INAUGURAL ADDRESS 29

fortify and sustain my own... and I fervently pray for the divine help
and guidance which will make me worthy of your confidence.

Today is a day of resolution, a day for setting courses, for establishing
goals. Our purpose is not just to keep Maryland abreast of our na-
tional life but to lead her in the vanguard of human progress.

Today we look ahead to new horizons with the constant awareness
that what suggests the future is the past; that what reveals the need
is the lack; that what inspires the perfect state is the imperfect one.

And if this day brings special promise, it is because we refuse to
accept as inevitable things as they are or things as they have been.
While indeed it is true that poverty does exist in times of prosperity,
that ignorance does persist in an age of enlightenment, it is in the
minds of men to deplore these imperfections and in the will of men
to pursue the ideal.

This is a time of vast and ever-accelerating change... a time
probably representing the most difficult period in our growth since
this country moved out of its totally rural years and into the incredibly
complex areas of mass production and urbanization. This change, if
order is to prevail, cannot go unguided.

That is why today we welcome new challenge and invite new op-
portunity, and resolve to bring a new and abundant energy to Mary-
land affairs. We will never acknowledge that the inequities of life
are the facts of life, nor allow the defeats of the past to predetermine
what lies ahead.

Exactly one century ago, the people of Maryland, the General As-
sembly and the Governor met together as we do today. They saw, as
we do, changing times; and a need to keep pace with a new wave of
social, political and economic life. The year 1867 saw Maryland re-
covering from the moral turbulence of the Civil War and, at the same
time, facing the impact and challenge of the Industrial Revolution.

The need for a new State Constitution was self-evident, and the
writing of a worthy one was imperative. To the lasting credit of their
generation, a new constitution was written and ratified... a model
of enlightened democracy under which Maryland grew and prospered
for 100 years. Listen to Article 6 of that Declaration of Rights:

.. whenever the ends of Government are perverted, and public
liberty manifestly endangered, and all other means of redress are
ineffectual, the People may, and of right ought, to reform the old,