voir 
 
 mmSm 
 
 liPi^"™ 
 
 i I 
 
 ,X.EWIS 
 
 iiaiiniiiliijIiliHilillill!! 
 
 Hi! !i 
 
 \\m\ 
 
 iiiil 
 
 H fi iji 
 
 
 HI!! 
 
 '^■'''^"'"^''1 i iiii iiii 
 
 ii ii 
 
 i!ljl{ I I 
 
 ! i i 
 
 ., !!! 
 mm 
 
 I i'i lit i I 
 iill! illlill l!f' 
 
 !!1 
 
 ■iiiSiiisI i":f'' 
 
 iiiijlliiiiii*iiiiiiiii]i]ii[illiffl^ 
 
Glass 
 
 «1B»*I*>S 
 
 Book 
 
 \:o 
 
 TlgHti\._ 
 
 COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 
 
.^ 
 
To 
 PRESIDENT WOODROW WILSON 
 Whose lofty utterances have inspired a world 
 struggling for Liberty and Justice, this book 
 is respectfully dedicated. 
 
ACKNOWLEDGMENT 
 
 For some of the addresses appearing in this 
 
 book the compiler is indebted to Doubleday 
 
 Page and Company, The National Geographic 
 
 Society and The Washington Post. 
 
THE VOICES OF ODR LEADERS 
 
 A COLLECTION OF ADDRESSES DELIVERED BY 
 STATESMEN OF THE UNITED STATES 
 
 AND 
 
 HER ALLIES IN THE GREAT WAR 
 
 COMPILED BY 
 
 WILLIAM MATHER LEWIS 
 
 EXECUTIVE SECRETARY 
 NATIONAL COMMITTEE OF PATRIOTIC SOCIETIES 
 
 HINDS. HAYDEN & ELDREDGE. Inc. 
 
 NEW YORK PHILADELPHIA CHICAGO 
 
31619 
 . U 4-5 
 
 Copyright, 1917, by 
 
 HINDS, HAYDEN & ELDREDGE, INC. 
 
 International Copyright secured. 
 
 QEC 18 1317 
 
 ©CI.A481(12<i 
 
 /IMS I 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 BY . 
 
 Hon. Newton D. Baker, 
 Secretary of War 
 
 Through these addresses he who Hstens 
 shrewdly will hear the voices of the millions who 
 have toiled and sacrificed that the promise of 
 these words might come true. There are no 
 literary exercises in this book. Nothing printed 
 here was said because it sounds well, there are 
 no empty rhetorical vanities. These are the 
 words of the chosen leaders of the free nations, 
 and they are underwritten every one of them with 
 the heroism and the skill and the benignant power 
 and the unfailing endurance of those who love 
 liberty more than their comfort and their lives. 
 
 This is what makes a speech memorable and 
 only this : that it should be spoken at a turning 
 point in human affairs on behalf of a great hope. 
 These speeches were spoken in the days when 
 the supreme decision was made to lay down the 
 weight of the New World that the earth may be 
 secure. In the light of such an event any utter- 
 ance would be repeated while there were men to 
 remember it. But the words printed here are 
 touched not only with the glory of the American 
 decision but with the undying warmth of the 
 Three Years' Resistance. We recognized at the 
 
THE J'OICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 time and we shall not iorget the messages brought 
 to us overseas. We shall play our part and these 
 words printed here shall be not only a promise 
 but a prophecy that out of this agony and this 
 enterprise we shall build a rich and enduring free- 
 dom. We seek nothing more and shall accept 
 nothing less. Scientifically and inexorably we 
 shall go on till the menace which has risen in 
 Central Europe to terrorize mankind is destroyed 
 from without or discarded from within. 
 
 IV 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Introduction, Hon. Newton D. Baker "i 
 
 Oratory in National Crises, ^.. 
 
 William Mather Lewis 
 
 Addresses 
 
 The Second Inaugural, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. . 3 
 War Message, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. . . . .... ]^ 
 
 Memorial Day Address, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. 33 
 
 Flag Day Address, Hon. Woodrow Wilson ^^ 
 
 Why Do We Fight Germany? 
 
 Hon. Franklin K. Lane 
 
 To Reserve Officers' Training Corps, ^^ 
 
 Hon. Robert Lansing l" "-li vq 
 
 Tribute to America, Hon. Herbert Henry Asquith /9 
 The Oldest Free Assemblies, 
 
 Rt. Hon. Arthur James Balfour 
 
 Greetings to America, 
 
 M. Alexandre Felix Joseph Ribot ^^ 
 
 The Harvest of Justice, M. Paul Dechanal._ W 
 
 Our Heritage of Liberty, M. Rene Viviam 103 
 
 Their Monuments in Our Hearts, 
 
 M. Rene Viviani 
 
 To the House of Representatives, 
 
 M. Rene Viviani 
 
 Tribute to Lincoln, M. Rene Viviani i^i 
 
 To the House of Representatives, 
 
 Prince of Udine 
 
 Greetings from Belgium, 
 
 Baron Ludovic Moncheur 13y 
 
 The New Russia, Prof. Boris Bakhmetiefif . ...... 145 
 
 Tribute to Washington, Viscount Kikujiro Ishii. . 151 
 Message to the Pope, Hon. Woodrow Wilson. . . 155 
 
PUBLIC SPEAKING IN NATIONAL 
 CRISES 
 The student of public speaking is impressed 
 with the fact that from the earhest time wide 
 periods have separated the occasions upon which 
 great orations have been given to the world. 
 Upon the stage of human affairs have come from 
 time to time little groups of men who have 
 wrought mightily with their ringing eloquence. 
 When for many years mediocrity has marked 
 the utterances of the public forum, the state- 
 ment has often been made that the golden age of 
 oratory was gone, never to return. But another 
 group has always arisen to give the lie to this 
 pessimistic assertion. The occasional recurrence 
 of surpassing eloquence, the long periods of 
 dreary utterance, suggest the fact that it is the 
 occasion rather than the man which produces 
 the spoken classic. Speakers may charm with 
 the grace of their utterance, with their flights of 
 fancy, with their brilliant word pictures, but 
 unless the cause for which they plead is one of 
 surpassing import to the people at large, they 
 and their contemporaries will not find place in 
 the Hall of Fame. The spoken word will ever 
 have its effect upon the stage and from the pul- 
 pit and in the courts of law: but only when a 
 great issue is to be met, a great wrong righted, 
 a great truth vindicated, will that spoken word 
 
 VII 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 rise to the dignity of oratory. It is the soul sob 
 of an oppressed people; the battle cry of an 
 aroused nation ; the struggle for release from 
 fetters of unrighteousness, which will ever sound 
 through the tone of the real orator. Among all 
 the great orations of the world, we find none 
 which proclaims the trivial issue ; none has lived 
 whose author was not obviously sincere. 
 
 The last profound crisis through which this 
 country passed was that culminating in the Civil 
 War. It was likewise our last great oratorical 
 period. Abraham Lincoln, master of the English 
 language that he was, could not have produced 
 a Gettysburg address under conditions less mov- 
 ing than that which brought it into being. Henry 
 Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, Stephen A. 
 Douglas and all the rest of that great group 
 have lived in history because of the opportunity 
 afforded by the times in which they worked. Back 
 of the Civil War period we have to go to our 
 Revolutionary days to find another great school 
 of speakers, led by Patrick Henry in America 
 and Edmund Burke in Great Britain. And so 
 down through history we pass to Robespierre 
 and Mirabeau of the French Revolution, back 
 to Demosthenes of crumbling Athens : only to 
 find that the great occasion has ever produced 
 the great orator: that for every mighty human 
 
 VIII 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 cause there has been "A Voice crying in the 
 wilderness." Even the great cause of Christian 
 reHgion shows its progress in these periodic 
 groupings surrounding critical events. 
 
 National crises, particularly wars, have always 
 produced great orations. It is reasonable to as- 
 sert that the present conflict, involving as it 
 does, not two, but a score of nations, and having 
 at root issues which afifect human happiness every- 
 where, will stimulate in this country and through- 
 out Europe public utterances of a commanding 
 strength. Therefore it is safe to assume that 
 some of the addresses chosen in the collection 
 herewith presented will find place among the 
 oratorical classics of all time. Be that as it may, 
 they all deserve careful study because each is the 
 product of a leader in the great struggle, each 
 illuminates in some manner the great Drama in 
 which all mankind has a part. 
 
 In his ''Memories and Portraits" Robert Louis 
 Stevenson says : "Whenever I read a book or a 
 passage that particularly pleased me, in which a 
 thing was said or an efifect rendered with pro- 
 priety, in which there was either some conspicu- 
 ous force or some happy distinction in the style, 
 I must sit down at once and set myself to ape 
 that quality. I was unsuccessful, and always un- 
 successful ; but at least in these vain bouts I got 
 
 IX 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 some practice in rhythm, in harmony, in con- 
 struction and the coordination of parts. . . . 
 That, like it or not, is the way to learn to write : 
 whether I have profited or not, that is the way. 
 It was so Keats learned, and there was never a 
 finer temperament for literature than Keats. It 
 is the great point in these imitations that there 
 still shines, beyond the student's reach, his in- 
 imitable model. Let him try as he please, he is 
 still sure of failure; and it is an old and very 
 true saying that 'Failure is the high road to suc- 
 cess." 
 
 To him who has reveled in the glorious word 
 pictures of Treasure Island, David Balfour, and 
 Kidnapped, no other proof need be presented 
 that the great novelist's method was effective, 
 to all beside, the place which Stevenson holds 
 in the world of letters will be assurance enough 
 that he knew whereof he spoke. And if it be 
 true that through the study and imitation of ac- 
 knowledged masters, there comes proficiency in 
 the written word, vastly more must such a 
 method be valuable where skill in vocal ex- 
 pression is sought. The essayist may spend 
 hours locating the word which brings out the 
 exact shade of meaning he wishes to con- 
 vey. The speaker must have the needed expres- 
 sion at his instant command. Thus it follows 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 that the student of piibUc speaking should make 
 his own the best examples of oral phraseology 
 available. He should bear in mind that the vocab- 
 ulary of speech, must have qualities unnecessary 
 and even undesirable in written composition ; and 
 that his hearer has but a fleeting moment to 
 grasp the thought, where the reader may pause 
 to ponder over the hidden meaning of some in- 
 volved sentence. He must study those composi- 
 tions which have stirred listening audiences. It 
 is for the student of this class that the addresses 
 contained in this brief work are presented. 
 
 It is well to familiarize one's self with the 
 standard orations of all times, but the greatest 
 good will come from the study of present-day 
 examples. A century ago the speaker thought 
 only of the audience before him: to-day, if he 
 is a distinguished man, the "breakfast table 
 audience" with the morning paper will be far 
 larger than that within the sound of his voice. 
 And so the style of oratory has changed, become 
 more restrained and less verbose. That it has 
 lost in this process none of its force and charm 
 will be evident to all who read this collection 
 of addresses bearing on the great war. It is 
 not too much to say that in clarity of expression 
 and felicity of phraseology some of the speeches 
 of Woodrow Wilson will rank with those of his 
 XI 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 great predecessors, Abraham Lincoln and George 
 Washington. Nor will the brief and brilliant 
 words of his contemporaries in Great Britain 
 and France suffer by comparison with the utter- 
 ances of the leaders of those nations which have 
 given so much to the oratorical literature of the 
 world. The student, young or old, who earn- 
 estly studies these twentieth century messages 
 and makes their style his own will acquire an 
 asset of immeasurable value. He will likewise 
 have a deeper love for the United States and a 
 greater conception of the holy cause for which 
 the nation struggles. 
 
 William Mather Lewis. 
 
 XU 
 
THE SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS 
 Hon. Woodrow Wilson 
 
 Delivered at Washington, D. C, 
 March 5th, 1917 
 
INAUGURAL ADDRESS, 
 
 WooDROW Wilson 
 
 My Fellow Citizens: 
 
 The four years which have elapsed since last 
 I stood in this place have been crowded with 
 counsel and action of the most vital interest and 
 consequence. Perhaps no equal period in our 
 history has been so fruitful of important reforms 
 in our economic and industrial life or so full of 
 significant changes in the spirit and purpose of 
 our political action. We have sought very 
 thoughtfully to set our house in order, correct 
 the grosser errors and abuses of our industrial 
 life, liberate and quicken the processes of our 
 national genius and energy, and lift our politics 
 to a broader view of the people's essential inter- 
 ests. It is a record of singular variety and singu- 
 lar distinction. But I shall not attempt to review 
 it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing 
 influence as the years go by. This is not the 
 time for retrospect. It is time, rather, to speak 
 our thoughts and purposes concerning the pres- 
 ent and the immediate future. 
 
 Although we have centered counsel and action 
 with such unusual concentration and success 
 upon the great problems of domestic legislation 
 to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, 
 other matters have more and more forced them- 
 3 
 
4 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 selves upon our attention, matters lying outside 
 our own life as a nation and over which we had 
 no control, but which, despite our wish to keep 
 free of them, have drawn us more and more 
 irresistibly into their own current and influence. 
 
 It has been impossible to avoid them. They 
 have affected the life of the whole world. They 
 have shaken men everywhere with a passion and 
 an apprehension they never knew before. It 
 has been hard to preserve calm counsel while the 
 thought of our own people swayed this way and 
 that under their influence. We are a composite 
 and cosmopolitan people. We are of the blood 
 of all the nations that are at war. The currents 
 of our thoughts as well as the currents of our 
 trade run quick at all seasons back and forth 
 between us and them. The war inevitably set 
 its mark from the first alike upon our minds, 
 our industries, our commerce, our politics, and 
 our social action. To be indifferent to it or inde- 
 pendent of it was out of the question. 
 
 And yet all the while we have been conscious 
 that we were not part of it. In that conscious- 
 ness, despite many divisions, we have drawn 
 closer together. We have been deeply wronged 
 upon the seas, but we have not wished to wrong 
 or injure in return ; have retained throughout the 
 consciousness of standing in some sort apart, 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 5 
 
 intent upon an interest that transcended the 
 immediate issues of the war itself. As some of 
 the injuries done us have become intolerable we 
 have still been clear that we wished nothing for 
 ourselves that we were not ready to demand for 
 all mankind, — fair dealing, justice, the freedom 
 to live and be at ease against organized wrong. 
 It is in this spirit and with this thought that 
 we have grown more and more aware, more and 
 more certain that the part we wished to play 
 was the part of those who mean to vindicate 
 and fortify peace. We have been obliged to arm 
 ourselves to make good our claim to a certain 
 minimum of right and of freedom of action. We 
 stand firm in armed neutrality since it seems that 
 in no other way we can demonstrate what it is 
 we insist upon and cannot forego. We may even 
 be drawn on, by circumstances, not by our own 
 purpose or desire, to a more active assertion of 
 our rights as we see them and a more immediate 
 association with the great struggle itself. But 
 nothing will alter our thought or our purpose. 
 They are too clear to be obscured. They are 
 too deeply rooted in the principles of our national 
 life to be altered. We desire neither conquest 
 nor advantage. We wish nothing that can be 
 had only at the cost of another people. We have 
 always professed unselfish purpose and we covet 
 
6 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 the opportunity to prove that our professions are 
 sincere. 
 
