Speech or Document 21

SPEED UP THE WAR AND TAKE THOUGHT FOR AFTER THE WAR

FROM A SPEECH DELIVERED AT THE MAINE CONVENTION OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY ON MARCH 28, 1918

THIS country is now involved in the greatest war of all time.  In common with the rest of the world it is passing through one of those tremendous crises which lie centuries apart in world history.  Under such conditions the question of partisanship sinks into utter insignificance compared with the great question of patriotism, compared with the duty of all of us to act with stern and whole-hearted loyalty to this mighty republic, and to serve the interests of the republic and the ideals which make the republic the hope of the future of mankind.  I come before you Republicans of Maine to speak only as an American to his fellow Americans, as a patriot speaking to patriots.  I make my appeal only in the interest of patriotism.  In other words, I make precisely such an appeal as I should have made here in Maine 55 years ago, in the days of the Civil War.  We stand for the nation now as Lincoln stood for the nation then.  We stand against Germany now as he stood against slavery then.  In those days the men who demanded peace or kept demanding conferences to talk about peace were the foes of the Union and of liberty.  Today they are the foes of liberty and civilization.  There is but one way to get a righteous and lasting peace and that is to beat Germany to her knees.  Let us refuse to go into a joint debate on peace with the Potsdam people.  Let us take our stand on that part of the President's speech of December in which he said, " This intolerable thing, this menace of combined intrigue and force, which we now see so clearly as the German power, a thing without conscience or honor or capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed;" and let us forget the peace parleyings of February; for these were inconsistent with the words just quoted.

The Republicans of Maine and the Republicans of the nation generally have in this crisis subordinated all other questions to their devotion to the nation.  Not in all our history has any political party when in opposition shown as fine, as whole-hearted and as completely disinterested patriotism as has been shown by the Republican party, especially by its representatives in the Senate and Congress of the United States during the year and two months now closing.  Their devotion has been to the interests of America.  They have sought to serve their party only by making it serve America; and they have realized that by serving America they could best serve the free nations of mankind.  There have been a few exceptions, but as a whole the record of the Republicans in Congress during this period entitled them to the support of all the people of the United States who put patriotism and service and undivided loyalty to the country before all other considerations at this time.  They have resisted all temptations to seek partisan advantage at the expense of the country; indeed, their only failing has been a reluctance to do what ought to be done, if the doing of it might lead even to untruthful charges of partisanship.  Such a record is unique, not merely in our history, but so far as I know in the history of any other nation with representative government in a crisis like this.

The Republicans, as soon as on January 31, 1917, Germany practically declared war upon us, abandoned instantly all thought of partisanship and from that moment rendered zealous service to the whole people, and to the administration at every point where it represented the whole people.  In every important matter vital to the successful prosecution of the war, it is an actual fact that on the whole the Republicans furnished a larger proportion of supporters for the administration's policies than were furnished by the Congress as a whole.

In consequence of this attitude the record of Congress during this year and two months has been one of unparalleled service to the country.  There have been during this period very grave faults and shortcomings and delays in governmental work.  But they were not due to the action of Congress; and the action of the Republicans in Congress was consistently designed to correct them, and was sometimes successful in securing at least their partial correction.  I believe that the people of our country recognize this faithful stewardship of their interests.

We are pledged to the hilt as a nation to put this war through without flinching until we win the peace of overwhelming victory.  We owe this to our own honor and to our future well-being.  We owe it to the liberty-loving peoples of mankind.  We are pledged to secure for each well-behaved nation the right to control its own destinies and to live undominated and unharmed by others so long as it does not harm others.

This is the people's war.     It is not the President's war.  It is not Congress' war.  It is the war of the people of the United States for the honor and welfare of America and of mankind.  It is the bounden duty of the Republican party to support every public servant, from the President down, insofar as he does good and efficient work in waging the war or helping wage the war, and to oppose him exactly to the extent of his failure to do such work; for our loyalty is to the people of the United States, and to every public servant in exact accordance with the way in which he serves the public.  It is the duty of the Republican party to stand like a rock against inefficiency, incompetence, hesitation and delay no less than against any lukewarmness in serving the common cause of ourselves and our allies.  Sixty odd years ago Abraham Lincoln set our duty before us when he said: “Stand with anybody that stands right.  Stand with him while he is right and part with him when he goes wrong.  In both cases you are right.  To desert such ground is to be less than a man, less than an American." Just as it is our duty to support every public servant who goes right, it is our equally emphatic duty fearlessly to oppose him when he goes wrong, and therefore to tell the exact truth about him whether he is right or whether he is wrong.  To support a public servant who does wrong is as profoundly unpatriotic as to oppose a public servant who does right.  To take any other position is to show a servile mind.  Whoever takes any other position shows that he is not fit to be a free man in a free land.  The public servant who does not approve such a position is not seeking to be the servant of the people, but the master of the people.

