have restored freedom of enterprise, when we have broken up the
partnerships between money and power which now block us at every turn, then
we shall see our way to accomplish all the handsome things which platforms
promise in vain if they do not start at the point where stand the gates of
liberty.

I am not afraid of the American people getting up and doing something. I am
only afraid they will not; and when I hear a popular vote spoken of as mob
government, I feel like telling the man who dares so to speak that he has no
right to call himself an American. You cannot make a reckless, passionate
force out of a body of sober people earning their living in a free country.
Just picture to yourselves the voting population of this great land, from the
sea to the far borders in the mountains, going calmly, man by man, to the
polls, expressing its judgment about public affairs: is that your image of "a
mob?"

What is a mob? A mob is a body of men in hot contact with one another, moved
by ungovernable passion to do a hasty thing that they will regret the next
day. Do you see anything resembling a mob in that voting population of the
countryside, men tramping over the mountains, men going to the general store
up in the village, men moving in little talking groups to the corner grocery
to cast their ballots,-is that your notion of a mob? Or is that your picture
of a free, self-governing people? I am not afraid of the judgments so
expressed, if you give men time to think, if you give them a clear conception
of the things they are to vote for; because the deepest conviction and
passion of my heart is that the common people, by which I mean all of us, are
to be absolutely trusted.

So, at this opening of a new age, in this its day of unrest and discontent,
it is our part to clear the air, to bring about common counsel; to set up the
parliament of the people; to demonstrate that we are fighting no man, that we
are trying to bring all men to understand one another; that we are not the
friends of any class against any other class, but that our duty is to make
classes understand one another. Our part is to lift so high the incomparable
standards of the common interest and the common justice that all men with
vision, all men with hope, all men with the convictions of America in their
hearts, will crowd to that standard and a new day of achievement may come for
the liberty which we love.