 There are many things still to do at home, to 
 clarify our own politics and give new vitality to 
 the industrial processes of our own life, and we 
 shall do them as time and opportunity serve ; but 
 we realize that the greatest things that remain 
 to be done must be done wnth the whole world 
 for stage and in cooperation with the wide and 
 universal forces of mankind, and we are making 
 our spirits ready for those things. They will 
 follow in the immediate wake of the war itself 
 and will set civilization up again. We are pro- 
 vincials no longer. The tragical events of the 
 thirty months of vital turmoil through which we 
 have just passed have made us citizens of the 
 world. There can be no turning back. Our own 
 fortunes as a nation are involved, whether we 
 would have it so or not. 
 
 And yet we are not the less Americans on that 
 account. We shall be the more American if we 
 but remain true to the principles in which we 
 have been bred. They are not the principles of 
 a province or of a single continent. We have 
 known and boasted all along that they were the 
 principles of a liberated mankind. These, there- 
 fore, are the things we shall stand for, whether 
 in war or in peace : 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 7 
 
 That all nations are equally interested in the 
 peace of the world and in the political stability 
 of free peoples, and equally responsible for their 
 maintenance ; 
 
 That the essential principle of peace is the 
 actual equality of nations in all matters of right 
 or privilege ; 
 
 That peace cannot securely or justly rest upon 
 an armed balance of power; 
 
 That governments derive all their just powers 
 from the consent of the governed and that no 
 other powers should be supported by the common 
 thought, purpose, or power of the family of 
 nations ; 
 
 That the seas should be equally free and safe 
 for the use of all peoples, under rules set up 
 by common agreement and consent, and that, so 
 far as practicable, they should be accessible to 
 all upon equal terms;- 
 
 That national armaments should be limited to 
 the necessities of national order and domestic 
 safety ; 
 
 That the community of interest and of power 
 upon which peace must henceforth depend im- 
 poses upon each nation the duty of seeing to it 
 that all influences proceeding from its own citi- 
 zens meant to encourage or assist revolution in 
 
8 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 other states should be sternly and effectually 
 suppressed and prevented. 
 
 I need not argue these principles to you, my 
 fellow countrymen : they are your own, part and 
 parcel of your own thinking and your own mo- 
 tive in affairs. They spring up native amongst 
 us. Upon this as a platform of purpose and of 
 action we can stand together. 
 
 And it is imperative that we should stand to- 
 gether. We are being forged into a new unity 
 amidst the fires that now blaze throughout the 
 world. In their ardent heat we shall, in God's 
 providence, let us hope, be purged of faction and 
 division, purified of the errant humors of party 
 and of private interest, and shall stand forth in 
 the days to come with a new dignity of national 
 pride and spirit. Let each man see to it that 
 the dedication is in his own heart, the high pur- 
 pose of the Nation in his own mind, ruler of his 
 own will and desire. 
 
 I stand here and have taken the high and 
 solemn oath to which you have been audience 
 because the people of the United States have 
 chosen me for this august delegation of power 
 and have by their gracious judgment named me 
 their leader in affairs. I know now what the 
 task means. I realize to the full the responsi- 
 bility which it involves. I pray God I may be 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 9 
 
 given the wisdom and the prudence to do my 
 duty in the true spirit of this great people. I am 
 their servant and can succeed only as they sus- 
 tain and guide me by their confidence and their 
 counsel. The thing I shall count upon, the thing 
 without which neither counsel nor action will 
 avail, is the unity of America, — an America 
 united in feeling, in purpose, and in its vision of 
 duty, of opportunity, and of service. We are 
 to beware of all men who would turn the tasks 
 and the necessities of the Nation to their own 
 private profit or use them for the building up 
 of private power; beware that no faction or dis- 
 loyal intrigue break the harmony or embarrass 
 the spirit of our people ; beware that our Govern- 
 ment be kept pure and incorrupt in all its parts. 
 United alike in the conception of our duty and 
 in the high resolve to perform it in the face of 
 all men, let us dedicate ourselves to the great 
 task to which we must now set our hand. For 
 myself I beg your tolerance, your countenance, 
 and your united aid. The shadows that now 
 lie dark upon our path will soon be dispelled 
 and we shall walk with the light all about us if 
 we be but true to ourselves, — to ourselves as we 
 have wished to be known in the counsels of the 
 world and in the thought of all those who love 
 liberty and justice and the right exalted. 
 
THE WAR MESSAGE 
 Hon. Woodrow Wilson 
 
 Delivered before a joint session of 
 the Senate and the House of Rep- 
 resentatives of the United States, 
 April 2nd, 1917 
 
THE WAR MESSAGE 
 WooDROw Wilson 
 
 Gentlemen of the Congress : 
 
 I have called the Congress into extraordinary 
 session because there are serious, very serious, 
 choices of policy to be made, and made imme- 
 diately, which it was neither right nor constitu- 
 tionally permissible that I should assume the 
 responsibility of making. 
 
 On the 3d of February last I officially laid 
 before you the extraordinary announcement of 
 the Imperial German Government that on and 
 after the first day of February it was its purpose 
 to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity 
 and use its submarines to sink every vessel that 
 sought to approach either the ports of Great 
 Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of 
 Europe or any of the ports controlled by the 
 enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean. 
 That had seemed to be the object of German 
 submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since 
 April of last year the Imperial Government had 
 somewhat restrained the commanders of its 
 undersea craft in conformity with its promise 
 then given to us that passenger-boats should not 
 be sunk and that due warning would be given to 
 all other vessels which its submarines might seek 
 to destroy, when no resistance was offered or 
 
 13 
 
14 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 escape attempted, and care taken that their crews 
 were given at least a fair chance to save their 
 lives in their open boats. The precautions taken 
 were meagre and haphazard enough, as was 
 proved in distressing instance after instance in 
 the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, 
 but a certain degree of restraint was observed. 
 The new policy has swept every restriction 
 aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, 
 their character, their cargo, their destination, 
 their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the 
 bottom without warning and without thought 
 of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels 
 of friendly neutrals along with those of bellig- 
 erents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying 
 relief to the sorely bereaved and stricken people 
 of Belgium, though the latter were provided with 
 safe conduct through the proscribed areas by 
 the German Government itself and were distin- 
 guished by unmistakable marks of identity, have 
 been sunk with the same reckless lack of com- 
 passion or of principle. 
 
 I was for a little while unable to believe that 
 such things would in fact be done by any gov- 
 ernment that had hitherto subscribed to the hu- 
 man practices of civilized nations. International 
 law had its origin in the attempt to set up some 
 law which would be respected and observed 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 15 
 
 Upon the seas, where no nation had right of 
 dominion, and where lay the free highways of 
 the world. By painful stage after stage has that 
 law has built up, with meagre enough results, 
 indeed, after all was accomplished that could be 
 accomplished, but always with a clear view, at 
 least, of what the heart and conscience of man- 
 kind demanded. This minimum of right the Ger- 
 man Government has swept aside under the plea 
 of retaliation and necessity and because it had no 
 weapons which it could use at sea except these 
 which it is impossible to employ as it is employ- 
 ing them without throwing to the winds all 
 scruples of humanity or of respect for the under- 
 standings that were supposed to underlie the 
 intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking 
 of the loss of property involved, immense and 
 serious as that is, but only of the wanton and 
 wholesale destruction of the lives of non-com- 
 batants, men, women, and children, engaged in 
 pursuits which have always, even in the darkest 
 periods of modern history, been deemed innocent 
 and legitimate. Property can be paid for; the 
 lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. 
 The present German submarine warfare against 
 commerce is a warfare against mankind. 
 
 It Is a war against all nations. American ships 
 have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways 
 
16 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, 
 but the ships and people of other neutral and 
 friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed 
 in the waters in the same way. There has been 
 no discrimination. The challenge is to all man- 
 kind. Each nation must decide for itself how it 
 will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves 
 must be made with a moderation of counsel and a 
 temperateness of judgment befitting our character 
 and our motives as a nation. We must put excited 
 feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or 
 the victorious assertion of the physical might of 
 the nation, but only the vindication of right, of 
 human right, of which we are only a single 
 champion. 
 
 When I addressed the Congress on the 26th of 
 February last I thought that it would suffice to 
 assert our neutral rights with arms, our right to 
 use the seas against unlawful interference, our 
 rights to keep our people safe against unlawful 
 violence. But armed neutrality, it now appears, 
 is impracticable. Because submarines are in 
 effect outlaws when used as the German subma- 
 rines have been used against merchant shipping, 
 it is impossible to *defend ships against their 
 attacks as the law of nations has assumed that 
 merchantmen would defend themselves against 
 privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS \7 
 
 upon the open sea. It is common prudence in 
 such circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to 
 endeavor to destroy them before they have shown 
 their own intention. They must be dealt with 
 upon sight, if dealt with at all. The German 
 Government denies the right of neutrals to use 
 arms at all within the areas of the sea which it 
 has proscribed, even in the defense of rights 
 which no modern publicist has ever before ques- 
 tioned their right to defend. The intimation is 
 conveyed that the armed guards which we have 
 placed on our merchant ships will be treated as 
 beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt 
 with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is 
 ineffectual enough at best ; in such circumstances 
 and in the face of such pretensions it is worse 
 than ineffectual: it is likely to produce what it 
 was meant to prevent ; it is practically certain to 
 draw us into the war without either the rights 
 or the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one 
 choice we cannot make, we are incapable of 
 making: we will not choose the path of sub- 
 mission and suffer the most sacred rights of 
 our nation and our people to be ignored or 
 violated. The wrongs agginst which we now 
 array ourselves are not common wrongs; they 
 reach out to the very roots of human life. 
 With a profound sense of the solemn and even 
 
18 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 tragical character of the step I am taking and of 
 the grave responsibilities which it involves, but 
 in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my 
 constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress 
 declare the recent course of the Imperial German 
 Government to be in fact nothing less than war 
 against the Government and people of the United 
 States ; that it formally accept the status of 
 belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it; 
 and that it take immediate steps not only to put 
 the country in a more thorough state of defense 
 but also to exert all its power and employ all 
 its resources to bring the Government of the 
 German Empire to terms and end the war. 
 
 What this will involve is clear. It will involve 
 the utmost practicable co-operation in counsel 
 and action with the governments now at war with 
 Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension 
 to those governments of the most liberal financial 
 credits, in order that our resources may so far as 
 possible be added to theirs. It will involve the 
 organization and mobilization of all the material 
 resources of the country to supply the materials 
 of war and serve the incidental needs of the na- 
 tions in the most abundant and yet the most eco- 
 nomical and efficient way possible. It will involve 
 the immediate full equipment of the navy in all 
 respects but particularly in supplying it with the 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 19 
 
 best means of dealing with the enemy's subma- 
 rines. It will involve the immediate addition to 
 the armed forces of the United States already pro- 
 vided for by law in case of war at least 500,000 
 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon 
 the principle of universal liability to service, and 
 also the authorization of subsequent additional 
 increments of equal force so soon as they may be 
 needed and can be handled in training. It will 
 involve also, of course, the granting of adequate 
 credits to the Government, sustained, I hope, so 
 far as they can equitably be sustained by the 
 present generation, by well-conceived taxation. 
 
 I say sustained so far as may be equitable by 
 taxation because it seems to me that it would be 
 most unwise to base the credits which will now 
 be necessary entirely on money borrowed. It 
 is our duty, I most respectfully urge, to protect 
 our people so far as we may against the very 
 serious hardships and evils which would be likely 
 to arise out of the inflation which would be pro- 
 duced by vast loans. 
 
 In carrying out the measures by which these 
 things are to be accomplished we should keep 
 constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as 
 little as possible in our own preparation and in 
 the equipment of our own military forces with 
 the duty, — for it will be a very practical duty, — of 
 
20 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 supplying- the nations already at war with Ger- 
 many with the materials which they can obtain 
 only from us or by our assistance. They are in 
 the field and we should help them in every way 
 to be effective there. 
 
 I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through 
 the several executive departments of the Gov- 
 ernment, for the consideration of your commit- 
 tees, measures for the accomplishment of the 
 several objects I have mentioned. I hope that 
 it will be your pleasure to deal with them as 
 having been framed after very careful thought by 
 the branch of the Government upon which the 
 responsibility of conducting the war and safe- 
 guarding the nation will most directly fall. 
 
 While we do these things, these deeply momen- 
 tous things, let us be very clear, and make very 
 clear to all the world what our motives and our 
 objects are. My own thought has not been driven 
 from its habitual and normal course by the un- 
 happy events of the last two months, and I do not 
 believe that the thought of the nation has been al- 
 tered or clouded by them. I have exactly the 
 same thing in mind now that I had in mind 
 when I addressed the Senate on the 22d of 
 January last; the same that I had in mind when 
 I addressed the Congress on the 3d of February 
 and on the 26th of February. Our object now, 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 21 
 
 as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace 
 and the justice in the hfe of the world as against 
 selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst 
 the really free and self-governed peoples of the 
 world such a concert of purpose and of action 
 as will henceforth insure the observance of those 
 principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or 
 desirable where the peace of the world is involved 
 and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace 
 to that peace and freedom lies in the existence 
 of autocratic governments backed by organized 
 force which is controlled wholly by their will, not 
 by the will of their people. We have seen the 
 last of neutrality in such circumstances. We are 
 at the beginning of an age in which it will be 
 insisted that the same standards of conduct and 
 of responsibility for wrong done shall be observed 
 among nations and their governments that are 
 observed among the individual citizens of civilized 
 states. 
 
 We have no quarrel with the German people. 
 We have no feeling toward them but one of 
 sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their 
 impulse that their government acted in entering" 
 this war. It was not with their previous knowl- 
 edge or approval. It was a war determined upon 
 as wars used to be determined upon in the old, 
 unhappy days, when peoples were nowhere con- 
 
22 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 suited by their rulers and wars were provoked 
 and waged in the interest of dynasties or of 
 little groups of ambitious men who were ac- 
 customed to use their fellowmen as pawns and 
 tools. Self-governed nations do not fill their 
 neighbor states with spies, or set the course of in- 
 trigue to bring about some critical posture of 
 affairs which will give them an opportunity to 
 strike and make conquest. Such designs can be 
 successfully worked out only under cover and 
 where no one has the right to ask questions. 
 Cunningly contrived plans of deception or ag- 
 gression, carried, it may be, from generation to 
 generation, can be worked out and kept from the 
 light only within the privacy of courts or behind 
 the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow 
 and privileged class. They are happily impos- 
 sible where public opinion commands and insists 
 upon full information concerning all the nation's 
 affairs. 
 