We are in this war because of special and intolerable grievance against Germany; because in addition to many other misdeeds she for two years followed a course of deliberate murder of our unarmed and unoffending citizens, men, women and children; because her continuous and contemptuous maltreatment of our country rendered it imperative for us to go to war in order to ensure our future safety against such maltreatment by any foreign nation.  Our first duty is to beat down Germany in order to save ourselves and our belongings, in order to save our women and our children and our homes.  We fight for the future of our own dear land, but we are also in the war because in common with all civilized mankind we have been outraged by Germany's callous and cynical brutalities against well-behaved weaker nations.  This is a war on behalf of treaties as against scraps of paper; for the freedom of the sea against world enslavement (for Germany has been the real foe of freedom of the seas); it is a war on behalf of small well-behaved nations against the domineering and infinitely cruel arrogance of the brutal and scientific German militarism; a war for helpless women and children against murderers; a war for civilization against barbarism, honor against infamy, right against wrong; a war against the powers of darkness, of death and of hell.  As for our own special grievance it is far more serious than any grievance for which ever before we had to fight a foreign foe.  Germany has wronged us far more seriously than Great Britain wronged us during the years that led up to our Declaration of Independence.  No man can advocate submission to Germany now without proving false to the spirit of the men of 1776.  Germany has waged war with utter faithlessness and with inhuman cruelty.  The black infamy of her conduct toward Belgium has no parallel in civilized history since the close of the dreadful wars of religion in the seventeenth century.  Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey have been her vassal states.  Turkey has behaved toward the Armenian and Syrian Christians and toward the Jews in her dominions and toward the Arabs with an even more revolting cruelty than Germany herself has shown.  Unless we war on Turkey precisely as we war on Germany, we show that we are insincere when we say that we wish to make the world safe for democracy.  Nor can we keep our promise to make the world safe for democracy unless the subject races in Austria are given a real and not a nominal freedom.  We are bound as a nation now to remember that fine phrases, that bold and lofty declarations of purpose, are of worth only as they are turned into brave deeds by men who are both strong and true.  Rhetoric which is not made good, rhetoric which has in it any element of hypocrisy and insincerity is an evil and not a desirable thing.  Let us keep steadfastly in mind St.  Paul's warning when he bade the Romans beware of those who “by good words and fair speeches deceive the hearts of the simple." We of this nation must now prove our truth by our endeavor.  We can not with honor accept any inconclusive peace.  Our aim is to beat Germany and the allies of Germany, and we can not abandon a single one of our allies, as long as that ally is true to the common cause.

The events of the past three and a half years have brought home to us in startling fashion the truth that in this country the man who is not wholly American and nothing but American is a traitor to America.  There can be no such thing as a fifty-fifty allegiance.  There are no better Americans in this land than the Americans of German blood, who are Americans and nothing else.  It is a shame and a disgrace not to treat these men precisely as all other Americans are treated.  They are fit to serve in our armies in any position from the major-general down; they are fit to hold any position in civil life from president down.  But the men of German blood who have tried to be both Germans and Americans are not Americans at all, but traitors to America and tools and servants of Germany against America.  Organizations like the German-American Alliance have served Germany against America.  Hereafter we must see that the melting pot really does melt.  There should be but one language in this country, the English language.  We require of all immigrants who come hither to become citizens that they shall specifically forswear allegiance to the land from which they came, as well as swear allegiance to this land.  Hereafter we must see to it that this oath is observed in spirit as well as in letter; and that the men born here, of whatever blood, and whether their ancestors have lived in this land for generations or came here from some foreign land, are brought up as Americans and as nothing else, speaking as their own tongue the speech of Washington and Lincoln, and knowing loyalty to but one flag, the flag that floats over our armies now, the flag that was carried by our fathers when in their days the storm of war blew over the land, the flag that was borne by their fathers' fathers up the red heights of danger to the summits of glory and honor.

