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 ^ERSITY OF ILLINOIS BULUETIN 
 
 Issued Weekly 
 
 MAY 6, 1918 
 
 No. 36 
 
 •econd-class matter December 11, 1912, at the poii office at Urbani. Illinois, under the Aet 
 
 - -i2.) 
 
 of August 24. 1912.) 
 
 WHAT THE UNITED STATES HAS ACHIEVED IN 
 
 WAR ACTIVITIES AND MORAL LEADERSHIP 
 
 BY 
 
 EDMUND JANES JAMES 
 President of the University 
 
 published by the university 
 Under the Direction of the War Committee 
 
 URBANA 
 
WHAT THE UNITED STATES HAS ACHIEVED IN 
 WAR ACTIVITIES AND MORAL LEADERSHIP* 
 
 Friends, Colleagues and Students: j^O 
 
 We arc gathered here this afternoon, not so much to review 
 what we have done or failed to do in the Great War during the p»st 
 year, as to dedicate ourselves anew to the great enterprise that we 
 have undertaken. 
 
 In spite of all that has been said during the year in which we 
 have been at war with the Central Powers of Europe, sustaining 
 and helping our hard-pressed and courageous Allies, it does not 
 seem to me that the average American citizen even yet realizes 
 what a fundamental world issue is involved; how great is our pri- 
 vilege in being permitted to enter this conflict actively and on the 
 right side; how important a turning point in the history of the world 
 the outcome of this war may be; and how fortunate we are in having 
 a president, who has seized the opportunity to convert what to a 
 narrow observer seemed a mere struggle for additional territory 
 and additional material resources into a great issue in the progress 
 of human freedom. 
 
 When Louis XVI called together the Estates General in the 
 year 1789 to take counsel as to the state of the kingdom, a struggle 
 arose between the king and the representatives of the various orders, 
 which might easily have remained a mere local incident in the life 
 of a single nation. But the genius of the French people converted 
 it into a great crusade for liberty, equality, and fraternity, out ot 
 which grew that mighty convulsion, called simply "The Revol- 
 ution," so fundamental in its characteristics and results, so sweep- 
 ing in its wide-spread ^influence, that all previous human history 
 seemed a mere preparation for it and all subsequent history a mere 
 outcome of it; all previous lines of development seeming to con- 
 verge toward it and all subsequent lines of progress to spring out 
 of it. 
 
 The present war at first was regarded by some as a mere con- 
 test on the part of great nations for more territory and a larger 
 population and greater wealth. It was natural to judge from pre- 
 vious human experiences that smaller powers standing in the way 
 
 *Abitr«ct of «n addresi by the President of the University »t the general convocation held April 
 8, 1918, in honor of the first anniversar) ot ihe entiancr of America into the Great War, April 6, 1917. 
 
 D- of D. 
 UN 5 1918 
 
of the waves of this furious struggle for national supremacy would 
 be swept away, devastated, ruined, utterly effaced perhaps, — and 
 that all this would happen as so inevitably a result of the conflict 
 of great powers that while much sympathy might be felt or even 
 expressed, the only active result would be a shrugging of the shoul- 
 ders and an "ala«! alas! Such is life. Such is the fate of the small 
 man! and the small nation!" 
 
 And then the conduct of the Central Powers became such that 
 even those Americans who did not appreciate or care for a moral 
 role among the nations for the Great Republics, saw themselves 
 constrained to force action in order to defend our national inde- 
 pendence, nay, our national existence. 
 
 Even then the issue might have been narrowed and might have 
 been formulated as a selfish one, affecting ourselves alone or the par- 
 ticular desires of national units, such as the securing to Italy of 
 the territory it desired at the expense of Austria, or the giving to 
 Russia of the right to determine the eastern boundaries of Ger- 
 many, while to France and England should be given a similar pri- 
 vilege as to the western boundaries, and the assignment to Eng- 
 land of the German Colonies — a kind of dispute in which the Ameri- 
 can people could have little personal interest except so far as it 
 safeguarded or threatened our power or security. 
 
 With one noble and sweeping gesture President Wilson wiped 
 out all these items on the slate of world division and organization 
 and wrote down as our goal the safeguarding of human liberty 
 throughout the earth: to all people — not merely to ourselves — ■ 
 to the small as well as to the great — to the weak as to the strong — 
 the assurance that they may order their own lives as freemen. 
 
 This is a program to which we may all subscribe, for which 
 we Americans may all toil and suffer and sacrifice and if need be, 
 die, because we believe that human liberty is the foundation stone 
 of all human progress. 
 
 Now the great thing which President Wilson has done is to 
 make this program of his the program of the United States, the 
 program of the Allies, — nay, the program of the world; for even 
 the Central Powers have been compelled to adopt the same slogan 
 — even the Kaiser is emphasizing that he has gone into Russia not 
 for his own sake but to free its people. We have not been misled. 
 
of course, by this statement, for we know the kind of freedom that 
 the lion brings to the lamb, — a freedom, it is true, from responsi- 
 bility, a freedom from independence, from self-determination, a 
 freedom from freedom with all its toil and trouble and sacrifice, — 
 but at the same time a freedom from all the joys and ecstacies of 
 self-development and progress which freedom permits. 
 
