Author _„„ Class . E.JZ6A Book . t . Title Imprint tt*-~2?iva~J vith. Those are the terms of self-respect upon which we deal with one another as individuals, and those are the terms of self-respect upon which nations deal with one another. Because character is determined, at any rate is manifested, by what an in- dividual and a nation most quickly responJ to. I have never found audiences in America responding to any doctrine or purpose of 3 4 JLDDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. aggression, but I have found them responding instantly, as the in- strument responds to the hand of the musician, to every sentiment of justice and every ideal of liberty and every purpose, of freedom. America has not grown cold with regard to the great things for which she created a Government and a Nation, and these are the only things that stir her passion: and surely it is a handsome and elevated passion, a disinterested passion, because at its heart dwells the in- terest of every man and every Avoman within her confines. There is a further foundation for peace additional to this conception of justice and of fairness to others. That is our internal attitude toward each other. America has been hospital in an unprecedented degree to- ward all nations, all races, all creeds. She has seemed almost to desire to be made up of all the stocks and influenced by all the thoughts of the wide world. She has seemed to realize that she could be fertile only if every great impulse were planted amongst her. So she has set for herself in this process, which is still un- finished, of uniting and amalgamating these things, the problem of making disparate things live together in peace and accommodation and harmony. The peace of America depends upon the attitude of the different elements of race and thought of which she is made up toward one another. I have been deeply disturbed, gentlemen, I think every thoughtful American has been deeply disturbed, at the evidence afforded in re- cent days of the recrudescence of religious antagonisms in this coun- try. That is a very dangerous thing which cuts at the very root of the American spirit. If men do not love one another, they can not love peace. If men are intolerant of one another they will be intolerant of the processes of peace, which are the processes of accommodation. " Live and let live " is a very homely phrase, and yet it is the basis of social existence. I have neighbors whose manners and opinions I would very much like to alter, but I entertain a suspicion that they would in turn very much like to alter mine, and I am afraid that if I began the process in their direction they might insist upon it in mine; and upon reflection as I grow older I agree to live and let live. Birrell says somewhere, " The child beats its nurse and cries for the moon; the old man sips his gruel humbly and thanks God that no- body beats him." I have not yet quite reached that point of humility, and I always accept, perhaps by some impulse of my native blood, the invitation to a fight; but I hope I always conduct the fight in knightly fashion. I hope I do not traduce my antagonists. I hope that I fight them with the purpose and intention of converting them, and I know that I wish that the best argument and the right purpose shall prevail. It is not a case of knock down and drag out ; it is a case of putting up the best reason why your own side should survive. These franknesses of controversy, these knightly equalities of condition in the fight, are the necessary conditions precedent to peace. Peace does not mean inaction. There may be infinite activity: there may be almost violent activity in the midst of peace. Peace dwells, after all, in the character and in the heart, and that is where peace is rooted in this blessed country of ours. It is rooted in the hearts of the people. The only place where tinder lies, and the spark may kindle a flame, is vice stilJ deeper things he winch they love, tl e principles and independence of their own life. Let no man drop fire there. Because peace is inconsistent with the loss ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 5 of self-respect. More than that, peace is inconsistent with the aban- donment of principle. But these things are not to be thought of. These things, I pray God, may never be challenged. I mention them merely that we may frankly remind each other of the conditions under which we live. We believe in peace, but we believe also in justice and righteousness and liberty, and peace can not subsist without these. In what you have too generously praised me for, therefore, gentlemen, I have conceived myself merely as the spokesman of yourselves and of all other Americans who, like yourselves, are thoughtful of the welfare and ideals of America. These are very responsible days. I do not see how any man dares utter anything but the truth in this tense atmosphere. I do not see how any man can in conscience display narrow or partisan passion. We are all of one spiritual kith and kin, and a great family is building up here which I believe in my heart will set an example to the world of those things which elevate and purify and strengthen mankind. SEVENTH ANNUAL DINNER OF THE RAILWAY BUSINESS ASSO- CIATION, AT THE WALDORF ASTORIA, NEW YORK CITY, JANU- ARY 27, 1916. Mr. Toastmaster, Ladies, and Gentlemen : The exactions of my official duties have recently been so great that it has been very seldom indeed that I could give myself so great a pleasure as that which I am enjoying to-night. It is a great pleasure to come and be greeted in such generous fashion by men so thoughtful as yourselves and so deeply engaged in some of the most important undertakings of the Nation, and I consider it a privilege to be permitted to lay before 3^011 some of the things to which we ought to give our most careful and deliberate consideration. The question, it seems to me, which most demands clarification just now is the question to which your toastmaster has referred, the ques- tion of preparation for national defense. I say that it stands in need of clarification because it has been deeply clouded by passion and prejudice. It is very singular that a question the elements of which are so simple and so obvious should have been so beclouded by the discussion of men of high motive, men of purpose as handsome as any of us may claim and yet apparently incapable of divesting them- selves of that sort of provincialism which consists in thinking the contents of their own mind to be the contents of the mind of the world. For. gentlemen, while America is a very great Nation, while America contains every element of fine force and accomplishment, America does not constitute the major part of the world. We live in a world which we d ; d not make, which we can not alter, which we can not think into a different condition from that which actually exists. It would be n hopeless piece of provincialism to suppose that because we think differently from the rest of the world we are at liberty to assume that the rest of the world will permit us to enjoy that thought without disturbance. It is a surprising circumstance, also, that men should allow parti- san feeling or personal ambition to creep into the discussion of this 6 ADDEESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. fundamental thing. How can Americans differ about the safety of America? I, for my part, am ambitious that America should do a greater and more difficult thing than the great nations on the other side of the water have done. In all the belligerent countries men without distinction of party have drawn together to accomplish a successful prosecution of the war. Is it not a more difficult and a more desirable thing that all Americans should put partisan pre- possessions aside and draw together for the successful prosecution of peace? I covet that distinction for America; and I believe that America is going to enjoy that distinction. Only the other day the leader of the Republican minority in the House of Representatives delivered a speech which shoved that he was ready and, I take it for granted, that the men behind him were ready, to forget party lines in order that all men may act with a common mind and impulse for the service of the country: and I want upon this first public- occasion to pay my tribute of respect and obligation to him. I find it very hard indeed to approach this subject without very deep emotion, gentlemen, because when we speak of America and the things that are to be conserved in her, does it not call a wonderful picture into your mind? America is young still; she is not yet even in the heydey of her development and power. Think of the great treasures of youth and energy and ideal purpose still to be drawn from the deep sources from which this Nation has always drawn its life. Think of the service which those forces can and must render to the rest of the world. Think of the position into which America has been drawn, almost in spite of herself, by the circumstances of the present day. She alone is free to help find things wherever they show themselves in the world. She will be forced also, whether she will or not, in the decades immediately ahead of us, to furnish the world with its chief economic guidance and assistance. It is very fine to remember what ideals will be back of that assist- ance. Economic assistance in itself is not necessarily handsome. It is a legitimate thing to make money, but it is not an ideal thing to make money. Money brings with it power which may be well or ill employed, and it should be the pride of America always to employ her money to the highest purpose. Yet if we are drawn into the maelstrom that now surges across the water, swirls alike in the west- ern and eastern regions of the world, we shall not be permitted to keep a free hand to do the high things that we intend to do. It is necessary, therefore, that we should examine ourselves and see whether we can make certain that the task's imposed upon us will be performed, well performed, and performed without interruption. America has been reluctant to match her wits with the rest of the world. When I face a body of men like this it is almost incredible to remember that only yesterday they were afraid to put their wits into free competition with the world. The best brains in the world afraid to match brains with the rest of the world. We have pre- ferred to be provincial. We have preferred to stand behind pro- tecting devices. And now, whether we will or no, we are thrust out to do on a scale never dreamed of by recent generations in America the' business of the world. We can not any longer be a provincial Nation. Let no man dare to say, if he would speak the truth, that the question of preparation for national defense is a question of war or of peace. ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 7 If there is one passion more deep-seated in the hearts of our fellow countrymen than another, it is the passion for peace. No nation in the world ever more instinctively turned away from the thought of war than this Nation to which we belong. Partly because in the plentitude of its power, in the unrestricted area of its opportunities, it has found nothing to covet in the possession and power of other nations. There is no spirit of aggrandizement in America. There is no desire on the part of any thoughtful and conscientious American man to take one foot of territory from any other nation in the world. 1 myself share to the bottom of my heart that profound love for peace. I have sought to maintain peace against very great and some- times very unfair odds. I have had many a time to use every power that was in me to prevent such a catastrophe as war coming upon this country. It is not permissible for any man to say that anxiety for the defense of the Nation has in it the least tinge of desire for a power that can be used to bring on war. But, gentlemen, there is something that the American people love better than they love peace. The love the principles upon which their political life is founded. They are ready at any tims to fight for the vindication of their character and of their honor. The}' will not at any time seek the contest, but they will at no time cravenly avoid it; because if there is one thing that the individual ought to fight for, and that the Nation ought to fight for, it is the integrity of its own convictions. We can not surrender our convictions. I would rather surrender territory than surrender those ideals which are the staff of life of the soul itself. And because we hold certain ideals we have thought that it was right that we should hold them for others as well as for ourselves. America has more than once given evidence of the generosity and disinterestedness of its love of liberty. It has been willing to fight for the liberty of others as well as for its own liberty. The world sneered when we set out upon the liberation of Cuba, but the world sneers no longer. The world now knows, what it was then loath to believe, that a nation can sacrifice its own interests and its own blood for the sake of the liberty and happiness of another people. Whether by one process or another, we have made ourselves in some sort the champions of free government and national sovereignty in both continents of this hemisphere; so that there are certain obliga- tions which every American knows that we have undertaken. The first and primary obligation is the maintenance of the integ- rity of our own sovereignty. That goes as of course. There is also the maintenance of our liberty to develop our political institutions without hindrance; and, last of all, there is the determination and the obligation to stand as the strong brother of all those in this hemisphere who mean to maintain the same principles and follow the same ideals of liberty. May I venture to insert here a parenthesis? Have any of you thought of this? We have slowly, very slowly indeed, begun to win the confidence of the other States of the American hemisphere. If we should go into Mexico, do you not know what would happen? All the sympathies of the rest of America would look across the water and not northward to the great Republic which we profess to represent; and do vou not see the consequences that would ensue in every international relation? Have gentlemen who have rushed 8 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. down to Washington to insist that we should go into Mexico re- flected upon the politics of the world? Nobody seriously supposes, gentlemen, that the United States needs to fear an invasion of its own territory. What America has to fear, if she has anything to fear, are indirect"!, round-about, flank movements upon her regnant position in the Western Hemisphere. Are we going to open those gates, or are we going to close them I For they are the gates to the hearts of our American friends to the south of lis and not gates to the ports merely. Win their spirits and you have won the only sort of leadership and the only sort of safety that America covets. We must all of us think from this time out in terms of the world, and must learn what it is that America has set out to maintain as a standard bearer for all those who love liberty and justice and righteousness in political action. Bat, gentlemen, we must find means to do this thing which are suitable to the time and suitable to our own ideals. Suitable to the time — does anybody understand the time? Perhaps when you learned, as I dare say you did learn beforehand, that I was expecting to address you on the subject of preparedness, you recalled the ad- dress which I made to Congress something more than a year ago, in which I said that this question of military preparedness was not a pressing question. But more than a year has gone by since then and I would be ashamed if I had not learned something in 14 months. The minute I stop changing my mind with the change of all the circumstances of the world. I will be a back number. There is another thing about which I have changed my mind. A year ago I was not in favor of a tariff board, and I will tell you why. Then the only purpose of a tariff board was to keep alive an un- profitable controversy. If you set up any board of inquiry whose purpose it is to keep business disturbed and to make it always an open question what you are going to do about the public policy of the Government, I am opposed to it; and the very men who were dinning it into our ears that what business wanted was to be let alone were, many of them, men who were insisting that we should stir up a controversy which meant that we could not let business alone. There is a great deal more opinion vocal in this world than is consistent with logic. But the circumstances of the present time are these: There is going on in the world under our eyes an economic revolution. No man understands that revolution; no man has the elements of it clearly in his mind. No part of the business of legis- lation with regard to international trade can be undertaken until we do understand it ; and members of Congress are too busy, their duties are too maltifarious and distracting to make it possible within a sufficiently short space of time for them to master the change that is coming. I hear a great many things predicted about the end of the war, but I do not know what is going to happen at the end of the war; and neither do you. There are two diametrically opposed views as to immigration. Some men tell us that at least a million men are going to leave the country and others tell us that many millions are going to rush into it. Neither party knows what they are talking about, and 1 am one of those prudent individuals who would really like to know the facts before he forms an opinion; not out of wisdom but out of prudence. I have lived long enough to know that if I do ADDEESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 9 not, the facts will get away with me. I have come to have a great and wholesome respect for the facts. I have had to yield to them sometimes before I saw them coming and that has led me to keep a weather eye open in order that I may see them coming. There is so much to understand that we have not the data to comprehend that I for one would not dare, so far as my advice is concerned, to leave the Government without the adequate means of inquiry — but that is another parenthesis. What I am trying to impress upon you now is that the circum- stances of the world to-day are not what they were yesterday, or ever were in any of our yesterdays. And it is not certain what they will be to-morrow. I can not tell you what the international rela- tions of this country will be to-morrow, and I use the word literally; and I would not dare keep silent and let the country suppose that to- morrow was certain to be as bright as to-day. America will never be the aggressor, America will always seek to the last point at which her honor is involved to avoid the things which disturb the peace of the world ; but America does not control the circumstances of the world, and we must be sure that w T e are faithful servants of those things which we love, and are ready to defend them against every contingency that may affect or impair them. And, as I was saying a moment ago, we must seek the means which are consistent with the principles of our lives. It goes without say- ing, though apparently it is necessary to say it to some excited per- sons, that one thing that this country never will endure is a system that can be called militarism. But militarism consists in this, gen- tlemen: It consists in preparing a great machine whose only use is for war and giving it no use upon which to expend itself. Men who are in charge of edged tools and bidden to prepare them for exact and scientific use grow very impatient if they are not permitted to use them, and I do not believe that the creation of such an instru- ment is an insurance of peace. I believe that it involves the danger of all the impulses that skillful persons have to use the things that they know how to use. But we do not have to do that. America is always going to use her Army in two ways. She is going to use it for the purposes of peace, and she is going to use it as a nucleus for expansion into those things which she does believe in, namely, the preparation of her citi- zens to take care of themselves. There are two sides to the question of preparation ; there is not merely the military side, there is the industrial side; and the ideal which I have in mind is this: We ought to have in this country a great system of industrial and vo- cational education under Federal guidance and with Federal aid, in which a very large percentage of the youth of this country will be given training in the skillful use and application of the principles of science in manufacture and business; and it will be perfectly feasible and highly desirable to add to that and combine with it such a training in the mechanism and care and use of arms, in the sani- tation of camps, in the simpler forms of maneuver and organization, as will make these same men at one and the same time industrially efficient and immediately serviceable for national defense. The point about such a system will be that its emphasis will lie on the indus- trial and civil side of life, and that, like all the rest of America, the use of force will only be in the background and as the last resort. H. Doe. 803, 04-1 2 10 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. Men will think first of their families and their daily work, of their service in the economic ranks of the country, of their efficiency as artisans, and only last of all of their serviceability to the Nation as soldiers and men at arms. That is the ideal of America. But, gentlemen, you can not create such a system overnight; you can not create such a system rapidly. It has got to be built up, and I hope it will be built up, by slow and effective stages; and there is much to be done in the meantime. We must see to it that a sufficient body of citizens is given the kind of training which will make them efficient now if called into the field in case of necessity. It is dis- creditable to this country, gentlemen, for this is a country full of intelligent men, that we should have exhibited to the world the example we have sometimes exhibited to it, of stupid and brutal waste of force. Think of asking men who can be easily trained to come into the field, crude, ignorant, inexperienced, and merely fur- nishing the stuff for camp fever and the bullets of the enemy. The sanitary experience of our Army in the Spanish-American War was merely an indictment of America's indifference to the manifest les- sons of experience in the matter of ordinary, careful preparation. We have got the men to waste, but God forbid that we should waste them. Men who go as efficient instruments of national honor into the field afford a very handsome spectacle indeed. Men who go in crude and ignorant boys only indict those in authority for stupidity and neglect. So it seems to me that it is our manifest duty to have a proper citizen reserve. I am not forgetting our National Guard. I have had the privilege of being governor of one of our great States, and there I was brought into association with what I am glad to believe is one of the most efficient portions of the National Guard of the Nation. I learned to admire the men, to respect the officers, and to believe in the Na- tional Guard ; and I believe that it is the duty of Congress to do very much more for the National Guard than it has ever done heretofore. I believe that that great arm of our national defense should be built up and encouraged to the utmost; but, you know, gentlemen, that under the Constitution of the United States the National Guard is under the direction of more than twoscore States; that it is not per- mitted to the National Government directly to have a voice in its development and organization ; and that only upon occasion of actual invasion has the President of the United States the right to ask those men to leave their respective States. I, for my part, am afraid, though some gentlemen differ with me, that there is no way in which that force can be made a direct resource as a national reserve under na- tional authority. What we need is a body of men trained in association with units of the Army, a body of men organized under the immediate direction of the national authority, a body of men subject to the immediate call to arms of the national authority, and yet men not put into the ranks of the Regular Army; men left to their tasks of civil life, men supplied with equipment and training, but not drawn away from the peaceful pursuits which have made America great and must keep her great. I am not a partisan of any one plan. I have had too much experience to think that it is right to say that the plan that I propose is the only plan that will work, because I have a shrewd suspicion that there may be other plans that will work. What I. am after, and what every ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. H American ought to insist upon, is a body of at least half a million trained citizens who will serve under conditions of danger as an immediately available national reserve. I am not saying anything about the Navy to-night, because for some reason there is not the same controversy about the Navy that there is about the Army. The Navy is obvious and easily understood; the Army apparently is very difficult to comprehend and understand. We have a traditional prejudice against armies which makes us stop think- ing calmly the minute we begin talking about them. We suppose that all armies are alike and that there can not be an American Army system, that it must be a European system, and that is what I for one am trying to divest my own mind of. The Navy is so obvious an instrument of national defense that I believe that, with differ- ences of opinion about the detail, it is not going to be difficult to carry out a proper and reasonable program for the increase of the- Navy. But that is another story; my theme to-night is national defense on land where we seem most negligent of it. And I do not want to leave in your minds the impression that I have any anxiety as to the outcome, for I have not the slightest. There is only one way for parties and individuals to win the confidence of this Nation and that is by doing the things that ought to be done. Nobody is going to be deceived. Speeches are not going to win elections. The facts are going to speak for themselves and speak louder than anybody who controverts them. No political party, no group of men, can afford to disappoint America. This is a year of political accounting, and the Americans in politics are rather expert accountants. They know what the books contain and they are not going to be deceived about them. No man is going to hide behind any excuse; the goods must be delivered or the confidence will not be enjoyed. For my part, I hope that every man in public life will get what is coming to him. If this is true, gentlemen, it is because of things that lie much deeper than laughter, much deeper than cheers; lie down at the very roots of our life. America refuses to be deceived about the things that most concern her natioanl honor and national safety, that lie at the foundation of everything that you love. It is the solemn time when men must examine not only their purposes but their hearts. Men must purge themselves of individual ambition, and must see to it that they are ready for the utmost self-sacrifice in the interests of the common welfare. Let no man dare play the marplot. Let no man dare bring partisan passion into these great things. Let men honestly debate the facts and courageously act upon them. Then there will come that day when the world will say, " This America that we thought was full of a multitude of contrary counsels now speaks with the great volume of the heart's accord, and that great heart of America has behind it the supreme moral force of righteousness and hope and the liberty of mankind." SOLDIERS' MEMORIAL HAL T ., PITTSBURGH, PA., JANUARY 29, 1916. Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen : I am conscious of a sort of truancy in being absent from my duties in Washington, and yet it did seem to me to be clearly the obligation laid upon me by the 12 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON". office to "which I have been chosen that, as your servant and represen- tative, I should come and report to you upon the progress of public a if airs. It has always been a feeling of mine that the best place for public servants was in the presence of those they serve, and that it was the obvious duty of every public man to hold frank counsel with the people themselves. I must frankly admit, with apologies to the chairman of the meeting and his associates, that I get a great deal more inspiration outside of Washington than inside of it; not be- cause others are not as devoted as I am to the performance of their duties, but because the people of the United States live out-ide of Washington. And the subject upon which I have come to address you is one upon which frank counsel is particularly needed. You know that there is a multitude of voices upon the question of national defence, and I, for my part, am not inclined to criticise any of the views that have been put forth upon this important sub- ject, because if there is one thing we love more than another in the United States, it is that every man should have the privilege, un- molested and uncriticised, to utter the real convictions of his mind. Some of the things that are being said proceed from sentiment, and I would be the last to detract from genuine sentiment, I feel myself moved by some of the sentiments, with the conclusions of which I can not agree, just as much as the gentleman are moved themselves who utter them. I believe in peace, I love peace. I would not be a true American if I did not love peace. But I know that peace costs something, and that the only way in which you can maintain peace is by thoroughly enjoying the respect of everybody with whom you deal. While, therefore, I can subscribe to every desire which those tine people have who are counselling us against assuming arms in this country, I must ask them to think a second time about the cir- cumstances under which we are living. There are other counselors the source of whose counsel is passion, and with them I can not agree. It is not wise, it is not possible, to guide national policy under the impulse of passion. I would be ashamed of the passion of fear, and I would try to put the passion of aggression entirely aside in advising my fellow citizens what they should do at any great crisis of their national life. America does not desire anything that any other nation can give it except friendship and justice and right conduct, and I am sorry for my part to see any passion, whether of fear or of dislike, stir the counsels of America. I have counseled my fellow citizens not only to be neutral in action in the presence of the present great European struggle, but also to be neutral in spirit and in feeling, and I have tried for my own part to hold off from every passion. I know it is not easy. When the world is running red with blood it is hard to keep the judgment cool. When men are suffering and offering up heroic sacrifice it is hard not to let the passion of sympathy take precedence over cool judgment. But while I can understand the excitements of the mind which cir- cumstances have generated, I would tremble to see them guide the decisions of the country. And there is other advice which we ii;Qt. which proceeds from pro- fessional enthusiasm. I am glad that the soldiers and sailors of the United States have professional enthusiasm, but I would not like them to run away with me any more than I would like the passions ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 13 and sympathies of my fellow countrymen to run away with me. While we admire their zeal, we must square their judgment with other standards than the professional standard. I admire every man's professional enthusiasm, but I would not wish to be guided by every man's professional enthusiasm. It is time, therefore, that we attempted at any rate to apply the standards of our own situation and of our own life to this great question of national defence. What is it that we want to defend? You do not need to have me answer that question for you; it is your own thought. We want to defend the life of this Nation against any sort of interference. We want to maintain the equal right of this Nation as against the action of all other nations, and we wish to maintain the peace and unity of the Western Hemisphere. Those are great things to defend, and in their defence sometimes our thought must take a great sweep, even beyond our own borders. Do you never stop to reflect just what it is that America stands for? If she stands for one thing more than another, it is for the sovereignty of self-governing peoples, and her example, her assistance, her encouragement, has thrilled two con- tinents in this Western World with all the fine impulses which have built up human liberty on both sides of the water. She stands, there- fore, as an example of independence, as an example of free institu- tions, and as an example of disinterested international action in the maintenance of justice. These are very great things to defend, and wherever they are attacked America has at least the duty of example, has at least the duty of such action as it is possible for her with self- respect to take, in order that these things may not be neglected or thrust on one side. So it seems to me that the thing that we are in love with in Amer- ica is efficiency. Not merely business efficiency; not merely efficiency in manufacture and in the professions; not merely the raising of great crops and the getting of our treasure out of the bowels of the earth and the manufacture of our raw materials into the things that are most useful to civilization. That efficiency merely underlies and furnishes a foundation for something a great deal bigger than that. We want the spirit of America to be efficient. We want American character to be efficient. We want American character to display itself in what I may perhaps be allowed to call spiritual efficiency — clear, disinterested thinking and fearless action along the right lines of thought. America is nothing if it consists merely of each of us; it is something only if it consists of all of us, and it can not consist of all of us unless our spirits are banded together in a common enterprise. That common enterprise is the enterprise of liberty and justice and right. Therefore, I for my part have a great enthusiasm for rendering America spiritually efficient, and that conception lies at the basis of what seems very far removed from it, namely, the plans that have been proposed for the military efficiency of this Nation. Those plans do not involve a great army, because that is not America's way of being efficient in respect of her physical force. We do not intend, we never intend, to have a stand army greater than is necessary for the ordinary uses of peace; but we want to have back of that army a people who can rally to its assistance in the most efficacious fashion at any time they are called on to do so, but who, in the meantime, are not professional soldiers, who do not take 14 ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. the professional soldier's point of view in respect of public affairs, whose thought is upon their daily tasks of peaceful industry, and who know that in the United States the civillian takes precedence of the soldier. ■ Your chairman has just told you that the Constitution ot the United States makes the President Commander in Chief of the armies and navies of the United States, and not often has the President been a soldier. I have sometimes said playfully that it was very awkward when dressed in a frock coat and a silk hat to ride a horse and review troops, and the only reason I have consented to do so is because those formal garments, the very sombre and formal garments which constitute a man's full dress in the daytime, are the symbol upon such occasions of the supremacy of the civil power over the military. A plain gentleman in black — sometimes a very plain gentleman—presides over the military force of the Nation, and the thing is symbolic. We think first of peace, we think first of the civilian life, we think first of industry; we want the men who are going to defend the Nation to be immersed in these pursuits of peace! But we want them to know how, when occasion arises, to rally to the assistance of the professional soldier of the country and show the nations of the world the might of America. Such men will not seek war. Such men will dread it as we all dread it. Such men will know that the happiness of their families and the prosperity of their countrysides and the wealth of their cities and everything upon which their life depends is rooted and grounded in peace, but they will also know that upon occasion infinite sacrifice must be made of life and of wealth and that there are things that are higher than the ordinary occupations of life, namely, all assertions of the ideals of right. . I am not going before audiences like this to go into the details of the programme which has been proposed to the Congress of the United States, because, after all, the details do not make any differ- ence. I believe in one plan; others may think that an equally good plan can be substituted, and I hope my mind is open to be convinced that it can ; but what I am convinced of and what we are all working for is that there should be provided, not a great militant force in this country, but a great reserve of adequate and available force which can be* called on upon occasion. I have proposed that we should be supplied with at least half a million men accustomed to handle arms and to live in camps ; and that is a very small number as compared with the gigantic proportions of modern armies. Therefore, it seems to me that no man can speak of proposals like that as if they pointed in the direction of militarism. When men talk of the threat of what is proposed, I wonder if they have really stopped to consider what is actually proposed. It is astonishing how many men of straw are set up and gallantly knocked down. It is astonishingly easy to prove that something is wrong which nobody has proposed, and this Nation is not going to be de- ceived by the fears of gentlemen who are fearful only of the things which they have imagined. We are not going to be stalked and daunted by ghosts and fancies. We are proposing a very business- like thing. I for my part believe that I am proposing a thoroughly business Tike thing. ' For 1 am proposing something more than what is temporary. It is my conception that as the Government of the ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 15 United States has done a great deal, though even yet probably not enough, to promote agricultural education in this country, it ought to do a great deal to promote industrial education in this country, and that along with thoroughgoing industrial and vocational train- ing it is perfectly feasible to instruct the youth of the land in the mechanism and use of arms, in the sanitation of camps, in the more rudimentary principles and practices of modern warfare, and so not to bring about occasions such as we have sometimes brought about, wiien upon a sudden danger youngsters were summoned by the proc- lamation of the President out of every community, who came crude and green and raw into the service of their country — infinitely willing but also wholly unfitted for the great physical task which was ahead of them. No nation should waste its youth like that. A nation like this should be ashamed to use an inefficient instrument when it can make its instrument efficient for everything that it needs to employ it for, and can do it along with the magnifying and ennobling and quickening of the tasks of peace. But we have to create the schools and develop the schools to do these things, and we can not at present wait for this slow process. We must go at once to the task of training a very considerable body of men to the use of arms and the life of camps, and we can do so upon one condition, and one condition only. The test, ladies and gentlemen, of what we are proposing is not going to be the action of Congress; it is going to be the response of the country. It is going to be the volunteering of the men to take the training and the willing- ness of their employers to see to it that no obstacle is put in the way of their volunteering. It will be up to the young men of this country and to the men who employ them; then, and not till then, we shall know how far it is true that America wishes to prepare itself for national defense — not a matter of sentiment, but a matter of hard practice. Are the men going to come out, and are those who employ them go- ing to facilitate their coming out? I for one believe that they will. There are many selfish influences at work in this country, as in every other ; but when it comes to the large view America can produce the substance of patriotism as abundantly as any other country under God's sun. I have no anxiety along those lines, and I have no anxiety along the lines of what Congress is going to do. You elect men to Congress who have opinions, and it is not strange that they should have differing opinions. I am not jealous of debate. If what I pro- pose can not stand debate, then something ought to be substituted for it which can. And I am not afraid that it is going to be all de- bate. I am not afraid that nothing is going to come out of it. I am not afraid that we shall fail to get out of it the most substantial and satisfactory results. Certainly when I talk a great deal myself I am not going to be jealous of the other man's having a chance to talk also. We are talking, I take it, in order to get at the very final analy- sis of the case, the final proof and demonstration of what we ought to do. My own feeling, ladies and gentlemen, is that it is a pity that this is a campaign year. I hope, with the chairman of the meeting, that the question of national preparation for defense will not by anybody be drawn into campaign uses or partisan aspects. There are many differences between Democrats and Republicans, honest differences 1Q ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. of opinion and of conviction, but Democrats do not differ from Republicans upon the question of the Nation's safety, and no man ought to draw this thing into controversy in order to make party or personal profit out of it. I am ready to acknowledge that men on the other side politically are just as deeply and just as intelligently interested in this question as I am, of course, and I shall be ashamed of any friends of mine who may take any different view of it. I want you to realize just what is happening, not in America but in the rest of the world. It is very hard to describe it briefly. It is very hard to describe it in quiet phrases. The world is on fire, and there is tinder everywhere. The sparks are liable to drop anywhere, and somewhere there may be material which we can not prevent from bursting into flame. The influence of passion is everywhere abroad in the world. It is not strange that men see red in such circumstances. What a year ago was incredible has now happened and the world is so in the throes -of this titanic struggle that no part of it is unaffected. You know what is happening. You know that by a kind of im- providence which should be very uncharacteristic of America we have neglected for several generations to provide the means to carry our own commerce on the seas, and, therefore, being dependent upon other nations for the most part to carry our commerce, we are depend- ent upon other nations now for the movement of our commerce when other nations are caught in the grip of war. So that every natural impulse of our peaceful life is embarrassed and impeded by the cir- cumstances of the time, and wherever there is contact there is apt to be friction. Wherever the ordinary rules of commerce at sea and of international relationship are thrust aside or ignored, there is danger of the more critical kind of controversy. Where nations are engaged as many nations are now engaged, they are peculiarly likely to be stubbornly steadfast in the pursuit of the purpose which is the mam purpose of the moment; and so, while we move among friends, we move among friends who are preoccupied, preoccupied with an ex- igent matter which is foreign to our own life, foreign to our own policy, but which nevertheless inevitably affects our own life and our own policy. While a year ago it seemed impossible that a struggle upon so great a scale should last a whole twelvemonth, it has now lasted a year and a half and the end is not yet, and all the time things have grown more and more difficult to handle. It fills me with a very strange feeling sometimes, my fellow citi- zens, when it seems to be implied that I am not the friend of peace. If these gentlemen could have sat with me reading the dispatches and handling the questions which arise every hour of the twenty-four, they would have known how infinitely difficult it had been to maintain the' peace and they would have believed that I was the friend of peace. But I also know the difficulties, the real dangers, dangers not about things that 1 can handle, but about things that the other parties handle and I can not control. It amazes me to hear men speak as if America stood alone in the world and could follow her own life as she pleased. We are m the midst of a world that we did not make and can not alter; its atmos- pheric and physical conditions are the conditions of our own life also, and therefore, as your responsible servant. I must tell you that the dangers are infinite and constant. I should feel that I was guilty of an unpardonable omission if I did not go out and tell my fellow ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 17 countrymen that new circumstances have arisen which nialie it abso- lutely necessary that this country should prepare herself, not for war, not for anything that smacks in the least of aggression, but for adequate national defence. So I have come out from the seclusion of Washington and have broken what I hope you consider a good rule, namely, that a man ought steadfastly to attend to business. Counsel has become the most necessary business of the hour. The most necessary thing to do now is to make America acquainted with her own situation in the world and acquainted with the fact that not all the processes of con- duct are within her own control; that, on the contrary, they are daily and hourly affected by things which she can not govern or direct. Appeals of this sort are apt to be only too adequate. I am not afraid that America will do nothing. I am only desirous that she should be very coolly considerate of what she does. One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels. The thing to do is to supply light and not heat. There ought, if there is any heat at all, to be that warmth of the heart which makes every man thrust aside his own personal feelings, his own personal interests, and take thought of the welfare and benefit of others. We seem sometimes, ladies and gentlemen, to be very careless in our use of words, and yet there are some words about which we are very careful. We call every sort of man who has displayed unusual powers "great"; we call some bad men "great'-; but we reserve the word "honorable" for those who are great, but spend their great- ness upon others rather than upon themselves. You erect statues to men who have made great sacrifices or to men who have given great beneficences. You do not erect statues to men who have served only themselves. There is a patriciate even in democratic America. Our peers are the men who have spent their great energies outside the narrow circle of their own self-interest, and who have seen to it that great largess of intellectual effort was given for the benefit of the communities in which they lived. These are the men we honor; these are the men who are the characteristic Americans. America was born into the world to do mankind service, and no man is a true American in whom the desire to do mankind service does not take precedence over the desire to serve himself. If I believed that the might of America was a threat to any free man in the world. I would wish America to be weak, but I believe the might of America is the might of righteous purpose and of a sincere love for the freedom of mankind. For my own part I am very much stirred by every sight that I get of the flag of the United States. I did not use to have the sentiment as poignantly as I have it now, but if you stood in my place, ladies and gentlemen, and felt that in some peculiar and unusual degree the honour of that flag was entrusted to your keeping, how would you feel? Would you not feel that you were a sort of trustee for the ideals of America ? Would you not feel that you ought to go out and seek counsel of your fellow citizens as to what they thought America to be and what they thought you ought to do honourably and per- fectly to represent America? Would you not feel that if anything were incumbent upon you more than another it was to understand H. Doc. S03, 64-1 3 18 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. what that flag- stands for? That flag was originally stained in very precious blood, blood spilt, not for any dynasty, not for any small controversies over national advantage, but in order that a little body of three million men in America might make sure that no man was their master; and as this Nation has accumulated in population and in power, as the tread of it has shaken every foot of this great con- tinent, as we have built up great wealth and majestic cities and made fertile farms to bloom from one side of it to ithe other, there have been built up men who were calling constantly upon their public representatives to be trustees of that original conception. America can not afford to be weak, and she can not afford to use her strength for anything which does not honour the Stars and Stripes. What I want you to do is this: I do not w-ant you merely to listen to speeches. I want you to make yourselves vocal. I want you to let everybody who comes within earshot of it know that you are a partisan for the adequate preparation of the United States for national defence. I have come to ask you not merely to go home and say, "The President seems to be a good fellow and to mean what he says"; I want you to go home determined that within the whole circle of your influence the President, not as a partisan but as the representative of the national honour, shall be backed up by the whole force that is in the Nation. I know that that appeal is not in vain, for I know what dee]) foun- tains of sentiment well up in America. I know that the surface of our life sometimes seems sordid. I know that the men who do most of the talking do not always hear the undertones of our life; but I know that the men who go in and out .on the farm, the men who go in and out at the factory door, the men who go in and out at the offices, the men who go abroad upon ships, the men who travel up and clown the country to quicken the courses of our commerce, underneath the surface of every one of these men there is the beating of a heart which is willing to make a profound sacrifice for the country that we all love; and those hearts are now going to be guided by very hard-headed minds, by minds that know how to think and plan and insist; and out of what seems an intricate debate there is foing to come a great plan for national defence of which we will all be proud and which will lend us to forget partisan differences in one creat enthusiasm for the United States of America. OVERFLOW MEETING AT SOLDIERS' MEMORIAL HALL, PITTS- BURGH, PA., JANUARY 29, 1916. Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen : I feel that I was lured here under false pretenses. I was told that I was to address an audi- ence of women, and the men, as usual, have been usurpers and have come in. When I reflected what I should say to a body of women about military preparation for national defense, it seemed to me that there was no excuse for mn king any difference between what I should say to them and what I should say to any other body of citizens of the United States, unless, indeed, there was this reason for :i difference: There is a sense in which the women of the country live closer to the life of it than the men. The preoccupations of business ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. 19 for the man who has to work for his daily bread and for the bread of those whom he loves and who are dependent on him are such that sometimes the material side of life seems to him the only real side of life. I find that very few T men stop to think of the life of the family, of the life of the community, of the life of the State and the Nation; their absorption is necessarily so great in the daily task that the spiritual needs do not often or very closely touch them, and it has seemed to me that in the home, in the contact with the children, in the anxieties for the morals and the daily conduct of those whom they love, the women perhaps feel the pulse of the country more than the men do. And it is in order that we may preserve the thoughtful ideals of America that it is necessary we should make preparation for national defense. The old cry for the defense of your hearth and home does not seem to me a very handsome appeal. It is easy to love what is your own, and it is easy to fight for what is your own. No man with a drop of manliness in him would do anything else. The thing that is hard is to light for the things that do not immediately touch us in order that others may live whom we do not love and do not even know, in order that the great tides of the national life might flow free and unobstructed, in order that the great ideals and purposes and longings of the people we never see might be realized. That is the life of a nation. No man ever saw the people of whom he forms a part. No man ever saw a government. I live in the midst of the Government of the United States, but I never saw the Government of the United States. Its personnel extends through all the nations and across the seas and into every corner of the world; in the pres- ence of the representatives of the United States in foreign capitals, and in foreign centers of commerce. 1 never saw the Government of the United States. It is an ideal, and I must share its spirit by the use of my imagination. I must make myself a part of it with thoughts that are national — the things that move great bodies of men to devote themselves to great tasks and even great adventures. I suppose that as the women of the country meditate upon the life that surges around them there must very often come into their hearts something of the profound feeling that pulses through great national existence. I do not believe that the women of this country are interested in national defense merely in order that they may be physically protected. If that was all we cared for, there would not be any spirit of America. The flag would not stand for anything if it were merely a roof over my head or a bulwark against an attack upon me. The flag stands for something for which we are all trustees, the great part that America is to play in the world. And what is the part that America is to play in the world? America stands, first of all, for the right of men to determine whom they will obey and whom they will serve; for the right of political freedom and a people's sovereignty; and anybody who interferes with those conceptions by touching the affairs of America makes it neces- sary that America should assert her rights. America has not only to assert her right to her own life within her own borders, she has also to assert her right to the equal and just treatment of her citizens wherever they go. And she has something even more than that to 20 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON". insist upon, because she made up her mind long ago that she was going to stand up, so far as this Western Hemisphere is concerned, for the right of peoples to choose their own politics without foreign influence or interference. So she has a gigantic task which she can not shirk without disgrace. In ordinary circumstances it has not been necessary for America to think of force, because everybody knows that there is latent in her as much force as resides anywhere in the world. This great body of 100,000,000 people has an average of intelligence and resourcefulness probably unprecedented in the history of the world. Nobody doubts that, given time enough, we can assert any amount of force that may be necessary; but when the world is on fire how much time can you afford to take to be ready? "When you know that there are com- bustible materials in the life of the world and in your own national life, and that the sky is full of floating sparks from a great con- flagration, are you going to sit down and say it will be time when the fire beg ; ns to do something about it? I do not believe that the lire is going to begin, but I would be surer of it if we were ready for the fire. And I want to come as your responsible servant and tell you this, that we do not control the fire. We are under the influ- ences of it, but we are not at the sources of it. We are where it at any time may affect us, and yet we can not govern its spread and progress. If it once touches us. it may touch the very sources of our life, for it may touch the very things we stand for, and we might for a little while be unable successfully to vindicate and defend them. I am not come here to tell you of any immediate threat of a definite danger, because by very great patience, by making our position perfectly clear, and then steadfastly maintaining the same attitude throughout great eontrovers es. we have so far held difficulty at arm's length ; but I want you to realize the task you have imposed upon your Government. There are two things which practically everybody who comes to the Executive Office in Washington tells me. They tell me. "The people are counting upon you to keep us out of this war." And in the next breath, what do they tell me, " The people are equally counting upon you to maintain the honor of the United States." Have you reflected that a time might come when I could not do both ? And have you made yourselves ready to stand behind your Government for the maintenance of the honor of your country, as well as for the maintenance of the peace of the country? If I am to maintain the honor of th ,' United States and it should be necessary to exert the force of the United States in order to do it, have you made the force ready? You know that you have not, and the very fact that the force in not ready may make the task you have set for me all the more delicate and all the more difficult. I have come away from WashV ingto to remind you of your part in this great business. There is no part that belongs to me that I wish to shirk, but I wish you to bear the part that belongs to you. I want every man and woman of you to stand behind me in pressing a reasonable plan for national defense. The only possible reasonable plan is an American plan. The American plan is not a great military establishment. The American plan is a great body of citizens who are ready to rally to the national ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 21 defense and adequately serve the national defense when it is neces- sary to do so. Just as the heart of our politics lies in the breast of the average man. so the strength of the Nation rests in the capacity of the individual man. He ought to know how modern arms are made and how they ought to be handled; he ought to know the rudimentary principles of camp sanitation; he ought to know the elements of military discipline, so that when he goes to the defense of his Nation he will not be a raw recruit, but a man who knows what is expected of him and needs only the guidance of competent officers to do it. You know how every constitution in the United States — the Con- stitution of the Nation and the constitutions of the States — lays it down as a principle that every man in America has the right to carry arms. He has not the right to conceal them, because you would converse with a man with a gun over his shoulder perhaps in a different tone of voice than if he had the gun concealed. Con- cealed arms are not the constitutional privilege of anybody, but obviously arms are the constitutional privilege of everybody in the United States, for the very conception of our politics is that the country is going to be taken care of by the men who live in it, and that they are not going to depute the task. Every audience still, after the passage of more than a hundred years, is stirred by the stories of the embattled farmers at Lexington, the men who had arms, who seized them and came forth in order to assert the independence and political freedom of themselves and their enterprise. That is the ideal picture of America, the rising of the Nation. But do we want the Nation to rise unschooled, inexperienced, ineffective, and fur- nish targets for powder and diet before they realize how to defend themselves at alH I am not going to expound to you a particular plan for training a great citizen reserve, because the detail of the plan is not the im- portant part of it. The important part is that it is imperatively necessary that we should have a plan, have it early, and put it into execution at the earliest possible moment, by which we will have a great reserve of men sufficiently trained for any kind of military service and ready when they are called on. These are the things that we are going to have. I say that because I believe it to be an actual necessity; I say it because I am confident that the men in Congress know a national necessity when they see it. I know there will be a great deal of debate and many differences of opinion — many honest and intelligent differences of opinion — as to how the thing ought to be done, but there is not going to be any difference of purpose as to what ought to be done. Of course, there are some gentlemen who allow themselves to be deceived by very handsome sentiments. If a man is so in love with peace that he can not imagine any kind of danger, I almost envy him the trance he is in, and so long as he is in the trance he is not going to do anything but enjoy the vision. But such men are not many. America is a hard-headed nation, and America generally wants to see the facts as they come before they get here. And the facts of the world are such that it is my duty to counsel my fellow citizens that preparation for national defense can not any longer be postponed. 