If we are men and not children, if we have the right stuff of manhood in us, we will look facts in the face, however ugly they be, and profit by them.  We must face the fact of our shameful unpreparedness before this war, and of the inefficiency with which for the first year and two months this war has been waged by us.  Many of our State governments have done extraordinarily good work; but the mismanagement at Washington has been such as to cause all good patriots grave concern.  The policy of unpreparedness, of watchful waiting, has borne most evil fruit.  For two and a half years before we drifted stern foremost into the war we were given such warning as never before in history was given a great nation.  Yet we failed in the smallest degree to profit by the warning, and we drifted into war unarmed and helpless, without having taken the smallest step to harden our huge but soft and lazy strength.  In consequence, although over a year has passed, we are still in a military sense impotent to render real aid to the allies or be a real menace to Germany.  Had we done our plain duty and prepared in advance we probably would not have had to go to war at all, and certainly would have ended the war almost as soon as we entered it.  If we had even begun seriously to fight last September Russia would probably not have been broken, and victory would now be in sight.  Von Hindenburg and von Tirpitz were reported as saying when we went to war that we would be a negligible factor in the military situation for 18 months.  Fourteen months have since gone by, and for these 14 months the facts have borne out their prophecy.  We utterly failed in our duty to build without an hour's delay a great fleet of cargo ships.  We have put a gallant little army on the other side, but it was a very small army and entirely unequipped for modern war.  After 14 months this great and wealthy nation has only been able to put in the field an army less numerous than poor, wrecked Belgium or ruined Servia has in the field, an army but little more numerous than Portugal has sent to the front.  Nor is this all — we had to send that army abroad absolutely unequipped with the special weapons of modern warfare.  No army can take the field nowadays without abundance of field artillery, of autorifles and airplanes.  Yet we have not as yet been able to put any field guns, but a negligible number of autorifles, not any aeroplanes of our own into action; and we had only an insufficient number of rifles and of heavy siege or fortress guns.  We have had to get from our hard-pressed allies, from the war-torn nations, to whose help we nominally came, weapons with which we could fight our own battles.  We have been able to prepare at all during the year and a quarter that has passed only because England and France protected us with their ships and with the bodies of their brave sons.  Even yet our men at the front form but a tiny fraction of the allies' army; and even this tiny fraction can serve at the front at all only because our hard-pressed allies give us the weapons of war without which we could not wage war at all.  With our immense wealth and individual energy, I believe that in spite of governmental blundering we shall soon get into better position.  But hitherto, for nearly a year and a quarter, this has been our position.  It is an ignoble position.  No true American can be content to have us hold such a position and least of all can he be content to have us attempt to cover it by untruthful boasting.

Our failure has been due in part to grave incompetence since Germany forced us into war.  But primarily it is due to our utter folly in failing to prepare during the preceding two and a half years, when the warning was written across the whole horizon in letters of blood and of fire.  Our first business now is to put through the war, and therefore to speed up the war.  Make our effort in ships, men, guns, airplanes felt abroad at the earliest possible moment.  Let us realize the grim truth that unless our men now fight triumphantly beside our allies, some day or other we shall have to fight at home, despairingly and without allies.  Our resources are so immense that in the end we shall begin to count in spite of all our governmental shortcomings; but as long as we think of the war as 3,000 miles away, and as long as some of the most important divisions of the executive branch of the government continue almost chemically pure of efficient organization, our strength will be exerted at a terrible disadvantage.  War is won by brains and steel, not by kid gloves and fine phrases.

Let us begin to do our immediate duty by both speeding up the war and making ready the ships and the men necessary to win no matter how long the war takes.  Let the ships be built by working night and day, three shifts in the 24 hours.  Let us prepare for a three years' war and begin now to make ready an army of five million men (and the best way to begin is to introduce at once universal military training for all our young men between 19 and 21, it being understood that they will not go to war until they are 21).  All our other activities in making arms, ammunition, airplanes and other war machines can be made to synchronize with this.

Our next duty, a duty the performance of which should begin at this moment, is to introduce the policy of permanent preparedness.  Never again must we be caught so utterly unprepared as we have been caught this time.  For myself, personally, I hold that there is but one efficient method, and that is to introduce as our permanent national policy the principle of basing manhood suffrage on manhood service; on universal service in peace and universal service in war; and therefore on the military training of all our young men in time of peace so that they may be ready if the nation calls to perform the tasks of war.  If ye do not work ye shall not eat! And the man who is not prepared and willing to defend his country in time of war is not fit to help manage her affairs either in time of peace or in time of war.  Such preparation would not invite war.  On the contrary it would be the surest guarantee against war.  Switzerland is the most democratic of all Republics; she has been free from foreign war for a century; although in the center of the maelstrom she has kept out of this war; and she owes her immunity from war solely to the fact that all her citizens were trained to be soldiers while peace still existed; that she prepared in advance against war, instead of confusedly trying to prepare after war had begun.

For nearly two and a half years before this war came the professional pacifists, and every politician who wished to cater to the pacifist vote and to get the support of easy-going, pleasure-loving materialists, and of sordid money-getting materialists, kept assuring us that if we would only keep unprepared we would keep out of war.  Well, we tried the experiment.  We kept unprepared.  And we got into war.  The pacifists did not keep us out of the war.  They got us into war.  They merely kept us unprepared to do our instant duty in the war.

