Remarks in Parsons, Kansas

Friends:

I will just bid you good-morning. I am so glad to be again in the Sunflower State. From the beginning I have believed in your people, and I am more than grateful for the way your people showed your belief in me last November. It is not possible for any man in any position to promise that things will seem right. All that he can promise is that so far as in him lies he will do his part toward making them right. This I can promise, and do. It is in one stage of life as it is in another. Right here I see one of the men who fought in the great war. All that he could do in that war was to do his part well, to do all that lay in him well. And that is what each one of us can do, in whatever position he is called to be. It is because of what you and the average man and woman of Kansas have done that Kansas is so great a State; and it is that every man, from the President right through, has got to do if our country is to be what it should be.

To you people in Kansas, to you in whom I believe so much, there are just one or two things I could say in this brief moment. There is nothing peculiar in the qualities you need in government that differentiates those qualities from the qualities you need in having one private man deal with another. If a man is to be an advantage to the community in which he lives he must be a decent, square dealing man, who does fairly by his neighbor and takes care of his family. The same qualities in another sphere must be applied in public life if he is to amount to anything-honesty, decency, courage, and common sense.