22 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. I am not one of those who believe that a great standing army is the means of maintaining peace, because if you build up a great pro- fession those who form parts of it want to exercise their professions, and I can not blame them for it. I should myself hate to be ready to do an expert thing and never be permitted to do it. But, for my part, I am sure we have never encouraged in America the spirit of militarism, and we shall never have militarism in the United States. What I am particularly interested in is that my fellow citizens should make a distinction between militarism in any form and the things that are now being proposed to the Congress of the United States. If men are engaged nine months out of the twelve in the pur- suits of commerce and manufacture and agriculture and are in camp to take a little training only two or three months in the year, do you suppose they are going to have the spirit of the three months and net the spirit of the nine months? Do you not see that they are immersed in the civil and economic life of the Nation? They know what war means; they know what it will cost them and those dependent en them. There will be bred in them no spirit of military ardor; there will merely be bred in them a sober spirit of readiness to defend peace and fend off war. to make good the ideals of America and the performance of all the great tasks which she has set herself. And there will be also bred in them the spirit of obedience, the thought of the Nation, the consciousness of having some kind of personal connection with the great body politic which they profess as citizens to serve; and there will be in them great fountains of sober sentiment which will affect their neighbors as well as them- selves, and Americans will be a little less careless of the general interest of the Nation, a little less thoughtful of their own peculiar and selfish interest, and something of the old spirit of ? 7P>, which was not the spirit of aggression, but the spirit of love of country and pure and underiled patriotism, will grow stronger and stronger in this country that we love. And so, my fellow citizens, what I am pleading for with the utmost confidence is the revival of that great spirit of patriotism for which a hall like this stands as a symbol. I was saying the other night that it was a very interesting circumstance that we never hang a lad's yardstick up over the mantelpiece, but that we do hang his musket up when he is gone. Not because the musket stands for a finer thing than the yardstick in itself — it is a brutal thing to kill — but that the musket stood for the risk of life, for something greater than the lad's own self. It stood for infinite sacrifice to the point of death, and it is for that sentiment of willingness to die for something greater than ourselves that we hang the musket up over the mantelpiece, and in doing so make a sacred record of the high service of the family from wh-ich it sprang. It is for that reason that we erect buildings like this; it is for that reason that we make monuments to those who serve us; and when we summon the young men of this country to volunteer for brief train- ing every year in order that they may be a source of security to the Nation and its ideals, I know that the response will bring something more than a few thousand youngsters in the field; it will bring the spirit of America back to self-consciousness, and we shall again know what it is to belong to a country that throbs with a spirit of life that will arrest the attention of mankind. ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 23 CLEVELAND, OHIO, JANUARY 29, 1916. Mr. President and Fellow Citizens: I esteem it a real privilege to be in Cleveland again and to address you upon the serious ques- tions of public policy which now confront us. I have not given mv- self this sort of pleasure very often since I have been President, tor I hope that you have observed what my conception of the office of President is. I do not believe that, ordinarily speaking, it is a speech- making office. I have found the exactions of it such that it was abso- lutely necessary for me to remain constantly in touch with the dailv changes of public business, and you so arranged it that I should be President at a time when there was a great deal of public business to remain in touch with. But the times are such, gentlemen, that it is necessary that we should take common counsel together regarding them. _ I suppose that this country has never found itself before in so singular a position. The present situation of the world would, only a twelvemonth ago, even after the European war had started, have seemed incredible, and yet now the things that no man anticipated have happened. The titanic struggle continues. The difficulties of the world's affairs accumulate. It was, of course, evident that this was taking place long before the present session of Congress assem- bled, but ( nly since the Congress assembled has it been possible to consider what we ought to do in the new circumstances of the times. Congress can not know what to do unless the Nation knows what to do, and it seemed to me not only my privilege but my duty to go out and inform my fellow countrymen just what I understood the present situation to be. What are the elements of the case? In the first place, and .most obviously, two-thirds of the world are at war. It is not merely a European struggle; nations in the Orient have become involved! as well as nations in the west, and everywhere there seems to be creep- ing even upon the nations disengaged the spirit and the threat of war. All the world outside of America is on fire. Do you wonder that men's imaginations take color from the situation? Do you wonder that there is a great reaction against war? Do you wonder that the passion for peace grows stronger as the spectacle grows more tremendous and more overwhelming? Do you wonder, on the other hand, that men's sympathies become deeply engaged on the one side or the other? For no small things are happening. This is a struggle which will determine the history of the world, I dare say, for more than a century to come. The world will never be the same again after this war is over. The change may be for weal or it may be for woe, but it will be funda- mental and tremendous. And in the meantime we, the people of the United States, are the one great disengaged power, the one neutral power, finding it ex- ceedingly difficult to be neutral, because, like men everywhere else, w 7 e are human; we have the deep passions of mankind in us; we have sympathies that are as easily stirred as the sympathies of any other people;, we have interests which we see being drawn slowly into the maelstrom of this tremendous upheaval. It is very difficult for us to hold off and look with cool judgment upon such stupendous matters. 24 ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. And yet we have held off. It has not been easy for the Govern- ment at Washington to avoid the entanglements which seemed to beset it on every side. It has needed a great deal of watchfulness and an unremitting patience to do so ? but all the while no American could fail to be aware that America did not wish to become engaged, that she wished to hold apart; not because she did not perceive the issues of the struggle, but because she thought her duties to be the duties of peace and of separate action. And all the while the nations them- selves that were engaged seemed to be looking to us for some sort of action, not hostile in character but sympathetic in character. Hardly a single thing has occurred in Europe which has in any degree shocked the sensibilities of mankind that the Government of the United States has not been called upon by the one side or the other to protest and intervene with its moral influence, if not with its physical force. It is as if we were the great audience before whom this stupendous drama is being played out, and we are asked to comment upon the turns and crises of the plot. And not only are we the audience, and challenged to be the umpire so far as the opinion of the world is concerneel, but all the while our own life touches these matters at many points of vital contact. The United States is trying to keep up the processes of peaceful commerce while all the world is at war and while all the world is in need of the essential things which the United States produces, and yet by an oversight for which it is difficult to forgive ourselves we did not proviele ourselves when there was proper peace and oppor- tunity with a mercantile marine, by means of which we could carry the commerce of the world without the interference of the motives of other nations which might be engaged in controversy not our own ; and so the carrying trade of the world is for the most part in the hands of the nations now embroiled in this great struggle. Ameri- cans have gone to all quarters of the world, Americans are serving the business of the world in every part of it, and every one of these men when his affairs touch the regions that are on fire is our ward, and we must see to his rights and that they are respected. Do you not see how all the sensitive places of our life touch these great dis- turbances? Now in the midst of all this, what is it that we are called on to do as a nation? I suppose that from the first America has had one peculiar and particular mission in the world. Other nations have grown rich, my fellow citizens, other nations have been as powerful as we in material resources in comparison with the other nations of the world, other nations have built up empires and exercised domin- ion; we are not peculiar in any of these things, but we are peculiar in this, that from the first we have dedicated our force to the service of justice and righteousness and peace. We have said, "Our chief interest is not in the rights of property but in the rights of men; our chief interest is in the spirits of men that they might be free, that they might enjoy their lives unmolested so long as they observed the just rules of the game, that they might deal with their fellow- men with their heads erect, the subjects and servants of no man; the servants only of the principles upon which their lives rested." And America has done more than care for her own people and think of her own fortunes in these great matters. She has said ever since ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 25 the time of President Monroe that she was the champion of the free- dom and the separate sovereignty of peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere. She is trustee for these ideals and she is pledged, deeply and permanently pledged, to keep these momentous promises. She not only, therefore, must play her part in keeping this confla- gration from spreading to the people of the United States; she must also keep this conflagration from spreading on this side of the sea. These are matters in which our very life and our whole pride are embedded and rooted, and we can never draw back from them. And I, my fellow citizens, because of the extraordinary office with which you have intrusted me, must, whether I will or not, be your respon- sible spokesman in these great matters. It is my duty, therefore, when impressions are deeply borne in upon me with regard to the national welfare to speak to you with the utmost frankness about them, and that is the errand upon which I have come away from Washington. For my own part, I am sorry that these things fall within the year of a national political campaign. They ought to have nothing what- ever to do with politics. The man who brings partisan feeling into these matters and seeks partisan advantage by means of them is unworthy of your confidence. I am sorry that upon the eve of a campaign we should be obliged to discuss these things, for fear they might run over into the campaign and seem to constitute a part of it. Let us forget that this is a year of national elections. That is neither here nor there. The thing to do now is for all men of all parties to think along the same lines and do the same things and forget every difference that may have divided them. And what ought they to do? In the first place, they ought to tell the truth. There have been some extraordinary exaggerations both of the military weakness and the military strength of this country. Some men tell you that we have no means of defense and others tell you that we have sufficient means of defense, and neither statement is true. Take, for example, the matter of our coast defenses. It is obvious to every man that they are of the most vital importance to the country. Such coast defenses as we have are strong and admirable, but we have not got coast defenses in enough places. Their quality is admirable, but their quantity is insufficient. The military authorities of this country have not been negligent; they have sought adequate appropriations from Congress, and in most instances have obtained them, so far as we saw the work in hand that it was necessary to do, and the work that they have done in the use of these appropriations has been admirable and skillful work. Do not let anybody deceive you into supposing that the Army of the United States, so far as it has had opportunity, is in any degree unworthy of your confidence. And the Navy of the United States. You have been told that it is the second in strength in the world. I' am sorry to say that experts do not agree with those who tell you that. Reckoning by its actual strength, I believe it to be one of the most efficient navies in the world, but in strength it ranks fourth, not second. You must reckon with the fact that it is necessary that that should be our first arm of defense, and you ought to insist that everything should be done that it is possible for us to do to bring the Navy up to an adequate stand- ard of strength and efficiency. H. Doc. S03. 64-1 4 26 ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON". Where we are chiefly lacking in preparation is on land and in the number of men who are ready to fight. Not the number of fighting men, but the number of men who are ready to fight. Some men are born troublesome, some men have trouble thrust upon them, and other men acquire trouble. I think I belong to the second class. But the characteristic desire of America is not that she should have a great body of men whose chief business is to fight, but a great body of men who know how to fight and are ready to fight when anything that is dear to the Nation is threatened. You might have what we have, millions of men who had never handled arms of war, who are mere material for shot and powder if you put them in the field, and America would be ashamed of the inefficiency of calling such men to defend the Nation. What we want is to associate in training with the Army of the United States men who will volunteer for a suffi- cient length of time every year to get a rudimentary acquaintance with arms, a rudimentary skill in handling them, a rudimentary ac- quaintance with camp life, a rudimentary acquaintance with military drill and discipline ; and we ought to see to it that we have men of that sort in sufficient number to constitute an initial army when we need an army for the defense of the country. I have heard it stated that there are probably several million men in this country who have received a sufficient amount of military drill either here or in the countries in which they were born and from which they have come to us. Perhaps there are, nobody knows, because there is no means of counting them; but if there are so many, they are not obliged to come at our call ; we do not know who they are. That is not military preparation. Military preparation con- sists in the existence of such a body of men known to the Federal authorities, organized provisionally by the Federal authorities, and subject by their own choice and will to the immediate call of the Federal authorities. We have no such body of men in the United States except the Na- tional Guard. Now, I have a very great respect for the National Guard. I have been associated with one section of that guard in one of the great States of the Union, and I know the character of the officers and the quality of the men, and I would trust them un- hesitatingly both for skill and for efficiency, but the whole National Guard of the United States falls short of '130,000 men. It is char- acterized by a very great variety of discipline and efficienc}'' as be- tween State and State, and it is by the Constitution itself put under authority of more than two score State executives. The President of the United States has not the right to call on these men except in the case of actual invasion, and, therefore, no matter how skillful they are, no matter how ready they are, they are not the instruments for immediate National use., I believe that the Congress of the United States ought to do, and that it will do, a great deal more for the National Guard than it ever hap done, and everything ought to be done to make it a model military arm. But that is not the arm that we are immediately interested in. We are interested in making certain that there are men all over the United States prepared, equipped, and ready to go out at the call of the National Government upon the shortest possible notice. You will ask me, " Why do you say the shortest possible notice ? " Be- cause, gentlemen, let me tell you very solemnly you can not afford ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 27 to postpone this thing. I do not know what a single day may bring forth. I do not wish to leave you with the impression that I am thinking of some particular danger; I merely want to leave you with this solemn impression, that I know that we are daily treading amidst the most intricate dangers, and that the dangers that we are treading amongst are not of our making and are not under our control, and that no man in the United States knows what a single week or a single day or a single hour may bring forth. These are solemn things to say to you but I would be unworthy of my office if I did not come out and tell you with absolute frankness fust ex- actly what I understand the situation to be. I do not wish to hurry the Congress of the United States. These things are too important to be put through without very thorough sifting and debate and I am not in the least jealous of any of the searching processes of discussion. That is what free people' are for, to understand what they are about and to do what they wish to do only if they understand what they are about. But it is impossible to discuss the details of plans in great bodies, unorganized bodies, of men like this audience, for example. All that I can do in this presence is to tell you what I know of the necessities of the case, and to ask you to stand back of the executive authorities of the United States in urging upon those who make our laws as early and effective action as possible. America is not afraid of anybody. I know that I express your feeling and the feeling of all our fellow citizens when I say that the only thing I am afraid of is not being ready to perform my duty. I am afraid of the danger of shame; I am afraid of the danger of inadequacy; i am afraid of the danger of not being able to express the great character of this country with tremendous might and effectiveness whenever we are called upon to act in the field of the world's affairs. For it is character we are going to express, not power merely. The United States is not in love with the aggressive use of power. It despises the aggressive use of power. There is not a foot of territory belonging to any other Nation which this Nation covets or desires. There is not a privilege which we ourselves enjoy that we would dream of denying any other nation in the world. If there is one thing that the American people love and believe in more than an- other it is peace and all the handsome things that belong to peace. I hope that you will bear me out in saying that I have proved that I am a partisan of peace. I would be ashamed to be belligerent and impatient when the fortunes of my whole country and the happiness of all my fellow countrymen were involved. But I know that peace is not always within the choice of the Nation, and I want to remind you, and remind you very solemnly, of the double obligation you have laid upon me. I know you have laid it upon me because I am constantly reminded of it in conversation, by letter, in editorial, by means of every voice that comes to me out of the body of the Nation. You have laid upon me this double obligation: "We are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep us out of this war, but we are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep the honor of the Nation unstained." Do you not see that a time may come when it is impossible to do both of these things? Do you net see that if I am to guard the honor 28 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. of the Nation, I am not protecting it against itself, for we are not going to do anything to stain the honor of our own country. I am protecting it against things that I cannot control, the action of others. And where the action of others may bring us I cannot foretell. You may count upon my heart and resolution to keep you out of the war, but you must be ready if it is necessary that I should maintain your honor. That is the only thing a real man loves about himself. .Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life ; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the Nation's honor is dearer than the Nation's comfort and the Nation's peace and the Nation's life itself. So that we must know what we have thrown into the balance; we must know the infinite issues which are impending every day of the year, and when Ave go to bed at night and when we rise in the morning, and at every interval of the rush of business, we must remind ourselves that we are part of a great body politic in which are vested some of the highest hopes of the human race. Why is it that all nations turn to us with the instinctive feeling that if anything touches humanity it touches us? Because it knows that ever since we were born as a Nation we have undertaken to be the champions of humanity and of the rights of men. Without that ideal there would be nothing that would distinguish America from her predecessors in the history of nations. Why is it that men who loved liberty have crowded to these shores? Why is it that we greet them as they enter the great harbor at New York with that majestic Statue of Liberty holding up a torch whose visionary beams are meant to spread abroad over the waters of the Avorld, and to say to all men, " Come to America where mankind is free and where we love all (he works of righteousness and of peace." AUDITORIUM, MILWAUKEE, WIS., JANUARY 31, 1916. Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens : I need not inquire whether the citizens of Milwaukee and Wisconsin are interested in the sub- ject of my errand. The presence of this great body in this vast hall sufficiently attests your interest, but I want at the outset to remove a misapprehension that I fear may exist in your mind. There is no sudden crisis; nothing new has happened; I am not out upon this errand because of any unexpected situation. I have come to confer with you upon a matter upon which it would, in any circumstances, be necessary for us to confer when all the rest of the world is on fire and our own house is not fireproof. Everywhere the atmosphere of the world is thrilling with the passion of a disturbance such as the world has never seen before, and it is wise, in the words just uttered by your chairman, that we should see that our own house is set in order and that everything is done to make certain that we shall not suffer by the general conflagration. There were some dangers to which this Nation seemed at the outset of the war to be exposed, which, I think I can say with confidence, are now passed and overcome. America has drawn her blood and her strength out of almost all the nations of the world. It is true of a great many of us that there lies deep in our hearts the recollec- tion of an origin which is not American. We are aware that our ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 29 roots, our traditions, run back into other national soils. There are songs that stir us; there are some far-away historical recollections which engage our affections and stir our memories. Y^e can not forget our forbears; we can not altogether ignore the fact of our essential blood relationship; and at the outset of this war it did look as if there were a division of domestic sentiment which might lead us to some errors of judgment and some errors of action ; but I, for one, believe that that danger is passed. I never doubted that the danger was exaggerated, becaiii-e I had learned long ago, and many of you will corroborate me by your experience, that it is not the men who are doing the talking always who represent the real sentiments of the Nation. I for my part alwaj^s feel a serene confidence in waiting for the declaration of the principles and sentiments of the men who are not vociferous, do not go about seeking to make trouble, do their own thinking, attend to their own business, and love their own country. I have at no time supposed that the men whose voices seemed to contain the threat of division amongst us were really uttering the sentiments even of those whom they pretended to represent I for my part have no jealousy of family sentiment. I have no jealousy of that deep affection which runs back through long lineage. It would be a pity if we forget the fine things that our ancestors have done. But I also know the magic of America; I also know the great principles which thrill men in the singular body politic to which we belong in the United States. 