47 2 Presidential Addresses 



about what is right, but that his average fellow- 

 countryman has the same intention and the same 

 power to make his intention effective. He knows, 

 whether he be business man, professional man, 

 farmer, mechanic, employer, or wage-worker, that 

 the welfare of each of these men is bound up with 

 the welfare of all the others; that each is neighbor- 

 to the other, is actuated by the same hopes and fears, 

 has fundamentally the same ideals, and that all alike 

 have much the same virtues and the same faults. 

 Our average fellow-citizen is a sane and healthy 

 man, who believes in decency and has a wholesome 

 mind. He therefore feels an equal scorn alike for 

 the man of wealth guilty of the mean and base spirit 

 of arrogance toward those who are less well off, and 

 for the man of small means who in his turn either 

 feels, or seeks to excite in others the feeling of 

 mean and base envy for those who are better off. 

 The two feelings, envy and arrogance, are but oppo- 

 site sides of the same shield, but different develop- 

 ments of the same spirit. Fundamentally, the un- 

 scrupulous rich man who seeks to exploit and op- 

 press those who are less well off is in spirit not op- 

 posed to, but identical with, the unscrupulous poor 

 man who desires to plunder and oppress those who 

 are better off. The courtier and the demagogue are 

 but developments of the same type under different 

 conditions, each manifesting the same servile spirit, 

 the same desire to rise by pandering to base pas- 

 sions ; though one panders to power in the shape of 

 a single man and the other to power in the shape of 



