Great Grandpa's Thoughts

I came accross this address that Great Grandpa gave in 1960 and felt that all of you would be interested in his thoughts. No one love his country more than he did and he continued to be passonate in that regard all his life. I hope you enjoy reading it.
Dad

Address Given by Charles E. Ward (Great Grandpa), President of the Utah Manufactures Association, in 1960, at the Annual Conference of Intermountain Industry

Some eight score years ago, our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are crested equal. For many years now, we have been engaged in a great internal strife, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.

With business management, with labor leaders, and with public officials, the personal integrity and equality envisioned in our father has too often been forgotten. “What’s in it for me?” “How much can I get, and how little can I do?” Too frequently, we find this is our code, as we developed into a “Society of Pressure”. Business Management pressures itself and its executives, who in turn pressures the worker – to perform their job better for the dollar paid them, so that keen competition can be met on equal footing; labor leaders pressure their members for more funds for various “needs” and in turn pressure management for higher wages, often attracting impractical measures; government increasingly pressures the very people who are supposed to be running it, for more money in the form of taxes – frequently for the good of the people, but too often to insure and perpetuate outdated bureaucracies, and, government too, has created so many department and divisions of departments, all of which, maintain such a steady flow of instructions, rules, and orders, that even their own people in the field do not have time to keep up to date.

In our “Society of Pressure” we have become so enmeshed with conferences, hearings, red-tape and restrictions that it is utterly astounding that any of us have the time left to properly conduct our businesses in even a superficial manner, and, if all this “Society of Pressure” continues to undermine us economically, we, as a people and a nation are ultimately doomed. Just as Carthiage, Athens, Rome, and every other great civilization fell because of economic chaos, selfishness and greed, so will we.

President Bannow, Honored Guests, Ladies and Gentlemen: As you can observe, tonight I have taken liberally from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address – one of the greatest speeches in the history of our nation, by one of that nation’s greatest sons. It is true we are menaced by the world power outside our borders, but we are likewise menaced, perhaps to a greater degree, right here at home – because we no longer fight back at the liberties taken with our liberties; we remain pacified, allowing one wrong to be heaped upon the other, hoping perhaps someday that it will “all go away”, and we can once again operate our businesses in a climate of true free enterprise. If the liberties taken with Lincoln tonight have sparked just one or two or ten of you here to think about the situation, and to realize its seriousness, and then start doing something about it, I am sure that he would approve.

Our “Society of Pressure” must concentrate pressure on the return to true democracy. For you will recall that Mr. Lincoln concluded his Gettysburg Address with this sentence: “That, this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from this earth.”
Thank You.