 Never before in human history have so many nations lined 
 up consciously for the great end of establishing the right of all to 
 live, and also their bounden duty to let live, and for this end we 
 have to thank the President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson. 
 Let us stand by him until this end is achieved! 
 
 There is another side from which our participation in this war 
 may bring to us satisfaction and hope. The advantage of victory 
 in this great war, friends, will not redound merely to the Pole, 
 the Bohemian, the Slovak, the Serb, but also, and in no less degree, 
 to the subjects of other governments, fighting not on the side of 
 the Central Powers but on the side of the Allies, — on our side. 
 
 We Americans can not in good conscience and with self-respect 
 line up for freedom and fair treatment for the Pole and Serbian 
 without forming a new and more potent resolution that the negro, 
 the Porto Rican, the Filipino shall have no reasonable cause of 
 complaint under our government. We can not insist that the 
 German Government shall secure political rights to the common 
 man without resolving anew that the ordinary civil rights shall 
 be secured to all our citizens alike, no matter what their color or 
 race or previous condition of servitude; without determining that 
 mobs and lynching parties shall have an end throughout the broad 
 territory subject to the jurisdiction of the Republic. 
 
 I do not mean to say that all these things are going to happen 
 immediately upon the conclusion of peace, but I do maintain that 
 they are all involved in a complete and sweeping victory by the 
 Allies over the Central Powers. 
 
 A chapter out of our own history, which we ought never to for- 
 get, will help us to understand what will be possible if we only keep 
 our eyes on the stars. 
 
 On the fourth of July, 1776, a representative body of American 
 colonists announced to the world a thesis for the defense of which 
 they pledged their lives and fortunes and sacred honor. This thesis 
 
/ 
 
 was that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by the 
 Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are life, liberty 
 and the pursuit of happiness. 
 
 None of these men found it particularly inconsistent with the 
 above thesis to hold human slaves in a peculiarly debasing form of 
 bondage known as African slavery. Such a practice was, of course, 
 not consistent with the profession given above, and when this pro- 
 fession was once made, so great is the power of the winged word 
 that the practice had to cease in time or the profession had to 
 be renounced. That profession was not, alas! the statement of a 
 fact in existence at that time, but a prophecy of something to 
 come; and one of those peculiar prophecies, — thank God, — the 
 mere formulation of which helps to their realization. 
 
 It behooves us Americans, who have entered this great contest 
 for human liberty, to remember how easily such a conflict may de- 
 generate and how necessary it is to hold it on a high plane, worthy 
 of our aspiration and our sacrifice. We ought not to forget that the 
 price of liberty is still eternal vigilance, watching not merely over our 
 enemies, but over ourselves, our desires, our ambitions, our conduct. 
 
 In spite of that magnificent announcement in the Declaration 
 of Independence, which sounded a new note in the history of the 
 world, leading directly to the French Revolution and all its conse- 
 quences, it was nearly ninety years before we in this country were 
 willing to draw the logical conclusion and to take the decisive step 
 in our own policy so imperatively called for by the sentiments and 
 language of this declaration. Eighty-five years after the Declar- 
 ation of Independence was given to the world, calling forth senti- 
 ments and aspirations that seemed to have died out in the world's 
 breast, a considerable proportion of the intelligent, liberty-loving, 
 warm-hearted American citizens pledged their lives and fortunes and 
 sacred honor to a war in defense of this same institution of African 
 slavery. And it was not until they were thoroughly defeated, until 
 a million precious lives had been sacrificed, uncounted billions of 
 money had been destroyed, that they finally acquiesced in an out- 
 come of the Civil War, which was nothing but the logical develop- 
 ment of the Declaration which their ancestors had adopted, and 
 to which they had pledged their support and enthusiasm for near- 
 
ly'a century. With the close of the American Civil War, the Declar- 
 ation of Independence began to have a new meaning for us, although 
 it is far from being realized fully yet. 
 
 This war and our relation to it will put a new and larger meaning 
 into this great Declaration of which every American should be proud 
 and which every American should be determined to help realize to 
 the fullest possible extent. We shall come to understand more fully 
 than we do now that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of 
 happiness are not mere negative rights but positive rights calling not 
 merely for inaction, but for positive policies on the part of society 
 that they may be fully realized. Thus the time shall be hastened 
 when no man who is able and willing to labor shall suffer for lack of 
 work; when to every one willing to do his share the means for living 
 a decent human life shall be secured; when economic and industrial 
 liberty, shall be recognized as essential elements in that civil liberty 
 chiefly contemplated in the Declaration. 
 
 Toward all this a decisive and early victory over Germany and 
 her allies will be greatly conducive. 
 
 We ask you all to enlist in this war and for the duration of this 
 war in the trenches, in the factories, in the shipyards, on land and 
 on the sea, in your own homes — wherever you are and whatever else 
 you may be doing — all the time helping to create that atmosphere 
 which will insure success. 
 
