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THE FOES OF OUR OWN HOUSEHOLD
By
Theodore Roosevelt

COPYRIGHT,   1917, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

TO
OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS
THEIR   MOTHER  AND   I DEDICATE THIS BOOK

Sagamore Hill, September ist
In an age of fops and toys,
Wanting wisdom, void of right,
Who shall nerve heroic boys
To hazard all in Freedom's fight,—
Break sharply off their jolly games,
Forsake their comrades gay,
And quit proud homes and youthful dames
For famine, toil and fray?
Yet on the nimble air benign
Speed nimbler messages,
That waft the breath of grace divine
To hearts in sloth and ease.
So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, Thou must,
The youth replies, I can.
—emerson

FOREWORD

The man who still asks "why we are at war," or apologizes in any way for Germany, should look to his own soul; he is neither a patriot nor a true American, nor a lover of mankind; and the foes of his own household are the folly and the cowardice and the cold selfishness of his own heart.

We should hold Germany in horror for what she has done. But we should regard with contempt and loathing the Americans who directly or indirectly give her aid and comfort; whether they do so by downright attack on our own country, by upholding Germany, by assailing any of our allies, by trying to discourage our people from vigorous, resolute, unyielding prosecution of the war, or by crying on behalf of peace, peace, when there ought not to be peace.

In the long run we have less to fear from foes without than from foes within; for the former will be formidable only as the latter break our strength. The men who oppose preparedness in our military and our industrial life ; the business or political corruptionist or reactionary and the reckless demagogue who is his nominal opponent; the man of wealth and greed who cares for nothing but profits, and the sinister creature who plays upon and inflames the passions of envy and violence; the hard materialist, the self-indulgent lover of ease and pleasure, and the silly sentimentalist—all these are the permanent foes of our own household. From their ranks are drawn our immediate foes; the faint-hearted who fear Germany, the puzzle-headed who refuse to understand her, and the men of foul soul who do her evil bidding. The Hun within our gates masquerades in many disguises; he is our dangerous enemy; and he should be hunted down without mercy. High-minded men and women should brace their souls against the Menace of Peace without Victory for the Right. It is worse than idle to talk of a League to Enforce Peace for the Future, unless we, who are now partners in the League to Smite Down Wrong in the Present with iron will carry the war through to overwhelming triumph.

CHAPTER 1

THE   INSTANT  NEED;  AND   THE  ULTIMATE   NEED

THE world is at this moment passing through one of those terrible periods of convulsion when the souls of men and of nations are tried as by fire. Woe to the man or to the nation that at such a time stands as once Laodicea stood; as the people of ancient Meroz stood, when they dared not come to the help of the Lord against the mighty! In such a crisis the moral weakling is the enemy of the right; and the pacifist is as surely a traitor to his country and to humanity as is the most brutal wrong-doer.

At the outbreak of the war our people were stunned, blinded, terrified by the extent of the world disaster. Those among our leaders who were greedy, those who were selfish and ease-loving, those who were timid, and those who were merely short-sighted, all joined to blindfold the eyes and dull the conscience of the people so that it might neither see iniquity nor gird its loins for the inevitable struggle. The moral sense of our people was drugged into stupor by the men in high places who taught us that we had no concern with the causes of this war, that all the combatants were fighting for the same things, that it was our duty to be neutral between right and wrong, that we should look with tepid indifference on the murder of our unarmed men, women and children, that we ought to be too proud to fight for our just rights, that our proper aim should be to secure peace without victory for the right. But at last we stand with our faces to the light. At last we have faced our duty. Now it behooves us .to do this duty with masterful efficiency.

We are in the war. But we are not yet awake. We are passing through, in exaggerated form, the phase through which England passed during the first year of the war. A very large number of Englishmen fooled themselves with the idea that they lived on an island and were safe anyhow, that the war would soon be over, and that if they went on with their business as usual, and waved flags and applauded patriotic speeches, somebody else would do the fighting for them. England has seen the error of her ways; she has paid in blood and agony for her short-sightedness; she is now doing her duty with stern resolution. We are repeating her early errors on a larger scale; and assuredly we shall pay heavily if we do not in time wake from our short-sighted apathy and foolish, self-sufficient optimism.

