The use of this text or audio material is subject to the TR American Patriot user agreement located at: TR American Patriot.com 

All of the concluding public addresses made by Theodore Roosevelt that appear in this volume were furnished by his literary executor, and his final articles contributed to, and copyrighted by, the Metropolitan Magazine are reprinted by permission.  For permission to include in this volume the articles entitled, Fear God and Take Your Own Part, Uncle Sam's Only Friend is Uncle Sam, Murder on the High Seas, Socialism Versus Social Reform, The Farmer: The Corner-Stone of Civilization, The Hun Within Our Gates and Nine Tenths of Wisdom is Being Wise in Time, thanks are due to the George H.  Doran Company by whom they are copyrighted.  Three addresses entitled Progressive Cause Greater Than Any Individual, A Confession of Faith and Woman's Place in Politics, made during the Presidential campaign of 1912, were selected from manuscripts Colonel Roosevelt furnished to E.  H.  Youngman by whom they are copyrighted
THE EDITOR.

NEWER ROOSEVELT MESSAGES

Speech or Document 1

PROGRESSIVE CAUSE GREATER THAN ANY INDIVIDUAL

FROM   AN   ADDRESS DELIVERED   AT   MILWAUKEE, WIS.,   OCTOBER   14,   1912

Just before entering the Auditorium at Milwaukee, an attempt was made on Colonel Roosevelt's life.  The speech which follows is from a stenographic report, differing considerably from the prepared manuscript.

FRIENDS, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible.  I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.  But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet — there is where the bullet went through — and it probably saved me from it going into my heart.  The bullet is in me now, so that I can not make a very long speech, but I will try my best.

And now, friends, I want to take advantage of this incident and say a word of solemn warning to my fellow countrymen.     First of all, I want to say this about myself: I have altogether too important things to think of to feel any concern over my own death; and now I can not speak to you insincerely within five minutes of being shot.  I am telling you the literal truth when I say that my concern is for many other things.  It is not in the least for my own life.  I want you to understand that I am ahead of the game, anyway.  No man has had a happier life than I have led; a happier life in every way.  I have been able to do certain things that I greatly wished to do, and I am interested in doing other things.  I can tell you with absolute truthfulness that I am very much uninterested in whether I am shot or not.  It was just as when I was colonel of my regiment.  I always felt that a private was to be excused for feeling at times some pangs of anxiety about his personal safety, but I can not understand a man fit to be a colonel who can pay any heed to his personal safety when he is occupied as he ought to be occupied with the absorbing desire to do his duty.

I am in this cause with my whole heart and soul.  I believe that the Progressive movement is for making life a little easier for all our people; a movement to try to take the burdens off the men and especially the women and children of this country.  I am absorbed in the success of that movement.

Friends, I ask you now this evening to accept what I am saying as absolutely true, when I tell you I am not thinking of my own success.  I am not thinking of my life or of anything connected with me personally.  I am thinking of the movement.  I say this by way of introduction, because I want to say something very serious to our people and especially to the newspapers.  I don't know anything about who the man was who shot me tonight.  He was seized at once by one of the stenographers in my party, Mr.  Martin, and I suppose is now in the hands of the police.  He shot to kill.  He shot — the shot, the bullet went in here — I will show you.

I am going to ask you to be as quiet as possible for I am not able to give the challenge of the bull moose quite as loudly.  Now, I do not know who he was or what party he represented.  He was a coward.  He stood in the darkness in the crowd around the automobile, and when they cheered me, and I got up to bow, he stepped forward and shot me in the darkness.

Now, friends, of course, I do not know, as I say, anything about him; but it is a very natural thing that weak and vicious minds should be inflamed to acts of violence by the kind of awful mendacity and abuse that have been heaped upon me for the last three months by the papers in the interest of not only Mr.  Debs but of Mr.  Wilson and Mr.  Taft.

Friends, I will disown and repudiate any man of my party who attacks with such foul slander and abuse any opponent of any other party; and now I wish to say' seriously to all the daily newspapers, to the Republican, the Democratic and the Socialist parties, that they can not, month in and month out and year in and year out, make the kind of untruthful, of bitter assault that they have made and not expect that brutal, violent natures, or brutal and violent characters, especially when the brutality is accompanied by a not very strong mind; they can not expect that such natures will be unaffected by it.

Now, friends, I am not speaking for myself at all.  I give you my word, I do not care a rap about being shot; not a rap.

I have had a good many experiences in my time and this is one of them.  What I care for is my country.  I wish I were able to impress upon my people — our people, the duty to feel strongly but to speak the truth of their opponents.  I say now, I have never said one word against any opponent that I can not — on the stump — that I can not defend.  I have said nothing that I could not substantiate and nothing that I ought not to have said — nothing that I — nothing that, looking back at, I would not say again.

Now, friends, it ought not to be too much to ask that our opponents — [speaking to some one on the stage] — I am not sick at all.  I am all right.  I can not tell you of what infinitesimal importance I regard this incident as compared with the great issues at stake in this campaign, and I ask it not for my sake, not the least in the world, but for the sake of our common country, that they make up their minds to speak only the truth, and not to use the kind of slander and mendacity which if taken seriously must incite weak and violent natures to crimes of violence.  Don't you make any mistake.  Don't you pity me.  I am all right.  I am all right and you can not escape listening to the speech either.

And now, friends, this incident that has just occurred — this effort to assassinate me, emphasizes to a peculiar degree the need of this Progressive movement.  Friends, every good citizen ought to do everything in his or her power to prevent the coming of the day when we shall see in this country two recognized creeds fighting one another, when we shall see the creed of the “Have-nots " arraigned against the creed of the “Haves." When that day comes then such incidents as this tonight will be commonplace in our history.  When you make poor men — when you permit the conditions to grow such that the poor man as such will be swayed by his sense of injury against the men who try to hold what they improperly have won, when that day comes, the most awful passions will be let loose and it will be an ill day for our country.

Now, friends, what we who are in this movement are endeavoring to do is to forestall any such movement by making this a movement for justice now — a movement in which we ask all just men of generous hearts to join with the men who feel in their souls that lift upward which bids them refuse to be satisfied themselves while their countrymen and countrywomen suffer from avoidable misery.  Now, friends, what we Progressives are trying to do is to enroll rich or poor, whatever their social or industrial position, to stand together for the most elementary rights of good citizenship, those elementary rights which are the foundation of good citizenship in this great Republic of ours.

My friends are a little more nervous than I am.  Don't you waste any sympathy on me.  I have had an A-1 time in life and I am having it now.

I never in my life was in any movement in which I was able to serve with such whole-hearted devotion as in this; in which I was able to feel as I do in this that common weal.  I have fought for the good of our common country.

And now, friends, I shall have to cut short much of the speech that I meant to give you, but I want to touch on just two or three of the points.

In the first place, speaking to you here in Milwaukee, I wish to say that the Progressive Party is making its appeal to all our fellow citizens without any regard to their creed or to their birthplace.  We do not regard as essential the way in which a man worships his God or as being affected by where he was born.  We regard it as a matter of spirit and purpose.  In New York, while I was Police Commissioner, the two men from whom I got the most assistance were Jacob Riis, who was born in Denmark, and Oliver Van Briesen, who was born in Germany — both of them as fine examples of the best and highest American citizenship as you could find in any part of this country.

I have just been introduced by one of your own men here — Henry Cochems.  His grandfathers, his father and that father's seven brothers, all served in the United States army, and they entered it four years after they had come to this country from Germany.  Two of them left their lives, spent their lives, on the field of battle.  I am all right — I am a little sore.  Anybody has a right to be sore with a bullet in him.  You would find that if I was in battle now I would be leading my men just the same.  Just the same way I am going to make this speech.

At one time I promoted five men for gallantry on the field of battle.  Afterward in making some inquiries about them I found it happened that two of them were Protestants, two Catholics and one a Jew.  One Protestant came from Germany and one was born in Ireland.  I did not promote them because of their religion.  It just happened that way.  If all five of them had been Jews I would have promoted them, or if all five had been Protestants I would have promoted them; or if they had been Catholics.  In that regiment I had a man born in Italy who distinguished himself by gallantry; there was a young fellow, a son of Polish parents, and another who came here when he was a child from Bohemia, who likewise distinguished themselves; and friends, I assure you, that I was incapable of considering any question whatever, but the worth of each individual as a fighting man.  If he was a good fighting man, then I saw that Uncle Sam got the benefit from it.  That is all.

I make the same appeal in our citizenship.  I ask in our civic life that we in the same way pay heed only to the man's quality of citizenship, to repudiate as the worst enemy that we can have whoever tries to get us to discriminate for or against any man because of his creed or his birth-place.

Now, friends, in the same way I want our people to stand by one another without regard to differences of class or occupation.  I have always stood by the labor unions.  I am going to make one omission tonight..  I have prepared my speech because Mr.  Wilson had seen fit to attack me by showing up his record in comparison with mine.  But I am not going to do that tonight.  I am going to simply speak of what I myself have done and of what I think ought to be done in this country of ours.

It is essential that there should be organizations of labor.  This is an era of organization.  Capital organizes and therefore labor must organize.

My appeal for organized labor is twofold; to the outsider and the capitalist I make my appeal to treat the laborer fairly, to recognize the fact that he must organize, that there must be such organization, that the laboring man must organize for his own protection, and that it is the duty of the rest of us to help him and not hinder him ii.  organizing.  That is one-half of the appeal that I make.

Now, the other half is to the labor man him-self.  My appeal to him is to remember that as he wants justice, so he must do justice.  I want every labor man, every labor leader, every organized union man, to take the lead in denouncing crime or violence.  I want them to take the lead in denouncing disorder and in denouncing the inciting of riot; that in this country we shall proceed under the protection of our laws and with all respect to the laws, and I want the labor men to feel in their turn that exactly as justice must be done them so they must do justice.  That they must bear their duty as citizens, their duty to this great country of ours, and that they must not rest content unless they do that duty to the fullest degree.

I know these doctors when they get hold of me they will never let me go back, and there are just a few things more that I want to say to you.

And here I have got to make one comparison between Mr.  Wilson and myself, simply because he has invited it and I can not shrink from it.

Mr.  Wilson has seen fit to attack me, to say that I did not do much against the trusts when I was President.  I have got two answers to make to that.  In the first place what I did, and then I want to compare what I did while I was President and what Mr.  Wilson did not do while he was Governor.

When I took office the Anti-Trust Law was practically a dead letter and the Inter-State Commerce Law in as poor a condition.  I had to revive both laws.  I did.  I enforced both.  It will be easy enough to do now what I did then, but the reason that it is easy now is because I did it when it was hard.

Nobody was doing anything.  I found speedily that the Inter-State Commerce Law by being made more perfect could be made a most useful instrument for helping solve some of our industrial problems.  So with the Anti-Trust Law.  I speedily found that almost the only positive good achieved by such a successful lawsuit as the Northern Securities suit, for instance, was in establishing the principle that the Government was supreme over the big corporation, but that by itself that law did not accomplish any of the things that we ought to have accomplished; and so I began to fight for the amendment of the law along the lines of the Inter-State Commerce Law, and now we propose, we Progressives, to establish an inter-State commission having the same power over industrial concerns that the Inter-State Commerce Commission has over railroads, so that whenever there is in the future a decision rendered in such important matters as the recent suits against! the Standard Oil, the sugar — no not that — tobacco — Tobacco Trust — we will have a commission which will see that the decree of the court is really made effective; that it is not made a merely nominal decree.

Our opponents have said that we intend to legalize monopoly.  Nonsense.  They have legalized monopoly.  At this moment the Standard Oil and Tobacco Trust monopolies are legalized; they are being carried on under the decree of the Supreme Court.

Our proposal is really to break up monopoly.  Our proposal is to put in the law — to lay down certain requirements, and then require the commerce commission — the industrial commission — to see that the trusts live up to those requirements.  Our opponents have spoken as if we were going to let the commission declare what the requirements should be.  Not at all.  We are going to put the requirements in the law and then see that the commission requires them to obey that law.  .  .  .

I ask you to look at our declaration and hear and read our platform about social and industrial justice and then, friends, vote for the Progressive ticket without regard to me, without regard to my personality, for only by voting for that platform can you be true to the cause of progress through-out this Union.
Speech or Document 2

A CONFESSION OF FAITH

FROM AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL CONVENTION OF THE PROGRESSIVE PARTY IN CHICAGO, AUGUST 6, 1912

To you, men and women who have come here to this great city of this great State formally to launch a new party, a party of the people of the whole Union, the National Progressive Party, I extend my hearty greeting.  You are taking a bold and a greatly needed step for the service of our beloved country.  The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly what should be said on the vital issues of the day.  This new movement is a movement of truth, sincerity and wisdom, a movement which proposes to put at the service of all our people the collective power of the people, through their governmental agencies, alike in the Nation and in the several States.  We propose boldly to face the real and great questions of the day, and not skillfully to evade them as do the old parties.  We propose to raise aloft a standard to which all honest men can repair, and under which all can fight, no matter what their past political differences, if they are content to face the future and no longer to dwell among the dead issues of the past.  We propose to put forth a platform which shall not be a platform of the ordinary and insincere kind, but shall be a contract with the people; and, if the people accept this contract by putting us in power, we shall hold ourselves under honorable obligation to fulfil every promise it contains as loyally as if it were actually enforceable under the penalties of the law.

The prime need today is to face the fact that we are now in the midst of a great economic evolution.  There is urgent necessity of applying both common sense and the highest ethical standard to this movement for better economic conditions among the mass of our people if we are to make it one of healthy evolution and not one of revolution.  It is, from the standpoint of our country, wicked as well as foolish longer to refuse to face the real issues of the day.  Only by so facing them can we go forward; and to do this we must break up the old party organizations and obliterate the old cleavage lines on the dead issues inherited from fifty years ago.

Our fight is a fundamental fight against both of the old corrupt party machines, for both are under the dominion of the plunder league of the professional politicians who are controlled and sustained by the great beneficiaries of privilege and reaction.  How close is the alliance between the two machines is shown by the attitude of that portion of those Northeastern newspapers, including the majority of the great dailies in all the Northeastern cities — Boston, Buffalo, Springfield, Hartford, Philadelphia and, above all, New York — which are controlled by or representative of the interests which, in popular phrase, are conveniently grouped together as the Wall Street interests.  The large majority of these papers supported Judge Parker for the Presidency in 1904; almost unanimously they supported Mr.  Taft for the Republican nomination this year; the large majority are now supporting Professor Wilson for the election.  Some of them still prefer Mr.  Taft to Mr.  Wilson, but all make either Mr.  Taft or Mr.  Wilson their first choice; and one of the ludicrous features of the campaign is that those papers supporting Professor Wilson show the most jealous partisanship for Mr.  Taft whenever they think his interests are jeopardized by the Progressive movement — that, for instance, any electors will obey the will of the majority of the Republican voters at the primaries, and vote for me instead of obeying the will of the Messrs.  Barnes-Penrose-Guggenheim combination by voting for Mr.  Taft.  No better proof can be given than this of the fact that the fundamental concern of the privileged interests is to beat the new party.  Some of them would rather beat it with Mr.  Wilson; others would rather beat it with Mr.  Taft; but the difference between Mr.  Wilson and Mr.  Taft they consider as trivial, as a mere matter of personal preference.  Their real fight is for either, as against the Progressives.  They represent the allied reactionaries of the country, and they are against the new party because to their unerring vision it is evident that the real danger to privilege comes from the new party, and from the new party alone.  The men who presided over the Baltimore and the Chicago conventions, and the great bosses who controlled the two conventions, Mr.  Root and Mr.  Parker, Mr.  Barnes and Mr.  Murphy, Mr.  Penrose and Mr.  Taggart, Mr.  Guggenheim and Mr.  Sullivan, differ from one another of course on certain points.  But these are the differences which one corporation lawyer has with another corporation lawyer when acting for different corporations.  They come together at once as against a common enemy when the dominion of both is threatened by the supremacy of the people of the United States, now aroused to the need of a National alignment on the vital economic issues of this generation.

Neither the Republican nor the Democratic platform contains the slightest promise of approaching the great problems of today either with understanding or good faith; and yet never was there greater need in this Nation than now of understanding and of action taken in good faith, on the part of the men and the organizations shaping our Governmental policy.  Moreover, our needs are such that there should be coherent action among those responsible for the conduct of National affairs and those responsible for the conduct of State affairs; because our aim should be the same in both State and Nation; that is, to use the Government as an efficient agency for the practical betterment of social and economic conditions throughout this land.  There are other important things to be done, but this is the most important thing.  It is preposterous to leave such a movement in the hands of men who have broken their promises as have the present heads of the Republican organization (not of the Republican voters, for they in no shape represent the rank and file of the Republican voters).  These men by their deeds give the lie to their words.  There is no health in them, and they can not be trusted.  But the Democratic Party is just as little to be trusted.  The Underwood-Fitzgerald combination in the House of Representatives has shown that it can not safely be trusted to maintain the interests of this country abroad or to represent the interests of the plain people at home.  The control of the various State bosses in the State organizations has been strengthened by the action at Baltimore; and scant indeed would be the use of exchanging the whips of Messrs.  Barnes, Penrose and Guggenheim for the scorpions of Messrs.  Murphy, Taggart and Sullivan.  Finally, the Democratic platform not only shows an utter failure to understand either present conditions or the means of making these conditions better but also a reckless willingness to try to attract various sections of the electorate by making mutually incompatible promises which there is not the slightest intention of redeeming, and which, if redeemed, would result in sheer ruin.  Far-seeing patriots should turn scornfully from men who seek power on a platform which with exquisite nicety combines silly inability to understand the National needs and dishonest insincerity in promising conflicting and impossible remedies.

If this country is really to go forward along the path of social and economic justice, there must be a new party of Nation-wide and non-sectional principles, a party where the titular National chiefs and the real State leaders shall be in genuine accord, a party in whose counsels the people shall be supreme, a party that shall represent in the Nation and the several States alike the same cause, the cause of human rights and of Governmental efficiency.  At present both the old parties are controlled by professional politicians in the interests of the privileged classes, and apparently each has set up as its ideal of business and political development a government by financial despotism tempered by make-believe political assassination.  Democrat and Republican alike, they represent government of the needy many by professional politicians in the interests of the rich few.  This is class government, and class government of a peculiarly unwholesome kind.

It seems to me, therefore, that the time is ripe, and overripe, for a genuine Progressive movement, Nation-wide and justice-loving, sprung from and responsible to the people themselves, and sundered by a great gulf from both of the old party organizations, while representing all that is best in the hopes, beliefs and aspirations of the plain people who make up the immense majority of the rank and file of both the old parties.

The first essential in the Progressive program is the right of the people to rule.  But a few months ago our opponents were assuring us with insincere clamor that it was absurd for us to talk about desiring that the people should rule, because, as a matter of fact, the people actually do rule.  Since that time the actions of the Chicago convention, and to an only less degree of the Baltimore convention, have shown in striking fashion how little the people do rule under our present conditions.

We should provide by National law for Presidential primaries.  We should provide for the election of United States Senators by popular vote.  We should provide for a short ballot; nothing makes it harder for the people to control their public servants than to force them to vote for so many officials that they can not really keep track of any one of them, so that each becomes indistinguishable in the crowd around him.  There must be stringent and efficient corrupt practices acts, applying to the primaries as well as the elections; and there should be publicity of campaign contributions during the campaign.

We should provide throughout this Union for giving the people in every State the real right to rule themselves, and really and not nominally to control their public servants and their agencies for doing the public business; an incident of this being giving the people the right themselves to do this public business if they find it impossible to get what they desire through the existing agencies.  I do not attempt to dogmatize as to the machinery by which this end should be achieved.  In each community it must be shaped so as to correspond not merely with the needs but with the customs and ways of thought of that community, and no community has a right to dictate to any other in this matter.  But wherever representative government has in actual fact become non-representative there the people should secure to themselves the initiative, the referendum and the recall, doing it in such fashion as to make it evident that they do not intend to use these instrumentalities wantonly or frequently, but to hold them ready for use in order to correct the misdeeds or failures of the public servants when it has become evident that these misdeeds and failures can not be corrected in ordinary and normal fashion.  The administrative officer should be given full power, for otherwise he can not do well the people's work; and the people should be given full power over him.

I do not mean that we shall abandon representative government; on the contrary, I mean that we shall devise methods by which our Government shall become really representative.  To use such measures as the initiative, referendum, and recall indiscriminately and promiscuously on all kinds of occasions would undoubtedly cause disaster ; but events have shown that at present our institutions are not representative — at any rate in many States, and sometimes in the Nation — and that we can not wisely afford to let this condition of things remain longer uncorrected.  We have permitted the growing up of a breed of politicians who, sometimes for improper political purposes, sometimes as a means of serving the great special interests of privilege which stand behind them, twist so-called representative institutions into a means of thwarting instead of expressing the deliberate and well-thought-out judgment of the people as a whole.  This can not be permitted.  We choose our representatives for two purposes.  In the first place, we choose them with the desire that, as experts, they shall study certain matters with which we, the people as a whole, can not be intimately acquainted, and that as regards these matters they shall formulate a policy for our betterment.  Even as regards such a policy, and the actions taken there under, we ourselves should have the right ultimately to vote our disapproval of it, if we feel such disapproval.  But, in the next place, our representatives are chosen to carry out certain policies as to which we have definitely made up our minds, and here we expect them to represent us by doing what we have decided ought to be done.  All I desire to do by securing more direct control of the Governmental agents and agencies of the people is to give the people the chance to make their representatives really represent them whenever the Government becomes misrepresentative instead of representative.

Speech or Document 3 

WOMAN'S PLACE IN POLITICS

ANYTHING that the women of this country want, I want to give them.  Now, I base my hope and base my firm belief in the future of the American Nation because I think that the average American is a pretty good fellow and that his wife is a still better fellow.

The New York Times, in an interview attributed to a prominent citizen who has repudiated it, criticized me and denounced Jane Addams for nominating me, and also criticized the Progressive Party for permitting women to be in the Progressive convention.  It attacked Miss Addams' conduct as “spectacular" and” in very bad taste," and also criticized me as being spectacular because I had "the bad taste to publicly compliment her on her action and thank her."

My only reference to Miss Addams was contained in the following sentence: “I wish to tell those who proposed and seconded my nomination that I appreciate to the full the significance of having such men and such a woman put me in nomination." It will be noticed that in this sentence I did not even mention Miss Addams' name, and if this allusion to Miss Addams is considered as being spectacular and in bad taste I should feel a mild curiosity to know just what would be regarded as non-spectacular and in good taste.

It would not be worth while to pay any heed to this article in itself; but it illustrates an attitude of mind sufficiently common to deserve consideration.  Among the other sentences in the article were the following: “Women have no proper share in a political convention.  We need women to bear children and attend to their homes.  The men ought to be able to regulate their own politics and meet all needs without direct assistance of the women."

Of course, it is entirely right to say that we need women to bear children and attend to their homes; just as it would be right to say that we need men to beget children and make the homes in which the women can live and the children be brought up.  One statement is as true as the other and both come under the head of the obvious.

I have said not once but scores of times that I put the domestic life above every other kind of life, that I honor the good and wise mother as I honor no other woman and no man, and that the perpetuity of the Nation depends primarily upon the average man and the average woman therein being the father and mother of healthy and happy and wisely brought-up children; children trained, boys and girls alike, in industry and decent conduct, and to the habit of meeting with wisdom and with high courage the many and difficult problems that confront each of us in his everyday individual life and all of us in our collective life.

I think the highest life, the ideal life, is the married life.  But there are both unmarried men and unmarried women who perform service of the utmost consequence to the whole people; and it is equally foolish and wicked for a man to slur the unmarried woman when he would not dream of slurring the unmarried man.  Bishop Brent in the Philippines is unmarried.  He has done admirable work there just as Jane Addams has done at Hull House.  When the Times says that it dislikes to see Miss Addams " held up in the limelight as an example for all other women to follow," it speaks offensively, and its words are true only in the sense that they would be true if it had used them about Bishop Brent or the late Phillips Brooks.  Again and again I have heard Bishop Brent held up as an example, and I have held him up as an example myself; and so of the late Phillips Brooks.  And in just the same way, I am heartily glad to say, I have heard Jane Addams held up as an example and have thus held her up myself.  The cases of the three stand on the same plane: all three by their lives have added to or are adding to our heritage of good in this country, and it is an absurdity to say that in recognizing this fact as regards any one of them we are in any shape or way explicitly or implicitly failing to take the position that we ought as a matter of course to take about marriage and the happy married life.

Now for the statement about women having no proper share in a political convention, and that men ought to be able to regulate their own politics and meet all needs without direct assistance from the women.

That man knows little of our political, social and industrial needs as a Nation who does not know that in political conventions the politics that ought to be " regulated " are the politics that affect women precisely as much as they affect men; and he must be unfortunate in his list of acquaintances if he does not know women whose advice and counsel are preeminently worth having in regard to the matters affecting our welfare which it is of the utmost consequence to have dealt with by political conventions.

I suppose that the trouble is that the Times fails to understand that we intend from now on to make participation in " politics " a method of applying ethics to our public life and both ethics and economics to our industrial life.  Such a theory of public conduct is wholly incomprehensible both to those who dominated the Republican convention at Chicago and to those who dominated the Democratic convention at Baltimore.  The Progressive Party is the one party which since the War has dealt with real issues, and these real issues affect women precisely as much as men.  The women who bear children and attend to their own homes have precisely the same right to speak in politics that their husbands have who are the fathers of their children and who work to keep up their homes.  It is these women who bear children and attend to their own homes and these men, their husbands, who work for their wives and children and homes, whom the Progressive Party is endeavoring to represent and in whose interest the Progressive Party proposes that the Governmental policy of this Nation shall hereafter be shaped.  Such being the case, it is eminently wise that women should share in the political conventions, and that they should join with the men in regulating the politics, which are in no proper sense only " the politics of the men " as the Times says, because they are of as vital concern to the women as to the men.

I doubt if there ever was a convention more really representative of the people, and with a higher average of individual character among the representatives, than was the case with the Progressive National Convention at Chicago.  The spirit in which it met was a spirit of deep and genuine religious fervor, using the word religious in its broadest and truest sense.  A spirit which found expression in singing the noble " Battle Hymn of the Republic," a hymn by the way, which was written by a woman, Mrs.  Julia Ward Howe, who as wife and mother, and in all her relations of both public and private life, was one of the best citizens this Republic has ever brought forth.

I am glad to say that among the representatives in our convention were a number of women; and not only in high purpose, but in wisdom, in character, in cool-headedness and in far-sighted understanding of the needs of the Nation, they stood on an exactly equal footing with the men.

One of the memories of the convention which I shall always cherish is the fact that Jane Addams seconded my nomination.

I grew to believe in woman suffrage not because of associating with women whose chief interest was in woman suffrage, but because of finding out that the women from whom I received most aid in endeavoring to grapple with the social and industrial problems of the day were themselves believers in woman suffrage.  For a long time I have been interested in such questions as the betterment of tenement-house conditions, the abolition of sweat-shop factories in tenement-houses, the betterment of the conditions of work and life of working girls in industry, the establishment of children's courts, the establishment of playgrounds, the putting a stop to the employment of children in industry, and dozens of other like matters.  Now, the way I get into touch with each different kind of such work was to get hold of some man or woman who knew about it and could guide and instruct me and enable me to see for myself what the facts were.  The man to whom I owe most in this matter is Jacob Riis, and I shall never forget all he did for me during the time I was Police Commissioner.  In exactly the same fashion I have profited by the teachings and experience of Judge Ben Lindsey of Colorado, of Judge DeLacey of Washington, of Charles Stelzle, of Father Curran, of Homer Folks, of Paul Kellogg, of Mannis, of Raymond Robbins, of Weyl and McCarthy and Kingsbury — of many, many men connected with the work of organized charity and with private or religious charity, and of many, many clergymen, priests and rabbis — I can not begin to enumerate all of them.

Well, in precisely the same way I grew acquainted with women who were doing the same kinds of work, with Miss Addams, with Miss Kellor, with Mrs.  Kelly and with many others.  I talked with them and worked with them just as I did with the men.  I found that they had the same zeal and earnestness and judgment that the, men had, and differed among themselves just as the men did.  I also found that as a result of their actual experience they felt that working girls would be helped by the suffrage just as working men are helped, and that in our warfare against certain dreadful evils of our social life the help of the women would be of peculiar value.  Very much of what I learned to believe from them they were quite unconscious of having taught me, and it was this largely unconscious teaching of theirs and my study of what had been done in the States where suffrage exists that gradually turned me into a believer that women should have the same right to vote that men have.  I do not believe that there is identity of function between men and women, but I do believe that there should be equality of right.  I see no reason why voting should interfere with women's home life any more than it interferes with the everyday work of the man which enables him to support the home.

Of all the planks of the Progressive platform, and they are all of them good, the two which most go to my own heart are the one which deals with social and industrial justice and the one on country life.  Not only the present Republican and Democratic platforms fail in any way to deal with these matters as our platform deals with them, but no platform previous to ours has ever shown an intellectual understanding of what social and industrial justice was.  Our proposals are definite and concrete, and they are absolutely practical.  We treat our whole platform as a covenant with the people, binding upon ourselves and upon our candidates in State and in Nation.  We pledge ourselves to legislation looking to the prevention of industrial accidents and occupational diseases.  We intend to deal with the problem of involuntary unemployment and of overwork.  We intend to secure compensation for men or women who are killed or crippled in industry; to prohibit sweated labor; to secure a minimum wage standard for working women, and a living wage in all industrial occupations.  We pledge ourselves to secure one day's rest in seven for all wage-workers, and an eight-hour day in continuous twenty-four hour industries, the prohibition of night work and the establishment of an eight-hour day for women.  We pledge ourselves to the abolition of the convict contract labor system, and the application of prisoners' earnings to the support of their dependent families.  We recognize that in all matters such as these women are as vitally concerned as men.  We recognize that there can not be identity of function, but that there should be equality of right, between men and women, and we are therefore for equal suffrage for men and women.

Speech or Document 4

DECLINING A NOMINATION

A STATEMENT ISSUED FROM PORT-OF-SPAIN, TRINIDAD, TO THE CHAIRMAN OF THE PROGRESSIVE NATIONAL COMMITTEE, ON MARCH 9, 1916

I AM deeply sensible of the honor conferred on me and of the goodwill shown me by the gentlemen who have announced themselves as delegates to be elected in my interest in the Massachusetts presidential primary.  Nevertheless I must request, and I now do request and insist, that my name be not brought into the Massachusetts primaries, and I emphatically decline to be a candidate in the primaries of that or of any other State.  Months ago I formally notified the authorities of Nebraska, Minnesota and Michigan to this effect.

I do not wish the nomination.

I am not in the least interested in the political fortunes either of myself or any other man.

I am interested in awakening my fellow countrymen to the need of facing unpleasant facts.  I am interested in the triumph of the great principles for which with all my heart and soul I have striven and shall continue to strive.

I will not enter into any fight for the nomination and I will not permit any factional fight to be made in my behalf.  Indeed, I will go further and say that it would be a mistake to nominate me unless the country has in its mood something of the heroic — unless it feels not only devotion to ideals but the purpose measurably to realize those ideals in action.

This is one of those rare times which come only at long intervals in a nation's history, where the action taken determines the basis of the life of the generations that follow.  Such times were those from 1776 to 1789, in the days of Washington, and from 1858 to 1865, in the days of Lincoln.

It is for us of today to grapple with the tremendous national and international problems of our own hour in the spirit and with the ability shown by those who upheld the hands of Washington and Lincoln.  Whether we do or do not accomplish this feat will largely depend on the action taken at the Republican and Progressive conventions next June.

Nothing is to be hoped for from the present administration, and the struggles between the President and his party leaders in Congress are today merely struggles as to whether the nation shall see its governmental representatives adopt an attitude of a little more or a little less hypocrisy and follow a policy of slightly greater or slightly less baseness.  All that they offer us is a choice between degrees of hypocrisy and degrees of infamy.

But disgust with the unmanly failure of the present administration, I believe, does not, and I know ought not to, mean that the American people will vote in a spirit of mere protest.  They ought not to, and I believe they will not, be content merely to change the present administration for one equally timid, equally vacillating, equally lacking in vision, in moral integrity and in high resolve.  They should desire, and I believe they do desire, public servants and public policies signifying more than adroit cleverness in escaping action behind clouds of fine words, in refusal to face real internal needs, and in complete absorption of every faculty in devising constantly shifting hand-to-mouth and day-today measures for escape from our international duty by the abandonment of our national honor — measures due to sheer dread of various foreign powers, tempered by a sometimes harmonizing and sometimes conflicting dread of various classes of voters, especially hyphenated voters, at home.

We must clarify and define our policies, we must show that our belief in our governmental ideals is so real that we wish to make them count in the world at large and to make the necessary sacrifice in order that they shall count.  Surely we, of this great republic, have a contribution to make to the cause of humanity and we can not make it unless w£ first show that we can secure prosperity and fair dealing among our own men and women.  I believe that in a crisis so grave it is impossible too greatly to magnify the needs of the country or too strongly to dwell on the necessity of minimizing and subordinating the desires of individuals.

The delegates who go to Chicago will have it in their power to determine the character of the administration which is to do or leave undone the mighty tasks of the next four years.  That administration can do an incalculable amount to make or mar our country's future.  The men chosen to decide such a question ought not to be politicians of the average type and parochial outlook ; still less should they be politicians controlled by sinister influence from within or without.  They should be the very best men that can be found in our country, whose one great mission should be to declare in unequivocal terms for a program of clean-cut, straight-out, national Americanism, in deeds no less than in words, and in internal and international matters alike, and to choose as their candidate a man who will not merely stand for such a program before election, but will resolutely and in good faith put it through if elected.

These men should be men of rugged independence, who possess the broadest sympathy with and understanding of the needs and desires of their fellows; their loyalty should be neither to classes nor to sections, but to the whole of the United States and to all the people that dwell therein.  They should be controlled by no man and no interest and their own minds should be open.

June is a long way off.  Many things may occur between now and then.  It is utterly impossible to say now with any degree of certainty who should be nominated at Chicago.  The crying, the vital need now is that the men who next June assemble at Chicago from the forty-eight States and express the view of the entire country shall act with the sane and lofty devotion to the interest of our nation as a whole which was shown by the original Continental Congress.  They should approach their task unhampered by any pledge except to bring to its accomplishment every ounce of courage, intelligence and integrity they possess.

Speech or Document 5
NATIONAL DUTY AND INTERNATIONAL IDEALS

A SPEECH   MADE BEFORE THE ILLINOIS BAR ASSOCIATION AT CHICAGO, APRIL 29,, 1916

A YEAR and three-quarters have passed since the opening of the great war.  At the outset our people were stunned by the vastness and terror of the crisis.  We had been assured by many complacent persons that the day of great wars had ended, that the reign of violence was over, that the enlightened public opinion of the world would prevent the oppression of weak nations.  To be sure, there was ample proof that none of these assurances were true, and far-seeing men did not believe them.  But there was good excuse for the mass of the people being misled.  Now, however, there is none.  War has been waged on a more colossal scale than ever before in the world's history; and cynical indifference to international morality and willingness to trample on inoffensive peace-loving people who are also helpless or timid have been shown on a greater scale than since the close of the Napoleonic Wars over a century ago.  Alone of the great powers, we have not been drawn into this struggle.

A two-fold duty was imposed upon us by the fact of our prosperity and by the fact of our momentary immunity from danger.  This twofold duty was, first, to make our voice felt for the weak who had been wronged by the strong, and for international humanity and honor, and for peace on terms of justice for all concerned; and, second, immediately and in thorough going fashion to prepare ourselves so that there might not befall us on an even greater scale such a disaster as befell Belgium.  We have signally failed in both duties.  Incredible to relate, we are not in any substantial respect stronger at this moment in soldiers or rifles, in seamen or ships, because of any Governmental action taken in consequence of this war; and moreover we have seen every device and provision designed by humanitarians to protect international right against international wrongdoings torn into shreds, and have not so much as ventured to speak effectively one word of protest.

The result is that every nation in the world now realizes our weakness, and that no nation in the world believes in either our disinterestedness or our manliness.  The effort to placate outside nations by being neutral between right and wrong, and to gain good will along professional pacifist lines by remaining helpless for self-defense, has resulted, after two fatuous years, in so shaping affairs that the nations either already feel, or are rapidly growing to feel, for us, not only dislike but contempt.

This is not a pleasant truth; but it is the truth; and as a people we will do well to remember Emerson's saying that in the long run the most unpleasant truth is a safer traveling companion than the pleasantest falsehood.  Our duty is to face the facts and then to take the thorough-going action necessary in order to meet the situation that these facts disclose.

Our prime duty, infinitely our most important duty, is the duty of preparedness.  Unless we prepare in advance we can not when the crisis comes be true to ourselves.  If we can not be true to ourselves, it is absolutely certain that we shall be false to every one else.  If we are not able to safeguard our own national honor and interest, we shall make ourselves an object of scorn and derision if we try to stand up for the rights of others.  We have been sinking into the position of the China of the Occident; and we will do well to remember that China — pacifist China — has not only been helpless to keep its own territory from spoliation and its own people from subjugation but has also been helpless to exert even the most minute degree of influence on behalf of right dealing among other nations.

There are persons in this country who openly advocate our taking the position that China holds, the position from which the best and wisest Chinamen are now painfully trying to raise their land.  Nothing that I can say will influence the men and women who take this view.  The holding of such a view is entirely incompatible with the right to exercise the privileges of self-government in a democracy, for self-government can not permanently exist among people incapable of self-defense.

But I believe that the great majority of my fellow-countrymen, when they finally take the trouble to think on the problem at all, will refuse to consent to or acquiesce in the Chinafication of this country.  I believe that they will refuse to follow those who would make right helpless before might, who would put a pigtail on Uncle Sam, and turn the Goddess of Liberty into a pacifist female huckster, clutching a bag of dollars which she has not the courage to guard against aggression.  It is to these men and women that I speak.  I speak to the mass of my fellow-countrymen.  I speak to all men and women who are loyal to the principles of those who in the Revolutionary War made us a nation, and who have in their souls the high qualities possessed by the men who in the iron days of the Civil War followed the banners of Grant and of Lee, and of the mothers and wives of these men.  My appeal may not be heeded; if so, then either our people will pay heed in time to the appeal of some other man, able to speak more strongly and more convincingly, or else they will when it is too late learn the lesson from some terrible gospel in which it is written by an alien conqueror in letters of steel and of flame.

The first necessity is that we shall in good faith and without reservation undertake to be a nation, and not merely to call ourselves a nation.  I make my especial appeal to the national spirit here in Chicago, here in the great Middle West, here in the territory stretching from the Alleghanies to the Rockies.  The prophets of gloom have said that the West, prosperous and indifferent, secure in her fancied safety because she is in the middle of the continent, cares nothing for the dangers that might befall the cities on the Atlantic or the Pacific Coast, cares nothing for what has befallen the dwellers along the Mexican boundary, and is as indifferent to what befalls elsewhere as Peking once was to what befell its outlying Chinese provinces— to the ultimate ruin of Peking, by the way.  This I do not for one moment believe.  If I did, I should despair of the republic.  This is to a peculiar degree the democratic, the intensely and characteristically American, section of our land.  The West produced for the service of the whole nation Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson; and I know that their spirit is still the spirit of her sons.

I appeal to the men of the West to take the lead in the movement for the genuine nationalization of our people.  If the republic founded by Washington and saved by Lincoln is to be turned into a mere polyglot boarding-house, where dollar-hunters of twenty different nationalities scramble for gain, each nationality bearing no real allegiance except to the land from which it originally came, then we may as well make up our minds that the great experiment of democratic government on this continent will have failed.  No less will it have failed if each section thinks only of the welfare of that section, and with crass blindness believes that disaster to some other section will not affect it.  And the failure will be the greatest of all if foolish men are persuaded by wicked men that one caste or class is the prime, enemy of some other class or caste.  I appeal to the men of the East to prepare so that the men of the Pacific Slope shall be free from all menace of danger.  I appeal to the men of the West to prepare so that the men of the Atlantic Coast shall be free from all danger.  I appeal to the North, South, West and East alike, to hold the life of every man and the honor of every woman on the most remote ranch on the Mexican border as a sacred trust to be guaranteed by the might of our entire nation — and the life of every man, woman and child who should be protected by the United States on the high seas likewise.  I appeal to every good American, whether farmer or merchant, business man or professional man, whether he works with brain or hand.  Anything of disgrace or dishonor that befalls our people anywhere is of vital moment to all of us wherever we live; and any deed that reflects credit on the American name is a subject of congratulation for every American of every section of this country.  I speak of the United States as a whole.  Surely it ought to be unnecessary to say that it spells as absolute ruin to permit divisions among our people along the lines of creed or of national origin as it does to permit division by geographical section.  We must not stand merely for America first.  We must stand for America first and last; and for no other nation second — except as we stand for fair play for all nations.  There can be no divided loyalty in this country.  The man who tries to be loyal to this country and also to some other country is certain in the end to put his loyalty to the other country ahead of his loyalty to this.  The politicoracial hyphen is the breeder of moral treason.  We are a new nation, by blood akin to but different from all the nations of Europe.  In the veins of our people runs the blood of German, Englishman and Irishman, of Scandinavian, Slav and Latin.  Any one of these people can bring something of value to our common national life.  Each can contribute social and cultural traditions and customs of value; and all must join in cordial mutuality of respect for whatever is valuable that each brings; but each must put the contribution at the service of our common and unified citizenship, and by utilizing all that is thus contributed, and by adapting and developing it so that it shall meet and express our common needs, we shall build our own distinctive national culture.  .  .  .

No form of government will survive unless it can justify its existence.  Boasting about democracy won't make democracy succeed.  We are the greatest democratic republic and we are false not only to our own country but to democracy everywhere if we do not seriously endeavor to show, by our actions .and success, that with us the many men can make a nation as efficient as elsewhere nations have been made efficient by a few men.  We must make America efficient within its own borders, efficient to repel attack from beyond its own borders, and yet a friend and not a menace to other peoples.  We must make ourselves serviceable to democracy, to the cause of popular rights and popular duties in national and also in international matters.  A happy-go-lucky belief that we can become serviceable by combining sentimental speeches with selfish actions will bring us to futility.  Service-ableness comes only through preparedness; and both the training and the service — through economic, social and military efficiency — imply courage, sustained effort, clear vision, and the power for self-sacrifice.

I speak for military preparedness.  I speak for industrial preparedness.  I speak for the performance of international duty, which can only come when we fit ourselves to do our duty to ourselves, and when we have made up our minds never to make a promise to any other nation which can not be kept, which ought not to be kept, and which will not be kept.  I speak of all this in the interest of national unity and manhood, of international peace, and of the service of our country and of the world at large.  It is our duty to secure justice and well-being at home; but we live in a fool's paradise if we think that we shall be permitted to secure such justice and well-being, as the world now is, unless we are prepared to hold our own against all alien enemies.  I appeal to the men of the West; I appeal to Americans everywhere to stand against the crass materialism which can show itself just as much in peace as in war.  I appeal to our people to prepare in advance so that there shall be n< hideous emergency which renders it necessary to submit to inordinate profit-making by the few simply because, when the emergency comes, we must improvise at whatever cost the things that for our sins we have failed to provide beforehand.  We can not afford to leave this democracy of ours inefficient.  If we do it will assuredly some day go down in ruin.  We can not afford to tolerate with cynical indifference the pork-barrel theories of government so dear to the hearts of politicians of the baser sort.  With a wealth of billions of dollars, and a population of one hundred million, we can not afford to be in a condition of utterly unstable social and industrial equilibrium, nor to see our sons grow up steeped in a spirit of mere selfish individualism, without self-control or discipline or sense of cooperation, or firmness of purpose.  We have great individual capacity.  This we must keep.  But we must train it so that we shall have great collective capacity, so that there may be that collective democratic power and discipline with-out which no great modern democracy can permanently subsist.

We must not only do away with sectionalism but we must see that our land really is a melting-pot of citizenship and that all peoples who come here become Americans and nothing else.  We have equally to dread the sleek, well-fed materialist whose be-all and end-all in life are ease and comfort; and the base, selfish man who thinks only of his individual aggrandizement; and the foolish, boastful, wordy sentimentalist who with amazing ignorance fancies that Americans armed only with words can successfully oppose strong and brutal men with rifles.