And friends, be on your guard against these same apostles of weakness and folly when peace comes.  They will then tell you that this is the last great war.  Less than four years ago these same men were telling you that no great war could ever again happen.  They will tell you that to keep unprepared is to avoid war.  Well, that's just what they told you for two and a half years after the great war broke out, and you see for yourselves the result.  They will tell you that they can make paper treaties and agreements and guarantees by which brutal and unscrupulous men will have their souls so softened that weak and timid men won't have anything to fear and that brave and honest men won't have to prepare to defend themselves.  Well, we have seen that all such treaties are worth less than scraps of paper when it becomes to the interest of powerful and ruthless militarist nations to disregard them.  In our own country just prior to the outbreak of the great war, and for some months after the war, our government, through the state department, was busy signing dozens of ridiculous little peace treaties and in solemnly giving to the signers small metal plowshares made of condemned cavalry sabers.  And this ludicrous monkey-work went on at the very time that Germany had trampled Belgium and Northern France and Servia into bloody mire, and when those engaged in the fatuous work owed their safety at that very moment only to the fact that the English and French fleets and armies held back Germany from world dominion.  After the war is over all these foolish pacifist creatures will again raise their piping voices against preparedness and in favor of patent devices for maintaining peace without effort.  Let our people be on their guard against them.  [Let us enter into every reasonable agreement which bids fair to minimize .the chances of war and to circumscribe the area of war; but let us remember that all such agreements when tested will prove what the German chancellor called them, " scraps of paper," unless back of them lies the resolute strength of a nation which loves peace, but which loves righteousness more than peace, and which has prepared in advance to defend its rights.  Let us enter into the treaties by all means, merely taking care not to promise anything we can not and do not seriously intend to perform.  But let us also remember that it is a hundred times more important for us to prepare our strength for our own defense than to enter into any of these peace treaties; and that if we thus prepare our strength for our own defense we shall minimize the chances of war as no paper treaties can possibly minimize them; and we shall thus make our views effective for peace and justice in the world at large as in no other way they can be made effective.

Friends, it is not only our duty to be prepared against war.  It is if possible even more our duty to prepare for peace.  And we are almost as unprepared in one respect as the other.  Moreover, in the affairs of peace, as in the affairs of war, let us as grown men, as serious citizens of a great republic, impatiently brush aside the silly sham-trust in rhetoric as a substitute for action.  It is, I suppose, a besetting sin of all mankind, and certainly of mankind as we see it around us, always to endeavor to hide ugly action, or ugly inaction, behind a cloak of lofty-sounding sentimentality, and to endeavor to justify and atone for the refusal to look ugly truths in the face by using fine phrases as an anodyne for a partially aroused conscience.

We can not afford any longer to continue our present industrial and social system, or rather no-system of every-man-for-himself and devil-take-the-hindmost.  We can not any longer afford to cover our inaction by Fourth of July oratory in praise to ourselves.  Least of all can we afford to accept sham remedies which would merely make our condition worse instead of better.  What is needed is to fix definite ideals and then to try to realize them by deeds; to endeavor practically and cautiously but resolutely by the actual service test, by actual experiment to find out just how to translate these ideals into working actualities; and therefore to understand the necessity of refusing to accept glittering half truths and of painfully endeavoring to reduce real truths to action.  That great citizen of Maine, the late Tom Reed, used to be fond of saying that nothing was easier to formulate, nothing more attractive to shallow-thinking persons, and nothing more mischievous when reduced to action, than a half truth; whereas a whole truth is always one of the most difficult things to state and one of the most difficult things actually to reduce to action, while nevertheless it is indispensable that it should be so reduced.

It is our business as a nation seriously to face our industrial conditions, to realize that we can not without folly permit them to go on unchanged, and yet that we are worse than fools if we permit them to be changed for evil.  Therefore we must shun equally the bourbon reactionaries who invite disaster by refusing to face and grapple with the needs of the hour, and the sinister demagogues and loose-minded visionaries who preach a red folly that would bring us to even worse disaster.  It will not help us in the least to have avoided Scylla if we land on Charybdis.  Unless we sail equally far from both we shall sooner or later be wrecked.

The great Russian commonwealth offers a lamentable example of the effect of following the opposite course and of vibrating between the tyranny of an autocracy and the tyranny of a mob.  The autocracy of the Romanoffs united extreme incapacity with complete despotism.  It could not permanently control the people and it kept them utterly unfit to control themselves.  It was overthrown.  After seething tumult the Bolsheviki came to the fore.  We can all sympathize with the well-meaning, ignorant men whose past pitifully forbade their acting with wisdom in the present and who were therefore ready-made followers of the Bolshevist leaders.  But our sympathy must not blind us to the fact that these leaders led them into the abyss.  The Bolsheviki have no more to teach America than the Romanoffs themselves.  The Romanoffs announced that they stood for order and in the long run they proved the most fatal enemies of order.  The Bolsheviki announced that they stood for liberty, and during the last six months they have been, with the exception of the autocracy of the Hohenzollerns, the most dangerous of all the enemies of liberty.  In international matters they proved false to all liberty-loving nations, and they betrayed their own country, and sought to betray all the free nations, into the hands of Germany.  They were first the tools and allies, and then the dupes and victims, of Prussian militarism.  Within their own boundaries they have brought Russia to the verge of complete dissolution.  Their government was a squalid despotism.  They trampled freedom under foot.  They were no less the enemies of human rights than of property rights.  There is in this country just as little room for the analogues of the Bolsheviki as there is for the analogues of the Romanoffs.  If we are wise we shall not permit ourselves to be withheld from a forward movement by the Romanoffs or our own social and industrial system, and neither shall we permit ourselves to be plunged into the abyss of fathomless disaster into which we would be plunged if we followed the American Bolsheviki.

