138 Presidential Addresses 



had to win as the soldiers of Washington had won 

 before you, as we of the younger generation must 

 win if ever the call should be made upon us to 

 face a serious foe. Arms change, tactics change, 

 but the spirit that makes the real soldier does not 

 change. The spirit that makes for victory does 

 not change. 



It is just so in civic life. The problems change, 

 but fundamentally the qualities needed to face them 

 in the average citizen are the same. Our new and 

 highly complex industrial civilization has produced 

 a new and complicated series of problems. We 

 need to face those problems and not to run away 

 from them. We need to exercise all our ingenuity 

 in trying to devise some effective solution, but the 

 only way in which that solution can be applied is 

 the old way of bringing honesty, courage, and com 

 mon-sense to bear upon it. One feature of honesty 

 and common-sense combined is never to promise 

 what you do not think you can perform, and then 

 never fail to perform what you have promised. 

 And that applies in public life just as much as in 

 private life. 



If some of those who have seen cause for wonder 

 in what I have said this summer on the subject of 

 the great corporations, which are popularly, although 

 with technical inaccuracy, known as trusts, would 

 take the trouble to read my messages when I was 

 Governor, what I said on the stump two years ago, 

 and what I put into my first message to Congress, I 

 think they would have been less astonished. I said 