Our national character is in the balance.  Americanism is on trial.  If we produce merely the self-seeking, ease-loving, duty-shirking man, whether he be a mere materialist or a mere silly sentimentalist; if we produce only the Americanism of the grafter and the mollycoddle and the safety-first, get-rich-quick, peace-at-any-price man, we will have produced an American faithful only to the spirit of the Tories of 1776 and the Copperheads of 1861, and fit only to vanish from the earth.

Speech or Document 6

RIGHTEOUS PEACE AND NATIONAL UNITY

FROM A SPEECH MADE AT DETROIT, MAY   19, 1916

I HAVE been very reluctant to make speeches during these weeks immediately preceding the National Nominating Conventions, because it is very difficult to make people understand that speeches at such a time are not of the ordinary political type made in the interest of some particular individual's candidacy.  But I finally determined that I would come here to Michigan to say certain things which I believe should be said at this time.  What I have to say to you will not be in the interest of any man, and least of all, of myself.  It will not refer to the candidacy of any individual.  It will not refer to the policy of any party, save as such party policy may, and ought to, vitally concern the welfare of the nation.  My speech will be devoted exclusively to certain great principles which should be fundamental in this giant democratic commonwealth of ours.  Wherever I touch on an individual, it will be because I can not make my meaning clear, save by speaking of individuals who embody or typify certain movements.

In the history of this country this is the third great crisis and it coincides with a tremendous world crisis.  The issue is: are we prepared with a sane and lofty idealism to fit ourselves to render great service to mankind by rendering ourselves fit for our own service, or are we content to avoid effort and labor in the present by preparing to tread the path that China has trodden? We must choose one course or the other.  We1 shall gain nothing by making believe that we can avoid choosing either course.  At present the attitude of many of our politicians in Congress and outside strongly resembles the attitude of many of the politicians in the gold and silver controversy of twenty years ago.  At that time the free silver men were bold and insistent, just as the professional pacifists are today.  At that time, as today, the great bulk of the politicians, not only in the Democratic Party but in the Republican Party, were at first mortally afraid to offend the free silver men.  They made every effort to compromise, and to take some position that should not be either for gold or for silver.  Above all they strove to avoid the use of the word "gold." The fifty-one Republicans who, the other day, voted against an adequate Army are the spiritual successors of the Republicans who, twenty years ago, in Congress voted for all kinds of half measures which they hoped would convince the free silver people that we were to have the unlimited coinage of silver, and would convince the other people that we were not to have it.  The older among you of course remember how at that day the politicians squirmed in their effort to prevent the Republican National Convention from using the word " gold "; how they demanded that instead we should use some such expression as " having each dollar equally as good as every other dollar "; how they sought to evade facing the issue.

But when the time came, when the lines were drawn, and the battle was on, it became perfectly evident that the only way to beat the free silver people was to come straight out for the gold standard without equivocation or timidity.  The effort to avoid a fight on the currency, and make the fight only on the tariff was a failure.  The gold men stood for a high tariff; but first and foremost they made the fight on the issue of maintaining and securing the gold standard, the sound money standard; and if they had tried double dealing and hesitation and equivocation they would have lost, and they would have deserved to lose.  Let us today profit by their example.

In any serious crisis there are always men who try to carry water on both shoulders.  These men try to escape the hard necessity of choice between two necessarily opposite alternatives, by trying to work up some compromise.  In actual practice, this compromise usually proves to combine with exquisite nicety all the defects and none of the advantages of both courses.  It is true that in ordinary political matters compromise is essential.  It is true that in ordinary times it is essential.  But there come great crises when compromise is either impossible or fatal.  This is one of those crises.  There is no use in saying that we will fit ourselves to defend ourselves a little, but not much.  Such a position is equivalent to announcing that, if necessary, we shall hit, but that we shall only hit soft.  The only right principle is to prepare thoroughly or not at all.  The only right principle is to avoid hitting if it is possible to do so, but never under any circumstances to hit soft.  To go to war a little, but not much, is the one absolutely certain way to ensure disaster.  To prepare a little but not much, stands on a par with a city developing a fire department which, after a fire occurs, can put it out a little, but not much.

There are, at this time, two great issues before us, both inseparably bound together.  They are the issues of Americanism and Preparedness.  As a people we have to decide whether we are to be in good faith a people and able and ready to take care of ourselves; or whether we doubt our national unity and fear to prepare, and intend instead to trust partly to a merciful Providence and partly to elocutionary ability in high places.  Those in power at Washington have taken the latter position.  The followers of Mr.  Ford in the Republican primaries have taken what is in reality the same position.  What stand do the opponents of this position intend to take? The advocates of unpreparedness, the advocates of sham-preparedness, and the peace-at-any-price men all advocate what is in reality the same policy.  Those who stand against such a policy are not to be excused if they stand so half-heartedly that the people do not recognize much difference between themselves and their opponents.  Why should the people change their government if they are merely to change slightly the degree of unpreparedness? The only sufficient reason for a change would be to inaugurate a policy of real and thoroughgoing preparedness from the top to the bottom, preparedness to defend ourselves in war, preparedness to do well and justly our normal work of peace.  We must make this nation as strong as are its convictions in reference to right and wrong.  It little matters what our ideals may be and what achievements we may hope for, if these ideals and achievements can not be reduced to action.  The events of the past, and the events of today, show that national ideals amount to nothing if the nation lacks the power to maintain them against opposition.  .  .  .

Now as to the pacifists.  They have told us that if we remain helpless, w« shall escape all difficulties with other nations and earn their good will.  Let them ponder on what has happened in Mexico today.  Let them ponder our relations at this moment with Germany and the other great powers engaged in the world war.  They will then realize the utter futility of their hopes.  For nearly five years we have followed the principles of the pacifists as regards Mexico.  We have not ourselves prepared; but we have helped the Mexicans to prepare by furnishing them arms and munitions.  We have tamely submitted to the murder of our men and the rape of our women.  We have permitted foreigners to be plundered in Mexico and our own people to be plundered in Mexico; and murder has been added to plunder.  Many of our troops have been shot.  While we have been nominally at peace with Mexico, the Mexicans have killed more American citizens than the Spaniards killed in the entire Spanish war.  Moreover, when the Spanish war was through, it was through; and Cuba, Porto Rico, and the Philippines were started on a career of peace and prosperity such as had never been known in all their history.  But in Mexico, after all the bloodshed, the trouble has only begun, and we are no nearer a solution than we were three years and a quarter ago.

I call the attention of the pacifists to the fact that we have not avoided trouble in Mexico.  On the contrary, although we are assured that we are at peace with Mexico, we have killed and wounded nearly as many Mexicans as were killed and wounded among the Spaniards when our armies in the Spanish War took Santiago and Manila.  We have not gained the good will of the Mexicans.  They hate us and despise us infinitely more than they hated us five years ago — at which time they did not despise us at all.  The policy of pacifism has been practically applied in Mexico and it has resulted in incalculable loss of life and property.  It has gained us the utter contempt of the people with whom we dealt; and it has brought us to the verge of war with them.

Exactly the same thing is true as regards Germany.  For sixteen months we have been employed in sending Germany ultimatum after ultimatum in monotonous succession, while Germany in equally monotonous succession sank ship after ship, drowning our men, women and children by the hundreds.  (I use the word “ultimatum " in the sense that it has been given by our practice with both Mexico and .Germany during the past three years — for under this condition an ultimatum is a note which is not ultimate, but an invitation to further correspondence, and is on no account to be translated into action.) We have suffered as a nation from prolonged and excessive indulgence in note-writing; and incidentally we have made the discovery that note-writing is not an antidote to murder.  The pacifists assured us that note-writing and similar intellectual exercises would avert all difficulties and keep foreign nations feeling friendly toward us.  As a matter of fact, while we have been writing these notes, the loss of life among non-combatant men, women and children on the ships which were torpedoed and about which we wrote notes, has exceeded the total number of lives lost in both the Union and Confederate navies during the entire Civil War.  Think of that, friends! Such has been the net result of our note-writing; and incidentally we have incurred the contemptuous dislike of all the great powers engaged in the war.  As regards the loss of American lives, and the sinking of these ships, I hold Germany less responsible than I hold this nation.  Germany is engaged in a life and death struggle; and we need not expect that she will forego any advantage which the weakness or timidity of our nation, of this republic, offers her.  I firmly believe that if at the outset we had clearly made it evident that our words would be translated into deeds; that our first ultimatum sixteen months ago was really an ultimatum, Germany would have yielded, the Lusitania and the other ships would not have been sunk, and all the lamentable loss of life would have been avoided.  It is our own attitude of culpable weakness and timidity — an attitude assumed under the pressure of the ultra-pacifists — which is primarily responsible for this dreadful loss of life, and for our national humiliation.

We have suffered a loss of friendly feeling with each of the countries at war, and we have been within grave danger of trouble that would eventually lead to our being dragged into war with one or more of them.  I would rather go to war than permit our women and children to be killed.  But it is a crime against this nation that our own supine folly, our weakness and vacillation, our utter failure to prepare, should expose us to the possibility of war without having made us ready for war.  If, as soon as the great war broke out, our navy had been mobilized, and a competent man put at the head of the Navy Department (appointed for national and service reasons, instead of purely political reasons), and if we had begun vigorously to prepare, and had shown that we meant what we said, the Lusitania would never have been sunk; no power would have infringed on our rights; and we should today be absolutely free from all danger of war.  .  .  .

I wish to say a special word to my fellow Americans who are in the whole or in part of German blood.  I very heartily admire them.  I believe in them.  I understand the difficulties under which they have labored during the last twenty-two months.  I sympathize with, I feel for them, even although I feel that many of them are not taking the position they ought to take.  I know that what I preach to them is hard doctrine.  But I believe it to be a doctrine necessary for them, and for all their — and my — fellow countrymen.  I do not address them as German-Americans, for I hold that here in the United States ruin will come to the country in which our children and children's children are to live — your children's children and mine, friends — if we permit ourselves to be sundered one from the other by the lines either of creed or of national origin.

I shall speak a word of my own ancestry to illustrate the points I am about to make.  Some two centuries and a half ago there were certain Dutch immigrants, mechanics and small merchants, in New York City, which was then called New Amsterdam.  There were in Eastern Pennsylvania two German peasant farmers who were among the founders of Gerrnantown, having been driven out of the Palatinate when it was ravaged by the armies of Louis XIV; and west of them in Pennsylvania lived certain Irish, Welsh and English immigrants, the latter being Quakers.  In South Carolina and Georgia were certain Scotch and French Huguenot farmers.  These men and women left many descendants who intermarried with one another.  Of these descendants I am one.  My ancestors originally came from different countries, professed different creeds and spoke different tongues.  But they became Americans and nothing else; and as the generations succeeded one another they did the ordinary work of American life.  These ancestors of mine did the same tasks that fell to the lot of the ancestors of all of us who are of the old colonial stocks.  All of these men, your ancestors, friends, and mine, could do their duty only so long as they acted purely as Americans.  They fought in the War of the Revolution and again in the War of 1812; and they did not inquire whether the foreign foes whom Washington assailed were Germans, as at Trenton, or British, as at Princeton, or French, like those whom he fought near Pittsburg in his youth.  If these old time Americans had kept apart from one another and had made their loyalty a loyalty to the countries from which they came, and not to this new great republic, and if their fellow citizens of that day had done the same thing, there would not be any United States now, and there would be no Americans to feel either pride or shame in what our people do.

My plea is that all our citizens today shall act in the spirit of the men of many different race strains — the Washingtons, Adamses and Lees, the Schuylers and Sullivans; the Carrolls and Muhlenbergs, the Marions and Herkimers — who disregarded all questions of national origin and became Americans and nothing else when they founded this country.

I make the same plea precisely to the Americans of German birth or descent that I always have made and always shall make to all Americans, no matter what their creed or their national origin.  I am exactly as much opposed to English-Americans as to German-Americans.  I oppose all kinds of hyphenated Americanism.  I ask my fellow-Americans who are partly or wholly of German blood to show the foreign foes of America who, from abroad, instigate and guide our traitors at home — and above all I ask them to show these traitors at home — that the immense majority of Americans of German descent, whether naturalized or native born, are loyal Americans and nothing else and that they stand for the honor and the interest of the United States should to shoulder with all other good Americans of no matter what creed or national origin.  Americanism is a matter of the spirit, not of birthplace or descent.  Among the best Americans I have ever known, among the man closest to me in social and political life, are, and have been, men born in, or men whose fathers were born in, Germany, Ireland, the Scandinavian kingdoms, and other European countries.  They stand on an exact level with the other Americans, whose ancestors were here in Colonial times.  We are all part of the same people.

We all stand together for our common flag and our common country.  We must so prepare that this country will be a good place in which the children's children of all of us shall live; and to do this we must so prepare that we can repel all foreign foes and preserve the inestimable right of settling for ourselves the fate of this mighty democratic Republic.  But the essence of this policy of full preparedness, which remember is not only military but at least as much industrial and social, is that it is purely defensive, and is the best possible assurance of peace.  No nation will ever attack a unified and prepared America.

Speech or Document 7

NATIONAL PREPAREDNESS — MILITARY — INDUSTRIAL — SOCIAL

FROM A SPEECH MADE AT KANSAS CITY, MAY 30, I9l6

I COME to Kansas City, here in the Great West, to speak on Memorial Day to the farmers and merchants and wage workers and manufacturers who dwell west of the Mississippi.  What I have to say to you is exactly what I should say to your fellows who dwell on the Atlantic Coast, or on the Pacific Slope, or beside the Great Lakes, or on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico.  My message is a message to all Americans.  My appeal is to the spirit of thorough-going Americanism in all our people in whatever portion of the land they dwell.  In thanking all the organizations — business, political and social — whose invitation I have accepted, including my comrades of the Spanish War, I know that none of you will object to my putting first the Grand Army of the Republic and the Confederate Veterans.  I come here to speak on behalf of the spirit which, in the early sixties, burned in the hearts of men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray.  In what I have to say I shall appeal with equal emphasis to the soul qualities of the men who followed Grant and of the men who followed Lee; of all who, in the great crisis, proved their truth by their endeavor and showed themselves willing to sacrifice everything for the right, as God gave them to see the right.  But I make no appeal to the spirit of the peace-at-any-price men of '61 to '65.  I ask that we in this generation prove ourselves the spiritual heirs both of the men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray.  But I make no appeal to the memory of the copperhead pacifists who put peace above duty, who put love of ease and love of money-getting before devotion to country, and whose convictions were too weak to stir to action their tepid souls.

This is one of the great years of decision in our national history.  The way in which we now decide will largely determine whether we are to go forward in righteousness and power or backward in degradation and weakness.  We are face to face with elemental facts of right and wrong, of force or feebleness.  According to the spirit in which we face these facts and govern our actions, we shall determine whether in the future we shall enjoy a growing national life or suffer a lingering national decay.

First and foremost, friends, I ask you to beware of the false prophets, both the prophets of sordid materialism, and the prophets of that silly sentimentalism which refuses to look truths in the face if the truths are unpleasant.  We can not meet the future either by mere gross materialism or by mere silly sentimentalism; above all we can not meet it if we attempt to balance gross materialism in action by Silly sentimentalism in words.  In actual practice the professional pacifists do not serve good.  They serve evil.  They do not serve high ideals.  It is not righteous to fail to fight on behalf of assailed righteousness.  Such a course probably means sheer cowardice, and certainly means moral surrender.  The men who are the torch carriers of world civilization are those, and only those, who acknowledge the supreme duty of protecting sacred spiritual things when attacked.  In actual practice the professional pacifist is merely the tool of the sensual materialist who has no ideals, whose shriveled soul is wholly absorbed in automobiles, and the movies, and money making, and in the policies of the cash register and the stock ticker, and the life of fatted ease.

Two years ago any number of persons were assuring us that the day of great wars had passed; that it was impossible that there ever should be great wars again; that preparedness brought on war; that we did not need to take any steps in our own defense; that the capitalists of the world, because high finance had become internationalized, would never permit a great war; that the opinion of the civilized world was enough to stop all international outrages.  This was only two years ago.  During these two years we have seen the most destructive war in all history waged on a wider scale than ever in history before.  Never before has there been such slaughter as has been compressed into the last twenty-two months; and, alas that it should be written, the brutality, the ruthlessness, the disregard for International Law, and the callous and calculated atrocities committed on non-combatants, including women and children, have been such as the civilized world has not even approached during the past century.

Two years ago the false prophets who said that there never would be another war were applauded by all our people who were wholly absorbed in money-getting; by all who cared only for lives of soft ease and vapid pleasure; by all who liked to satisfy their emotions cheaply and safely by applauding high sounding phrases; and by the great mass of well meaning men who had not thought out the matter with conscientious thoroughness.

Let us not be misled again.  Undoubtedly as soon as this war ends all the well-meaning, shortsighted persons, who two years ago said there never would be a war again, and who have been obliged to be silent on this particular point during the past two years, will once more begin their shrill pipings that the last war has occurred.  Once more they will demand or announce the invention of some patent device by which strong and ruthless and cunning men will be held in place by timid men without any preparedness, without any display of courage or acceptance of endurance, risk, labor and hardship.

When this war is over it is possible that some one of the combatants, being fully armed, will assail us because we offer ourselves as a rich and helpless prize.  On the other hand it is also possible that there will be temporary exhaustion among the combatants, and a willingness, even on the part of the most brutal and ruthless, to go through the form of saying that they are peaceful and harmless.  In such event there will be real danger lest our people be influenced by the foolish apostles of unpreparedness to accept this condition as permanent, and once more to shirk our duty of getting ready.

I wish to say, with all the emphasis in my power, that if peace in Europe should come tomorrow, it ought not, in the smallest degree, to affect our policy of preparedness.  As a matter of fact, we probably can not now prepare in any way what will have a material effect upon the present war.  Our folly has been such that it is now too late for us to do this.  All we can now do is to prepare so that the war shall leave no aftermath of horror and disaster for our nation.  If we fail so to prepare then assuredly some day we or our children will have bitter cause to rue our folly, and to remember too late the words of old Sir Thomas Browne: " For since we can not be wise by teachings .  .  .  there is an unhappy necessity that we must smart in our own skins."

I wish especially to call the attention of all people who may be momentarily misled by the statements of the peace-at-any-price men, the professional pacifists of today, to the actual results of our policy of unpreparedness.  Twenty-two months have gone by since this war began.  Nearly five years have gone by since the revolution in Mexico loosed on Americans in Mexico, and on Americans on our own side of the border, the forces of murder and misrule.  Yet, during these five years we have taken no efficient steps to control the situation in Mexico, and during these twenty-two months, since the world has been in such a cataclysm of fear and blood as never before in its history, we of this Republic, with literally astounding folly, with a folly criminal from the national standpoint, have refused in any way to prepare.  The professional pacifists said, and even now say, that such preparedness would have invited trouble with Mexico and trouble with Germany and perhaps with other old world powers.  Look at the facts! We kept ourselves helpless to do justice to or for Mexico; we refused to make ready in any way to protect our citizens in Mexico, or even on our own side of the Mexican border.  We submitted tamely to the murder of our men and the rape of our women.  We bore with spiritless submission outrages upon outrages, until the number of our citizens killed mounted into the hundreds.  Yet, so far from securing the good-will of the Mexicans, this policy of unpreparedness and of tame submission to insult and injury, merely aroused both their anger and contempt to such a degree that we are now engaged in a harassing little war along the border.

We have not the forces to make that war effective.  We have actually drained the Coast Artillery from the seaboard defense, to serve as infantry down on the Mexican border.  This nation of one hundred million people with a territory as large as all Europe and more wealth than any other nation in the world possesses, has to strip its seacoast forts of their defenders and put these defenders at work which they are not trained to do.  Even thus we are wholly unable to make good our complete lack of preparedness.

If at the outset, if three years ago, we had resolutely and with foresight prepared to act, and then, if necessary, acted, in Mexico, that country would today be as peaceful and prosperous as Cuba — where we actually did take the very action I advocate for Mexico.  If, the instant that the great war broke out in July, 1914, our fleet had been mobilized, a competent man put at the head of the Navy Department, our army put into proper trim, and steps taken by our representatives at Washington, both Executive and Legislative, to show that we were making ready to meet any exigency that arose, there would have been no trouble of any kind with any belligerent.  Of course, when we submitted to wrongdoing from one side, we invited a repetition of that wrong-doing by that side, and the infliction of similar wrongs by the other side.  The thousands of non-combatants, men, women and children, including many hundreds of American men, women and children, who have been killed on the high seas, owe the loss of their lives primarily to the supine inaction of this nation; to our failure to prepare, and our failure in instant insistence on our own rights and on those rights of others which we had guaranteed to protect.

Military preparedness is only one side of all around preparedness.  It would be worthless unless based on industrial preparedness, and both would be worthless unless based on preparedness of the soul and the spirit.  You men who wore the Blue and the Gray, when once the war was over, turned to the farm and the shop and the counting house, and again took up your life work of earning your living and supporting your families, and making provision for the generation that was to come after you.  You did this work thoroughly, as you had thoroughly done the work of war.

Our people of today must apply your spirit to the changed circumstances of today.  It is never possible to treat the past as giving the exact precedent for given action in the present.  But the spirit shown by the men who in the great crisis in the past rose level to those crises, must be shown by the men of the present in the crisis of the present.  In this country we have the double duty of training ourselves so as to be willing to die for the country and of developing our internal policy so as to make the country worth living in.  In the long run the country must be worth living in if it is worth dying for.

In order to make this country worth living in we must develop a real national purpose controlled not only by moral motives but by cool intelligence.  If our people put a premium upon the demagogue by supporting the man who makes impossible promises, and who either does not attempt to reduce these promises to action, or else fails in attempting to do so, then we shall go down.  The people must choose as their executive and legislative leaders at Washington men absolutely national in spirit; men whose theory of government is as far as the poles from the pork-barrel theory — and this, whether the pork-barrel be considered from a personal, political or sectional standpoint — men who look forward and not back; men who face the facts as they actually are.  After this war we shall see a new Europe; a Europe energetically developing new social and economic means of meeting new problems.  If, under these circumstances, we take refuge in formulae dug out as fossils from the workings of principles in the past, instead of developing these principles so as to meet the future, we shall be as foolish as if we were to arm our soldiers with flintlocks and send them against an army possessing machine guns, high power rifles, and modern artillery.  The time for flintlock theories of statesmanship in this country is past.  The end we have in view is a high and fine national life based on an industrial efficiency which shall be accompanied by social and economic justice.  Military preparedness against war is merely a means to this end.  But it is an indispensable means.  We are not fit to be free men unless we show the forethought and will power necessary to insure that we ourselves shall have the right to decide our own destinies, and not be forced helplessly to submit to have them decided by alien conquerors.

Speech or Document 8

SOCIALISM VERSUS SOCIAL REFORM

IT is always difficult to discuss a question when it proves impossible to define the terms in which that question is to be discussed.  Therefore there is not much to be gained by a discussion of Socialism versus Individualism in the abstract.  Neither absolute Individualism nor absolute Socialism would be compatible with civilization at all; and among the arguments of the extremists of either side the only unanswerable ones are those which show the absurdity of the position of the other.  Not so much as the first step towards real civilization can be taken until there arises some development of the right of private property; that is, until men pass out of the stage of savage socialism in which the violent and the thriftless forcibly constitute themselves co-heirs with the industrious and the intelligent in what the labor of the latter produces.  But it is equally true that every step toward civilization is marked by a check on individualism.  The ages that have passed have fettered the individualism which found expression in physical violence, and we are now endeavoring to put shackles on that kind of individualism which finds expression in craft and greed.  There is growth in all such matters.  The individualism of the Tweed Ring type would have seemed both commonplace and meritorious to the Merovingian Franks, where it was not entirely beyond their comprehension; and so in future ages, if the world progresses as we hope and believe it will progress, the standards of conduct which permit individuals to make money out of pestilential tenements or by the manipulation of stocks, or to refuse to share with their employees the burdens laid upon the latter by old age and by the inevitable physical risks in a given business, will seem as amazing to our descendants as we now find the standards of a society which regarded Clovis and his immediate successors as preeminently fit for leadership.

There are many American " Socialists" to whom " Socialism " is merely a rather vaguely conceived catchword, and who use it to express their discontent with existing wrongs and their,' purpose to correct them.  These may be men of high character, who wish to protest against concrete and cruel injustice.  So far as they make any proposals which tend towards betterment, we can wisely act with them.  But the real, logical, advanced Socialists, who teach their faith as both a creed and a party platform, may deceive to their ruin decent and well-meaning, but short-sighted men; and there is need of plain speaking in order accurately to show the trend of their teaching.  The leaders of the Socialist party have, in the present war, shown themselves the enemies of America, and the tools of German militaristic brutality.

The immorality and absurdity of the doctrines of Socialism as propounded by these advanced advocates are quite as great as those of the advocates of an unlimited individualism.  As an academic matter Herbert Spencer stands as far to one side of the line of sane action as Marx stands on the other.  But practically there is more need of refutation of the creed of absolute Socialism than of the creed of absolute individualism; for it happens that at the present time a greater number of visionaries, both sinister and merely dreamy, believe in the former than in the latter.  One difficulty in arguing with professed Socialists of the extreme type, however, is that those of them who are sincere almost invariably suffer from great looseness of thought; for if they did not keep their faith nebulous, it would at once become abhorrent in the eyes of any upright and sensible man.  The doctrinaire Socialists, the extremists, the self-styled " scientific " Socialists, the men who represent the doctrine in its most advanced form, are, and must necessarily be, not only convinced opponents of private property, but also bitterly hostile to religion and morality; in short, they must be opposed to all those principles through which, and through which alone, even an imperfect civilization can be built up by slow advances through the ages.

Indeed, these thoroughgoing Socialists occupy, in relation to all morality, and especially to domestic morality, a position which can only be described as revolting.  In America the leaders even of this type have usually been cautious about stating frankly that they proposed to substitute free love for married and family life as we have it, although many of them do in a roundabout way uphold this position.  In places on the continent of Europe, however, they are more straightforward, their attitude being that of the extreme French Socialist writer, M.  Gabrielle Deville, who announces that the Socialists intend to do away with both prostitution and marriage, which he regards as equally wicked — his method of doing away with prostitution being to make unchastity universal.  Professor Carl Pearson, a leading English Socialist, states their position exactly: " The sex relation of the future will not be regarded as a union for the birth of children, but as the closest form of friendship between man and woman.  It will be accompanied by no child-bearing or rearing, or by this in a much more limited number than at present.  With the sex relationship, so long as it does not result in children, we hold that the state in the future will in no wise interfere, but when it does result in children, then the state will have a right to interfere." He then goes on to point out that in order to save the woman from “economic dependence " upon the father of her children, the children will be raised at the expense of the state; the usual plan being to have huge buildings like foundling asylums.

Mr.  Pearson is a scientific man who, in his own realm, is worthy of serious heed, and the above quotation states in naked form just what logical scientific Socialism would really come to.  Aside from its thoroughly repulsive quality, it ought not to be necessary to point out that the condition of affairs aimed at would in actual practice bring about the destruction of the race within at most a couple of generations; and such destruction would be heartily to be desired for any race of such infamous character as to tolerate such a system.

“Advanced “Socialist leaders are fond of declaiming against patriotism, of announcing their movement as international, and of claiming to treat all men alike.  As regards patriotism their practice is generally as bad as their preaching; in this war the Socialist leaders have played the part of traitors to America, and many sincere men have in consequence left the Socialist party — although as so many of the Socialist leaders here are Germans, and as they have been warm upholders of every revolting act of the German autocracy, they may claim that their patriotism is merely inverted.  But as regards real internationalism, the Socialists would not for one moment stand the test of actual experiment.  If the leaders of the Socialist party in America should today endeavor to force their followers to admit all negroes and Chinamen to a real equality, their party would promptly disband, and rather than submit to such putting into effect of their avowed purpose, would, as a literal fact, follow any capitalistic organization as an alternative.

It is not accident that makes thoroughgoing and radical Socialists adopt the principles of free love as a necessary sequence to insisting that no man shall have the right to what he earns.  When Socialism of this really advanced and logical type, or any social system really, although not nominally, akin to it, is tried as it was in France in 1792, and again under the Commune in 1871, it is inevitable that the movement, ushered in with every kind of high-sounding phrase, should rapidly spread so as to include, not merely the forcible acquisition of the property of others, but every conceivable form of monetary corruption, immorality, licentiousness, and murderous violence.  In theory, distinctions can be drawn between this kind of Socialism and anarchy and nihilism; but in practice, as in 1871, the apostles of all three act together; and if the doctrines of any of them could be applied universally, all the troubles of society would indeed cease, because society itself would cease.  The poor and the helpless, especially women and children, would be the first to die out, and the few survivors would go back to the condition of skin-clad savages, so that the whole painful and laborious work of social development would have to begin over again.  Of course, long before such an event really happened the Socialistic regime would have been overturned, and in the reaction men would welcome any kind of one-man tyranny that was compatible with the existence of civilization.

The fact is that this kind of Socialism represents an effort to enthrone privilege in its crudest form.  Much of what we are fighting against in modern civilization is privilege.  We fight against privilege when it takes the form of a, franchise to a street railway company to enjoy the use of the streets of a great city without paying an adequate return; when it takes the form of a great business combination which grows rich by rebates which are denied to other shippers; when it takes the form of a stock-gambling operation which results in the watering of railway securities so that certain inside men get an enormous profit out of a swindle on the public.  All these represent various forms of illegal, or, if not illegal, then anti-social, privilege.  But there can be no greater abuse, no greater example of corrupt and destructive privilege, than that advocated by those who say that each man should put into a common store what he can and take out what he needs.  This is merely another way of saying that the thriftless and the vicious, who could or would put in but little, should be entitled to take out the earnings of the intelligent, the foresighted, and the industrious.  Such a proposition is morally base.  To choose to live by theft or by charity necessarily means the complete loss of self-respect.  The worst wrongs that capitalism can commit upon labor would sink into insignificance when compared with the hideous wrongs done by those who would degrade labor by entailing upon it the rapid lowering of self-reliance.

However — and this we must say again, and again, and again — the fact that the professed socialists hold views that are on some points profoundly immoral, does not in the smallest degree excuse us from warring against existing evils.  To fail to do so would rank us among the foes of this nation's own household.  And in thus warring, we must lose sight neither of our moral nor of our economic needs.

We should do everything that can be done, by law or otherwise, to keep the avenues of occupation, of employment, of work, of interest, so open that there shall be, so far as it is humanly possible to achieve it, a measurable equality of opportunity; an equality of opportunity for each man to show the stuff that is in him.  We ought, as far as possible, to make it possible for each man to obtain the education, the training which will enable him to take advantage of the opportunity, if he has the stuff in him to do so.  When it comes to reward, let each man, within the limits set by a sound and far-sighted morality, get what, by his energy, intelligence, thrift, courage, he is able to get, with the opportunity open.  We must set our faces against privilege; just as much against the kind of privilege which would let the shiftless and lazy laborer take what his brother has earned as against the privilege which allows the huge capitalist to take toll to which he is not entitled.  We stand for equality of opportunity, but not for equality of reward unless there is also equality of service.  If the service is equal, let the reward be equal; but let the reward depend on the service; and, mankind being composed as it is, there will be inequality of service for a long time to come, no matter how great the quality of opportunity may be; and just so long as there is inequality of service it is eminently desirable that there should be inequality of reward.

We recognize, and are bound to war against, the evils of today.  The remedies are partly economic and partly spiritual, partly to be obtained by laws, and in greater part to be obtained by individual and associated effort; for character is the vital matter, and character can not be created by law.  These remedies include a religious and moral teaching which shall increase the spirit of human brotherhood; an educational system which shall train men for every form of useful service — and which shall train us to prize common sense no less than morality; such a division of the profits of industry as shall tend to encourage intelligent and thrifty tool-users to become tool-owners; and a Government so strong, just, wise, and democratic that, neither lagging too far behind nor pushing heedlessly in advance, it may do its full share in promoting these ends.

Speech or Document 9

THE FARMER; THE CORNER-STONE OF CIVILIZATION

RECENTLY an Indiana woman was peeling some potatoes, and in a hollow in one she found a note from the Southern farmer who had raised the potatoes running:

“I got 69 cents.  A bushel for these potatoes.  How much did you pay for them?"

She wrote back:
“I paid $4 per bushel."

The farmer sent her just one more letter.  It said:

“I got 69 cents.  for those potatoes.  It could not have cost more than 31 cents.  to carry them to you.  Who got the other $3? I am going to try to find out."

It is idle to say that when such an occurrence is typical — and it most certainly is to a large extent typical — there is no cause for uneasiness.  Something is wrong.  It may be wholly the fault of outsiders.  It may be at least partially the fault of the farmers and of those who eat the food the farmers raise.  The trouble may be so deep-rooted in our social system that extreme caution must be exercised in striving for betterment.  But one thing is certain.  The situation is not satisfactory and calls for a thoroughgoing investigation, with the determination to make whatever changes, including radical changes, are necessary in order once more to put on a healthy basis the oldest and most essential of all occupations, the occupation which is the foundation of all others, the occupation of the tiller of the soil, of the man who by his own labor raises the raw material of food and clothing, without which the whole fabric of the most gorgeous civilization will topple in a week.

We can not permanently shape our course right on any international issue unless we are sound on the domestic issues; and this farm movement is the fundamental social issue — the one issue which is even more basic than the relations of capitalist and workingman.  The farm industry can not stop; the world is never more than a year from starvation; this great war has immensely increased the cost of living without commensurately improving the condition of the men who produce the things on which we live.  Even in this country the situation has become grave.

The temporary causes of this' situation have produced such effect in our land only because they aggravated conditions due to fundamental causes which have long been at work.  These fundamental causes may all be included in one: the farmers' business in our country has remained almost unchanged during the century which has seen every other business change in profound and radical fashion.  He still works by methods belonging to the day of the stagecoach and the horse canal-boat, while every other brain or hand worker in the country has been obliged to shape his methods into more or less conformity to those required by an age of steam and electricity.

Our commercial, banking, manufacturing, and transportation systems have been built up with a rapidity never before approached.  We have accumulated wealth at an unheard of rate.  There has been grave injustice in the distribution of the wealth, our law-givers having erred both by unwisdom in leaving the matter alone, and at times by even greater unwisdom when they interfered with it.  But on the whole the growth and prosperity have been enormous; and yet we have allowed the basic industry of farming, the industry which underlies all economic life, to drift along haphazard, we have allowed the life of the dwellers in the open country to become more and more meager, and their methods of production and of marketing to remain so primitive that their soil was impoverished and their profits largely usurped by others.

In 1880, one farmer in four was a tenant; and at that time the tenant was still generally a young man to whom the position of tenant was merely an intermediate step between that of farm laborer and that of farm owner.  In 1910, over one farmer in three had become a tenant; and now-adays it becomes steadily more difficult to pass from the tenant to the owner stage.  If the process continues unchecked, half a century hence we shall have deliberately permitted ourselves to plunge into the situation which brought chaos in Ireland, and which in England resulted in the complete elimination of the old yeomanry, so that nearly nine-tenths of English farmers today are tenants and the consequent class division is most ominous for the future.  France and Germany are today distinctly better off than we are in this respect; and in New Zealand, where there is an excellent system of land distribution, only one-seventh of the farmers are tenants.

If the tendencies that have produced such a condition continue to work unchecked no prophetic power is needed to foretell disaster to the nation.  Therefore, the one hopeless attitude, in this as in recent international matters, is “watchful waiting," sitting still and doing nothing to prepare for or to avert disaster.  It is far better to try experiments, even when we are not certain how these experiments will turn out, or when we are certain that the proposed plan contains elements of folly as well as elements of wisdom.  Better “trial and error “than no trial at all.  And the service test, the test of actual experiment, is the only conclusive test.  It is only the attempt in actual practice to realize a realizable ideal that contains hope.  Mere writing and oratory and enunciation of theory, with no attempt to secure the service test, amount to nothing.

This applies to the tenancy problem.  It also applies to every other farming problem.  As regards each, let us test the plans for reform, so far as may be, by actual practice.

For many of these plans the several states offer themselves as natural laboratories, where experiments  n be tried when conditions and public opinion are right; and this although thepermanent remedies must ultimately, at least in major part, be national.  It is exceedingly interesting to watch such an experiment as that seemingly to be tried in North Dakota.  This is a farming State, where the farming is the predominant interest, and inasmuch as all reforms cost money, and as even advisable reforms become utterly disastrous if in spending money upon them we treat " the sky as the limit," and decline to consider the proportion between what the reform achieves and what it costs, it is well that the farmers themselves should pay a good proportion of the cost of reforms necessary to and peculiarly affecting themselves.  In North Dakota, in addition to matters like hail insurance, it is proposed that the State shall purchase and operate grain elevators, mills and terminals and other business instrumentalities of vital concern to farmers.  I most heartily commend the earnest effort the leaders in the movement have made actually to better conditions; and I say this although from the facts at my command I judge that most of the work which it is thus proposed to have done by the State could be done better by cooperative societies among the farmers themselves.  Present conditions should certainly be changed.  To keep them unchanged is to act in a spirit of mere Toryism.  From the North Dakota experiment, when put in actual practice, we can learn some things to follow and some things to avoid; and perhaps we can also learn to be wise in time, and, by sane determination to put in practice reforms that we are reasonably sure will have no bad effects, avoid the sad necessity of paying with our own skins for experiments which probably will have bad effects.

I greatly prefer to see the Government leave untouched whatever the corporations under Government supervision can do; and just as far as possible I want to see all the corporations made into cooperative associations.  But there are things so important that the Government must do them, if it is only through such exercise of collective power that they can be done.

Our object must be (1) to make the tenant farmer a landowner; (2) to eliminate as far as possible the conditions which produce the shifting, seasonal, tramp type of labor, and to give the farm laborer a permanent status, a career as a farmer, for which his school education shall fit him, and which shall open to him the chance of in the end earning the ownership in fee of his own farm; (3) to secure cooperation among the small landowners, so that their energies shall produce the best possible results; (4) by progressive taxation or in other fashion to break up and prevent the formation of great landed estates, especially in so far as they consist of unused agricultural land; (5) to make capital available for the farmers, and thereby put them more on an equality with other men engaged in business; (6) to care for the woman on the farm as much as for the man, and to eliminate the conditions which now so often tend to make her life one of gray and sterile drudgery; (7) to do this primarily through the farmer himself, but also, when necessary, by the use of the entire collective power of the people of the country; for the welfare of the farmer is the concern of all of us.

Speech or Document 10

THE HUN WITHIN OUR GATES

THE Hun within our gates is the worst of the foes of our own household, whether he is the paid or the unpaid agent of Germany.  Whether he is pro-German or poses as a pacifist, or a peace-at-any-price man, matters little.  He is the enemy of the United States.  Senators and Congressmen like Messrs.  Stone, La Follette and Maclemore belong in Germany and it is a pity they can not be sent there, as Vallandigham was sent to the hostile lines by Lincoln during the Civil War.  Such men are among the worst of the foes o£ our own household; and so are the sham philanthropists and sinister agitators and the wealthy creatures without patriotism who support and abet them.  Our Government has seemed afraid to grapple with these people.  It is permitting thousands of allies of Berlin to sow the seeds of treason and sedition in this country.  The I.  W.  W.  boasts its defiance of all law, and many of its members exultingly proclaim that in their war against industry in the United States they are endeavoring to give the Government so much to do that it will have no troops to spare for Europe.  Every district where the I.  W.  W.  starts rioting should be placed under martial law, and cleaned up by military methods.  The German-language papers carry on a consistent campaign in favor of Germany against England.  They should be put out of existence for the period of this war.  The Hearst papers, more ably edited than the German sheets, play the Kaiser's game in a similar way.  When they keep within the law they should at least be made to feel the scorn felt for them by every honest American.  Wherever any editor can be shown to be purveying treason in violation of law he should be jailed until the conflict is over.  Every disloyal German-born citizen should have his naturalization papers recalled and should be interned during the term of the war.  Action of this kind is especially necessary in order to pick out the disloyal but vociferous minority of citizens of German descent from the vast but silent majority of entirely loyal citizens of German descent who otherwise will suffer from a public anger that will condemn all alike.  Every disloyal native-born American should be disfranchised and interned.  It is time to strike our enemies at home heavily and quickly.  Every copperhead in this country is an enemy to the Government, to the people, to the army and to the flag, and should be treated as such.

This pro-German, Anti-American propaganda has been carried on for years prior to the war, and its treasonable activities are performed systematically today.  The great majority of the men and women of German blood, are absolutely good Americans, and we owe it just as much to them as to the rest of our fellow countrymen with the utmost severity to suppress the tens of thousands of Germans and German-Americans who, having taken the oath of allegiance, yet intrigue and conspire against the United States and do their utmost to promote the success of Germany and to weaken the defense of this nation.  These men support and direct the pro-German societies.  They incite disloyal activities among the Russian Jews.  They finance the small groups of Irish-Americans whose hatred for England makes them traitors to the United States.  They foment seditious operations among the German-American socialists and the I.  W.  W.'s.  They support the German-language periodicals.  Their campaigns range from peace movements and anti-draft schemings to open efforts in favor of sedition and civil war.

These traitors are following out the vicious teachings of Prussian philosophers; there is no cause for surprise at their treasonable course.  Unfortunately there is cause for surprise at the license which the Administration extends to their detestable activities.  In this attitude the Administration is repeating its course of indifference to world-threatening aggression, and of submission to studied acts of murderous violence, which resulted, after two and a half years of injury and humiliation, in our being dragged unprepared into war.

If during those two and a half years a policy of courage, and of consistent and far-sighted Americanism, had been followed, either the brutal invasion of our national rights would have been checked without war or else if we had been forced into war we would have brought it instantly to a victorious end.  Our failure to prepare is responsible for our failure now efficiently to act in the war.  In exactly the same fashion it may be set down as certain that continuance of the present craven policy of ignoring sedition and paltering with treason will encourage and aid German autocracy, and will be translated either into terrible lists of Americans slain and crippled on the battlefield or else into an ignoble peace which will leave Germany free at some future time to resume its campaign against America and against liberty-loving mankind.

Speech or Document 11

NINE-TENTHS OF WISDOM IS BEING WISE IN TIME

A SPEECH DELIVERED AT LINCOLN, NEBRASKA, JUNE 14, 1917

IN the past there have been two great crises in our national life: that in which the infant nation was saved by the soldierly valor and single-minded statesmanship of Washington, and that in which, in its raw maturity, the nation was again saved by the men who followed Lincoln and Grant.  In each case the victory was followed by over half a century of national unity, secured by the peace of victory; and during this peace, brought by the victory of righteousness, men forgot that all its benefits would be lost if it were turned into the peace of cowardice and slackness.  The Revolution was a war for liberty; and that liberty became of permanent value only when, again under Washington's lead, it was made secure by the orderly strength of the Union.  The liberty secured in the Civil War to the black man was thus secured only because the white man was willing to fight to the death for the Union, and for the flag to which we owe undivided allegiance.  The old thirteen States were born of the Revolution.  Nebraska, like Kansas, was born of the Civil War.  It was the struggle over the admission to statehood of Kansas and Nebraska which marked the real opening of the contest that culminated at Appomattox.

The contest settled three great principles:

I.  That we were no longer to make words substitutes for facts, or accept fine phrases in lieu of great deeds; and that therefore we were to make our devotion to liberty a fact instead of a phrase by abolishing slavery.

2.   That we were all hereafter to be Americans with an undivided allegiance to the flag of the Union; an allegiance even more incompatible with a loyalty divided between our flag and some foreign flag than with a loyalty divided between the whole country and some section of the country.

3.   That we were definitely to realize that while peace was normally a good thing, yet that righteousness stood above peace, and that the only good citizens were those who were sternly ready to face war rather than submit to an unrighteous or cowardly peace.

All these principles are at stake at the present moment.  All three have been threatened, and therefore the honor and the welfare and the usefulness and, indeed, the very life of the Republic have been threatened by the pacifist and pro-German agitation of the last three years.

Our national record during these three years is not one to which we can look back with pride; for during these three years we violated the three principles established by the Civil War.

I.  For two years and a half we used fine phrases to cover ugly facts, when we unctuously protested our devotion to the liberties of small, well-behaved nations in the abstract, and yet, in the concrete did not say one word of indignant protest when with ruthless brutality, and without one shadow of moral justification, Germany conquered and enslaved Belgium.  We did not even dare to act when our own innocent women and children and unarmed men lost their lives on the high seas, and when their murder was insolently justified by the tyrannous Prussianized autocracy which now menaces the entire peace-loving and liberty-loving world.