I am not blind to the fact that there must be a proper moral standard or no material success will avail.  But it is just as true that there must be a basis of material, of economic justice and well-being or no high moral standard can permanently be maintained.  This standard of economic well-being can only exist if we use the government to secure a high degree of individual initiative and yet hold ourselves in readiness at any time to apply our collective strength, always cautiously but resolutely, to prevent the individuality of any one man from being exercised to the detriment of his fellows, and to see that the individual initiative of each shall be in fair measure used for the common good of all.  We can neither afford to be dogmatic individualists nor dogmatic in a blind belief in collectivism.  We must gradually and cautiously make the necessary changes; never making any change merely for the sake of change or without due and careful consideration, and remembering that each considerable change may work hardship if made too quickly and too sweepingly; but refusing to rest content with any policy of mere obstruction.  We must apply these principles alike to the farmer and to the working man and to the business man — to the men who in the aggregate make up the vast majority of our citizenship.

It is a mere truism to say that the prosperity of the farmer stands as basic to the prosperity of the nation.  On the whole, in every great crisis in the past, the farmer has stood as preeminently the arch-typical American, who in peace and in war took the lead in the work without which the republic must succumb.  In our country the typical farmer has been the man who owned the land which he himself, with his own hands, assisted by his sons and by one or two hired men, tilled — and this is the farmer of whom I especially speak.  We can not afford to have him supplanted by the man who merely holds his land as a tenant for an absentee owner.  We can not afford to have his farm absorbed by a big landowner.  Yet in sections of our country the tenant farmer has tended to increase ominously at the expense of the man who owns his farm, and in other sections there has been an equally ominous tendency to see the big landowner, especially the big absentee land-owner, grow at the expense of the small land-owner.  Various causes have combined to bring about these results; and these causes have been due far less to any evil action than by sheer inaction.  No one remedy will by itself avail.  But there are various remedies which, taken together, can do much.  The laws must be so shaped as to secure to the tenant not merely a right to his improvements, but a certain right to the land which he cultivates, and of giving him easy means of himself acquiring it.  We should sharply discriminate in favor of the actual farmer against the moneyed man, not really a farmer at all, who buys thousands of acres and holds them for speculation.  We must in every way favor the man who lives upon the land which he owns and which he himself cultivates.  Moreover, we must render it possible for the man who works on the farm, but who does not own any land, for the hired man who is not a tramp laborer, but a hard-working, steady, industrious worker, to acquire and to own a farm for himself.  We must make it more practicable than at present for the farmer to get money at not too high a price for the actual work of production — not in order to acquire more land or for other purposes, but actually do the productive work of the farm.  By preference the money thus advanced should be by private organizations, encouraged by the government for that purpose; but if such organizations fail, then the government itself must undertake the work.

Under certain conditions of joint production it has in practice proved possible for certain purposes to get groups of farmers to guarantee one another; and this offers a mighty tangible way of becoming one's brother's keeper — of course when, and only when, the conditions make it practicable.  If you go on a man's bond to permit him to get a hog, you take an intelligent interest in his getting the right kind of a hog and that he himself is the right kind of a man to take care of the hog!

As in all cases whatsoever of social and industrial reform, what is needed is actual betterment by action, actual betterment in practice; we should welcome every experiment, and then profit by a large scale application of the lessons taught by such experiment.  In California such experiment has practically been tried in connection with aid given by the State to encourage fit persons to take up land in the irrigated sections; insistence being laid upon getting only the right kind of practical farmer, while the State secures to him the advantages that can only come from the outlay of capital.  The principle thus successfully tried is capable of widespread application.

Above all, everything should be done to encourage cooperative work among our farmers.  The business man and the working man have both grown to realize during the last two generations that each is strengthened by unity with his fellows.  There must be no improper discrimination against any man because of his choice to work by himself.  There will always be plenty of positions in which individualistic work is best.  But more and more we shall find that normally men can do best by working in combination with one another.  This especially applies to the farmer.  It is a slow process to learn.  Much has been done among the farmers in certain parts of Europe along the line of cooperation — cooperation in marketing their products; cooperation even in purchasing what they need, and cooperation in more than one matter of home management.  The state should encourage such cooperation, and where necessary cautiously supplement it by governmental action.  Standing as a separate unit the farmer can not completely hold his own and get full and proper reward for his work in the face of great business concerns.  But cooperative organizations of farmers if wisely handled, and if they are willing to accept and to pay for the proper leadership, can hold their own with any of the great business concerns with which they have to deal, can eliminate such middlemen as are unnecessary, and can use the services of those middlemen who fill a great and useful function in such manner as to be of benefit to both, and of benefit to the public at large.  Every such powerful organization of farmers, like every other organization of our citizens, must while safe-guarding their own interests never forget their duty to stand with disinterested and unselfish loyalty by the whole commonwealth.  The one union to which all of us belong, and to which our paramount allegiance is owing, is that union which is known as the American republic.

