MY COUNTRYMEN:

When one surveys the world of today, with its prophets of doom and its indifferent masses yearning to eat chocolate, he can, if he is male, or she can, if she is female, hardly fail in her, or perhaps his, contemplation of the spectacle to note the one glaring injustice which remains to be unglared.

Liberty—by which I mean a freedom of action within the constraints of a due observance of all applicable regulations—and civilization are inseparable. Yet, until this day, liberty has been denied entirely to one class of persons, on no other pretext than a mere physical difference.

Eightscore and nine years ago, my predecessor Abraham Lincoln ended the practice of enslaving millions of Americans on no other grounds than the color of their skin. Some time later—indeed, only a short time before I occupied the White House for the first time—the Nineteenth Amendment granted the right of suffrage to the female half of our great nation. It was my great pride to have been the first President summoned to the White House by the votes of both sexes, and in the short time allotted to me by fate I did my best to return my gratitude to the female voters on an individual basis.

Yet now, after so many advances in equality, the Dead citizens of our country, who probably make up an absolute majority of the population, have no rights whatsoever. It would be no exaggeration, I fear, to say that, once a citizen has passed into a deceased state, our government begins to treat that citizen as if he, or perhaps she, no longer existed. In many districts even the right of voting is denied to the Dead, although I am pleased to say that this is by no means the case uniformly across our fair land.

But today, with our new administration, a ray of hope shines for these cruelly neglected citizens. As they look to Washington and see one not unlike themselves standing, or as it may be sitting, in the Oval Office, they can be assured that my first priority will be to relieve the senseless discrimination that has oppressed them for so many ages. My second priority will be to find someone to vacuum up all the dog hair in here. This I plight to God and country.