2.  We   permitted  our  national  policy  to  be swayed by the national devotions and national antipathies of men who exercised the rights of American citizens but who showed themselves traitors to America by the way in which they prostituted  our citizenship  to the  interests  of Germany, or to their hatred of England; men whose allegiance to this country was merely one of the lips, while in their hearts their loyalty was wholly given to Germany, or else to any and every enemy of England, even although that enemy was also an enemy of the United States and of mankind.     Such disloyalty was quite as mischievous as, and far less excusable than, sectional  disloyalty.

3.	It would be impossible to overstate the damage done to the moral fiber of our country by the professional pacifist  propaganda, the  peace-at-any-price propaganda, which had been growing in strength for the previous decade and which for the first two and a half years of the war was potent in influencing us as a people to play a part which was wholly unworthy of the teachings of the great men of our past.     The professional pacifist movement was heavily financed by certain big capitalists.     This was not merely admitted but blazoned abroad by some among them; whereas the accusations that the munition makers or any other interested persons, played any important part in the movement for preparedness were malicious falsehoods, well known to be such by those who  uttered them.     The professional pacifists during these two and a half years have occupied precisely the position of the copperheads during the time of Abraham Lincoln.

We now pay the same tribute of respect to the men who fought for their convictions in the Civil War, whether they wore the blue or the gray — kinsmen of mine were in the union army, and other kinsmen of mine in the Confederate army, and I am equally proud of both.  But nobody is proud of the copperheads, who exalted peace above righteousness; and the professional pacifists of today are their spiritual heirs.

At last, thank Heaven, we came to our senses, realized our shortcomings, and tardily did our duty.  At last we spurned the mean counsels of timidity and folly.  At last we showed that we were not too proud to fight; and we have reversed and repudiated the mean and base proposal to secure peace without victory.  At last we took up the challenge which Germany had, with equal brutality and contempt, so often hurled in our faces.  At last we determined to make our loyalty to this nation's past and to the welfare of humanity, a matter of deeds and not merely of empty words.  We have entered the great war for the future of civilization; and now that we are at war it behooves us to bear ourselves like men.

We are utterly unprepared.  The things we are now doing, even when well done, are things which we ought to have begun doing three years ago.  We can now only partially offset our folly in failing to prepare doing these last three years, in failing to heed the lesson writ large across the skies in letters of flame and blood.  Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time! Now we must fight without proper preparation.  But we must prepare as well as we can at this late date; and the most important of all forms of preparedness is spiritual preparedness.

First of all we must sternly insist that all our people practice the patriotism of service, and that we all give a fervid and undivided loyalty to our common country.  Patriotism is an affair of deeds, and patriotic words are good only in so far as they result in deeds.  If phrase-making and oratory, whether by public servants or by out-siders, are treated as substitutes for deeds, the result is unmixed mischief.  We read Lincoln's Gettysburg speech and Second Inaugural, only because his words were made good by his deeds, only because he threw aside all considerations other than the welfare of the nation, and with steadfast efficiency fought to the end for freedom and for the preservation of the Union.

As it was with that very great man in the past, so it must be with us lesser men in the present.  Unless we now, at this moment, in this war, strive each of us to serve the country according to our several abilities, we are false to the memories of the nation-builders to whose sagacity and prowess we owe the creation of this state fifty years ago.  Nebraska was founded as a State of the Union only because there were in the nation, at that time enough men who were willing to do and dare and die at need for the Union.  Today, likewise, the instant and overwhelming need of the nation is for men who will serve in arms, and if necessary die, for the nation; and next to this is the need for the men and women who will put our entire industrial and agricultural strength back of the fighting men in the field.  Only the men and women who do this are true patriots; for patriotism means service to the nation; and only those who render such service are fit to enjoy the privilege of citizenship.

We can not render such service if our loyalty is in even the smallest degree divided between this and any other nation.  There must be no division within our own ranks along the lines of creed or national origin; and any citizen of this country who uses his citizenship in the interest of some other country is a traitor to the United States.  It is not merely our right, but our high duty, to insist on this fact.  Twice over a century ago we fought Great Britain.  In each contest the great majority of the citizens of British descent took the lead and proved that they were Americans and nothing else.  Those who did not so act were traitors.  Now we are at war with Germany; and every citizen of German blood is bound in this contest to show the same wholehearted Americanism in support of the United States against Germany that was shown in 1776 and 1812 by the Americans of British descent in the contests with Great Britain.  To act otherwise is to be guilty of treason.

In the Revolutionary War the British armies who strove against our liberties were aided by powerful bodies of German auxiliaries.  One of Washington's most famous victories, that at Trenton, was gained purely over Germans; and his first military experience was against the French.  But it would be unworthy folly now to inveigh against Germany because a hundred and forty years ago she furnished mercenary troops for our subjugation; or to inveigh against the French because they were the bitter foes of our people in colonial days.  It was precisely as unworthy, precisely as silly and wicked, now to nourish hatred against England.  Washington's troops included men of English and Irish, of German and French, blood.  But they were Americans and nothing else! They did not ask whether they were to fight English, French, or Germans.  They fought the foes of the American flag, whoever these foes might be.

This must be our spirit today.  We are a different people from any people of Europe.  It is our boast that we admit the immigrant to full fellowship and equality with the native born.  In return we demand that he shall share our undivided allegiance to the one flag which floats over all of us.  The events of the last few years have conclusively shown that the man, whether of German, or of any other origin, who attempts to combine allegiance to this country with allegiance to another, is necessarily false to this country.

In this country we must have but one flag, the American flag; but one language, the English language; and above all, but one loyalty, an exclusive and undivided loyalty to the United States, with no Lot's wife attitude, no looking back to the various Old World countries from which our ancestors have severally come.

Now for the lesson of preparedness — military and economic, spiritual and material.  As yet, nearly five months after Germany declared war on us, we have not so much as a division of troops ready for action.  As yet we are utterly helpless to act in our own defense.  The fault lies primarily in our complete failure to prepare during the last three years since the great war opened.  Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time! We have not been wise in time; and now we rely on our allies to protect us from the effect of our folly.  Just think of what Germany would have done to us within the first month — not to speak of the first four months — after we broke off diplomatic relations with her if we had not been able to shield our feeble and short-sighted un-readiness behind the navy of Great Britain and the armies of the allies.  We owe our ignoble safety to the British fleet, and the French and English armies.  We escape paying an utterly ruinous payment for our folly only because the soldiers and sailors of our allies pay for it with their lives.  Uncle Sam is in the undignified position of the man who gets on a street car and then fumbles in his pocket while somebody else pays his fare.

If we had been willing to prepare, and if we had showed that we meant what we said, we would probably have prevented the war, and would certainly have brought it to a close as soon as we entered it.  Now, friends, there is no use crying over spilt milk.  But it is even worse to make believe that the milk was not spilt.  The important thing is to face the fact of the spilling and resolve that it shall not be spilt again.  Let us act in the spirit of the words of Abraham Lincoln at the close of the Civil War: “Human nature will not change.  In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good.  Let us therefore study the incidents of this as philosophy to learn wisdom from, and none of them as wrongs to be revenged." Let us manfully acknowledge how great have been our shortcomings for the last few years, and then let us, without a particle of revengeful or recriminatory or uncharitable feeling, learn from them wisdom to be applied in our future conduct.  From this time on let us insist on an absolute and undivided Americanism in this land, untempered by any half allegiance to the countries from which our ancestors may severally have sprung, and untainted by any unworthy national animosity towards any other country.  Let us prepare ourselves spiritually, economically, and in all military and naval matters — including as a permanent policy the policy of universal military training and service — so that never again shall we be utterly unready, as we now are, to meet a great crisis.  Finally, in the present war, a war for liberty and democracy against the ruthless militaristic tyranny of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns, let us as speedily as possible train our giant, but our soft and unready, strength, so that we may use our hardened might to bring the slaughter to an end in the only way honorably possible, by securing for ourselves and our allies the peace of justice based on overwhelming victory.

Speech or Document 12

FEAR GOD AND TAKE YOUR OWN PART

FEAR God; and take your own part! Fear God, in the true sense of the word, means love God, respect God, honor God; and all of this can only be done by loving our neighbor, treating him justily and mercifully, and in all ways endeavoring to protect him from injustice and cruelty; thus obeying, as far as our human frailty will permit, the great and immutable law of righteousness.

We fear God when we do justice to and demand justice for the men within our own borders.  We are false to the teachings of righteousness if we do not do such justice and demand such justice.  We must do it to the weak, and we must do it to the strong.  We do not fear God if we show mean envy and hatred of those who are better off than we are; and still less do we fear God if we show a base arrogance towards and selfish lack of consideration for those who are less well off.  We must apply the same standard of conduct alike to man and to woman, to rich man and to poor man, to employer and employee.  We must organize our social and industrial life so as to secure a reasonable equality of opportunity for all men to show the stuff that is in them, and a reasonable division among those engaged in industrial work of the reward for that industrial work, a division which shall take into account all the qualities that contribute to the necessary success.  We must demand honesty, justice, mercy, truthfulness, in our dealings with one another within our own borders.  Outside of our own borders we must treat other nations as we would wish to be treated in return, judging each in any given crisis as we ourselves ought to be judged — that is, by our conduct in that crisis.  If they do ill, we show that we fear God when we sternly bear testimony against them and oppose them in any way and to whatever extent the needs require.  If they do well, we must not wrong them ourselves.  Finally, if we are really devoted to a lofty ideal we must in so far as our strength permits aid them if they are wronged by others.  When we sit idly by while Belgium is being overwhelmed, and rolling up our eyes prattle with unctuous self-righteousness about “the duty of neutrality," we show that we do not really fear God; on the contrary, we show an odious fear of the devil, and a mean readiness to serve him.

But in addition to fearing God, it is necessary that we should be able and ready to take our own part.  The man who can not take his own part is a nuisance in the community, a source of weakness, an encouragement to wrongdoers and an added burden to the men who wish to do what is right.  If he can not take his own part, then somebody else has to take it for him; and this means that his weakness and cowardice and inefficiency place an added burden on some other man and make that other man's strength by just so much of less avail to the community as a whole.  No man can take the part of any one else unless he is able to take his own part.  This is just as true of nations as of men.  A nation that can not take its own part is at times almost as fertile a source of mischief in the world at large as is a nation which does wrong to others, for its very existence puts a premium on such wrongdoing.  Therefore, a nation must fit itself to defend its honor and interest against outside aggression; and this necessarily means that in a free democracy every man fit for citizenship must be trained so that he can do his full duty to the nation in war no less than in peace.

Unless we are thorough-going Americans and unless our patriotism is part of the very fiber of our being, we can neither serve God nor take our own part.  Whatever may be the case in an infinitely remote future, at present no people can render any service to humanity unless as a people they feel an intense sense of national cohesion and solidarity.  The man who loves other nations as much as he does his own, stands on a par with the man who loves other women as much as he does his own wife.  The United States can accomplish little for mankind, save in so far as within its borders it develops an intense spirit of Americanism.  A flabby cosmopolitanism, especially if it expresses itself through a flabby pacifism, is not only silly, but degrading.  It represents national emasculation.  The professors of every form of hyphenated Americanism are as truly the foes of this country as if they dwelled outside its borders and made active war against it.  This is not a figure of speech, or a hyperbolic statement.  The leaders of the hyphenated-American movement in this country (who during the last eighteen months have been the professional German-Americans and Austro-Americans) are also leaders in the movement against preparedness.  I have before me a little pamphlet, circulated by a “German-American " organization, consisting of articles written by a German-American for a paper which claims to be the leading German paper in Illinois.  This pamphlet is a bitter attack upon the policy of preparedness for the United States, and a slanderous assault on those advocating this American policy.  It is, therefore, an effort in the interest of Germany to turn the United States into a larger Belgium — an easy prey for Germany whenever Germany desires to seize it.  These professional German-Americans and Pro-Germans are Anti-American to the core.  They play the part of traitors, pure and simple.  Once it was true that this country could not endure half free and half slave.  Today it is true that it can not endure half American and half foreign.  The hyphen is incompatible with patriotism.

Patriotism should be an integral part of our every feeling at all times, for it is merely another name for those qualities of soul which make a man in peace or in war, by day or by night, think of his duty to his fellows, and of his duty to the nation through which their and his loftiest aspirations must find their fitting expression.  After the Lusitania was sunk, Mr.  Wilson stated in effect that such a time was not the right time to stir up patriotism.  This statement is entirely incompatible with having a feeling of deep patriotism at any time.  It might just as appropriately have been made by George Washington immediately after his defeat at the Brandywine, or by Abraham Lincoln immediately after the surrender of Fort Sumter; and if in either of these crises our leaders had acted on any such principle we would not now have any country at all.  Patriotism is as much a duty in time of war as in time of peace, and it is most of all a duty in any and every great crisis.  To commit folly or do evil, to act inconsiderately and hastily or wantonly and viciously, in the name of patriotism, represents not patriotism at all, but a use of the name to cloak an attack upon the thing.  Such baseness or folly is wrong, at every time and on every occasion.  But patriotism itself is not only in place on every occasion and at every time, but is peculiarly the feeling which should be stirred to its deepest depths at every serious crisis.  The duty of a leader is to lead; and it is a dreadful thing that any man chosen to lead his fellow-countrymen should himself show, not merely so profound a lack of patriotism, but such misunderstanding of patriotism, as to be willing to say in a great crisis what President Wilson thus said at the time of the sinking of the Lusitania.  This statement, coupled with his statement made about the same time as to being “too proud to fight," furnishes the clue to the Administration's policy both before and since.  This policy made our great democratic commonwealth false to its duties and its ideals in a tremendous world crisis, at the very time when, if properly led, it could have rendered an inestimable service to all mankind, and could have placed itself on a higher pinnacle of worthy achievement than ever before.

Patriotism, so far from being incompatible with performance of duty to other nations, is an indispensable prerequisite to doing one's duty toward other nations.  Fear God; and take your own part! If this nation had feared God it would have stood up for the Belgians and Armenians; if it had been able and willing to take its own part there would have been no murderous assault on the Lusitania, no outrages on our men and women in Mexico.  True patriotism carries with it not hostility to other nations but a quickened sense of responsible good-will towards other nations, a good-will of acts and not merely of words.  I stand for a nationalism of duty, to oneself and to others; and, therefore, for a nationalism which is a means to internationalism.  World peace must rest on the willingness of nations with courage, cool foresight, and readiness for self-sacrifice to defend the fabric of international law.  No nation can help in securing an organized, peaceful and justice-doing world community until it is willing to run risks and make efforts in order to secure and maintain such a community.

The nation that in actual practice fears God is the nation which does not wrong its neighbors, which does so far as possible help its neighbors, and which never promises what it can not do or will not or ought not to perform.  The professional pacifists in and out of office who at peace congresses pass silly resolutions which can not be, and ought not to be, lived up to, and enter into silly treaties which ought not to be, and can not be, kept, are not serving God, but Baal.  They are not doing anything for anybody.  If in addition these people, when the concrete case arises, as in Belgium or Armenia, fear concretely to denounce and antagonize the wrongdoer, they become not merely passive, but active agents of the devil.  The professional pacifists who applauded universal arbitration treaties and disarmament proposals prior to the war, since the war have held meetings and parades in this country on behalf of peace, and have gone on silly missions to Europe on behalf of peace — and the peace they sought to impose on heroes who were battling against infamy was a peace conceived in the interest of the authors of the infamy.  They did not dare to say that they stood only for a peace that should right the wrongs of Belgium.  They did not dare to denounce the war of aggression by Germany against Belgium.  Their souls were too small, their timidity too great.  They were even afraid to applaud the war waged by Belgium in its own defense.  These pacifists have served morality, have shown that they feared God, exactly as the Pharisees did, when they made broad their philacteries and uttered long prayers in public, but did not lift a finger to lighten the load of the oppressed.  When Mr.  Wilson and Mr.  Bryan made this nation shirk its duty towards Belgium, they made us false to all our high ideals; for they acted and caused this government to act in that spirit of commercial opportunism which refuses to do duty to others unless there is in it pecuniary profit for oneself.  This combination of mean timidity and mean commercial opportunism is peculiarly odious because those practicing it have sought to hide it by profuse outbursts of wordy sentimentality and loud professions of attachment to impossible and undesirable ideals.  One of the besetting sins of many of our public servants (and of not a few of our professional moralists, lay and clerical) is to cloak weakness or baseness of action behind insincere oratory on behalf of impractical ideals.  The true servant of the people is the man who preaches realizable ideals; and who then practices what he has preached.

Moreover, even as regards the pacifists who genuinely desire that this nation should fear God, it is to be remembered that if the nation can not take its own part, the fact that it fears God will be of no practical consequence to any one.  Nobody cares whether or not the feeling of the Chinese people is against international wrongdoing; for, as China is helplessly unable to take her own part, she is in practice even more helpless to take the part of any one else and to secure justice and mercy for any one else.  The pacifists who are seeking to Chinafy the United States are not only seeking to bring the United States to ruin, but are also seeking to render it absolutely impotent to help upright and well-behaved nations which are oppressed by the military power of unscrupulous neighbors of greater strength.

The professional pacifists, the leaders in the pacifist movement in the United States, do particular harm by giving well-meaning but uninformed people who do not think deeply what seems to them a convincing excuse for failure to show courage and resolution.  Those who preach sloth and cowardice under the high-sounding name of “peace " give people a word with which to cloak, even to themselves, their failure to perform unpleasant duty.  For a man to stand up for his own rights, or especially for the rights of somebody else, means that he must have virile qualities; courage, foresight, willingness to face risk and undergo effort.  It is much easier to be timid and lazy.  The average man does not like to face death and endure hardship and labor.  He can be roused to do so if a leader of the right type, a Washington or Lincoln, appeals to the higher qualities, including the stern qualities, of his soul.  But a leader, or at least a man who holds a leader's place, earns praise and profit unworthily if he uses his gift of words to lull well-meaning men to sleep, if he assures them that it is their duty to do the easy and selfish thing, and furnishes them high-sounding phrases with which to cover ignoble failure to perform hard and disagreeable duties.

Peace is not the end.  Righteousness is the end.  When the Savior saw the money-changers in the Temple he broke the peace by driving them out.  At that moment peace could have been obtained readily enough by the simple process of keeping quiet in the presence of wrong.  But instead of preserving peace at the expense of righteousness, the Savior armed himself with a scourge of cords and drove the money-changers from the Temple.  Righteousness is the end, and peace a means to the end, and sometimes it is not peace, but war which is the proper means to achieve the end.  Righteousness should breed valor and strength.  When it does breed them, it is triumphant; and when triumphant, it necessarily brings peace.  But peace does not necessarily bring righteousness.  .  .  .

Let this nation fear God and take its own part.  Let it scorn to do wrong to great or small.  Let it exercise patience and charity toward all other peoples, and yet at whatever cost unflinchingly stand for the right when the right is menaced by the might which backs wrong.  Let It furthermore remember that the only way in which successfully to oppose wrong which is backed by might is to put over against it right which is backed by might.  Wanton or unjust war is an abhorrent evil.  But there are even worse evils.  Until, as a nation, we learn to put honor and duty above safety, and to encounter any hazard with stern joy rather than fail in our obligations to ourselves and others, it is mere folly to talk of entering into leagues for world peace or into any other movement of like character.  The only kind of peace worth having is the peace of righteousness and justice; the only nation that can serve other nations is the strong and valiant nation; and the only great international policies worth considering are those whose upholders believe in them strongly enough to fight for them.  The Monroe Doctrine is as strong as the United States navy, and no stronger.  A nation is utterly contemptible if it will not fight in its own defense.  A nation is not wholly admirable unless in time of stress it will go to war for a great ideal wholly unconnected with its immediate material interest.

Let us prepare not merely in military matters, but in our social and industrial life.  There can be no sound relationship toward other nations unless there is also sound relationship among our own citizens within our own ranks.  Let us insist on the thorough Americanization of the newcomers to our shores, and let us also insist on the thorough Americanization of ourselves.  Let us encourage the fullest industrial activity, and give the amplest industrial reward to those whose activities are most important for securing industrial success, and at the same time let us see that justice is done and wisdom shown in securing the welfare of every man, woman, and child within our borders.  Finally, let us remember that we can do nothing to help other peoples, and nothing permanently to secure material well-being and social justice within our own borders, unless we feel with all our hearts devotion to this country, unless we are Americans and nothing else, and unless in time of peace by universal military training, by insistence upon the obligations of every man and every woman to serve the commonwealth both in peace and war, and, above all, by a high and fine preparedness of soul and spirit, we fit ourselves to hold our own against all possible aggression from without.

We are the citizens of a mighty Republic consecrated to the service of God above, through the service of man on this earth.  We are the heirs of a great heritage bequeathed to us by statesmen who saw with the eyes of the seer and the prophet.  We must not prove false to the memories of the nation's past.  We must not prove false to the fathers from whose loins we sprang, and to their fathers, the stern men who dared greatly and risked all things that freedom should hold aloft an undimmed torch in this wide land.  They held their worldly well-being as dust in the balance when weighed against their sense of high duty, their fealty to lofty ideals.  Let us show ourselves worthy to be their sons.  Let us care, as is right, for the things of the body; but let us show that we care even more for the things of the soul.  Stout of heart, and pledged to the valor of righteousness, let us stand four-square to the winds of destiny, from whatever corner of the world they blow.  Let us keep untarnished, unstained, the honor of the flag our fathers bore aloft in the teeth of the wildest storm, the flag that shall float above the solid files of a united people, a people sworn to the great cause of liberty and of justice, for themselves, and for all the sons and daughters of men.

Speech or Document 13

UNCLE SAM'S ONLY FRIEND IS UNCLE SAM

OVER forty years ago Charles Dickens wrote as follows of the United States:

“In these times in which I write it is honorably remarkable for protecting its subjects wherever they may travel with a dignity and a determination which is a model for England." Ulysses Grant was then President of the United States.

Like Washington and Lincoln and Andrew Jackson, he was an American who was not too proud to fight.  Those of my countrymen who are still faithful to the old American tradition can not but feel with bitter shame the bitter contrast between the conditions Charles Dickens thus described and the conditions at the present moment.

The policy of watchful waiting, a policy popular among governmental chiefs of a certain type ever since the days of Ethelred the Unready and for thousands of years anterior to that not wholly fortunate rule, has failed, as of course it always does fail in the presence of serious difficulty and of a resolute and ruthless foe.  We have tried every possible expedient save only the application of wisdom and resolution.  It has been said that we have not tried war; but this statement can be made only by those who are inexact in their terminology.  Of course, if any one's feelings are soothed by saying that when we took Vera Cruz, suffered a loss of a hundred and twenty men killed and wounded and in return killed and wounded several hundred Mexicans, we were waging peace and not waging war, why there is no particular objection to this individual gaining whatever comfort is afforded by using words which misdescribe facts.  But this is all the comfort he can gain.  As a natural result of the impression created on foreigners by our conduct in Mexico, we were forced to hostile action in Haiti and a number of our men and our opponents were killed and wounded.  Apparently we " waged peace " in Haiti, much as we " waged peace " in Mexico — and in Mexico the end of the war or peace or whatever it was that we waged was that we withdrew without getting the result which our Government had announced that it would get when it took Vera Cruz.

We of the United States have had a twofold duty imposed on us during the last year.  We have owed a duty to ourselves.  We have owed a duty to others.  We have failed in both.  Primarily both failures are due to the mischievous effects of the professional pacifist agitation which became governmental nearly five years ago when the then Administration at Washington sought to negotiate various all-inclusive arbitration treaties under which we abandoned the right to stand up for our own vital interest and national honor.  Very reluctantly we who believe in peace, but in the peace of righteousness, have been forced to the conclusion that the most prominent leaders of the peace agitation of the past ten years in this country, so far as they have accomplished anything that was not purely fatuous, have accomplished nothing but mischief.  This result of the activities of these professional pacifist agitators has been due mainly to the fact that they have consistently placed peace ahead of righteousness, and have absolutely refused to look facts in the face if they thought the facts were unpleasant.

It is as foolish to ignore common sense in this matter as in any other matter.  It is as wicked to exalt peace at the expense of morality as it is to exalt war at the expense of morality.  The greatest service that Lincoln rendered to the cause of permanent peace to the greater cause of justice and of righteousness was rendered by him when, with unshaken firmness, he accepted four years of grinding warfare rather than yield to the professional pacifists of his day — the Copperheads.  Washington's greatest service to peace was rendered by similar action on his part.  And be it remembered that never in history have two men rendered greater service to the only kind of peace worth having for honorable men and women than was rendered by these two heroes who did not shrink from righteous war.

Failure to perform duty to others is merely aggravated by failure to perform duty to our-selves.  To pay twenty-five million dollars black-mail to Colombia does not atone for our timid refusal to do our duty by Belgium.  It merely aggravates it.  Moreover, it should always be remembered that in these matters the weak can not be helped by the weak; that the brutal wrongdoer can not be checked by the coward or by the fat, boastful, soft creature who does not take the trouble to make himself fit to enforce his words by his deeds.  Preparedness means forethought, effort, trouble, labor.  Therefore soft men, selfish, indolent men, men absorbed in money-getting, and the great mass of well-meaning men who shrink from performing the new duties created by new needs, eagerly welcome a political leader who will comfort them, and relieve their secret sense of shame, by using high-sounding names to describe their shortcomings.

An adroit politician can unquestionably gain many votes in such fashion, if he exalts unpreparedness as a duty, if he praises peace and advocates neutrality, as both in themselves moral — even although the “peace " and " neutrality " may be conditioned on the failure to do our duty either to others or to ourselves.  Such a politician, if he excels in the use of high-sounding words, may win votes and gain office by thus pandering to men who wish to hear their selfishness, their short-sightedness or their timidity exalted into virtues.  But he is sapping the moral vitality of the people whom he misleads.

It has been an evil thing that this nation, which for five years has been strutting as the champion of peace and holding conferences to denounce war and praising its wealthy citizens for founding peace leagues, has contented itself with these futile activities and has not dared to strike a blow, has not dared even to say a word for righteousness in the concrete, while wrong has been at least temporarily triumphant during the past eighteen months.  It is an even worse thing that during this last eighteen months we have wholly failed to prepare to defend our own homes from disaster.

Nor can we, the people of the United States, escape blame for ourselves by putting it upon our public servants.  Unquestionably the Administration has been guilty of culpable indifference to the honor and the interest of the nation during the last year and a half; but it has been guilty in this fashion precisely because it could count upon popular support; and therefore the ultimate blame rests on the people, that is, on us.  It may well be that political gain will come to the politicians who appeal to what is selfish and timid in the hearts of our people, and who comfort soft self-indulgence by praising it as virtuous.

The events of the last year have shown that all who believed that the most frightful wrongdoing by warlike nations could be averted by the opinion of civilized mankind as a whole have been utterly in error.  What is happening in this year 1916 shows that not the slightest particle of advance in international morality has been made during the century that has elapsed since the close of the Napoleonic wars.  This failure is quite as much due to the misconduct of the pacifists as to the misconduct of the militarists.  The milk-and-water statesmanship of the American Government during the past year has been a direct aid to the statesmanship of blood-and-iron across the water; it may not be as wicked, but it is far more contemptible.  The United States has signally and culpably failed to keep its promises made in the Hague Conventions, and to stand for the right.  Instead, it has taken refuge in the world-old neutrality between right and wrong which is always so debasing for the man practicing it.  As has been well said, such a neutral is the ignoblest work of God.

There was much excuse for a general failure of Americans to understand the danger to America prior to what happened in this world war.  ; But now there is no excuse whatever.  Now, thanks to our own feeble shirking of duty, we know that if any great nation menaces us, no matter how innocent of offense we may be, we have absolutely nothing to expect from other nations.

The United States has — and deserves to have — only one friend in the world.  This is the United States.  We have ourselves treated the Hague Conventions as scraps of paper; and we can not expect any one else to show the respect for such treaties which we have lacked.  Our safety and therefore the safety of democratic institutions rests on our own strength and only on our own strength.  If we are a true democracy, if we really believe in government of the people by the people and for the people, if we believe in social and industrial justice to be achieved through the people, and therefore in the right of the people to demand the service of all the people, let us make the Army fundamentally an army of the whole people.

This will be carrying out the democratic ideal.  The policy advocated for Britain by Lord Roberts was really the necessary complement to the policy advocated for Britain by Lloyd-George.  In a democracy service should be required of every man, in peace and in war; we should guarantee to every man his rights, and require from each man the full performance of his duties.  It may well be that in the end we shall find it worth while to insist that all our young men, at their entrance to manhood, perform a year's industrial service — in the harvest fields, in city sanitation, on the roads, anywhere.  Such service would be equally beneficial to the son of the millionaire and to the boy who grows up in the crowded quarters of our great cities or out on lonely farms in the back country.

This is for the future.  As for the present, it is certain that a half year's military service would be a priceless boon to these young men themselves as well as to the nation.  It would tend to social cohesion.  We would gain a genuine citizens' army, and we would gain a far higher type of citizenship.  Our young men, at the outset of their lives, would be trained— not merely to shoot and to drill, which are only small parts of military training — but to habits of bodily endurance and moral self-mastery, to command and to obey, to act on their own initiative and to understand and promptly execute orders, to respect themselves and to respect others, and to understand that they are to serve their country with deeds and not words only.  Under such conditions the young American would enter manhood accustomed to take pride in that disciplined spirit of orderly self-reliance combined with ability to work with others, which is the most essential element in the success of a great, free, modern democracy.

Speech or Document 14

MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS

On the ninth of May, 1915, two days after the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine, Colonel Roosevelt made the following statement in the press:

THE German submarines have established no effective blockade of the British and French coast lines.  They have endeavored to prevent the access of French, British and neutral ships to Britain and France by attacks upon them which defy every principle of international law as laid down in innumerable existing treaties, including The Hague Conventions.  Many of these attacks have represented pure piracy; and not a few of them have been accompanied by murder on an extended scale.  In the case of the Lusitania the scale was so vast that the murder became wholesale.

A number of American ships had already been torpedoed in similar fashion.  In two cases American lives were lost.  When the Lusitania sank some twelve hundred non-combatants, men, women and children, were drowned, and more than a hundred of these were Americans.  Centuries have passed since any war vessel of a civilized power has shown such ruthless brutality toward non-combatants, and especially toward women and children.  The Moslem pirates of the Barbary Coast behaved at times in similar fashion, until the civilized nations joined in suppressing them; and the other pirates who were outcasts from among these civilized nations also at one time perpetrated similar deeds, until they were sunk or hung.  But none of these old-time pirates committed murder on so vast a scale as in the case of the Lusitania.

The day after the tragedy the newspapers reported in one column that in Queenstown there lay by the score the bodies of women and children, some of the dead women still clasping the bodies of the little children they held in their arms when death overwhelmed them.  In another column they reported the glee expressed by the Berlin journals at this “great victory of German naval policy." It was a victory over the defenseless and the unoffending, and its signs and trophies were the bodies of the murdered women and children.

Our treaties with Prussia in 1785, 1799, and 1828, still in force in this regard, provide that if one of the contracting parties should be at war with any other power the free intercourse and commerce of the subjects or citizens of the party remaining neutral with the belligerent powers shall not be interrupted.  Germany has treated this treaty as she has treated other scraps of paper.

But the offense goes far deeper than this.  The action of the German submarines in the cases cited can be justified only by a plea which would likewise justify the wholesale poisoning of wells in the path of a hostile army, or the shipping of infected rags into the cities of a hostile country; a plea which would justify the torture of prisoners and the reduction of captured women to the slavery of concubinage.  Those who advance such a plea will accept but one counter plea — strength, the strength and courage of the just man armed.

When those who guide the military policy of a state hold up to the soldiers of their army the Huns, and the terror once caused by the Huns, for their imitation, they thereby render themselves responsible for any Hunnish deed which may follow.  The destruction of cities like Louvain and Dinant, the scientific vivisection of Belgium as a warning to other nations, the hideous wrongdoing to civilians, men, women and children in Belgium and nothern France, in order thereby to terrorize the civilian population — all these deeds, and those like them, done on the land, have now been paralleled by what has happened on the sea.

In the teeth of these things, we earn as a nation measureless scorn and contempt if we follow the lead of those who exalt peace above righteousness, if we heed the voices of those feeble folk who bleat to high heaven that there is peace when there is no peace.  For many months our government has preserved between right and wrong a neutrality which would have excited the emulous admiration of Pontius Pilate— the arch-typical neutral of all time.  We have urged as a justification for failing to do our duty in Mexico that to do so would benefit American dollars.  Are we now* to change faces and advance the supreme interest of American dollars as a justification for continuance in the refusal to do the duty imposed on us in connection with the world war?

Unless we act with immediate decision and vigor we shall have failed in the duty demanded by humanity at large, and demanded even more clearly by the self-respect of the American Republic.

We did not act with immediate decision and vigor.  We did not act at all.  The President immediately after the sinking made a speech in which occurred his sentence about our “being too proud to fight." This was accepted, very properly, by foreign nations as the statement of our official head that we ranked in point of national spirit and power with China.  I then published the following interview:

“I think that China is entitled to draw all the comfort she can from this statement, and it would be well for the United States to ponder seriously what the effect upon China has been of managing her foreign affairs during the last fifteen years on the theory thus enunciated.

“If the United States is satisfied with occupying some time in the future the precise international position that China now occupies, then the United States can afford to act on this theory.  But it can not so act if it desires to regain the position won for it under Washington and by the men who in the days of Abraham Lincoln wore the blue under Grant and the gray under Lee.

“I very earnestly hope that the President will act promptly.  The proper time for deliberation was prior to sending his message that our Government would hold Germany to a ' strict accountability ' if it did the things which it has now actually done.

“The 150 babies drowned on the Lusitania, the hundreds of women drowned with them — scores of these women and children being Americans — and the American ship, the GulHight, which was torpedoed, offer an eloquent commentary on the actual working of the theory that it is not necessary to assert rights and that a policy of blood and iron can safely be met by a policy of milk and water.

" I see it stated in the dispatches from Washington that Germany now offers to stop the practice of murder on the high seas, committed in violation of the neutral rights she is pledged to preserve, if we will now abandon further neutral rights, which by her treaty she has solemnly pledged herself to see that we exercise without molestation.

“Such a proposal is not even entitled to an answer.  The manufacture and shipments of arms and ammunition to any belligerent is moral or immoral, according to the use to which the arms and munitions are to be put.  If they are to be used to prevent the redress of hideous wrongs inflicted on Belgium then it is immoral to ship them.  If they are to be used for the redress of those wrongs and the restoration of Belgium to her deeply-wronged and unoffending people, then it is eminently moral to send them.

“Without 24 hours' delay this country should and could take effective action.  It should take possession of all the interned German ships, including the German warships, and hold them as a guarantee that ample satisfaction shall be given us.  Furthermore it should declare that in view of Germany's murderous offenses against the rights of neutrals all commerce with Germany shall be forthwith forbidden and all commerce of every kind permitted and encouraged with France, England, Russia, and the rest of the civilized world.

“I do not believe that the firm assertion of our rights means war, but, in any event, it is well to remember there are things worse than war.

“Let us as a nation understand that peace is worth having only when it is the hand-maiden of international righteousness and of national self-respect."

Speech or Document 15

THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE BELGIANS

A LETTER ADDRESSED TO A MASS MEETING HELD AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, ON DECEMBER 15, I9l6, TO PROTEST AGAINST THE BRUTAL TREATMENT OF THE BELGIANS BY THEIR GERMAN “CONQUERORS”

I EARNESTLY wish you all success in your meeting; and all Americans who are proud of the good name of their country and also have in them the capacity for general indignation on behalf of a foully wronged people, must join in hearty thanks to you and your associates.

Germany's campaign of methodically organized atrocities against the unhappy Belgian people has culminated in the transplanting of over a hundred thousand Belgian men into a condition of state-slavery in Germany where their labor is to be used to aid in the conquest of their fellow-countrymen.  Similar transplantings of civilian non-combatants, both men and women, into slavery in Germany have already occurred in Northern France.

This action is paralleled by the action of the Assyrian conquerors of Syria and Palestine; but until the present war broke out it was supposed that such hideous infamies were effectively checked by the system of international law which has grown up under modern Christian civilization.  But Germany has trampled under foot every device of international law for securing the protection of the weak and the unoffending.  She has shown an utter disregard of all considerations of pity, mercy, humanity and international morality.  She has counted upon the terror inspired by her ruthless brutality to protect her from retaliation or interference.

The outrages committed on our own people have been such as the United States has never before been forced to endure, and have included the repeated killing of our men, women and children.  The sinking of the Marina and the Cheming the other day, with the attendant murder of six Americans, was but the most recent in an unbroken chain of injuries and insults, which by comparison make mere wrong to our property interests sink into absolute insignificance.

As long as neutrals keep silent, or speak apologetically, or take refuge in the futilities of the professional pacifists, there will be no cessation in these brutalities.  But surely this last and crowning brutality, which amounts to the imposition of a cruel form of state-slavery on a helpless and unoffending conquered nation, must make our people realize that they imperil their own souls, that they degrade their own manhood, if they do not bear emphatic testimony against the perpetration of such iniquity.

I am glad to be one among the Americans who thus bear testimony.  Yours very truly, THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Speech or Document 16

APOSTLES OF FOLLY AND FATUITY

A LETTER TO THE CONGRESS OF CONSTRUCTIVE PATRIOTISM HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY LEAGUE ON JANUARY 26, 1917

As it is unfortunately impossible for me to be present in person, I desire in this letter to express my heartiest good wishes for the success of your meeting and my belief that the movement in which you are engaged is one of the really vital movements — indeed at the moment it is I think the really vital movement — for the ultimate honor and welfare of this country.

We need, more than anything else in this country, thorough-going Americanism,— for unless we are Americans and nothing else, we are not a nation at all — and thorough-going preparedness in time of peace against war,— for if we are not thus prepared we shall remain a nation only until some more virile nation finds it worth while to conquer us.

The work of preparedness — spiritual and material, civic, industrial and military — and the work of Americanization are simply the two paramount phases or elements of the work of constructive patriotism which your Congress has gathered to foster.  There can be no real preparedness in this country unless this country is thoroughly Americanized; for only a patriotic people will prepare; and there can be no deep national feeling for America until we are all of us Americans through and through.

Americanism means many things.  It means equality of rights and, therefore, equality of duty and of obligation.  It means service to our common country.  It means loyalty to one flag, to our flag, the flag of all of us.  It means on the part of each of us respect for the rights of the rest of us.  It means that all of us guarantee the rights of each of us.  It means free education, genuinely representative government, freedom of speech and thought, equality before the law for all men, genuine political and religious freedom, and the democratizing of industry so as to give at least a measurable equality of opportunity for all, and so as to place before us as our ideal in all industries where this ideal is possible of attainment, the system of cooperative ownership and management, in order that the tool users may, so far as possible, become the tool owners.  Everything is un-American that tends either to government by a plutocracy or government by a mob.  To divide along the lines of section or caste or creed is un-American.  All privileges based on wealth, and all enmity to honest men merely because they are wealthy, are un-American — both of them equally so.  Americanism means the virtues of courage, honor, justice, truth, sincerity, and hardihood — the virtues that made America.  The things that will destroy America are prosperity-at-any-price, peace-at-any-price, safety-first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.

Preparedness must be of the soul no less than of the body.  We must keep lofty ideals steadily before us, and must train ourselves in practical fashion so that we may realize these ideals.  Throughout our whole land we must have fundamental common purposes, to be achieved through education, through intelligent organization and through the recognition of the great vital standards of life and living.  We must make Americanism and Americanization mean the same thing to the native born and to the foreign born; to the man and to the woman; to the rich and to the poor; to the employer and to the wage-worker.  If we believe in American standards, we shall insist that all privileges springing from them be extended to immigrants, and that they in return accept these standards with whole-hearted and entire loyalty.  Either we must stand absolutely by our ideals and conceptions of duty, or else we are against them.  There is no middle course, and if we attempt to find one, we insure for ourselves defeat and disaster.

Citizenship must mean an undivided loyalty to America; there can be no citizenship on the 50-50 basis; there can be no loyalty half to America and half to Germany or England or France or Ireland, or any other country.  Our citizens must be Americans, and nothing else, and if they try to be something else in addition, then they should be sent out of this country and back to the other country to which, in their hearts, they pay allegiance.  We must have one American language ; the language of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, of Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech and Second Inaugural, and of Washington's farewell address.  The American standard of living conditions and the American standard of working conditions both must be high.  We must insist upon them for immigrants as well as for the native born.  We must insist that the people who work here, live here; that they are not mere birds of passage from abroad.  We must insist upon industrial justice, and we can not get it if we let ignorance and need be preyed upon either by vulpine cunning or by wolfish brutality, and if we do not train the ignorant and the needy up to self-reliance and efficiency.

Preparedness does not mean merely a man with a gun.  It means that too; but it means a great deal more.  It means that in this country we must secure conditions which will make the farmer and the working man understand that it is in a special sense their country; that the work of preparedness is entered into for the defense of the country which belongs to them, to all of us, and the government of which is administered in their interest, in the interest of all of us.  At this moment Lloyd George is able to do more than any other man in rallying the people of Great Britain to the defense of that Empire, because the working men, the men who actually do the manual labor, know that he has their welfare at heart, that the national ideal for which he is fighting is that which will give them the best chance for self-development, and for that happiness which comes to the man who achieves his rights at the same time that he performs his duties.  He is followed by the people as a whole because they know that he stands for the people as a whole.  We in America who are striving for preparedness must make it evident that the preparedness is to serve the people as a whole.  The war on the other side has shown that there can be no efficient army in the field unless the men behind are trained and efficient and unless they are whole-heartedly loyal in their patriotic devotion to their country.  Here in America we must do justice to the workers, or they will not feel that this is the country to which their devotion is due; and we must exact patriotic devotion to the flag from them, for if they fail to render it they are unfit to live in this country at all.  I appeal to all Americans to join in the common effort for the common good.  Any man who holds back and refuses to serve his country with whole-hearted devotion, on the ground that enough has not been done for him, will do well to remember that any such holding back or lukewarmness of patriotism is itself an admission of inferiority, and admission of personal unfitness for citizenship in a democracy, and ought to deprive him of the rights of citizenship.  As for the men of means, from whom we have the right to expect a special quality of leadership, let them remember that, as much has been given to them so much will be expected of them, and that they have no moral right whatsoever to the enjoyment of the ease and the comforts of life beyond what their fellows enjoy unless they render service beyond what their fellows render.

I advocate military preparedness not for the sake of war, but for the sake of safe-guarding this nation against war so long as that is possible, and of guaranteeing its honor and safety if war should nevertheless come.  We hope ultimately the day will come on this earth when wars will cease.  But at present the realization of that hope seems as far in the future as the realization of that other hope, that some day in the future all crime shall cease.  By wise action, based equally on observed good faith and on thoroughly prepared strength — the precise characteristics which during the last few years we have failed to show — we may hope to limit the probable field of wars; but at present it is as certain as anything can be that every great nation will at some time or other, as generations follow generations, have to face war, and that ours will be no exception to the rule.  It is, therefore, not merely folly, but criminal and unpatriotic folly, to fail to prepare, or to preach the ignoble cult of the professional pacifist, the peace-at-any-price man.

We need first and foremost a thoroughly efficient and large Navy; a navy kept under professional guidance; a navy trained at every point with the sole purpose of making it the most formidable possible instrument of war the moment that war comes; a navy, the mismanagement of which shall be treated as a capital offense against the nation.  In the next place, we need a small but highly efficient regular army, of say a quarter million men; an army where provision is made for a certain proportion of the promotions to be by merit, instead of merely seniority; an army of short-term soldiers, better paid than at present; and an army which, like the navy, shall be under the guidance of a general staff.  Moreover, every year there should be at one time field maneuvers of from fifty to one hundred thousand men, so that the Army Commander, the Corps Commanders, the Division, Brigade and Regimental Commanders, who would have to face a foe at the out-break of war, would all have had experience in
 performing their duties, under actual field conditions, in time of peace.

