I promise the enforcement of the law with equal severity and equal justice to all, rich and poor, corporations and individuals.

We are all members of one body politic. We could not separate our interests if we tried. We desire to preserve the opportunities for individual initiative and the rewards of ability, industry, and integrity. We desire to protect the government, with its guaranties of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, from being used by any person or combination of persons to promote a selfish interest at the expense of the other members of the community. We desire to enforce the laws we have and to enact such additional laws as may be required to secure equal privileges and opportunities and to prevent any one person or class of persons from being made the victim of oppression. We believe in open discussion and responsible criticism. But efforts to make discontent serve self-interest, to create class hatred, to distort the good and to exaggerate the evil, are subversive of free institutions and tend to anarchy.

We make our appeal to the common sense of the American people, which has never failed to express itself decisively in a great crisis. We are pledged to achieve reforms in the

American manner, in accordance with the genius of our institutions, and with love of truth and even-handed justice.

It is in this spirit and with these pledges alone that I accept the nomination.

III.

Inaugural Address, Albany, N. Y., January 1, 1907.

Fellow Citizens:-I assume the office of Governor without other ambition than to serve the people of the State. I have not coveted its powers nor do I permit myself to shrink from its responsibilities. Sensible of its magnitude and of my own limitations, I undertake the task of administration without illusion. But you do not require the impossible. You have bound me to earnest and honest endeavor in the interest of all the people according to the best of my ability and that obligation, with the help of God, I shall discharge.

We have reason to congratulate ourselves that, coincident with our prosperity, there is an emphatic assertion of popular rights and a keen resentment of public wrongs. There is no panacea in executive or legislative action for all the ills of society which spring from the

frailties and defects of the human nature of its members. But this furnishes no excuse for complaisant inactivity and no reason for the toleration of wrongs made possible by defective or inadequate legislation or by administrative partiality or inefficiency.

It is sometimes said that we have laws enough, and that the need is not of more law but of better enforcement of the law. There is abundant occasion for caution against hasty legislation. Whether or not we have laws enough, we certainly have enough of ill-considered legislation, and the question is not as to the quantity but as to the quality of our present and of our proposed enactments.

The proper confines of legislative action are not to be determined by generalities. Slowly but surely the people have narrowed the opportunities for selfish aggression, and the demand of this hour, and of all hours, is not allegiance to phrases, but sympathy with every aspiration for the betterment of conditions and a sincere and patient effort to understand every need and to ascertain in the light of experience the means best adapted to meet it. Each measure proposed must ultimately be tested by critical analysis of the particular problem, the precise mischief alleged and the

adequacy of the proffered remedy. It is the capacity for such close examination without heat or disqualifying prejudice which distinguishes the constructive effort from vain endeavors to change human nature by changing the forms of government.

It must freely be recognized that many of the evils of which we complain have their source in the law itself, in privileges carelessly granted, in opportunities for private aggrandizement at the expense of the people recklessly created, in failure to safeguard our public interests by providing means for just regulation of those enterprises which depend upon the use of public franchises. Wherever the law gives unjust advantage, wherever it fails by suitable prohibition or regulation to protect the interests of the people, wherever the power derived from the State is turned against the State, there is not only room but urgent necessity for the assertion of the authority of the State to enforce the common right.

The growth of our population and the necessary increase in our charitable and correctional work, the great enterprises under State control,-our canals, our highways, our forest preserves,-the protection of the public