 A steadfast concert for peace can never be 
 maintained except by a partnership of democratic 
 nations. No autocratic government could be 
 trusted to keep faith within it or observe its 
 covenants. It must be a league of honor, a part- 
 nership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals 
 away; the plotting of inner circles who could 
 plan what they would and render account to no 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 23 
 
 one would be a corruption seated at its very 
 heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose 
 and their honor steady to a common end and 
 prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow 
 interest of their own. 
 
 Does not every American feel that assurance 
 has been added to our hope for the future peace 
 of the world by the wonderful and heartening- 
 things that have been happening within the last 
 few weeks in Russia? Russia was known by 
 those who knew it best to have been always in 
 fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits 
 of her thought, in all the intimate relationships 
 of her people that spoke their natural instinct, 
 their habitual attitude toward life. Autocracy 
 that crowned the summit of her political structure, 
 long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality 
 of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, 
 character or purpose; and now it has been 
 shaken off and the great, generous Russian 
 people have been added in all their native ma- 
 jesty and might to the forces that are fighting 
 for freedom in the world, for justice, and for 
 peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of 
 Honor. 
 
 One of the things that have served to convince 
 us that the Prussian autocracy was not, and could 
 never be our friend is that from the very outset 
 
24 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting 
 communities and even our offices of government 
 with spies and set criminal intrigues everywhere 
 afoot against our national unity of counsel, our 
 peace within and without, our industries and our 
 commerce. Indeed it is now evident that its spies 
 were here even before the war began ; and it is 
 unhappily not a matter of conjecture but a fact 
 proved in our courts of justice that the intrigues 
 which have more than once come perilously near 
 to disturbing the peace and dislocating the in- 
 dustries of the country have been carried on at 
 the instigation, with the support, and even under 
 the personal direction of official agents of the 
 Imperial Government accredited to the Govern- 
 ment of the United States. Even in checking 
 these things and trying to extirpate them we have 
 sought to put the most generous interpretation 
 possible upon them because we knew that their 
 source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose 
 of the German people toward us (who were, no 
 doubt as ignorant of them as we ourselves were), 
 but only in the selfish designs of a Government 
 that did what it pleased and told its people 
 nothing. But they have played their part in serv- 
 ing to convince us at last that that Government 
 entertains no real friendship for us and means to 
 act against our peace and security at its conveni- 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 25 
 
 ence. That it means to stir up enemies against 
 up at our very doors, the intercepted note to the 
 German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent evi- 
 dence. 
 
 We are accepting this challenge of hostile pur- 
 pose because we know that in such a govern- 
 ment, following such methods, we can never have 
 a friend; and that in the presence of its or- 
 ganized power, always lying in wait to accom- 
 plish we know not what purpose, there can be 
 no assured security for the democratic govern- 
 ments of the world. We are now about to 
 accept the gauge of battle with this natural foe 
 to liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole 
 force of the nation to check and nullify its pre- 
 tensions and its power. We are glad, now that 
 we see the facts with no veil of false pretense 
 about them, to fight thus for the ultimate peace 
 of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, 
 the German people included : for the rights of 
 nations great and small and the privilege of 
 men everywhere to choose their way of life and 
 of obedience. The world must be made safe 
 for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon 
 the trusted foundations of political liberty. We 
 have no selfish ends to serve. We desire no 
 conquest, no dominion. We seek no indemni- 
 ties for ourselves, no material compensation for 
 
26 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 the sacrifices we shall freely make. We are but 
 one of the champions of the rights of mankind. 
 We shall be satisfied when those rights have been 
 made as secure as the faith and the freedom of 
 the nation can make them. 
 
 Just because we fight without rancour and with- 
 out selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves 
 but what we shall wish to share with all free peo- 
 ples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our opera- 
 tions as belligerents without passion and our- 
 selves observe with proud punctilio the principles 
 of right and of fair play we profess to be fighting 
 for. 
 
 I have said nothing- of the governments allied 
 with the Imperial Government of Germany be- 
 cause they have not made war upon us or chal- 
 lenged us to defend our right and our honor. 
 The Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, 
 avowed its unqualified indorsement and acceptance 
 of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare 
 adopted now without disguise by the Imperial 
 German Government, and it has therefore not 
 been possible for this Government to receive 
 Count Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently ac- 
 credited to this Government by the Imperial and 
 Royal Government of Austria-Hungary ; but that 
 Government has not actually engaged in warfare 
 against citizens of the United States on the seas, 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 27 
 
 and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of 
 postponing- a discussion of our relations with the 
 authorities at Vienna. We enter this war only 
 where we are clearly forced into it, because there 
 are no other means of defending our rights. 
 
 It will be all the easier for us to conduct our- 
 selves as bellig^erents in a high spirit of right and 
 fairness because we act without animus, not in 
 enmity toward a people or with the desire to 
 bring any injury or disadvantage upon them, but 
 only in armed opposition to an irresponsible gov- 
 ernment which has thrown aside all considera- 
 tions of humanity and of right and is running 
 amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere 
 friends of the German people, and shall desire 
 nothing so much as the early re-establishment of 
 intimate relations of mutual advantage between 
 us, — however hard it may be for them, for the 
 time being to believe that this is spoken from 
 our hearts. We have borne with their present 
 government through all these bitter months be- 
 cause of that friendship, — exercising a patience 
 and forbearance which would otherwise have 
 been impossible. We shall, happily, still have an 
 opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily 
 attitude and actions toward the millions of men 
 and women of German birth and native sympathy 
 who live amongst us and share our life, and we 
 
28 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 shall be proud to prove it toward all who are in 
 fact loyal to their neighbors and to the Govern- 
 ment in the hour of test. They are, most of them, 
 as true and loyal Americans as if they had never 
 known any other fealty or allegiance. They will 
 be prompt to stand with us in rebuking and re- 
 straining the few who may be of a different mind 
 and purpose. If there should be disloyalty it will 
 be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression ; 
 but, if it lifts its head at all, it will lift it only 
 here and there and without countenance except 
 from a lawless and malignant few. 
 
 It is a distressing and oppressive duty. Gentle- 
 men of the Congress, which I have performed in 
 thus addressing you. There are, it may be, many 
 months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. 
 It is a fearful thing to lead this great, peaceful 
 people into war, into the most terrible and dis- 
 astrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to 
 be in the balance. But the right is more precious 
 than peace, and we shall fight for the things 
 which we have always carried nearest our hearts, 
 — for democracy, for the right of those who sub- 
 mit to authority to have a voice in their own gov- 
 ernments, for the rights and liberties of small na- 
 tions, for a universal dominion of right by such 
 a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and 
 safety to all nations and make the world itself 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 29 
 
 at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our 
 lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and 
 everything that we have, with the pride of those 
 who know that the day has come when America is 
 privileged to spend her blood and her might for 
 the principles that gave her birth and happiness 
 and the peace which she has treasured. God 
 helping her, she can do no other. 
 
MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS 
 Hon. Woodrow Wilson. 
 
 Delivered at the National Cemetery, 
 Arlington, Virginia, May 30th, 1917 
 
MEMORIAL DAY ADDRESS 
 WooDROW Wilson 
 The program has conferred an unmerited dig- 
 nity upon the remarks I am going to make by 
 calHng them an address, because I am not here 
 to dehver an address. I am here merely to show 
 in my official capacity the sympathy of this 
 great government with the object of this occa- 
 sion, and also to speak just a word of the senti- 
 ment that is in my own heart. 
 
 Any Memorial Day of this sort is, of course, 
 a day touched with sorrowful memory, and yet 
 I for one do not see how we can have any 
 thought of pity for the men whose memory we 
 honor to-day. I do not pity them. I envy them, 
 rather, because theirs is a great work for liberty 
 accomplished and we are in the midst of a work 
 unfinished, testing our strength where their 
 strength has already been tested. 
 
 There is a touch of sorrow, but there is a 
 touch of reassurance also in a day like this, 
 because we know how the men of America have 
 responded to the call of the cause of liberty, 
 and it fills our mind with a perfect assurance that 
 that response will come again in equal measure, 
 with equal majesty, and with a result which will 
 hold the attention of all mankind. 
 
 When you reflect upon it these men who died 
 33 
 
34 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 to preserve the Union died to preserve the instru- 
 ment which we are now using to serve the world 
 — a free nation espousing the cause of human Hb- 
 erty. In one sense the great struggle into which 
 we have now entered is an American struggle, 
 because it is in the sense of American rights, 
 but it is something even greater than that, it is 
 a world struggle. 
 
 It is a struggle of men who love liberty every- 
 where, and in this cause America will show her- 
 self greater than ever, because she will rise to 
 a greater thing. 
 
 We have said in the beginning that we planned 
 this great government that men who wish free- 
 dom might have a place of refuge and a place 
 where their hope could be realized and now, 
 having established such a government, having 
 preserved such a government, having vindicated 
 the power of such a government, we are saying 
 to all mankind, "We did not set this government 
 up in order that we might have a selfish and sep- 
 arate liberty, for we are now ready to come to 
 your assistance and fight out upon the fields of 
 the world the cause of human liberty." In this 
 thing America attains her full dignity and the 
 full fruition of her purpose. 
 
 No man can be glad that such things have hap- 
 pened as we have witnessed in these last fateful 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 35 
 
 years, but perhaps it may be permitted to us 
 to be glad that we have an opportunity to show 
 the principles that we profess to be living, prin- 
 ciples that live in our hearts, and to have a 
 chance by the pouring out of our blood and treas- 
 ure to vindicate the things which we have pro- 
 fessed. 
 
 For, my friends, the real fruition of life is to do 
 the things we have said we wished to do. There 
 are times when words seem empty and only ac- 
 tion seems great. Such a time has come, and in 
 the providence of God America will once more 
 have an opportunity to show the world she was 
 born to serve mankind. 
 
FLAG DAY ADDRESS 
 Hon. Woodrow Wilson 
 
 Delivered at Washington, D. C, 
 June 14th, 1917 
 
<l 
 
FLAG DAY ADDRESS 
 WooDROW Wilson 
 
 My Fellow Citizens : 
 
 We meet to celebrate Flag Day because th>s 
 fla.. which we honor and under which we serve 
 is "the emblem of our unity, our power, our 
 thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other 
 character than that which we give it from gen- 
 eration to generation. The choices are ours, 
 utats in majestic silence above the hosts that 
 execute those choices, whether in peace or m 
 war. And yet, though silent, it speaks to us,- 
 speaks to us of the past, of the men and women 
 who went before us and of the records they wrote 
 upon it. We celebrate the day of its birth; and 
 from its birth until now it has witnessed a great 
 history, has floated on high the symbol of great 
 events, of a great plan of life worked oiit by a 
 great people. We are about to carry it into 
 battle, to lift it where it will draw the fire of our 
 enemies. We are about to bid thousands, hun- 
 dreds of thousands, it may be millions, of our 
 men, the young, the strong, the capable men of 
 the nation, to go forth and die beneath it on 
 fields of blood far away,-for what? For some 
 unaccustomed thing? For something for which 
 it has never sought the fire before? American 
 armies were never before sent across the seas. 
 
 39 
 
40 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 Why are they sent now ? For some new purpose, 
 for which this great flag- has never been carried 
 before, or for some old, famihar, heroic purpose 
 for which it has seen men, its own men, die on 
 every battlefield upon which Americans have 
 borne arms since the Revolution? 
 
 These are questions which must be answered. 
 We are Americans. We in our turn serve America, 
 and can serve her with no private purpose. We 
 must use her flag as she has always used it. We 
 are accountable at the bar of history and must 
 plead in utter frankness what purpose it is we 
 seek to serve. 
 
 It is plain enough how we were forced into 
 the war. The extraordinary insults and aggres- 
 sions of the Imperial German Government left 
 us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms 
 in defense of our rights as a free people and of 
 our honor as a sovereign government. The mili- 
 tary masters of Germany denied us the right to 
 be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting com- 
 munities with vicious spies and conspirators and 
 sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in 
 their own behalf. When they found that they 
 could not do that, their agents diligently spread 
 sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own 
 citizens from their allegiance, — and some of 
 those agents were men connected with the official 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 41 
 
 Embassy of the German Government itself here 
 in our own capital. They sought by violence to 
 destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. 
 They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms 
 against us and to draw Japan into a hostile 
 alliance with her,-and that, not by indirectmn, 
 but by direct suggestion from the Foreign Office 
 in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use 
 of the high seas and repeatedly executed their 
 threat that they would send to their death any 
 of our people who ventured to approach the 
 coasts of Europe. And many of our own people 
 were corrupted. ^len began to look upon their 
 own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in 
 their hot resentment and surprise whether there 
 was any community in which hostile intrigue did 
 not lurk. What great nation in such circum- 
 stances would not have taken up arms? Much 
 as we had desired peace, it was denied us, and 
 not of our own choice. This flag under which 
 we serve would have been dishonored had we 
 ■withheld our hand. 
 
 But that is only part of the story. We know 
 now as clearly as we knew before we were our- 
 selves engaged that we are not the enemies of 
 the German people and that they are not our ene- 
 mies They did not originate or desire this 
 hideous war or wish that we should be drawn 
 
42 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 into it ; and we are vaguely conscious that we are 
 fighting their cause, as they will some day see it, 
 as well as our own. They are themselves in the 
 grip of the same sinister power that has now at 
 last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood 
 from us. The whole world is at war because the 
 whole world is in the grip of that power and is 
 trying out the great battle which shall determine 
 whether it is to be brought under its mastery 
 or fling itself free. 
 