The events of the last summer have shown that the Hay Bill was as foolish and unpatriotic a bit of flintlock legislation as was ever put on the statute book.  I have the greatest admiration and respect for the individual militiamen who went to the border.  But the system under which they were sent worked rank injustice to most of them, rank favoritism for some of them, and was worse than ineffective from the national standpoint.  It is folly and worse than folly, to pretend that the National Guard is an efficient second line of defense.  Remember also that the laws passed nominally for the betterment of the regular army and navy are producing almost no result.  The delays in building the ships are extraordinary.  The shortage of enlisted men in the navy and army is appalling, nor is it being made good.  It can not wholly be made good under the volunteer system.  But much could be done.  Our first care should be to make the navy and the regular army thoroughly efficient.

But this is not enough.  To trust only to the Navy and the regular Army amounts merely to preparing to let the other men do it.  If we ordinary citizens are fit to be citizens of this country, we shall fit ourselves to defend this country.  No man has a right to citizenship in a democracy if, for any cause whatsoever, he is unwilling to fight, or is morally or mentally incapable of fighting, for the defense of that democracy against a powerful alien aggressor.  If a man is physically unfit but is right in his soul and in his head, then he can render high service to the nation although incapable of bearing arms.  But, if from any moral or mental causes, he is unwilling to train himself to bear arms, and to bear them if necessary in his country's cause, then he has no moral right to vote.

Be it remembered that such a national armed force as that for which I ask, while very powerful for defense would be almost useless for aggression.  I wish to see our Navy second only to that of Great Britain, because Great Britain is the only power whose naval needs are greater than ours.  I do not ask that our Army become second, or anywhere near second, to Germany's, because Germany's military needs are far greater than ours; but merely that relatively to our size our Army be made to correspond to that of Switzerland.

This would mean that for the last two or three years of school our boys would have some military training, substantially such as is given in the Swiss and Australian schools; and that at about the age of nineteen they would spend six months in actual service in the field (or at sea with the fleet) with the colors, and would thereafter for three or four years be required to spend a couple of weeks each year with the colors.  Each year, among those who had served well for the six months, a number could be chosen to be trained as officers.  These would then be given by the nation for two years, free, a training somewhat like that at West Point, although not as rigid or as thorough.  They would be required to pay for this training by, for a certain number of months during each of the few following years, doing their part in drilling the recruits of that year.  It would probably be necessary to pay the recruits a small minimum wage so as to be sure that the poorest family would not suffer hardship because of the absence of the young man for six months.  No man would be allowed to purchase exemption.  The sons of the richest men in the land would have to serve exactly like any one else and do exactly the same work — which, incidentally, would be a bit of uncommon good fortune for them.

Side by side with this preparation of the man-hood of the country must go the preparation of its resources.  The Government should keep a record of every factory or work shop of any kind which would be called upon to render service in war, and of all the railroads.  All the workers in such factories and railroads should be tabulated so that in the event of war they would not be sent to the front if they could do better service where they were — although as far as possible every strong man should be sent to the front, to the position of danger, while work done in safety should be done by women and old men.  The transportation system should receive special study.  Factories which would be needed in time of war should be encouraged by the Government to keep themselves properly prepared in time of peace, and should be required to fill specimen orders, so that there would be no chance of their breaking down in the event of a sudden call at the outbreak of war.  Industrial preparedness must go hand in hand with military preparedness.

Indeed, this military preparedness and the acceptance by the nation of the principle of universal, obligatory military training in time of peace as a basis of universal, obligatory service in time of war, would do more than anything else to help us solve our most pressing social and industrial problems in time of peace.  It would Americanize and nationalize our people as nothing else could possibly do.  It would teach our young men that there are other ideals besides making money.  It would render them alert, energetic, self-reliant, capable of command and willing to obey; respectful to others and demanding respect from others for themselves.  It would be the best possible way to teach us how to use our collective strength in order to accomplish those social and industrial tasks which must be done by all of us collectively if we are to do them well.

Just before this war began, the male and female apostles of folly and fatuity were at their highest pitch of denunciation of preparedness, and were announcing at the tops of their voices that never again would there be a great war.  These preachers of professional pacifism, of peace-at-any-price, of peace put before righteousness and honor and duty, temporarily lead astray many good and earnest men and women.  These good, honest, intelligent men and women can be shown the facts and when shown the facts will ultimately see the profound immorality as well as the utter folly of the professional pacifist or peace-at-any-price position.  There is, however, little to hope for as regards the professional pacifists themselves.  The antics of their brethren in England has shown that even although brayed in a mortar their folly shall not depart from them.  At the moment, their clamor is drowned by the thunder of the great war.  But when this war comes to an end their voices will be as loud as ever on behalf of folly and wickedness, and their brazen effrontery will be proof against all shame as well as against all wisdom.  They will unblushingly repeat every prophecy that has just been falsified by the merciless march of events; they will reiterate all the promises that have always been broken in the past and will always be broken in the future.  They are in the majority of cases primarily concerned for the safety of their own wretched bodies, and they are physically safe in the course they follow, for if the disaster they court should come upon this nation, they would themselves instantly flee to safety, while their folly and wrong doing would be atoned for by the blood of better and braver men.

It is useless to appeal to these persons.  But it is necessary to warn our people against them.  If our people fail to prepare, whatever the real reason may be and whatever the reason is which they allege, their fate in the end will be the same.  Sooner or later, in such case, either we ourselves or our children will tread the stony path of disaster and eat the bitter bread of shame.  Faithfully yours, THEODORE ROOSEVELT.

Speech or Document 17

THE DUTY OF EVERY AMERICAN

FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE A DELEGATION OF NEW YORK BUSINESS MEN IN BEHALF OF THE THIRD LIBERTY LOAN, AT OYSTER BAY, LONG ISLAND, APRIL, 1917

THE first thing that I wish to do is, as an American, heartily to thank you men and women who have done and are doing the actual work of floating the Liberty Bonds.  It is a vitally important work, and it is as laborious and exhausting as it is important.  I wish that the worthy people who think the governmental processes, even so far as they affect the public, go on with-out effort, might have a little of the experience you have had in handling this work that you have been on, and they would learn the necessity of coordinated effort.

There are several hundred of you men, all above or below the military age, except, as I have been informed, three who have been exempted because of dependent families and one man who has been doing his best to get into the army but has been rejected for physical reasons.  I dwell upon that fact because, as you know, I feel that the prime duty of the fighting man who can get to the front is to try to get to the front.  The thing that primarily counts in this war is the strength of the fighting man.  The primary work is the work of the men at the front, but the men at the front can not do that work unless they have the weapons, the instrumentalities with which to do it.

It is only you and those like you who can furnish the means to secure those instrumentalities, and therefore the work of you and of those like you has been second in importance only to the work of the men at the front.  Without it the work of the men at the front could not go on.  You men and women have devoted every energy to it, have sacrificed all your private interests, and have acted in the broadest and fullest spirit of patriotism.  A loan does not float itself.  No governmental work does itself.  Somebody has to do it.  You and your associates in the other districts of the country have assumed this burden of disinterested service to the country.

I appeal to our people to back you to the fullest limit.  This is the people's war.  It is America's war.  It is a war for our children and for the welfare of our children's children.  If we do not win now, fighting abroad beside our allies, then sooner or later our sons or our grandsons will have to fight here at home without allies.  We are fighting in our own quarrel.  The man who does not think that it was America's duty to fight for her own sake in view of the infamous conduct of Germany toward us stands on a level with a man who wouldn't think it necessary to fight in a private quarrel because his wife's face was slapped.  We have a special and intolerable grievance against Germany, and we are warranted in fighting in the war, because of that special injury of our own.  Warranted is not a strong enough word: We were required to go to war, if we were ever hereafter individually to hold up our heads as citizens of a free nation.  But in addition to these special grievances that we as citizens of the United States had against Germany, we also are fighting in the quarrel of civilization against barbarism, of liberty against tyranny.  Germany has become a menace to the whole world.  She is the most dangerous enemy of liberty now existing.  She has shown herself utterly ruthless, treacherous and brutal.  When I use those words, I use them with scientific precision.  The American who is not now heart and soul against her and heart and soul in favor of fighting this war through to a victorious conclusion, to the peace of overwhelming victory, is a traitor to this country and a traitor to mankind.  He is unfit to live in America.  He is unfit to be a free man, for his soul is the soul of a slave.  And if that American has associated himself with other Americans in order to work against the interests of America, as has been done in the case of the German-American Alliance, then I hope with all my heart that Congress and the State legislatures will act, will dissolve the German-American Alliance, and if there is a method of getting at the leaders of it, will get at them in any way that is necessary.

No man can serve two masters in this country at this time.  There can be no such thing as a fifty-fifty allegiance here.  If the man is not an American, and nothing else, he should be sent out of this country.  (Applause.) If he plays the part of sedition in this country, he should be shot.  But if he is just neutral, then let him get out to some other neutral country.  Don't let him be neutral here any longer.  And, incidentally, I wish to say that is my view of the conscientious objector, too.

Now and then I receive protests from some conscientious objector who says that he expects me to respect his conscience.  I will.  But he has got to respect mine, too.  In the first place, if his conscience makes him act either a fool or a traitor, then I should advise him to take it out and look at it and see if it is in good working order.  In the next place, I would try to find out what he is conscientious about.  He may be conscientious about killing somebody else.  He may be conscientious about keeping his own carcass safe from injury.  Now, if he merely objects to killing some one else, then send him to the front with a spade to dig trenches, in the danger zone, or else put him on a mine sweeper.  Do you know about mine sweepers? They go about and collect mines.  If they don't collect them just right, they go up.  If you put a conscientious objector on a mine sweeper, he is not in danger of killing any one else.  But I can not guarantee his own personal safety.  Now, if he will do that work, all right, I have got nothing to say — treat him all right.  But if he won't do that work, if he says that his conscience forbids him to do any of the necessary work of national self-defense, then I would answer that my conscience would forbid me to let him vote in a country which can only exist at all because its sons are willing to fight for it.

So it is our business to stand by the men at the front.  We can stand by them effectively only through action, such as you here and your associates and those like you in other districts are taking and have taken.  We can not fight this war without vast numbers of soldiers, ships, guns and airplanes, and vast quantities of food and munitions.  For all this we must pay money.  As the war is the war of all of us, so each of us, according to his or her ability, should bear some part of the burden.  I want to etch that in.  If there is an American in this country who at this time is not bearing some part of the common burden, then he is not fit to be in the country at all.

No man now-a-days should be able to feel that he has a right to a night's sleep at the end of the day unless during the day he has done something for the common cause, the cause of all of us.  Each of us should gladly and cheerfully sacrifice everything necessary in order to win this war.  The men at the front, the men whose high privilege it is to be at the front, stand ready to sacrifice life and limb and health for our dear land.  We who are not given that high privilege, we who can not go to the front, must at least back them to the limit with the work of head and of hand, with our dollar and our self-sacrifice, our courage and endurance, our thrift and our intelligence, our labor and our money.  Do the thing that is next, that is always the important point to make.  Don't resolve in a glow of virtue how good you are going to be next year.  Do it now.

Do the thing that is next, and at this moment the thing that is next for us here and for millions like us elsewhere in the land, the thing that is next is to raise the money for the Liberty Loan.

I have said before this is the people's war.  Let us make the people themselves the owners of the debt incurred for the sake of the people.  Every man, big or little, has a chance to subscribe.  Let every wage-earner and every farmer subscribe what he can.  He will thereby serve the country and he will thereby serve himself and his family, for he will strengthen his own economic position.  I would like to drive that point home.
Now, there are some forms of activity where no one can promise any money return for what is done, of course, that is especially the case with men who go to the front.  There can be no money reward in any way adequate for what they do.  Again, it is true of such work as the work of the Red Cross, of the Y.  M.  C.  A., of the Knights of Columbus, or all kindred organizations.  If you put your money into them, you have put it in, making the sacrifice gladly and not expecting anything back.  But in the case of the Liberty Loan, I am asking you to help the nation and help yourselves at the same time.

The greatest good that can come to the individual himself is to put his money in the Liberty; Loan.  That is the way he can best help the nation at this time, and he will help it as an incident to helping himself.  The older among you will remember listening in time past now and then to frothy orators who in the name of the people denounced the bondholders.  You have heard them say, “Stand up for the people against the bondholders." Fine! Now, let us stand up for the people against the bondholders, by making the people the bondholders.

Let us make the people and the bondholders interchangeable terms; and after these loans have been floated let it be remembered that no human being without hypocrisy can denounce the bond-holders without denouncing the people, for the chance is open to every man to become one of the bondholders, and when I say to every man, I mean to every man.  The conditions are such that anybody with a little self-denial and a little thrift can become to a certain extent a holder of the bonds of the United States.  And the effort of you men and of those like you elsewhere has consistently been to make it especially easy for the men and women of small means to subscribe to the loans.  And the security is the best in the world, for it will be good as long as this nation endures, and if the nation breaks, we shall all of us be broken, nothing will make any difference to any of us.

Now, friends, I wish I could adequately express to you my sense of appreciation of the work that you and those like you are doing.  The financial standing of this country depends primarily now upon the work of just such organizations as your organization here, and the welfare of our soldiers, the weight of our part in the war, depends upon your success.  It depends upon other things in addition.  We of course must see that there is the highest grade of efficiency reached by our public servants in handling the funds thus provided.  But the funds have to be provided before they are handled.  That ought to be accepted as an axiomatic truth.  So, you men and women here and the men and women like you engaged in similar tasks elsewhere through the country are standing by our soldiers in the trenches at the front.

I thank you as an American and wish you well, and I am mighty glad to see you.

Speech or Document 18

WAKE UP, AMERICA!

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT PITTSBURG, PENNSYLVANIA, ON JULY 27, 1917

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 wrongdoer.

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 shortsighted, 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.  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 shortsightedness; 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 shortsighted 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.  Unless we beat Germany in Europe, we shall have to fight her deadly ambition on our own coasts and in our own continent.  A great American army in Europe now is the best possible insurance against a great European or Asiatic army in our own country a couple of years, or a couple of decades hence.

Make no mistake.  We are fighting for humanity; but we are also, and primarily, fighting for our own vital interests.  Our army in France will fight for France and Belgium; but most of all it will be fighting for America.  Until we make the world safe for America (and incidentally until we make democracy safe in America), it is empty rhetoric to talk of making the world safe for democracy; and no one of these objects can be obtained merely by high-sounding words, or by anything else save by the exercise of hard, grim, commonsense in advance preparation, and then by unflinching courage in the use of the hardened strength which has thus been prepared.

The only really effective preparation is preparation in advance.  Only our vanity can blind us to the painful and humiliating proof of this elementary fact which our experience in the world war is at this very moment furnishing.  There was some excuse, although no real justification, for our unpreparedness prior to the breaking out of the world war three years ago.  But when once the giant letters of warning were written in flame and blood across the whole horizon, it seems literally incredible that we should have behaved with such utter fatuity as to say that there was no need of preparedness, and that the war did not concern us, and that no issue affecting our interest or our conscience was at stake.  When the Lusitania was sunk it was evident not merely that we ought to prepare for war, but that we were actually at war (although only at the receiving end — the position we have ever since occupied).  However, we did not prepare.  For two years and a half we followed the clamor of the professional pacifists who shrieked that unpreparedness would “keep us out of war." They insisted that our tame submission to insult and injury, our timid refusal to protest against international wrong, and our supine failure to prepare for our own defense had “kept us out of war " and would do so in the future.

Well, you see the result.  We did not prepare.  Neither did we keep out of war.  Germany's note of January 31 was in effect a downright declaration of war, and congress by its action showed this to be the fact, for it did not declare war, but stated that Germany was already at war with us — which was the truth.  Our helpless refusal either to resent insult or injury or to prepare for self-defense did not win Germany's good will, and did not avert the war.  It merely earned Germany's contempt, and rendered us impotent to make our strength effective when at last we drifted stern foremost into war.  Among nations, as among individuals, we gain the good will of others only by inspiring respect, not contempt, and the bully has less respect for those whom he can wrong with impunity than he has for any other living creatures.

Preparedness does not always avert war.  But unpreparedness never averts war, and always renders war lengthy, and possibly humiliating, if the enemy is formidable.  If after the outbreak of the world war, or even after the sinking of the Lusitania, we had begun energetically and thoroughly to prepare, we would now have had thousands of aircraft, submarine chasers, cargo ships and great guns; three months ago we would have put a couple of million men in France, and the war would have been over at this moment — indeed, if we had thoroughly prepared we would probably not have had to go to war at all.

In contrast to what we thus ought to have done, and could readily have done, look at the actual facts as they are.  Six months have elapsed since Germany went to war with us; nearly four months since we reluctantly admitted that we were at war.  We have not at this time a single airplane fit to send across the German lines; and months must pass before we can manufacture such an airplane.  We have no heavy artillery to put in the battle line, none that can be pitted against the Germans, and in any serious engagement gallant Pershing and his gallant little force will have to trust to French and English guns.  Sims will do everything that can be done with his submarine chasers, but they are so few that they represent a mere tiny fraction of the English force.  It will be a year after the declaration of war before we begin to get a fair number of big cargo ships.  We have not enough rifles for our men.  We are painfully short in equipment.  We have not yet begun to assemble the draft army; the first elementary, or primary, officers' training camps have not finished; the National Guard has only just begun to mobilize.  We have put a fragment of our fine little regular army into France; we can rest assured that everything possible will be done by Gen.  Pershing and the officers and men under him; but even this little army is still fitting itself to go to the front; and as it is composed almost exclusively of infantry without artillery, it would be helpless against any well-equipped enemy were it not aided by our allies.  Numerically, it is much smaller than the army which Belgium, or Servia or Rumania has in the field; it probably represents about one-half of 1 per cent, of the allied forces now arrayed against the central powers.

This is the sum total of the activities of a nation of 100,000,000 people, and in possession of incalculable wealth and boundless resources, during the six months following its entry (after two and one-half years' warning) into the greatest war in history; a war in which every other great nation has been forced to exert the fullest power, and strike with the utmost efficiency, within a week or a fortnight after it entered the conflict.  Look at what Germany did to Belgium in the first 30 days of the war.  We would now be in exactly the position of Belgium, were it not that we owe our safety — our ignoble safety — to the British fleet and the French and British armies.

The simple truth is that, relatively to the other great nations of the world, we have in this war exhibited ourselves a miracle of inefficiency; and we shall always be inefficient during the first vital months of any war until we learn to prepare in advance.  Flag-waving, and! uttering and applauding speeches, and singing patriotic songs, are excellent in so far as they are turned into cool foresight and 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.

We announced that we were coming to the help of the allies.  As a matter of fact, after six months we owe our safety solely to the fact that these hard-pressed and war-worn allies protect us with their lives, with their trained bodies and perfected machines, while we fuss and talk and with confused hurry endeavor to get ready to do something.  This fussy inefficiency is partly, but not chiefly, due to our shortcomings during these last six months.  Primarily it is due to our failure to prepare during the preceding two years and a half — the period during which such failure to prepare was wholly inexcusable.

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 the criminal refusal — to provide for the future that forces every honest and farsighted lover of America to speak.  I would far rather speak words of boastful flattery to you; 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 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.

The prime fact to remember is our utter help-lessness at this moment, six months after we really, four months after we nominally, went to war.  The actual event has shown that if we had not been shielded by our allies, a single small German army of a couple of corps — or a similar small army of any old world military power — would have conquered us out of hand.  When I say conquered, I mean conquered.  Such an army could have been ferried across the ocean in 30 days.  In that time we could not have assembled, out of this whole country, an army force of trained soldiers to meet it; and we had not even a single aeroplane or a single battery of artillery which to meet the hostile flying squadron and artillery.  We would have been as easy a prey as Belgium, and we would have been as completely conquered.

We have been saved because, and only because, for their own purposes, our allies, the British and French had to protect us.  But next time we may have no allies! Next time, if it happens that it is the United States which is assailed, England and France may remain neutral in thought and deed — and if they so remained neutral for even a fraction of the two years and a half during which we were neutral and if we were as unprepared as at present, we would be trampled into the dust.  We can not afford to count for our safety on anything but our own armed strength; the only way to make our strength effective is to make it ready in advance; and the only way really to make ready in advance is to introduce the principle of obligatory universal military training in time of peace for our young men, and universal service in time of war for every man and woman in the country, in whatever position that man or woman can do most effective work.  This is the only democratic system.  The enjoyment of rights should rest on the performance of duties.  Every privilege enjoyed, including the suffrage, should rest on an obligation met.  Universal suffrage can only be justified by universal service.  If a man is too conscientious to fight then we ought to be too conscientious to let him vote as to the destiny of a commonwealth for which brave men are willing to shed their blood.  To make military service a matter of individual choice is as unjustifiable as to make payment of taxes or obedience to the law an individual choice.  Volunteering and the selective draft are makeshifts by which we impose on a few individuals the burden of sacrificing themselves for others who stay at home.

At present we must do the best we can with these makeshifts, because we did not have the wisdom to prepare in advance.  But these make-shifts are not satisfactory.  The training camps for officers have necessarily been open only to men of some means, and of a college education, or its equivalent.  The draft is selective, which means that certain men will be chosen out to bear the burdens that ought by rights to fall on all alike.  All we can do at the present moment is to work under these conditions, accepting them heartily and cheerfully.  But for the future let us prepare better things, under the system of universal training.  That every man will bear his just share of the common burden, and no one will have to bear the share of some one else.  Under the system of universal training every young man will serve in the actual field, on an exact equality with every other young man; so that the son of the rich man and the poor man, of the lawyer, banker, railroad president, baker, carpenter, big farmer, or small farmer, will do the same work as every one else, eat the same fare, go on the same hikes, and then, at the end, among those willing to undergo the training for officers, every man will be chosen strictly on his merits, as actually shown in the field, without any regard to his money, or to the accident of his position.  This is the only proper way — the only democratic way.

So much for our future policy.  At this moment our policy should consist in whole-heartedly bending our every effort to win an overwhelming triumph in the war.  We are for the time being safe behind the rampart of the British fleet, and of the French and British armies.  It is galling thus to owe our safety to others; but let us at least bend all our energies to developing our might so that in our turn we may be able to guarantee safety to ourselves and triumph to our allies.  We would not have time to develop our strength were it not for the protection the allies give us.  But they do give it.  Therefore we have the opportunity to make use of our gigantic resources.  We can within a year, if only we choose, develop our strength so that we shall be the deciding factor in the war.  If we do this we shall restore our self-respect, we shall incalculably benefit our children, we shall win a commanding position, and we shall be able to render untold service to ourselves and to our allies.  If we do not do this, if we fail to develop and exert our strength to the utmost, if we partly adopt the attitude of the onlooker, if we let others do the hard, rough, dangerous fighting work, then we shall have betrayed a sacred trust, from the standpoint of America, of heroic and bleeding France, of gallant and suffering Belgium, and of the world at large.  In such case we must, when peace comes, stand humbly in the presence of the nations who have really fought.  In such case the world will have been saved, but it will have been saved by England, and not by us.  In such case all that we can do will be to thank England for having saved the world — and the peace will be England's peace.  Only those who do the job will have a right to the reward in honor and in power.  Only if we do play a leading part in bringing the war to a close can we expect to make the peace in part our peace.  I honor England for all that she is doing; but I wish us to do as well, for otherwise we shall have no right to be more than a looker-on at England's peace, at the allies' peace.  Only if we do our full duty can we make it a joint peace, a peace in which we rightfully have our full say, on an equality with England, France, Russia, Italy.  If we aren't going to do the job, then I shall be glad to see it done by England and the rest of the allies.  But I am a good American and therefore I wish to see us do the job ourselves.  Rhetoric and boasting won't give us our place in the world.  This is the hour of the fighting men and of the other men and the women who stand back of the fighting men, and enable them to fight.

In order to fight effectively abroad we must deal with certain troubles here at home, within our own household.

The first essential is an absolutely undivided Americanism.  The events of the last three years have opened the eyes of all true patriots to the fact that any man who attempts to combine loyalty to this country with loyalty to any other inevitably when the strain arises, becomes disloyal to this country.  There can be no 50-50 allegiance.  He who is not with us is against us.  We must have but one flag; and we must have but one language — the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington's farewell address, and of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech.  We must all be Americans, and nothing else.  In this war, either a man is a good American, and therefore is against Germany, and in favor of the allies of America, or he is not an American at all, and should be sent back to Germany where he belongs.

There are no stancher Americans in the country than the average Americans who are in whole or in part of German descent; and all these are as stanchly against Germany now, as the Americans of English descent were against Great Britain in 1776.  These men stand on a full and exact equality with all other Americans.  They are fit to lead or serve in our armies and to fill every civil position from President down.  I speak of them with knowledge; for German blood runs in my own veins.

But the American of German descent who remains a German or a half-German is not an American at all; and a large number of the men of this type are dangerous traitors who ought instantly to be sent out of the country.  These men work steadily against America in the company of the native-American, professional pacifists, and the pro-German Socialists, and all the anti-English foreigners.  Often they dare not openly assail this country, and so they assail our allies, especially England.  To assail England or any other of our allies at this time is to give aid and comfort to the public enemy and is therefore morally treasonable to the United States.  Some of these pro-German and anti-American leaders have been advocating that men of German descent should not be required to serve in our armies against Germany.  This is precisely as if in the Revolutionary War it had been proposed that men of English descent should not serve against England.  Such a proposal should be regarded as treasonable, and all men making it should be treated accordingly.

The Cologne Gazette of June 10 brazenly declares that the “German-Americans of the United State are the ' best allies' of Germany against the United States," and rejoices in the fact that these German-Americans “embarrass and restrain “us in the war.  The most prominent German newspapers in New York and Chicago have thusly deserved during the last three years this ominous and sinister praise.  They have served Germany against the United States.  They seek to embarrass and restrain our government so as to bring victory for Germany over the United States.  They may have kept within the law, but they have been guilty of moral treason against the Republic.  There are papers published in English which are just as guilty; but in these the treason is at least not hid in a foreign language.  Every German paper in the United States should be obliged hereafter to publish in English, column for column, a complete and accurate translation of everything written in German.

We can tolerate no class jealousies in this country.  I believe in organized labor, as I believe in organized capital, but no man is fit to take part in either organization unless his first loyalty is due to the organization which includes all of us to the union of all these states, to the American nation as a whole.  Washington and Lincoln are our heroes.  Washington was, for his day, a very rich man, and Lincoln a poor man; but no American worth calling such holds either to the poverty of one or the riches of the other, as being either in his favor or against him.  Each was moved by the spirit of service; each risked everything and was willing to give everything to render service to the country; and this is the spirit which we must demand of every man, rich or poor, in this country.

No man is a good American who does not at this time render to the commonwealth the best service of which he is capable, whether as a farmer, a business man, or a wageworker.  The government should exact from each the fullest performance of duty and in return guarantee to each, so far as is possible an ample reward if the duty is well performed.  By all means fix prices where necessary; but let it be clearly understood that it would be as great an evil to fix them too low as to permit them to rise too high.  Guarantee to every business that does first-class work of any kind for the government an ample profit; beyond that impose a heavy progressive tax on excess profits; demand that an ample wage be given the working men, and that in return he do first-class work for the first-class wage.

Friends, fellow Americans, I preach to you the sword of the Lord and Gideon.  In this great war for righteousness, we Americans have a tremendous task ahead of us.  I believe the American people are entirely willing to make any sacrifice, and to render any service, and I believe that they should be explicitly shown how great the service is they are called upon to render, how great the need is that they should unflinchingly face any sacrifice that is made.  I ask of you, and I ask of those who govern you — who govern this great mass of people — that we may be given direct practical lines of effort.  With all my heart I believe that our people have in them the same patriotism, the same nobility of soul to which Washington and Lincoln were able to appeal.  I ask that the appeal be made, the appeal for effort, and with it the guarantee by actual governmental performance that the effort shall not be wasted.

It is through the government that we must do the chief work of course; but let us also ourselves do individually each his or her own part.  Let us help the Red Cross; let us cheerfully accept the draft, and gladly volunteer, if we meet the requirements, and if we are allowed to volunteer.  Then in addition let each of us make up his mind willingly and cheerfully to accept any personal hardships that may come, in high taxes, in repeated loans and reduced income.  Let us fare more simply, and cut out alcohol; let us show our eager and resolute purpose to key up the industrial and social life of the country to the highest scale of efficiency and accomplishment.  We must raise food in abundance.  We must speed up our industries.  We shall need an enormous provision of supplies; we shall need much concentration and control of the means of production.

If we are to hold our proper place as a great nation, there must be prodigious exertions on the part of this republic.  We are in this war, and we must not make it a half war.  The only proper rule is never to fight at all if you can honorably avoid it, but never under any circumstances to fight in a half hearted way.  When peace comes it must be the peace of complete victory.  In winning this victory we must have played a full part — the part of deeds — the deeds of fighting men.  We should instantly strain every nerve to make ready millions of men, and an abundance of all the huge and delicate and formidable and infinitely varied instruments of modern warfare.

We can't achieve our ends by talk — they have got to be achieved by effort.  We can't achieve them unless we act together loyally, and with all our hearts; as Americans and nothing else.  We are fighting for humanity, for the right of each well-behaved nation to independence and to whatever form of government it desires; and we are fighting for our own hearth stones and for the honor and the welfare of our children and our children's children.  We are fighting against a very efficient and powerful, and an utterly brutal and unscrupulous enemy.  Let us give every man in this country his rights without regard to creed or birthplace, or national origin, or color.  Let us in return exact from every man the fullest performance of duty, the fullest loyalty to our flag, and the most resolute effort to serve it.  Let us face this crisis in the spirit of the men who followed Washington; the men whose service and self-sacrifice culminated in the winter at Valley Forge.  Valley Forge was the test of the democracy of the country, the test of democracy under arms, the trying out of American manhood 140 years ago.  In that winter camp of misery and starvation our forefathers decided by their own steadfast valor that they were worthy to win the great prize of freedom.  Now it is for us to decide, in the spirit of Washington and his followers, in the spirit of Lincoln and Grant, and Lee, that we in our turn are worthy to keep and to enjoy the priceless heritage which our forefathers thus won.

Speech or Document 19

ONE FLAG AND ONE LANGUAGE

FROM A STATEMENT ISSUED FOR PUBLICATION BY THE VIGILANTES ON SEPTEMBER 5,

WE are Americans and nothing else.     We are the true children of the crucible.     This is a new nation.  It is a melting pot of the old world nationalities that come hither.  The new type is different from all other types.  But the mold into which the crucible pours its contents was fixed in the days of Washington and the Revolution.  All the children of the crucible must be loyal to the American tradition as established by the men of Washington's day, as preserved by the men of Lincoln's day.  Otherwise they are not true Americans.  Unless we come out as one people, and unless that people is the American people, true to the old ideals, then the crucible has failed to do its work.  We must have one flag, and only one flag; and we must tolerate no divided loyalty.  We must have one language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington's farewell address, and Lincoln's great speeches.  While this war lasts we should not permit any newspaper to be published in German or in the tongue of any of the other nations with which we are at war; and laws to this effect should be passed at once by Congress.  The leading German papers of this country have been scandalously disloyal to the United States and to humanity.  The conduct of Germany in this war has been hideous beyond belief.  The obscene cruelty and brutality of the German armies under the explicit direction of the German government has been of such unspeakable foulness that it is a crime against this nation and against all mankind directly or indirectly to uphold Germany; and all who do not heartily back the United States, and the allies of the United States, against Germany are guilty of this crime, and are disloyal to this country.  Above all, any man, and especially any senator or congressman or editor who seeks to exempt Americans of German descent from service in the army against Germany, is a traitor, pure and simple; he should be proceeded against under the law, if possible, and if that is not possible the law should be amended so as to make his offense a crime.

We Americans have a two-fold duty imposed on us by our diversity of origin.  First we are bound to insist that every American citizen, no matter from what stock he comes, be loyal only to this country, and that in every international crisis he treat every other nation simply according to its conduct in that crisis, and wholly without regard to his ancestral origin.  In the Revolution and the War of 1812 any man of English descent who was not against England was a traitor to America; and now any man of German descent who is not against Germany is a traitor whether he be outright in his attack on America or whether with mean indirectness and treachery he endeavors to hide his treachery by merely attacking America's allies.  Usually he attacks England.  In this crisis the man who attacks our ally England is just as much a traitor to America as was the man in revolutionary days who attacked our ally France.  And any man who now demands peace except the peace of complete victory over the brutalized and Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns is an enemy to this country and an enemy to mankind.

Next, when men are thus entirely loyal to this country it is an outrage to discriminate, or permit discrimination against them because of where their fathers or they themselves were born.  The highest honor at this time should be paid to the Americans in whole or in part of German blood whose loyalty to the United States in this crisis has been whole-hearted and without reserve.  These men are fit to hold the highest positions in our government from President, lieutenant-general and admiral down.  They would in such positions act as Americans and nothing else.  The stanchest leaders and representatives of true Americanism in this crisis have included a very large proportion of men in whole or in part of German blood; and any failure to recognize this is itself a sinister attack on Americanism and a blow to this nation.

In addition to insisting upon an absolutely undivided Americanism we must insist upon social and industrial justice among our own people; and this not merely in the negative sense of refraining from doing wrong, but by affirmative action to eradicate or at least to minimize wrongdoing.  It is the business of all of us to see that the farmer and the wage-worker get justice, for they are the two men upon whose work and well-being all else depends.  But with these men, as with all other men — as with each of us here, friends — the demand must be both for justice to, and justice from, the persons concerned.  It is of no permanent benefit to anybody — boy or man, girl or woman — to teach him or her to be everlastingly clamoring about his or her rights and never saying a word about the performance of duty.  We should guarantee to every man his full rights, and we should exact from every man the full performance of his duty.  We should aid the farmer by in every way encouraging cooperation between him and his fellows.  If necessary, we should also aid him by the direct action of the state when necessary to secure him from exploitation and to bring producer and consumer together without paying toll to those middlemen who do not serve a useful purpose.  But the proper way to help him permanently is to help him to help himself by cooperating with his fellows.  Such cooperation should not only be permitted but in every way encouraged by the government, subject of course to governmental supervision and control; and the same course should be followed as regards the business men.  Cooperation and control should be our slogan so as to avoid on the one hand a single-headed, irresponsible monopoly, and on the other hand a system of ruinous, cut-throat competition among a crowd of individuals and weak concerns who are hurtful to each other and helpless against any strong outside corporation.  As regards the workingman, our aims should steadily be to promote all practical measures for the democratization of industry, for making the tool user a tool owner and giving him a voice in the control of the business in which he ought to be a partner.  But we should set our faces like flint against slack or poor or scamped work; and we should deal relentlessly and speedily with lawlessness.  We must hold an even hand and punish alike crimes of greed and cunning by the wealthy and crimes of brutal violence by those who are not wealthy.  One type is as bad as the other in its effects; although morally the heavier load of blame rests on the man who is well off and who therefore has least excuse for wrongdoing.  The man who makes a huge profit out of a war in which his fellow-citizens suffer and give their lives is an enemy of his country; and an organization like the I.  W.  W., which is playing the German game in this country, and whose preaching and practice spell destruction to civilization, is as much an enemy to this country as a hostile army.  The unscrupulous profiteers who wish to make huge sums out of their country's needs, and the workingmen who refuse to do first-class work for a first-class wage are really the allies of our enemies and of course the pro-Germans, the professional pacifists, the men who wish an inclusive peace or a peace without victory, the I.  W.  W., the Socialist party machine, are not merely the allies of our enemies, but are themselves our enemies.

We are at war.  Every man and woman in this nation is therefore bound to serve the country in whatever way is necessary.  We should work in the spirit of the body of men representing the railroad brotherhoods whom I addressed not long ago in Philadelphia; whose chairman in introducing me said that the one purpose, now the country was at war, was to help the country in every possible way, not only by making it a matter of pride to do their work with the utmost efficiency, and pending the war to insist on nothing in their own interest unless it was primarily in the interest of the country as a whole.  The able-bodied young man, rich or poor, should by preference render such service in the army.  Other men should render it in business or agriculture, by the work of food production and food conservation along the lines indicated by Mr.  Hoover and the national and State officials engaged in similar work, by speeding up transportation, manufacturing and every other kind of business, and by paying taxes.  The taxes should be laid progressively on those able to pay, up to, but not beyond, the point where the payment becomes unjust or oppressive and interferes with production.

What we and our allies at this time most need is maximum production and quick distribution of food, munitions, clothing — in short, everything.  Any such restriction of profits as would reduce production would be a calamity.  Moreover, in many of the most important industries labor is the largest element of cost; in view of the high cost of living a reduction in wages would be a calamity; and therefore profits must not be kept down so as to injure the ability to pay this rate of wages.  Again, nothing should be done to upset the general financial situation, for the United States is the last financial reservoir of the world, and it would be a grave calamity to upset the financial situation by upsetting the economic basis of our business.  As regards certain necessities of life the government must certainly prevent owners, and especially speculators, from charging excessively high prices; but it is equally important that the government should be cautious not to enforce unreasonably low prices, especially as regards what the government itself uses, and as regards exports.  Our ability to extend credit to the allies largely depends on our continuing to get properly full prices on exports; we should follow the rule that England has followed, of refusing to sell to our allies at less than the open market price.  Let us help our allies primarily by a great army; we can rest assured that even if they asked us merely to give them money and goods at half price and to let them do the fighting, we should earn their utter contempt and derision if we acquiesced.  We would be in the position of a pawn-broker who bribes a gunman to defend him; we would have put a premium on both our allies and our enemies ultimately joining to plunder us.  Heavily graduated inheritance and income taxes are necessary.  They should follow the English and German models.  But at present what is most needed is a heavily — a very heavily — graduated tax on the excess profits due to war conditions; a tax as heavy as Great Britain has now imposed.  In the purchases made by the government it ought to pay prices high enough to enable not merely the big manufacturers, but their smaller and less advantageously situated rivals to secure a generous living profit.  This means that the big manufacturers would have excess profits; and the proper way to reach these is by taxing them heavily.  If the government fails to follow such action, if it follows a course of indecision and delay, the result will be as bad as it has already proved in the matter of building ships.  Seven months ago Germany went to war with us because she deemed it more important to sink unarmed cargo and passenger ships than to keep our friendship.  This, of course, ought to have shown us that our instant and prime duty was to nullify the threat by exerting all our wisdom and energy, to grappling aggressively with the sub-marine by building many of the big and most efficient anti-submarine cruisers, and striving to devise new methods of attack on the submarines, and by without the smallest delay beginning on a vast scale to build numbers of strong, swift steel cargo ships.  These were almost our vital duties.  But we shilly-shallied over them, and dawdled and backed and filled.  We did nothing new, and very little that was effective in building anti-submarine craft of the largest, best engined and most effective type.  We didn't take any effective steps at all to provide for building the cargo ship our-selves, and yet in at least one case we prevented a great firm from building the ships for one of our allies.  The result may prove a capital misfortune; one of those misfortunes which is practically a crime against the nation; for if during these seven months we had gone properly to work in the business of getting ships built, we would have had the first ships ready next month; and I believe that the knowledge of this fact would have meant to Germany the knell of doom, so far as her submarine campaign was concerned, and therefore would have made peace immediately probable.

The war has clearly raised two problems; the problem of the present, which is to help our allies win this war, by endeavoring in every way now, to offset the effect of our utter failure to prepare in advance; and the permanent problem, the problem of defense against a future — perhaps a distant, perhaps an immediately impending future — attack upon us when we have no allies; the problem of preparing our strength as a permanent policy so that never again shall we be caught as shamefully unprepared as now, so that never again shall we be forced as at present to owe our safety purely to the valor of our allies and not to our own courage and strength.

The last is the permanently vital problem, and we can never understand it or meet it unless we fully understand the pitiful condition in which we have been for the last seven months; a condition due purely to our own lack of forethought and of steadfast resolution during the last three years.  Now and then we read in the papers boastful accounts of how much money we have appropriated, of how many men have been registered for the draft, of what wonderful plans we intend to develop for an aeroplane fleet, of how many cargo ships and big guns we intend to build.  All of this would be excellent, if we meant to prepare for a war three years hence; but it is all of it, every particle of it, just exactly what we ought to have done three years ago, or at the very least two years and a half ago, when the Lusitania was sunk — for we had exactly the same cause for action then that we have now.  Seven months have passed since the German note of January 31 last, which was in effect a declaration of war.  This is a longer time than it took Germany to conquer France in 1870.  And when you read anything boastful about what we have done during these seven months, remember what our accomplishment— not belated preparation, but actual accomplishment — really is.  We have put a few anti-submarine craft into European waters under Admiral Sims; and that is all! We have in training camps in France gallant Gen.  Pershing and his fine divisions of infantry, his engineers, and his artillery regiments without guns.  We have several hundred thousand National Guardsmen about to begin training in camp; and several hundred thousand drafted men are preparing to go to camp.  We have not yet been able to put in France any heavy field guns fit to match the German artillery.  We have not yet a single airplane fit to send over the German lines.  We have not put a single man into the firing line.  We have only what is relatively to the size of the armies engaged, a small body of infantry, without artillery, who will be fit to go to the firing line in the immediate future.  As for the rest, after seven months, this nation of a hundred millions of people, the wealthiest nation in the world, able to work without any danger behind the shield of the British fleet and the French and British armies, has neither the trained troops nor the guns nor the air craft to meet even a single small German army if it could get at us.  After these seven months we are still nothing like as formidable as Belgium or Rumania.  Under such conditions boasters would do well to remember the remark of Thangbrand, the priest, about the boastful Icelanders, in the Norse saga:

“What’s the use
Of all this bragging up and down 
When three women and one goose
Make a market in your town."

I do not mention this for the sake of criticizing any one.  I mention it so that we may take warning and never again be guilty of such shameful shortcomings.  There is no use of crying over spilt milk; but there is far less use of making believe that it has not been spilt.  Let us make up our minds, we Americans, hereafter to behave like men and to quit acting like spoiled, overgrown children.  Children don't have forethought.  Men do.  Let us make ready in advance so that hereafter we may owe our safety to our own prepared strength and trained courage.  There is but one way thus to prepare and that is by introducing as a permanent policy the policy of universal obligatory military training, for all our young men in time of peace, and of universal service in time of war, so that every man and woman in this country shall be fitted in advance to render, and at need required to render, whatever service the nation demands.  Then we won't have to begin to train for a fight after the fight has itself begun.  The law of service should be the law of life; and in every real democracy universal suffrage will be based on universal service.  So much for our ultimate and permanent need.  The immediate need is to bring this war to a close by complete and overwhelming victory.  We must strive for the peace of victory as in their day our forefathers strove.  As yet we count for almost nothing in the war; but sooner or later — I hope within six months or so — we shall develop our tremendous strength, and then let us see the war through.  Hitherto the allies have been fighting our battles, as an incident to fighting theirs, and, of course, because their interest demanded it.  Now let us fight our own battles; thereby we shall also fight theirs.  We are fighting for humanity; but primarily we are fighting for our own country, for the safety of America in the world.  We are fighting on the other side of the water so that we may not have to fight on this side of the water.  Only the overthrow of the brutal and unscrupulous militarism of the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns will make this world safe either for the United States or for democracy.  Let us bend our whole energies towards this end.  Let us resolve that if all our allies should slip away from us we would nevertheless continue the war single-handed until the end is attained.  Let us heartily back up the government in every wise step it takes for the speedy achievement of this end; but let us, as patriots, not less clearly emphasize the fact that we demand from our government wisdom, energy and a spirit of broad Americanism and a patriotic absence of partisanship in thus prosecuting the war.  Let us furthermore each as individuals do all we severally can to aid in securing the triumph.  Let us live simply, cut out all extravagance and all alcohol, show thrift, avoid waste, and do every bit of productive work we can, in agriculture or industry, in producing food, or clothing, or munitions, or in managing the transportation of the country.  Let us cheerfully pay our increased taxes, subscribe to government loans, help the Red Cross and Y.  M.  C.  A.  and all similar organizations which are trying to aid our soldiers.  So far as our bodily strength and condition permit let us serve with our bodies.  If we are permitted let us volunteer in the army or the navy; if we are drafted let us treat the fact as a great privilege.  Service should be the law of life, and thrice blessed is that man who in this world crisis is granted the supreme good fortune of risking his life and all else that he has for the honor of serving his country and mankind.