Let us steadily keep in mind the one great fact that nothing must be allowed to interfere with ample production.  There must be no limitation of production.  This means that there must be no attempt by the government at price-fixing which shall result to the detriment of the farmer.  Any experiment in price-fixing, and especially in maximum price-fixing, should be entered into only most cautiously, and only when there has been such thorough canvass of the situation as to enable us to guarantee that good and not harm will result.  The price-fixing by the, government during the past year has worked nothing but mischief.  It has slowed up production; it has aggravated existing inequalities by making some prices too high and some too low.  In the winter that has just closed we have seen great suffering, especially among the poor, on account of a coal famine which was in part caused by very injudicious and improper price-fixing.  A year ago our government should have undertaken to put a premium upon the greatest possible production by the farmer.  It failed to do so and some of its actions positively tended to reduce production.  Such limitation of production is an invitation to calamity.  This war means shortage of food everywhere, and it is worse than folly, both for our own sakes and for the sakes of our allies, if we fail in every way to stimulate farm production (and all other production necessary for winning the war as well) at this time.  The farmers of this country, the men who have for years earned their livelihood by tilling the soil, and who are not merely enthusiastic amateurs in the matter, are those to whom we must look for the immense bulk of production from the soil.  It is they who must grow the foodstuffs upon which the rest of us depend.  Everything should be done to aid them.  Most certainly no obstacle should be put in their way by the government, and the government should not permit any other person to put obstacles in their way.

The questions of business and labor can not be considered wholly apart from one another.  Unless business is prosperous it is out of the question that the country can prosper and, therefore, out of the question that labor can prosper.  On the other hand, it is no less true that the prosperity may come in altogether improper proportion to business men at the expense of those whom they serve and those who work for them.  We have to avoid equally the foolish creature who fails to see that unless business prospers there can not be general prosperity, and the equally foolish creature who fails to see that it is our duty collectively to take such steps as are necessary in order that the prosperity may be passed around with reasonable equity.

Our aim must be to help business, not hamper business.  The Sherman law at first did good for it stopped the uncontrolled riot of the big business men who wished to be a law unto themselves and to absorb all business, and it definitely established the supremacy of the national government over them.  But for the last 10 years it has done serious mischief, far more mischief than it has done good.  It is foolish to object to large scale business.  The telegraph and telephone, steam and electricity, have rendered large scale business an absolute necessity, if this country is to be kept abreast of the progressive countries of the world.  And in international relations it is only large scale business that can secure for America its proper share of world business.  In internal relations on the whole there should be less difficulty in securing a high wage and proper treatment for labor from large scale business than from other kinds of business, for the simple reason that it is the prosperous business which has the prosperity to share with its employee.  This seems a sufficiently obvious truth.  But in practice there are plenty of demagogues and plenty of timid or self-seeking politicians who forget it.  In business, as in farming and in the labor world, our aim should be to secure cooperation and control; cooperation among business men, subject to control by the government.  We should accept the fact that big business deserves fair treatment and should not be penalized; but that it should not be Jeft unregulated, uncontrolled.  The nation must be the master of the corporation; not in the least to destroy the corporation; on the contrary, to help it and to see that an ample reward comes to those who invest in it and who manage it; but to see also that no injustice is done competitors, that the public is served, and that the labor men, the working men, are treated as in effect partners who must have their full share of the prosperity.

In this war no profiteering should be allowed.  It should not be stopped, however, by hampering production.  Production should be encouraged in every way.  But the excess profits should be taxed on a heavily increasing scale (which, incidentally, can not be done to a fully satisfactory degree so long as production is kept down by the kind of price-fixing that has been attempted).  All corporations doing an interstate or foreign business, which means all big corporations, should, by a system of license or of incorporation, come under national control, being made subject to some national board at Washington and required to comply with the regulations established by this administrative board in compliance with congressional action; and so long as the corporations thus comply they should be left free from the operations of the Sherman law.

The law and regulations should be designed to carry out the purpose above expressed.

Business can not be permanently successful nor can the commonwealth itself permanently stand on a safe basis in a political democracy like ours unless we conscientiously strive to make the working man in some real sense a partner in the business in which he works; that is, to make this an industrial as well as a political democracy.  Democracy can succeed neither in peace nor in war save through leadership.  The effort to level down instead of leveling up represents that odious envy of success which is but another manifestation of the same evil spirit which in certain very successful men shows itself as an odious arrogance toward the less successful.  The arrogance and the envy are merely different sides of the same evil shield.  In striving to secure a square deal for the working man, to secure for him an increase in his share of the profits of, and gradually a share along certain lines in the control of the business, we must keep steadily in mind these truths or we shall cause more harm than we remedy.