1 know the 'impulses which have drawn men to our shores. They have not come idly; they have not come without conscious purpose to be free; they have not come without voluntary desire to unite themselves with the great nation on this side of the sea; and I know that whenever the test comes every man's heart will be first for America. It was principle and affection and ambition and hope that drew men to these shores, and they are not going to forget the errand upon which they came and allow America, the home of their refuge and hope, to suffer by any forgetfulness on their part. And so the trouble makers have shot their bolt, and it has been ineffectual. Some of them have been vociferous; all of them have been exceedingly irresponsible. Talk was cheap, and that was all it cost them. They did not have to do anything. But you will know without my telling you that the man who for the time being you have charged with the duties of Presi- dent of the United States must talk with a deep sense of responsi- bility, and he must remember, above all things else, the fine tradi- tions of his office which some men seem to have forgotten. There is no precedent in American history for anv action of aggression on the part of the United States or for any action which might mean that America is seeking to connect herself with the controversies on the other side of the water. Men who seek to provoke us to such action have forgotten the traditions of the United States, but it behooves those with whom you have entrusted office to remember the traditions of the United States and to see to it that the actions of the Govern- ment are made to square with those traditions. But there are other dangers, mv fellow citizens, which are not past and which have not been overcome, and they are dangers which we can not control. We can control irresponsible talkers amidst ourselves. All we have got to do is to encourage them to 30 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. hire a hall find their folly will be abundantly advertised by them- selves. But we can not in this simple fashion control the dangers that surround us now and have surrounded us since this titanic struggle on the other side of the water began. I say on the other side of the water; you will ask me, "On the other side of which water," for this great struggle has extended to all quarters of the srlobe. There is no continent outside, I was about to say, of this Western Hemisphere which is not touched with it, but I recollected as I began the sentence that a part of our own continent was touched with it, because it involves our neighbors to the north in Canada. There is no part of the world, except South America, to which the direct influences of this struggle have not extended, so that now we are com- pletely surrounded by this tremendous distrubance and you must realize what that involves. Our thoughts are concentrated upon our own affairs and our own relations to the rest of the world, but the thoughts of the men who are engaged in this struggle are concentrated upon the struggle itself, and there is daily and hourly danger that they will feel themselves constrained to do things which are absolutely inconsistent with the rights of the United States. They are not thinking of us. I am not criticising them for not thinking of us. I dare say if I were in their place neither would I think of us. They believe that they are struggling for the lives and honor of their nations, and that if the United States puts its interests in the path of this great struggle, she ought to know beforehand that there is danger of very serious misunderstanding and difficulty. So that the very uncalculating, unpremeditated, one might almost say accidental, course of affairs may touch us to the quick at any moment, and I want you to realize that, standing in the midst of these difficulties, 1 feel that I am charged with a double duty of the utmost difficulty. In the first place, I know that you are depending upon me to keep this Nation out of the war. So far I have done so, and I pledge you my word that, God helping me, I will if it is possible. But you have laid another duty upon me. You have bidden me see to it that nothing stains or impairs the honor of the United States, and that is a matter not within my control; that depends upon what others do, not upon what the Government of the United States does. Therefore there may at any moment come a time when I can not preserve both the honor and the peace of the United States. Do not exact of me an impossible and contradictory thing, but stand ready and insistent that everybody who represents you should stand ready to provide the necessary means for maintaining the honor of the United States. I sometimes think that it is true that no people ever went to war with another people. Governments have gone to Avar with one another. Peoples, so far as I remember, have not, and this is a government of the people, and this people is not going to choose war. But we are not dealing with people; we are dealing with Govern- ments. We are dealing with Governments now engaged in a great struggle, and therefore" we do not know what a day or an hour will bring forth. All that we know is the character of our own duty. We do not want the question of peace and war. or the conduct of war, entrusted too entirely to our Government. We want war, if it must ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 31 come, to be something- that springs out of the sentiments and prin- ciples and actions of the people themselves; and it is on that account that I am counseling the Congress of the United States not to take the advice of those- who recommend that we should have, and have very soon, a great standing Army, but, on the contrary, to see to it that the citizens of this country are so trained and that the military equipment is so sufficiently provided for them that when they choose they can take up arms and defend themselves. The Constitution of the United States makes the President the Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the Nation, but I do not want a big Army subject to my personal command. If danger comes, I want to turn to you and the rest of my fellow countrymen and say, "Men, are you ready? " and I know what the response will be. I know that there will spring up out of the body of the Nation a great host of free men, and I want those men not to be mere targets for shot and shell. I want them to know something of the arms they have in their hands. I want them to know something about how to guard against the diseases that creep into camps, where men are unaccustomed to live. I want them to know something of what the orders mean that they will be under when they enlist under arms for the Government of the United States. I want them to be men who can comprehend and easily and intelligently step into the duty of national defense. That is the reason that I am urging upon the Congress of the United States at any rate the beginnings of a sys- tem by which Ave may give a very considerable body of our fellow citizens the necessary training. I have not forgotten the great National Guard of this country, but in this country of one hundred million people there are oniy 129,000 men in the National Guard; and the National Guard, fine ast it is, is not subject to the orders of the President of the United States. It is subject to the orders of the governors of the several States, and the Constitution itself says that the President has no right to withdraw them from their States even, except in the case of actual invasion of the soil of the United States. I want the Con- gress of the United States to do a great deal for the National Guard, but I do not see how the Congress of the United States can put the National Guard at the disposal of the national authorities. There- fore it seems to me absolutely necessary that in addition to the National Guard there should be a considerable body of men with some training in the military art who will have pledged themselves to come at the call of the Nation. I have been told by those who have a greater knack at guessing statistics than I have that there are probably several million men in the United States who, either in this country or in other countries from which they have come to the United States, have received training in arms. It may be; I do not know, and I suspect that they do not either, but even if it be true, these men are not subject to the call of the Federal Government. They would have to be found; they would have to be induced to enlist; they would have to be organized; their numbers are indefinite; and they would have to be equipped. Such are not the materials which we need. We want to know who these men are and where they are and to have everything 32 ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON". ready for them if they should come to onr assistance. For we have now got down, not to the sentiment of national defence, but to the business of national defence. It is a business proposition and it must be treated as such. And there are abundant precedents for the pro- posals which have been made to the Congress. Even that arch-Demo- crat, Thomas Jefferson, believed that there ought to be compulsory military training for the adult men of the Nation, because he be- lieved, as every true believer in democracy believes, that it is upon the voluntary action of the men of a great Nation like this that it must depend for its military force. There is another misapprehension that I want to remove from your minds: Do not think that I have come to talk to you about these things because I doubt whether they are going to be done or not. I do not doubt it for a moment, but I believe that when great things of this sort are going to be done the people of this country are en- titled to know just what is being proposed. As a friend of mine says, I am not arguing with you; I am telling you. I am not trying to convert you to anything, because I know that in your hearts you are converted already, but I want you to know the motives of what is proposed and the character of what is proposed, in order that we should have only one attitude and coimsel with regard to this great matter. It is being very sedulously spread abroad in this country that the impulse back of all this is the desire of men who make the materials of warfare to get money out of the Treasury of the United States. I wish the people that say that could see meetings like this. Did you come here for that purpose ? Did you come here because you are in- terested to see some of your fellow citizens make money out of the present situation? Of course you did not. I am ready to admit that probably the equipment of those men whom we are training will have to be bought from somebody, and I know that if the equipment is bought, it will have to be paid for; and I dare say somebody will make some money out of it. It is also true, ladies and gentlemen, that there are men now, a great many men, in the belligerent countries who are growing rich out of the sale of the materials needed by the armies of those countries. If the Government itself does not manu- facture everything that an army needs, somebody has got to make money out of it, and I for my part have been urging the Congress of the United States to make the necessary preparations by which the Government can manufacture armor plate and munitions, so that, being in the business itself and having the ability to manufac- ture all it needs, if it is put upon a business basis, it can at any rate keep the price that it pays within moderate and reasonable limits. The Government of the United States is not going to be im- posed upon by anybody, and you may rest assured, therefore, that while I believe you prefer that private capital and private initiative should bestir themselves in these matters, it is also possible, and I assure you that it is most likely, that the Government of the United States will. have adequate means of controlling this matter very thoroughly indeed. There need be no fear on that side. Let nobody suppose that this is a money-making agitation. I would for one be ashamed to be such a dupe as to be engaged in it if it had any sus- picion of that about it, but I am not as innocent as I look; and I be- ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 33 lieve that I can say for my colleagues in Washington that they are just as watchful in such matters as you would desire them to be. And there is another misapprehension that I do not wish you to entertain. Do not suppose that there is any new or sudden or recent inadequacy on the part of this Government in respect of prepara- tion for national defense. I have heard some gentlemen say that we had no coast defenses worth talking about. Coast defenses are not nowadays advertised, you understand, and they are not visible to the naked eye, so that if you passed them and nothing exploded, you would not know they were there. The coast defenses of the United States, while not numerous enough, are equipped in the most modern and efficient fashion. You are told that there has been some sort of neglect about the Navy. There has not been any sort of neglect about the Navy. We have been slowly building up a Navy which in quality is second to no navy in the world. The only thing- it lacks is quantity. In size it is the fourth navy in the world, though I have heard it said by some gentlemen in this very region that it was the second. In righting force, though net in quality, it is reckoned by experts to be the fourth in rank in the world; and yet- when I go on board those ships and see their equipment and talk with their officers I suspect that they could give an account of them- selves which would raise them above the fourth class. It reminds me of that very quaint saying of the old darky preacher, "The Lord says unto Moses, come fourth, and he came fifth and lost the race." But I think this Navy would not come fourth in the race, but higher. What we are proposing now is not the sudden creation of a Navy, for we have a splendid Navy, but the definite working out of a program by which within five years we shall bring the Navy to a fighting strength which otherwise might have taken eight or ten years; along exactly the same lines of development that have been followed and followed diligently and intelligently for at least a decade past. There is no sudden panic, there is no sudden change of plan; all that has happened is that we now see that we ought more rapidly and more thoroughly than ever before to do the things which have always been characteristic of America. For she has always been proud of her Navy and has always been addicted to the principle that her citizenship must do the fighting on land. We are working out American principle a little faster, because American pulses are beating a little faster, because the world is in a whirl, because there are incalculable elements of trouble abroad which we cannot control or alter. I would be derelicit to the duty which you have laid upon me if I did not tell 3^011 that it was absolutely necessary to carry out our principles in this matter now and at once. And yet all the time, my fellow citizens, I believe that in these things we are merely interpreting the spirit of America. Who shall say what the spirit of America is? I have many times heard orators apostrophize this beautiful flag which is the emblem of the Nation. I have many times heard orators and philosophers speak of the spirit which was resident in America. I have always for my own part felt that it was an act of audacity to attempt to characterize anything of that kind, and when I have been outside of the country in foreign lands and have been asked if this, that, or the other was true of America I have habitually said, " Nothing stated in general terms is H. Doc. 803, G4-1 5 34 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON". true of America, because it is the most variegated and varied and multiform land under the sun." Yet I know that if you turn away from the physical aspects of the country, if you turn away from the variety of the strains of blood that make up our great population, if you turn ;iway from the great variations of occupation and of interest among our fellow citizens, there is a spiritual unity in America. I know that there are some things which stir every heart in America, no matter what the racial derivation or the local environment, and one of the things that stirs every American is the love of individual liberty. We do not stand for occupations. We do not stand for ma- terial interests. We do not stand for any narrow conception even of political institutions; but we do stand for this, that we are banded together in America to see to it that no man shall serve any master who is not of his own choosing. And we have been very liberal and generous about this idea. We have seen great peoples, for the most part not of the same blood with ourselves, to the south of us build up polities in which this same idea pulsed and was regnant, this idea of free institutions and individual liberty, and when we have seen hands reached across the water from older political polities to interfere with the development of free institutions on the Western Hemisphere we have said : " No ; we are the champions of the freedom of popular sovereignty wherever it displays or exercises itself throughout both Americas." We are the champions of a particular sort of freedom, the sort of freedom which is the only foundation and guarantee of peace. Peace lies in the hearts of great industrial and agricultural popu- lations, and we have arranged a government on this side of the water by which their preferences and their predilections and their interests are the mainsprings of government itself. And so when we prepare for national defense we prepare for national political integrity; we prepare to take care of the great ideals which gave birth to this Government; we are going back in spirit and in energy to those great first generations in America, when men banded them- selves together, though they were but a handful upon a single coast of the Atlantic, to set up in the world the standards which have ever since floated everywhere that Americans asserted the power of their Government. As I came along the line of the railway to-day, I was touched to observe that everywhere, upon every railway station, upon every house, where a flag could be procured, some temporary stand- ard had been raised from which there floated the stars and stripes. They seemed to have divined the errand upon which I had come, to remind you that we must subordinate every individual interest and every local interest to assert once more, if it should be necessary to assert them, the great principles for which that flag stands. Do not deceive yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, as to where the colors of that flag came from. Those lines of red are lines of blood, nobly and unselfishly shed by men who loved the liberty of their fellow men more than they loved their own lives and fortunes. God forbid that we should have to use the blood of America to freshen the color of that flag; but if it should ever be necessary again to assert the majesty and integrity of those ancient and honorable principles, that flag will be colored once more, and in being colored will be glorified and purified. ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 35 AUDITORIUM, CHICAGO, ILL., JANUARY 31, 1916. Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens: You put me under a great obligation to you by the generosity of your reception, and I am quite aware that it is largely because you know how desirous I am to speak to you with the utmost frankness upon some of the most essen- tial issues of our national life. The Constitution of the United States explicitly lays upon the President the dut}' of reporting at the beginning of each annual session of Congress to the representatives of the people concerning the state of the Union, and it seems to me that it is a very natural inference from that command that the President should from time to time, when unusual circumstances arise, make his report, so far as it is possible for him to do so, directly to the people themselves. It is with that conception in view that I have taken the liberty of coming to you to-night. I have not permitted myself the privilege of leaving my duties at Washington very often, because they have been very exacting and very anxious duties, and there is a very clear sense in which it is my duty to be constantly there and constantly watchful of the changing circum- stances of the day; but I thought you would feel me justified in the unusual circumstances of the time if I left my duties there for a little while and came to explain a few matters to you. A year ago, though the war in Europe had then been six months in progress, I take it it would have seemed incredible to all of us that the storm should continue to gether in intensity instead of spending its force. I suppose that twelve months ago no one could have predicted the extraordinary way in which the violence of the struggle has increased from month to month ; and the difficulties in- volved by reason of that war have also increased beyond all calcula- tion. A year ago it did seem as if America might rest secure without very great anxiety and take it for granted that she would not be drawn into this terrible maelstrom, but those first six months was merely the beginning of the struggle. Another year has been added, and now no man can confidently say whether the United States will be drawn into the struggle or not. Therefore it is absolutely necessary that we should take counsel together as to what it is necessary that we should do. The circumstances of the day are so extraordinary that perhaps it is not prudent for a man upon whom the responsibility of affairs is laid to know too particularly the details of what is hap- pening. The trouble with a great many of our fellow citizens is that they have let their imaginations become so engaged in this terrible affair that they cannot look upon it as those should who wish to keep a cool head and a detached judgment. So many men on this side of the water are seeing red that we seem to see in their thoughts the reflection of the blood that is being spent so copiously on the other side of the sea. It is not wise for us to let our thoughts become so deeply involved that we cannot think separately and must think with a sort of personal immersion in this great struggle. I must admit to you very frankly that I have been careful to re- frain from reading the details in the newspaper reports. I wish to see the thing and realize it enly in its large aspects and to keep my thoughts concentrated on America, her duty, her circumstances, her tasks. And her tasks have been very difficult. They have not been 36 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. merely negative. Have you not realized how all the world seems to have been constantly conscious from the beginning of this struggle that America was, so to say, the only audience before whom this terri- ble plot was being worked out; how everybody engaged in the struggle has seemed to turn to America for moral judgments con- cerning it; how each side in the titanic struggle has appealed to us to adjudge their enemies in the wrong; how there has been no tragical turn in the course of events that America has not been called on^for some sort of protest or expression of opinion? And so those of us who are charged with the responsibility of affairs have realized very intensely that there was a certain sense in which America was looked to to keep even the balance of the whole world'g thought. And America was called upon to do something very much more than that, even; profoundly difficult, if not impossible, though that be, she was called upon to'assert in times of war the standards of times of peace. There is an old saying that the laws are silent in the presence of war. Alas, yes; not only the civil laws of individual nations but also apparently the law that governs the relation of nations with one another must at times fall silent and look on in dumb impotency. And yet it has been assumed throughout this struggle that the great principles of international law and of international comity had not been suspended, and the United States, as the greatest and most powerful of the disengaged nations, has been looked to to hold high the standards which should govern the relationship of nations to each other. I know that on the other side of the water there has been a great deal of cruel mis judgment with regard to the reasons why America has remained neutral. Those who look at us at a distance, my fellow citizens, do not feel the strong pulses of ideal principle that are in us. They do not feel the conviction of America, that her mission is a mission of peace, and that righteousness can be maintained as a standard in the midst of arms. They do not realize that back of all our energy by which we have built up great material wealth and created great material power we are a body of idealists, much more ready to lay down our lives for a thought than for a dollar. They suppose, some of them, that we are holding off because we can make money while others are dying, the most cruel misunderstanding that any nation has ever had to face; so wrong that it seems almost use- less to try to correct it, because it shows that the very fundamentals of our life are not comprehended and understood. I need not tell you, my fellow citizens, that we have not held off from this struggle from motives of self-interest, unless it be con- sidered self-interest to maintain our position as the trustees of the moral judgment of the world. We have believed, and I believe, that we can serve even the nations at war better by remaining at peace and holding off from this contest than we could possibly serve them in any other way. Your interest, your sympathy, your affections may be engaged on the one side or the other, but no matter which side they are engaged on it is your duty even to your affections in this great affair to stand oil and not let this Nation be drawn into the war. Somebody must keep the great stable foundations of the life of na- tions untouched and undisturbed. Somebody must keep the great ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON". 37 (economic processes of the world of business alive. Somebody must see to it that we stand ready to repair the enormous damage and the incalculable losses which will ensue from this war, and which it is hardly credible could be repaired if every great nation in the world were drawn into the contest. Do you realize how nearly it has come about that every great nation in the world has been drawn in? The flame has touched even our own continent by drawing in our Cana- dian neighbors to the north of us, and, except* for the South American Continent, there is not one continent upon the whole surface of the world to which this flame has not spread ; and when I see some of my fellow citizens spread tinder where the sparks are falling, I wonder what their ideal of Americanism is. I dare say you realize, therefore, the solemnity of the feeling with which I come to audiences of my fellow citizens at this time. *" I can not indulge the reckless pleasure of expressing my own private opin- ions and prejudices. I speak as the trustee of the Nation, called upon to speak its sober judgments and not its individual opinions; and it is with the feeling of this responsibility upon me that I have come to you to-night and have approached the other audiences that I have had the privilege of addressing upon this journey. Do you realize the peculiar difficulty of the situation in which your Executive is placed ? You have laid upon me, not by implication, out explicitly — it has come to me by means of every voice that has been vocal in the Nation — you have laid upon me the double obligation of main- taining the honor of the United States and of maintaining the peace of the United States. Is it not conceivable that the two might be- come incompatible? Is it not conceivable that, however great our passion for peace, we would have to subordinate it to our passion for what is right? Is it not possible that in maintaining the integrity of the character of the United States it may become necessary to see that no man does that integrity too great violence? It is a very terrible thing, ladies and gentlemen, to have the honor of the United States intrusted to your keeping. It is a great honor, that honor of the United States ! In it runs the blood of generations of men who have built up ideals and institutions on this side of the water intended to regenerate mankind, and any man who does vio- lence to right, any nation that does violence to the principles of just international understandings, is doing violence to the ideals of the United States. We observe the technical limits; we assert these rights only when our own citizens are directly affected, but you know that our feeling is just the same whether the rights of those indi- vidual citizens are affected or not, and that we feel all the concern of those who have built up things so great that they dare not let them be torn down or touched with profane hands. Look at the task that is assigned to the United States, to assert the principles of law in a world in which the principles of law have broken down — not the technical principles of law, but the essential principles of right dealing and humanity as between nation and nation. Law is a very complicated term, "it includes a great many things that do not engage our affections, but at the basis of the things that we are now dealing with lie the deepest affections of the human heart, the love of life, the love of righteousness, the love of fair dealing, the love of those things that are just and of good report. 