Speech or Document 20

HOW TO SAVE OURSELVES BY SAVING OTHERS

FROM AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE WORKING-MEN'S RED CROSS SUNDAY CELEBRATION AT JOHNSTOWN, PENNSYLVANIA, ON SEPTEMBER 30, 1917

I TAKE not merely peculiar pleasure but peculiar pride in coming to Johnstown as the invited guest of the various local organizations, who have joined in making this the Red Cross Sunday.  I feel that this war is not only essentially America's war, but also a war to make measureably good, at least for large portions of the earth, Lincoln's doctrine of a government for the people, by the people and of the people.  Therefore, it is as emphatically a war primarily in the interest of the working people, as the war for the preservation of the Union itself.  It was not possible that the man who himself works with his hands, whether as a farmer or on the railroad, or in a shop or factory could permanently prosper or even exist in a country which tolerated black slavery, and this Abraham Lincoln clearly saw.  In just the same way it is not possible that the working men, and the farmers who till the soil they themselves own, can permanently enjoy political freedom and the right to rule their own destinies in their own country in a world which is dominated by Prussian militarism.  Remember that the essential part of Lincoln's statement was that this should be a government by the people, and not merely a government of the people and for the people.  Every government is of course a government of the people.  This is just as true of a despotism as it is true of a democracy.  Again there have often been despotisms or autocracies which for a greater or less length of time have handled their government for the people.  But it is only in a free country that the government is by the people.  Bismarck's oft-repeated saying was that “Everything should be done for the people and nothing by them." We feel that not only everything should be done for them but by them.  We hold that Bismarck's, or the Prussian theory inevitably in the end means that in as much as nothing is done by the people, less and less will be done for them.  Every man in this country believes in the American doctrines for which our fathers and fore-fathers struggled, and often laid down their lives, must see that the difference between us and our allies the other free peoples on the one side, and the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns on the other, is an absolutely fundamental difference.  Germany sees this clearly.  If this war ends in a German victory or a stalemate we can count with absolute certainty upon Germany at her own time striking down this republic, for she rightly feels that our existence is incompatible with the safety of that spirit of despotic autocracy which she embodies today more than any other nation in the whole world.

Of course we went to war purely because we had a special grievance against Germany.  We did not go to war to make democracy safe, and we did go to war because we had a special grievance.  We went to war because after two years, during which with utter contempt of our protests, she had habitually and continually murdered our non-combatant men, women and children on the high seas, Germany formally announced that she intended to pursue this course more ruthlessly and vigorously than ever.  This was our special grievance — the special grievance because of which we went to war, and it was far more than an empty justification for going to war.  As you know, my own belief is that we should have acted immediately after the sinking of the Lusitania.  But in any event, no self-respecting American can doubt that we had to act when we did act.  The man who is not willing to see his nation fight when its men and women are habitually killed by the order of the government of another nation, stands on a level with the man who will peacefully submit to having his wife's face slapped and his children kidnaped by a black-hander.  The man who submits tamely to such private outrages is unfit to associate with decent people, and the nation that submits tamely to such private outrages forfeits all right to the respect of its own citizens or of other nations.

In our school books we read of the wrongs committed by George III, and the English of his days on our revolutionary ancestors, and we rightly applaud the conduct of those revolutionary ancestors in following Washington and standing for our rights, at the expense of war.  But King George and the English of his day never committed against us crimes which in any way compare with the atrocities that have been committed against us during the last two and one-half years by the German government, acting through its diplomatic and military agents, and with the full approval of the German people.  We not only had a special grievance against Germany, because of which we went to war, but this grievance is of the very gravest character, so grave that we would have rendered ourselves infamous had we declined to go to war.  But, in addition, it was imperatively necessary that we go to war on behalf of outraged humanity.

I wish every one in this nation would read the sermons now being delivered by the Rev.  Newell Dwight Hillis, pastor of the Plymouth church, Brooklyn.  Dr.  Hillis is one of the most high-minded men in this country, and he possesses a singularly accurate mind.  He abhors injustice or wanton war.  Nobody could ever make Dr.  Hillis support this country in going into an un-righteous war.  But much though he loves peace, he loves honor and justice and mercy and self-respect and national rectitude even more than he loves peace.  He has recently been on the other side and he looked at the affidavits and photographs, the legal proofs that, as he said, make the German atrocities committed in France and Belgium, and in their air raids on England far better established than the crimes of the Sioux Indians on our western frontier, the murders of the Black Hole of Calcutta, or the hideous infamies committed three centuries ago in the dreadful wars of religion.  He has seen himself, as I have said, the countless photographs of dead and mutilated girls, children and old men.  He has read some of the countless affidavits describing cruelties and brutality, which literally make the heart sick.  Germany has reduced savagery to a science, and this great war for the victorious peace of justice must go on until the German cancer is cut clean out of the world body.  There are official records of more than 10,000 separate atrocities committed by the German armies, not sporadically, but as a part of the deliberate plan of “schrecklichkeit" of horror upon which the German government has counted.

In a recent letter from Dr.  Hillis he says: “For weeks the Germans on the eastern front have been gas-bombing and driving the children and women back through the French lines.  The prefect, Governor Mirman, of Nancy, showed me 2,500 children and women that he had brought into his town, and there are not less than 50,000 of these orphans, half orphans and aged women, who have suddenly and quite unexpectedly been thrust upon the villages south of the Verdun line.  These poor children represent France's supreme need and America's supreme opportunity.  They must be saved today, or there will be no France of tomorrow."

The conditions thus authoritatively described by an unimpeachable witness should wake every man and woman in America to the need of trying to help the tortured people of Belgium and France.  Your committees here in Johnstown should get in touch with Dr.  Hillis and follow his advice as to how to proceed, and you should of course back up the Red Cross in every way.  France and Belgium together with England have been fighting our battle as surely as they have been fighting their own.  The Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns is seeking world dominion.  It has shown ruthless treachery and brutality.  Its course for three years has proved that it wants only the opportunity to strike down and plunder any power not able by military force to resist its attacks.  In trying to save themselves, France and England and poor little Belgium have saved us; for this wealthy and helplessly unprepared nation would have been an easy and most desirable victim for Germany if it had not been for the allied fleets and armies which for three years have stood between us and ruin.  During these years of ease our wealth has grown; and all of us should give what we can to help the wretched victims who have suffered such intolerable wrongs in France and Belgium.

But this is not enough.  Merely to help the sorely stricken does not meet the situation.  We must punish the aggressor in such fashion that never again will there be a repetition of wrongdoing as Germany has committed in this war.  Never again must we be put in such an ignoble position as to owe our safety only to others.  Next time it may not pay other nations to save us from the effects of our folly.  Uncle Sam must hereafter prepare his strength so that he himself can guarantee his own safety against any foreign foe.  We have gone to war because Germany had, during two years, committed upon us outrages to which no self-respecting or manly nation could endure.  We shall fight in Europe so as to save ourselves or our children from the necessity of fighting on our own continent against alien conquerors.  We are also fighting the battle of liberty-loving, self-respecting, decently behaved nations of mankind.  We must back up the Red Cross and all similar organizations in every way possible.  But we must remember that our first duty is to develop to the limit our military strength.  Everything else is of secondary importance to this.  If we of this great democratic republic do not show that we are able to defend ourselves by our own might, if we do not teach Germany that she can not commit acts of insolent brutality at our expense without being called to account, we will lay up either for ourselves or for our children a future of shame and disaster.

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.

Speech or Document 22

NO QUESTION OF DIVIDED LOYALTY CAN BE TOLERATED

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED UNDER THE AUSPICES OF WITTENBERG COLLEGE AT SPRINGFIELD, OHIO, ON MAY 25, 1918

AT this time no good American should sleep easily, if during the day he has not done everything in his power to put this country back of the armed men who in France are fighting for our own national honor and interest, and for the future of the free peoples of civilized mankind.  The peril is faced by and the honor is rightly due to those at the front.  But the rest of us, the men and women who can not get to the front, must at least back up our men in every possible way; and the way to back them up is every day, every week, every month, to do the thing that is next.  At this moment the thing that is next is the Red Cross drive.  Last month it was the Liberty loan.  And all the time the biggest thing that is next is to back up the men who wear our uniform by insisting that we at home tolerate absolutely no division on the great question of Americanism.

It is primarily on this question of Americanism that I come to speak today.  I accepted the invitation to come here, from the president of Wittenberg college, who informed me he wished me because Wittenberg college, founded by Lutherans of German blood, was American and nothing else, and that he wanted me to preach the straightest and stiffest doctrine of Americanism, exactly such doctrines as I have been preaching all my life, and most of all during the past four years.  To emphasize the quality of true Americanism, President Heckert, the president of this Lutheran college, has asked my old and deeply valued friend, Monseigneur Vattman to come, so that it is a Lutheran preacher and a Catholic ecclesiastic who give the invocation and the benediction at this meeting.  Both alike are of German blood, and both of them are as straight and good Americans as are to be found in the whole United States, bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.  Americans in body and in spirit, standing like all other good Americans, for America and the allies of America, and against the Prussianized Germany of today and all her allies and vassal states.

Such an invitation from such a source appealed to me peculiarly, and I was glad to accept it.

The first essential here in the United States is that we shall be one nation and that the American nation.  We are a new nation, by blood akin to but different from every one of the nations of Europe.  We have our own glorious past, we are a nation with a future such as no other nation in the world has before it, if only we the men and women of today, do our full duty and bring up our sons and daughters to do their full duty, as Americans, and as nothing else.

In such a nation there can be no fifty-fifty allegiance.  There is not such thing as being loyal to the United States, and also loyal to any other power.  It is just as impossible as for a man to be loyal to his wife and also equally loyal to some other woman.  If any man dilutes his loyalty to America by any degree of loyalty to any other country whatsoever, he ought instantly to be sent out of this country and back to the country where he belongs.  And of course the case is even worse if he sacrifices his loyalty for America to his hatred for some other country.  The German-American alliance put the interests of Germany above the interests of the United States, it showed itself the embittered foe of America and tried to run our politics with reference not to our own honor and interests but to the needs of the Germany of the Hohenzollems.  The Sinn Feiners have put the honor and interest of America second to their hatred to England.  The German-American alliance is dissolved, but Congress ought by law to make the dissolution permanent, and to render forever impossible its revival or the creation of any similar anti-American and semi-traitorous organization.  In just the same way every Sinn Feiner who directly or indirectly seeks to discredit America's allies in this war and thereby to give aid and comfort to Germany, should be interned as an enemy alien or sent out of the country.  The same thing is true of the Russian Bolshevists who seek to plunge this country into the chaotic ruin into which Russia has been plunged.  All these men are the allies of Germany, and the enemies of the United States.  Their most potent allies are the native American demagogues whether politicians or newspaper editors, who pander to the foreign vote that is hostile to America, and the native American pacifists who have been the mean allies of German militarism, and the I.  W.  W.  people, and the Germanized societies.  All these are enemies to the United States and should be treated as such.

This question of Americanism has two sides to it.  The first side is that which I have above out" lined.  Applying what I have said in concrete form, it means that at this time the American of German blood should himself take the lead in proceeding against every man in this country who directly or indirectly favors Germany, or is luke-warm in our war against Germany.  In the Revolution the American of English blood took the lead against the British king and his backers.  In this war it should be the Americans of German blood who take the lead against the Germany of the Hohenzollerns, the Germany that has become a menace to liberty and to justice and to mercy and to honor throughout the world.  America has special and intolerable grievances of her own against Germany, for no nation is worth being called a nation if it permits such wrong as Germany did this country to go unpunished.  But in addition America is fighting the battle of all well-behaved nations.  It is fighting for the right of free peoples to exist.  No nation can be of full effect in such a war as this unless it stands loyally by its allies; and any man who now seeks to embroil us with our allies is a traitor to the cause of America.

Nor can any nation make such a fight effectively if it is not itself united.  We can permit no division here.  Our ideals and our principles of national unity and honor and greatness must be the same in whatever part of the country we dwell and from whatever stock we come.  Therefore, we must have but one flag — the American flag, and but one language — the English language.  In our primary schools nothing but the English language should be taught or studied, and the law should require that after a reasonable period every newspaper in this country to be published in English.  As for our higher institutions of learning, all foreign languages should be taught in them insofar as it is considered necessary, but the language of the high school or college itself should always be the English language, and only the English language — just as it is in Wittenberg college today, just as it is in Rutgers college, which my own Dutch Reformed ancestors helped to found.  And what is true of the newspaper and the college is true of the church.  Let the Lutheran church profit by what befell my own church, the Dutch Reformed church, in New York.  That church clung to Dutch as a language and dwindled until its leaders saw that it was doomed unless it adopted English as its tongue.  If the Lutheran church tries to remain a German church, using the German language, either it will dwindle or else it will be an alien body in the American commonwealth.  We Americans must speak in the school, in the church and in the home and must read in our newspapers one language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington's farewell address and of Lincoln's Gettysburg speech.

This is one side of Americanism.  But there is another side just as important.  If a man behaves as an American it is an infamy to hold his creed or his national origin against him, or to fail in any way to give him the square deal as an American.  If the man is a straight American it is our business to stand by him.  I don't care a rap whether he is Catholic, Protestant or Jew — I don't care a rap whether his ancestors or he himself came from England or Ireland or Germany, France or Italy, the Scandinavian or the Slavonic countries.  We have a right to insist that he be an American and nothing else.  If he lives up to that requirement he has a right to insist that we treat him exactly on a level with every other American.

At this moment the great majority of the Americans who are in whole or in part of German blood are as heartily loyal to America and, therefore, as resolutely hostile to Germany, as all other good Americans.  These men are fit to hold every office, civil or military, from the highest to the lowest, in this country.  The best text books on Americanism and on the duty of Americans within this country and in regard to Germany, that have been written by Americans during this war, have been written by Americans who themselves are partly of German blood.  Witness Owen Wistar's “Pentecost of Calamity," James Beck’s” Documents In the Case," and Gustavus Ohlinger's “Their True Faith and Allegiance."

As a matter of fact, all our children's children will intermarry and in a very few generations all our people will derive their blood from various European nationalities.  Let me give you my own case.  About two and a half centuries ago some German peasants who had been driven out of the palatinate by the armies of Louis XIV came to America, and founded Germantown, near Philadelphia.  Two of these were ancestors of mine.  At about the same time a French Protestant came here because the Catholics in France persecuted the Protestants, and an Irish Catholic came here, because the Protestants in Ireland persecuted the Catholics; and some Dutch traders settled at the mouth of the Hudson, and some Scotch farmers and some Welsh and English Quakers settled in Pennsylvania.  All these people lived here and their children lived here after them.  They devoted themselves to this land and ceased to think of any other.  Their children's children intermarried with one another — and if they had not intermarried I would not have been here.  Therefore, in my case, if you tried to express me in terms of the hyphen, you would have to use seven hyphens; and sooner or later the children of all of you will pass through a similar experience, for they are all going to intermarry, and even before they do thus intermarry they will all be turned out in the same American type.  It is the type of Washington and Lincoln and Andrew Jackson.  It is also the type of Muhlenberg and Herkimer and Custer, of Sheridan and Sullivan and Farragut, of Carroll and Schuyler and Paul Revere.  I have named some of the great names in our history.  They were borne by men whose fathers had come from many different lands.  Who cares? They were all Americans and nothing but Americans.  There wasn't a hyphen in the lot.

Here where I speak in the shadow of Wittenberg college there can be no truer American ideal to uphold than that of Muhlenberg.  He was the pastor of a Lutheran church when the Revolution opened.  He got up to preach his last sermon in the uniform of the Continental army, and told his congregation that now war had come it was his duty to fight as an American patriot in the ranks of American soldiers under Washington.  His brother was the first speaker of the national Congress.  They were Americans and nothing but Americans; they knew but one flag, the American flag, and their speech was the speech of their American fellows.

A Red Cross friend, Maj.  Simons, of St.  Louis, told me a little anecdote the other day that illustrates just what I mean.  He had just come back from France, where he had been to the hospital to see my son Archie.  In the next cot but one to Archie lay a young fellow who was a little worse hurt even than Archie was, for a bullet had gone right through the point of his heart.  He had to lie absolutely motionless for eight days, until the muscle knitted, and his life was saved.  He had shown conspicuous gallantry and ability.  My friend, the Red Cross man, got into conversation with him, and after taking certain messages to be delivered to his family (and to one young lady who was not of his family) my friend asked him what his name was.  Whereupon the young officer, who was really little more than a boy, grinned and said, “Say, now don't faint when you hear my name.  It is Von Holtzendorf.  Wouldn't the Huns feel good if they knew they had ' got' a man with a name like that? "

The boy in the cot between my son and this young officer had an English name.  But those three boys were Americans and nothing else.  They were straight United States! They had given their blood for this country — for one country, for one flag; and they talked to one another in one language — the language of the soldiers of Washington and of the soldiers of Grant and Lee.

Speech or Document 23

WHY GERMANY MUST BE BEATEN

THE two prime purposes of the American people at this time, having precedence of all others, are: first to insist upon the absolute and thoroughgoing Americanization of our entire citizenship; and second, to win the war, to win it as speedily as possible, and to end it by the peace of overwhelming victory, a peace which shall guarantee to us, and to our Allies and to all well-behaved nations of the civilized world, lasting relief from the threat and horror of German world dominion.

As regards Americanism, we must insist that there be in this country but one Nationality, the American nationality.  There must be no perpetuation in this country of separate national groups, with their separate languages and special loyalties to alien oversea flags.  There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country.  There is room here only for 100 per cent.  Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.  We must have loyalty to only one flag, the American flag; and it is disloyal to the American flag to try to be loyal to any other, whether that other is a foreign flag or the black and red flags which symbolize either anarchy or else treacherous hostility to all for which this nation stands.  There is room in this country for but one language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, of Washington's Farewell Address and of Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech and Second inaugural; the English language.  Americanism transcends every party consideration.  No man who is not 100 per cent.  American is entitled to the support of any party which is itself entitled to be considered an American party.  We should treat as disloyal any attempt to carry water on both shoulders, to try to conciliate any half American vote here at home, or to antagonize any of our allies, or to serve Germany by seeking a peace without victory, or a peace as favorable to her as to the nations she has so brutally and unscrupulously wronged.  We must set our faces like flint against all foreign racial solidarity in this country; we must treat the Hun within our gates as the worst traitor to this Republic; and we must treat agitation for a premature or inconclusive peace as treason to the Republic.  The German spy, the alien enemy here at home, and the even fouler and more despicable native American who serves the alien, should be interned at hard labor — or if his office be rank he should be buried.  The surest way to stop the activities of spies and plotters is to shoot every one of them who is caught in a flagrant offense.

This is one side of Americanism.  The other and equally important side is to insist that every man who shows himself to be a 100 per cent.  American, wholehearted and single-minded in his loyalty to this country, no matter what his birthplace, national origin or creed, be treated as on a full and exact equality with every other good American.  The bulk of American citizens in whole or in part of German blood (and I am myself in part of German blood) are absolutely loyal.  They have furnished as large and as gallant a proportion of the fighting men of our army and navy as any other element; and of course it is the fighting men who meet and furnish the highest test of sound American citizenship at this time.  Moreover, in civil life they furnish their full proportion of the leaders in the movement to insist upon a unified, an unqualified and an undivided American loyalty to our country.  These men are fit to fill every civil and military position in this country, from the very highest down.  It is not only an outrage, but it is deeply unpatriotic and un-American to discriminate against them in any shape or way.  We are all Americans together; and we must neither permit any divided allegiance in our citizenship, nor any attempt to divide our citizenship along lines of old-world nationality, nor any attempt to discriminate between or against good Americans because of their national origin.

Americanism means that we are a nation.  But it is no use to be a nation if the nation can not defend itself, if its sons can not and will not fight for its existence.  The one task to which at this time we must all of us devote all our energies is to win this war and to win it now.  We must speed up the war.  We must insist upon absolute efficiency in our war activities.  We must insist upon a peace conditioned upon the complete over-throw of Germany and the removal of all threat of German world dominion.  We have across the seas a most gallant American army.  The man is a poor American whose veins do not thrill with pride as he reads of the feats of our fighting men in France.  Moreover, at least we have begun to send over enough soldiers to count for something real in the struggle.  We have begun to give them some airplanes.  As yet they only have what cannon we can get from the French, and we could get the army across at all only by the lavish use of British ships.  But we have seemingly made a real start in ship production and airplane production at home, and we actually have several hundred thousand soldiers at the fighting front.  We owe much of this achievement to the work of the Senate Committee on Military Affairs; and we owe even more to the success of the German drive which began in March.  At that time our fighting army at the front was smaller than that of Belgium and (in spite of its striking gallantry it could not play a great part) and this represented the sum of our military achievement after a year of war! A very small degree of efficiency in handling the War Department would have meant that our army in France on January 1st would have far surpassed in size and equipment the army we have over there now in July.  In such event the German drive would probably have been beaten back at once; exactly as if we had done our duty since the sinking of the Lusitania (which was the " Firing on Fort Sumter " of this war), and had prepared in advance, we would have put a couple of million men in the field a year ago; in which event Russia would never have broken, and the war would unquestionably have been over before this.  Nine-tenths of wisdom consists in being wise in time.

It is too late to remedy the past.  It is a case of spilled milk.  But let us avoid spilling the milk in the same fashion in the future.  Let us begin to prepare now so that we shall not next year be again apologizing for a shortage of troops, guns, ships and airplanes.  For four years the English and French, and for over three years the Italians have fought our battles, and we have only just begun to fight for ourselves.  This is not right.  We have a larger population and greater resources than Germany or than France and Great Britain taken together.  We have played a poor part in the early stages of the world war.  Let us make the finishing of the war an American task.  By this time next year we ought to have overseas an army as great as the combined armies of France and England, an army of between three and four million fighting soldiers on the various fighting fronts, and this, considering replacements and non-combatants, means at least six million men.  Congress should refuse assent to the War Department's present policy of procrastination in deferring the necessary extension of the age limits for the draft, and in other ways.  There should be no further delay.  Besides enormously strengthening our army in France we should by this time have declared war on Turkey and to have sent a hundred thousand soldiers to aid our Allies in western Asia.  We have had to use English ships to ferry our troops across the Atlantic, and we could use Japanese ships to ferry them across the Pacific.

There must be no peace until Germany is beaten to her knees.  To leave her with a strangle-hold on Russia, and, through her vassal allies, Austria, Bulgaria and Turkey, dominant in Central Europe and Asia Minor, would mean that she had won the war and taken a giant stride towards world dominion.  Belgium must be reinstated and reimbursed; France must receive back Alsace and Lorraine; Turkey must be driven from Europe, Armenia made free, the Syrian Christians protected, and the Jews given Palestine.  Italian-Austria must go to Italy and Roumanian-Hungary to Roumania.  Moreover, we must raise against the German menace the sleeping sword of the Slavs of Central Europe; we must establish the great free commonwealths of the Poles, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Jugo-Slavs, and save the other submerged peoples who are their neighbors.  Unless we do all this, unless we stand by all our Allies who have stood by us, we shall have failed in making the liberty of well-behaved civilized peoples secure, and we shall have shown that our announcement about making the world safe for democracy was an empty boast.

These are the tasks set us as regards winning the war and ending the war.  Therefore, the men elected this fall should not only be absolutely loyal, but possessed of broad vision, sound common sense, high character and unyielding resolution; for they must grapple with tremendous international questions.  A timid man, a half-hearted pacifist or a foolish visionary may do as incalculable harm as the demagogue or conscienceless political trickster.  And of course no disloyal man, and no man of merely lukewarm loyalty, should be chosen, no matter what the ticket on which he runs.

Loyalty to the people of the United States is the prime need.  This is the people's war.  It is not the President's war.  It is not the war of Congress.  It is the war of the people of the United States.  Our whole-hearted and undivided loyalty is due to the country as a whole, and to every public servant, whether President or Senator, executive official or Congressman, precisely to the degree in which that public servant disinterestedly and efficiently serves the country.  We demand loyalty of this type, for it is the only loyalty for self-respecting American freemen.

The events of the last year and a half have shown the necessity of electing a Republican Congress, to support the Administration at every point where it acts vigorously in prosecuting the war, and to supply its deficiencies in the prosecution of the war and in the carrying out of a proper world policy.  This country needs a Congress which will give the Administration this kind of vigorous support, and yet will fearlessly supervise, and when necessary investigate, what is being done.  Since the war began the Republicans in Congress have acted in a spirit of the largest patriotism, and wholly without regard to questions of politics.  For the Administration measures designed for efficiently carrying on the war they have furnished a larger percentage of support than have the Democrats; and where the Administration was wrong, the bulk of the Republicans have ventured to withstand it and have stood by the country, whereas the bulk of the Democrats have not done so; although there have been some conspicuous and honorable exceptions.  It is only by such conduct that we can win the war and secure the right kind of peace.  The need in Congress is for loyal Americans, far-sighted, strong-willed, resolute, who shall represent the people of this country and who shall stand steadfastly by the nation as a whole.

So much for the war.  But when we have closed the giant war we must then prepare for the giant tasks of peace.  First and foremost we should act on Washington's advice, and in time of peace prepare against war, so that never again shall we be caught in such humiliating inability to defend ourselves and assert our rights as has been the case during the last four years.  In a democracy such preparation should be the duty of the whole people and not merely a part of the people.  There should be universal obligatory military training in the field for a period of, say, six months of all our young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-one.  I wish there could be industrial training also; but the six-months period would have to be lengthened if any serious industrial training is to be added to the military training.  Such training would instill into our people a fervent and intense Americanism which would forever free us from the menace of Bolshevism and all of its American variety, from the frank homicidal march of the I.  W.  W.  to the sinister anti-Americanism of the Germanized socialistic party.

The preparation for the tasks of peace must be in the interest of all our people, of those who dwell in the open country and of those who dwell in the cities; of all men who live honestly and toil with head or hand, and of all women just as much as of all men.  Often there can be identity of function between men and women, generally there can not be, but always there must be full equality of right.  Women have the vote in this state.  They should be given it at once in the nation at large.  And in the councils of this state, and in the councils of our party, women should be admitted to their share of the direction on an exact equality with the men, and whenever it is wisely possible their judgment and directive power should be utilized in association with men rather than separately.

In our industrial activities, alike of farmer, wage worker and business man, our aim should be cooperation among ourselves, and control by the state to the degree necessary, but not beyond the degree necessary, in order to prevent tyranny and yet to encourage and reward individual excellence.  Business men should be permitted to cooperate and combine, subject to such regulation and control by the Government as will prevent injustice and sharp dealing among themselves or towards their employees, or as regards outsiders and the general public.  There should be no penalizing of business merely because of its size, although, of course, there is peculiar need of supervision of big business.  Government ownership should be avoided wherever possible; our purpose should be to steer between the anarchy of unregulated individualism and the deadening formalism and inefficiency of widespread state ownership.  From time to time it has been found and will be found necessary for the Government to own and run certain businesses, the uninterrupted prosecution of which is necessary to the public welfare and which can not be adequately controlled in any other way, but normally this is as inadvisable as to permit such business concerns to be free from all Government supervision and direction.  Normally, and save where the necessity is clearly shown, our aim should be to encourage and stimulate private action and cooperation subject to Government control.  Profiteering out of the war should be stopped, but it is mere common sense to say that proper profit making should be encouraged, for unless there is a profit the business can not run, labor can not be paid, and neither the public nor the Government can be served.  And the misery in which this country was plunged before our business was artificially stimulated by the outbreak of the world war shows the need of a protective tariff.

Labor likewise should have full right to cooperate and combine, full right to collective bargaining and collective action; subject always, as in the case of capital, to the paramount general interest of the public, of the commonwealth; and the prime feature of this paramount general interest is that each man shall do justice and shall receive justice.  Hereafter in a very real sense labor should be treated, both as regards conditions of work and conditions of reward, as a partner in the enterprises in which it is associated; housing and living conditions must be favorable; effort must be made to see that the work is interesting, there must be insurance against old age, sickness and involuntary unemployment; and a share in the money reward for increased business success, whether it conies from efficiency shown in speeding up or from labor-saving machinery or from any other cause.  And on the other side there must be no restriction of output, no levelling down, no failure by the man to exert his full powers, and to receive the full reward to which his individual excellence entitles him; and no failure to recognize that unless there is a proper reward for the capital invested and for the management provided, absolute industrial disaster will result to every human being in this country.

The welfare of the farmer stands as the bedrock welfare of the entire commonwealth.  Hitherto he has not received the full share of industrial reward and benefit to which he is entitled.  He can receive it only as the result of organization and cooperation.  Along certain lines the Government must itself cooperate with him; but normally most can be accomplished by cooperation among the farmers themselves, in marketing their products, in buying certain things which they particularly need, and in joint action along many lines.  The state can wisely supplement such work of cooperation, but most of such work it can not with wisdom itself undertake.

These, in brief outline, are the tasks of rebuilding and upbuilding which are before us when peace comes.  But the prime needs now are the needs of war.  We must insist that this whole country be unified, nationalized, Americanized, and that no division of our American loyalty and American citizenship along the lines of national origin or of adherence to an alien flag be for one instant tolerated.  We must insist upon speeding up the war, so that our giant strength may be fully utilized, and next year our armies overseas at least equal in the aggregate to the German armies.  We must refuse any peace except the peace of overwhelming victory, a peace which will guarantee us against the threat of the German world dominion by securing to every well-behaved civilized power its real and complete freedom.

Speech or Document 24
YANKEE BLOOD VERSUS GERMAN BLOOD

A   SPEECH   DELIVERED   AT   SPRINGFIELD,   ILLINOIS, ON AUGUST 26,   1918

THE two great needs of the moment are to insist upon thorough-going and absolute Americanism throughout this land, and to speed up the war; and secondarily to these needs come the needs of beginning even now to make ready, to prepare for the tasks that are to come after the war, the task of preparing so that never again shall war find us helpless, and the task of preparing for the social and industrial problems which this earth-shaking conflict of giants will leave in its ruinous wake.

To insist upon thorough-going, 100 per cent.  Americanism among all our people is merely another way.  of saying that we insist upon being a nation proud of our national past and confident of our future as the greatest of the nations of mankind: for if we permit our people to be split into a score of different nationalities, each speaking a different language and each paying its real soul homage to some national ideal overseas, we shall not be a nation at all, but merely a polyglot boarding house; and nobody feels much loyalty to a polyglot boarding house or is proud to belong to it.  Moreover, there is no such thing as a divided loyalty.  Any kind of alloy in the loyalty makes the loyalty completely valueless.  At this time the man of German origin who says he is loyal to "Germanism," to “Deutschtum," although not to Germany, to “Deutschland," is disloyal to America.  Germanism is incompatible with Americanism.  The slightest loyalty to Germany is disloyalty to the United States.  We can tolerate no halfway attitude, no fifty-fifty loyalty.  The man must be an American and nothing else, or he is not an American at all.

If a man is loyal to any other flag, whether a foreign flag or the red flag of anarchy, or the black flag of Germanized socialism, he is disloyal to the American flag; and we must have but one language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, and of Washington's Farewell Address, and of Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech, the English language.

We are not internationalists.  We are American nationalists.  We intend to do justice to all other nations.  But in the last four years the professed internationalists like the profound pacifists have played the game of brutal German autocracy, the game of the militaristic and capitalistic tyranny which now absolutely rules the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns.  Professional internationalism stands towards patriotism exactly as free love stands toward a clean and honorable and duty-performing family life.  And American pacifism has been the tool and ally of German militarism, and has represented, and always will represent, deep disloyalty to our beloved country.

Having said this, with all the emphasis at my command, I wish with no less emphasis to say that the equally important other side of Americanism is the imperative duty of treating all men who show that they are in very truth Americans as on an entire equality of right and privilege, with no more regard to their birthplace, or the birthplace of their parents than to their creed.  In this crisis, since once our people grew fully awake, the Americans of German blood have in the immense majority of cases shown themselves as absolutely and aggressively and single-minded American as the citizens of any other stock or as the citizens who like most of us are of mixed stock.  The German government and the-German newspapers have reluctantly recognized this and they are more bitter against the Americans of German blood than against any other Americans.  The leading papers of Germany have contained bitter denunciations of them; and recently in the captured report of a German Inspector General which spoke of the American prisoners, the General especially dwelt on the fact that the soldiers of foreign parentage felt and behaved precisely like the soldiers of native parentage, and that this applied especially to the soldiers of German parentage.  Among the feats of especial gallantry chronicled of our men at the front a full proportion are to be credited to men whose names show that they are in whole or in part of German blood.  We Americans all stand shoulder to shoulder in war and in peace; and woe to the men who would try to divide us.  No man can serve two masters.  No man can serve both the United States and Germany.  If he is loyal to one side he must be hostile to the other.  If he is a loyal American he must be against Germany and all her works.

For the moment the pacifists and internationalists and pro-Germans dare not be noisy.  But let our people beware of them as soon as the peace negotiations begin and from that time onward.  They have worked together in the past and they will work together in the future, the pro-Germans furnishing the most powerful and most sinister element of the combination while the pacifists and the internationalists prance in the foreground and furnish the rhetoric.  Let our people remember that for the two and a half years before we entered the war the pacifists clamorously insisted that if we kept unprepared we would avoid war.  Well, we tried the experiment.  We kept completely unprepared.  Even after we broke off diplomatic relations with Germany we refused to make the slightest preparation.  And nevertheless we drifted into the war.  Pacifism and unpreparedness never keep a nation out of war.  They invite war; and they insure that if war comes it shall be costly; and long drawn out and bloody.  If when the great war broke out four years ago, or even if when the Lusitania was sunk three years and a quarter ago, we had begun with all our energy to prepare, we would very possibly never have had to go to war at all, and if forced to go to war we would have conquered peace ninety days after our entry into the conflict.

Let us remember this when the peace comes.  Don't trust the pacifists; they are the enemies of righteousness.  Don't trust the internationalists; they are the enemies of nationalism and Americanism.  Both of these groups appeal to all weaklings, illusionists, materialists, lukewarm Americans and faddists of all the types that vitiate nationalism.  Their leaders are plausible, make-believe humanitarians, who crave a notoriety that flatters their own egotism, who often mislead amiable and well-meaning, but short-sighted persons, who care for their own worthless carcasses too much to go anywhere near the front when fighting comes, but who in times of inert and slothful thinking, when war seems a remote possibility, can gain a reputation by windy schemes which imply not the smallest self-sacrifice or service among those who advocate them, and which therefore appeal to all exponents of intellectual vagary, sentimental instability and eccentricity, and that sham altruism which seeks the cheap glory of words that betray deeds.  All these elements combined may, when the people as a whole are not fully awake, betray this country into a course of folly for which when the hour of stern trial comes our bravest men will pay with blood and our bravest women with tears.  For those illusionists do not pay with their own bodies for the dreadful errors into which they have led a nation.  They strut through their time of triumph in the hours of ease; and when the hours of trial come they scatter instantly and let the nationalists, the old-fashioned patriots, the men and women who believe in the virile fighting virtues, accept the burden and carry the load, meet the dangers and make the sacrifies, and give themselves to and for the country.  Nations are made, defended, and preserved, not by the illusionists but by the men and women who practice the homely virtues in time of peace, and who in time of righteous war are ready to die, or to send those they love best to die, for a shining ideal.

When peace comes let us accept any reasonable proposal, whether calling for a league of nations or for any other machinery, which we can in good faith act upon, and which does really offer some chance of lessening the number of future wars and diminishing their area.  But let us never forget that any promise that such a league or other piece of machinery will definitely do away with war is either sheer nonsense or rank hypocrisy.  When the test comes any strong and brutal nation will treat any such agreement as a scrap of paper, precisely as Germany treated the Hague conventions and the treaties guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, unless well-behaved nations possess both the will and the power to enforce the observance of the agreement.  There-fore let us treat any peace treaties and agreements never as substitutes for but merely as supplementary to the duty of preparing our own strength for our own defense.  And let us make this duty the duty of all the people, as it should be in a democracy, where universal suffrage should rest on universal service.  Let us rest our strength on an army which shall consist not of a special caste, but of the people themselves; on an army produced by the universal obligatory training of all our young men sometime between the ages of 19 and 21.

This is for the future.  Our immediate duty is to win the war.  We must speed up the war to the limit.  We must try to finish it at the earliest possible moment, but be resolved to finish it, no matter how long it takes.  We must insist on the peace of complete and overwhelming victory.  We must remember that a huge army put in the field at one time will accomplish what the same number of men put into the field in driblets can never accomplish.  We have a much larger population and much greater natural resources than Germany or than France and England combined.  Therefore, by next spring we should have thousands of our own field guns, and scores of thousands of our own airplanes at the front, and an enormous ship tonnage in which to ferry across the ocean so many troops that by April we may have four million trained fighting men at the front, not counting non-combatants and reserves.  The age limits for the draft should be greatly increased and the exemptions greatly diminished.  All of this, of course, should have been done six months ago — indeed a year ago.  But it is not too late now.  It is the eleventh hour, but not the twelfth.  We must quit making this a “leisurely war." Our gallant fighting men at the front have shown the most splendid military qualities, and have won for themselves and for this nation the highest honor.  Therefore we who stay at home must back them up by deeds, not merely by applause.  They are entitled to such backing; and such backing means great quantities of ships, guns and airplanes, and millions of trained men.  It is a good thing, an admirable thing, to back up the Red Cross and the Y.  M.  C.  A., and all kindred bodies; to pay taxes cheerfully and buy Liberty bonds and thrift stamps; to save food and grow food, and to work with all our might with head and hand at useful industry.  All these things will help the fighting men to win the war.  But it is the fighting men at the front who will win the war.  Therefore back up the fighting men; and the only way to back them up is to do the things of which I have spoken above.

So much for the vital, the immediate, the imperative needs.  They are the needs that must at all hazards be met forthwith.  But there are other paramount needs which we must also conside.

This terrible war, with all its dreadful and lamentable accompaniments, may nevertheless do a lasting good to this nation; for it may scourge us out of the wallow of materialism, made only worse by a mawkish or vicious sham sentimentality, into which we were tending to sink.  The finest, the bravest, the best of our young men have sprung eagerly forward to face death for the sake of a high ideal; and thereby they have brought home to us the great truth that life consists of more than easy-going pleasure, and more than hard, conscienceless, brutal striving after purely material success; that while we must rightly care for the body and the things of the body, such care leads nowhere unless we also have thought for our own souls and for the souls of our brothers.  When these gallant boys, on the golden crest of life, gladly face death for the sake of an ideal, shall not we who stay behind, who have not been found worthy of the grand adventure, shall not we in our turn try to shape our lives so as to make this country the ideal which in our hearts we acknowledge, and the actual workaday business of our world, come a little nearer together, correspond in practice a little more closely? Let us resolve to make this country a better place to live in for these men, and for the women who sent these men to battle and for the children who are to come after them.

When peace comes, and even before peace comes, let us weigh and ponder the mighty spiritual forces called into being by this war and turn them to the social and industrial betterment of this nation.  Abraham Lincoln, with his usual homely commonsense and unerring instinct for the truth, made our people remember that the dollar has its place, an essential place, but that the man stands above the dollar.  Of late years we have worshiped the dollar overmuch, and have been snugly content with sleek service to Mammon, heedless of the ominous fact that over-devotion to dollars is almost equally damaging to those who have too many and to those who have too few; for when success is treated as tested and measured, not by the achievement of a self-respecting, hardworking, happy family life, and the performance of duty to oneself and to others with pleasure as a proper accompaniment of the duty; but merely by the mass of dollars amassed — why, the result is that the successful greedy ones develop a mean arrogance, and the unsuccessful greedy ones a mean envy; and envy and arrogance are equally unlovely sides of the same evil shield.

At present the best blood in this country, from all the homes of this country, is being spilled by our sons and brothers for principle and for justice and for humanity and for love of country, because our sons and brothers have placed love of a great cause above the dollar.  Let us see that the position is not reversed for a long time to come! The other day I read the statement that there were a hundred thousand undernourished children in New York City.  If we had a like number of undernourished soldiers, what a cry would go up! Yet these children are the citizens of the future, and the industrial arm is of just as much importance as the military.  We must realize this, and act on our realization, or some day our republic will rock to its foundation.

In achieving this purpose we must be equally on our guard against the American Romanoffs, the reactionaries of industry and politics, and against the American Bolshevists who appeal to the basest passions of envy and class hatred, and who strive for disorder and anarchy.  The history of Russia during the last 18 months teaches our country exactly what to avoid.  And one of the lessons it teaches is that the most sordid corruptionist may do no more harm to the nation than the conscienceless demagogue or the fanatical and impracticable visionary.

We must take the rule of justice and fair play as our guide in dealing alike with capital and with labor, with the business man and the working man.  Our theory should be cooperation among individuals, and control by the government with the purpose of helping the business succeed, but of seeing that the success implies service to the public and a fair division of profits among all concerned.  During war time there should be no profiteering, no unusual and abnormal profits; but there must be legitimate profits or the business can not go on, and unless it goes on the public can not be served nor the wage earners receive their wages.  If there are no profits we can not raise the taxes necessary to provide money for the war.  The working-men likewise should have their right of collective action, including collective bargaining, insured; and in a very real sense they should be made partners in the business, with a share in the profits and, at least along certain lines, a share in the control; and provision should be made for their honorable security in old age, and for their insurance against disease, accident and involuntary unemployment.  There must be the fullest recognition, in honor and in material reward, of the skillful, conscientious, intelligent, hard-working man — I mean a recognition which he will accept as such, not merely a recognition which outsiders think sufficient.  But there must be no limiting of production, no limiting of output, and no deadening insistence on reducing the efficiency of the skillful and hardworking to the plane of the shiftless or inefficient.

The foundation of our permanent civilization rests on the farmer; and by farmer I mean not the man who owns land which others till, but the man who himself tills or helps till the ground part of which at least he himself owns.  A cardinal feature of our national policy should be the insuring of his rights to this man; and this not only for his sake, but for the sake of all of us.

Normally, he must be the owner of the ground he and his sons and his hired man till; and the hired man must have conditions shaped so that if he is hardworking, thrifty and energetic he shall have the means and the opportunity himself to purchase farming land on which to dwell and to bring up his family.  We ought now to formulate, and we ought long ago to have formulated, an American agricultural policy; and the national agricultural department should be completely reorganized and its activities made far more productive than at present, especially in view of the large sum of money now allotted it.  Normally, in farming regions, where the land is agricultural land, tenancy should be recognized only as a transitional and temporary phase, and normally the working farmer should himself be the landowner; and legislation to secure this should at once be enacted.  In different sections of the country there are different needs, and therefore different methods of meeting the needs will be necessary; nor do I now intend to define them; for the remedies may be cumulative, and may include progressive taxation of land holdings in excess of a quarter section or at most a half section, the rights of tenants to compensation for all improvements or indeed a certain property right to the land itself, and real, not nominal, provision by the government for loaning money to those who need it in order to buy themselves a freehold.  There must be improved methods of farm financing with emphasis on the getting and spending more money on the farms that are worth while.  The high roads must be developed.  Drastic action should be taken to stop the purchase of agricultural land for speculative purchasers; where necessary this should go to the length of giving full title to the occupant for use only, and limiting his power of alienating the land.  System of marketing must be developed, so as to do away with the hold-up methods that in so many places still obtain.  The producer must get more, and the consumer pay less, than at present; and both these ends can be and have been attained by proper legislation.

We ought to do these and the many other things necessary now, when it is possible to do them without causing too great distress to those in possession of long undisputed privileges which by time have grown to possess much of the character of rights.  Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.  In this country tenant farming and the individual ownership of extensive tracts of agricultural land are growing at the expense of the homestead holders.  Let us take whatever steps — conservative, if possible, radical, if necessary — are needed to remedy the situation; for if left unremedied the result may be something unpleasantly near revolution a half century hence; and in such case the wrongs will be remedied only by action which causes other wrongs to innocent people and works deep demoralization to those benefited; whereas at present by the exercise of forethought and resolution we may escape both kinds of evil.

There are certain things the state can do and must do for the farmer.  But most things the farmer can do for himself by association with his fellow farmers, and such independence of unnecessary state action is healthy in itself and is consonant with the rugged self-reliance characteristic of that most typical of American citizen, the American who dwells in the open country and tills the soil with his own hands.  There must be cooperation on a large scale among farmers, in marketing their products so as to get them as nearly as possible direct to the consumer, and in purchasing at least all of their needed goods that can be standardized; and gradually in other ways also.  Whatever can be done by such cooperation rather than by the state should be done: but where such cooperation proves inadequate to achieve the end, whether in shipping, storing or marketing, the state must itself assume the task.