 The war was begun by the military masters 
 of Germany, who proved to be also the masters 
 of Austria-Hungary. These .men have never 
 regarded nations as peoples, men, women, and 
 children of like blood and frame as themselves, 
 for whom governments existed and in whom 
 governments had their life. They have regarded 
 them merely as serviceable organizations which 
 they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to 
 their own purpose. They have regarded the 
 smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who 
 could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural 
 tools and instruments of domination. Their pur- 
 pose has long been avowed. The statesmen of 
 other nations, to whom that purpose was incred- 
 ible, paid little attention ; regarded what German 
 professors expounded in their classrooms and 
 German writers set forth to the world as the goal 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 43 
 
 of German policy as rather the dream of minds 
 detached from practical affairs, as preposterous 
 private conceptions of German destiny, than as 
 the actual plans of responsible rulers ; but the 
 rulers of Germany themselves knew all the while 
 what concrete plans, what well advanced in- 
 trigues lay back of what the professors and the 
 writers were saying, and were glad to go for- 
 ward unmolested, filling ,the thrones of Balkan 
 states with German princes, putting German 
 officers at the service of Turkey to drill her 
 armies and make interest with her government, 
 developing plans of sedition and rebellion in 
 India and Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. 
 The demands made by Austria upon Servia 
 were a mere single step in a plan which com- 
 passed Europe and Asia, from Berlin to Bag- 
 dad. They hoped those demands might not 
 arouse Europe, but they meant to press them 
 whether they did or not, for they thought them- 
 selves ready for the final issue of arms. 
 
 Their plan was to throw a broad belt of Ger- 
 man military power and political control across 
 the very centre of Europe and beyond the Medi- 
 terranean into the heart of Asia ; and Austria- 
 Hungary was to be as much their tool and pawn 
 as Servia or Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous 
 states of the East. Austria-Hungary, indeed, was 
 
44 THE VOICES OE OUR LEADERS 
 
 to become part of the central German Empire, 
 absorbed and dominated by the same forces and 
 influences that had originally cemented the Ger- 
 man states themselves. The dream had its heart 
 at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere 
 else! It rejected the idea of solidarity of race 
 entirely. The choice of peoples played no part 
 in it at all. It contemplated binding together 
 racial and political units which could be kept 
 together only by force — Czechs, Magyars, 
 Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Turks, Armenians, — 
 the proud states of Bohemia and Hungary, the 
 stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, the 
 indomitable Turks, the subtile peoples of the 
 East. These peoples did not wish to be united. 
 They ardently desired to direct their own afifairs, 
 would be satisfied only by undisputed indepen- 
 dence. They could be kept quiet only by the 
 presence or the constant threat of armed men. 
 They would live under a common power only 
 by sheer compulsion and await the day of revolu- 
 tion. But the German military statesmen had 
 reckoned with all that and were ready to deal 
 with it in their own way. 
 
 And they have actually carried the greater 
 part of that amazing plan into execution ! Look 
 how things stand. Austria is at their mercy. 
 It has acted, not upon its own initiative or upon 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 45 
 
 the choice of its own people, but at Berhn's 
 dictation ever since the war began. Its people 
 now desire peace, but cannot have it until leave 
 is granted from Berlin. The so-called Central 
 Powers are in fact but a single Power. Servia 
 is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a 
 moment freed. Bulgaria has consented to its 
 will, and Roumania is overrun. The Turkish 
 armies, which Germans trained, are serving Ger- 
 many, certainly not themselves, and the guns of 
 German warships lying in the harbour at Con- 
 stantinople remind Turkish statesmen every day 
 that they have no choice but to take their orders 
 from Berlin. From Hamburg to the Persian 
 Gulf the net is spread. 
 
 Is it not easy to understand the eagerness 
 for peace that has been manifested from Berlin 
 ever since the snare was set and sprung? Peace, 
 peace, peace has been the talk of her Foreign 
 Office for now a year and more ; not peace upon 
 her own initiative, but upon the initiative of the 
 nations over which she now deems herself to 
 hold the advantage. A little of the talk has been 
 public, but most of it has been private. Through 
 all sorts of channels it has come to me, and in 
 all sorts of guises, but never with the terms dis- 
 closed which the German Government would be 
 willing to accept. That government has other 
 
46 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 valuable pawns in its hands than those I have 
 mentioned. It still holds a valuable part of 
 France, though with slowly relaxing grasp, and 
 practically the whole of Belgium. Its armies 
 press close upon Russia and overrun Poland at 
 their will. It cannot go further; it dare not go 
 back. It wishes to close its bargain before it is 
 too late and it has little left to ofifer for the 
 pound of flesh it will demand. 
 
 The military masters under whom Germany is 
 bleeding see very clearly to what point Fate has 
 brought them. If they fall back or are forced 
 back an inch, their power both abroad and at 
 home will fall to pieces like a house of cards. 
 It is their power at home they are thinking about 
 now more than their power abroad. It is that 
 power which is trembling under their very feet; 
 and deep fear has entered their hearts. They 
 have but one chance to perpetuate their military 
 power or even their controlling political influence. 
 If they can secure peace now with the immense 
 advantages still in their hands which they have 
 up to this point apparently gained, they will 
 have justified themselves before the German peo- 
 ple: they will have gained by force what they 
 promised to gain by it; an immense expansion 
 of German power, an immense enlargement of 
 German industrial and commercial opportunities. 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS A7 
 
 Their prestige will be secure, and with their 
 prestige their political power. If they fail, their 
 people will thrust them aside; a government ac- 
 countable to the people themselves will be set 
 up in Germany as it has been in England, in 
 the United States, in France, and in all the great 
 countries of the modern time except Germany. 
 If they succeed they are safe and Germany and 
 the world are undone; if they fail Germany is 
 saved and the world will be at peace. If they 
 succeed, America will fall within the menace. 
 We and all the rest of the world must remain 
 armed, as they will remain, and must make ready 
 for the next step in their aggression ; if they fail, 
 the world may unite for peace and Germany may 
 be of the union. 
 
 Do you not now understand the new intrigue, 
 the intrigue for peace, and why the masters of 
 Germany do not hesitate to use any agency that 
 promises to efifect their purpose, the deceit of 
 the nations? Their present particular aim is 
 to deceive all those who throughout the world 
 stand for the rights of peoples and the self- 
 government of nations; for they see what im- 
 mense strength the forces of justice and of liber- 
 alism are gathering out of this war. They are 
 employing liberals in their enterprise. They are 
 using men, in Germany and without, as their 
 
48 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 Spokesmen whom they have hitherto despised and 
 oppressed, using them for their own destruction,, 
 — sociaUsts, the leaders of labour, the thinkers 
 they have hitherto sought to silence. Let them 
 once succeed and these men, now their tools, will 
 be ground to powder beneath the weight of the 
 great military empire they will have set up ; the 
 revolutionists in Russia will be cut off from all 
 succor or co-operation in western Europe and a 
 counter revolution fostered and supported ; Ger- 
 many herself will lose her chance of freedom; 
 and all Europe will arm for the next, the final 
 struggle. 
 
 The sinister intrigue is being no less actively 
 conducted in this country than in Russia and in 
 every country in Europe to which the agents 
 and dupes of the Imperial German Government 
 can get access. That government has many 
 spokesmen here, in places high and low. They 
 have learned discretion. They keep within the 
 law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. 
 They proclaim the liberal purposes of their mas- 
 ters ; declare this a foreign war which can touch 
 America with no danger to either her lands Or 
 her institutions ; set England at the center of 
 the stage and talk of her ambition to assert 
 economic dominion throughout the world ; appeal 
 to our ancient tradition of isolation in the politics 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 49 
 
 of the nations ; and seek to undermine the gov- 
 ernment with false professions of loyalty to its 
 principles. 
 
 But they will make no headway. The false 
 betray themselves always in every accent. It is 
 only friends and partisans of the German Gov- 
 ernment whom we have already identified who 
 utter these thinly disguised disloyalties. The 
 facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere 
 are they more plainly seen than in the United 
 States, where we are accustomed to deal with 
 facts and not with sophistries ; and the great 
 fact that stands out above all the rest is that 
 this is a Peoples' War, a war for freedom and 
 justice and self-government amongst all the na- 
 tions of the world, a war to make the world safe 
 for the peoples who live upon it and have made 
 it their own, the German people themselves in- 
 cluded ; and that with us rests the choice to break 
 through all these hypocrisies and patent cheats 
 and masks of brute force and help set the world 
 free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated 
 a long age through by sheer weight of arms and 
 the arbitrarv choices of self-constituted masters, 
 by the nation which can maintain the biggest 
 armies and the most irresistible armaments, — a 
 power to which the world has afforded no paral- 
 
50 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 lei and in the face of which poHtical freedom 
 must whither and perish. 
 
 For us there is but one choice. We have made 
 it. Woe be to the man or group of men that 
 seeks to stand in our way in this day of high 
 resolution when every principle we hold dearest 
 is to be vindicated and made secure for the sal- 
 vation of the nations. We are ready to plead 
 at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a 
 new lustre. Once more we shall make good with 
 our lives and fortunes the great faith to which 
 we were born, and a new glory shall shine in 
 the face of our people. 
 
 II 
 
WHY DO WE FIGHT GERMANY? 
 
 Hon. Franklin K. Lane, 
 Secretary of the Interior 
 
 Delivered before the Home Club, Interior Depart- 
 ment, Washington, D. C, June 4th, 1917. 
 
WHY DO WE FIGHT GERMANY? 
 Franklin K. Lane 
 
 Tomorrow is registration day. It is the duty 
 of all, their legal as well as their patriotic duty, 
 to register if within the class called. There are 
 some who have not clearly seen the reason for 
 that call. To these I would speak a word. 
 
 Why are we fighting Germany? The brief 
 answer is that ours is a war of self-defense. We 
 did not wish to fight Germany. She made the 
 attack upon us; not on our shores, but on our 
 ships, our 'lives, our rights, our future. For two 
 years and more we held to a neutrality that made 
 us apologists for things which outraged man's 
 common sense of fair play and humanity. At each 
 new offense— the invasion of Belgium, the kill- 
 ing of civilian Belgians, the attacks on Scar- 
 borough and other defenseless towns, the laying 
 of mines in neutral waters, the fencing off of 
 the seas— and on and on through the months 
 we said : "This is war— archaic, uncivilized war, 
 but war ! All rules have been thrown away ; all 
 nobility; man hag come down to the primitive 
 brute. And while we cannot justify we will not 
 intervene. It is not our war." 
 
 Then why are we in? Because we could not 
 keep out. The invasion of Belgium, which 
 opened the war, led to the invasion of the United 
 53 
 
54 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 States by slow, steady, logical steps. Our sym- 
 pathies evolved into a conviction of self-interest. 
 Our love of fair play ripened into alarm at our 
 own peril. 
 
 We talked in the language and in the spirit 
 of good faith and sincerity, as honest men should 
 talk, until we discovered that our talk was con- 
 strued as cowardice. And Mexico was called 
 upon to cow us. We talked as men would talk 
 who cared alone for peace and the advancement 
 of their own material interests, until we discov- 
 ered that we were thought to be a nation of 
 mere money makers, devoid of all character — 
 until, indeed, we are told that we could not 
 walk the highways of the world without permis- 
 sion of a Prussian soldier, that our ships might 
 not sail without wearing a striped uniform of 
 humiliation upon a narrow path of national sub- 
 servience. We talked as men talk who hope for 
 honest agreement, not for war, until we found 
 that the treaty torn to pieces at Liege was but 
 the symbol of a policy that made agreements 
 worthless against a purpose that knew no word 
 but success. 
 
 And so we came into this war for ourselves. 
 It is a war to save America — to preserve self- 
 respect, to justify our right to live as we have 
 lived, not as some one else wishes us to live. In 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 55 
 
 the name of freedom we challenge with ships 
 and men, money, and an undaunted spirit, that 
 word "Verboten" which Germany has written 
 upon the sea and upon the land. For America is 
 not the name of so much territory. It is a living 
 spirit, born in travail, grown in the rough school 
 of bitter experiences, a living spirit which has 
 purpose and pride and conscience — knows why 
 it wishes to live and to what end, knows how it 
 comes to be respected of the world, and hopes 
 to retain that respect by living on with the light 
 of Lincoln's love of man as its old and new testa- 
 ment. It is more precious that this America 
 should live than that we Americans should live. 
 And this America as we now see has been chal- 
 lenged from the first of this war by the strong 
 arm of a power that has no sympathy with our 
 purpose, and will not hesitate to destroy us if 
 the law that we respect, the rights that are to us 
 sacred, or the spirit that we have, stand across 
 her set will to make this world bow before her 
 policies, backed by her organized and scientific 
 military system. The world of Christ — a neg- 
 lected but not a rejected Christ — has come again 
 face to face with the world of Mahomet, who 
 willed to win by force. 
 
 With this background of history and in this 
 sense, then we fight Germany — 
 
56 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 Because of Belgium — invaded, outraged, en- 
 slaved, impoverished Belgium. We cannot for- 
 get Liege, Louvain, and Cardinal Mercier. Trans- 
 lated into terms of American history these names 
 stand for Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Patrick 
 Henry. 
 
 Because of France — invaded, desecrated 
 France, a million of whose heroic sons have died 
 to save the land of LaFayette. Glorious golden 
 France, the preserver of the arts, the land of 
 noble spirit. The first land to follow our lead 
 into republican liberty. 
 
 Because of England — from whom came the 
 laws, traditions, standards of life, and inherent 
 love of liberty which we call Anglo-Saxon civil- 
 ization. We defeated her once upon the land and 
 once upon the sea. But Australia, New Zealand, 
 Africa, and Canada are free because of what we 
 did. And they are with us in the fight for the 
 freedom of the seas. 
 
 Because of Russia — New Russia. She must 
 not be overwhelmed now. Not now, surely, 
 when she is just born into freedom. Her peasants 
 must have their chance; they must go to school 
 to Washington, to Jefferson, and to Lincoln, 
 until they know their way about in the new, 
 strange world, of government by the popular 
 will. 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 57 
 
 Because of other peoples, with their rising 
 Tiope that the world may be freed from govern- 
 ment by the soldier. 
 
 We are fighting Germany because she sought 
 to terrorize us and then to fool us. We could 
 not believe that Germany would do what she 
 said she would do upon the seas. 
 
 We still hear the piteous cries of children 
 <:oming up out of the sea where the Lusitania 
 went down. And Germany has never asked for- 
 giveness of the world. 
 
 We saw the Sussex sunk, crowded with the 
 sons and daughters of neutral nations. 
 
 We saw ship after ship sent to the bottom 
 — ships of mercy bound out of America for the 
 Belgian starving; ships carrying the Red Cross 
 and laden with the wounded of all nations ; ships 
 carrying food and clothing to friendly, harmless, 
 terrorized peoples ; ships flying the Stars and 
 Stripes — sent to the bottom hundreds of miles 
 from shore, manned by American seamen, mur- 
 dered against all law, without warning. 
 
 We believed Germany's promise that she would 
 respect the neutral flag and the rights of neu- 
 trals, and we held our anger and outrage in 
 check. But now we see that she was holding 
 us off with fair promises until she could build 
 her hugh fleet of submarines. For when sprnig 
 
58 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 came she blew her promise into the air, just as 
 at the beginning she had torn up that "scrap 
 of paper." Then we saw clearly that there was 
 but one law for Germany — her will to rule. 
 
