Presidential Addresses 



There is no room in our healthy American life 

 for the mere idler, for the man or the woman whose 

 object it is throughout life to shirk the duties which 

 life ought to bring. Life can mean nothing worth 

 meaning, unless its prime aim is the doing of duty, 

 the achievement of results worth achieving. A re- 

 cent writer has finely said : "After all, the saddest 

 thing that can happen to a man is to carry no 

 burdens. To be bent under too great a load is 

 bad; to be crushed by it is lamentable; but even 

 in that there are possibilities that are glorious. But 

 to carry no load at all there is nothing in that. 

 No one seems to arrive at any goal really worth 

 reaching in this world who does not come to it 

 heavy laden." 



Su'rely from our own experience each one of us 

 knows that this is true. From the greatest to the 

 smallest, happiness and usefulness are largely found 

 in the same soul, and the joy of life is won in its 

 deepest and truest sense only by those who have 

 not shirked life's burdens. The men whom we 

 most delight to honor in all this land are those 

 who, in the iron years from '61 to '65, bore on their 

 shoulders the burden of saving the Union. They 

 did not choose the easy task. They did not shirk 

 the difficult duty. Deliberately and of their own 

 free will they strove for an ideal, upward and on- 

 ward across the stony slopes of greatness. They 

 did the hardest work that was then to be done; 

 they bore the heaviest burden that any generation 

 of Americans ever had to bear; and because they 