We live on a continent; we have .trusted to that fact for safety in the past; we do not understand that world conditions have changed and that the oceans and even the air have become highways for military aggression. The exploits of the German U-boat off Nantucket last summer—exploits which nothing but feebleness, considerations of political expediency and downright lack of courage on our part permitted—showed that if Germany, or any other possible opponent of ours, were free to deal with us the security that an ocean barrier once offered was annihilated. In other words, the battle front of Europe is slowly spreading over the whole world.

We are fighting this war for others. But we are also, and primarily, fighting it for ourselves. We wish to safeguard to all civilized nations which themselves do justice to others, the right to enjoy their independence, and therefore to enjoy whatever governmental system they desire. But rightly and properly our first concern is for our own country. Our own welfare is at stake. Our own interests are vitally concerned. We are fighting for the honor of America and for our permanent place among the self-governing nations of mankind. We are fighting for our homes, our freedom, our independence, our self-respect and well-being. We are fighting for our dearest rights, and to avert measureless disaster in the future from the land in which our children's children are to dwell when we are dead.

In international relations, the Prussianized Germany of to-day stands for ruthless self-aggrandizement, and contempt for the rights of other nations. She stands for the rule of might over right; of power over justice. If Germany now conquered France and England, we would be the next victim; and if the conquest took place at this moment we would be a helpless victim. France and England have been fighting the battle of this nation as certainly as they have been fighting for themselves. Every consideration of honor, of self-respect, of self-interest, and self-preservation demand that we Americans throw our full force into this war immediately, without reservation, with entire loyalty to our allies, and with the stern and steadfast determination to fight the war through to a victorious finish. Moreover, we should act at once. We have to atone for three years of folly and indecision.
We are a nation of a hundred millions of people, richer in wealth and resources than any other on the earth. Yet we were so utterly unprepared that although Germany declared war on us seven months ago we are still merely getting ready our strength, we still owe our safety exclusively to the fleets and armies of our hard-pressed and war-worn allies, to whose help we nominally came.

It is this utter unpreparedness which should convey the real lesson to us of this war. And remember that as yet we, as a people, acting through our governmental authorities, have not taken one step to avert disaster in the future by introducing a permanent policy of preparedness. By actual test the system, or rather no-system, upon which during the last three years we have been told we could rely has proved entirely worthless. The measures under which we are now acting are temporary makeshifts, announced to be such. We have been caught utterly unprepared in a terrible emergency because we did nothing until the emergency actually arose; and now our Government announces that what we are doing is purely temporary; that we shall stop doing it as soon as the emergency is over, and will then remain equally unprepared for the next emergency.

    It  is  this  blind  refusal—from  the  nation's standpoint I can only call it this criminal refusal—to provide for the future that forces every honest and far-sighted lover of America to speak. I would far rather speak words of boastful flattery; it is not pleasant to tell unpleasant truths. Probably it is personally more advantageous to utter high-sounding platitudes; but platitudes are not what this nation needs at this time. I would gladly refrain from pointing out our shortcomings of the present and the immediate past were there any indication that we intended to provide for the future. But there is no such indication. And yet now is the time to formulate our permanent policy; now, when the lessons of the war are vivid before our eyes, when for the moment the silliness of the professional pacifists has less influence than in time of peace. Flag-waving, and uttering and applauding speeches, and singing patriotic songs, are excellent in so far as they are turned into cool foresight in preparation and grim resolution to spend and be spent when once the day of trial has come; but they are merely mischievous if they are treated as substitutes for preparedness in advance and for hard, efficient work and readiness for self-sacrifice during the crisis itself.

It is not our alien enemies who are responsible for our complete unpreparedness.   It is the foes of our own household. The leaders who have led us wrong are these foes; and in so far as our own weakness and short-sightedness and love of ease and undue regard for material success have made us respond readily to such leadership, we ourselves have been our own foes.

Preparedness against war cannot be real, cannot be thoroughgoing, unless it rests on preparedness for the tasks of peace. The I. W. W. and similar organizations, including the bulk of the "scientific" party socialists, have showed themselves the enemies of this country in this crisis, and will be its permanent enemies; and exactly the same thing is true of the self-satisfied, short-sighted rich men who oppose, or are inertly indifferent to, the effort to remove the causes of that preventable misery and wrong which drive honest poor men to follow the false prophets of evil. The dishonest demagogue and the corrupt reactionary are equally the foes of social and industrial justice; and mere ignorance—simple, sheer inability to understand the facts of present-day life—may prevent good people from trying to help the farmer and the workingman to help themselves, until it is too late to give such help save at the price of social convulsion.