 We are fighting Germany because she violated 
 our confidence. Paid German spies filled our 
 cities. Officials of her Government, received as 
 the guests of this Nation, lived with us to bribe 
 and terrorize, defying our law and the law of 
 nations. 
 
 We are fighting Germany because while we 
 were yet her friends — the only great power that 
 still held hands ofif — she sent the Zimmermann 
 note, calling to her aid Mexico, our southern 
 neighbor, and hoping to lure Japan, our western 
 neighbor, into war against this Nation of peace. 
 
 The nation that would do these things pro- 
 claims the gospel that government has no con- 
 science. And this doctrine cannot live, or else 
 democracy must die. For the nations of the 
 world must keep faith. There can be no living 
 for us in a world where the state has no con- 
 science, no reverence for the things of the spirit, 
 no respect for international law, no mercy for 
 those who fall before its force. What an unor- 
 dered world! Anarchy! The anarchy of rival 
 wolf packs ! 
 
 We are fighting Germany because in this war 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 59 
 
 feudalism is making its last stand against on- 
 coming democracy. We see it now. This is a 
 war against an old spirit, an ancient, outworn 
 spirit. It is a war against feudalism — the right 
 of the castle on the hill to rule the village below. 
 It is a war for democracy — the right of all to 
 be their own masters. Let Germany be feudal 
 if she will, but she must not spread her system 
 over a world that has outgrown it. Feudalism 
 plus science, thirteenth century plus twentieth 
 — this is the religion of the mistaken Germany 
 that has linked itself with the Turk, that has, 
 too, adopted the method of Mahomet. ''The 
 state has no conscience." "The state can do 
 no wrong." With the spirit of the fanatic she 
 believes this gospel and that it is her duty to 
 spread it by force. With poison gas that makes 
 living a hell, with submarines that sneak through 
 the seas to slyly murder noncombatants, with 
 dirigibles that bombard men and women while 
 they sleep, with a perfected system of terroriza- 
 tion that the modern world first heard of when 
 German troops entered China, German feudal- 
 ism is making war upon mankind. Let this 
 old spirit of evil have its way and no man will 
 live in America without paying toll to it in 
 manhood and in money. This spirit might de- 
 mand Canada from a defeated, navyless Eng- 
 
60 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 land, and then our dream of peace on the north 
 would be at an end. We would live, as France 
 has Hved for 40 years, in haunting terror. 
 
 America speaks for the world in fighting Ger- 
 many. Mark on a map those countries which 
 are Germany's allies and you will mark but four, 
 running from the Baltic through Austria and 
 Bulgaria to Turkey. All the other nations the 
 whole globe around are in arms against her or 
 are unable to move. There is deep meaning in 
 this. We fight with the world for an honest 
 world in which nations keep their word, for a 
 world in which nations do not live by swagger 
 or by threat, for a world in which men think of 
 the ways in which they can conquer the common 
 cruelties of nature instead of inventing more 
 horrible cruelties to inflict upon the spirit and 
 body of man, for a world in which the ambition 
 or the philosophy of a few shall not make miser- 
 able all mankind, for a world in which the man 
 is held more precious than the machine, the sys- 
 tem, or the state. 
 
ADDRESS TO THE RESERVE OFFICERS' 
 TRAINING CORPS 
 
 Hon. Robert Lansing, 
 Secretary of State 
 
 Delivered at Madison Barracks, New York, 
 July 29th, 1917 
 
ADDRESS TO THE RESERVE OFFICERS' 
 TRAINING CORPS 
 
 Robert Lansing 
 
 Gentlemefi: It is an opportunity which I 
 greatly appreciate to be here this evening and to 
 say a few words to you about the great enter- 
 prise in which you are to be participants. There 
 are so many things to be said, so many view- 
 points, that it is hard to know how to deal with 
 the subject in a way that will appeal to the 
 greatest number. 
 
 First, we must all realize that we are living 
 in the most momentous time in all history, in 
 a time when the lives and destinies of nations 
 are in the balance, when even the civilization, 
 which has taken centuries to build, may crumble 
 before the terrible storm which is sweeping over 
 Europe. We are not only living in this critical 
 period but we, as a nation, have become a par- 
 ticipant in Kie struggle. Having cast our lot on 
 the side of the powers allied against the Imperial 
 German Government we will put behind our de- 
 cision the full power and the resources of the 
 Republic. We intend to win in this mighty conflict, 
 and we will win because our cause is the cause 
 of justice and of right and of humanity. 
 63 
 
64 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 I wonder how many of us comprehend what 
 the outcome of this war means to mankind, or, 
 to bring it nearer to each one of us, what it 
 means to our country. I sometimes think that 
 there prevail very erroneous impressions as to 
 the reasons why we entered the war, not the 
 immediate reasons, but the deep underlying- rea- 
 sons which affect the life and future of the 
 United States and of all other liberty-loving na- 
 tions throughout the world. 
 
 Of course the immediate cause of our war 
 against Germany was the announced purpose of 
 the German Government to break its promises 
 as to indiscriminate submarine warfare and the 
 subsequent renewal of that ruthless method of 
 destruction with increased vigor and brutality. 
 
 While this cause was in itself sufficient to force 
 us to enter the war if we would preserve our 
 self-respect, the German Government's deliberate 
 breach of faith and its utter disregard of right 
 and life had a far deeper meaning, a meaning 
 which had been growing more evident as the war 
 had progressed and which needed but this act 
 of perfidy to bring it home to all thinking Ameri- 
 cans. The evil character of the German Govern- 
 ment is laid bare before the world. We know 
 now that that Government is inspired with am- 
 bitions which menace human liberty, and that 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 65 
 
 to gain its end it does not hesitate to break 
 faith, to violate the most sacred rights, or to 
 prepetrate intolerable acts of inhumanity. 
 
 It needed but the words reported to have been 
 uttered by the German Chancellor to complete 
 the picture of the character of his Government 
 when he announced that the only reason why the 
 intensified submarine campaign was delayed until 
 February last was that sufficient submarines 
 could not be built before that time to make the 
 attacks on commerce effective. Do you realize 
 that this means, if it means anything, that the 
 promises to refrain from brutal submarine war- 
 fare, which Germany had made to the United 
 States, were never intended to be kept, that they 
 were only made in order to gain time in which 
 to build more submarines, and that when the 
 time came to act the German promises were un- 
 hesitatingly torn to pieces like other '^scraps of 
 paper" ? 
 
 It is this disclosure of the character of the 
 Imperial German Government which is the under- 
 lying cause of our entry into the war. We had 
 doubted, or at least many Americans had doubted, 
 the evil purposes of the rulers of Germany. Doubt 
 remained no longer. In the light of events we 
 could read the past and see that for a quarter 
 of a century the absorbing ambition of the mili- 
 
66 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 tary oligarchy which was the master of the Ger- 
 man Empire was for world dominion. Every 
 agency in the fields of commerce, industry, 
 science and diplomacy had been directed by the 
 German Government to this supreme end. Phil- 
 osophers and preachers taught that the destiny of 
 Germany was to rule the world, thus preparing 
 the mind of the German people for the time when 
 the mighty engine which the German Govern- 
 ment had constructed should crush all opposition 
 and the German Emperor should rule supreme. 
 
 For nearly three years we have watched the 
 conduct of the Imperial Government, and we 
 have learned more and more of the character 
 of that Government and of its aims. We came 
 very slowly to a realizing sense that not only 
 was the freedom of the European nations at stake, 
 but the liberty throughout the world was threat- 
 ened by the powerful autocracy which was seek- 
 ing to gratify its vast ambition. 
 
 Not impulsively, but with deliberation, the 
 American people reached the only decision which 
 was possible from the standpoint of their own 
 national safety. Congress declared that a state 
 of war existed between the United States and the 
 Imperial Government of Germany, and this coun- 
 try united with the other liberal nations of the 
 earth to crush the power which sought to erect 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 67 
 
 on the ruins of democracy a world empire 
 greater than that of Greece or Rome of the 
 CaHphs. 
 
 The President has said, with the wonderful 
 ability which he has to express aptly a great 
 thought in a single phrase that "the world must 
 be made safe for democracy." In that thought 
 there is more than the establishment of liberty 
 and self-government for all nations, there is in 
 it the hope of an enduring peace. 
 
 I do not know in the annals of history an 
 instance where a people, with truly democratic 
 institutions, permitted their government to wage 
 a war of aggression, a war of conquest. Faithful 
 to their treaties, sympathetic with others seeking 
 self-development, real democracies, whether mon- 
 archical or republican in their forms of govern- 
 ment, desire peace with their neighbors and with 
 all mankind. 
 
 Were every people on earth able to express 
 their will there would be no wars of aggression, 
 and if there were no wars of aggression then 
 there would be no wars, and lasting peace would 
 come to this earth. The only way that a people 
 can express their will is through democratic in- 
 stitutions. Therefore, when the world is made 
 safe for democracy, when that great principle 
 
68 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 prevails, universal peace will be an accomplished 
 fact. 
 
 No nation or people will benefit more than the 
 United States when that time comes. But it 
 has not yet come. A great people, ruled in thought 
 and word, as well as in deed, by the most sin- 
 ister government of modern times, is straining 
 every nerve to supplant democracy by the au- 
 tocracy which they have been taught to worship. 
 When will the German people awaken to the 
 truth? When will they arise in their might and 
 cast off the yoke and become their own masters ? 
 I fear that it will not be until a physical might 
 of the united democracies of the world have 
 destroyed forever the evil ambition of the military 
 rulers of Germany, and liberty triumphs over its 
 arch enemies. 
 
 And yet in spite of these truths which have 
 been brought to light in these last three years 
 I wonder how many Americans feel that our 
 democracy is in peril, that our liberty needs pro- 
 tection, that the United States is in real danger 
 from the malignant forces which are seeking to 
 impose their will upon the world, as they have 
 upon Germany and her deceived allies. 
 
 Let us understand once for all that this is no 
 war to establish an abstract principle of right. 
 It is a war in which the future of the United 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 69 
 
 States is at stake. If any among you have the 
 idea that we are fighting others' battles and not 
 our own, the sooner he gets away from that idea 
 the better it will be for him, the better it will be 
 for all of us. 
 
 Imagine Germany victor in Europe because 
 the United States remained neutral. Who, then, 
 think you, would be the next victim of those who 
 are seeking to be masters of the whole earth? 
 Would not this country with its enormous wealth 
 arouse the cupidity of an impoverished though 
 triumphant Germany? Would not this democ- 
 racy be the only obstacle between the autocratic 
 rulers of Germany and their supreme ambition? 
 Do you think that they would withhold their 
 hand from so rich a prize ? 
 
 Let me then ask you, would it be easier or 
 wiser for this country single-handed to resist a 
 German Empire, flushed with victory and with 
 great armies and navies at its command, than 
 to unite with the brave enemies of that Empire 
 in ending now and for all time this menace to 
 our future? 
 
 Primarily, then, every man who crosses the 
 ocean to fight on foreign soil against the armies 
 of the German Emperor goes forth to fight for 
 his country and for the preservation of those 
 things for which our forefathers were willing to 
 
70 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 die. To those who thus offer themselves we owe 
 the same debt that we owe to those men who in 
 the past fought on American soil in the cause 
 of liberty. No, not the same debt, but a greater 
 one. It calls for more patriotism, more self- 
 denial, and a truer vision to wage war on distant 
 shores than to repel an invader or defend one's 
 home. I, therefore, congratulate you, young 
 men, in your choice of service. You have done 
 a splendid thing. You have earned already the 
 gratitude of your countrymen and of generations 
 of Americans to come. Your battle flags will 
 become the cherished trophies of a nation which 
 will never forget those who bore them in the 
 cause of liberty. 
 
 I know that some among you may consider 
 that the idea tHat Germany would attack us, if 
 she won this war, to be improbable ; but let him 
 who doubts remember that the improbable, yes, 
 the impossible, has been happening in this war 
 from the beginning. If you had been told prior 
 to August, 1914, that the German Government 
 would disregard its solemn treaties and send its 
 armies into Belgium, would wantonly burn Lou- 
 vain, would murder defenseless people, would 
 extort ransoms from conquered cities, would, 
 carry away men and women into slavery, would 
 like vandals of old, destroy some of history's 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 71 
 
 most cherished monuments, and would with ma- 
 licious purpose lay waste the fairest fields of 
 France and Belgium, you would have indignantly 
 denied the possibility. You would have exclaimed 
 that Germans, lovers of art and learning, would 
 never permit such foul deeds. Today you know 
 that the unbelievable has happened, that all these 
 crimes have been committed, not under the im- 
 pulse of passion but under official orders. 
 
 Again, if you had been told before the war that 
 German submarine commanders would sink 
 peaceful vessels of commerce and send to sudden 
 death men, women, and little children, you would 
 have declared such scientific brutality to be im- 
 possible. Or if you had been told that German 
 aviators would fly over thickly populated cities, 
 scattering missiles of death and destruction, with 
 no other purpose than to terrorize the innocent 
 inhabitants, you would have denounced the very 
 thought as unworthy of belief and as a calumny 
 upon German honor. Yet, God help us, these 
 things have come to pass, and iron crosses have 
 rewarded the perpetrators. 
 
 But there is more, far more, which might be 
 added to this record of unbelievable things which 
 the German Government has done. I only need 
 to mention the attempt of the Foreign Office at 
 Berlin to bribe Mexico to make war upon us by 
 
72 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 promising her American territory. It was only 
 one of many intrigues which the German Gov- 
 ernment was carrying on in many lands. Spies 
 and conspirators were sent throughout the world. 
 Civil discord was encouraged to weaken the po- 
 tential strength of nations which might be ob- 
 stacles to the lust of Germany's rulers for world 
 mastery. Those of German blood who owed 
 allegiance to other countries were appealed to 
 to support the Fatherland, which beloved name 
 masked the military clique at Berlin. 
 
 Some day I hope that the whole tale may be 
 told. It will be an astounding tale indeed. But 
 enough has been told, so that there no longer 
 remains the shadow of a doubt as to the character 
 of Germany's rulers, of their amazing ambition 
 for world empire, and of their intense hatred 
 for democracy. 
 
 The day has gone by when we can measure 
 possibilities by past experiences or when we be- 
 lieve that any physical obstacle is so great or 
 any moral influence is so potent as to cause the 
 German autocracy to abandon its mad purpose 
 of world conquest. 
 