Any such cooperative association should deal with the work that peculiarly affects farmers.  Therefore it should most emphatically not be turned into a political party; and a political party which goes into politics as such is just as much a political party even although it chooses to call itself by some name with non-partisan in it.  Any party which represents purely a class of our citizens inevitably works mischief.  It is just as bad to have public servants who represent nobody but farmers as to have public servants who do not represent farmers.  Our public servants are in honor bound to represent all of us, and not merely a few of us; and unless they represent all of us, and work sincerely and wisely for the permanent benefit of all of us, then they do not really and permanently represent any of us.  Individually some of us are farmers, others workingmen, others business people, others doctors or lawyers or writers, or clergymen; but in addition we are all of us Americans first and foremost; and in government our common interest as decent citizens comes ahead of the separate interest of any of us.  It is wise and it may be necessary that we shall individually belong to any one of various unions or associations or leagues or corporations; but there is one union to which all of us belong and to which our first allegiance is always due, and that union is the United States.

Speech or Document 25

LAFAYETTE — MARNE DAY ADDRESS

DELIVERED ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF LAFAYETTE AND OF THE BATTLE OF THE MARNE, IN THE ALDERMANIC CHAMBERS, CITY HALL, NEW YORK, ON SEPTEMBER 6, 1918.

LAFAYETTE DAY commemorates the services rendered to America in the Revolution by France.  I wish to insist with all possible emphasis that in the present war France and England and Italy and the other allies have rendered us a similar service.  The French at the Battle of the Marne four years ago and at Verdun, and the British at Ypres — in short the French, the English, the Italians, the Belgians, the Serbians have been fighting for us when they were fighting for themselves.  Our army on the other side is now repaying in part our debt, and next year we have every reason to hope, and we must insist, that the fighting army in France from the United States shall surpass in numbers the fighting army in France, of either France or England.  It is now time —, and it long has been time — for America to bear her full share of the common burden borne by all the allies in this great war for liberty and justice.

We must win the war as speedily as possible.  But we must set ourselves to fight it through no matter how long it takes with resolute determination to accept no peace until, no matter at what cost, we win the peace of overwhelming victory.  The peace that we win must guarantee full reparation for the awful cost of life and treasure which the Prussianized Germany of the Hohenzollerns has inflicted on the entire world; and this reparation must take the form of action that will render it impossible for Germany to repeat her colossal wrongdoing.  Germany has been able to wage this fight for world dominion because she has subdued to her purpose her vassal allies, Austria, Turkey and Bulgaria.  Serbia and Roumania must have restored to them what Bulgaria has taken from them.  The Austrian and Turkish Empires must both be broken up, all the subject peoples liberated, and the Turk driven from Europe.  We do not intend that Germany or Magyar should be oppressed by others, but neither do we intend that they shall oppress and domineer others.  France must receive back Alsace and Lorraine.  Belgium must be restored and indemnified.  Italian Austria must be restored to Italy, and Roumanian Hungary to Roumania.  The heroic Czecho-Slovaks must be made into an independent commonwealth.  The southern Slavs must be united in a great Jugo-Slav commonwealth.  Poland as a genuinely independent commonwealth must receive back Austrian and Prussian Poland, as well as Russian Poland, and have her coastline on the Baltic.  Lithuania and Finland must be guaranteed their freedom and no part of the ancient Empire of Russia left under the German yoke.  Northern Schlesswig should go back to the Danes.  Britain and Japan should keep the colonies they have conquered.  Armenia must be freed, Palestine made a Jewish state, and the Syrian Christians liberated.

It is sometimes announced that part of the peace agreement must be a League of Nations which will avert all war for the future and put a stop to the need of this nation preparing its own strength for its own defense.  Many of the adherents of this idea grandiloquently assert that they intend to supplant nationalism by internationalism.

In deciding upon proposals of this nature it behooves our people to remember that competitive rhetoric is a poor substitute for the habit of resolutely looking facts in the face.  Patriotism stands in national matters as love of family does in private life.  Nationalism corresponds to the love a man bears for his wife and children.  Internationalism corresponds to the feeling he has for his neighbors generally.  The sound nationalist is the only type of really helpful internationalist, precisely as in private relations it is the man who is most devoted to his own wife and children who is apt in the long run to be the most satisfactory neighbor.  To substitute inter-nationalism for nationalism means to do away with patriotism, and is as vicious and as profoundly demoralizing as to put promiscuous devotion to all other persons in the place of steadfast devotion to a man's own family.  Either effort means the atrophy of robust morality.  The man who loves other countries as much as his own stands on a level with the man who loves other women as much as he loves his own wife.  One is as worthless a creature as the other.  The professional pacifist and the professional internationalist are equally undesirable citizens.  The American pacifist has in the actual fact shown himself to be the tool and ally of the German militarist.  The professional internationalist is a man who under a pretense of diffuse attachment for everybody hides the fact that in reality he is incapable of doing his duty by anybody.

We Americans should abhor all wrongdoing to other nations.  We ought always to act fairly and generously by other nations.  But we must remember that our first duty is to be loyal and patriotic citizens of our own nation, of America.  These two facts should always be in our minds in dealing with any proposal for a League of Nations.  By all means let us be loyal to great ideals.  But let us remember that unless we show common sense in action, loyalty in speech will amount to considerably less than nothing.

Test the proposed future League of Nations so far as concerns proposals to disarm and to trust to anything except our own strength for our own defense, by what the Nations are actually doing at the present time.  Any such League would have to depend for its success upon the adhesion of nine nations which are actually or potentially the most powerful military nations; and these nine nations include Germany, Austria, Turkey and Russia.  The first three have recently and repeatedly violated and are now actively and continuously violating not only every treaty, but every rule of civilized warfare and of international good faith.  Russia played a heroic part for the first three years of the war (during the first two and a half years her conduct was in shining contrast to ours).  But during the last year Russia under the dominion of the Bolshevists has betrayed her allies, has become the tool of the German autocracy, and has shown such utter disregard of her national honor and plighted word and her international duties that she is now in external affairs the passive tool and ally of her brutal conqueror, Germany.  What earthly use is it to pretend that the safety of the world would be secured by a League in which these four nations under the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, under the Sultan and the Bolshevists, would be among the nine leading partners? Long years must pass before we can again trust any promises these four nations make.  Any treaty of any kind or sort which we make with them should be made with the full understanding that they will cynically repudiate it whenever they think it to their interest to do so.  Therefore, unless our folly is such that it will not depart from us until we are brayed in a mortar let us remember that any such treaty will be worthless unless our own prepared strength renders it unsafe to break it.

After this war the wrong-doers will be so punished and exhausted that they may for a number of years wish to keep the peace.  But the surest way to make them keep the peace in the future is to punish them heavily now.  And don't forget that China is now useless as a prop to a League of Peace simply because she lacks effective military strength for her own defense.

Let us support any reasonable plan whether in the form of a League of Nations or in any other shape, which bids fair to lessen the probable number of future wars and to limit their scope.  But let us laugh out of court any assertion that any such plan will guarantee peace and safety to the foolish, weak or timid creatures who have not the will and the power to prepare for their own defense.  Support any such plan which is honest and reasonable.  But support it as an addition to, and never as a substitute for, the policy of preparing our own strength for our own defense.  To follow any other course would turn this country into the China of the Occident.  We can not guarantee for ourselves or our children peace without effort or safety without service and sacrifice.  We must prepare both our souls and our bodies, in virile fashion, alike to secure justice for ourselves and to do justice to others.  Only thus can we secure our own national self-respect.  Only thus can we secure the respect of other nations and the power to aid them when they seek to do well.

In sum then I shall be delighted to support the movement for a League to Enforce Peace, or for a League of Nations, if it is developed as a supplement to and not a substitute for the preparation of our own strength.  I believe that this preparation should be by the introduction in this country of the principle of universal training and universal service, as practiced in Switzerland and modified, of course, both along the lines indicated in Australia and in accordance with our own needs.  There will be no taint of Prussian militarism in such a system.  It will merely mean prepared ability to fight for our own self-defense, and for a great democracy in which law, order and liberty are to prevail.

Speech or Document 26

AMERICANS MUST STAND TOGETHER OR HANG TOGETHER

FROM AN ADDRESS OPENING THE FOURTH LIBERTY LOAN CAMPAIGN AT BALTIMORE, MARYLAND, ON SEPTEMBER 28, 1918

TODAY we are gathered to back up the government in its call to our people to subscribe to the Fourth Liberty loan.  It is our duty not only to subscribe to it, but to over subscribe to it, and thereby to make our own men on the other side and our enemies on the other side understand how heartily and loyally the people of the United States are back of this war.  Moreover in asking our people to subscribe to this loan I am asking them to display wisdom, but not self-sacrifice.  There are plenty of war activities where there must be some sacrifice.  Of course, the men at the front and their mothers and wives at home are making the supreme sacrifice and are rendering the supreme service.  All that the rest of us can do is simply to back up these men at the front.  Of course, when we give money for war charities or cheerfully pay our taxes or do any of the hundred things we ought to do to aid in the war, we are making to some extent a sacrifice — although it is too trivial a sacrifice to be even alluded to in connection with the sacrifice made by the men at the front.  But in subscribing to the Liberty bonds we are benefiting ourselves.  The interest is good and the security is the very best in the world.  Whoever subscribes is certain to get his money back, unless Uncle Sam bursts up, and in that event it won't matter, because every one of us will burst up too.  In other words, the security is the best in the world, and we are helping ourselves and encouraging habits of thrift and foresight and prudence at the same time that we are helping Uncle Sam.  The bonds are so arranged that every one can take them and every human being in the country ought to take either a Liberty bond or Thrift stamps.  We should make the bondholders and the people interchangeable terms.  It is not the obligation of the government officials to raise and furnish the money.  That, my fellow citizens, is your obligation, our obligation, and duty.  We must in the heartiest and most generous spirit raise the money.  Then, when it has been raised, it is the duty of the officials to see that it is well and wisely spent.

It is our business to give the government all the money it demands, whether in taxes or in loans.  It is our business to back up every official, wholly without regard to party, so long as he does his duty efficiently in speeding up the war, so that we may secure the peace of overwhelming victory.  It is also our business to see that every official actually does his duty and that of the money appropriated, every dollar spent represents 100 cents worth of service to the army and the public.  It is the duty of the executive officials of the government to demand all the money that is necessary in order to render the great service that is necessary.  It is the duty of the congressmen to give this money freely, to back up the rendering of the service, and to insist that it be rendered; and it is also their duty to see that we get the proper return for the money spent.  I don't care how heavy the taxes or how big the loans, I will not only stand for them all but insist upon them all, and I believe our people will stand for them all, right up to the bed rock dollar of the nation, if it is necessary in order to put this war through, until Germany is brought to her knees.  But I believe I speak for the nation, and I know I speak for myself, when I say that we intend to see that the money produces results.  Therefore it is our clear duty to send to congress men who will take this attitude.  There must be no skimping, no niggardliness when the nation's honor and vital interests are at stake.  Our representatives must give the executive officers all the assistance, all the money that is necessary.  But it is their clear duty to investigate and supervise and see that the money is well and wisely spent by these executive officials, and that from now on our men who fight at the front are backed with the airplanes and the field cannons and the tanks and the machine guns for which we have paid.

It is no less our duty and the duty of our governmental representatives both to hurry up the war so that it may be finished as speedily as possible and also to show such foresight in preparedness that we shall be ready with overwhelming forces to fight it through, no matter how long it takes.  We must be content with no peace except a peace dictated by the victorious allies, a peace which will leave Germany and her vassal states powerless to repeat the hideous wrongdoing which for over four years has plunged the world into a sea of slaughter.  We do not intend that Germany shall be oppressed, but neither do we intend she shall be able to oppress us.  She must be punished, if the dreadful wrongs she has inflicted on France and Belgium are really to be righted.  Therefore, the Turk must be driven from Europe and the races subject to him be given their freedom.  Therefore, the Austrian empire must be broken up and the German strangle-hold removed from Russia.  All Roumanians and all Italians must be united to Roumania and Italy.  The Jugo-Slavs, the Czecho-Slovaks and the Poles must be made into independent commonwealths; Finland, the Baltic provinces and the Ukraine must be made free not merely of Russia, but of Germany also.  As for poor Russia herself, we earnestly wish we could help her.  We will help her when she allows us to.  She fought valiantly and suffered terribly during the early years of the war, while this nation was still neutral and was making a profit out of the awful struggle.  But under the Bolshevists Russia has become an ally of Germany — an enemy of the free peoples.  We are fighting for our dearest rights.  We are also fighting for the rights of all people, small or great, so long as they are well-behaved and do not wrong others, to enjoy their liberty and govern themselves in the forms they see fit to adopt.  We intend to try to help others, but we know well that we can not do so unless we are able to do justice within our own borders and to manage well the affairs of our own household.  Therefore it behooves us even now, while we are bending all our energies to winning the great war, also to look to the future and to begin to ponder the things that we must do to bring greater happiness and well-being and a higher standard of conduct and character within our own borders when once the war is through.

Surely friends, all of us and especially those of us who stay at home and who are denied the opportunity to go to the front, ought to realize the need in this country of a loftier idealism than we have had in the past; and the further and even greater need that we should in actual practice live up to the ideals we profess.  The things of the body have a rightful place and a great place.  But the things of the soul should have an even greater place.  There has been in the past in this country far too much of that gross materialism which in the end eats like an acid into all the finer qualities of our souls.

The war came — our gross ideals were shattered and the scales fell from our eyes and we saw things as they really were.  Suddenly in the awful presence of death we grew to understand the true value of life.  We realized that only those men were fit to live who were not afraid to die; that although death was a terrible thing, yet that there were other things that were more terrible, other things that made life not worth living.  All the finest of our young men, all those of high souls, responded eagerly to the call to arms, the son of the rich man and the son of the poor man, side by side, neither claiming any favor except the chance to win honor and perform duty in the face of deadly peril.  These men who have been going and are going abroad by the millions are sacrificing everything for the sake of a great ideal.  They have shown their willingness to sacrifice money and ease and pleasure and life itself when duty calls and the nation bids them go.

Let us who are left behind in our turn strive to make our lives a little nearer the right ideal.  Let us introduce into the work of peace something of the spirit that they have introduced into the work of war.  When these men come home, or at least when those of them who escape death come home, I believe that they will demand and I know that they ought to demand a juster type of life, socially and industrially, in this country.  I believe, and I hope, that they will demand a loftier idealism in both our public and private affairs, and better and more common sense methods of reducing our ideals to practice and making them realizable.  I believe that they will themselves show both idealism and also that common sense the lack of which insures disaster in peace as in war.  I think they will insist upon a livelier sense of brotherhood and yet will no less insist upon the duty of recognizing leadership.  Let the difference of reward be as great as that between our generals and admirals, such as Pershing and Sims, and the warrant officers or senior non-commissioned officers under them.  But let there be a better proportion than is now the case in industrial life between the service rendered and the reward given.  Gradually I hope to see the wage-worker become in a real sense a partner in the enterprise in which he works; and to achieve this end he must develop the power of self-control, the power of recognizing the rights of others no less than insisting upon his own; he must develop common sense, and that strength of character which can not be conferred from without, and the lack of which renders everything else of no avail.  Above all, I wish to see that farmers develop their strength by cooperation so that the elemental work of the soil will resume its ancient importance among us.

At this moment we can only lay the foundation in outline; but there are certain things that we should do at once in connection with the war.  One of them is to stop all profiteering by capitalists, and another is to stop all slacking and loafing whether by individual workmen or as a result of union action.  Of these two perhaps the profiteer is worse, but the slacker is almost as bad.  As for the profiteer, any man who makes a fortune out of this war ought to be held up to derision and scorn.  No man should come out of this war materially ahead of what he was when we went into it.  There must be the reward for capital necessary in order to make it profitable to do the necessary work and to cover the necessary risks; this is indispensable, and the government should see that neither demagogy nor ignorance interferes with this necessary reward.  But we heartily approve, as a war measure, heavy progressive taxation of all profits, beyond the reasonable profits necessary for the continuance of industry.  Most of our captains of finance are doing with all their energy necessary governmental work without any financial reward for themselves.  I honor these men, I honor their sons who have gone to the war.  But I have scant patience with the other men who treat the war merely as a chance for profit; and I have least patience with the rich men who keep their sons at home.  I will not excuse the poor man from going to war; but I would make it obligatory on the man who has much.  As for the profiteer if I could get at him I would like to put him to digging the front trenches.  And I would put beside him his brother in wrongdoing, the slacker or loafer, the man who limits the output when it is necessary at this time that we should have the greatest possible production; and I would do this whether he was acting as an individual or an official or member of a labor union.  Pershing's men are not limiting their output, and shame and disgrace should be the portion of any man who limits his output here at home.

In all things I would keep just as far from, Bolshevism as from kaiserism.  In this country the Germanized socialists have shown themselves in their true light as the enemies of the republic; and I would permit no enemies of the republic to be at large while the republic is at death-grips with a foreign foe.  I am utterly against every species of anarchy, and therefore I am against Bolshevism in all its forms; but I am equally against the gross industrial and social abuses which tend to promote the growth of anarchy and of Bolshevism and of Germanized socialism.

From the days when civilized man first began to strive for self-government and democracy success has depended primarily upon the ability to steer clear of extremes.  For almost its entire length the course lies between Scylla and Charybdis; and the heated extremists who insist upon avoiding only one gulf of destruction invariably land in the other — and then take refuge in the meager consolation afforded by denouncing as " inconsistent " the pilot who strives to avoid both.  Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive; special privilege for the few and special privilege for the many are alike profoundly anti-social; the fact that unlimited individualism is ruinous in no way alters the fact that unlimited state socialism spells ruin of a different kind.  All of this ought to be trite to reasonably intelligent people — even if they are professional intellectuals — but in practice an endless insistence on these simple fundamental truths is endlessly necessary.

Before our eyes the unfortunate Russian nation furnishes an example on a gigantic scale of what to avoid in oscillating between extremes.  The autocratic and bureaucratic despotism of the Romanoffs combined extreme tyranny with extreme inefficiency; and the Bolshevists have turned the revolution into a veritable witches Sabbath of anarchy, plunder, murder, utterly faithless treachery and inefficiency carried to the verge of complete disintegration.  Each side sought salvation by formulas which were condemned alike by common sense and common morality and which their own actions belied.

I believe that when this war is over we should prepare for our self-defense against other nations, and I believe we should prepare for our own inner development.  And in order to meet both needs, I believe in the principle of universal service.  Of this, military service is but a part.  It is a vital part and under no circumstances can we neglect it.  But it is only a part.  Universal suffrage can be justified only by universal service, service in peace and service in war.  The man who will not render this service has no right to the vote.  If he won't fight for the country in war and do his duty by the country in peace, we ought not to permit him to vote in the country.  The conscientious objector, who won't serve as a soldier or won't pay his taxes, has no place in a republic like ours, and should be expelled from it, for no man who won't pull his weight in the boat has a right in the boat.  The society of Friends have come forward in this war just as gallantly as they came forward in the Civil War, and all true believers in peace will do well to follow their example.

We now have an approach to the universal service which some of us have for many years been demanding.  We now have all men from 18 to 45 required to serve their country, and required to register.  Let us make this system permanent and let us use it for the purposes of peace no less than for the purposes of war.  Let us extend the principle to women no less than to men.  Let us have suffrage on service.  Let us demand the service from women as we do from men, and in return give the suffrage to all men and women who in peace and war perform the service, and to no others.  Base suffrage on service and not on sex.  Treat it not as an unearned privilege, but as a duty which each of us is to perform in a spirit of service to all of us, and as a right which is not to be enjoyed unless the person enjoying it does his or her full duty in peace and war.

Universal training is a prerequisite for efficient universal service.  It is just as much a prerequisite for efficient service in war as for efficient service in peace.  It is just as much a prerequisite for women as for men.  At this moment we have embodied in law the principle of universal military service for men, but inasmuch as there has never been universal obligatory military training for the service we now have to do all this training during the war itself.  In consequence we were not able to exert any considerable fraction of our man power until over a year after we went to war, and over two will have elapsed before the proportion of our strength thus actually usable and used will be anywhere near as great as the proportion of the French, English or Italian strength thus used.  This means that during the first year of the war we would have been absolutely helpless, and during the first year and a half almost helpless, against our antagonists if we had not been protected by the armies and navies of our allies.  In other words, while we were hardening our unprepared and helpless strength, and making it ready, we were saved from the strength and fury of our enemy only by the strength and valor of our allies.  We now have universal military service.  If four years ago we had had universal military training, so that the service would have been immediately efficient when called for, the war would have been over within 90 days from the time we entered it, and infinite bloodshed and treasure would have been spared.  Next time we may not have allies to protect us.  And even if we do have allies, let us remember that our latent strength is such that if we prepare it in advance, the chances are strong for our imposing an almost immediate peace in any conflict into which we are obliged to enter; whereas, if we do not prepare it in advance we are doomed to impotence in any war unless we have allies who protect us during the year or two we spend in hurried and extravagant effort to do what we ought to have already done.

I am not advocating Prussian militarism.  I am advocating the kind of democratic preparedness which Switzerland has developed to her own great advantage, socially and economically, and with the result of keeping war out of her borders.  I refer you to our own experience of the last year.  I believe that our training camps have been universities of applied Americanism.  I believe that for every young man between the ages of 18 and 20 to have six months in such a camp, which would include, of course, some field service, would be of incalculable benefit to him, and of like benefit to the nation.  It would teach him self-reliance, self-respect, mutuality of respect between himself and others, the power to command and the power to obey; it would teach him habits of cleanliness and order and the power of cooperation ; and above all devotion to the flag, the ideal of country.  It would make him a soldier immediately fit for defense and readily to be turned into a soldier fit for offensive work if, as in the present war, offense prove the only method of real defense.  I believe that every such man, after his experience in the camp, would tend to be a better citizen and would tend to do his own work for himself and his family better and with more efficient result.  I believe it would help him in material matters and at the same time would teach him to put certain great spiritual ideals in the foremost place.

Incidentally, if I had my way, I would change the draft rules now, so far as giving any special privileges to the young fellows between 18 and 20 in the matter of college training, to fit them to be officers.  To say that the nation will pay for all of them to go to college is a deception, and to believe it is a delusion.  I do not believe in a selective draft for a favored class.  I wish to see fair play for the workman's son who has not had the chance to learn so that he can go to college, but who has the natural ability to command and lead men.  Only boys whose parents, in the past, have had the money to give them a special education can enter college at the present time, and it is unfair to the other boys to give these a special advantage.  Let all go into the ranks together and after six months or a year of service the best men to be chosen out.  Of course with the older men and at the beginning we had to take those already available.  But when we come to need the young fellows under 21 let every man enter the ranks and stand on fair footing with every one else, and be given promotion on his merits.  Hitherto the men who came in under 21 came in as volunteers, and they were entitled to try for any position they could get, but now we have at last done what we ought to have done in the beginning.  Now let them all stand alike.

Therefore, I hope that now we will make the system of universal military service and military training which we have introduced permanent, although of course in modified form.  But I would not stop here.  I would use the registration of all our men as a basis for further development for training and service in the duties of peace.  I would register the young women just as much as the young men.  I would give them both certain fundamental forms of industrial training — training in the things that are fundamental in the ordinary work of the ordinary man and woman in their business occupations and in and around their home; in the things which it is good for every man and woman to know.  I mean certain forms of manual labor and mechanical labor for men, and certain forms of household work and work outside of the house for women.  The teaching in the schools should be only in English; in this country there is room for but one flag and for but one language.  I believe in education.  I believe in giving it free to every man and every woman, because I don't think we can have a successful democracy unless it is an educated one.  I believe in making it obligatory so far as primary education is concerned; and I believe in making it possible for every man or woman who really desires it to have a higher education, but that this shall be permissive and not obligatory.  Moreover, I believe that the education shall be an education not only of the mind but also of the soul and the body.  I think we should educate men and women toward and not away from what is to be their life work, toward the home, toward the farm, toward the shop — and not away from them.  I would use the introduction of a system of universal training and service as a means for securing this education.

I mention education only as one of the aims we ought to have in view in connection with universal training of our citizenship for service.  There are very many lines of endeavor in such an effort of constructive statesmanship; for construction and not destruction should be the keynote of our policy at this time.  Our educational system should deal especially with all immigrants; and a peculiarly important branch of it at the present time ought to be the training of the disabled and the crippled returning soldiers so that they may become not objects of charity, but self-supporting citizens.  We should develop the water powers under the government, keeping ownership in the public, and preventing the pollution of interstate streams.  We should begin at once to take thought for the soldiers when they return; to develop national employment agencies for the redistribution of men after the war.  We should enter on a course of taxation, purchase and development of land so as to give to the returned soldier who is fit for it the chance to do the most vital of all works, to till the soil on the farm which he himself owns; and we can treat this as a stepping stone to further study of and action concerning country life and farm production so as to promote the growth and prosperity of the farmers who work hard on their own land.  We must prepare our shipping for times of peace, and prepare to deal with the foreign markets situation, as part of our program of wise universal service, and, what is even more important, we can deal on a national scale with factory and industrial conditions, city and country housing conditions, child labor, and old age, health and unemployment insurance for workers.  As for the needs of the moment, let us act with drastic severity, much greater severity than at present, against German spies and pro-German traitors.  There is room for no half-and-half loyalty in this country; every man who has the slightest feeling in favor of Germany should be interned or sent out of the country, and if he is guilty of serious disloyalty he should be shot or hung.  Let us go to the limit against every pro-German and in uncompromising insistence that we speed up the war and fight it through until we beat Germany to her knees and impose our own peace on her.  But save in the case of spies and traitors and preachers of sedition, let us insist on a free press and free speech, for a free press and free speech are the foundation-stones of self-government by a free people.  Let us make our belated intervention in Russia more effective both as regards military measures against the Germans and the pro-German Russians and as regards friendly economic relief and aid for the mass of the Russian people.  Now is the time to accomplish constructive work which will make us strong for the conflict and able to deal with the aftermath of the conflict, and the step to be taken at this moment is to back up the fourth Liberty loan.

Speech or Document 27

WHAT WILSON DID AND LINCOLN DIDN'T

A NOTABLE ADDRESS DELIVERED AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, ON OCTOBER 28, 1918

I COME to this meeting as an American, and only as an American.  In this crisis I do not consider politics at all whenever doing so conflicts in the slightest degree with the great cause of Americanism or with our immediate purpose of winning the war and of securing the peace of unconditional surrender by Germany.  I will support no disloyal man on any ticket and no man who is not heartily in favor of winning the war and of the peace of overwhelming victory.  I make my appeal to all good Americans, in the name of Americanism, and I make it just as much to all independents and to all far-sighted, patriotic Democrats who are awake to the real needs of the situation as I do to Republicans.  Americanism means that in this country there is to be loyalty to only one flag — the American flag — and that we will permit no fifty-fifty loyalty, no loyalty to any foreign flag and no loyalty either to the red flag of anarchy or to the black flag of international or Germanized socialism.  During the last four years international socialism has shown itself the enemy of all the liberty-loving nations and the tool of the capitalistic and militaristic tyranny of the Hohenzollerns.  When applied by its leading practical advocates, according to the Stark-Marxian formulas of class consciousness and class hatred, it has thrown Russia into hideous ruin; so that at this moment, while autocratic Germany is dangerous to all liberty-loving peoples as a man-eating wild beast is dangerous, Russia is dangerous because she has become a plague spot of infection and misery for the nations of mankind.  In this country we must steer equally clear of Kaiserism and of Bolshevism, for if we swerve toward either we swerve toward the gulfs of ruin.  This meeting is held under peculiar circumstances.  If the President of the United States is right in the appeal he has just made to the voters, then you and I, my hearers, have no right to vote at this election or to discuss public questions while the war lasts.  If his appeal is justified, only that faction of the Democratic party which accepts towards the President the rubber stamp attitude of complete servility is entitled to control Congress; and no man who is a Republican, and no man whether a Republican or not who puts loyalty to the people ahead of loyalty to the servant of the people, is to have a voice in determining the greatest questions ever brought before this Nation.

In this election appeal which the President has issued to the voters of the country he states that he " earnestly begs" the voters to return " a Democratic majority to both the Senate and the House of Representatives," and that although " the leaders of the minority in the present Congress have unquestionably been pro-war they have been anti-administration," and that " the return of a Republican majority to either House of Congress would certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my (President Wilson's) leadership."

This is an extraordinary document.  It is an emphatic repudiation and reversal of the President's announcement of a few months back that “politics is adjourned." It casts the gravest doubt on the sincerity of that announcement; and indeed for the last few months the Democratic party organization, acting with the support and direction of the President's closest advisers, such as Messrs.  Burleson and Creel, has been working with naked eagerness for partisan success, and has displayed a greedy unscrupulousness as to methods and a complete subordination of national interest to partisan welfare never before known in our history during a great war.  When this war broke out I, and all those who believed as I did, cast all thought of politics aside and put ourselves unreservedly at the service of the President.  Of course if Mr.  Wilson had really meant to disregard politics he would at once have constructed a coalition, non-partisan cabinet, calling the best men of the nation to the highest and most important offices under him, without regard to politics.  He did nothing of the kind.  In the positions most vital to the conduct of the war, and in the positions now most important in connection with negotiating peace, he retained or appointed men without the slightest fitness for the performance of the tasks, whose sole recommendation was a supple eagerness to serve Mr.  Wilson personally and to serve Mr.  Wilson's party insofar as such service benefited Mr.  Wilson.

I am glad that Mr.  Wilson has now cast off the mask.  His appeal is now to pure partisanship.  By his actions (since he announced that politics were adjourned) he had already repudiated his words; for he had already interfered for purely political reasons in the election contents in Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan and many other States.  Now he openly by formal announcement repudiates all pretense of putting the public welfare above party.  Now he declares that this is a party war, and that the Republicans, although he admits “that they have been unquestionably pro-war," are to be excluded from any share in controlling the war.

Nor is this all.  He makes his appeal on behalf of the Democratic party.  But he is careful to qualify it so as to exclude all Democrats who put loyalty to the Nation or even loyalty to their party principles ahead of adherence to the administration.  He in no way discriminates between Democrats who are pro-war and those who are anti-war.  He asks the exclusion from Congress of the man who is anti-administration, without the slightest reference to whether he is pro-war or antiwar, loyal or disloyal, patriotic or unpatriotic.  The one test he imposes is loyalty to himself.  The President of the United States repudiates the position of being President of all the people, and substitutes for it the position of partisan leadership of one political faction; while even in this faction he makes servile adherence to his administration the test of membership and of the moral right of any man to do his share in the great work of national self-government.

Contrast with this the position of Abraham Lincoln.  In the darkest days of the Civil War, Lincoln declined outright to make any party appeal or to apply any party test or any test save that of loyalty in the prosecution of the war and loyalty to the Union and to liberty.  In March, 1863, he advocated sending to Congress only " unconditional supporters of the war," making no reference to any party; and in June of that year, in answer to some correspondents who signed themselves as " Democrats," he expressed his regret that they had not called themselves " American citizens," saying, " In this time of national peril I would have preferred to meet you upon a level one step higher than any party platform "; and in August, in the only political letter he wrote that year, he appealed to " all those who maintain unconditional devotion to the Union," and in this appeal he explicitly included his own political friends with those of his political enemies, " whom no partisan malice or partisan hope can make false to the nation's life." He thus explicitly based his appeal to pro-war men, without asking about their attitude towards himself.  Again and again he appealed to “all loyal men” and to “all friends of union and liberty “and in 1864 he accepted his nomination as coming from the “unconditional Union men."

Lincoln made no party test.  He appealed to all loyal men of all parties.  He asked that the test of fitness for Congress be, not adherence to his personal administration, but unconditional support of the war.  Mr.  Wilson applies the most rigid party test.  He explicitly repudiates loyalty to the war as a test.  He demands the success of the Democratic party, and asks the defeat of all pro-war men if they have been anti-administration.  He asks for the defeat of pro-war Republicans.  He does not ask for the defeat of antiwar Democrats.  On the contrary, he supports such men if although anti-war they are pro-administration.  He does not ask for loyalty to the Nation.  He asks only for support of himself.  There is not the slightest suggestion that he disapproves of disloyalty to the nation.  I do not doubt that he does feel some disapproval of such disloyalty; but apparently this feeling on his part is so tepid that it slips from his mind when he contemplates what he regards as the far greater sin of failure in adherence to himself.

I ask all patriotic Americans to consider just what is meant when the President says that in the present Congress “the leaders of the minority although unquestionably pro-war have been anti-administration." These leaders supported the Administration when a declaration of war was needed.  They supported it when there was a demand for the draft.  They supported it when we sent the army overseas.  They supported every demand for money whether by taxation or by loans.  They supported it or gave it initiative and guidance on every issue where it stood for vigorous prosecution of the war; and they supported it on these issues when half the leaders of President Wilson's own party opposed him when he had committed himself to war measures — and yet President Wilson now makes a partisan appeal in favor of the Democrats who opposed the war measures and against the Republicans who supported them.

Now, what does Mr.  Wilson mean when he speaks of these leaders as being, although “pro-war," yet "anti-administration"? He means that when the War Department was administered with utter inefficiency they investigated the matter and insisted upon efficiency.  He means that when they found that nothing effective was being done in ship-building they insisted that the work be speeded up.  He means that when they found that six hundred million dollars had been spent for airplanes and yet that not an airplane had reached our soldiers at the front they insisted that our soldiers should get the airplanes for which the people had paid.  Mr.  Wilson regards it as “anti-administration “to demand that our gallant men at the front receive the guns and auto-rifles and tanks and airplanes and shoes and clothing for which Congress has appropriated so many billions of dollars.  The entire offense of the Republican leaders in Mr.  Wilson's eyes is that they have demanded that inefficiency, waste and extravagance be remedied.  Such a demand he treats as “anti-administration." In other words, the attitude which patriotic people regard as pro-United States he regards as anti-administration.  I hold, on the contrary, that these Republican leaders have in a great crisis shown complete indifference to party and complete devotion to the Union.  They have disinterestedly supported Mr.  Wilson in everything he did that was right, and fearlessly opposed him where he was wrong.  Over half the Democratic leaders whom he is now supporting opposed him when he was right, and supported him when he was wrong.  He urges that the people return to Congress the men who were anti-war but who shielded the failures of the administration.  He urges that the people defeat for Congress the men who were pro-war but who sought to remedy the failures of the administration.  He puts loyalty to the Nation second, and adherence to his personal leadership first.  The Republican leaders whom he assails have put loyalty to the Nation ahead of all other considerations and have conditioned their support of every executive official solely upon the efficiency with which that official serves the Nation.

And I ask you to consider one thing more, you Republicans and Independents and you Democrats who decline to put cringing subservience to any man, ahead of the Republic.  Indeed, I appeal most of all to the high-minded and patriotic Democrats whose boys are over in the army side by side with the boys of their Republican neighbors, and who do not wish to see these loyal neighbors treated as enemies of the Republic.  President Wilson says that Republicans are not good enough to serve the Republic in Congress at this time.  But they are good enough to die for the Republic in the army and navy! They are good enough to pay the taxes and subscribe to the Loan! We have sent our sons and our brothers to spill their blood like water overseas under the flag; we have given our strength and our money without stint to serve the country at home, to float the Loans, to back up the war activities of every kind; and now we are told that the blood of our sons, and the money saved at the expense of our wives and little children, do not entitle us to any word in saying1 how the war is to be waged! Or what are the terms on which peace is to be made, or what shall be our policies after the war!

Mr.  Wilson says that this is no time for divided counsels.  Yet the Constitution of the United States says that he must counsel with the Congress of the United States.  It is mere insolence for the servant of the people to say that he will not counsel with those other servants of the people whom the people have elected for the express purpose of giving him counsel.  The world would be better off now by hundreds of thousands of fearless lives and by many billions of dollars of treasure if Mr.  Wilson had been willing to supplement his own self-sufficient ignorance by the counsel of those who would gladly have counseled him wisely, but who would not creep into his presence as slaves.

So far as I know, no Democratic Congressman has resigned his seat to go to the war.  But six Republican Congressmen have resigned to go into the army, and already one of these has died.  These men are deemed fit to die for the country; but the President says that they and those like them are not fit to sit in the councils of the Nation and to take part in so shaping our policy that our men shall not die in vain.  The President says that this is his war, not the people's war, and that the half of the people who have been most resolute in favor of the firm and efficient prosecution of the war are hereafter to be excluded from all share in its management, and from all say-so as to the peace which is to crown and justify it.  We can pay with the blood of our hearts' dearest; but that is all that we are to be allowed to do; and yet the price we pay, and the peace the Nation is to get for that price, are to be settled by the agency or the aid of the men of cold heart who do not fight themselves, whose nearest kin are not in danger, who prepared for war not at all, who helped wage the war feebly, and who are content with a craven peace.

Mr.  Henry Ford has announced that he does not believe in patriotism, that he thinks the flag is silly and does not believe in it, and that when this war is over he will pull the flag down and never hoist it again.  The son of this multi-millionaire stays at home while hundreds of thousands of men of small means leave their wives and children and go to the war.  But Mr.  Wilson is supporting Mr.  Ford for the Senate.  On the other hand, Senator Weeks does believe in patriotism.  He does believe in the war.  His only son is fighting overseas at this moment facing death' side by side with his comrades from every rank of life.  But Mr.  Wilson is opposing Mr.  Weeks.  There are dozens of such cases; and the only explanation possible of the President's attitude is that he makes adherence to his personal fortunes and not loyalty to the Nation the acid test in accordance with which he gives or withholds sup~ port.

The President's personal organ, The World, itself says that the present Democratic Congress is a “slacker Congress." And the President asks the voters to keep these slackers in control provided only that these slackers follow him with abject alacrity in whichever new direction he may momentarily lead.  Small wonder that in the cloakroom of the House the bitter jest circulates: “Here’s to our Czar, last in war, first towards peace, long may he waver!” The President says he is anxious about the effect on Germany and our Allies of the election of a Congress which would follow the present Republican leadership of the House and Senate.  He need be under no anxiety.  It would be clearly understood abroad as at home.  Our Allies would know that it meant that America was determined to speed up the war, to back her own army and the armies of the Allies to the limit, to tolerate no corruption or inefficiency in waging the war and to insist on Germany's unconditional surrender.  Germany and her vassal states would know that in this country the pro-Germans and pacifists and Bolshevists and Germanized Socialists could no longer be counted upon as efficient and tortuous tools, that the fighting men and not the rhetoricians were uppermost, and that henceforth the Germans would have to deal with the resolute and straightforward soul of the American people and not merely with the obscure purposes and wavering will of Mr.  Wilson.

And finally, let our people remember that the incoming Congress will deal with the vital questions of reconstruction after the war.  The President proposes to let these questions be dealt with by those who control what his personal organ calls the present “slacker Congress." He proposes to put the reconstruction of the country in the hands of these slackers under the guidance of such men as Mr.  Kitchin, the present leader of the House, and incidentally one of the anti-war leaders of the House.  Surely the country will feel that this work of reconstruction ought to be entrusted to other hands, and that these hands shall be those of the Republican leaders whose vision is for the future and who yet possess practical ability to work for the best interests of the present.

I speak at this party meeting only because the attitude of the Administration and the attitude of the Democratic organization, which is wholly subservient to the Administration, makes it, in my judgment, absolutely imperative upon good citizens to support the Republican ticket this year and to secure the election of a Republican House and Senate at Washington.  When I speak of the Republican party and what it stands for I ask you to think not only of the words of the leaders, but of their acts in Congress for over a year and a half.  And by leaders I mean the men like Senators Lodge and Poindexter and Johnson and Nelson, and Congressmen Fess and Gillett and McCormick, and all those like them, and all who have taken substantially the attitude that these men have taken about the war during the last eighteen months, including especially the last three weeks; and I mention the men I have named almost at random among their colleagues, and only because I wish by illustration to make my point absolutely clear.

I believe in putting this war through to our last man and our last dollar rather than to fail in beating Germany to her knees.  That is the spirit of our wonderful fighting men at the front.  The world has never seen finer fighting men than our soldiers at the front.  But let this people never forget that in the bitter weather of last winter we left our small army overseas without a sufficient number of overcoats or shoes; we got uniforms from the British, and two-thirds of the ships in which we ferried our troops across the ocean were from the British; we got our cannon and our machine guns from the hard-pressed French, the tanks from the British and French; we had practically no airplanes at the front until seventeen months after we went to war — in short, our governmental shortcomings were so lamentable that even now we can fight at all only because of the weapons our allies give us.

I hold that it was a foolish and evil thing to have failed to prepare during the two years and a half after the world war began, and a foolish and evil thing to have shown the hesitation and delay and incompetency displayed in making our strength effective, which we showed for over a year after we had finally helplessly drifted stern foremost into the war.  I hold that it is our duty now to insist upon the maximum efficiency and upon absolute disregard of all political considerations in speeding up the war.  Let us try to win it at once; but let us set ourselves resolutely to win it, no matter what the cost and no matter how long it takes.  I hold that it is necessary clearly to face the dreadful blunders and worse than blunders that have been made in order to avoid repeating them in the future.  But I hold with even greater tenacity that it is our duty to treat these blunders not in any way as an excuse for failure to do our duty, but as an additional incentive to devoting every ounce of strength we have to winning the war.  If we had prepared in advance the war would have been over ninety days after we entered it.  If the Administration had used with moderate efficiency the results of the lavish generosity of Congress our armies and the Allied armies would have been doing last March what they actually are doing now in October.  I trust our people will keep well in mind, as a lesson concerning the mere money cost of unpreparedness, that the enormous sums we have had to raise by taxation and by borrowing are at the very least twice as great as if we had begun to prepare in advance, without hurry and confusion and without the attendant waste and extravagance and profiteering, and with the patriotic and businesslike refusal to consider politics or anything else except winning the war.

We should accept no peace not based on the unconditional surrender of Germany and her vassal allies, Austria and Turkey, and upon the freeing of the subject races of Austria and Turkey from the yoke of the Austrian, the Magyar and the Turk.  Therefore, it is inexcusable in us, and is a reflection upon our good faith, to have remained so long without declaring war on Turkey, for it is mere hypocrisy to talk of making the world safe for democracy so long as we are not at war with Turkey and have not insisted upon putting the Turk out of Europe and freeing the Armenian and the Syrians of all creeds from his yoke and giving Palestine to be made a Jewish state.

I would not subject the German or the Magyar to the dominion of any one else.  But neither would I permit them to lord it over any one else.  The true way to put a stop to Germany's ability again to convulse the world by an effort to secure world dominion is to give, not autonomy, but freedom to all the nations that now cower under the tyranny of Germany and her allies.  Belgium, of course, must be restored and amply indemnified; and all the gold that Germany has can not repay Belgium the frightful wrongs so wantonly committed against her by Germany during the last four years.  France must receive back Alsace and Lorraine, and Germany be forced to carry out her broken promise to the Danes of North Schleswig.  All of Poland must be a separate commonwealth with a seafront on the Baltic; Finland, the Baltic provinces, Lithuania and Ukrainia must be made as absolutely independent of Germany as of Russia; the Czecho-Slovaks and the Jugo-Slavs must be made into independent commonwealths ; the Roumanians in East Hungary restored to Roumania; the Italians of Southwestern Austria joined to Italy; the Greeks safeguarded in their rights; Constantinople made a free city, and all other injustices remedied in so far as it is humanly possible to do so.  The German stranglehold must be removed from Russia, and we should ourselves help Russia so far as she will permit us to do so; and we can not efficiently do so unless our government acts with infinitely greater wisdom, forethought, insight and resolution than it has shown in its handling of the Siberian matters for the last six months.

Then, when the end of the war is come and we have obtained the peace of complete victory, a peace obtained by machine guns and not type-writers, we shall have to turn to the affairs of our own household and undertake the work of reconstruction with cool intelligence and resolution, with firm determination to secure the highest good for the average man, and yet with equally firm determination not to be misled by the visionaries and fanatics who, under the plea of helping the average man, would bring our whole civilization to ruin.

I believe that in order efficiently to perform these different tasks it is absolutely essential to recognize the fact that of the parties, as at present constituted and led, it is only the Republican party that is a fit instrument for the purpose.  That is why I come before you tonight to speak for the success of the Republican state ticket here in New York and for the success of the Republican Congressional ticket throughout the Union.

