488 Presidential Addresses 



the honor of the flag in the far tropic lands are yet 

 differently armed and differently clad and differ- 

 ently trained; but the spirit that has driven you all 

 to victory has remained forever unchanged. So it 

 is in civil life. As you did not win in a month 

 or a year, but only after long years of hard and 

 dangerous work, so the fight for governmental 

 honesty and efficiency can be won only by the dis- 

 play of similar patience and similar resolution and 

 power of endurance. We need the same type of 

 character now that was needed by the men who with 

 Washington first inaugurated the system of free 

 popular government, the system of combined liberty 

 and order here on this Continent; that was needed 

 by the men who under Lincoln perpetuated the gov- 

 ernment which had thus been inaugurated in the 

 days of Washington. The qualities essential to good 

 citizenship and to good public service now are in 

 all their essentials exactly the same as in the days 

 when the first Congresses met to provide for the es- 

 tablishment of the Union; as in the days seventy 

 years later, when the Congresses met which had to 

 provide for its salvation. 



There are many qualities which we need alike 

 in private citizen and in public man, but three above 

 all three for the lack of which no brilliancy and 

 no genius can atone and those three are courage, 

 honesty, and common sense. 



