A Spectator's Notebook P ROSAICALLY familiar though we have become with
the marvels of modern scientific achievement, I found it a sufficiently astonishing experience last Saturday to sit by the fire in a cottage on a Surrey hill and listen without strain cr effort to the administration of the oath to the new President of the United States on another hill three thousand miles away. As the President's own voice followed I wondered how much his inaugural owed to the address his last Democratic predecessor delivered on the same spot just twenty years before. Compare, for example, this from Woodrow Wilson :
" This is not a day of triumph ; it is a day of dedication. Here muster, not the forces of party, but the forces of humanity. Men's hearts wait upon us, men's lives hang in the balance, men's hopes call upon us to say what we will do. Who shall live up to the great trust ? Who dares fail to try ? I summon all honest men, all patriotic, all forward-looking. men, to my aide. God helping me, I will not fail them if they will but counsel and sustain me,"
with this from Roosevelt :
" This is a day of national consecration. We face the arduous days that lie before us in the warm courage of national unity, with the clean satisfaction that comes from the stern performance of duty by old and young alike. . . . Our people have asked for discipline and direction in leadership. They have made me the present instrument of their wishes. In the spirit of the gift. I take it. In this dedication, in this dedication of a nation, we humbly ask the blessing of God. May He protect each and every one of us. May He guide me in the days to come."
To listen to an address like last Saturday's means a great deal more than reading it in the next day's paper. If President Roosevelt's courageous assumption of the tasks of leadership has its due effect in giving new con- fidence to the world, that confidence will be appreciably more vigorous, and substantially more widely diffused, for the invention of the microphone. Material things can have moral consequences.
Previous page