I shall not try to speak at length to you on behalf of the state ticket, because those whose special familiarity is with State matters will specially address you on the subject.  But I ask for support of Governor Whitman and all his associates, not only because of their record in office, but also because this State can not with wisdom see Tammany Hall extend its grip from New York to Albany.  It is not necessary to speak of personalities in such a matter.  The reforms for which Governor Whitman stands are the very reforms which Tammany most opposes.  The system upon which Tammany is based has in the past always been applied at the cost of all that is best in our social life wherever Tammany has been victorious.  This system when applied to New York City has borne such results that I think all fair-minded men will agree with me that it would be a veritable calamity to have it applied through-out the State.

I especially ask the women of New York, now about to vote for the first time, to think well what the enthronement of Tammany in power at Albany may mean.  As you know, I have been a very ardent champion of woman suffrage for the State and the nation.  I am sure that having granted it in New York means that it will speedily have to be granted in the nation as a whole.  Therefore, I earnestly hope that the women of New York, the first time they vote, will not give New York State to the control of the organization which having long mastered completely the Democratic party in New York City has now equally completely mastered it in New York State, and which has stood with lamentable insistency for precisely those forms of evil misgovernment which are peculiarly offensive to decent womanhood.  We have a right to appeal to all good citizens who are men to be against Tammany, and an even stronger right so to appeal to all good citizens who are women.

Now for the national side of the question.  I ask support for the Republicans, because it is time to put an end to that one party rule which has so rapidly developed intolerable invasion of the rights of free speech and of a free press; and because it is time fearlessly to assert the right of the Republican party to a life of useful performance of public duty in the United States.  The Democratic party, under the lead of the Administration, and taking adroit advantage of the great patriotic outburst in support of the war, has, under the pretense of the elimination of partyism, come dangerously near to creating a condition of one-partyism.  It has not striven to eliminate partisanship; it has merely striven to destroy the Republican party in the interest of the Democratic party.

The Republican party has an honest duty to perform and an honest appeal to make in this matter.  Party is an instrument that has been degraded and abused; but the degradation and abuse consequent upon the existence of two parties can never approach in mischievous effect the degradation and abuse where the whole power of the government is devoted to crushing out everything except one party and to making within that party the sole test of party loyalty, loyalty not to our nation but to the Administration in power.  Under the cover of an entirely insincere declaration against perseverance in partisan politics, the Democratic party, under the lead of the Administration, has carried partisan politics during the last eighteen months to an extreme never before known in this country in a time of war, as among loyal upholders of the war.

The effort is constantly made to confuse the mind of the average citizen and to cow him into supporting the Democratic party by accusations of lack of patriotism if he does not do so.  This is an intolerable outrage.  We admit that a party is an instrument that can be abused; but we hold not only that the Republican party has shown itself staunchly patriotic, but that actually, in Congress and out of Congress, it has rendered a greater percentage of war service to the nation during and before this war than has the Democratic party.  We hold that the Republican party must tell its war service to the nation, and that it must ask the people to remember that it gave the President greater support in every measure designed efficiently to wage the war than did the party to which he himself belongs and which he is striving to keep in power.  We hold that the Republican party is the only party that as a party has dared to attack the war failures and has stood for the duty of criticism of what is wrong, and therefore for the imperative duty of telling the truth.

The Democrats have announced that it is disloyal to tell the truth.  We hold on the contrary that the highest proof of loyalty is truth-telling when only by telling the truth can we expose and remedy shameful failure efficiently to carry on the war.  We hold that the record of the Republican party for patriotism in the past eighteen months has never before been equalled or approached by any party in opposition during a great war, and that its record shines by comparison with the record of its party opponents.  We have the right to assert our patriotism and to stand by it and to say — and challenge the support of the people when we do say — that we will stand by the President and by every other executive official so long as he is right, that we will stand against him when he is wrong and that we show our loyalty to the people in both attitudes.  We act in letter and spirit according to the words of Abraham Lincoln 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.  In both you are national and nothing less than national.  To act otherwise for any reason is to be less than a man, less than an American."

This means that it is our duty to stand by the President when he really represents the American people and carries forward the policies demanded by the honor and interest of the people, and to fearlessly call him to account when he fails to stand by the American people.  It means that it is not merely the privilege but the duty of the American people to support or oppose the President as a political leader, precisely as the convictions of the American people incline them to act.  We Republicans pledge ourselves to stand by the President so long as he stands by the American people, and to part company with him at any point where in our judgment he does not stand by the people.  This is the people's government, this is the people's war and the peace that follows shall be the people's peace.

Such is the essence of our position.  As for the need of taking it, I ask you to consider the following facts: Advantage has been taken of Liberty Loan meetings and meetings of Four-Minute Men to distribute at, Liberty bond booths and elsewhere cards with this appeal: " Stand by Wilson over here.  Don't let the elections go against the government.  Vote with President Wilson and for the Democratic ticket." This is a frank appeal to win votes for the Democratic ticket by misleading patriotic citizens and making them confused between patriotism and partisanship.

In the recent letters of the President on behalf of the election of various Democratic Senators and Congressmen he has set forth explicitly what he demands.  One letter, for instance, runs: “Senator So and So has been conspicuous among the Democrats in the Senate for his opposition to the Administration.  If the voters of his State should again choose him I should be obliged to accept their action as a condemnation of my administration." This language is explicit; what is demanded is not loyalty to the country, but loyalty to the Administration.  It is the language not of a President appealing, without regard to party, to the people for loyalty to the people's cause, but the language of a party leader insisting upon the most rigid discipline among all his party subordinates in the rank and file of the party, and asserting that loyalty to him personally, and not even loyalty to the party and far less loyalty to the country, is to be accepted as the final test.

But on October 14 last — just two weeks ago — the President went even further than this, and by his utterance cast vivid light on the path which our people must tread if in servile spirit they accept loyalty to any man as an adequate substitute for loyalty to the nation.  The President's words, as reported in the press, were: " I earnestly request every patriotic American to leave to the governments of the United States and of the Allies the momentous discussions initiated by Germany, and to remember that for each man his duty is to strengthen the hands of these governments, and to do it in the most important way now immediately presented — by subscribing to the utmost of his ability for bonds of the fourth Liberty Loan."

I have often found it difficult to understand the meaning of the President's statements, but there is no difficulty in understanding the meaning of this statement.  It is the straightforward expression of the President's view that the ordinary man, Democrat, or Republican, or independent, is to contribute all the money that the government needs, but that there his function stops, and that he is to have no voice in deciding the policy the government can carry out only because he contributes the money.  There is a popular expression which runs “Put up or shut up," but this request to the average citizen is that he shall both put up and shut up.  The declaration is so extraordinary that it is hard to be believe it accurate, but it has appeared without comment in the public press as a quotation from President Wilson's speech, and I have seen no contradiction.

I ask you men and women, I ask all good citizens, and I ask Democrats just exactly as much as I ask Republicans or independents, to think what it means if we in the first place abolish all parties except one; if we then make full membership in that one party depend not upon loyalty to the country, or even loyalty to the party's principles, but loyalty to and support of the Administration; and if finally we accept the view that members of other parties and of all parties who subscribe the money necessary to run the government are to be told that their function is to be limited to giving up the money, that they are to have no say-so in the governmental policy, and are not even to discuss what the government is doing.

This has a direct bearing upon what has happened within the last two weeks.  The events in connection with the peace negotiations or interchange of notes between the President and the Central governments illustrate just what I mean.  The President's first note to Germany, about two weeks ago, delivered him into the hands of Germany by his compromising inquiries.  It was accepted by the Allies and accepted by our own people as meaning that if Germany answered as she actually did answer he was bound by the implications of the questions he had asked.  There was in this country a very extraordinary outburst of indignation and protest and a demand for the peace of unconditional surrender.  Senators Lodge and Poindexter and a number of other Senators, including one or two high-minded independent Democrats, but in the great majority of instances Republicans, introduced resolutions or took other action emphatically repudiating the implications of the President's inquiries and demanding unconditional surrender by Germany.  Our Allies were as profoundly disturbed as our own people, and their clear understanding of the situation is shown by a special cable from Paris contained in the Democratic New York Times of October 9, which says: " The reports of the debates in the American Senate share first pages with the news of the great military victories on the Western front.  Senators McCumber, Nelson and Lodge are as highly thought of in France today as are the American generals."

The feeling was so strong that President Wilson speedily grew to realize it.  Germany answered him by an acceptance of his terms, phrased in the very words he had used.  There remained for him then only two courses of action.  He was compelled either to fulfill the plain obligation of his note by entering into negotiations with Kaiserism, which meant the sacrifice of America and humanity, and which would have also certainly meant the repudiation of his action by the American people, or else he was himself obliged to respond in such fashion as to stultify his own diplomacy and repudiate his own implied offer.  I am thankful that he chose the latter course; he served our people and humanity by so doing; but it was a service rendered only because he had received the sternest warning, by the voice of the nation, that this people would ratify no compromise and would tolerate no such parley as that upon which he had entered; and inasmuch as he was the spokesman for the nation, it was not a pleasant thing for Americans that he should have put himself, and the nation behind him, in the position of inviting a.  proposition which when accepted he repudiated.  For the very reason that I abhor Germany's trickery, treachery and bad faith, I am most anxious that Americans shall not imitate her in these matters.  And now, in the light of the latest developments, we are again utterly at sea as to what position he will ultimately take.

In the face of these facts, The New York World, which shares with Mr.  Hearst's papers the credit of being the special organ of the national administration, demands a Democratic victory this year so as to stand by the President on the alleged ground that our allies and Germany would misinterpret the election of a Republican House as being a repudiation of the war aims of this country.  Such a statement is the veriest nonsense that even partisanship can conceive.  The quotation I have given above from The New York Times shows that the French people absolutely understand that the Republican leaders are the statesmen on this side of the water who are most uncompromisingly bent on the complete overthrow of Germany and bent on securing a peace which shall guarantee to all nations, great and small, so long as they are well behaved, the complete liberty from foreign invasion and from interference with their domestic concerns which we demand for ourselves.  The triumph of the party that has been led during the last eighteen months, and especially during the last fortnight, by such leaders as Messrs.  Lodge, Poindexter, Nelson, Johnson and their associates will be accepted everywhere as the triumph of the war spirit of America and of our purpose to insist upon the peace of victory for justice and right and popular freedom.  There have been high-minded and honorable Democrats who have not feared to tell the exact truth about our failures and blunders and to insist on speeding up the war.  But the great bulk of the action thus indispensably necessary has been furnished by the Republicans, and the great bulk of the Democrats have tended to sink more and more into the position of mere rubber stamps for the administration.

Democratic Senator Lewis, of Illinois, has actually introduced a resolution pledging Congress to abdicate its allegiance to the people and to substitute therefore a frankly rubber stamp attitude of cringing acquiescence in any reversal of policy by the Administration.  What we now need is an American Congress, a Congress of straight-out Americans, and not a Congress of rubber stamps.

It is necessary to make the world safe for democracy, and we can not do it unless we make this nation safe for truth.  Truth telling, both where the Administration is right and where it is wrong, is imperatively demanded.  Criticism is imperatively demanded.  Nine times out of ten this Administration has never led the people.  The leadership has been furnished by others, and the Administration has been reluctantly forced forward into action by criticism against which it has violently protested.  Even when it has followed this leadership it has sullenly and sometimes maliciously sought to punish the men who by their truth telling have forced it into action.  It was such truth telling that forced the Administration reluctantly into the war; it was such truth telling that forced the Administration to send our army abroad; it was such truth telling which forced reasonable efficiency in the War Department; it was such truth telling which has forced the speeding-up of the ship program, the aircraft program and all the other programs which have been so lamentably delayed.

The patriotic zeal of the people was taken advantage of to secure legislation for the purpose of dealing with the work of German spies and with seditious conduct in our own country.  The laws thus enacted, however, have been used far less for their legitimate purpose than to discourage and penalize any truth-telling by newspapers or by private individuals about the Administration.  Never before, in any war, has there been such interference with freedom of the press and freedom of speech as in this war.  The whole weight of effort has been not against seditious action but against that legitimate criticism of public measures and public servants which is absolutely indispensable if any country is to remain free in fact as well as in name.  According to a former chief of the Secret Service, there are a quarter of a million German spies in this country, and a Democratic Senator, Mr.  Overman, is reported as making the figures even larger.  Only an infinitesimal number of these men have been really punished.  But the loyal press has been bullied and cowed as never before.  The test insisted upon has been not loyalty to our allies and hostility to Germany, but adherence to the Administration.  It is utterly impossible to account on any other ground for the immunity granted the so-called Hearst papers, when compared with the extreme severity with which many other papers were treated for conduct which amounted to nothing whatever but entirely legitimate criticism of wrong action or of failure to act properly by the Administration.

I know personally, from conversation after conversation with editors of dailies, weeklies and monthlies, of the apprehension felt by the best papers in the land of telling the truth lest they be crippled financially by some act of the Administration.  Take what was done by the Administration in suppressing the report of the airplane scandal.  This was a report by a committee of the United States Senate, made by Democrats and Republicans alike.  It was printed in Canadian and other outside papers, so that our allies and our enemies were certain to know every fact it contained; yet, on the plea of restraining daily papers and magazines from giving information to the enemy, tens of thousands of copies — probably many hundreds of thousands of copies — were seized and deleted or withdrawn from circulation and great financial loss and trouble thereby caused many reputable papers.  Within a fortnight I have been told by two editors that they were afraid to publish any further comments on the airplane scandal at all lest the government should take further action against them.

Our enemies know all about it, our allies know all about it; the only people kept in ignorance are the people of the United States.  I hope to see a Republican Congress elected, because such a Congress will insist upon the most vigorous prosecution of the war and upon the complete overthrow of Germany and an absolutely satisfactory peace; and because it will also insist that the laws meant to punish German spies and to put a stop to sedition be effectively used for that purpose, and not used to subvert the freedom of the press and the freedom of speech in the United States and the perpetuation in power of a group of politicians.

Remember that the terms of peace are not to be settled by the President alone, but by the President acting in conjunction with two-thirds of the Senate.  Both the President and the Senate must be responsible to the American people.  The platform adopted by the Republicans of Kansas offers a model of what the Republican position should be at this time because of its straightforward truthfulness and broad Americanism.  It begins by demanding the absolute crushing of the Prussian military power.  It insists that there shall be no peace without victory.  It declares against all sectionalism, and states that war profiteering should be treated as treason.  It continues: “In this crisis there is no room for narrow partisanship.  This is no one-party war.  It is an American war, and we denounce all attempts to make the support of Democratic candidates a test of loyalty.  The best statesmanship and business ability, regardless of party, should be utilized.  There is no place for desk soldier favoritisms, for shielding of graft or incompetence.  There is no place for mere faultfinding, but there is a vital need for criticism, fair and constructive.

" The Democratic slogan of 1916,' Kept us out of war,' is now known to every intelligent person to have been political camouflage.  Vital information was withheld from the public to make the slogan effective.  Ambassador Gerard's disclosures and other evidences of Prussian intrigue and insolence, subsequently given to the public, show the true facts of our relations with Germany as far back as the sinking of the Lusitania.  This concealment of facts showing the fixed and sinister purposes of Germany and the failure for more than two years to make adequate preparation immeasurably increases the price in blood and money we must now pay for victory." This is the sound doctrine to which all good Americans should subscribe.

When it comes to the peace negotiations we should emphatically repudiate the famous fourteen points announced by the President last January.  One of them he has himself repudiated, but the remainder are either so mischievous that they ought to be repudiated without further definition or else we should insist upon having them defined in order to know just exactly what they mean.  They have been greeted with enthusiasm by Germany and by all the pro-Germans on this side of the water, especially by the Germanized Socialists and by the Bolshevists of every grade; and for this reason good Americans should regard them with suspicion.  For example, the statement about the freedom of the seas may be interpreted as meaning what Germany contends, and if so no patriotic American can support it.  The first need in freeing the seas is to free them from the German practice of murder of innocent women and children.

Again, we ought to know just what the President means when he speaks of breaking down economic barriers.  If he means that he proposes to allow Germany to dump her manufactures on us without restriction we ought to be against it, and neither business man nor workingman can afford to accept it.  We ought to insist on keeping in our hands the complete right to handle our tariff as the vital interests of our own citizens and especially our own workingmen demand.  If these two points mean anything they mean that the seas are to be free for our enemies' use in time of war and our home markets free for our enemies' trade in time of peace.

Again, if the President's language means anything, one of these fourteen points is a proposal to guarantee that every nation shall reduce its armament to a point sufficient to preserve domestic order.  If this language is to be taken according to its necessary meaning, America would be obliged to scrap its navy and reduce its army to a police force capable only of putting down riot, and would have to trust to a league of nations for protecting it against outside aggression.  Either the President's language means this or it means nothing.  But if it means this, every high-minded and farsighted patriotic American citizen should be against the proposal.  According to what is contained in the President's fourteen points, under this proposal Germany, Austria, Turkey and Russia would, as part of the League of Nations, have the say-so as to America's future, and America would have nothing but a small police force with which to protect its own rights.

It is hard for me to speak patiently of such a proposition.  If it were made by any one except the President it would be considered as foolish as the wildest folly uttered by the professional pacifists prior to the occurrence of this great war.  The conduct of the powers above named shows that whenever it was to their interest they would treat any agreement they made with us as a scrap of paper.  The simple fact is that no league of nations or any other scheme of the kind should be accepted as anything but an addition to, and never as a substitute for, the development for our own defense of our own strength and its preparedness in advance.  Internationalism is a curse if it is sought to make it as a substitute for nationalism.  We have to be good Americans first before we can be good citizens of the world; we must behave justly to all other nations, but we must remember in the first place our duty to our own wives and children and to the generations that are to come after us in this fair and mighty land.  There are plenty of questions, such as our territorial integrity, our right to control immigration, our right to establish our own tariff policy and the like, which I trust we will never surrender to the safe-keeping of any league of other nations.

Remember one or two obvious facts, my friends.  Remember that in Asia there are about ten times as many people as there are in the United States.  If the league of nations means anything, and if internationalism is substituted for nationalism, this means that the Asiatics in such a league would have ten votes for every American vote, and that they would have the right to decide such questions as the admission of unchecked Asiatic immigration to the United States and of the refusal to permit us to build up any barriers for the keeping up of the standard of living of our people and our distinctive American nationality and American social and industrial life.  Whoever advocates the submerging of nationality in internationalism is either hypocritical or else he advocates just precisely and exactly what I have outlined.  With all my heart and soul I adjure our people not to be fooled by fine phrases and glittering generalities, but to insist on facing facts as they actually are.  If they do so they will put nationalism in the first place and accept our duty to prepare our own strength for our own self-defense as our prime duty.  Then, as an addition to, but never as a substitute for, the performance of these duties, they will join in any international agreement that promises only what can and ought to be performed and that in good faith seeks to secure international fair-dealing on a basis of justice and right and of scrupulous respect for all nations, big or little, which are well behaved and do not wrong others and which preserve at least a reasonable measure of orderly freedom within their own bounds.  But we can help the world at large only if we stand by our own people first.  More than two thousand years have passed since it was written: “He who fails to provide for his own, they of his own household, hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel."

But the task of the next Congress will be to deal not only with war and peace and international relations; it will also have to deal with the vital work of the reconstruction of our industrial system at home.  At the present moment it is our duty to speed up production to the limit.  This means that there must be some interference with the private rights of individuals.  Such interference must be equitable.  The farmer must not have the price of his products cut down when the price of what he gets is not cut down and when other products of farmers in other sections are left without price fixing at all.  There must be no war profiteering, but there must be a legitimate reward for the money invested and the risk taken, or the great work necessary to be done will not be done.  When this legitimate reward is passed the heaviest kind of progressive taxation on the surplus should be enforced.  The working-men should receive the highest wages possible, and their housing and living conditions in all plants doing government work should be carefully safeguarded.  But when this has been done it should be understood that our motto is " work or fight," that slackers will be at once sent into the army and to the front, and that every man is expected to do a full day's work every day and a full week's work every week, and that we permit no limitation of output whatever, whether under the pretext of obeying a union rule or from sheer loafing.

When the war is over we should begin to reshape our economic policy on the basis of endeavoring to secure a general raise of the tableland of reward for ordinary effort, without reducing the peaks of exceptional reward for exceptional achievement.  We must insist both on the need of practically recognizing the spirit of brotherhood and also of recognizing in full and generous fashion the necessity of leadership and of an ungrudging, although never an excessive, reward for such leadership.  Capital should have the right to combine, for combination is essential to the efficient and economic handling of much business; but because of the power it confers such combination should always be strictly controlled and regulated by the government.

Our aim should be to encourage business efficiency by guaranteeing it an ample reward, but also to supervise it in such fashion as to insure its usefulness to the community, and to prevent the reward from becoming excessive and disproportionate to the service rendered.  Service should be the true test and the reward should so far as possible be proportionate to the service.  In a very true sense our effort should be steadily and cautiously to give labor a certain right of ownership and control in the business in which it is associated with capital, and inasmuch as this right can not be wisely given nor maintained at all unless labor intelligently recognizes its duties and the rights of capital, we must insist that labor, no less than capital, never forgets that the enjoyment of right should be conditioned upon the performance of duty and that the enjoyment of one's own rights must always be accompanied by the fullest recognition of the rights of others.

Labor has the same right to collective action, including collective bargaining, that capital has.  We should insist upon the guaranteeing of the safety of each right, and we should furthermore insist that neither right be abused and that the government act fearlessly when either is abused.  We should guarantee to the hard-working man who toils with his hands the right to safety and comfort while working and during his old age, and therefore we should insist upon proper forms of old age insurance and insurance against accident, disease and unemployment, and no business should receive any favors unless the living and working conditions of labor are properly cared for.  We must steer equally clear of the deadening paralysis of state socialism and of the lawless anarchy of unregulated individualism.  We are equally against Bourbonism and Bolshevism.

The foundation of our permanent civilization rests on the farmer, and by farmer I mean not the man who owns lands which others till, but the man who himself tills or helps till the ground, part of which at least he himself owns.  He is the man who raises our food in peace and does his full share of fighting our battles in war.  A cardinal feature of our national policy should be the insuring of his rights to this man; and this not only for his sake, but for the sake of all of us, for his welfare is fundamental to the welfare of all of us.  Normally he must be the owner of the ground he and his sons and his hired man till; and the hired man must have conditions shaped so that if he is hard working, thrifty and energetic he shall have the means and the opportunity himself to purchase farming land on which to dwell and to bring up his family.  Nation and state must combine to secure this.

Normally, in farming regions, where the land is agricultural land, tenancy should be recognized only as a transitional and temporary phase, and normally the working farmer should himself be the land owner, and legislation to secure this should at once be enacted.  Of course, I recognize fully that the needs are widely different in different sections, and must be met in different ways.

Drastic action should be taken to stop the purchase of agricultural land for speculative purposes.  Systems of marketing must be developed, partly by governmental action, partly by organized action among the farmers themselves, so as to do away with the holdup methods that in so many places still obtain.  The producer must get more and the consumer pay less than at present, and both these ends can be, and have been, attained by proper legislation.

We ought to do these and the many other things necessary now, when it is possible to do them without causing too great distress to those in possession of long undisputed privileges which by time have grown to possess much of the character of rights.  Nine-tenths of wisdom is being wise in time.  In this country tenant farming and the individual ownership of enormous tracts of agricultural land are growing at the expense of the homestead holders.

Let us take whatever steps — conservative, if possible; radical, if necessary — are needed to remedy the situation; for if left unremedied the result may be something unpleasantly near revolution a half century hence; and in such case the wrongs will be remedied only by action which causes other wrongs to innocent people and works deep demoralization to those benefited; whereas, at present, by the exercise of forethought and resolution, we may escape both kinds of evil.

There are certain things the state can do and must do for the farmer.  But most things the farmer can do for himself by association with his fellow farmers, and such independence of unnecessary state action is healthy in itself and is consonant with the rugged self-reliance characteristic of that most typical of American citizens the American who dwells in the open country and tills the soil with his own hands.

Finally, we should make it our prime duty, coming ahead of all other duties, to care for the soldier, and the wife and children of the soldier, who has served his country in this war.  We should shape our whole policy so as to give him when he returns the opportunity to get back into the industrial system in improved position.  I do not mean to coddle him or excuse him from work, whether he be wounded or unwounded, for no man is helped by being coddled or excused from work.  The law of worthy life is the law of worthy work! I mean to treat him as the man whom we most delight to honor and whose self-respect we guard as jealously as we guard our own.  We should take all the steps necessary to give full opportunity to go on the land to all soldiers who are willing to go on the land, and we should guarantee them the opportunity, on reasonable terms, to get the land and to work and live on it.  If the soldier turns to other forms of labor or business, his opportunity should be made as open as possible and his rights guarded with a jealousy which we extend to no other citizen of our commonwealth.

The American army overseas, and the officers and enlisted men of the navy, and the officers and enlisted men of our army here who eagerly desire to go abroad, have put us all under an immeasurable debt; they are the Americans who more than any others we delight to honor, and we must make our honoring them as a matter of actual fact and not of empty phrase.

Speech or Document 28

THE AMERICAN NEGRO AND THE WAR

REMARKS MADE AT A MEETING HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE CIRCLE FOR NEGRO WAR RELIEF, AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, ON NOVEMBER 2, 1918.
AT this time I would not willingly speak for any cause not connected with our direct and immediate duty of winning the war and caring for those who are to win the war.  (Applause.) I take peculiar pleasure in coming to speak for the Circle for Negro War Relief.  And now if any of you haven't given, turn in a pledge card, and if any one is likely to forget the admirable adjuration at the end of one line of the song before the last, be sure that you pay what you pledge!

I wish to mention that when it became my duty to divide the Nobel Peace Prize among our war activities I gave an equal share to the work being done by Negro women for war relief (Applause) with the shares I had given to such organizations as the Y.  M.  C.  A., the Knights of Columbus, and the Salvation Army, and in doing it I tried to follow out the counsel so wisely given by one of our speakers this evening, to remember that the Negro has a right to sit at the council board where questions vitally affecting him are considered — and at the same time that as a matter of expediency it is well to have white men at the board too.  (Laughter and applause.) And I say that though I know there are many colored men — Mr.  Scott is one and the Chairman is another — whom I would be delighted to have sit at the council board where only the affairs of white men are concerned.  As things are now, the wisest course to follow is that followed in the organization of this Circle.  And so when I gave the $4,100 from the Nobel Peace Prize I mentioned two women, one white and one colored, as the ones whose advice I wished to have followed in the actual disposition of the fund.  Now, I only mention this to show that I tried by works to show the faith that is in me.  And I want you to do the same with the pledge cards!

I wish to congratulate you on the dignity and self-restraint with which the appeal of the Circle is issued.  You have put what I would like to say better than I could have put it, when you say that you would like the men at the front and in the camps to know that there is a distinctively colored organization working for them.  The people at home ought to know that this organization, though started and maintained with friendly cooperation from white friends, is intended to prove to the world that the colored people themselves can manage war relief in an efficient, honest and dignified way, and so bring honor to their race.  (Applause.) Every organization like the Circle for Negro War Relief is doing its part in bringing about the right solution for the great problem which the chairman has spoken of this evening.  I do not for one moment wish to be understood as excusing the white man from his full responsibility for what he has done to keep the black man down; but I do wish to say with all the emphasis and all the earnestness at my command that the greatest work the colored man can do to help his race upward is by his own person, and through cooperation with his fellows, showing the dignity of service by the colored man and colored woman for all our people.  (Applause.)

Let me illustrate by an example suggested to me by one name I see both on your list of vice-presidents and on your list of directors, to show just what I mean when I say the advisability of white cooperation and the occasional advisability of doing without white cooperation.  Had I been permitted to raise troops to go to the other side in what will soon be the “late war," I should have asked permission to raise two colored regiments.  It is perfectly possible of course that there is more than one colored man in the country fit for the extraordinarily difficult task of commanding one such regiment which would contain nothing but colored officers.  But it happened that I only knew of one, and that was Colonel Charles Young.  (Applause.) I had intended, and Colonel Young had been so notified, to offer him the colonelship of one regiment, telling him that I expected him to choose only colored officers and that, while I was sure he would understand the extreme difficulty and extreme responsibility of his task, I intended to try to impress it upon him still more; to tell him that under those conditions I put a heavier responsibility upon him than upon any other colored man in the country; that he was to be given an absolutely free hand in choosing his officers; and that on the other hand he would have to treat them absolutely mercilessly if they didn't come right up to the highest level.  On the other hand, with the other colored regiment I should have had a colonel and a lieutenant-colonel and three majors who would have been white men.  One of them, Hamilton Fish, is over there now.  He was offered promotion in another regiment; but he said no, he would stay with his sun-burned Yankees.  (Laughter and applause.) He stayed accordingly.

Mr.  Cobb has spoken to you as an eyewitness of what has been done by the colored troops across the seas.  I am well prepared to believe it.  In the very small war in which I served, which was a kind of pink tea affair compared to this, I was in a division, a small dismounted cavalry division, where in addition to my own regiment we had three white regular regiments and two colored regiments; and when we had gotten through the campaign my own men, who were probably two-thirds southerners and south westerners, used to say " The Ninth and Tenth Cavalry are good enough to drink out of our canteens." (Laughter and applause.)

Terrible though this war has been, I think it has been also fraught with the greatest good for our national soul.  We went to war, as Mr.  Cobb has said, to maintain our own national self-respect.  And, friends, it would have been dreadful if we hadn't gone in.  Materially, because the fight was so even that I don't think it is boasting, I think it is a plain statement of fact, Mr.  Cobb, that our going in turned the scale.  Isn't that so? (Applause.) I think the Germans and their vassal allies would have been victorious if we hadn't gone in.  And if they had been victorious and we had stayed out — soft, flabby, wealthy —they would have eaten us without saying grace.  (Laughter and applause.) Well, thank Heaven! we went in, and our men on the other side, our sons and brothers on the other side, white men and black, white soldiers and colored soldiers, have done such admirable work that every American can now walk with his head up and look the citizen of any other country in the world straight in the eyes.  (Applause.) We have the satisfaction of knowing that we have played the decisive part.  I am not saying this in any spirit of self-flattery.  If any of you have heard me speak during the preceding four years, you know that I have not addressed the American people in a vein of undiluted eulogy.  But without self-flattery we can say that it was our going in that turned the scale for freedom and against the most dangerous tyranny that the world has ever seen.  We acted as genuine friends of liberty in so doing.

Now, after the war, friends, I think all of us in this country, white and black alike, have also got to set an example to the rest of the world in steering a straight course equally distant from Kaiserism and bolshevism.  (Applause.)

And, friends, I wish as an American to thank you, and as your fellow-American to congratulate you, upon the honor won and the services rendered by the colored troops on the other side; by the men, such as the soldier we have with us tonight who won the cross of war, the French war cross for gallantry in action; by the many others like him who acted with equal gallantry and who for one reason or another never attracted the attention of their superiors, and, well though they did, did not receive the outward and visible token to prove what they had done.  I congratulate you on what all those men have done.  I congratulate you on what the colored nurses at home have done and have been ready to do (Applause), and I express my very sincere regret that some way was not found to put them on the other side at the front.  I congratulate you upon it in the name of our country, and above all in the name of the colored people of our country.  For in the end services of this kind have a cumulative effect in winning the confidence and the respect of your fellows of another color.  And I hope — and I wish to use a stronger expression than " hope "; I expect — and I am going to do whatever small amount I can to bring about the realization of the expectation — I expect that as a result of this great war, intended to secure a greater justice internationally among the peoples of mankind, we shall apply at home the lessons that we have been learning and helping teach abroad (Applause) ; that we shall work sanely, not foolishly, but resolutely, toward securing a juster and fairer treatment in this country of colored people, basing that treatment upon the only safe rule to be followed in American life, of treating each individual accordingly as his conduct or her conduct requires you to treat them.  (Applause.)

I don't ask for any man that he shall, because of his race, be given any privilege.  All I ask is that in his ordinary civil and political rights, in his right to work, to enjoy life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, that as regards these rights he be given the same treatment that we would give him if he was an equally good man of another color.  (Applause.)

Now, friends, both the white and the black man in moments of exultation are apt to think that the millennium is pretty near; that the “sweet chariot" has swung so low that everybody can get upon it at once.  I don't think that my colored fellow-citizens are a bit worse than my white fellow-citizens as regards that particular aspiration! But mine is the ungrateful task of warning both that they must not expect too much.  They must have their eyes on the stars but their feet on the ground.  I have to warn my white fellow-citizens on this point when they say “Well now, at the end of this war we are going to have universal peace, and everybody will always hereafter love everybody else!" I wish you to remember that the strongest professional exponents of international love in public life today are Lenine and Trotsky; and when these professed internationalists got control of Russia they ruined Russia and betrayed the liberty-loving nations of mankind.  I wish to help forward the cause of internationalism; and for that very reason I decline to indulge in dreams that might turn to nightmares.  Now, in the same way, I will do everything I can to aid, to help bring about, to bring nearer, the day when justice, the square-deal, will be given as between black man and white.  (Applause.) And yet I want to warn you that that is only going to come gradually; that there will be very much injustice; injustice that must not overmuch disappoint you; that must not cow you; and, above all, must not make you feel sullen and hopeless.  And one thing I wish to say, not to you here, but to the colored men who live where the bulk of colored men do, in the south: always remember the lesson which, I learned from Booker Washington: that in the long run the white man who can give most help to the colored man is the white man who lives next to him.  And in consequence I have always felt it my duty, in or out of office, and I have always tried — not always successfully, but I always tried — to work so that I could command the assistance and respect of the bulk of the white men who are decent and square, in what I attempted to do for the colored man who is decent and square.  I say I did not always succeed.  Sometimes I had most intricate rows with one side, and sometimes with the other — there were moments when I thought I had committed both in an offensive alliance against myself.

But at any rate such is the ideal I have had before me.  It is the ideal all of us must have before us: to try never to be content unless we have gone forward; never to be content unless we are trying to make things better, but always to be taking into account just how far it is possible to press things forward so as not to invite a reaction that would make things worse than they were before.  It is not an easy task; but it is a task that every one of us must set himself to perform.  The prime thing for the white man to remember is that it is his business to treat the colored man, and even more the colored woman, squarely; to give him or her not only the proper treatment in material things, but also the respect to which every decent man or woman is entitled as a matter of right.  (Applause.) And the prime thing for the colored man is to conduct himself so that the unjust suspicions of the white may not be given any foundation of justice so far as his colored neighbor is concerned.  To each side I preach the doctrine of thinking more of its duties than of its rights.  I don't mean that you shan't think of your rights.  I want you to do so.  But it is awfully easy, if you begin to dwell all the time on your rights, to find that you suffer from an ingrowing sense of your own perfections and wrongs and that you forget what you owe to any one else.  To the white man I never speak of the Negro's failings at all.  When I speak to the white man I speak to him about his duty to give the colored man a square deal in industry, in self-respect, in matters like housing, in everything of the kind, and just so far as possible to aid him to preserve, as is said here " his dignity so that he shall live and work in an efficient, honest and dignified way." In other words, so that he or she shall keep and maintain his or her self-respect, the most valuable quality that any citizen can have.  That's the advice that I give to the white man.

To the colored man I say, " Stand up for your rights of course, but be perfectly certain that the right-thinking white man understands what your point of view is and that he is given a full opportunity to know your rights so that he can join you in standing up for them.  And set your faces like flint against the Negro criminal." And I ask that because of the very fact that too often the white man is guilty of the dreadful injustice of putting on the whole Negro race the responsibility for the Negro criminal, as he never dreams of doing in the case of the white race and the white criminal.  But as colored men I wish to impress upon you to the limit of my power that the colored criminal is peculiarly an enemy of the colored race; because of the very fact that the white man and white woman who hear of him inevitably symbolize him as the race.  They ought not to do it; but they do! And therefore the worst offender against the colored race is the colored criminal.  He is the man who does more to keep the Negro down than any white man can possibly do.  And I ask you colored men to of all things hunt down, hunt out, the colored criminal of every type.  Thereby you will render the greatest service to the colored race that can possibly be rendered.
Well, friends, you see I have suffered from my usual temptation to drop into a sermon.  I didn't intend to preach it.  I have come here simply to wish you well and to congratulate all colored men and women, and all their white fellow-Americans upon the gallantry and efficiency with which the colored men have behaved at the front, and the efficiency and wish to render service which has been shown by both the colored men and the colored women behind them in this country.

Speech or Document 29

THE ROMANOFF SCYLLA AND THE BOLSHEVIST CHARYBDIS

AN   ARTICLE   PUBLISHED   IN   THE   METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE IN DECEMBER, 1918

FROM the days when civilized man first began to strive for self-government and democracy success in this effort has depended primarily upon the ability to steer clear of extremes.  For almost its entire length the course lies between Scylla and Charybdis; and the heated extremists who insist upon avoiding only one gulf of destruction invariably land in the other — and then take refuge in the meager consolation afforded by denouncing as " inconsistent" the pilot who strives to avoid both.  Order without liberty and liberty without order are equally destructive; special privilege for the few and special privilege for the many are alike profoundly anti-social; the fact that unlimited individualism is ruinous in no way alters the fact that absolute state ownership and regimentation spells ruin of a different kind.  All of this ought to be trite to reasonably intelligent people — even if they are professional intellectuals — but in practice an endless insistence on these simple fundamental truths is endlessly necessary.

Before our eyes the unfortunate Russian nation furnishes an example on a gigantic scale of what to avoid in oscillating between extremes.  The autocratic and bureaucratic despotism of the Romanoffs combined extreme tyranny with extreme inefficiency; and the Bolshevists have turned the Revolution into a veritable Witches' Sabbath of anarchy, plunder, murder, utterly faithless treachery and inefficiency carried to the verge of complete disintegration.  Each side sought salvation by formulas which were condemned alike by common sense and common morality; and even these formulas were by their actions belied.

I do not say these things from any desire to speak ill of the Russian people.  I am far too conscious of our own smug shortcoming during the world war to wish to comment harshly on a great people which has suffered terribly and which battled bravely for the three years during which we as a nation earned the curse of Meroz by the complacent and greedy selfishness with which we refused to come to the help of the Lord against the mighty — while our leaders with unctuous hypocrisy justified our course by deliberate falsehood and by a sham sentimentality which under the circumstances was nauseous.  Our astute profiting by the valor of others saved us from paying the terrible penalty which Russia has paid; but from the standpoint of national and international morality our offense was well nigh as rank as Russia's.  Since the Bolshevists rose to power Russia has betrayed her own honor, and the cause of world democracy, and the liberties of well-behaved minorities within her own borders, and the right to liberty and self-government of small well behaved nations everywhere.  But for the two years after the Lusitania was sunk, we continued to fawn on the blood-stained murderers of our people, we were false to ourselves and we were false to the cause of right and of liberty and democracy throughout the world.  Had we done our duty when the Lusitania was sunk, instead of following the advice of the apostles of greedy and peaceable infamy, the world war with its dreadful slaughter would long ago have been over.  Incidentally Russia would have been saved from the abyss into which she has fallen, for in her inevitable revolution the Bolshevists would not have had the German support which has enabled them to wrench loose the very foundations of their country.  No wonder poor Kerensky during his brief and perilous moment of leadership exclaimed that it was America's turn to do the fighting and endure the loss, for the three years' effort had strained Russia to the snapping point.

Moreover, we can feel genuine sympathy with the immense mass of Russian peasants, who have never been given the chance to learn self-government or to discriminate between possibilities and impossibilities, and who in their ignorance and poverty, their suffering and bewilderment, must not be too heavily blamed for behaving as, when all is said, a very considerable fraction of our own people were anxious to behave.  And during the last year or eighteen months our own government has behaved toward Russia with such shortsightedness and infirmity of purpose, such failure to adopt either or any of the possible courses until it was too late to get more than a fraction of the possible benefit, that it behooves us to be very charitable in our estimate of the Russian people.  We neither back the men like Raymond Robbins who desired us to give peaceful aid to the Soviet Governments and to attempt to save Russia by our economic strength; nor yet did we back the Czecho-Slovaks by putting a substantial army in Siberia early last spring.  We were neither wise and generous friends, nor just and fearless foes.  We never acted until after the best time for action had passed.  We hit; but we hit softly.

It is absolutely imperative for the sake of this nation that we shall realize the lamentable calamities that have befallen Russia and shall condemn in sternest fashion the men in our own country who would invite such calamities for America.  The reactionaries, the men whose only idea is to restore their power to the bourbons of wealth and politics, and obstinately to oppose all rational forward movements for the general betterment, would if they had their way bring to this country the ruin wrought by the regime of the Romanoffs in Russia.  To withstand the sane movement for social and industrial justice is enormously to increase the likelihood that the movement will be turned into insane and sinister channels.  And to oscillate between the sheer brutal greed of the haves and the sheer brutal greed of the have-nots means to plumb the depths of degradation.  The soldiers who in this war have battled at the front against autocracy will not submit to the enthronement of privilege at home.  They believe in discipline and leadership, they believe in the superior reward going to leaders like General Pershing and Admiral Sims; but they believe that in time the difference in industrial reward between the good man at the top of the management class and the good man in the workingman's class ought roughly to correspond to the difference in reward between the General and the Sergeant-Major, the Admiral and the Warrant Officer.

We will not submit to privilege in the form of wealth.  Just as little will we submit to the privilege of a mob.  There are no worse enemies of America than the American Bolshevists and the crew of politicians who pander to them.  We ought therefore clearly to understand what the Bolsheviki attempted in Russia and what after a year of power they have done for, or rather to, Russia.  They utterly repudiated the idea of a democracy where every man is guaranteed his rights and is limited in his power to do wrong.  Their effort was to create a Marxian socialistic state, based on the class conscious purpose of the proletariat to destroy and rob every other class.  They oppressed and plundered impartially all former oppressors and wrongdoers and all former champions of fair dealing and liberty.  They attacked the rest-while corrupt bureaucrat or wealthy land-owner who had neglected all his duties not a whit more venomously than they attacked the small shopkeeper or skilled mechanic or industrious farmer or thrifty workingman who, because he had saved money and began to live decently, they denounced as having adopted " bourgeois standards." They definitely sought to realize the stark formulas of Marxian socialism; and therefore they have made a genuine contribution for warning and prevention against destructive adventure of a similar character in our own land.  The followers of Trotsky and Lenine, like the followers of Robespierre and Marat, have just one lesson to teach the American people: what to avoid.

In the peace treaty of last March the Russian Bolshevists and the German autocracy joined against the free nations.  Anarchy and despotism joined against liberty.  The representatives of the privilege of a proletarian mob and the representatives of the privilege of a plutocratic oligarchy struck hands against the men who believe in no privilege.  Germany suppressed Bolshevism and restored military order in the Russian provinces the Bolshevists ceded to her, and cynically supported Bolshevism in the rest of Russia precisely because Bolshevism is a cancerous growth; Germany recognizes that anarchy destroys freedom; therefore Germany encourages anarchy in every land to which she can not apply her own iron despotism; for she wishes to destroy every nation that she can not enslave.  The Bolshevist leaders — it matters not whether they were sinister visionaries, or the corrupted agents of Germany — played Germany's game in order to gain a respite during which they brought still further destruction to their own countrymen.  They preached socialism, and practiced anarchy — in their extreme forms the two always meet when the effort is made actually to apply them.

Surely this lesson will not be lost on the people of the United States, the keen, kindly, brave people, who are often slow to wake but who are far-sighted and resolute when once awake.  We of the United States must set ourselves to the task of ordering our own household in the spirit of Abraham Lincoln.  Therefore we must realize that the reactionaries among us are the worst foes of order, and the revolutionaries the worst foes of liberty; and unless we can preserve both order and liberty the republic is doomed.  At the moment, the profiteers, and all men who make fortunes out of this war, represent the worst types of reactionary privilege; and on a level of evil with them stand all the various exponents of American Bolshevism.  Prominent, although not always powerful, among the latter are the professional intellectuals, who vary from the soft-handed, noisily self-assertive frequenters of frowsy restaurants to the sissy socialists, the pink tea and parlor Bolshevists who support what they regard as " advanced " papers, and aspire to notoriety as make-believe " reds." I call these persons “intellectuals " in deference to the terminology of European politics; for they ape the silly half-educated people, and the educated able people with a moral or mental twist, who in almost every European country have found notoriety and excitement in fomenting revolutionary movements which they were utterly powerless to direct or control.  Unless the term intellectual is to be construed as excluding either character or common sense it can be applied to them only in irony.  In our own vernacular, they have been styled the exponents of Highbrow Hearstism or Bolshevism.  The sincere and well meaning among them come in the class of those described by Don Marquis in his account of “Hermione and her little group of serious thinkers." Those in this class usually furnish the funds with which their more astute brethren carry on the propaganda and earn a shifty livelihood.  Worthy soft-headed persons of both sexes —including some who edit magazines or write for them — think it smart and uplifting to describe with sympathy the Russian exile who wishes to smash our government because the " bourgeoise " who love music can purchase reserved seats at a musical performance — I suppose they should be kept free for the proletariat to sit in ten at a time; or to eulogize the red flag leaders of a " picnic of socialist locals " whose " spiritually alive " faces inflamed with " explosive ideas, big emotions and winged visions" the particular member of Hermione's group of serious thinkers who chronicled them — and who evidently had not exercised the infinitesimal amount of thought necessary to realize just what these same explosive ideas of the red flag gentry were at that moment producing in Russia.