38 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. The things that are rooted in our -very spirit are the stuff of the law that I am talking about now. We may have to assert these principles of right and of humanity at an} 7 time. What means are available? What force is at the disposal of the United States to assert these things? The force of opinion? Opinion, I am sorry to say, my fellow citizens, did not bring this war on, and I am afraid that opinion can not stay its progress. This war was brought on by rulers, not by the people: and I thank God that there is no man in America who has the authority to bring war on without the consent of the people. No man for many a year yet can trace the real sources of this war, but this thing we know, that opinion did not bring it on and that the force of opinion, at any rate the force of American opinion, is not going to stop it. I admire the hopeful confidence of those of our fellow T citizens who believe that American opinion can stop it, but, being somewhat older than some of them, and having run through a rather wide gamut of experience, I am prevented from sharing their hopeful optimism. I would not belittle the influences of opinion, least of all the influences of American opinion — it is very influential — but it will not stop this overwhelming flood. And, if not the f o) ce of opin- ion, what force has America available to stop the flood from over- flowing her own fair area ? We have one considerable arm of force, a very considerable arm of force, namely, the splendid Navy of the United States. I am told by the experts, to whose judgment I must defer in these mat- ters, that the Navy of the United States, in respect of its enumerated force, ranks only fourth among the navies of the world. I indulge myself in the opinion that in quality it ranks very much higher than fourth place. The United States has never been negligent of its Navy, despite what some gentlemen may say; least of all has it been negligent in recent years. Three years ago there were 182 vessels in commission in that Navy; there are now 238. Three dread- noughts and fifteen subordinate craft will be added within a month or tAvo. There have been added six thousand capable sailors to the ranks of the enlisted men of that Navy. The Congress of the United States in the last three years has poured out more money than was poured out on the average in any previous years in the history of the United States for the maintenance and upbuilding of the United States Navy; has spent forty-four million dollars a year as con- trasted with a previous average of not more than thirty-three and a half million. All the subsidiary arms of the service have been built up. Three years ago there were four officers assigned the duty con- nected with aviation, and they did not have a single available — at any rate usable — craft at their service; now there are thirty-seven airships, 121 commissioned officers, and a large number of non- commissioned officers and a sufficient force of enlisted men in the school of practice at Pensacola ; and that is only the beginning, be- cause the Sixty-third Congress, the last Congress, was the first to make a specific appropriation for aviation in connection with the Navy. We have given to the present fleet of the United States an organ- ization such as it never had before, I am told by Admiral Fletcher. ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 39 and we have made preparations for immediate war, so far as the Navy is concerned. The trouble is not with the quality or the organization of the existing Navy; it is merely that we have fol- lowed plans piecemeal, a little bit at a time, now in this direction, now in that direction; that we have never had a plan thought out to cover a number of years in advance; that we have never set our- selves a definite goal of equipment and set our resolution to attain that goal within a reasonable length of time. The plans that are being proposed to the present Congress, and which the present Congress will adopt, are plans to remedy this piecemeal treatment of the Navy and bring it to its highest point of efficiency by steady plans carried out from month to month and year to year. It is going to cost a good deal of money, and I find that the difficulty with some Members of Congress is, not what ought to be done about the Navy, but what they are going to tax in order to get the money. I do not happen to be a Member of Congress but I would be willing to go before any constituenc.v in the United States in the confidence that they were willing to pay for the defense of the Nation. We are neither poor not niggardly. We know how things cost and we intend to pay for them ; and we do not intend to pay for them more than they are worth. That is a matter which is troubling a good many people. I have proposed to the Congress that for one thing we at once build our own armor plant, not for the purpose of making all the armor that our ships need, unless that should become necessary, but for the pur- pose of keeping the price within sight. I have proposed to the Congress that we prepare to manufacture also the munitions which the Government may need — for the same purpose — not to drive other people out of business, but merely to serve other people with notice that if necessary w T e will manufacture all the munitions we need. We have had some experience in this matter. The Navy now makes a very large proportion of its own powder. Before it began, it paid 53 cents a pound for it, and now it pays 3G cents. That shows the very interesting effect of Government competition upon the price. So all along the line we mean business, and we are going to see that business characterizes the processes of national defense. We would not be Americans if we did not. But what Army have we available? I can tell you, because it has been necessary for us to take care of the patrolling of a very long southern border between us and Mexico. We have not men enough in the United States Army for the routine work of peace, and the increase in the Regular Army that is being proposed to the present Congress is intended only to bring the Regular Army up to an adequate peace establishment. I say that that is all that is being proposed with regard to the Regular Army. The United States has never, my fellow citizens, depended upon the Regular Army to conduct its wars. It has depended upon the Volunteers of the United States, and it has never been disappointed either in their numbers or in their quality. But modern warfare is very different from what warfare used to be. Warfare has changed so within the span of a single life that it is nothing less than brutal to send raw recruits into the trenches and into the field. I am told by gentle- men who are very much more expert in knowing things that nobody 40 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON else knows than I am that there are probably several million men in this country who have been trained to arms either in this country or in the country of their nativity. It may be, but who has a list of them? Where are they? What law lays upon them the duty of coming into the ranks of the armed forces of the United States if it should be necessary to call for volunteers? How are they organized? Who can reach them? Who can command them? There might be several million men with that training, but if they would not come upon the call they would be of no immediate use to the United States. What we wish is a definite citizen reserve of men trained to arms to a sufficient extent to make them quickly transformable into a fight- ing force, organized under the immediate direction of the United States, subject to a definite pledge to serve the United States, and pledged to obey immediately the call of the President when Congress authorizes him to call them to arms. We do not want men to devote the greater part of their time to training in arms. We want men whose occupation and passion and habit is peace, because they are the only men who can carry into the field the spirit of America as contrasted with the spirit of the professional soldier. I would not have you for a moment understand me as detracting from the character and reputation of the professional soldier as we know him in the United States. I have dealt with him; he i's as good an American as I am. He has a degree of intelligence and of devotion to his duty which commands my entire admiration. But the spirit of every profession is different from the spirit of the community. I would not trust any particular business to any particular profession exclusively if it were the public business, because every profession that I know anything about has its special point of view. But when a man has to defend his country outside the circle of the things that he ordinarily does, he has, I believe, the spirit of his country in a degree that he would not have it if he were merely performing a professional duty. Have you looked at the most valued souvenir of families in Amer- ica? Have you never seen a rusty sword treasured from the days of the Revolution or from the days of the Civil War? Have you never seen an old-fashioned musket hung lip in some conspicuous place of honor? Did you ever see a spade hung up, or a pick hung up, or a yardstick hung up, or a ledger hung up? Did you ever see in such place of honor any symbol of the ordinary occupations of peace? Why? Because America loves war and honors it more than she loves peace? Certainly not! But because America honors utter self-sacrifice more than she honors anything else. It is no self-sacrifice to earn your daily bread; it is a necessity — a necessity which, if you accomplish it with success, you are deserving of all praise. But it is not self sacrifice. It is no self-sacrifice to work for yourself and the people you love. The self-sacrifice comes when you are ready to forget yourself, forget your loved ones, forget everything, even your love of life itself, to serve an invisible master, the great spirit of America herself. We dread war, we condemn war in America. We Love peace. But we know that the lads who carried those swords ami those muskets loved something more even than they loved peace — that they loved honor and the integrity of the Nation. And m». ladies and gentlemen, we have to prepare ourselves not to be unfair to the men who are going to make this self-sacrifice should ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 41 the terrible necessity arise for them to make it. We ought to make sure that we are not responsible for leaving them unprepared in knowledge and in training, and we ought to make it the pride of America that great bodies of men greater than the Government calls for are ready to prepare themselves for the day of exigency and the day of sacrifice. Every lad that did this would feel better for it. Every lad that obeyed his officers in the process of training would feel that he was obeying something greater than the officer, that he was obeying the instinct of patriotic service, and clothing himself with a new nobility by reason of the process. I have been asked by questioning friends in Washington whether I thought a sufficient number of men would volunteer for the training or not. Why, if they did not, it is not the America that you and I know ; something has happened. They have said, " Do you suppose that the men who employ young men would give them leave to take this training " ? I say, " Certainly I suppose it ; I know it." Because I know that the patriotism of America is not a name and an empty boast, but a splendid reality. If they did not do it, I should be ashamed of America, and I never expect to see the day when America gives me the slightest reason to be ashamed of her. I am sorry for the skeptics who believe that the response would not be tremendous; not grudging, but overflowing in its abundant strength. And it is to prove that that we want to try the plans that are before the present Congress. You will remind me of the great National Guard of the country; but how great is it, ladies and gentlemen? There are one hundred million people in this country and there are only 129,000 men in the National Guard, and those 129,000 men are under the direction, by the constitutional arrangement of our system, of the governments of more than two score States. The President of the United States is not at liberty to call them out of their States except upon the occa- sion of actual invasion of the territory of the United States. We are not now thinking of invasion of the territory of the United States. That is not what is making us anxious. We are not asking ourselves, " Shall we be prepared to defend our own shores and our own homes ? " Is that all that we stand for, to keep the door securely shut against enemies? Certainly not. What of the great trustee- ship we have set up for liberty of government and national inde- pendence in the whole Western Hemisphere? What of the pledges back of that great principle that has been ours and guided our foreign affairs ever since the day of President Monroe? We stand pledged to see that both the continents of America are left free to be used by their peoples as those peoples choose to use them, under a principle of national popular sovereignty as absolute and unchal- lenged as our own. And at this very moment, as I am speaking to you, the Americas are drawing together upon that handsome principle of reciprocal respect and reciprocal defence. When I speak of preparation for national defence I am speaking of something intangible and visionary; I am looking at a vision of the mind. America has never seen its destiny with the physical eye. The destiny of America lies written in the lines of poets, in the char- acters of self-sacrificing soldiers, in the conceptions and ambitions of her greatest statesmen; lies written in the teachings of her school- rooms, in all those ideals of service of humanity and of liberty for 42 ADDRESSES OE PRESIDENT WILSON. the individual which are to be found written in the very sehoolbooks of the boys and girls whom we send to be taught to be Americans. The destiny of America is an ideal destiny. America has no reason for being unless her destiny and her duty be ideal. It is her in- cumbent privilege to declare and stand for the rights of men. Noth- ing less is worth fighting for, nothing less is worth sacrificing for. The men and women of the American Colonies were physically com- fortable. Even the much complained of arrangements of trade in those days were not unfair in the sense that they did not bring pros- perity. "'America was offended and restless under the mere sug- gestion that she was not allowed to get her prosperity in her own way and under the guidance of her own spirit and purpose, and the American Revolution was fought for an ideal. We would have been as prosperous under the British Crown, but we should not have been as happy and we should not have respected ourselves as much. Therefore, what America is bound to fight for when the time comes is nothing more nor less than her self-respect. There is no immediate prospect that her material interests may be seriously affected, but there is constant danger, every day of the week, that her spiritual interests may suffer serious affront, and it is in order that they may be safeguarded, in order that America may show that the old concep- tions of liberty are ready to translate themselves in her hands into con- ceptions and manifestations of power at any time that it is necessary so to transform them, that we must make ourselves ready. You have not sent your representatives to Washington, ladies and gentlemen, to represent your business merely, to represent your ideals of material life. You'have sent them there to represent you in your character as a Nation, and it is only from that point of view that they counsel you; it is onlv upon that footing that they can appeal to you. I feel this so profoundly that I want to add this: I did not come away from Wash- ington because I had the least misgiving as to what the United States was going to do. You must not get impatient because there are long processes of debate at Washington. Wait for the end of the debate. The things that are necessary to be done are going to be done and thoroughly done. I for my part would be sorry for the man who did not take part in doing them if he had to stand up and give the reasons why, and I hope that every man who does not consent to do them will be made to stand up and give the reasons why. But it is empty to say that, because there is no danger; the things are going to be done. I came merely in order that you might understand the spirit in which they are proposed, and also receive from my lips the assurance of the absolute necessity that they should be done thoroughly and done very soon. For if they are not done and thoroughly done and done very soon it may turn out that you have laid upon me an impossible task, and that I should have to suffer the mortification and you the disap- pointment of having the combination of peace with honor prove to be impossible. It is not a happy circumstance to have these moments of national necessity arise, and yet I for my part am not sorry that this neces- sity has arisen. It has awakened me, myself, I frankly confess to you, to manv things and many conditions which a year ago I did not realize. I did not realize then that the things were possible which have since become actual facts. I am glad that I know better than ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. 43 I knew then exactly the sort of world we are living; in. I would be ashamed of my intelligence if I did not understand the significance of indubitable facts. And it may be that large bodies of our fellow citizens were resting in a false security, based upon an imaginary correspondence of all the world with the conceptions under which they were themselves conducting their own lives. It is probably a fortunate circumstance, therefore, that America has been cried awake by these voices in the disturbed and reddened night, when fire sweeps sullenly from continent to continent, and it may be that in this red flame of light there will rise again that ideal figure of America hold- ing up her hand of hope and of guidance to the people of the world and saying, " I stand ready to counsel and to help ; I stand ready to assert whenever the flame is quenched those infinite principles of rec- titude and peace which alone can bring happiness and liberty to man- kind." DES MOINES, IOWA, FEBRUARY 1, 1916. Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, and Fellow Citizens: I am greatly cheered, as well as greatly honored, by the sight of this great audience. I have been very much impressed by being told that you have been waiting here patiently for more than two hours for the exercises of the evening, and I think I know, I hope I know, what that means. It is not only that in your gracious courtesy you have waited to greet the President of the United States, but that, knowing the errand upon which he has come, you are profoundly in- terested, as he is, in the candid discussion of some of the chief things which concern the welfare and the safety of the Nation. Some one who does not know our fellow citizens quite as well as he ought to know them told me that there was a certain degree of indifference and lethargy in the Middle "West with regard to the defence of the Nation. I said, " I do not believe it, but I am going out to see " ; and I have seen. I have seen what I expected to see — great bodies of serious men, great bodies of earnest women, coming to- gether to show their profound interest in the objects of this visit of mine. I know, therefore, that it is my privilege to address those who will realize the spirit of responsibility in which I speak to them. My fellow citizens, it would be easy, if I permitted myself to do so, to draw a picture of the present situation of the world which would deeply stir your feelings and perhaps deeply excite your ap- prehension, but you would not think that it was right for your Chief Magistrate to speak any word of excitement whatever. I want you to believe that in what I say to you I am endeavoring as far as extemporaneous speech will permit to weigh every word that I say. I said a moment ago that you know the errand upon which I have come to you, but do you know the reasons why I have undertaken that errand? There are some very conclusive and imperative reasons. Some of our fellow citizens are seeking to darken counsel upon this great matter ; not I hope and believe out of wrong motives, but cer- tainly I believe out of mistaken conceptions of the duty and interest of America. On the one hand there is a considerable body of men who are try- ing to stir the very sort of excitement in this country upon which 44 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. every true, well-balanced American ought to frown. There are actu- ally men in America who are preaching war, who are preaching the duty of the United States to do what it never would before seek entanglement in the controversies which have arisen on the other side of the water — abandon its habitual and traditional policy and deliberately engage in the conflict which is now engulfing the rest of the world. I do not know what the standards of citizenship of these gentlemen may be. I only know that I for one can not subscribe to those standards. I believe that I more truly speak the spirit of America when I say that that spirit is a spirit of peace. Why, no voice has ever come to any public man more audibly, more unmis- takably, than the voice of this great people has come to me, bearing this impressive lesson, "We are counting upon you to keep this country out of war." And I call you to witness, my fellow country- men, that I have spent every thought and energy that has been vouchsafed me in order to keep this country out of war. It can not be disclosed now, perhaps it can never be disclosed, how anxious and difficult that task has been, but my heart has been in it. I have not grudged a single burden that has been thrown upon me with that end in view, for I knew that not only my own heart, but the heart of all America, was in the cause of peace. Yet, my fellow citizens, there are some men amongst us preaching peace who go much further than I can go. Not further than I can go in the sentiment of peace ; not further than truth warrants them in going in interpreting the desire and sentiment of America, but further than I can follow them, further, I believe, than j^ou can follow them, in preaching the doctrine of peace at any price and in any circumstances. There is a price which is too great to pay for peace, and that price can be put in one word. One can not pay the price of self-respect. One can not pay the price of duties abdicated, of glorious opportunities neglected, of character, national character left without vindication and exemplification in action. America has a character as distinct as the character of any individual amongst us. We read that character in every page of her singular and glorious history. It is written in invisible signs which, nevertheless, our spirits can decipher upon the very folds of the flag which is the emblem of our national life. The gentlemen who are out-and-out pacifists are making one funda- mental mistake. That is not a mistake about the sentiments of America, but a mistake about the circumstances of the world. Amer- ica does not constitute the world. In many of her sentiments and predilections she does not represent or influence the world. The dangers to our peace do not come any longer from within our own borders. I could not have said that a few months ago. Passion was astir in this country. There was a clash of sjmipathies and a heat of passion which made our air tense and made men hold their breath for fear some of our fellow countrymen would forget that their first loyaltv was to America and only their second loyalty to the ancient affections which bound them, and honorably bound them, to some older country and polity. But those dangers have passed. America has regained her self-possession. Men are now ready to feel and to act in common in the groat cause of a common national life, and no influence * ithin America is going to disturb the peace of America. ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. 45 But America can not be an ostrich with its head in the sand. America can not shut itself out from the rest of the world, because all the dangers at this present moment, and they are many, come from her contacts with the rest of the world. Those contacts are going to be largely determined by other nations and not determined by ourselves. I have not come to tell you that there is any danger to our national life from anything that your Government may do or your Congress propose. I have come to tell you that there is danger to our national life from what other nations may do. And let me say, ladies and gentlemen, that I would not speak of other nations in a spirit of criticism. Not only would it not become me to do so, as your spokesman and representative, but I would not be interpret- ing my real feeling if I did so. Every nation now engaged in the titanic struggle on the other side of the water believes, with an intensity of conviction that can not be exaggerated, that it is fighting for its rights, and in most instances that it is fighting for its life; and we must not be too critical of the men who lead those nations. If America's liberty Avere involved, if we thought that America's life was involved, would we criticize our leaders and public men because they went every length of even desperate endeavor to see that the Nation did not suffer and that the Nation did triumph? I have it not in my heart to criticize these men. But I want you to know the dangers that they are running, and that the dangers they are run- ning are dangers which involve us also. Look what it is that America is called on to do. I can tell you what America is called on to do, because there is hardly a day goes by that some bit of news does not bear to my office some kind of appeal. There is hardly a week goes by that some delegation does not come to the Executive Office in Washington bearing some kind of protest, some kind of request, some land of urgent message, looking toward interference in the interest of peace. Why, I have talked with earnest men and women, not of our own citizenship, but come out of the body of these other great nations, who plead with me to put the moral force of the Government of the United States into one or other of the European scales, so as to see that this struggle was the sooner brought to a peaceful conclusion. America is looked upon to sit in a sort of moral judgment upon the processes of war. And the processes of what a war ! The world, my fellow citizens, never wit- nessed a struggle like this before. Do you know that there is not a single continent except the continent of South America that has not been touched by the flame of this terrible conflagration? Do you know that there is not a single country in the world, not even except- ing our own, into which the influences of this tremendous struggle have not been thrust by way of political influence and effect? The whole world is tremulous with the influences of passion and of des- perate struggle, and the only great disengaged nation is this Nation which we love and whose interests we would conserve. What is America expected to do? She is expected to do nothing less than keep law alive while the rest of the world burns. You know that there is no international tribunal, my fellow citizens. I pray God that if this contest have no other result, it will at least have the result of creating an international tribune and producing some sort of joint guarantee of peace on the part of the great nations of the 46 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. world. But it has not yet done that, and the only thing, therefore, that keeps America out of danger is that to some degree the under- standings, the ancient and honorable understandings, of nations with regard to their relations to one another and to the citizens of one another are to some extent still observed and followed. And when- ever there is a departure from them, the United States is called upon to intervene, to speak its voice of protest, to speak its voice of in- sistence. Do you want it to be only a voice of insistence? Do you want the situation to be such that all that the President can do is to write messages; to utter words of protest? If these breaches of inter- national law which are in daily danger of occuring should touch the very vital interests and honor of the United States, do you wish to do nothing about it? Do you wish to have all the world say that the flag of the United States, which we love, can be stained with im- vanity ? Why, to ask the question is to answer it. I know that there is not a man or a woman in the hearing of my voice who would wish peace at the expense of the honor of the United States. I said just now that an unmistakable voice had come to my ears from out the great body of this Nation, saying, " We depend upon you to keep us out of war;" but that same voice added always this sentence also, "But we depend upon you to maintain unsullied and unquestioned the honor and integrity of the United States;" and many a night when it has seemed impossible for me to sleep, because of the thought of the apparently inextricable difficulties into which our international relations were drifting, I have said to myself, " I wonder if the people of the United States fully realize what that mandate means to me?" And then sleep has come because I have krown, as I have known in my own mind and in my own heart, that there was not a community in America that would not stand behind me in maintaining the honor of the United States. My fellow citizens, you may be called upon any day to stand behind me to maintain the honor of the United States. And how are you going to do it? There are two Avays of doing it, One is the careless, easy-going, wasteful way in which we have done these things hitherto. You say, "There are plenty of fighting men in the United States; there are unexhausted and inexhaustible material resources in the United States; nobody could do more than put us at a disadvan- tage for a little while?' Yes; there are plenty of fighting men in the United States; but do they know how modern war is con- chicted? Do