The government at Washington has wholly failed to do its duty in connection with labor, and it is to this failure that a large part of the calamitous breakdown in the shipping program is due.  To say that we are behind in the ship program is to describe disaster in the terms of an accident.  It is now apparent that the promise made a year ago as to the shipbuilding program will not be more than a third fulfilled; and this will immeasurably cramp our effort abroad; and for the last few months trouble has primarily lain with the labor situation, and this in turn has been largely, and probably mainly, due to the government's haphazard lack of a settled and well thought-out plan.  The government failed efficiently to regulate profiteering by our own capitalists, or to discriminate between those of our own capitalists who did well and those who did ill (a situation which is, of course, merely aggravated by any abandonment of the tariff or other action to the interest of profiteering by foreign capitalists and manufacturers who can use the underpaid labor of overseas against our own industrial workers).  This invited labor troubles; and the government then feared to deal efficiently with the evil conditions which its own previous inefficiency had invited.  England, on the contrary, by dealing fairly and fearlessly with both sides, has avoided nine-tenths of the labor troubles we have had and has been able to accumulate incredible quantities of war material.  Our government has let both capitalists and labor unions use the war merely as a means to gain advantage in the struggle with each other.  Such an attitude, on either side, in this stupendous struggle for human rights and human safety is treachery to this country and to the whole human race.  Fundamentally it is due to failure in duty by the government; and an aroused public opinion must compel the government to do its duty, or else we shall find that America has entered the war too late, and has proved unequal to her task.

The immediate need while the war lasts, and while it is necessary in every way to speed up production, is for the government so to act as regards every industry connected with the war as to secure the necessary reward for the capitalists and yet to stop all excessive and improper profiteering; so as to secure an ample reward for the wage-worker, and also to insist that for the full wage a full day's work be done.  In the past too often capitalists in the name of efficiency have speeded up the work of the laborers to the top notch and themselves absorbed almost all the profits.  Naturally this has produced a revolt in which the workman has sought to protect himself against exploitation by limiting production and by reducing the work of all to the level of the work of the least efficient.  We can not accept such attitude by either side as proper.  We have a right to insist upon the utmost efficiency.  But a due proportion of the reward for the efficiency must go to the wage worker; and he must have some representation in the business which will satisfy honest inquiry on his part that justice is being done.  Here I do not have to ask that we proceed merely on theory.  At the moment the Indiana State Council of Defense, under the presidency of Mr.  Hays, for example, illustrates precisely what I mean.  The heads of labor organizations work on that board with representatives of the government, and with representatives of capital.  They are given their full share of the management, and all the details of the work have been laid bare to them; and they have accepted their full share of the responsibility and have worked on exactly the same basis as their colleagues.  In all war business concerns the government, as an incident to encourage the business and yet to supervise and control it, must hereafter see that the wage worker has his right guaranteed to him and that in return the full performance of his duties is expected.  He must be given the same right to organize as capital has, and the same right to bargain that the corporation has, and exactly as the corporation that does ill should be held to strict account, so the labor organization should hereafter be expected itself to give the fullest measure of service, and while jealously safeguarding the safety, of its members to do so by building up and not by pulling down the efficiency and productiveness of the business.  The corporation should not be allowed to forbid the organization of the workers; first-class wages and working conditions, and if possible some share in any profits should be assured; and in return the organized workers should neither be allowed to drive out non-organized workers nor permitted to shirk the job.  The laboring man, the wage worker, through a system of old-age insurance and insurance against accidents and involuntary unemployment must have his future made certain.  His housing and living conditions must be made such as are computable with self-respecting citizenship.  He must be given the amplest wage consistent with seeing business develop to its full possibilities.  The state must when necessary intervene in the interest of the commonwealth as a whole to see that no wrong is done by either side.  The wage worker has a right to all these things and it is to the profound interest of the commonwealth that he should have them.  It is to the interest of the commonwealth that collectively and individually the wage workers should be in a position of economic safety or economic advantage; that they should have money in the savings banks and the power and dignity that come when men are relieved from the sense of precariousness in their livelihood.  In order to achieve this economic power and dignity for the worker himself and in order that the community as a whole shall profit to the full by the ample reward, this ample reward should and must be given the working man.  When he speeds up his work the employer must not be permitted to usurp the benefit.  But the working man must himself do his full job.  If a coal miner, instead of working eight hours a day at high wages, works four hours and loafs four; if a man in an industrial plant works only three days and idles three because he can get as much money for three days as he formerly could for six; if a riveter in a shipyard drives but half the number of rivets he formerly did — why, all alike are proving false to themselves, to their fellow workmen and to the country.  In such case their offense is different in kind from but in degree precisely as bad as the offense of the profiteering capitalists; and they are just as unworthy citizens as he is.  The law of a successful democracy must be the law of service and of reward measurably proportionate to the service rendered; service from the great and service from the small, service in peace and service in war.  Let us employ our collective strength through the government so far as it is humanly possible to secure justice to each man.  Let us also demand from each man service, not as a favor but as a right, expected by, and where possible exacted by, the commonwealth.