The foes of our own household are our worst enemies; and we can oppose them, not only by exposing and denouncing them, but by constructive work in planning and building for reforms which shall take into account both the economic and the moral factors in human advance. We of America can win to our great destiny only by service; not by rhetoric, and above all not by insincere rhetoric, and that dreadful mental double-dealing and verbal juggling which makes promises and repudiates them, and says one thing at one time, and the 'directly opposite thing at another time. Our service must be the service of deeds, the deeds of war and the deeds of peace.

The deeds of peace are for the future. The instant need is for the deeds of war. If we wish to preserve our own self-respect we must do our own fighting; and not merely pay—or feed —others to fight for us. We must not make this a mere dollar war, or potato war. The dollars and potatoes are needed; but the great need is for armed men who are sternly ready to face death in a great cause. Pawnbroker patriotism is a poor substitute for fighting patriotism.

At present our prime duty is to fight effectively and to send constantly increasing masses—millions—-of fighting men to the front at the earliest moment. Then we must care for these men; we must till our farms, make our factories more efficient, increase our taxes and subscribe to our loans; and back up the Red Cross and similar organizations. Our governmental representatives must show both disinterestedness and common sense in dealing with business. We need maximum production; and improper restriction of profits, and, therefore, improperly low prices, will put a stop to maximum production. It is criminal to halt the work of building the Navy or fitting out our training camps because of refusal to allow a fair profit to the business men who alone can do the work speedily and effectively; and it is equally mischievous not to put a stop to the making of unearned and improper fortunes out of the war by heavy progressive taxation on the excess war profits—taxation as heavy as that which England now imposes; and as regards the proper profits that are permitted and encouraged, we should insist on a reasonably equitable division between the capitalists, the managers and the wage workers; and when the wage worker gets a first-class wage we should insist that in this crisis, as a matter of vital patriotic duty, he does first-class work for the first-class wage.

Universal suffrage should be based on universal service in peace and war; those who refuse to render the one have no title to the enjoyment of the other. We stand for the democracy of service; we are against privilege, and therefore against the privilege which would escape service in war. If a man's conscience forbids him to fight, put him to dangerous work, such as mine-sweeping or digging trenches, where, although his own life is in peril, he does not attempt to kill anyone else; and if his conscience forbids him to do this kind of work then let it be understood that our consciences forbid us to let him vote in a country whose destiny must ultimately be decided by men who are willing to fight. No human being is entitled to any "right," any privilege, that is not correlated with the obligation to perform duty.

We must continue this war with steadfast endurance until we win the peace of overwhelming victory for righteousness; and even while thus fighting we must prepare the way for the peace of industrial justice, and the justice of industrial democracy, which are to come after, and to make perfect, the war. These are the two needs; the instant need and the ultimate need; and both must be met. At the moment our chief foes are outside of our border; but they are now a danger to us only because of the folly and short-sightedness and wrong-doing of those who, wittingly or unwittingly, are our permanent foes—the foes of our own household. The passions and follies of each of us individually are such foes. And the men in whose souls these passions and follies gain the upper hand are the permanent foes of this great republic.