they know how to guard themselves against disease^ in the camp? Do they know what the discipline of organization is? Shall we send the whole body of those men who first volunteer to be butchered because they did not know how to make themselves imme- diately ready for the battlefield and the trench; because they did not know anything about the terrible vicissitudes and disciplines of mod- ern battle? Why, war has been transformed almost within the memory of men. The mere mustering of volunteers is not war. Mere bodies of men are not an army; and we have neither the men nor the equipment for the men if they should be called out, It would take time to make an army of them— perhaps a fatal length of time— and it would take a ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 47 long lime to provide them with the absolute necessities of warfare. America is not going* to sacrifice her youth after that fashion. Amer- ica is going to prepare for war by preparing citizens who know what war means and how war can be conducted. It is going to increase its standing army up to the point of efficiency for the present uses for which it is needed, and it is going to put back of that army a great body of peaceful men, following their daily pursuits, knowing that their own happiness and the happiness of everybody they love de- pends upon peace, who, nevertheless, at the call of their country, will know how immediately to make themselves into an army and to come out and face an enemy in a fashion which will show that America can neither be daunted nor taken by surprise. I spoke just now of equipment. I know that there is a very gen- eral impression that influences are at work in this country whose impulse does not come from a thoughtful conviction of danger, but which is said to come from a very thoughtful prospect of profit. I have heard the preposterous statement made that the agitation for preparation for national defense has come chiefly from the men who make armor plate for the ships and munitions for the Army. Why, ladies and gentlemen, do you suppose that all the thoughtful men who are engaged upon this side of this great question are susceptible of being led by influences of that sort? Do you suppose that they are so blind to the manifest opportunities for that sort of profit that they do not know the influences that are abroad and effective in such matters? I have not found the impulse for national defense coming from those sources. I have found it coming from the men with whom I rubbed shoulders on the street and in the factory; I have found it coining from the men who have nothing to do with the making of profits, but who have everything to do with the making of the daily life of this country. And it is from them that I take my inspiration. But I know the points of danger, and from the first, ladies and gentle- men, I have been urging upon Congress — I urged upon Congress before this war began — that the Government of the United States supply itself with the necessary plants to make the armor for the ships and to make the munitions for the guns and the men, and I believe, and confidently predict, that the adoption of measures of that sort will be part of the preparation for national defense; not in order, for it is not necessary, that the Government should make all the armor plate needed for the fleet or all the munitions needed for the men and the guns, but in order that it should make enough to regulate and control the price. We are not theorists in this matter. We have tried it in one field. The Government is now manufacturing a very considerable propor- tion of the powder needed for the Navy. The consequence is that it has reduced its price from 53 cents to 36 cents. The point is that it can now get its powder from the private manufacturers of powder at 36 cents, because they know that it can be manufactured for that with a reasonable profit, and that if the Government can not buy it from them, it will make it for itself. Of course somebody is going to make money out of the things privately manufactured, manufactured by private capital. There are men now in the great belligerent countries making, I dare say, 48 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. vast sums of money out of the Avar, but making it perfectly legiti- mately, and I for one do not stand here to challenge or doubt their patriotism in the matter. America is not going to be held back from any great national enterprise by any great financial interest of any sort, because America, of all places in the world, is alive to things of that sort and knows how to avoid the difficulties which are in- volved. If there is any thought on the part of those who make armor plate and munitions that they will get extraordinary profit out of preparation for national defense, all I have to say is that they will be sadly disappointed. But these are things which to my mind go without saying, for, ladies and gentlemen, if it is neces- sary to defend this Nation we are going to defend it no matter who makes money and no matter what it costs. I have heard some gentleman say, "My constituents do not object to the program, but they do object to the bills that will have to be paid afterwards." I would be very sorry to give that account of any constituency in the United States. I would be very sorry to believe, and I do not believe, that any constituency in the United States will be governed by considerations of that sort. Of course it is going to cost money to prepare for defense, but equally of course the American people are going to pay for it, and pay for it without grumbling. We are not selfishly rich; we are a very rich people, but we can not be rich as a people unless we maintain our character and integrity as a people. Life is not worth anything for us as a nation if the very issues of life for the Nation itself are put in jeopardy by the action which we neglect to take. So I have come out on this errand merely to get into touch with you, my fellow citizens, merely to let you know in temperate words from my own lips that the men who are saying that preparation for national de- fense is necessary, and immediately necessary, are speaking the sober truth. And I believe that you will credit the statement that no man is in a better position to know that than I am. One aspect of this matter makes me very glad, indeed. Party politics, my friends, sometimes plays too large a part in the United States. Parties are worth while only when their differences are based upon absolute conviction. They are not worth while when they are based upon differences of personal ambition. Parties are dignified and worthy of the consideration of a nation only when their arguments are for the national benefit, each arguing according to their genuine opinion, their real observation of facts, their real ardor for the national welfare; and it is very delightful sometimes, as upon this occasion, to find an issue regarding which no line can be drawn between one party and another. I have not the embarrassment in standing before you to-night of making the im- pression that I am urging the advantage of a party or the advantage of an individual. There are just as many men interested in national defense on the one side as on the other. They are all actuated by the same motives; they differ as to details, but they do not differ as to their objects, and I thank God that there is no party politics when it comes to the life and welfare of the United States. Do you .suppose that if the country were in danger, any man would hesitate to volunteer on the ground that he belonged to this party or to that? Do you suppose that if a Republican administration were ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 49 in power at Washington any Democrat would hesitate to enlist, or that, a Democratic administration being there, any Republican would hesitate to enlist? Why, the whole history of the country gives an emphatic negative to that question. We are not Democrats or Re- publicans to-night. We are Americans. It was a very thrilling thing to me as I came into this hall to see the multitude of American flags that waved above the heads of this audience, and upon every stage of my journey since I left Washington, on Friday last, I have seen flags, big flags, little flags, flags of every sort, old flags torn with use, new flags brought out for the first time, dis- played any way — upon improvised poles, upon the roof trees of houses, upon chimneys, upon any point of vantage where somebody might throw to the breeze this thrilling signal of our national life; and it has seemed to me that as each stage of the journey was accomplished, there was imprinted still deeper upon my heart this solemn reflection, that the honor of that flag was in my keeping not only, but in the keeping of the people who displayed it, for, ladies and gentlemen, the impulses of government in this country do not come from the rulers, they come from the people. I was saying the other night that I know of no case where one people made war upon another people. I know only of cases where one Government made war upon another Government. No Government can make war in the United States. The people make war through their representatives. The Constitu- tion of the United States does not give the President even a partic- ipating part in the making of war. War can be declared only by the Congress, by an action which the President does not take part in and can not veto. I am literally, by constitutional arrangement, the mere servant of the people's representatives. I know that a great pulse of feeling underlies the thought of every one of you, as it underlies my thought. We teach our children, ladies and gentlemen, the history of the United States, and I suppose we do incidentally point out to them the great material growth and tremen- dous physical power of this country, but that is not what we em- phasize in our history. We tell them the stories (how proudly we tell them the stories) of the men who have died for their country without any thought of themselves; of the great ideal principles for the vindication of which America was set up, and which the flag that we honor was designed to represent. And as I look at that flag I seem to see many characters upon it which are not visible to the physical eye. There seem to move there ghostly visions of devoted men who, looking to that flag, thought only of liberty, of the rights of mankind, of the mission of America to show the way to the world for the realization of the rights of mankind; and every grave of every brave man of the country would seem to have upon it the colors of the flag, if he was a true American; would seem to have on it that stain of red which means the true pulse of blood, and that beauty of pure white which means the peace of the soul. And then there seems to rise over the graves of these men and to hallow their memories that blue space of the sky in which stars swim, those stars which exemplify for us that glorious galaxy of the States of the Union, bodies of free men banded together to vindicate the rights of mankind. 50 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. TOPEKA, KANS., FEBRUARY 2, 1916. Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency, Fellow Citizens: Tt is a gen- uine satisfaction on my part to find myself in Kansas again. I feel that every word that your governor has said about Kansas is true. It likes to know what the facts are and it likes to give them an open and frank consideration. Moreover, I believe that you realize that I would not have come away from Washington except upon a very unusual occasion. Obviously it is my duty, so far as possible, to be always in Washington during these critical times of change, when no- body knows what an hour will bring forth or what delicate question will assume some new aspect. You will realize, therefore, that it was only because I felt it my imperative and supreme duty to come out and discuss matters with you that I have left Washington at all, and that only for a few days. I have come, not to plead a cause — the cause I would speak for does not need to be plead for — but because I would assist, if I could, to clarify judgment and to sweep away those things irrelevant and untrue which are likely to cloud the issue of national defence if they be not very candidly spoken about. You will ask me, " Is there some new crisis that has arisen?" I answer. "No; there is no special, new, critical situation which I have to discuss with you; but I want you to understand that the situation every day of the year is critical while this great contest continues in Europe." I need not tell you what my own attitude toward that contest is. I have tried to live up to the counsel which I have given my fellow citizens, not only to be neutral in action but also to be neutral in the genuine attitude of my thought and mind. It is easy to refrain from unneutral acts, but it is not easy, when the world is swept by storm, to refrain from unneutral thought. Moreover, America is a composite Nation. You do not realize it quite so much in Kansas as it is realized in some ether parts of the Union. So overwhelming a proportion of your population is native born that you naturally feel your first conscious- ness to be of America and things American; but imagine those com- munities — and they are many — which contain very large bodies of men whose birthplace, whose memories, whose family connections are on the other side of the sea, in places now swept by the flame of war; men for whom every mail brings news of some disaster that, it- may be, has touched those whom they love or has swept the face of some countryside which they remember in association with the days of their youth. Their intimate sympathies are with some of the places now most affected by this titanic struggle. You can not WO nder — I do not wonder — that their affections are stirreci, old memories awakened and old passions rekindled. The majority of them are steadfast Americans, nevertheless. Look what happened to them, my fellow citizens. You and I were born in America : they chose to be Americans. They deliberately came to America, beckoned hither by some of the fairest promises and prospects ever offered to mankind. They were told that this was a land of liberty and of opportunity, as it' is. They were told that this was a land in which they could throw off some of the restraints and trammels under which they had chafed in the older countries. They were told that this was the place for the feet of young men who had ambition and ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON". 51 who wished untrammeled hope to be their only leader; and of their own free and deliberate choice they crossed the waters and joined their destinies with ours, and the vast majority of them have the pas- sion of American liberty in their hearts just as much as you and I have. I do not want any American to misunderstand the real situ- ation, and I believe that to be the real situation. Some men of for- eign birth have tried to stir up trouble in America, but, gentlemen, some men of American birth have tried to stir up trouble in America, too. If you were to listen to the counsels that are dinned into my ears in the Executive Office in Washington, you would find that some of the most intemperate of them came from the lips of men whose people have for generations together been identified with America but who for the time being are so carried away by the sweep of their sympathies that they have ceased to think in the terms of American tradition and American policy. So that the situation for us is this: There is no country in the world, I suppose, whose heart is more open to generous emotions than this dear country which we love. You have seen what the result was in the extraordinary amount of assistance which we have tried to render to those who are suffering most grievously from the consequences of the war on the other side of the sea. I express no judgment concerning any matter with regard to the conduct of the war, but the heart of America has bled because of the condition of the people in Belgium, and you know how we have poured out of our sympathy and of our wealth to assist in the relief of suffering in that sorrow-swept land. America looks to all quarters of the world and sympathizes with mankind in its sufferings wherever those sufferings may be displayed or undergone. What you have to realize is that everywhere throughout America there is combustible material — combustible in our breasts. It is easy to take fire where everything is hot. It is easy to start a flame when the air is full of the floating sparks of a great conflagration. We have got to be on our guard, and it has been our hourly and daily anxiety in Washington to see that the exposed tinder was covered up and the sparks prevented from falling where there were magazines. I was told before I came here, and I read in one of your papers this morning, that Kansas was not in sympathy with any policy of prepa- ration for national defense. I do not believe a word of it. I long ago learned to distinguish between editorial opinion and popular opinion. Moreover, having been addicted to books, I happened to have read the history of Kansas, and if there is any place in the world fuller of fight than Kansas I would like to hear of it ; any other place fuller of fight on the right lines. Kansas is not looking for trouble, but Kansas has made trouble for everybody that inter- fered with her liberties or her rights, and if I were to pick out one place which was likely to wince first and get hot first about invasion of the essential principles of American liberty I certainly would look to Kansas among the first places, in the country. If Kansas is op- posed or has been opposed to the policy of preparation for national defense, it has been only because somebody has misrepresented that policy, and Kansas does not know what it is. What is the issue? Why. of course, there are some men going about proposing great military establishments for America, but you 52 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. have not heard anybody connected with the administration who d'd. You have not heard anybody in any responsible position who could carry his plan out who did. The singular thing about this situation is that the loudest voices have been the irresponsible voices. It is easy to talk and to say what ought to be done when you know that you do not have to do it. Nobody in authority, nobody in a position to lead the policy of the country, has proposed great military arma- ments, and nobody who really understands the history or shares the spirit of America could or would propose great military establish- ments for America. But I have heard of men in Kansas who owned their own firearms and knew how to use them, and if there is any place in the Union more than another where you ought to understand what it is to be ready to take care of yourselves, this is the place. All that anybody in authority has proposed is that America should be put in such a position that her free citizens should know how to take care of themselves and their country when the occasion arose. We have been proposing only a very moderate increase in the standing army of the country because it is already too small for the routine uses of peace. I have not had soldiers enough to patrol the border between here and Mexico. I have not had soldiers enough for the ordinary services of the Army, and there are many things that it has been impossible for me to do which it was my duty to do, be- cause there were not men to do them with. You are not, I am sure, going to be jealous of an increase of the Army merely sufficient to enable the Executive to carry out his constitutional responsibilities. Over and above that we have proposed this, that a sufficient number of men out of the ranks of the civil pursuits of the country should be trained in the use and keeping of arms, in the sanitation of camps, in the maneuvers of the field, and in military organization; to be ready and pledged to be ready, if the call should come upon act of Congress, to unite their force with the little force of the Army itself and make a great multitude of armed men who were ready to vindicate the rights of America. Is there, anything inconsistent with the traditions of Kansas or with the true traditions of America in a proposal like that? The very essence of American tradition is contained in the proposal. Every constitution of every State in the Union forbids the State legislature to abridge the right of its citizens to carry arms. At the very outset the makers of our very institutions realized that the force of the Nation must dwell in the homes of the Nation. I do not mean the moral force merely; I mean the physical force also. They rea- lized that every man must be allowed not only to have a vote, but, if he wanted to, to have a gun too, so that when the voices of peace did not suffice, the voices of force would prevail; knowing that great bodies of men do not use force to usurp their own liberties, but to de- clare and vindicate their liberties, and that there will be no collusion among free men to upset free institutions; that, whereas cliques and coteries and professional groups may conceive it to be of their in- terest to interfere with the peaceful life of the country, the general body of citizens would never so conceive it. What we are asking is this, that the Nation supply arms for those of the Nation who are ready, if occasion should arise, to come to .the national defense, and that it should do this without withdrawing ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON". 53 them from their pursuits of industry and of peace, in order that America should know that in the fountains from which she always draws her strength there welled up the inexhaustible resources of American manhood. This is not a military policy; this is a policy of adequate preparation for national defense, and any man who rep- resents it in any other light must either be ignorant or is consciously misrepresentine; Hie facts. You will say, "We have a National Guard." Yes; Ave have a Na- tional Guard, and the units of it, so far as I have observed them, command my admiration and respect, but there are only 1-29,000 enlisted men in the National Guard, taking the Nation as a whole, and they are divided up into as many units as there are States. The Constitution of the United States puts them under the direct com- mand and control of the governors of the States, not of the President of the United States, and the national authority has no right to call upon them for any service outside their States unless the territory of the Nation is actually invaded. I want to see Congress do every- thing that it can to enhance the dignity and the force and to assist in the development of the National Guard, but the National Guard is a body of State troops and not a body of national reserves, because the Constitution makes them so, no matter whether we now think those are the best arrangements or not. The other matter I want to speak to you about is not the plan itself, for that is a question of detail. I have given you the idea of it, and time does not suffice to discuss the detail in meetings of this sort. The detail is printed, for that matter, for anybody to see who wants it. The other matter is this: Suppose you had a great body of, let us say, half a million men sufficiently trained to arms to make the nucleus of a great army if it were necessary to create a great army. What would be your idea that you would do with it? That is the matter that we need to clear up most of all. There are all sorts of people in the United States, and there are people who think that we ought to use the force of the United States to get any- thing we can get with it; but you do not think that, and I do not think that, and not one American in a hundred thousand thinks that. We would never use this force to carry out any policy that even smacked of aggression of any kind ; because this Nation loves peace more than it loves anything else except honour. I like that exclamation of Henry V in that stirring play of Shakes- peare's, " If it be an offence to covet honour, then am I the most offending soul alive," and I believe that could be said of America. If it be an offence against the peace of the nations to covet honour, then is America the most offending nation in the world. But she knows the basis of honour — that the basis of honour is right, is peace- ful intention, is just action, is the treatment of others as we would wish to be treated ourselves, is the insistence upon the rule of a free field and no favor. The spirit of America would hold any Executive baric, would hold any Congress back, from any action that had the least taint of aggression upon it. We are not going to invade any nation's territory. "We are not going to covet any nation's posses- sions. We are not going to invade any nation's rights. But sup- pose, my fellow countrymen, some nation should invade our rights. What then? What would Kansas think? What would Kansas do 54 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. then? What Avould America, speaking by the voice of Kansas or any other State in the Union, think and do then? I have come here to tell you that the difficulties of our foreign policy, the delicate questions of our foreign relationships, do not diminish either in number or in delicacy and difficulty, but, on the contrary, daily in- crease in number and in intricacy and in danger, and I would be dere- lict to my duty to you if I did not deal with .you in these matters with the utmost candor and tell you what it may be necessary to use the force of the United States to do. For one thing, it may be necessary to use the force of the United States to vindicate the right of American citizens everywhere to enjoy the protection of international law. There is nothing you would be quicker to blame me for than neglecting to safeguard the rights of Americans, no matter where they might be in the world. There are perfectly clearly marked rights guaranteed by interna- tional law which every American is entitled to enjoy, and America is not going to abide the habitual or continued neglect of those rights. Perhaps not being as near the ports as some other Americans, you do not travel as much and you do not realize the infinite number of legitimate errands upon which Americans travel — errands of com- merce, errands of relief, errands of business for the Government, errands of every sort which make America useful to the world. Americans do not travel to disturb the world; they travel to quicken the processes of the interchange of life and of goods in the world, and their travel ought not to be impeded by a reckless disregard ot international obligation. There is another thing that we ought to safeguard, and that is our right to sell what we produce in the open neutral markets of the world. Where there is a blockade, we recognize the right to blockade; where there are the ordinary restraints created by a state of war, we ought to recognize those restraints; but the world needs the wheat off of the Kansas fields and off the other great flowering acres of the United States, and we have a right to supply the rest of the world with the products of those fields. We have a right to send food to peaceful populations wherever the conditions of war make it possible to do so under the ordinary rules of international law. We have a right to supply them with our cotton to clothe them. We have a right to supply them with our manufactured products. We have made some mistakes, my fellow citizens. For several generations past Ave have so neglected our merchant marine that cue of the difficulties Ave are struggling against has nothing to do with international questions. We have not got the American ships to send the goods in. and Ave have got to get them. I am going to ask you to folloAV the fortunes of the so-called shipping bill in the present Congress and make suggestions to your Congressmen as to the absolute necessity of getting your wheat and your other products out of the ports and upon the high seas where they can go, and shall go, under the protection of the laAvs of the United States. But that is a mere parenthesis. Aside from that, so far as there are vehicles to carry our trade, we have the right to extend our trade for the assistance of the world. For we have not been selfish in this neutral attitude of ours. I resent the suggestion that Ave have been ADDEESSES OF PKESIDENT WILSON. 