 I have been asked to say one word, and my time limits do not 
 permit more, about what our country has already accomplished dur- 
 ing this first year of the war toward the winning of it. 
 
 First of all I wish to say in a very positive way that I think our 
 achievements in this direction have been truly remarkable and are 
 fully comparable with the best done by other nations working under 
 anything like similar conditions, and I think our Government de- 
 serves the respect and confidence of the American people. 
 
 Of course we have made mistakes — many of them and shall 
 doubtless make many more — costly, bitter mistakes, owing pardy 
 to that cockiness which is so characteristic of all us Americans; 
 partly owing to our ignorance; partly to our inefficiency in making 
 war to which this generation is practically strange, for our Spanish 
 war was not a war at all; partly to our love of individuality which 
 makes co-operation difficult; partly to our ingrained partiality for 
 competition instead of combination, etc., etc. 
 
 6 
 
In spite of all this, we hare adopted a system lor recruiting our 
 armies far superior to anything we ever had before. It has been 
 inaugurated without difficulty and with little trouble, and with the 
 full consent as well as the enthusiastic support of the American peo- 
 ple. It is the most democratic plan we have ever employed and with 
 a few changes will rank with the best schemes ever adopted for this 
 purpose, viz: recruiting the armies of a free State and providing for 
 their maintenance in man power and equipment. 
 
 We have called a large number of men to the standards and are 
 training them for the various branches of military and naval service 
 under, on the whole, very satisfactory conditions, though there have 
 been some egregious mistakes , calculated to make us blush for Ameri- 
 can inefficiency. Instances of gross inability, however, to handle 
 difficult situations are becoming less numerous as our organization 
 is improved. 
 
 Again, we have raised a different kind of army from any army 
 hitherto produced in the history of mankind, — an army of which we 
 shall be increasingly proud as the months go on and from the training 
 of which our country will derive an advantage long after the war is 
 over. 
 
 We have begun to build and launch ships and from all present 
 indications we shall soon be turning out an increasing tonnage. We 
 were not a nation of shipbuilders and it takes time to train men and 
 get material. We are manufacturing munitions and guns faster 
 than we can get them to the front, and there is no reason to suppose 
 that we shall break down at any time in this work. 
 
 Our aircraft program has from various causes failed to meet our 
 reasonable expectations. The full causes have not yet been made 
 public but it looks now as if the whole movement were going into a 
 new era and we shall speed up in this department also. 
 
 We have been successful in our war finance. All our enter- 
 prises have turned out well. Our taxes have yielded all that was 
 expected of them. Our loans have been over-subscribed, and the 
 Red Cross, Y. M. C.A., and Knights of Columbus campaigns, fruit- 
 ful beyond our expectations. 
 
 We have been able to meet all our bills and lend in addition 
 large sums to our Allies to help them in their straits. 
 
 Above all and finally and most important of all, we have begun 
 to send troops to the firing line. 
 
 7 
 
LIBRftRY OF CONGRESS 
 
 V 
 
 \ 
 
 We have already done very subs 018 465 828 8 ^ ^o 
 
 meet the submarine danger and thus nelp Keep the ocean sate tor 
 the transport of troops and supplies. 
 
 We have sent, nobody outside the War Department knows 
 really how many, troops to France and England, but my guess is 
 over one-half million. No information has as yet been given out 
 as to how many troops are actually on the firing line. 
 
 But one great fact stands out in which we may take profound 
 comfort in spite of regret that we have not done more, viz: that be- 
 fore the close of the first year after the declaration of war, a con- 
 siderable number of American soldiers were actually engaged by the 
 side of our English and French comrades in defending the battle line 
 of freedom on the bloodstained fields of France. Coming to their 
 aid from every part of this country are long lines of railway trains 
 filled to their limits with American boys — great steamers are send- 
 ing them by the tens of thousands to the training camps in France. 
 Guns, amunition, supplies of all sorts make almost continuous mov- 
 ing lines from the great forests of Washington, Oregon, and the mines 
 of California, Nevada, Arizona, and the wheatfields and stockranges 
 of the whole North American Continent — ever on! ever on to the 
 trenches of France and Belgium! 
 
 What does it all mean? What can it mean except victory for 
 our Allies? The Germans may take Amiens; they may take Paris; 
 they may take Calais; but the more they take the more they will 
 ultimately have to disgorge. The further they drive forward, the 
 longer the way back. The greater their temporary victory, the 
 more crushing their final defeat. 
 
 The stars in their courses are fighting for us and our cause, and 
 if only we are true to the high ideals we have adopted, and show our- 
 selves worthy of our ancestry — in energy, in perseverance, in skill, 
 and in devotion — the victory, an overwhelming victory will be ours. 
 
 A victory for us means victory for the forces of righteousness 
 and of progress; protection for the small nation and the small man, 
 for women and children. It means LIBERTY and FREEDOM 
 for all! 
 
Ho!