In the present crisis the most evil of these foes of our own household are the men who wish us to accept peace without victory. In the old days on the Western plains we had a proverb, "Never draw unless you mean to shoot." The braggart, the man who uses words which he does not translate into deeds, is a source of fearful wrong and suffering in any serious crisis. Having gone into this war, we earn dishonor unless we exert our utmost strength and fight the war through, at all costs, to a successful finish; unless we fight until we win the peace of victory. When we went to war there was neither talk nor thought of "making the world safe for democracy"—if war for that purpose was necessary then it had been necessary for the preceding two years and a half. We went to war because for two years the Germans had been murdering our unarmed men, women and children, and had definitely announced their intention to continue the practice. After we had been at war a few weeks the President announced that our purpose was to make the world safe for democracy. This phrase, uttered by the President when we were already at war, solemnly pledged us to exert our whole strength, and suffer any losses, in a terrible crusade, not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of mankind as a whole. To make such a pledge lightly, or to abandon it when once made, would be infamous. Therefore we must keep it. And, therefore, we must understand what it means. There is a certain rhetorical lack of precision about Mr. Wilson's phrase. It cannot mean that we are to force our allies, Belgium, Servia, Montenegro, England, all of them monarchies, to abandon the forms of government which they find suitable, and for which they have battled with devoted courage. Neither can it mean that we are to let peoples which show themselves incapable of self-government continue permanently as centres of infection in an otherwise reasonably healthy world-polity. Mr. Wilson's action in regard to the two republics of Hayti and San Domingo shows that if in any weak country he regards democracy as unsafe for others, as a nuisance to its neighbors, he will without hesitation suppress it. Interpreting his phrase, therefore, by the course of conduct he was at the same time following, we must regard it as a solemn pledge that we will not accept peace without complete victory over Germany and her allies, Austria and Turkey; inasmuch as Germany's mere existence under her present government makes the world unsafe for democracy, and inasmuch as the continued existence of Austria and Turkey in their present form necessarily means the crushing out of democracy and liberty in the nations subject to them. We do not intend that the German, Magyar and Turk shall be oppressed. We do mean that they shall be forbidden to oppress others. First and foremost we are to make the world safe for ourselves. This is our primary interest. This is our war, America's war. If we do not win it, we shall some day have to reckon with Germany single handed. Therefore, for our own sakes let us strike down Germany—and we cannot at this time make any distinction between the German people and the German rulers, for the German people stand solidly behind their rulers, and until they separate from their rulers they earn our enmity. Belgium must be restored and indemnified. France should receive back Alsace and Lorraine. England and Japan should keep the colonies they have conquered. Austria and Turkey should be broken up. Poland should be made independent, with Galicia and Posen included, and reaching to the Baltic. The Czechs and their Moravian and Slovak kinsmen should be made into a Greater Bohemia. The Jugoslavs should be united in one state. Greater Roumania should take in Roumanian Hungary, and Italy Italian Austria. The Turks should be ousted from Europe; Constantinople can be made a free commonwealth of the Straits, or given to democratic Russia as events may determine. Arabia should be an independent Moslem state; probably Armenia should be independent; provision for the full protection of the Syrians— Christians, Druses, and Mohammedans—should be made. Northern Schleswig should go back to the Danes; and the victorious allies should themselves grant full autonomy to Lithuania and Finland; and, to Ireland, Home Rule within the Empire.

But I do not ask our fellow countrymen who fight this war to think merely of others. The future of America is at stake, and it is this for which our concern is deepest. We must for our own sakes now make our whole potential war strength as speedily effective as possible. And, if we have the smallest power to learn by experience, let us face the damage done by our lamentable failure to prepare in the past, so that we may learn the need of preparing for the future.

During the last seven months we have to our credit some things which give us just cause for pride. But the net achievement, when compared with what every other great nation in the war achieved during a similar period, is a cause for profound humility.

We have not yet so much as fired one rifle against the German armies. We have not a man in the trenches. We are now doing, so far as preparation is concerned, only those things which it was inexcusable for us not to begin doing in September, 1914. Yet the time we have thus occupied, seven months, is just the length of time Germany took in 1870-71, for the conquest of France. It is four times as long as it took for the conquest of Austria. And we are not yet ready to meet a single thoroughly equipped hostile army corps of any great military nation! We owe our safety from conquest only to the fact that, to serve their own purposes, England and France have protected us and fought our battles for us. Nor have our governmental authorities given the slightest indication of any intention to provide permanently against the continuance of the fatuous policy which has produced these results; and yet to continue this fatuous policy will ultimately mean ruin to the nation.

The men who boast over what has been accomplished by us in this war during the last seven months—during which we have actually accomplished nothing, although along many lines we have begun to prepare to begin—will do well to remember the comments by Olaf's priest Thangbrand on the boasting of the Icelanders :
Quoth Priest Thangbrand:  "What's the use Of all this bragging up and down, When three women and one goose Make a market in your town?" Three women and one goose do not make a market.     Nor  do  they  win  a  war.    And  in neither case does boasting permanently supply the deficiency.