A democratic republic such as each of ours--an effort to
realize in its full sense government by, of, and for the
people--represents the most gigantic of all possible social
experiments, the one fraught with greatest possibilities alike for
good and for evil. The success of republics like yours and like ours
means the glory, and our failure the despair, of mankind; and for you
and for us the question of the quality of the individual citizen is
supreme. Under other forms of government, under the rule of one man or
of a very few men, the quality of the rulers is all-important. If,
under such governments, the quality of the rulers is high enough, then
the nation may for generations lead a brilliant career, and add
substantially to the sum of world achievement, no matter how low the
quality of the average citizen; because the average citizen is an
almost negligible quantity in working out the final results of that
type of national greatness.
But with you and with us the case is different. With you here, and
with us in my own home, in the long run, success or failure will be
conditioned upon the way in which the average man, the average woman,
does his or her duty, first in the ordinary, every-day affairs of
life, and next in those great occasional crises which call for the
heroic virtues.
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