 It was the policy of those, who plotted and 
 made ready for the time to accomplish the desire 
 of the German rulers, to lull into false security 
 the great nations which they intended to subdue, 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 73 
 
 SO that when the storm broke they would be 
 unprepared. How well they succeeded you know. 
 But democracy no longer sleeps. It is fully 
 awake to the menace which threatens it. The 
 American people, trustful and friendly, were re- 
 luctant to believe that imperialism again threat- 
 ened the peace and liberty of the world. Con- 
 viction came to them at last, and with it prompt 
 action. The American Nation arrayed itself with 
 the other great democracies of the earth against 
 the genius of evil which broods over the destinies 
 of Central Europe. 
 
 No thought of material gain and no thought 
 of material loss impelled this action. Inspired 
 by the highest motives, American manhood pre- 
 pared to risk all for the right. I am proud of 
 my country. I am proud of my countrymen. I 
 am proud of our national character. With lofty 
 purpose, with patriotic fervor, with intense earn- 
 estness the American democracy has drawn the 
 sword, which it will not sheathe until the baneful 
 forces of absolutism go down defeated and 
 broken. 
 
 Who can longer doubt — and there have been 
 many who have doubted in these critical days — 
 the power of that eternal spirit of freedom which 
 lives in every true American heart? 
 
 My friends, I am firmly convinced that the 
 
74 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 independence of no nation is safe, that the liberty 
 of no individual is sure, until the military despot- 
 ism which holds the German people in the hollow 
 of its hand has been made impotent and harmless 
 forever. Appeals to justice, to moral obligation, 
 to honor, no longer avail with such a power. 
 There is but one way to restore peace to the 
 world and that is by overcoming the physical 
 might of German imperialism by force of arms. 
 
 For its own safety as well as for the cause of 
 human liberty this great Republic is marshaling 
 its armies and preparing with all its vigor to aid 
 in ridding Germany, as well as the world, of the 
 most ambitious and most unprincipled autocracy 
 which has arisen to stay the wheels of progress 
 and imperial Christian civilization. 
 
 It is to this great cause you, who are present 
 here tonight, like thousands of other loyal 
 Americans, have dedicated yourselves. Upon 
 each one of you much depends. You are going 
 forth into foreign lands, not only as guardians 
 of the flag of your country and of the liberties 
 of your countrymen, but as guardians of the 
 national honor of the United States. American 
 character will be judged by your conduct ; Ameri- 
 can spirit, by your deeds. As you maintain your- 
 selves courageously and honorably, so will you 
 bring glory to the flag which we all love as the 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 75 
 
 emblem of our national unity and independence. 
 
 I know that it is unnecessary to emphasize the 
 responsibilities which will rest upon you as you 
 lead the men under your command. To their 
 officers they will look for guidance and example 
 not only in the battle line, but in the camp and 
 on the march. Your responsibilities are great. 
 As you meet them so will your services be meas- 
 ured by your country. 
 
 It is in the toil and danger of so great an ad- 
 venture as you are soon to experience that a 
 man's true character will become manifest. He 
 will be brought face to face with the realities. 
 The little things which once engrossed his 
 thought and called forth his energies will be 
 forgotten in the stern events of his new life. 
 The sternness of it all will not deprive him of 
 the satisfaction which comes from doing his 
 best. As he found gratification and joy in the 
 peaceful pursuits of the old life, so will he find 
 a deeper gratification and greater joy in serving 
 his country loyally and doing his part in molding 
 the future aright. 
 
 And, when your task is completed, when the 
 grim days of battle are over and you return once 
 more to the quiet life of your profession or occu- 
 pation, which you have so generously abandoned 
 at your country's call, you will find in the grati- 
 
7e THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 tude of your countrymen an ample reward for the 
 great sacrifice which you have made. 
 
 If enthusiasm and ardor can make success sure, 
 then we, Americans, have no cause for anxiety, 
 no reason to doubt the outcome of the conflict. 
 But enthusiasm and ardor are not all. They must 
 be founded on a profound conviction of the 
 righteousness of our cause and on an impHcit 
 faith that the God of Battles will strengthen the 
 arm of him who fights for the right. In the time 
 of stress and peril, when a man stands face to 
 face with death and its most terrible forms, God 
 will not desert him who puts his trust in Him. 
 It is at such a time that the eternal verities will 
 be disclosed. It is then, when you realize that 
 existence is more than this life and that over 
 our destinies watches' an all-powerful and com- 
 passionate God, you will stand amidst the storm 
 of battle unflinching and unafraid. 
 
 There is no higher praise that can be be- 
 stowed upon a soldier of the Republic than to 
 say that he served his country faithfully, and 
 trusted in his God. Such I hope will be the 
 praise which each one of you will be entitled to 
 when peace returns to this suffering earth, and 
 mankind rejoices that the world is made safe for 
 democracy. 
 
A TRIBUTE TO AMERICA 
 
 Hon. Herbert Henry Asquith, 
 Formerly Prime Minister of Great Britain 
 
 Delivered in House of Parliament, 
 April 17th, 1917 
 

A TRIBUTE TO AMERICA 
 Herbert Henry Asquith 
 
 It is only right and fitting that this House, the 
 chief representative body of the British Empire, 
 should at the earliest possible opportunity give 
 definite and emphatic expression to the feelings 
 which throughout the length and breadth of the 
 Empire have grown day by day in volume and 
 fervor since the memorable decision of the Presi- 
 dent and Congress of the United States. 
 
 I doubt whether, even now, the world realizes 
 the full significance of the step America has taken. 
 I do not use language of flattery or exaggeration 
 when I say it is one of the most disinterested 
 acts in history. For more than 100 years it has 
 been the cardinal principle of American policy 
 to keep clear of foreign entanglements. A war 
 such as this must necessarily dislocate interna- 
 tional commerce and finance, but on the balance 
 it was doing little appreciable harm to the ma- 
 terial fortunes and prosperity of the American 
 people. 
 
 What, then, has enabled the President — after 
 waiting with the patience which Pitt described as 
 the first virtue of statesmanship — to carry with 
 him a united nation into the hazards and horrors 
 of the greatest war in history? 
 
 Not calculation of material gain, not hope of 
 79 
 
80 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 territorial aggrandizement, not even the pricking 
 of one of those so-called points of honor which 
 in days gone by have driven nations, as they 
 used to drive individuals, to the duelling ground. 
 
 It was the constraining force of conscience 
 and humanity, growing in strength and compul- 
 sive authority month by month, with the gradual 
 unfolding of the real character of German aims 
 and methods. It was that force alone which 
 brought home to the great democracy overseas 
 the momentous truth that they were standing 
 at the parting ways. The American nation had 
 to make one of those great decisions which in the 
 lives of men and nations determine for good or 
 ill their whole future. 
 
 What was it that our kinsmen in America 
 realized as the issue in this unexampled conflict? 
 The very things which, if we are worthy of our 
 best traditions, we are bound to vindicate — essen- 
 tial conditions of free and honorable development 
 of the nations of the world, humanity, respect 
 for law, consideration for the weak and unpro- 
 tected, chivalry toward mankind, observance of 
 good faith — these things, which we used to regard 
 as commonplaces of international decency, one 
 after another have been flouted, menaced, trodden 
 under foot, as though they were effete supersti- 
 tions of a bygone creed. 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 81 
 
 America sees in this clear issue something of 
 wider import than the vicissitudes of the battle- 
 fields, or even of a rearrangement of the map of 
 Europe on the basis of nationality. 
 
 The whole future of civilized government and 
 intercourse, in particular the fortunes and faith 
 of democracy, has been brought into peril. In 
 such a situation aloofness is seen to be not only 
 a blunder, but a crime. To stand aside with 
 stopped ears, with folded arms, with averted 
 gaze, when you have the power to intervene, is 
 to become not a mere spectator, but an accom- 
 plice. 
 
 There was never in the minds of any of us a 
 fear that the moment the issue became apparent 
 and unmistakable the voice of America would 
 not be heard. She has now dedicated herself 
 without hesitation or reserve, heart and soul and 
 strength, to the greatest of causes, to which, 
 stimulated and fortified by her comradeship, we 
 here renew our fealty and devotion. 
 
il 
 
THE OLDEST FREE ASSEMBLIES 
 
 Right Honorable Arthur James Balfour, For- 
 merly Prime Minister of Great Britain, Head 
 of the British Mission to the United States. 
 
 Delivered in the United States House of Represen- 
 tatives, May 5th, 1917. 
 

 i 
 
THE OLDEST FREE ASSEMBLIES 
 Arthur James Balfour 
 
 Mr. Speaker, Ladies and Gentlemen of the 
 House of Representatives: Will you permit me 
 on behalf of my friends and myself, to offer you 
 my deepest and sincerest thanks for the rare and 
 valued honor which you have done us by re- 
 ceiving us here today? 
 
 We all feel the greatness of this honor; but 
 I think to none of us can it come home so closely 
 as to one who, like myself, has been for 43 years 
 in the service of a free assembly like your own. 
 I rejoice to think that a member— a very old 
 member, I am sorry to say— of the British House 
 of Commons has been received here today by this 
 great sister assembly with such kindness as you 
 have shown to me and to my friends. 
 
 Ladies and gentlemen, these two assemblies 
 are the greatest and the oldest of the free assem- 
 bhes now governing great nations in the world. 
 The history indeed of the two is very different. 
 The beginnings of the British House of Com- 
 mons go back to a dim historic past, and its full 
 rights and status have only been conquered and 
 permanently secured after centuries of political 
 struggle. 
 
 Your fate has been a happier one. You were 
 called into existence at a much later stage of 
 85 
 
86 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 social development. You came into being com- 
 plete and perfected and all your powers deter- 
 mined, and your place in the Constitution secured 
 beyond chance of revolution ; but, though the his- 
 tory of these two great assemblies is different, 
 each of them represents the great democratic prin- 
 ciple to which we look forward as the security 
 for the future peace of the world. 
 
 All of the free assemblies now to be found 
 governing the great nations of the earth have 
 been modeled either upon your practice or upon 
 ours or upon both combined. 
 
 Mr. Speaker, the compliment paid to the mis- 
 sion from Great Britain by such an assembly and 
 upon such an occasion is one not one of us is 
 ever likely to forget. But there is something, 
 after all, even deeper and more significant in the 
 circumstances under which I now have the honor 
 to address you than any which arise out of the 
 interchange of courtesies, however sincere, be- 
 tween the great and friendly nations. 
 
 We all, I think, feel instinctively that this is 
 one of the great moments in the history of the 
 world, and that what is now happening on both 
 sides of the Atlantic represents the drawing to- 
 gether of great and free peoples for mutual pro- 
 tection against the aggression of military des- 
 potism. 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 87 
 
 I am not one of those, and none of you are 
 among those, who are such bad democrats as to 
 say that democracies make no mistakes. All free 
 assemblies have made blunders : sometimes they 
 have committed crimes. 
 
 Why is it, then, that we look forward to the 
 spread of free institutions throughout the world, 
 and especially among our present enemies, as 
 one of the greatest guaranties of the future peace 
 of the world? I will tell you, gentlemen, how 
 it seems to me. It is quite true that the people 
 and the representatives of the people may be 
 betrayed by some momentary gust of passion into 
 a policy which they ultimately deplore ; but it is 
 only a military despotism of the German type 
 which can, through generations if need be, pursue 
 steadily, remorselessly, unscrupulously, the ap- 
 palling object of dominating the civilization of 
 mankind. 
 
 And, mark you, this evil, this menace under 
 which we are now suffering, is not one which 
 diminishes with the growth of knowledge and 
 the progress of material civilization, but, on the 
 contrary, it increases with them. 
 
 When I was young we used to flatter our- 
 selves that progress inevitably meant peace, and 
 that growth of knowledge was always accompa- 
 nied, as its natural fruit, by the growth of good- 
 
88 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 will among the nations of the earth. Unhappily, 
 we know better now, and we know there is such 
 a thing in the world as a power which can with 
 unvarying persistency focus all the resources of 
 knowledge and of civilization into the one great 
 task of making itself the moral and material 
 master of the world. 
 
 It is against that danger that we, the free 
 peoples of western civilization, have banded our- 
 selves together. It is in that great cause that 
 we are going to fight, and are now fighting this 
 very moment side by side. 
 
 In that cause we shall surely conquer, and our 
 children will look back to this fateful date as 
 the one day from which democracies can feel 
 secure that their progress, their civilization, their 
 rivalry, if need be, will be conducted, not on 
 German lines, but in that friendly and Christian 
 spirit which really befits the age in which we 
 live. 
 
 Mr. Speaker, ladies and gentlemen, I beg most 
 sincerely to »-epeat again how heartily I thank 
 you for the cordial welcome which you have 
 given us today, and to repeat my profound sense 
 of the significance of this unique meeting. 
 
GREETINGS TO AMERICA 
 
 M. Alexandre Felix Joseph Ribot, 
 President of the French Council 
 
 Delivered in the Chamber of Deputies, 
 April 6th, 1917 
 
GREETINGS TO AMERICA 
 Alexandre Felix Joseph Ribot 
 
 Before the Chamber adjourns the Government 
 asks it to address a cordial greeting to the great 
 RepubHc of the United States. 
 
 You have read the admirable message of Presi- 
 dent Wilson. We all feel that something great, 
 which exceeds the proportions of a political event, 
 has been accomplished. 
 
 It is an historic fact of unequalled importance 
 — this entry into the war on the side of us 
 and our allies by the most peaceful democracy 
 in the world. After having done everything to 
 affirm its attachment to peace, the great Amer- 
 ican nation declares solemnly that it cannot 
 remain neutral in this immense conflict between 
 right and violence, between civilization and 
 barbarism. It holds that honor requires it to 
 take up the defiance flung at all rules of inter- 
 national law so laboriously built up by the civil- 
 ized nations. 
 
 It declares at the same time that it is not fight- 
 ing for self-interest, desires neither conquest nor 
 compensation, intends only to help toward a vic- 
 tory of the cause of law and liberty. 
 
 The grandeur, the nobility, of this action is en- 
 hanced by the simplicity and serenity of the lan- 
 91 
 
92 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 guage of the illustrous leader of the great dem- 
 ocracy. 
 
 If the world had entertained the least doubt 
 of the profound meaning of this war in which 
 we are engaged, the message of the President of 
 the United States would dissipate all obscurity. 
 It makes apparent to all that the struggle is verily 
 a struggle between the liberal spirit of modern 
 societies and the spirit of oppression of societies 
 still enslaved to military despotism. It is for this 
 reason that the message rings in the depths of all 
 hearts like a message of deliverance to the world. 
 
 The people which, under the inspiration of the 
 writings of our philosophers, declared its rights in 
 the eighteenth century, the people who place 
 Washington and Lincoln foremost among their 
 heroes, the people who in the last century suffered" 
 a civil war for the abolition of slavery, were 
 indeed worthy to give such an example to the 
 world. 
 