55 selfish, desiring merely to make money. What would happen if there were no great nation disengaged from this terrible struggle? What would happen if every nation were consuming its substance in war? What would happen if no nation stood ready to assist the world with its finances and to supply it with its food? We are more indispen- sable now to the nations at war by the maintenance of our peace than we could po: dbly be to either side if we engaged in the war, and therefore there is a moral obligation laid upon us to keep out of this war if possible. But by the same token there is a moral obligation laid upon us to keep free the courses of our commerce and of our finance, and I believe that America stands ready to vindicate those rights. But there are rights higher than either of those, higher than the rights of individual Americans outside of America, higher ami greater than the rights of trade and of commerce. I mean the rights of mankind. We have made ourselves the guarantors of the rights of national sovereignty and of popular sovereignty on this side of the water in both the continents of the Western Hemisphere. You would be ashamed, as I would be ashamed, to withdraw one inch from that handsome guarantee; for it is a handsome guarantee. We have noth- ing to make by it. unless it be that we are to make friendships by it, and friendships are the best usury of an)' sort of business. So far as dollars and cents and material advantage are concerned we have nothing to make by the Monroe doctrine. We have nothing to make by allying ourselves with the other nations of the Western Hemi- sphere in order to see to it that no man from outside, no government from outside, no nation from outside attempts to assert any kind of sovereignty or undue political influence over the peoples of this con- tinent. America knows that the only thing that sustains the Monroe doctrine and all the inferences that flow from it is her own moral and physical force. The Monroe doctrine is not part of international law. The Monroe doctrine has never been formally accepted by any international agreement. The Monroe doctrine merely rests upon the statement of the United States that if certain things happen she will do certain tilings. So, nothing sustains the honour of the United States in respect of these long-cherished and long-admired promises except her own moral and physical force. Do you know what has interfered more than anything else with the peaceful relations of the United States with the rest of the world 1 The incredulity of the rest of the world when we have made state- ment of our sincere unselfishness in these matters ! The greatest surprise the world ever had, politically speaking, was when the United States withdrew from Cuba. We said, " We are fighting this war for the sake of the Cubans, and when it is over we are going to turn Cuba over to her own people "; and statesmen in every capital in Europe smiled behind their hand. They said, "What! that great rich island lying directly south of the foot of your own Florida ! plant your flag there and then haul it down?" Some Americans even said. " We will never raise the flag of the United States anywhere and then haul it down." And then, when the American people saw that the time had come when her promises were to be fulfilled, down came that fluttering emblem of our sovereignty, and we were more hon- ored in its lowering than we had been in its hoisting. The American 5G ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. people feel the same way about the Philippines, though the rest of the world does not yet believe it. We are trustees for the Filipino people, and just so soon as we feel that they can take care of their (UTn affairs without our direct interference and protection, the Hag of the United States will again be honored by the fulfillment of a promise. That flag stands for honor, not for advantage. That flng stands for the rights of mankind, no matter where they be, no matter what their antecedents, nc matter what the race involved; it stands for the absolute right to political liberty and free self government, and wherever it stands for the contrary American traditions have begun to be forgotten. But, my friends, the world does not understand that yet. It has got to have a few more demonstrations like the demonstration in Cuba ; it has got to have a few more vindications of the American name. When those vindications have come, I believe that nothing but peace will ever reign between the United States and the nations of the rest of the world. For every man who minds his own busi- ness is sure of peace. Every man who respects his own character and observes the rights of others is sure of peace. And every nation that makes right its guide and honor its principle is sure of peace. But until these things are believed of us we must be ready with the hand of force to hold others off from the invasion of any right which we hold sacred. I have come to you with the utmost confidence that the moment you understood the issue, all differences of party, all differences of individual judgment, all differences of point of view would fall away, and like true Americans we should all stand shoulder to shoulder in a common cause, — : America first and her vindication the sacred law of our life. For, ladies and gentlemen, it is only upon the most solemn occasions that I would appeal to you as I have been ap- pealing to-day. The final test of the validity, the strength, the irre- sistible force of the American ideal, has come. The rest of the world must be made to realize from this time out just what America stands for, and when that happy time comes when peace shall reign again and America shall take part in the undisturbed and unclouded coun- sels of the world, it will be realized that the promises of the fathers, the ambitions of the men who fought for the bloodv soil of Kansas, the ideals of the men who thought nothing of their lives in compari- son with their ideals, will have been vindicated and the world will say, "America promised to hold this light of liberty and right up for the guidance of our feet, and behold she has redeemed her promise. Her men, her leaders, her rank and file are pure of heart; they have purged their hearts of selfish ambition and they have said to all man- kind, 'Men and brethren, let us live together in righteousness and in the peace which springeth only from the soil of righteousness itself.'" CONVENTION HALL, KANSAS CITY, MO., FEBRUARY 2, 1916. Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizf.xs: You have certainly given me a most royal welcome to Kansas City, and I esteem it a very great privilege to deliver the message which I have come to deliver to this great throng of intelligent people. My natural duty to you, ladies and gentlemen, is in Washington, not here. I have a certain scruple ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON". 57 of conscience in being away from Washington for many days at a time, because it is one of the interesting circumstances of the moment that there is hardly a day which does not in some degree alter the aspect of affairs. It is important for your sake, and, I venture to add, for the sake of the peace of the world, that those who represent you in responsible stations should keep in constant touch with these changes. You will, therefore, credit me when I say that it is only an extraordinary occasion which draws me away from duties needing such constant attention. I would not have come away from Washington had I not believed that there was a stronger compulsion of conscience to acquaint you with the state of affairs than there was to remain during this week at the place of guidance. You will know without my describing it to you what the task assigned me has been. It has* been the task of keeping the scales so poised from day to day that no man should throw into one scale or the other any makeweight which would im- peril the peace of the United States; for I have felt that you were depending upon your Government to keep you out of this turmoil which is disturbing the rest of the world. You are counting upon me to do more than keep you out of trouble, however. Y^ou are count- ing upon me to see to it that the rights of citizens of the United States, wherever they might be, are respected by everybody. You have counted upon me to see that your energies should be released also along the channels of trade in order that you might serve the world as the only Nation disengaged and ready to serve it. You have expected me to see that the rest of the world permitted America thus to express and exercise her humane and legitimate energy. I have come out to ask you what there was behind me in this task. Y'ou know the lawyers speak of the law having a sanction back of it. The judge as he sits on his bench has something back of him. He has the whole physical force of the nation back of him. The laws reside and sit upon him, no matter how commonplace his individual aspect, with a sort of majesty, because there is the sovereignty of the people and of the people's government back of him. When he utters a judgment the man against whom it is uttered knows that he dare not resist it. But when I, as your spokesman and representative, utter a judgment with regard to the rights of the United States in its relations to other nations, what is the sanction ? What is the compul- sion? What lies back of that? Y r ou will say, "The force and majesty of the United States." Yes; the force and majesty of the United States; but is it ready to express itself? If you resist the judge, there are the bailiffs of the court; if you resist the bailiffs of the court, there are those who assist the sheriff of the county;. if you resist the sheriff, there is the National Guard; if you resist the National Guard, there is the Army of the United States. But if you ignore in some foreign capital what the President of the United States urges as the rights of the people and Government of the United States, what is there back of that? It is necessary, my fellow citizens, that I should ask you this question, because I do not know how long the mere word and in- sistence of your Government will prevail to maintain your honor and the dignity and power of the Nation. There may come a time — ■ I pray God it may never come, but it may, in spite of everything wo 58 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. do, come upon us, and come of a sudden — when I shall have to ask: "I have had my say; who stands back of me? Where is the force by which the majesty and right of the United States are to be main- tained and asserted ? " I take it that there may in your own convic- tion come a time when that might and force must be vindicated and asserted. You are not willing that what your Government says should be ignored. I have seen editorials written in more than one part of the United States sneering at the number of notes that were being written from the State Department to foreign Governments, and asking, " Why does not the Government act?" And in those same papers I have seen editorials against the preparation to do anything whatever effective if those notes are not regarded. Is that the temper of the United States? It may be the temper of some editorial offices, but it is not the temper of the people of the United States. I came out upon this errand from Washington, and see what hap- pened. Before I started everybody knew what errand I was bound on. I expected to meet quiet audiences and explain to them the issues of the day, and what did I meet? At every stop of the train multi- tudes of my fellow citizens crowded out, not to see the President of the United States merely — he is not much to look at — but to declare their ardent belief in the majesty of the Government which he stands for and for the time being represents, and to declare 1 in one fashion or another, if it were only by cheers, that they stood ready to do their duty in the hour of need. I have been thrilled by the experiences of these few days, and I shall go back to Washington and smile at any- body who tells me that the United States is not wide awake. But, gentlemen, crowds at the stations, multitudes in great audience halls, cheers for the Government, the display — the ardent display, as from the heart — of the emblem of our Nation, the Stars and Stripes, only express the spirit of the Nation; they do not express the organized force of the Nation. And while I know, and knew before I left Washington what the spirit of the people was, I have come out to ask them what their organization is and what they inte*nd to make it. Modern wars are not won by mere numbers. They are not won by mere enthusiasm. They are not won by mere national spirit. They are won by the scientific conduct of war, the scientific application of irresistible force. And what is there behind the President of the United States? Well, in the first place, there is a Navy, which, far my part, I am very proud of; a Navy, which for its numbers, ship by ship, man by man, officer by officer, I believe to be die equal of any navy in the world. But look at the great sweep of our coasts. Mind you, this war has engaged all the rest of the world outside of South America and the portion of North America occupied by the United States, and if this flame begins to creep in on us, it may, my fellow citizens, creep in toward both coasts, and here are thousands upon thousands of miles of coast. Do you know that the great sweep from the canal up the coast to Alaska is something like half the cir- cumference of the world? Do you remember the great reaches of sea from the canal up to the St. Lawrence River? Do you know the bays, the inviting harbors, the great cities which cluster upon those coasts? And do you think that a Navy that ranks only fourth in the world in force is enough to defend the coasts and make secure the territory of a great continent like this? ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON - . 59 We have been interested in our Navy for a great many years, and we have been slowly building it up to excellent force, but we have done it piecemeal and a little at a time. There has been a party in Congress that was for a little Navy, as well as a party in Con- gress that was for a big Navy, and it seemed to me a sort of theoretical situation as to whether we wanted a Navy to be proud of or not. No nation ought to wish either an Army or Navy to be proud of, to make a display with, to make a toy of. It is the arm of force which must lie back of every sovereignty in the world, and the Navy of the United States must now be as rapidly as possible brought to a state of efficiency and of numerical strength which will make it practically impregnable to the navies of the world. The fighting force of the Navy now is splendid, and I should expect very great achievements from the fine officers and trained men that constitute it, but it is not big enough; it is not numerous enough; it is in- complete. It must be completed, and what the present administra- tion is proposing is that we limit the number of years to five within which we shall complete a definite program which will make that Navy adequate for the defense of both coasts. But, on land what stands behind the President, if he should have to act in your behalf to enforce the demands of the United States for respect and right? An Army so small that I have not had men enough to patrol the Mexican border. The Mexican border is a very long border, I admit; it runs the whole southern length of Texas and the whole southern length of New Mexico and Arizona besides, and that is a great strip of noble territory. But what is that single border to the whole extent and coast of the United States? I have not had men enough to prevent bandits from raiding across the border of Mexico into the United States. It has been a very mortify- ing circumstance indeed. I have been tempted to advise Congress to help Texas build up its little force of Texas Rangers; and now, if yon please, because I am asking the Congress to give the Government an Army adequate to the uses of peace, to the uses of the moment, some gentlemen go about and prate of military establishments. They see phantoms, they dream dreams. Militarism in the United States springing out of any of the proposals of this administration is, — why, a man must have a very strong imagination indeed to conceive any such nonsense as that ! I am not asking, the administration is not asking, to be backed by any bigger standing Army than is necessary for the uses of the moment, but it is asking this : Do you remember the experiences of the Spanish-American war? That was not much of a war, was it? It did not last very long. You remember the satirical verses that some newspaper man wrote about it — War is rude and impolite. It quite upsets a nation ; It's made of several weeks of fight, And yeais of conversation. A war which was parodied in verse! What happened? You sent thousands of men to their death because they were ignorant. They did not get any farther than the camps in Florida. They did not get on the water even, much less get to Cuba, and they died in the camps like flies, of all sorts of camp diseases, of all sorts of diseases that come from the ignorance of medical science and camp sanitation. Splendid bo3 T s, boys fit, with a little training, to make an invincible army, but 60 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. sent to their death by miserable disease, the soil of which was igno- rance, helpless ignorance. Why, the percentage of our loss in that war by disease in the camp was greater than the percentage of the loss of the Japanese by disease and battle together in their war with Russia. It is a very mortifying thing. There is not any place in the world where medical science is more nobly studied or more adequately ap- plied than in the United States, but we poured crude, ignorant, un- trained boys into the ranks of those armies and they died before they got sight of an enemy. Do you want to repeat that? And while that is going on what may happen? What sort of disaster may come to you while you are trying to make an army out of abso- lutely raw material? Why, it seems almost ridiculous to state how little the present administration is asking for. It is asking that you give it something that is not mere raw material out of which to begin to make an army when it is absolutely necessary to make an army. It is asking that five hundred thousand men be asked to vol- unteer to take a little training every year for three years, not more than two or three months out of the year, in order that when vol- unteers are called for in the case of war we may have men, at least five hundred thousand of them, who know something about the use of arms, something about the sanitation of camps, something about the organization and discipline of war in the field and in the trenches. That is all that we are asking for at the present time, and if there is any criticism to be made upon it, it is that it is too little, not too much. There are men in Congress asking, " Can you get the five hundred thousand men ? Will they volunteer ? " Why, I believe you could get them out of any one State in the Union. You could almost get five thousand of them out of this audience. But, ladies and gentle- men, do not forget that that is not all there is to this problem. Sup- pose that I knew that back of the insistence of the United States upon its rights was a great navy that ranked first in the world and a body of men trained to arms adequate, at any rate, to fend off any initial disaster to the United States while we were making a greater army ready. That would be only the beginning. There are other things that Ave have been very much concerned about in Washington and that we are taking steps to attend to. The railroads of this coun- try have never been drawn into the counsels of the Government, never until recently, in such fashion as to make plans for coordi- nating all of them, to transport troops and transport provisions and transport munitions in such a way as to be the effective arteries of the red blood and energy of the Nation; never until recently, though we are now beginning to do it, for we called the business men and the engineers of the country into counsel to say, "What are the resources of manufacture in this country, and how can we coordinate them and put them into cooperation, so that there will be no waste of time, no duplication of effort, and no failure to get every part of the machinery into operation should we need to use them in times of war? " We are taking counsel with regard to that now; but, mark you, the munitions of war are made in this country almost exclusively near the borders of the country, and for the most part upon the Atlantic seaboard, and anv initial disaster to the force of the United ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 61 States might put the greater part of them, if not all of them, in the possession of an enemy. So that you see the circle of my argument leads right back to the necessity for a force of men who can prevent an initial disaster, so that there will be no first failure, no first inva- sion, no first disaster. Did you ever hear more momentous things spoken of than these? Did it ever before occur to you that you must put more than the authority of words into the mouths of the men who speak for you? I have been wringing my heart and straining every energy of mind that I have to preserve the honor and integrity and peace of the United States, but think of what must lie at the back of my thought. I know what you want me to do. I would be ashamed if I did not use the utmost poAvers that are in me to do it. But suppose that some morning I should have to turn to you and say, " Fellow citizens, I have done as much as I can; now I must ask you to back me up with the force of the Nation." And suppose that I should know be- fore I said it that I had not told you what that meant, as I am telling you to-night. Suppose that I had not warned you of what was in- volved. Suppose that I had not challenged you in a moment of peace to make ready. Do not suppose, however, that I am afraid that it is not going to be done. I would not do the injustice that that impli- cation would involve to the gallant men upon the Hill yonder in Washington who make the laws of the Nation. They are going to do a good deal of debating, but they are going to deliver the goods. Do not misunderstand me; I do not mean that I can oblige them to deliver the goods; they are going to deliver the goods because you want them delivered. I am a believer not only in some of the men who talk, though not all of them, but also in that vast body of my fellow citizens who do not do any talking. I would a great deal rather listen to the still, small voice that comes out of the great body of the Nation than to all the vocal orators in the land. But there are times when I must come out and say, " Do not let the voice be too small and too still "; when I must come out and say, " Fellow citizens, get up on your hind legs' and talk and tell the people who represent you, wherever they are— in your State Capital or in your National Capital — what it is that the Nation desires and demands." The thing that everybody is listening for in a democracy is the tramp, tramp, tramp of the facts and the people. Did you ever realize what the force of a democracy is?. May I give you a small, whimsical example? A cynical English writer once said that the problem in every nation was how, out of a multi- tude of knaves, to make an honest people. Now, I, for my part, deny utterly that any nation is a multitude of knaves, but if it were a multitude of knaves as numerous as the people of the United States, you could make an honest nation out of them in this way : They are not all selfishly interested in the same things at the same time; they are going to take care of each other and neutralize each other and in- spire one another. Suppose that an audience as great as this sur- rounded, let us say, a football field, too far away from the field to hear anything that was said out in the middle of the field itself; and suppose two men, dressed in the ordinary street dress and not expected to pummel each other as the players perhaps are, should 62 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. come out before the players and, standing in the sight of that great multitude, should suddenly fall to blows. You know what would happen. A great outcry would be raised, " Put them out! Put them out!" and there would be universal indignation that they should have so lost their self-possession and forgotten their decency. Now, what happened? Perhaps one of those men said to the other something that nobody would allow another man to say to him without hitting him. Perhaps there was not a man in the whole body of the audience who would not have struck the first blow upon the same provocation. But it was not his provocation. He did not hear what was said; if he did, it was not addressed to him, and he is cool while they are hot. Now, that is the way to answer the Englishman's cynical question. This country is so vast, its interests are so various, there are so many competing interests in it, that, while any body of citizens is hot, the vast majority are cool, and the vast majority are going to sit in judg- ment on the minority and tell them they have got to keep their heads and decide the quarrel in decent fashion. That is the way a democracy works. We are all of us fit to be judges about what is l.one of our business, and that is the way that great bodies of men come to the most cool-headed judgments. Their passions are not involved, their special interests are not involved; they are looking at the thing with a certain remove, with a certain aloofness of, judg- ment. I am anxious, therefore, my fellow citizens, that you should look at the hot stuff of war before you touch it; that you should be cool ; that you should apply your hard business sense to the proposition, " Shall we be caught unawares and do a scientific job like tyros and igno- ramuses? Or shall we be ready? Shall we know how to do it, and when it is necessary to do it; shall we do it to the queen's taste?" I know what the answer of America is, but I want it to be unmistakably uttered, and I want it to be uttered now. Be- cause, speaking with all solemnity, I assure you that there is not a day to be lost; not, understand me, because of any new or specially critical matter, but because I can not tell 24 hoursfl at a time whether there is going to be trouble or not. And whether there is or not does not depend upon what I do or what I say, or upon what any man in the United States does or says. It depends upon what for- eign governments do; what the commanders of ships at sea do; what those in charge of submarines do; what those who are conducting blockades do. "Upon the judgment of a score of men, big and little, hang the vital issues of peace or war for the United States. This month should not go by without something decisive done by the people of the United States by way of preparation of the arms of self- vindication and defence. My heart burns within me, my fel- low citizens, when I think of the importance of this matter and of all that is involved. I am sorrv that there should be anybodv in the United States avIio goes about crying out for Avar. There are such men, but they are irresponsible men, who do a great deal of talking, and they are appealing to some of the most funda- mental and dangerous passions of the human heart. And yet they are appealing, it must also be said, to some of the handsomest passions of (he human heart, If I see somebody suffering, suffer- ing cruelly, suffering unjustly, and believe that by the exercise ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON, 63 of force on my part I can stop the suffering, it is not a low but an exalted passion which leads me to wish 'to go in and help. And there are men in this country, men by the thousand, who Relieve that we ought to intervene to stop the intolerable suffering which is involved in some of the processes of this terrible war. Yet I, for my part, am so convinced that we can help better by keeping out of the war, by giving our financial resources to the use of the injured world, b} r giving our cotton and our woolen stuffs to clothe the world ; I am so convinced that the processes of peace are even now the helpful and healing and redeeming forces that I do not see how any man can think that by adding to the number of guns you can decrease the suffering or the tragedy of the world. There is tragedy abroad in the world, my fellow citizens. We in these peaceful areas of this blessed country go about our daily tasks unmolested and unafraid. It seems very strange that this tragedy should be enacted while we lie so still and peaceful in our own abodes, but the world has never before in the history of mankind seen war upon such a scale, seen war with so many terrible features, seen the sweep of destruction comparable to that which is now devastating the fields of Europe. We think our own Civil War one of the bloodiest wars in history, but all the suffering of all the four years of that war are as dust in the balance as compared to the josses and sufferings and sacrifices which are being witnessed in Europe and upon the seas to-day. We are witnessing a cataclysm, and God only knows what the issue will be. See, therefore, the noble part that is assigned to America, — to stand steady, to stand cool, to keep alive all the wholesome processes of peace, — and we who are trustees to repair the world when the damage is done must take counsel with one another how we shall see to it that we shall not be prevented from the efficacious per- formance of that task. I would not condescend to appeal to your passions. I would be ashamed of myself if I tried to do anything but quiet your judgments. I do not wish you to be any more excited than I am. I am too solemn to be excited. I would not draw a passionate breath for fear I might disturb the nice equipoise of the peace of this part of the world. But, ladies and gentlemen, one can- not help seeing visions, one cannot help realizing what it means to stand for the honor of a great nation like this. You little realize thei feeling that it gives me when I see those little flags lifted in the air. and know that every one of them is a symbol of the solemn duty laid upon those selected to represent you in the counsels of the w T orld. And I have come in all solemnity to ask you to sustain the judgment of those who represent you in applying the means, the necessary means, the only means which will make it certain that those great interests may be conserved and cared for. I am going away from here reassured beyond even the hope that I entertained when I came here; and yet I want to beg of you that you do not let the impressions of this hour die with the hour. Let every man and woman in this place go out of here with the feeling that he must concentrate his influence from this moment until the thing is accomplished upon making certain the securit} r and adequacy of national