I am referring to two articles chosen almost at random in respectable magazines.  They represent a fad; a fad which is chiefly foolish but which may become mischievous.  The dilettante Reds who gratify their vanity by this fad, play into the hands of the genuine Reds, who are not dilettantes, and who resort to bomb throwing, arson, robbery and murder as a business and not as a fad.  The leaders of the Germanized socialists of this country are traitors to America and to mankind just exactly as are the Bolshevist leaders in Russia; and some at least of the leaders of the Non-Partisan League stand on the same footing.  The leaders of the I.  W.  W.  are no more victims of social wrong, are no more protesters against social evil, than are so many professional gun men.  There are plenty of honest, misled men among the rank and file of all the organizations; and plenty of wrongs from which these men suffer; but these men can be helped, and these wrongs remedied, only if we set our faces like flint against the evil leaders who would hurl our social organism into just such an abyss as that which has engulfed Russia.

So much for the false friends of liberty.  We must equally abhor the false friends of order.  Those who invoke order to prevent the righting of wrong are the ultimate friends of disorder.  Our sternest effort should be exerted against the man of wealth and power who gets the wealth by harming others and uses the power without regard to the general welfare.  In the times ahead we must avoid equally both hardness of heart and softness of head.  We must substitute the full performance of duty in a brotherly spirit, both for the mean and arrogant greed of the haves and for the mean and envious greed of the have-nots.  At present Germany is dangerous as a huge man eating beast is dangerous; Russia is dangerous as an infected and plague stricken body is dangerous.  We must guard against both.  And within our own borders we must steer our great free republic as far from the Romanoff Scylla as from the Bolshevist Charybdis.

Speech or Document 30

THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS

AN   ARTICLE   PUBLISHED   IN   THE   METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE IN JANUARY,   1919
WITHOUT question there is a general desire for some kind of international agreement or union or league which will tend to prevent the recurrence, or at least to minimize the scope and the horrors of such a hideous disaster to humanity as the world war.  In common with most of my friends I strongly share this feeling; indeed, the scheme which still seems to me most likely to prove feasible and beneficial in action is that which I gave in outline four years ago in the little volume called “America and the World War." In discussing this scheme I emphasized the vital need that there should be good faith among those entering into the scheme and honorable conduct in living up to the obligations incurred; for heedless readiness to make promises which are unlikely to be fulfilled is a public sin but one degree lower than callous readiness to break promises that can be kept.

In living up to the promises after once the league has been formed, the chief need will be insistence upon keeping faith when keeping faith is unpleasant or irksome.  But in forming the league the chief danger will come from the enthusiastic persons who in their desire to realize the millennium at once, right off, play into the hands of the slippery politicians who are equally ready to make any promise when the time for keeping it is far distant, and to evade keeping it when the time at last arrives.

Nothing is easier than to be the kind of sham idealist whose idealism consists in uttering on all occasions the loftiest sentiments, while never hesitating to act in direct contravention of them when self-interest is dictator; and verily this man has his reward, for he is repaid by the homage of all the foolish people who care for nothing but words, and by the service of all the unscrupulous people whose deeds do not square with any words which can be publicly uttered, and who seek profit by cloaking such action behind over-zealous adherence to lofty phrases.

But the idealist who tries to realize his ideals is sure to be opposed alike by the foolish people who demand the impossible good and by the wicked people who under cover of adherence to the impossible good oppose the good which is possible.

If the League of Nations is built on a document as high-sounding and as meaningless as the speech in which Mr.  Wilson laid down his fourteen points, it will simply add one more scrap to the diplomatic waste paper basket.  Most of these fourteen points, like those referring to the freedom of the seas, to tariff arrangements, to the reduction of armaments, to a police force for each nation, and to the treatment of colonies, could be interpreted (and some of them, by President Wilson and his advisers, actually were interpreted) to mean anything or nothing.  They were absolutely true to the traditions of the bad old diplomacy, for any nation could agree to them and yet reserve the right to interpret them in diametrically opposite manner to the interpretation that others put upon them.

Therefore in forming the league let us face the facts, whether pleasant or unpleasant, and let us show good faith with ourselves and with every one else.  The first fact is that nations do not stand on any real equality, and that at this moment we are not so treating them.  A couple of years ago Hayti and San Domingo were two little independent republics.  According to the principles Mr.  Wilson has publicly laid down they were as much entitled to the right of self-determination as the United States or France, and all our dealing with them should have been frank and above-board.  But in practice Mr.  Wilson conquered them, killed large numbers of their people, deprived them of self-determination, and kept the action and the reason for the action absolutely secret.  During the same period, in dealing with the affairs of China, a huge but pacifist power, unarmed and helpless, Mr.  Wilson made his most important agreement about this peaceful republic's future not with China at all but with the Empire of Japan.

As Mr.  Wilson practices only secret diplomacy we can not tell what his justification for these various actions may be.  But it is of course obvious that it would be absurd to include in a league of nations countries like China, Mexico, Hayti and San Domingo, on a make believe equality with the United States and Japan.  And there are dozens of other countries which stand in the same category.  Moreover, there are some very big nations whose recent action would make reliance on any of their promises proof of a feeble intellect on our part.  Most certainly Germany and Turkey ought to sit on the mourners' bench a good many years before we admit them to fellowship— and if any foolish person says that the German people and the German Government were not the same thing, it is enough to point out that the German people throughout supported the German Government as long as its wrongdoing seemed likely to be successful, and abandoned the government only when the Allied armies obtained a military decision over those of Germany and her vassals.  Russia's action during the last year would make any international guarantee of action on her part worth precisely nothing as a warrant for promise or action on our part.

Therefore, let us begin by including in the league only the present allies, and admit other nations only as their conduct persevered in through a term of years warrants it.  Let us explicitly reserve certain rights — to our territorial possessions, to our control of immigration and citizenship, to our fiscal policy, and to our handling of our domestic problems generally —: as not to be questioned and not to be brought before any international tribunal.  As regards impotent or disorderly nations and people outside the league, let us be very cautious about guaranteeing to interfere with or on behalf of them where they lie wholly outside our sphere of interest; and let us announce that our own sphere of special concern, in America (perhaps limited to north of somewhere near the equator), is not to be infringed on by European or Asiatic powers.

Moreover, let us absolutely decline any disarmament proposition that would leave us helpless to defend ourselves.  Let us absolutely refuse to abolish nationalism; on the contrary, let us base a wise and practical internationalism on a sound and intense nationalism.  There is not and never has been the slightest danger of this country being militaristic or a menace to other nations.  The danger is the exact reverse.  Keep our navy as second to that of Great Britain.  Introduce universal military training; say nine months with the colors for every young man somewhere between the ages of nineteen and twenty-three, with extra intensive training for the officers and non-commissioned officers, and preliminary work, including especially technical, industrial and agricultural training, of the most practical kind, in the schools for the boys of sixteen to eighteen.  We would thereby secure an army which would never be desirous of an offensive war; and its mere existence would be the best possible guarantee that we would never have to wage an offensive war.  Prepare in advance the material necessary for the use of our first line when called out; don't forget that we were able to fight in this war only because our allies gave us at the battle front the necessary cannon, tanks, gas machines, airplanes and machine guns — for until almost the end of the war we had practically none of our own on the fighting line.  Then, when all this has been done, let us with deep seriousness ponder every promise we make, so as to be sure that our people will fulfill it.  It will be worse than idle for us to enter any league if, when the test comes in the future, this country acts as badly as it did in refusing to make any protest when Germany violated the Hague Conventions, in refusing to go to war when the Lusitania was sunk, and in refusing to go to war with Bulgaria or Turkey at all.    As or Germany, unless her cynical violation of the Hague treaties is punished we put a premium on any violation of  any similar treaty hereafter.

Remember that the essential principle of the league, if it is to be successful, must be the willingness of each nation to fight for the right in some quarrel in which at the moment it seems we have no material concern.  The will-power, the intelligent farsightedness, and the stern devotion to duty implied in such action stand infinitely above the loose willingness to promise anything characteristic of so many of the most vociferous advocates of such a league.

Let us go into such a league.  But let us weigh well what we promise; and then train ourselves in body and soul to keep our promises.  Let us treat the formation of the league as an addition to but in no sense as a substitute for preparing our own strength for our own defense.  And let us build a genuine internationalism, that is, a genuine and generous regard for the rights of others, on the only healthy basis: — a sound and intense development of the broadest spirit of American nationalism.  Our steady aim must be to do justice to others, and to secure our own nation against injustice; and we can achieve this twofold aim only if we make our deeds square with our words.

Speech or Document 31
EYES TO THE FRONT

AN   ARTICLE   PUBLISHED   IN   THE   METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE IN FEBRUARY,   1919

IN the new Congress, which will be controlled by the Republicans, there is very much to do.  A large proportion of the work will have to take the shape of unraveling the twisted confusion into which the Wilson Administration has thrown almost every important feature of governmental policy.  But the Congress must not permit itself only to do this work.  It must itself keep its eyes on the future and begin to build for the future.  The great war has put us in a new world.  In this new world we must resolutely cling to the old things that were good, but we must also fearlessly adopt the new expedients imperative to bring justice under the new conditions.

The farmer, the working man and the business man are, of course, the three people upon whose welfare the welfare of all the rest of us and of the country depends.

With the farmers what is especially needed is that we shall accept their own best leadership and best thought about telling us what we are to do.  Men like Henry C.  Wallace of Iowa and Senator-Elect Capper of Kansas, and many others whom I could name, thoroughly understand the farmer; are farmers themselves; speak the farmer's language and know his needs.  What we need is to have men of this stamp set forth the farmers' viewpoint; and the rest of us must intelligently appreciate this viewpoint, and so far as possible embody in legislation what men of this stamp regard as the salient needs.  It is very earnestly to be hoped that a determined effort will be made to send to both houses of Congress men who are farmers and who out of their own experience can speak of the farmers' need.  There is much that should be done by government, and by preference by the national government, to prevent hold-up actions at the expense of the farmer in marketing his produce.  But even more can be done ' by cooperation among the farmers themselves.  The extraordinary success of the Illinois farmers in acquiring, owning and operating the grain elevators is a lesson of the utmost importance to all our people; the present head of the State Agricultural Department of Illinois was a leader in the work of bringing it about.  Experience in the past has taught us to look with grave suspicion upon the entry into politics of such a farmers' association.  The Non-Partisan League received much of its support because of the fact that there were serious grievances of which the farmer had a right to complain and with which the old parties had failed adequately to deal.  The bulk of the leadership of the association however, speedily took a position that rendered it impossible for self-respecting Americans to support them, as they verged dangerously near downright disloyalty in international relations, and in home affairs sought to establish close relations with the I.  W.  W., and preached a malicious class hatred of the exact type which has brought Russia to ruin.  It can not too often be said that the man who seeks to arouse malignant class hatred in this country is exactly as dangerous a character as the man who tries to subject us to a foreign power.  He is guilty of moral treason to the Republic.  The farmer is emphatically the producer.  He has not had a square deal.  He has not been put in the position to which he is entitled.  If he is not given the right kind of leadership he will follow the wrong kind of leadership, and therefore it behooves the Republican party in Congress to get men competent to speak for the farmer, and to make an earnest affirmative effort to start this nation on a course of policy which will put the farmers of this nation on a level never elsewhere attained.

Of equal importance with the farm situation is the labor situation.  We must never again permit the wage worker to be looked upon primarily as a mere cog in the industrial machine.  He must be looked upon as a citizen; given every chance possible to do the best that he can do, and held to a strict accountability if he refuses to do it.  Of course, labor must have the right to collective bargaining.  Moreover, we should endeavor cautiously to introduce a system of representation on the directorates, so that labor shall have its voice just as much as those who furnish the capital and those who furnish the management.  I am, of course, entirely aware that this process can only succeed to the degree in which the workers themselves prove their ability to select and reward the right type of leadership and to combine full consideration for the rights of others with insistence on their own rights.  Most emphatically every effort should be made to keep up the wages of labor and, above all, not to let them be thrust down faster than the prices of things which labor needs and has to pay for.  The eight-hour day should become the standard industrial day in all lines of work; there must be certain exceptions, but these should be treated as exceptions.  There should be some federal control of itinerant and seasoned labor under a federal employment bureau.  This is the type of labor which is in least satisfactory condition and which makes the I.  W.  W.  possible.  It should be carefully studied and action taken toward the end that we finally eliminate this type of labor altogether by arranging our agricultural and industrial status so as to absorb this labor all the year round.  Of course, it would need a number of years to accomplish this purpose.  We should spend hundreds of millions of dollars reclaiming land for the returning soldier and arranging labor bureaus so that he may be certain to have every chance to work.  The man who has gone into the army should be given in peculiar fashion the best chance that this country affords to become a farmer, or to work at his trade or profession.  If possible he should be encouraged to become a farmer, in accordance with some such plan as that proposed by Secretary Lane.  Old-age pensions and accident and involuntary unemployment insurance should, of course, become part of our settled policy.  The industrious and thrifty worker should be guaranteed the self-respect of honorable independence and of an assured future.

The immigration policy can not be considered apart from the labor policy.  We should have an infinitely more drastic method of exclusion of undesirable immigrants, and we should begin an active course of education and distribution among the immigrants that are admitted.  The most rigid steps should be taken to prevent any people of the Bolshevist type from coming here.  They are not in the least grateful for being allowed to come.  They add to the sum of misery, discontent and anarchy, and they do no good to themselves or to any one else.  Our prime purpose should be to maintain the living and working standards of the American working people.  No immigrant should be admitted here who would lower those standards, and this is especially true of the next few years, when we wish to see our working men retain what they have gotten, and our returned soldiers taken care of.

Business and labor can not be considered separately.  It is quite impossible permanently to elevate labor if business does not pay, and if the payment the business gets is not equitably divided with labor there is no use whatever of having it.  We ought to set our faces against any restriction of production, or any requirement that the good and skillful workman be kept down to the level of the incompetent or the lazy.  But we ought also to insist, and wherever necessary to guarantee by government action, that an equitable share of the increased work done by the skillful man go to that man himself.  To secure justice along these and many other lines there must be government control; but government control can not accomplish anything if it disregards the axioms of industrial production and success.  The first essential for successful government control is care for the thing controlled.  Our recent experience with the railroads is enough to show us this.  Fifteen and twenty years ago there was a riot of uncontrolled and greedy individualism in the railway business in this country.  It had to be stopped, and was stopped.  Then, as so often happens, in a reaction against bad conduct there was refusal to do justice.  There was refusal to allow the railroads to make the profit necessary if the needed amount of money was to be invested, and to make the combinations necessary if their work was to be done efficiently.  The war came — the railroads were taken over.  An immense increase of rates was at once made, and, of course, combinations were encouraged in every way.  Wages were raised with great rapidity.  But the net result has been utterly bewildering to everybody; the original situation was bad; some of the experimentation has been equally bad; and the President himself, after one and one-half years' experience, says he does not know what to suggest, and throws the problem back on, Congress.  Of course, and properly, the workers wish at least to retain wages at their present standard.  They can only do it if they give very efficient service, and, furthermore, if the business conditions are such as to make the railways prosper.  If they don't prosper, then neither government ownership nor individual ownership will result in benefit to the working man.  My own preference is for a unified system of transportation under about as close government supervision as that exercised over the Federal National Banks under the Federal Reserve Banking Act.  But the government can not fix rates unless it makes full allowance for, and if necessary takes part in, fixing the costs.  I earnestly hope that wages can be kept up for every man who has done his full duty during the last year and a half in whatever his work was — railroading, shipyards, munition plants.  If he was foreman of a gang of riveters and has driven more rivets than ever before, I should regard it as a calamity to have his wages reduced; but if he has driven only half the number of rivets for an increased wage, or worked only four hours a day, or only three days a week, then I am utterly indifferent as to his wages being reduced.

It is impossible in an article like this to even touch on most of the questions ahead of us.

Take the merchant marine, for instance.  We should provide for it in permanent fashion, and the government should control it rigidly and be able when necessity arises to dictate the character of tonnage and the destination of ships quickly and without question; of course, personally I should prefer that this be done under private ownership.  And there should be no further delay in giving the women the right to vote by federal amendment.  It is an absurdity longer to haggle about the matter.
Speech or Document 32

BRING THE FIGHTING MEN HOME

ON JANUARY 2, 1919, COLONEL ROOSEVELT DICTATED THIS ARTICLE TO HIS SECRETARY WHO TOOK IT TO HIM ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 4.  ONE OF THE LAST THINGS HE DID ON THE SUNDAY EVENING BEFORE HIS DEATH WAS TO CORRECT THE TYPEWRITTEN COPY.  IT APPEARED IN THE METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE IN MARCH, 1919

OUR army abroad is composed of three elements.  The first includes the officers and men who have entered the regular army as a permanent profession.  These men's homes are in the regular army wherever it may be and they are indifferent as to where they are ordered, and the best among them accept the Philippines, or Mexican Border, or Panama with like equanimity.  There are, second, the volunteers.  These include the national guard regiments and also very many men who went into the regular regiments and the drafted divisions because thereby they could quickest get to the other side.  These men entered for the one great purpose of beating Germany to her knees and winning the war.  Third, the drafted men.  These were drafted under a law specially devised to provide for fighting this great war through to a successful ending.  Congress never would have passed such a law if there had been any thought of permitting the men to be kept away from their ordinary business and from the task of earning their livelihood for themselves and those dependent upon them in order to take part in obscure European contests as to which the American people as a whole has little interest or information.

There are in this country, however, many regulars and many volunteers who did not get over into the fighting, who bitterly regret this fact and who would welcome the chance to see some service overseas under the American flag no matter what form it might take.

There are plenty of politicians willing to go to any maudlin extreme in praising our soldiers when they don't have to translate the praise into anything effective.  But there has been altogether too much acquiescence in the really scandalous failure of our Administration to see that the soldiers are promptly paid, that the allotments to their dependent relatives are promptly issued, that such a simple thing as getting them their mail is efficiently done and that reasonable expedition is shown in letting their kinsfolk at home know when they are killed or wounded.  There have been the queerest abuses in the refusal to allow the promotions whether for doughboys, medical men or any other which have been recommended by and on behalf of the men actually on the firing line.  But the most serious grievance is the proposal which has appeared in the public press from both the State and War Departments and indeed the Navy Department also to the effect that it might be a year or two before our men were brought home because they would be needed to police Europe and preserve order.

Now, as regards Russia.  I can not speak with decision because neither I nor any one else knows what has been promised explicitly or implicitly by the Administration — and I am by no means certain that the Administration itself knows.  We must keep our promises.  But it does seem exceedingly silly to have our gallant boys waging a midwinter campaign south of Archangel for objects which President Wilson has with determined furtiveness kept to himself.  Surely the men at Archangel can be brought home.  In Siberia, however, the case is different.  The Administration has waged war in Siberia with the maximum of fatuity.  We went in to aid the heroic Czechoslovaks.  We took no really efficient steps to aid them, but we did do enough to make the Bolshevists, who unquestionably at the moment represent the majority of the Russian people — feel that we are their armed enemies.  In fact the Administration in Siberia went on the theory of the back-woodsman, who, seeing a black object in the twilight, fired so as to hit it if it was a bear and miss it if it was a calf.  This is never a plan that is conducive to good marksmanship.  If fifty thousand troops under General Wood had been sent to Siberia last April, the American, Czecho-Slovak and allied line would now have been west of the Urals, and possibly in Moscow.  But we sent an insufficient force too late and we wouldn't permit that force to do anything.  Now, most emphatically we must keep our engagements.  Under no consideration must we abandon the Czecho-Slovaks and the Siberians who have trusted to our promises, nor need there be any difficulty about sending over plenty of troops to their aid.  The regular army and any number of volunteers would eagerly go.  I emphatically disbelieve in any proposal to conquer Russia with an alien army and order her to set up the sort of Government which we think the Russians ought to have.  Such an army tends to unite all the people of the country against it simply because it is foreign.  We should give all the means and arms that we can to the Russians who are our allies and who have been anti-German and to whom we have been committed.  If, as they say, the majority of the people are with them, then they will upset the Bolsheviki.  But we have finished the great war with Germany, the war which brought about our interference in Russia.  I do not believe in keeping our men on the other side to patrol the Rhine, or police Russia, or interfere in Central Europe or the Baltic Peninsula.  At the peace table it is to be presumed we shall give to each nationality all the aid we can in peaceful fashion.  But I do not believe that the United States should enter into a world-wide career of disinterested violence for the right; because where both the lands and the issues involved are remote from us our people wouldn't know with certainty where the right lay and wouldn't feel that we ought to go into the quarrel.  We have enough to do that is our business.  Mexico is our Baltic Peninsula and during the last five years, thanks largely to Mr.  Wilson's able assistance, it has been reduced to a condition as hideous as that of the Balkan Peninsula under Turkish rule.  We are in honor bound to remedy this wrong and to keep ourselves so prepared that the Monroe Doctrine, especially as regards the lands in any way controlling the approach to the Panama Canal, shall be accepted as immutable international law.

Speech or Document 33

SAYINGS OF THEODORE ROOSEVELT

FROM THE OUTSET OF HIS PUBLIC LIFE, COLONEL ROOSEVELT WAS NOTED FOR HIS ABILITY TO SCORE HIS POINT WITH CLARITY AND POSITIVENESS.  MANY OF HIS EPIGRAMMATIC UTTERANCES, SUCH AS THE FOLLOWING HAVE BECOME COINS CURRENT IN THE LANGUAGE:

I INTEND to vote the Republican Presidential ticket.  A man can not act both without and within the party; he can do either, but he can not possibly do both.  Each course has its advantages, and each has its disadvantages, and one can not take the advantages or the disadvantages separately.  I went in with my eyes open to do what I could within the party; I did my best and got beaten, and I propose to stand by the result.— From a statement in 1884, when Roosevelt was twenty-five years of age, during the Blaine-Cleveland campaign.  Roosevelt had supported Edmunds for the nomination against Blaine.

A man who is good enough to shed his blood for the country is good enough to be given a square deal afterwards.—From the "Life of Benton," 1886.

The man who becomes Europeanized, who loses his power of doing good work on this side of the water and who loses his love for his native land is not a traitor, but he is a silly and undesirable citizen.—From " American Ideals," 1897.

Unquestionably no community that is actually diminishing in numbers is in a healthy condition, and as the world is now, with huge waste places still to fill up with much of the competition between the races reducing itself to the warfare of the cradle, no race has any chance to win a great place unless it consists of good breeders as well as of good fighters.—From "American Ideals," 1897.

We do not wish, in politics, in literature, or in art, to develop that unwholesome parochial spirit, that overexaltation of the little community at the expense of the great nation, which produces what has been described as the patriotism of the village, the patriotism of the belfry.  .  .  .  The patriotism of the village or the belfry is bad, but the lack of all patriotism is even worse.— From "American Ideals," 1897.

Peace is a goddess only when she comes with a sword girt on thigh.—From "American Ideals," 1897

I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life, the life of toil and effort, of labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.— From " The Strenuous Life," 1900.

When at the White House

The mechanism of modern business is so delicate that extreme care must be taken not to interfere with it in a spirit of rashness or ignorance.  Many of those who have made it their vocation to denounce the great industrial combinations, which are popularly, although with technical inaccuracy, known as “trusts," appeal especially to hatred and fear.  These are precisely the two emotions, particularly when combined with ignorance, which unfit men for the exercise of cool and steady judgment.—From first annual message, December 3, 1901.

When home ties are loosened, when men and women cease to regard a worthy family life, with all its duties fully performed, and all its responsibilities lived up to, as the life best worth living; then evil days for the commonwealth are at hand.  There are regions in our land, and classes of our population, where the birth rate has sunk below the death rate.  Surely it should need no demonstration to show that willful sterility is, from the standpoint of the human race, the one sin for which the penalty is national death, race death; a sin for which there is no atonement.—From sixth annual message, December 3, 1906.

As I emphatically disbelieve in seeing Harvard or any other college turn out mollycoddles instead of vigorous men, I may add that I do not in the least object to a sport because it is rough.— From a speech at Cambridge, Mass., February 23, 1907.

This nation should help in every practicable way in the education of the Chinese people, so that the vast and populous Empire of China may gradually adapt itself to modern conditions.  .  .  .  Our educators should, so far as possible, take concerted action to this end.—From seventh annual message, December 3, 1907.

There is no moral difference between gambling at cards or in lotteries or on race track and gambling in the stock market.  One method is just as pernicious to the body politic as the other kind, and in degree the evil worked is far greater.  —From special message, January 31, 1908.

There is a homely old adage which runs: " Speak softly and carry a big stick: you will go far." If the American Nation will speak softly, and yet build, and keep at a pitch of the highest training a thoroughly efficient navy, the Monroe Doctrine will go far.—From addresses and messages.

Let us all strive, according to our ability and as far as conditions will permit, to secure to the man of one color who behaves uprightly and honestly, with thrift and with foresight, the same opportunity for reward and for living his life under the protection of the law and without molestation by outsiders, that would be his if he were of an other color.  The avenues of employments should be open to one as to the other; the protection of the laws should be guaranteed to one as to the other.— From a speech at Washington, November 26, 1908.

What He Said in Europe

The deadening effect on any race of the adoption of a logical and extreme socialistic system could not be overstated; it would spell sheer destruction; it would produce grosser wrong and outrage, fouler immorality than any existing system.  But this does not mean that we may not with great advantage adopt certain of the principles proposed by some given set of men who happen to call themselves Socialists; to be afraid to do so would be to make a mark of weakness on our part.— From the Sorbonne address, April 23, 1910.

One of the prime dangers of civilization has always been its tendency to cause the loss of the virile fighting qualities, of the fighting edge.  When men get too comfortable and lead too luxurious lives, there is always danger lest the softness eat like an acid into their manliness of fiber.  The barbarian, because of the very conditions of his life, is forced to keep and develop certain hardy qualities which the man of civilization tends to lose, whether he be clerk, factory hand, merchant, or even a certain type of farmer.— University of Berlin address, May 12, 1910.

In our complex industrial civilization of today the peace of righteousness and justice, the only kind of peace worth having, is at least as necessary in the industrial world as it is among nations.  There is at least as much need to curb the cruel greed and arrogance of part of the world of capital, to curb the cruel greed and violence of part of the world of labor, as to check a cruel and unhealthy militarism in international relationships.— From the University of Berlin address, May 12, 1910.

There are certain problems which both of us [Great Britain and America] have to solve, and as to which our standards should be the same.  The Englishman, the man of the British Isles in his various homes across the sea, and the American, both at home and abroad are brought into contact with utterly alien peoples, some with a civilization more ancient than our own, others still in, or having but recently arisen from, the barbarism which our people left behind ages ago.

It would be foolish indeed to pay heed to the unwise persons who desire disarmament to be begun by the very people who, of all others, should not be left helpless before any possible foe.  But we must reprobate quite as strongly both the leaders and the peoples who practice, or encourage, or condone, aggression and iniquity by the strong at the expense of the weak.  We should tolerate lawlessness and wickedness neither by the weak nor by the strong; and both weak and strong we should in return treat with scrupulous fairness.— From an address at Oxford University, England, June 7, 1910.

The New Nationalism

All that the new Nationalism means is the application of certain old-time moralities to the changed conditions of the day.  I wish to see greater governmental efficiency because we have to deal with greater business efficiency.  Simple laws are all that are necessary in small communities where there is no big business and each man works for himself.  When you get masses of wealth gathered together and great corporations developing, conditions then become so changed that there must be an increase in governmental activity to control the wealth for business efficiency.  I would not do wrong to the great corporation, but I don't intend to rely only on the big corporation's good nature to see that the corporation doesn't do harm against us.  I want to see such control of the wealth now gathered for business uses as to favor the honest man who uses the wealth genuinely for the service of the public and to make the dishonest man feel that he has to do what is right; and if he doesn't feel it, we shall see to it that he does.  That is my whole creed.— From speech at Riverhead, L.  I., September 15, 1910.

So long as I have any influence left I shall protest against arbitration between this and any other country which will not keep its agreements.  Arbitration is all well enough under favorable conditions, but not otherwise.  It isn't right to arbitrate with a country when you know that that country will not keep an agreement if it comes to a pinch.

If you think that the people of the United States want universal peace arbitration I suggest that you go to California and investigate conditions.  I have no use for liars, national, international, or those found in private life.— From a speech in Arlington Cemetery, May 31, 1911.

I am in this fight for certain principles, and the first and most important of these goes back to Sinai, and is embodied in the commandment, " Thou shalt not steal," " Thou shalt not steal a nomination." Thou shalt neither steal in politics nor in business.  Thou shalt not steal from the people the birthright of the people to rule themselves.

I hold, in the language of the Kentucky Court of Appeals, that “stealing is stealing." No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.  No truly honest man should be satisfied with an office to which his title is not as valid as that of the homestead which shelters his family.— From a speech in Chicago, June 22, 1912.

For the Protection of Labor

In the last twenty years an increasing percentage of our people have come to depend on industry for their livelihood, so that today the wage workers in industry rank in importance side by side with the tiller of the soil.  As a people we can not afford to let any group of citizens, any individual citizen, live or labor under conditions which are injurious to the common welfare.  Industry, therefore, must submit to such public regulation as will make it a means of life and health, not of death or inefficiency.  We must protect the crushable elements at the base of our present industrial structure.— From a speech in Chicago, August 6, 1912.

During the last half of the nineteenth century the leaders of reaction in the United States, political and financial alike, gradually grew to recognize in the judiciary their most powerful potential ally.  There was very little actual corruption on the bench; on the contrary, our Judges have been, on the whole, both able and upright public servants, standing on a level probably higher than that of any other civil servants of the Government.  But their whole training and the aloofness of their position on the bench prevent their having, as a rule, any real knowledge of, or understanding sympathy with, the lives and needs of the ordinary hard-working toiler.— From a speech at Santiago, Chile, November 22, 1913.

It seems to me that we should realize with the keenest gratitude how much we owe to the fact that by steady application of the Monroe Doctrine this country has succeeded in preventing the colonization of this continent by the great military Old World powers.  If it had not been for the existence of that doctrine, and its support by this Government under Presidents of all shades of political belief, the great military nations of the Old World would unquestionably long ere this have possessed masses of territory in the western hemisphere.  In such case nothing under heaven could have prevented our being involved in European struggles like the present.  We would also in such case be under the crushing burden of immense armaments in time of peace, a burden the bearing of which has grown more enormous year by year in Europe.  Well meaning and amiable but shortsighted persons have from time to time protested against the Monroe Doctrine and said it was outworn.  I wish these good persons would seriously consider the present contest and realize that if it had not been for the Monroe Doctrine in the past, and if the Monroe Doctrine were at this moment abandoned, the United States would, in all probability, have been drawn into the present dreadful struggle.— From a speech at Hartford.  Conn., August 15, 1914.

It is the country's duty to put itself into such shape that it will be able to defend its rights if they are invaded.  I myself have seen the plans of at least two empires now involved in the war to capture our great cities and hold them for ransom because our standing army is too weak to protect them.  I have seen plans prepared deliberately to take both San Francisco and New York and hold them for ransom that would cripple our country and give funds to the enemy for carrying on the war.— From a speech at Trenton, N.  J., October 30, 1914.

Criticism of the Wilson Administration

To the extent of my power I supported Mr.  Wilson either by silence or by open championship as long as there was the remotest chance that in standing by him as President I was also standing by the honor and interest of the country.  I construed every doubt, both as regards Mexico, as regards Germany, and as regards Belgium, in his favor, often against my innermost convictions, as long as it was possible to do so.
I insisted to myself and to others that President Wilson doubtless had some definite plan; that he doubtless had sources of information unknown to the outside public which rendered proper his course, both as regards Mexico and Belgium, until I became convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that such was not the case; that he had no secret facts at his command, other than corroborative of the facts known to me and to all other intelligent men, and that he had no plan whatever save by adroit elocution to cover inaction and refusal to perform national and international duty.  — From an article in The Metropolitan Magazine, May, 1915.

We have been culpably, well nigh criminally, remiss as a nation in not preparing ourselves during this year; and if, with the lessons taught the world by the dreadful tragedies of the last twelve months, we continue with soft complaisance to stand helpless and naked before the world, we shall excite only contempt and derision, if, and when, disaster ultimately overwhelms us.— From a speech in San Francisco, July 21, 1915.

Professional pacifists, the peace-at-any-price, non-resistance, universal arbitration people are seeking to Chinafy this country.— From a speech in San Francisco, July 21, 1915.

During the last year this nation has negotiated some thirty all-inclusive peace treaties by which it is agreed that if any issue arises, no matter of what kind, between itself and any other nation, it would take no final steps about it until a commission of investigation had discussed the matter for a year.  This was an explicit promise in each case that if American women were raped and American men were murdered, as had actually occurred in Mexico, or American men, women, and children drowned on the high seas, as in the case of the Gulflight and Lusitania, or if a foreign power secured and fortified Magdalena Bay or the Island of St.  Thomas, we would appoint a commission and listen to a year's conversation before taking action.— From a speech in San Francisco, July 21, 1915.

Before We Entered the War

Unfortunately it is evident that many of our public men are afraid of Germany, afraid of the professional German-American vote, and are willing to sacrifice the honor of this country to their fears.  There is practically no French-American or English-American vote; and these politicians therefore feel that they can act against England and France with safety — and their motto is safety first.— From a speech in Brooklyn, January 30, 1916.

Now you can have universal training or you can have voluntary training, but when you use the word “voluntary “after” universal “you are using a weasel word which sucks the meaning out.

These are weasel words.— From a speech in St.  Louis, May 31, 1916.

I believe in democratic training, where the multi-millionaire and the son of the bricklayer will be in the same dog tent, and then have the best one of the bunch, whether the multi-millionaire's son or the bricklayer's son, made the officer.  —From a speech in Oyster Bay, July 4, 1916.

Instead of speaking softly and carrying a big stick, President Wilson spoke bombastically and carried a dishrag.— From a speech at Louisville, October 19, 1916.

President Wilson has seen the Mexicans during these three and a half years become socially, politically, and morally bankrupt.  He has not helped Mexico.  He has ruined Mexico.  The jungle is creeping over the great plantations.  The cattle on the ranches have been wantonly and wastefully slaughtered.  The thoroughbred stock farms which were the work of decades have been destroyed.  Irrigation plants are out of service, railroad terminals have been burnt, rolling stock and locomotives broken up and damaged beyond repair.  Mines that furnished employment to scores of thousands are standing idle.  The National Treasury has been emptied.  A paper currency, debased and worthless, has been substituted for the nation's money.  All the means of an orderly, economic life have been destroyed.  An epidemic of typhus rages that twice has menaced the health of our border cities.  The country no longer produces sufficient foodstuffs.  Actual starvation is upon the people.  Sixty thousand white men, who were one of the great civilizing and developing forces of Mexico, are in exile.— From a speech at Phoenix, Ariz., October 22, 1916.

You say that hereafter nobody shall be neutral as respects the disturbance of the world's peace for an object which the world's opinion can not sanction.  What do you mean by this, Mr.  Wilson? Why do you delay action to the future when you had The Hague Convention to warrant action in the present when Belgium's neutrality was invaded, her cities despoiled, her men and women slaughtered? ...  If you mean what you say as to the future, then you must mean precisely and exactly that this is your duty in the present.  Do it now, Mr.  President.  It is sheer hypocrisy to chatter ten days before election as to what ought to be done in the future when throughout your whole term of office you have failed in the present to do what you now say is your duty.— From a speech in Brooklyn, October 29, 1916.

I criticize him [Wilson] now because he has adroitly and cleverly and with sinister ability appealed to all that is weakest and most unworthy in the American character; and also because he has adroitly and cleverly and with sinister ability sought to mislead many men and women who are neither weak nor unworthy, but who have been misled by a shadow dance of words.  He has made our statesmanship a thing of empty elocution.  He has covered his fear of standing for the right behind a veil of rhetorical phrases.  He has wrapped the true heart of the nation in a spangled shroud of rhetoric.  He has kept the eyes of the people dazzled so that they know not what is real and what is false, so that they turn bewildered, unable to discern the difference between the glitter that veneers evil and the stark realities of courage and honesty, of truth and strength.  In the face of the world he has covered this nation's face with shame as with a garment.— From a speech at Cooper Union, November 2, 1916.

I care little for the cubist school in patriotism.  The effort to be original or being fantastic is always cheap.  Second-rate work is always second-rate, even if it is done badly.— From a speech on "Nationalism in Literature and Art," November 15, 1916.

After We Entered the War

The war has clearly raised two problems, the problem of the present, which is to help our allies to win this war by endeavoring in every way now to offset the effect of our utter failure to prepare in advance ; and the permanent problem, the problem of defense against a future — perhaps a distant, perhaps an immediately impending future — attack upon us when we have no allies ; the problem of preparing our strength as a permanent policy so that never again shall we be caught as shamefully unprepared as now, so that never again shall we be forced as at present to owe our safety purely to the valor of our allies and not to our own courage and strength, — From a speech at the county fair at Chatham, N.  Y., September 5,

Much has been said about our being against the German Government but not against the German people.  The attitude of the German-American press and the German Alliance in this country in their hearty support of the German Government and the practically unanimous support of that Government heretofore by the Germans at home shows that at present the Germans are back of the German Government.  They have enthusiastically supported its policy of brutal disregard of the rights of others.  Until they reverse themselves, until they cast off the yoke of militaristic autocracy, they identify themselves with it and force us to be against them.

It is for the German people themselves to differentiate themselves from their Government.  Until they do this they force us to be against the German people as a necessary incident of being against the German Government.— From a speech at Kansas City, Mo., September 24, 1917.

America is not to be made a polyglot boarding house for money hunters of twenty different nationalities who have changed their former country for this country only as farm-yard beasts change one feeding trough for another.  America is a nation.  No man has any right to come here and no man should be permitted to stay here unless he becomes an American and nothing else.  Be loyal to the principles established by Washington and his fellows in 1776 and perpetuated by Lincoln and his fellows in 1861 and 1865.  We must have in this country only one flag, and that flag the American flag; only one language, the English language, the language of the Declaration of Independence, Washington's Farewell Address, Lincoln's Gettysburg speech and the second inaugural ; and but one loyalty, that to the United States.  — From a speech to munition workers at Bridgeport, Conn., November 3, 1917.

We must accept no peace except the peace of overwhelming victory.  To accept an inconclusive peace would mean that the whole war would have to be fought over again by ourselves or our children.  To accept an inconclusive peace would really mean to work for a German victory.  Those who now demand such a peace are not only the enemies of America, but of democracy throughout the world, and stand on the level of the Bolsheviki, who have betrayed both Russia and her allies to the militaristic and capitalistic autocracy of the Hohenzollerns.— From a speech before Ohio Society of New York, January 12, 1918.

But I believe that the great majority of my fellow-countrymen, when they finally take the trouble to think on the problem at all, will refuse to consent to or acquiesce in the Chinafication of this country.  I believe that they will refuse to follow those who would make right helpless before might, who would put a pigtail on Uncle Sam, and turn the Goddess of Liberty into a pacifist female huckster clutching a bag of dollars, which she has not the courage to guard against aggression.— From a speech at Chicago, April 29, 1918.

You stand up when " The Star-Spangled Banner " is sung, not because of men who previously sang it, but because of the men who stood the bombardment through the night — for the man who stood up to the killing and did the killing when the need came.  That is why you are proud to be Americans now.  Talking amounts to less than nothing, save just to the degree in which it is turned into action, and in this country of ours the man who is not only ready to fight for it, but to fit himself to fight for it, the man who has not raised himself to be a soldier, and the woman who has not raised her boy to be a soldier for the right — neither one of them is entitled to citizenship in the Republic.  Universal suffrage, to justify itself, must be based on universal service.  It is only you and your kind who have the absolutely clear title to the management of this Republic.— From a speech to soldiers at Camp Upton, November 18, 1917.

I ask that we in this generation prove ourselves the spiritual heirs both of the men who wore the blue and of the men who wore the gray.  But I make no appeal to the memory of the Copperhead pacifists who put peace above duty, who put love of ease and love of money-getting before devotion to country, and whose convictions were too weak to stir to action their tepid souls.  —From a speech in Kansas City, May 30, 1918.

Fifty-Fifty Americanism

As regards Americanism, we must insist that there be in this country but one nationality, the American nationality.  There must be no perpetuation in this country of separate national groups, with their separate languages and special loyalties to alien overseas flags.  There can be no fifty-fifty Americanism in this country.  There is room here for only 100 per cent.  Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.  We must have loyalty to only one flag, the American flag; and it is disloyal to the American flag to try to be loyal to any other, whether that other is a foreign flag or the black and red flag, which symbolize either anarchy or else treacherous hostility to a war for which the nation stands.  — From a speech at Republican Convention at Saratoga, July 19, 1918.

Two prime purposes of the American people at this time having precedence of all others are: First, to insist upon the absolute and thorough going Americanization of our entire citizenship; and, second, to win the war; to win it as speedily as possible, and end it by the peace of overwhelming victory, a peace which shall guarantee to us, and to our allies, and to all the well-behaved nations of the civilized world, lasting relief from the threat and horror of German world dominion.— From a speech before Republican Convention at Saratoga, N.  Y., July 19, 1918.
The End

A concluding word from Robert J.  Kuniegel

TR AMERICAN PATRIOT hopes you enjoy our books.  Theodore Roosevelt lived his life in a manner that is the only way possible to make government responsive to the people.  He has written how to make meaningful reform possible not only for his generation but for future generations, if we read what he has said.  We only need to interest others in reading what he has said to transform our government. 

Reading the books on TR AMERICAN PATRIOT DOT COM  and having others do the same, will develop citizens and leaders capable of transforming American politics into a system of government that will be honest, and responsive to “a square deal”.  A square deal has no special deals for the rich, the middle class, or the poor.  Our government today has degenerated into a system that rewards citizens for not being productive.  It promotes entitlements under the guise of helping people, when in fact it only helps politicians to protect their own royal positions.  Policies that foster a special privileged class was the type of government policies Theodore Roosevelt fought against and won.  He was a visionary.  He knew this fight would need to be fought through the ages if we were to keep our country strong.  He was an intrepid pioneer that blazed a trail through a jungle of corrupt government, so that others might follow his proven and highly successful common sense approach toward honest government.  His fearless course helped make America a beacon of hope to all that seek justice.  His endless devotion to America helped make America a super power that no just nation has needed to fear as long as our citizens value his lofty resolute square deal policy toward our fellow citizens and those of other nations. 

Theodore Roosevelt’s greatest gift to this country is before us.  It is not in the past, if we as Americans recognize that his message is not just a story from American history pages.  His message is an example, clearly defined.  It details actions that are required if we desire to do something meaningful for our country.  Join the good fight today.  You only need to read and interest others to do the same.  

David Boyd, repeating what he had read, once said, “The person we become is because of our experiences in life, the people we meet, and the books we read. ” It is time to have others meet Theodore Roosevelt.  It is time for a Theodore Roosevelt revival, “Fear God and do your own part”.  Dare to help make Theodore Roosevelt the standard and not the exception.  America needs to adopt a wise, fearless and honest role model as the standard we revere, so that our public servants know what we expect.  The first step to honest government is no harder than setting proper standards of conduct for our public servants through the use of a proper role model.  Can you find one quality in Theodore Roosevelt that is not right in a public servant?  If you think you can, I bet your conjecture is based upon something other than truth and honest reasoning and this American would love an opportunity to debate any such conjecture.