 Thus they remain faithful to the traditions of 
 the founders of their independence and demon- 
 strate that the enormous rise of their industrial 
 strength and of their economic and financial 
 power has not weakened in them that need for 
 an ideal without which there can be no great 
 action. 
 
 What touches us particularly is that the United 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 93 
 
 States has held to the friendship which at an 
 earher time was ratified in blood. We bear wit- 
 ness with grateful joy to ihe enduring sympathy 
 between the peoples, which is one of the delicate 
 virtues the bosom of a democracy can nourish. 
 
 The Star-Spangled Banner and the Tri-Color 
 will fly side by side; our hands will join; our 
 hearts beat in unison. This will mean for us, 
 after so much suffering, heroically borne, so 
 many bereavements, so many ruins, a renewal of 
 the sentiments which have animated and sus- 
 tained us during this long trial. The powerful, 
 decisive aid which the United States brings us 
 is not only a material aid; it will be especially 
 moral aid, a real consolation. 
 
 Seeing the conscience of peoples everywhere in 
 the world awake and rise in an immense protest 
 against the atrocities of which we are the victims, 
 we feel more keenly that we are fighting not only 
 for ourselves and for our allies, but for something 
 immortal, and that we are laying the foundations 
 of a new order. Thus our sacrifices will not 
 have been in vain ; the generous blood poured 
 out by the sons of France will have sowed fertile 
 seeds in the ideas of justice and of liberty funda- 
 mentally necessary to concord between nations. 
 
 In the name of the whole country, the govern- 
 ment of the French Republic addresses to the 
 
94 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 government and people of the United States, with 
 the expression of its gratitude, its warmest good 
 wishes. 
 
 •I 
 
THE HARVEST OF JUSTICE 
 
 M. Paul Dechanel, 
 President of the French Chamber of Deputies 
 
 Delivered in the Chamber of Deputies, 
 April 6th, 1917 
 
THE HARVEST OF JUSTICE 
 Paul Dechanel 
 
 The French Chamber greets with enthusiasm 
 the verdict of the President of the RepubUc of the 
 United States, who has indeed spoken for justice, 
 and the vigorous decision of the Federal Senate 
 accepting the war imposed by Germany. 
 
 ^chylus says in "The Persians": "When 
 insolence takes root, it grows into crime; the 
 harvest is suffering." 
 
 And we can say: "The growth of the crime 
 brings vengeance; after the harvest of suffering 
 comes the harvest of justice!" 
 
 The cry of the women and children from the 
 depths of the abyss where hideous wickedness 
 flung them echoed from one end of the earth to 
 the other. Washington and Lincoln trembled in 
 their graves; their great spirit has roused 
 America. 
 
 And is it a question only of avenging Ameri- 
 cans? Is it a question only of punishing the 
 violation of treaties signed by the United States ? 
 No ; the eternal truths proclaimed in the Declara- 
 tion in 1776, the sacred causes which LaFayette 
 and Rochambeau defended, the ideal of pure con- 
 sciences from which the Great Republic was born 
 —honor, morality, liberty— these are the supreme 
 97 
 
98 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 values which shine in the folds of the Star-Span- 
 gled Banner. 
 
 Descendants of the Puritans of New England, 
 brought up on the precepts of the Gospel, and 
 who under the eyes of God are about to punish 
 the infernal creation of evil, falsehood, perjury, 
 assassination, profanation, rape, slavery, martyr- 
 dom, and all kinds of disasters ; Catholics sfruck 
 to the heart by curses against their religion, by 
 outrages against their cathedrals and statues, 
 reaching a climax in the destruction of Louvain 
 and Rheims; university professors, trustworthy 
 guardians of law and learning; industrialists of 
 the East and Middle West, farmers and agricul- 
 turists of the West; workmen and artisans, 
 threatened by the torpedoing of vessels, by the 
 interruption of commerce, revolted by the insults 
 to their national colors — all are arrayed against 
 the mad arrogance which would enslave the earth, 
 the sea, the heavens, and the souls of men. 
 
 At a time when, as in the heroic times of the 
 American Revolution, the Americans are to fight 
 with us, let us repeat once more: We wish to 
 prevent no one from living, working, and trading 
 freely, but the tyranny of Prussia has become 
 a peril for the New World as for the Old, for 
 England as for Russia, for Italy as for Austria, 
 and for Germany itself. To free the world, by 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 99 
 
 a common effort of all democratic peoples, from 
 the yoke of a feudal and military caste in order 
 to found peace upon right, is a work of human 
 deliverance and universal good. 
 
 In accomplishing, under an administration 
 henceforth immortal, the greatest act in its annals 
 since the abolition of slavery, the glorious nation 
 whose whole history is but a development of the 
 idea of liberty remains true to its lofty origin 
 and creates for itself another claim to the grati- 
 tude of mankind. 
 
 The French Republic, across the ruins of its 
 cities and its monuments, devastated without rea- 
 son or excuse by shameful savagery, sends to its 
 beloved sister Republic in America the palms of 
 the Marne, the Yser, and of Verdun and the 
 Somme, to which new victories will soon be 
 added. 
 
OUR HERITAGE OF LIBERTY 
 
 M. Rene Viviani, 
 
 Former Prime Minister and Minister of Justice 
 
 of France, President of the French 
 
 Mission to the United States 
 
 Delivered before the Senate of the United States, 
 May 1st, 1917 
 
OUR HERITAGE OF LIBERTY 
 Rene Viviani 
 
 Mr. President and Senators : Since I have been 
 granted the supreme honor of speaking before the 
 representatives of the American people, may I 
 ask them first to allow me to thank this magnifi- 
 cent Capital for the welcome it has accorded us ? 
 Accustomed as we are in our own free land to 
 popular manifestations, and though we had been 
 warned by your fellow-countrymen who live in 
 Paris of the enthusiasm burning in your hearts, 
 we are still full of the emotion raised by the 
 sights that awaited us. 
 
 I shall never cease to see the proud and stalwart 
 men who saluted our passage; your women, 
 whose grace adds fresh beauty to your city, their 
 arms outstretched, full of flowers ; and your chil- 
 dren hurrying to meet us as if our coming were 
 looked upon as a lesson for them— all with one 
 accord acclaiming in our perishable persons im- 
 mortal France. 
 
 And I predict there will be a yet grander mani- 
 festation on the day when your illustrious Presi- 
 dent, relieved from the burden of power, will 
 come among us bearing the salute of the Republic 
 of the United States to a free Europe, whose 
 foundations from end to end shall be based 
 on Right. 
 
 103 
 
104 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 It is with unspeakable emotion that we crossed 
 the threshold of this legislative palace, where 
 prudence and boldness meet, and that I for the 
 first time in the annals of America, though a 
 foreigner, speak in this hall which only a few 
 days since resounded with the words of virile 
 force. 
 
 You have set all the democracies of the world 
 the most magnificent example. So soon as the 
 common peril was made manifest to you, with 
 simplicity and within a few short days you voted 
 a formidable war credit and proclaimed that a 
 formidable army was to be raised. President 
 Wilson's commentary on his acts, which you made 
 yours, remains in the history of free peoples the 
 weightiest of lessons. 
 
 Doubtless you were resolved to avenge the 
 insults offered your flag, which the whole world 
 respected; doubtless through the thickness of 
 these massive walls the mournful cry of all the 
 victims that criminal hands hurled into the depths 
 of the sea has reached and stirred your souls ; 
 but it will be your honor in history that you also 
 heard the cry of humanity and invoked against 
 autocracy the right of democracies. 
 
 And I can only wonder as I speak what, if they 
 still have any power to think, are the thoughts of 
 the autocrats who three years ago against us, 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 105 
 
 three months ago against you, unchained this con- 
 flict. 
 
 Ah ! doubtless they said among themselves that 
 a democracy is an ideal government; that it 
 showers reforms on mankind; that it can in the 
 domain of labor quicken all economic activities. 
 And yet now we see the French Republic fighting 
 in defense of its territory and the liberty of na- 
 tions and opposing to the avalanche let loose by 
 the Prussian militarism the union of all its chil- 
 dren, who are still capable of striking many a 
 weighty blow. 
 
 And now we see England, far removed like 
 you from conscription, who has also, by virtue 
 of a discipline all accept, raised from her soil 
 millions of fighting men. And we see other na- 
 tions accomplishing the same act ; and that liberty 
 not only inflames all hearts, but co-ordinates and 
 brings into being all needed efforts. 
 
 And now we see all America rise and sharpen 
 her weapons in the midst of peace for the com- 
 mon struggle. 
 
 Together we will carry on that struggle, and 
 when by force we have at last imposed military 
 victory our labors will not be concluded. Our 
 task will be — I quote the noble words of President 
 Wilson — to organize the society of nations. 
 
 I well know that our enemies, who have never 
 
106 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 seen before them anything but horizons of carn- 
 age, will never cease to jeer at so noble a design. 
 Such has always been the fate of great ideas at 
 their birth ; and if thinkers and men of action had 
 allowed themselves to be discouraged by skeptics, 
 mankind would still be in its infancy and we 
 should still be slaves. After material victory we 
 will win this moral victory. 
 
 We will shatter the ponderous sword of mili- 
 tarism; we will establish guaranties for peace; 
 and then we can disappear from the world's stage, 
 since we shall leave at the cost of our common 
 immolation the noblest heritage future genera- 
 tions can possess. 
 
THEIR MONUMENT IN OUR HEARTS 
 M. Rene Viviani 
 
 Delivered before the Tomb of Washington, 
 April 29th, 1917 
 
THEIR MONUMENT IN OUR HEARTS 
 Rene Viviani 
 
 We could not remain longer in Washington 
 without accomplishing this pious pilgrimage. In 
 this spot lies all that is mortal of a great hero. 
 Close by this spot is the modest abode where 
 Washington rested after the tremendous labor 
 of achieving for a nation its emancipation. 
 
 In this spot meet the admiration of the whole 
 world and the veneration of the American people. 
 In this spot rise before us the glorious memories 
 left by the soldiers of France led by Rochambeau 
 and LaFayette ; a descendant of the latter, my 
 friend, M. de Chambrun, accompanies us. 
 
 And I esteem it a supreme honor, as well as a 
 satisfaction for my conscience, to be entitled to 
 render this homage to our ancestors in the pres- 
 ence of my colleague and friend, Mr. Balfour, 
 who so nobly represents his great nation. By 
 thus coming to lay here the respectful tribute of 
 every English mind he shows, in this historic 
 moment of communion which France has willed, 
 what nations that live for liberty can do. 
 
 When we contemplate in the distant past the 
 luminous presence of Washington, in nearer times 
 the majestic figure of Abraham Lincoln; when 
 we respectfully salute President Wilson, the 
 worthy heir of these great memories, we at one 
 109 
 
110 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 glance measure the vast career of the American 
 
 people. 
 
 It is because the American people proclaimed 
 and won for the nation the right to govern itself, 
 it is because it proclaimed and won the equality 
 of all men, that the free American people at the 
 hour marked by fate had been enabled with com- 
 manding force to carry its action beyond the seas ; 
 it is because it was resolved to extend its action 
 still further that Congress w^as enabled to obtain 
 within the space of a few days the vote of con- 
 scription and to proclaim the necessity for a na- 
 tional army in the full splendor of civil peace. 
 
 In the name of France, I salute the young army 
 which will share in our common glory. 
 
 While paying this supreme tribute to the 
 memory of Washington, I do not diminish 
 the effect of my words when I turn my thought 
 to the memory of so many unnamed heroes. I 
 ask you before this tomb to bow in earnest 
 meditation and all the fervor of piety before 
 all the soldiers of the allied nations who for 
 nearly three years have been fighting under dif- 
 ferent flags for some ideal. 
 
 I beg you to address the homage of your 
 hearts and souls to all the heroes, born to live 
 in happiness, in the tranquil pursuit of their la- 
 bors, in the enjoyment of all human affections, 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS HI 
 
 who went into battle with virile cheerfulness and 
 gave themselves up, not to death alone, but to 
 the eternal silence that closes over those whose 
 sacrifices remain unnamed, in the full knowledge 
 that, save for those who loved them, their names 
 would disappear with their bodies. 
 
 Their monument is in our hearts. Not the 
 living alone greet us here; the ranks of the dead 
 themselves rise to surround the soldiers of liberty. 
 
 At this solemn hour in the history of the world, 
 while saluting from this sacred mound the final 
 victory of justice, I send to the Republic of the 
 United States the greetings of the French Re- 
 public. 
 
TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTA- 
 TIVES 
 
 M. Rene Viviani 
 
 Address delivered before the House of Representa- 
 tives ot the United States, 
 May 3rd, 1917 
 
TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
 Rene Viviani 
 
 Gentlemen : Once more, my fellow country- 
 men and I are admitted to the honour of being 
 present at a sitting in a legislative Chamber. May 
 I be permitted to express our emotion at this 
 solemn derogation against rules more than a 
 century old, and, so far as my own person is con- 
 cerned, may I say that, as a member of Parlia- 
 ment accustomed for twenty years to the passions 
 and storms which sweep through political assem- 
 blies, I appreciate more than any one at this 
 moment the supreme joy of being near this 
 chair, which is in such a commanding position 
 that however feeble may be the voice that speaks 
 thence, it is heard over the whole world. 
 
 Gentlemen, I will not thank you ; not because 
 our gratitude fails, but because new words to 
 express it fail. No, I do not thank you for your 
 welcome. We all felt, my companions and my- 
 self, that the manifestations which rose toward 
 our persons came not only from your lips. We 
 felt that you were not merely fulfilling the obliga- 
 tions of international courtesy. Suddenly, in all 
 its charming intimacy, the complexity of the 
 American soul was revealed to us. 
 
 When one meets an American, one is supposed 
 to n-.eet a practical man, merely a practical man, 
 
 115 
 
116 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 caring only for business, only interested in busi- 
 ness. But when at certain hours in private life 
 one studies the American soul, one discovers at 
 the same time how fresh and delicate it is; and 
 when at certain moments of public life one con- 
 siders the soul of the Nation, then one sees all 
 the force of the ideals that rise from it: so that 
 this American people, in its perfect balance, is at 
 once practical and sentimental, a realizer and a 
 dreamer, and is always ready to place its practical 
 qualities at the disposal of its puissant thoughts. 
 
 And see, gentlemen, what a glorious compari- 
 son, to our profit, to yours also, we can establish 
 between our enemies and us. Entrusted with 
 a mandate from a free people we came among 
 free men to compare our ideas, to exchange 
 our views, to measure the whole extent of the 
 problems raised by this war. And all the allied 
 nations, simply because they repose on demo- 
 cratic institutions, through their governments 
 meet in the same lofty region, on equal terms, in 
 full liberty. 
 
