The great fundamental issue now before our people can be stated freely. It is, are the American people fit to govern themselves, to rule themselves, to control themselves? I believe they are. My opponents do not. I believe in the right of the people to rule.
I believe that the majority of the plain people of the United States will day in and day out make fewer mistakes in governing themselves than any smaller class or body of men, no matter what their training, will make in trying to govern them.
I believe again that the American people are as a whole capable of self-control and of learning by their mistakes. Our opponents, they live loyal to this doctrine, but they show their real beliefs by the way in which they champion every device to make the nominal rule of the people a sham.
I am not leading this fight as a matter of aesthetic pleasure. I am leading because somebody must lead, or else the fight would not be made at all.
I prefer to work with moderates, with rational conservatives, provided only that they do in good faith strive forward towards the light. But when they halt and turn their backs to the light, sit with the scorners on the seats of reaction, then I must part company with them. We, the people, cannot turn back. Our aim must be steady, wise progress. It would be well if our people would study the history of a sister republic. All the woes of France for a century in its waters have been due to the folly of her people in splitting into the two camps of unreasonable conservatism and unreasonable radicalism.
Had we revolutionarily, France listened to men like Turgot and backed them up, all would have gone well. But the beneficiaries of privilege, the bourbon reactionaries, the short-sighted ultra-conservatives, turned down Turgot and then found that instead of him they had obtained well-deserved. They gained 20 years’ freedom from all restraint and reform at the cost of the whirlwind of the Red Terror, and in their turn the unbridled extremists of the terror induced a blind reaction. And so with convulsion and oscillation from one extreme to another, with alternations of violent radicalism and violent bourbonism, the French people went through misery toward a shattered goal. May we pop it for the experiences of our brother Republicans across the water and go forward steadily avoiding all wild extremes.
And may our ultra-conservatives remember that the rule of the Bourbons brought on the revolution, and may our would-be revolutionaries remember that no Bourbon was ever such a dangerous enemy of the people and of freedom as the professed friend of both Robespierre. There is no danger of a revolution in this country, but there is grave discontent and unrest, and in order to remove them there is need of all the wisdom and property and deep-seated faking and purposeful uplift humanity we have at our command.