Excerpts from talk by Brooks Hays at Democratic State Convention - Page 3

Speech given at Democratic State Convention3 Hays War brings us once again to the end of an era. If the machinery of government needs some new gadgets, let's not add them now. Let us concentrate all our thoughts and actions on winning this war. Our achievements as a party and our hope for the future spring from faith in the capacity of people to govern themselves. Faith is as necessary an ingredient of political life as of religious endeavor. The men in our armed services could not fight another day except for faith in us. Life here would be insecure and unhappy except for our faith in them. We can create and maintain faith in political leadership only by a performance that justifies it. At the same time leadership should be protected against the false impressions that, because one is elected to office or given party honors, he tends to lose the ordinary impulses of honesty and responsibility. To give us faith that the people are able to act wisely and patriotically when they have possession of the facts, we need only study the pages of history. The ideals that were forumulated [sic] in the Declaration of Independence were earlier proposed in the cabin of the Maylfower [sic] and the Colonial councils of Virginia, and even before we became a nation our pioneer fathers demonstrated the soundness of this concept that government rests upon the consent of the governed. The time has come not only for the sacrifice of advantages heretofore enjoyed by particular groups, in the interest of the national welfare, but also for a lessing of georgraphical [sic] strains and rivalries. All of us can unite for the duration in the interest of the maximum freedom for the individual and the right of self-government for all peoples