This should be our ideal while the war lasts.  Substantially, and changing it as actual experience — the only true test — shows change to be necessary, it should be our ideal after the war.  “Hands" must hereafter be treated as hands with brains and hearts, with dignity and vision, tack of them.  Hereafter working men must in a very real sense be treated as partners.  They must have their seats at the council board.  They, and all the rest of us must all work together, to make this country a good place to live in for the children of all of us.  A square deal for every man! And for every woman; and for the little children.  An eight-hour law should be the general rule; and generally with provision for a bonus on the basis of individual production.  Overwork, underpay, bad housing, must all be provided against.  Class antagonism must yield to mutual respect and therefore to mutual forbearance and consideration.  Condescension and patronage by the capitalist must yield to comradeship and partnership; and in his turn the working man must treat with scorn and abhorrence the envy and mean hatred which have made the I.  W.  W.  and Germanized Socialists of our own land, like the Bolsheviki abroad, traitors to the great cause of orderly liberty, of self-respecting duty-performing democracy; of the cause of freedom and humanity.

Friends, it would neither be possible nor desirable for me to try to set forth in detail the governmental methods through which I think it is necessary for our great republic to work out its salvation.  All I can do and all it is desirable that I should do is to roughly outline, to set before you, the principles that should govern our actions.  This I have done.

But while it is evident that if we are to face the new era with success we must try new methods, it is also evident that we must stand by the old homely virtues that in their sum make up the standard of individual and national character.  No organization, no legislation, no possible governmental action will avail if the man does not have the right stuff in him.  Down at the bottom the commonwealth must rest on the character of the individual citizen; and this he must himself develop, and if he fails to develop it he must not seek to throw the blame on somebody else.  The action of the government must normally be of such type as to tell against that degeneracy of character which comes from habitually lying down on the government instead of trusting primarily to a hardy and virile self-reliance.  There must be seeming exceptions to this rule, where we use our collective power to prevent individual wrong-doing or individual suffering; but even these must be developed from, as a fundamental basis, the doctrines of the Declaration of Independence, the principles of (Washington and Lincoln, rather as to individual rights and duties, and not from the theories of the Prussian autocracy, which has adopted Marxism as a staff for absolutism, and which treats man as made for the state, and not the state as made for man.

We must work in the spirit of Washington and Lincoln, and this we can only do, if we apply that spirit to the issues of the present day.  It is in peace as it is in war.  Washington's Continentals, with their flint-lock muskets and short-range cannon, would have been helpless before the men in blue and gray who bore the weapons of the Civil War, and the weapons that were formidable in the days of Grant and Lee would now count for no more than stone-headed axes against the tremendous machinery of modern warfare.  But the spirit that now conquers in war is the same as it was in 1776 and in 1865.  Weapons change, but the soul of the man who is to handle the weapon does not change.  The men under Pershing reflect honor on this republic precisely because they have those qualities of courage, hardihood, resourcefulness and energy which were possessed by the men who followed Sheridan and Stonewall Jackson, by the men who followed Mad Anthony Wayne and Light Horse Harry Lee.  So it is with the great and complex machinery of our industrial and social life.  The simple governmental processes which sufficed in the days of Washington and even in the days of Lincoln are as utterly inadequate today in peace as the flint-lock of Bunker Hill and the smoothbore muskets of Bull Run would be in war.  We can not afford to tolerate flint-lock methods of warfare in time of war, or flint-lock methods of government for meeting the problems of industry in time of peace.  We need new weapons.  But we need the old spirit back of the new weapons.  We need to show the same combination of idealism and of hard-headed common sense, of indignation against wrong and sober caution against being misled into foolish action against wrong, that our forefathers have shown in both the great national crises of the past.  We need to show generosity of heart and also soundness of head.  We need courage, we need common sense — for without courage and common sense we shall not work out our salvation.  But even more we need to show in our relations with one another here within our own boundaries and in our relations with the rest of the nations of mankind, that quality for the lack of which no other qualities atone, that quality — itself the sum of many qualities — lacking which no nation can ever attain to true greatness; the quality of character — character, which neither does wrong nor suffers wrong; character which will rather do right to its own hurt than profit by the evil done others.

Let us judge each man on his worth as a man; for the line of cleavage between good men and bad men runs through every class.  There are some bad men in every rank of life.  Yet I believe that in every rank of life the good men far outnumber the bad.  Trouble generally comes from failure to understand one another, and therefore failure to sympathize with one another's needs and feelings and purposes.  Let us try to look at all the puzzling questions that arise with our brother's eyes as well as with our own.  Lincoln laid down the great needs for us to meet.  This is the people's government — our government, friends, yours and mine.  It must be a government of the people; for everybody must be governed, must be controlled, and if there is not self-control there will in the end be alien control, if we do not govern ourselves somebody else will surely govern us.  It must be government by the people; by all of us; not merely by some of us.  It must be government for the people; again for all the people, not merely some of us; not for a mob, nor for a plutocracy, but for all decent, well-behaved men and women.  Woe to those who would sunder us, brother from brother, along the lines either of envy or of arrogance!

We can secure among ourselves the necessary generosity and forbearance and pride in the performance of duty, we can in international matters show combined strength and justice only if in our hearts and with all our hearts we believe and act on the doctrine that righteousness exalteth a nation.