defence. Because, if America suffer, all the world loses its equipoise. Madness has entered into everything, and -that serene Hag which we have thrown to the breeze upon so many occasions 64 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. as the beckoning finger of hope to those who believe in the rights of mankind will itself be stained with the blood of battle, and stag- gering here and there among its foes will lead men to wonder where the star of America has gone and why America has allowed herself to be embroiled when she might have carried that standard serenely forward to the redemption of the affairs of mankind. I beg of you to stand by your Government with your minds as well as your hearts, and let us redeem America by applying our judgments to the whole- some process of national defence. COLISEUM, ST. LOUIS, MO., FEBRUARY 3, 1916. Mr. Chairman and Fellow Citizens: I came into the Middle West to find something, and I found it. I was told in Washington that the Middle West had a different feeling from the portions of the country that lie upon either coast, and that it was indifferent to the question of preparation for national defence. I knew enough of the Middle West of this great continent to know that the men who said that did not know what they were talking about. I knew the spirit of America to dwell as much in this great section of the country as in any other section of it, and I knew that the men of these parts loved the honor and safety of America as much as Americans every- where love it and are ready to stand by it. I did not come out to find out how you felt or what you thought, but to tell you what was going on. I came out in order that there might be an absolute clarification of the issues which are involved in the questions imme- diately confronting us, because I, for one, have an absolute faith in the readiness of America to act upon the facts just as soon as America knows what the facts are. The facts are very easily and briefly stated. What is the situation ? The situation is that America is at peace with all the world and desires to remain at peace with all the world. And it is not a shallow peace; it is a genuine peace, based upon some of the most fundamental influences of" international intercourse. America is at peace with all the world because she entertains a real friendship for all the nations of the world. It is not, as some have mistakenly supposed, a peace based upon self-interest. It is a peace based upon some of the most generous sentiments that characterize the human heart. You know, my fellow c : tizens, that this Nation is a composite Nation. It has a genuine friendship for all the nations of the world because it is drawn from all the nations of the world. The blood of all the great national stocks runs, and runs red and strong, in the veins of America, and America understands what the genuine ties of friendship and affection are. It would tear the heartstrings of America to be at war with any of the great nations of the world. Our peace is not a superficial peace. Our peace is not based upon the mere conveniences of our national life. If great ( issues were in- volved which it was our honorable obligation to defend, we should not be at peace, but would plunge into any struggle that was necessary in order to defend the honor and integrity of the Nation ; but we belive, my fellow citizens, that we can show our friendship tor the world and our devotion to the principles of humanity better ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. t)5 and more effectively by keeping out of this struggle than by getting into it. I do not misread the heart of this great country. The heart of this great country is sound, and it is made up of those fundamental prin- ciples of human sympathy which move all mankind when they are permitted free scope and are not interfered with by the politics of groups of men and the suggestions of those who do not represent* the people themselves. I have no indictment against any form of govern- ment, but I do believe in my heart that the world has never witnessed a case, and never will witness a case, where one people desired to make war upon another people, and I believe that the security of America rests in the fact that no man is the master of America; that no man can lead America any whither that her people do not de- sire to be led. I believe it to be my duty, whatever my individual opinions might be, whatever my individual sympathies, whatever my individual points of view, to subordinate everything to the consci- entious attempt to interpret and express in the international affairs of the world the genuine spirit of my fellow citizens. So far as America is concerned no man need go about amongst us preaching peace. We are disciples of peace already, and no man need preach that gospel amongst us. I, in my individual capacity, am also a disciple of domestic peace and security; but, suppose that my neighbor's house is on fire and my roof is of combustible shingles, is it my fault if the fire eats into the wood, if the flames leap from timber to timber? Is it my fault, because I love peace and security, that my doors are battered in and reckless men make light of the peace and security of my house?. The danger is not from within, gentlemen; it is from without, and I am bound to tell you that that danger is constant and immediate, not because anything new has happened, not because there has been any change in our international relationships within recent weeks or months, but because the danger comes with every turn of events. Why. gentlemen, the commanders of submarines have their instructions, and those instructions are con- sistent for the most part with the law of nations, but one reckless commander of a submarine, choosing to put his private interpreta- tion upon what his government wishes him to do, might set the world on fire. There are not only governments to deal with, but the servants of governments: there are not only the contacts of politics, but also those infinitely varied contacts which come from the mere movement of mankind, the quiet processes of the everyday world. There are cargoes of cotton on the seas: there are cargoes of wheat on the seas; there are cargoes of manufactured articles on the seas; and every one of those cargoes may be the point of ignition, because every cargo goes into the field of fire, goes where there are flames which no man can control. I know the spirit of America to be this: We respect other nations, and absolutely respect their rights so long as they respect our rights. We do not claim anything for ourselves which they would not in like circumstances claim for themselves. Every statement of right that we have made is grounded upon the previous utterances of their own public men and their own judges. There is no dispute about the rights of nations under the understandings of international law. America has drawn no fine points. America has raised no novel 66 ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. issue. America has merely asserted the rights of her citizens and her Government upon what is written plain upon all the documents of international intercourse. Therefore America is not selfish in claiming her rights; she is merely standing for the rights of man- kind when the life of mankind is being disturbed by an unprece- dented war between the greatest nations of the world. Some of these clays we shall be able to call the statesmen of the older nations to witness that it was we who kept the quiet flame of international principle burning upon its altars while the winds of passion were sweeping every other altar in the world. Some of these days they will look back with gratification upon the steadfast allegiance of the United States to those principles of action which every man loves when his temper is not upset and his judgment not disturbed. I am ready to make every patient allowance for men caught in the storm of national struggle. I am not in a critical frame of mind. I am ready to yield everything but the absolute final essential right, because I know how my heart would burn, I know how my mind would be in a whirl if America were engaged in what seemed a death grapple. I know how I would be inclined to sweep aside the minor impediments of the ordinary transactions of government, and how I would be inclined to say to myself : " Why, we are fighting for our lives, and we are not going to be punctilious as to how we are fighting for our lives. Punctilio has nothing to do with it." I am ready to make every allowance for both sides, for, having pledged myself, as your chairman has reminded you, to maintain, if it be possible for me to maintain, the peace of the United States, I have thereby pledged myself to think as far as possible from the point of view of the other side as well as from the point of view of America. I want the record of the conduct of this administration to be a record of genuine neutrality and not of pretended neutrality. You know the circumstances of the time. You know how one group of belligerents is practically shut off by circumstances over which we have no control from the ordinary commerce of the world. You know, therefore, how the spirit of America has not been able to express itself adequately in both directions. But I believe that the people of America are genuinely neutral. I believe that their desire is to stand in unprejudiced judgment upon what is going on; not that they would arrogate to themselves the right to utter rebuking judgment upon any nation, but that they are holding themselves off to assist neither side in what is wrong, and to counte- nance both sides in what they are doing for the legitimate defense of their national honor. The fortunate circumstance of America, my fellow countrymen, is that it desires nothing but a free field and no favor. Our security is in the purity of our motives. The minute we get an impure motive we are going to deserve to be insecure. The minute we de- sire what we have no right to, then we are going to get into trouble and ought to get into trouble. But, my fellow citizens, while we know our own hearts and know our own desires, it does not follow that other nations and other governments understand our purpose and our principle of action. These are days of infinite prejudice and passion, because they are days of war. It is said by an old maxim that amidst war the law is silent. It is also true that amidst ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 67 war the judgment is silent. Men press forward towards their object with a certain degree of blind recklessness, and they are apt to excite their passion particularly against those who in any way stand in their way. Therefore, this is the situation that I have come to remind you of, for you need merely to have it stated to see it: The peace of the world, including America, depends upon the aroused passion of other nations and not upon the motives of the United States. It is for that reason that I have come to call you to a consciousness of the necessity for preparing this country for anything that may happen. Here is the choice, and I do not see how any prudent man could doubt which side of the alternative to take: Either we shall stand still aud wait for the necessity for immediate national defence to come and then call for raw volunteers who for the first few months would be impotent as against a trained and experienced enemy, or we shall adopt the ancient American principle that the men of the country shall immediately be made ready to take care of their own Government. You have either got to make the men of this Nation in sufficient number ready to defend the Nation against initial disas- ter, or you have got to take the risk of initial disaster. Think of the cruelty, think of the stupidity, of putting raw levies of inexperi- enced men into the modern field of battle ! We are not asking for armies: we are asking for a trained citizenship which will act in the spirit of citizenship and not in the spirit of military establishments. If anybody is afraid of a trained citizenship in America he is afraid also of the spirit of America itself. I do not want to command a great army under the authority granted me by the Constitution to be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States; I want to command the confidence and support of my fellow citizens. Of course you will back me up and come to my assistance if I need you, but will you come knowing what you are about, or will you not? Will you come knowing the character of the arms that you carry in your hands, knowing something of the discipline of organization, knowing something of how to take care of yourselves in camp, know- ing something of all those things that it is necessary to know so as not to throw human life away? It is handsome, my fellow citizens, to sacrifice human life intelligently for something greater than life itself, but it is not handsome for any cause whatever to throw human life a \s ay. The plans now laid before the Congress of the United States are merely plans not to throw the life of American youth away. Those plans are going to be adopted. I am not jealous and you are not jealous of the details; no man ought to be confident that his judgment is correct about the details: no man ought to say to any legislative body, "You must take my plan or none at all" — that is arrogance and stupidity — but we have the right to insist, and I believe that it will not be necessary to insist, that we get the essential thing; that is to say, a principle, a system, by which we can secure a trained citizenship, so that if it becomes necessary to defend the Nation the first line of defence on land will be an adequate and intelligent line of defence. I say "on land" because America apparently has never been jealous of armed men if they are only at sea. America also knows 68 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. that you can not send volunteers to sea unless you want to send them to the bottom. The modern fighting ship, the modern submarine, every instrument of modern naval warfare must be handled by ex- perts. America has never debated or disputed that proposition, and all that we are asking for now is that a sufficient number of experts and a sufficient number of vessels be at our disposal. The vessels we have are manned by experts. There is not a better service in the world than that of the American Navy. But no matter how skilled and capable the officers or devoted the men, they must have ships enough, and we are going to give them ships enough. We have been doing it slowly and leisure^ and good-naturedly, as we are accus- tomed to do everything in times of peace, but now we must get down to business and do it systematically. We must lay down a pro- gramme and then steadfastly carry it out and complete it. There are no novelties about the programme. All the lines of it are the lines already established, only drawn out to their legitimate conclusion, and drawn out so that they will be completed within a calculable length of time. Do you realize the task of the Navy? Have you ever let your imagination dwell upon the enormous stretch of coast from the Canal to Alaska, — from the Canal to the northern corner of Maine? There is no other navy in the world that has to cover so great an area of defense as the American Navy, and it ought, in my judgment, to be incomparably the most adequate navy in the world. As I say, you have never been jealous of armed force at sea; you have been jealous of armed force on land; and I must say that I share with you the jealousy of a great military establishment. But I never have shared any prejudice against putting arms in the hands of trained citizens whose interest is to defend their own homes and their own security, and not to serve any political purpose whatever. There is no politics in national defense, ladies and gentlemen. I would be sorry to see men of different parties differ about anything but the details of this great question ; and I do not anticipate any es- sential differences. Some men do not see anything. Some men look straight in the face of the facts and see nothing but atmospheric air. Some men are so hopelessly and contentedly provincial that they can not seen the rest of the world; but they do not constitute a large or influential minority even. You must listen to them with indulgence, and then absolutely ignore them. They have a right to talk, but they have no right to affect our conduct. Indeed, if I were in your place 1 would encourage them to talk. Nothing chills folly like exposure to the air, and these gentlemen ought to be encouraged to hire large halls, and the more people they can get to hear them the safer the country will be. The judgment of America is a very hard-headed judgment. The judgment of America is not based upon sentiment; it is based upon facts, and I want to say to you that nothing has encouraged me more upon this trip that I have been making than the consciousness that America is awake to the facts. T do not want to say anything disrespectful about :my newspaper, but it is astonishing how little some newspaper editors know, and I would like from some of them a candid expression of the impression they have sot from what has happened since T left Washington. Thev nrobablv will giro it their own interpretation, but they will not (and this ought to comfort them ADDRESSES OP PRESIDENT WILSON. 69 if they are moral men), they will not deceive anybody. From the time I left Washington until now I have just had this feeling: The country is up; there is not a man who is not awake; there is not a man who does not realize what the situation is and what we ought to do in order to meet the situation. The strength of America is in that part of it which is not vocal. The voice of America is a very still but a very powerful voice. My constant endeavor in Washington is to hear that voice. I have often said that it has seemed to me a very fortunate circumstance that all the living rooms of the White House are on the side from which, if you look out of the windows, you can not see the city of Wash- ington. You see instead the broad spaces of Virginia across the river, and your imagination has free flight from those free spaces to those great stretches of country where the quiet people on the farms and the busy people in the factories and the absorbed men in the offices are realizing and living the life of America ; and from out those great national areas the people seem to send in at those southern win- dows of the Executive Mansion their message of reassurance. That is where T listen for the still voice of America, and I believe that that voice has brought to me in unmistaken accents the resolution of this country to do whatever it is adequate and necessary to do in order that no man might question the honor or invade the integrity or disregard the rights of the United States of America. BUSINESS MEN'S LEAGUE OF ST. LOUIS, JEFFERSON HOTEL, FEBRUARY 3, 1916. Mr. Chairman, Ladies, and Gentlemen : I can not stand here with- out remembering the last time that I had the pleasure of standing in this spot. Your Civic League had paid me the compliment of supposing that I knew something about the government of cities, and I under- took at their invitation to be very instructive and to lead you in the way in which you should go with regard to a new charter for the city of St. Louis. I hope that you have forgotten that speech. I say I hope that you have forgotten it because I had forgotten it myself until somebody unexpectedly produced a copy of it and cited opin- ions in it from some of which I had departed. It is just as well to shed your speeches as you go. As I think of the trip that I am now making my own chief regret about it is the number of speeches with which I am expected to be loaded so that I can go off at any time; and yet I am expected to speak exclusively of the preparation of the Nation for national de- fense, and, of course, I do that with a great deal of ardor and zest, because that is the most pressing and immediate question ahead of us. One must first emphasize the things which admit of no delay, and yet there are many things that I would like to talk to a company like this about. Not only is it necessary that we should prepare, gentlemen, to mobilize the forces of the Nation if necessary for the defense of the country,— if it should, unhappily, become necessary to use them for that purpose. — but it is also necessary to mobilize the economic forces of this country better than they have ever been mobilized before for the service of the world after this great war is over. 70 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. I am not looking forward to war; I am looking forward with the greatest ardor and interest to peace and to the services which this country may render the rest of the world in the times of peace and healing and restoration which will undoubtedly follow this great struggle. On the surface, gentlemen, there are many signs of bitterness and passion, but only on the surface. Men who are in contest with one another can sometimes hate one another, but no great people ever hated another great people. I believe that underlying all the contests of the world there is a true instinct of friendship among the peoples of the world, provided that the contests are righteous contests based upon merit and efficiency and not based upon the seeking of unfair advantage. America will be infinitely efficient in the world of busi- ness if she is punctiliously righteous in the field of business, and it is with the greatest interest and hope that I have seen the many move- ments abroad in this country, movements which may be illustrated by one, though that not the chief one. You know how the advertising men of this country have banded themselves together to see that advertisements speak the truth. Now, that is an index of what is happening in America. We have upon some occasions drawn it a little strong with regard to our individual business; now we are beginning to realize that the real efficacy is in the facts as they are, because they are going to be uncovered sooner or later. anyhow in the process of business. You can not sell a thing that is not w'hat you represent it to be without your customers ultimately finding out that it is not what you represent it to be. So that even upon an instinct of preservation, if you put it upon no higher plane, you had better anticipate the facts when you see them coming and not get caught by them. The truth is stronger and mightier than any other influence in the world in the long run. America is now going to be called out into an international posi- tion such as she has never occupied before. For some reason that I have never understood, America has been shy about going out into the great field of international competition. She has sought by one process or another, incomprehensible to me as a policy, to shut her doors against matching the wits of America with the wits of the world. I am willing to match the business capacity and the moral strength of American business men with, and to back them, against all the world. We have left it until very recently to foreign corporations to conduct the greater part of the banking business in foreign bills of exchange. We have seemed to hold off from handling the very machinery by which we are to serve the rest of the world by our commerce and our industry. And now. with, the rest of the world impaired in its eco- nomic efficiency, it is necessary that we should put ourselves at the service of trade and finance in all parts of the world. That is one of the reasons, gentlemen, why we are trying— trying so diligently; trying so patiently— to avoid' being drawn into this great struggle now coing on on the other side of the sea. We must keep our resources and our thoughts and our strength untouched by that flame in order that they may be in a condition to serve the restoration of the world, the healing processes, the processes which will put the world upon a footing of peace, which, in the providence of God, we all pray may last for many a generation after. The world will ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. 71 not endure, I believe, another struggle like that which is going on now. It can not endure it. The heart of man can not stand it. And I believe that after this war is over we shall have been set further forward toward permanent peace than perhaps any other process would have set us. Man is slow to learn: he has to have it burned in; but when it is burned in the lesson is finally compre- hended. I believe that the message which all men such as sit in this room to-day ought to carry at their hearts is the message of preparation for peace. Unhappily, you have to tread another way to approach that preparation. Unhappily, the conditions of peace are not estab- lished by us but established by the rest of the world. We do not have to defend ourselves against ourselves; we may have to defend our- selves against the invasion of those processes of passion which are now shaking the whole round globe with their disturbance. We must be ready to see that America shall remain untouched, because America is too valuable to the world now to allow herself to be touched by this disturbance. When we have settled this great question, as we shall presently settle it, of reasonable and rational and American preparation for national defense, then we shall talk about these other matters. Then we shall set our house in order. Then we shall see the facts and act upon the facts. That is the reason that some of us have had to change our minds about certain things, gentlemen. I have changed my mind, for example, about the advisability of having a tariff board, and I have done it for this reason: Before this war began and the universal sweep of economic change set in, I believed, and I think 1 was justified in believing, that a tariff board was meant merely to keep alive the question of protection. Now the sweep of this change has been so universal that an unprejudiced, nonpartisan board is absolutely necessary in order to find how far and in what way the facts have been changed. Because we can not pretend that any man iioav living can predict or foresee or guide the policy of the United States with regard to her legislation in economic matters. We need the facts, and we need them from the most unprejudiced and undisturbed quarters that we can get them from. Personally I look forward to the establishment of a tariff board with some misgivings, because I will have to choose the men that make it: and I tell you that men without prepossessions are hard to find, and when you find them they are generally empty of everything else. Gentlemen who have not done a lot of thinking and formed some very aefinite convictions are not very serviceable in public affairs; and, knowing that I have my due quota of prejudices and prepossessions myself and that I hold even my untested convictions in fighting spirit, I lira not sure that I would be a suitable member of a tariff board. Yet I shall have to choose suitable members for a tariff board, for I feel great confidence that we shall have one, and I want the best counsel I can get ; I want the best guidance I can get in the choosing of the men who shall make it up. If I make mistakes, they will not be mistakes of intention but mistakes of lack of information. It is very interest- ing how important men feel after they get put on a Federal board. They are thereafter hardly approachable. They are jealous of noth- ing so much as being spoken to too familiarly by the President, >72 ADDRESSES OF PRESIDENT WILSON. who seems to be regarded as some sort of suspicions political in- fluence. You do not know how interesting it is, gentlemen, to be regarded as the positive pole of n political battery, throwing out all sorts of electrifying influences which are supposed to be meant to in- crease the vitality of Democratic politics. I do not think that Demo- cratic politics needs any increase of vitality. You will see that I am merely uttering to you the casual thoughts of an unprepared address, but it always stimulates me to say some of the things that are in my mind in face of a company like this. I have been in St. Louis so often and have always enjoyed my visits here so much, that I have had the pleasure of making a great many friends here. When I arrived in Kansas City the other day, the reception committee said, " Mr. President, this is your fifth visit here." " Yes," I said, " my fifth visit since you began counting." And I made a good many visits Lo St. Louis before you began counting; sometimes merely as a Princeton man interested in the Princeton crowd, and sometimes upon purely private errands, but always with the renewed pleasure of meeting the substantial and thoughtful men who here vitalize the life of the business world of America. There is one thing, gentlemen, I want you to relieve yourselves of, and that is the suspicion that there is a Middle West as distinguished from the rest of America. As I say, I have sampled vour quality a great many times and I have never found your quality to be anything but thoroughly American, suitable for any part of the continent. The distance between you and the Pacific coast or the Atlantic coast is not a distance that segregates you or makes you different in sym- pathy and in impulse; on the contrary, standing somewhat nearer the middle of the continent than some other people, your horizon is the more symmetrical. I have come out to appeal to America, not because I doubted what America felt, but because I thought America wanted the satisfaction of uttering what she felt and of letting the whole world know that she was a unit in respect of every question of national dignity and national safety. o LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 013 900 876 5