【正文】 ents of an honest and enlightened people? For it is the people only that are represented. It is their power and majesty that is reflected, and only for their good, in every legitimate government, under whatever form it may appear. The existence of such a government as ours for any length of time is a full proof of a general dissemination of knowledge and virtue throughout the whole body of the people. And what object or consideration more pleasing than this can be presented to the human mind? If national pride is ever justifiable or excusable it is when it springs, not from power or riches, grandeur or glory, but from conviction of national innocence, information, and benevolence. In the midst of these pleasing ideas we should be unfaithful to ourselves if we should ever lose sight of the danger to our liberties if anything partial or extraneous should infect the purity of our free, fair, virtuous, and independent elections. If an election is to be determined by a majority of a single vote, and that can be procured by a party through artifice or corruption, the Government may be the choice of a party for its own ends, not of the nation for the national good. If that solitary suffrage can be obtained by foreign nations by flattery or menaces, by fraud or violence, by terror, intrigue, or venality, the Government may not be the choice of the American people, but of foreign nations. It may be foreign nations who govern us, and not we, the people, who govern ourselves。 for I assure myself that whilst you carefully avoid every alteration which might endanger the benefits of an united and effective government, or which ought to await the future lessons of experience, a reverence for the characteristic rights of freemen and a regard for the public harmony will sufficiently influence your deliberations on the question how far the former can be impregnably fortified or the latter be safely and advantageously promoted. To the foregoing observations I have one to add, which will be most properly addressed to the House of Representatives. It concerns myself, and will therefore be as brief as possible. When I was first honored with a call into the service of my country, then on the eve of an arduous struggle for its liberties, the light in which I contemplated my duty required that I should renounce every pecuniary pensation. From this resolution I have in no instance departed。 since we ought to be no less persuaded that the propitious smiles of Heaven can never be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right which Heaven itself has ordained。 between duty and advantage。 美國歷屆總統(tǒng)就職演說 President 1st Term 2nd Term 3rd Term 4th Term Gee Washington 1789 1793 John Adams 1797 Thomas Jefferson 1801 1805 James Madison 1809 1813 James Monroe 1817 1821 John Quincy Adams 1825 Andrew Jackson 1829 1833 Martin Van Buren 1837 William Henry Harrison 1841 James Polk 1845 Zachary Taylor 1849 Franklin Pierce 1853 James Buchanan 1857 Abraham Lincoln 1861 1865 Ulysses S. Grant 1869 1873 Rutherford B. Hayes 1877 James A. Garfield 1881 Grover Cleveland 1885 1893 Benjamin Harrison 1889 William McKinley 1897 1901 Theodore Roosevelt 1905 William Howard Taft 1909 Woodrow Wilson 1913 1917 Warren G. Harding 1921 Calvin Coolidge 1925 Herbert Hoover 1929 Franklin D. Roosevelt 1933 1937 1941 1945 Harry S. Truman 1949 Dwight D. Eisenhower 1953 1957 John F. Kennedy 1961 Lyndon Baines Johnson 1965 Richard Milhous Nixon 1969 1973 Jimmy Carter 1977 Ronald Reagan 1981 1985 Gee Bush 1989 Bill Clinton 1993 1997 Gee W. Bush 2020 First Inaugural Address of Gee Washington THE CITY OF NEW YORK THURSDAY, APRIL 30, 1789 FellowCitizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives: Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable dec ision, as the asylum of my declining yearsa retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste mitted on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellowcitizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated. Such being the impressions under which I have, in obedience to the public summons, repaired to the present station, it would be peculiarly improper to om