 I well know that at this very hour, in the 
 Central Empire, there is an absolute monarch who 
 binds to his will by vassal links of steel other 
 peoples. It has been said this was a sign of 
 strength: it is only a derisive appearance of 
 strength. And in truth, only a few weeks ago, 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 117 
 
 on the eve of the day when outraged America 
 was about to rise in its force, on the morrow of 
 the day when the Russian revolution, faithful to 
 its alliance, called at once its soldiers to arms 
 and its people to independence, this absolute mon- 
 arch was seen to totter on the steps of his throne, 
 as he felt the first breath of the tempest pass over 
 his crown. And he bent toward his people in 
 humiliation, and in order to win its sympathy 
 borrowed from free peoples their highest insti- 
 tutions and promised his subjects universal suf- 
 frage. 
 
 Here, as in the crucial hours of our history, as 
 in these of yours, it is liberty which clears the 
 way for our soldiers. We are all now united in 
 our common effort for civilization, for right. 
 
 The day before yesterday, in a public meeting 
 at which I was present, I heard one of your great- 
 est orators say with deep emotion: "It has been 
 sworn on the tomb of Washington." And I 
 understood the full emotion and import of those 
 words. If W^ashington could rise from his tomb, 
 if from his sacred mound he could view the world 
 as it now is, shrunk to smaller proportions by the 
 lessening of material and moral distances, and 
 the increase of every kind of communication be- 
 tween men, he would feel his labors are not yet 
 concluded ; and that, just as a man of superior and 
 
118 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 powerful mind has a debt to all other men, so a 
 superior and powerful nation owes a debt to other 
 nations; after establishing its own independence 
 it must aid others to maintain their independence 
 or to conquer it. This is the mysterious logic 
 of history which President Wilson so marvelously 
 understood, thanks to a mind as vigorous as it is 
 subtle, as capable of analysis as It is of synthesis, 
 of minute observation followed by swift action. 
 It has been sworn on the tomb of Washington. 
 It has been sworn on the tomb of our allied sol- 
 diers, fallen in a sacred cause ! It has been sworn 
 by the bedside of our wounded men ! It has been 
 sworn on the heads of our orphan children ! It 
 has been sworn on cradles and on tombs ! It has 
 been sworn ! 
 
TRIBUTE TO LINCOLN 
 M. Rene Viviani 
 
 Delivered before the Illinois State Legislature, 
 Springfield, Illinois, May 7th, 1917 
 
TRIBUTE TO LINCOLN 
 Rene Viviani 
 
 Gentlemen and Ladies: 
 
 Before coming here we went to the field of 
 silence to lay quick-fading flowers on the immor- 
 tal tomb of Abraham Lincoln, and bear to his 
 great shade the greeting of all France. 
 
 And I would have you know that however great 
 the distance between Springfield and France may 
 be, the radiance of his noble face has long been 
 known in our native land. In no democracy, in no 
 modern democracy, did any man ofifer the world 
 a purer image than he by his noble career. That 
 career is far better known to you than to me. 
 You know that, born of the people, the son of a 
 man who could not read, after having in his youth 
 suffered every sort of privation, he rose through 
 silent meditation, by study, to the full cultiva- 
 tion of his mind and the full development of his 
 will. You know that silently he rose to the sum- 
 mit of civic honor: and that from the summit 
 he had attained he looked with untroubled gaze 
 upon a great, an heroic, a tragic duty: he knew 
 that the minds of men cannot without abasement 
 live in contact with injustice. And that is why 
 whatever pity and compassion rent his soul, since 
 the equality of all human beings must needs be 
 proclaimed, since the laws must needs rise to the 
 121 
 
122 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 level of man's dignity in all places, he let loose 
 civil war upon his native land — that civil war 
 whose heroes we have seen in their old age recon- 
 ciled, wherever we have passed. On the morrow 
 of his gigantic enterprise he died. He cannot be 
 said to have been buried in his triumph: that 
 triumph will last as long as an American is left 
 to revere it, and we have come here to salute 
 his great memory in the name of France, of the 
 French Republic. But permit me to recall with just 
 pride that the French of the French Revolution, 
 of the Revolution of 1848, also proclaimed the 
 rights of man. And this shows that all democ- 
 racies, in spite of distance and time, are one. And 
 when three years ago Imperial Germany in arms, 
 without provocation, without a shadow of excuse, 
 by right of force alone, rushed on France, tore up 
 international rights and violated all human con- 
 sciences, France with her allies defended those 
 eternal principles. And for three years she has 
 defended them. And now America in turn, to 
 their defence rises at the call of her illustrious 
 President, Mr. Wilson, who, too, though a man 
 of thought and a philosopher, has seen he must 
 become a man of action when these eternal prin- 
 ciples exacted reparation and vengeance. 
 
 Now, we are all united in this great struggle, 
 worthy to be ranked with the struggles of the 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 123 
 
 French Revolution. We all are united to defend 
 right and justice. And our French hearts thrilled 
 with gratitude when we heard the words of your 
 President, of your Governor. Yes : we feel as if 
 at every step in this blissful valley we found old 
 memories of our beloved motherland, as if we had 
 never left it. Here it was, as you said, Mr. Presi- 
 dent, that French missionaries, the first French 
 to discover the Mississippi, came to labor, to live, 
 to die. Here it was they founded the first govern- 
 ment that ruled over this land which once was 
 French, where the French flag floats once more 
 in tragic hours, our flag which carries in its folds 
 all our hopes, and calls to file every form of cour- 
 age in all our sons. Here we find the shades and 
 memories of our forefathers. You can well un- 
 derstand what emotions swell in the heart of a 
 Frenchman when this tragic meeting comes about 
 on American soil. But is it enough to evoke these 
 memories in a speech? Must we bury all our 
 ardent hopes in our hearts? I shall not forget, 
 but transmit to my fellow countrymen your desire 
 to pay back your debt of gratitude to France, in 
 memory of LaFayette who brought here help and 
 French soldiers to fight for American independ- 
 ence. But permit me, without any thought of 
 diminishing the effect of your words, to define 
 their full sense. It is not to France your debt 
 
124 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 lies. What France did for America, she did for 
 liberty, with no thought of exacting a reward for 
 it some day. It is to all humanity your debt of 
 gratitude should be paid : humanity and France 
 here are one. Yes, it is because that noble land 
 has at all times in its history held in its hands 
 the fate of the world : it is because on our terri- 
 tory which seems to have been chosen by history 
 as the meeting place for all combats and immola- 
 tions, that the fate of the world has so often been 
 decided; because our children with their hearts, 
 their arms, their hands, their brains, are strug- 
 gling even now to keep liberty from perishing, 
 to keep disaster away from the whole world; it 
 is because of all that you have risen in arms. And 
 when you rally to France, you rally to the cause 
 of liberty, of right, of democracy. 
 
 Come, then. We will bear away from your 
 land the memory of these meetings of free citi- 
 zens, and when we return to our country, when 
 the free citizens of republican France ask us what 
 we have seen, we will answer: We have seen 
 crowds tumultuous in their joy, enthusiastic 
 crowds, but they came not forth to see alone, to 
 gaze on passing men : they came as to some great 
 duty, to acclaim France through us. We will 
 take back the words of all your orators : we will 
 tell what you think, what you desire, what you 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 125 
 
 hope for from the future, not only a free and 
 delivered France, but a regenerate Europe, 
 founded on right at last, built on the rock of jus- 
 tice. 
 
 And when this great work shall have been 
 accomplished, American brothers, faithful to the 
 traditions of Washington and Abraham Lincoln, 
 you may return in pious pilgrimage to Mount 
 Vernon and to the graveyard of Springfield and 
 there bow in silent reverence before the two pure 
 heroes of your race. You will most surely have 
 served their memory ; and rest assured that by 
 so doing you will have broadened yet the glorious 
 annals of the American Republic. 
 
TO THE HOUSE OF REPRE- 
 
 SENTATIVES 
 
 The Prince of Udine, 
 
 Head of the ItaUan Mission to the 
 United States 
 
 Delivered before the House of Representatives 
 
 of the United States, 
 
 June 2nd, 1917 
 
TO THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES 
 The Prince of Udine 
 
 Mr. Speaker and Members of the House : No 
 one could appreciate the honor of your invitation 
 more than myself and my colleagues. 
 
 To address the Representatives of the greatest 
 among new democracies at a time when the desti- 
 nies of humanity are awaiting decision, at a time 
 when our destiny and yours depend on the issue 
 of the war, to bring you the greeting of distant 
 brothers who are fighting for the same ideals at 
 the foot of the snowy Alps or in the deadly 
 trenches, to express to you our feelings and our 
 sympathy for your feelings— all those are for 
 me so many reasons for legitimate pride. 
 
 During our brief stay among you we have 
 found everywhere the most joyous welcome and 
 the most friendly cordiality. Everywhere it was 
 not only friendly words that greeted us, but also 
 friendly souls who welcomed us. 
 
 We have felt deeply moved by this. 
 
 We know, gentlemen, that such cordial senti- 
 ments, such hearty friendship, are meant not so 
 much for our persons as for our beautiful and 
 distant country ; our country, of which every foot 
 is sacred to us because of its century-old great- 
 ness and sufferings and because of the noble 
 129 
 
130 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 share which it has always had in human thought 
 and history. 
 
 But your great RepubHc, when it grants us 
 such courteous hospitahty, honors still more that 
 which at the present moment is dearest to us — 
 the efforts of Italy's soldiers, the noble sacrifice 
 of so many young lives freely given for their 
 country and for civilization and in defense of 
 ideas which you have made your own and which 
 we all love. 
 
 In the name of the soldiers of Italy, one of 
 whom I am proud to be ; in the name of all those 
 who are fighting on the mountains, on the plains 
 and on the treacherous seas ; in the name of those 
 to whom your words of friendship have brought 
 a message of hope and faith across the ocean, I 
 thank you from the bottom of my heart. 
 
 The aims of the war for the allied nations 
 were pointed out by President Wilson in his 
 magnificent message, which will not only remain 
 in the minds of our descendants as a historic 
 event, but which has already aroused, because 
 of its moral force, intense admiration among all 
 civilized peoples. We shall be satisfied, what- 
 ever sacrifices we may be called upon to make, 
 when the rights of humanity are assured, when 
 the guaranties of peace are effectual, and when 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 131 
 
 free nations are able to work for their own pros- 
 perity and elevation. 
 
 President Wilson has proclaimed that to the 
 Americans right is more precious than peace and 
 that the people of the United States are ready 
 to shed their blood in defense of those principles 
 in the name of which they became a nation. 
 
 For the sake of the same principles we are 
 ready to face every sacrifice and every sorrow. 
 
 We are fighting a terrible war. Our enemies 
 were long since prepared for it, while we were 
 content to live, trusting in peace, and only sought 
 to contribute to the development of our people 
 and to the progress of our country, almost uncon- 
 scious of the clouds which so suddenly grew 
 dark over our heads. 
 
 We came into the war when we realized that 
 there was no room for neutrals and that neutral- 
 ity was neither possible nor desirable, when the 
 freedom of all democratic nations was threatened 
 and the very existence of free peoples was at 
 stake. 
 
 Ever since that day we have not hesitated 
 before any danger or any suffering. Our wide 
 fighting front presents conditions of exceptional 
 difficulty. The enemy is, or has been until now, 
 in possession of the best positions. He has dug 
 deep trenches ; he has concealed his guns among 
 
132 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 mountains. We are even compelled to fight at 
 altitudes of eight and ten thousand feet in spots, 
 where it seemed impossible that any fighting 
 should ever take place. We are alone on our 
 wide and treacherous front, and every step for- 
 ward that we take, every progress that we accom- 
 plish costs us great efforts and many lives. The 
 enthusiasm of our soldiers has often helped them 
 among the glaciers of the Alps and the many 
 snares of the Carso to triumph over difficulties 
 which seemed to defy every human effort. But 
 the deep faith which burns in them, kept their 
 strength alive. 
 
 We must, we will, triumph over other difficul- 
 ties and other insidious devices. 
 
 Nature, which gave us our pure skies, our mild 
 climate, has denied us almost entirely the two 
 great necessities of modern industries — coal and 
 iron. Therefore, with industries still in course 
 of formation, Italy has had ever since their incep- 
 tion to overcome obstacles which appeared 
 insuperable. Italy occupies one of the first places 
 in Europe as regards the number and power of 
 her waterfalls ; but this wealth, which constitutes 
 the great reserve of the future, has only been 
 partly exploited until now. The treacherous 
 enemy, who has long since prepared the weapons 
 of aggression, not having obtained victory on 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 133 
 
 the field, Is now trying by means of submarine 
 warfare to endanger our existence, to cause a 
 scarcity of food, and, above all, a sca.rcity of 
 the coal, for her railways, and for her industries. 
 
 We have reduced the consumption of all neces- 
 sities, and we are ready to reduce it still further 
 within the limits of possibility. We do not com- 
 plain of the privations that we have to endure. 
 Wealth itself has no value if life and liberty are 
 endangered. And when millions of soldiers offer 
 their young lives for their country, there is not 
 one among the civil population who is not ready 
 to make any sacrifice. 
 
 But to overcome the dangers of submarines, 
 which, in defiance of every law of humanity, are 
 not only destroying wealth, but endangering the 
 lives of peaceful travelers, sinking hospital ships, 
 and murdering women and children, we must all 
 make a great effort. 
 
 We must unite all our forces to oppose the 
 strongest resistance to the insidious devices of 
 the enemy. You possess a great and magnificent 
 industrial organization. You, more than any one, 
 are in a position to put an end to the enemy's 
 barbarous dream and to create with your energy 
 much more than he can destroy. 
 
 This great and terrible trial can only make us 
 better men. They who know how to offer to the 
 
134 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 fatherland their wealth and their lives ; they who 
 give themselves unto death and, more than them- 
 selves, that which is sweetest and most sacred, 
 their children; they who are ready to suffer and 
 to die; they will know when the morrow dawns 
 how to contribute to civilization new elements of 
 moral nobility and of strength. 
 
 We must not grieve over our sorrows. When 
 we fight for the rights of humanity we are con- 
 scious that we are elevating ourselves morally. 
 
 When America proclaimed herself one with us 
 a great joy ran through every city and every lit- 
 tle village of Italy. We knew the full value of 
 your co-operation, and at the same time we appre- 
 ciated the nobility of your sentiments. 
 
 The families of 30,000,000 Italians who dwell 
 in the United States under the protection of your 
 hospitable and just laws, felt a deep sense of joy. 
 
 Mr. Speaker and Members of the House, the 
 words which his Majesty the King of Italy, first 
 among our soldiers, wrote to your President 
 expressed his feelings and those of all his people. 
 
 To-morrow, when the news reaches Italy that 
 this Congress, which represents the will of the 
 American Nation, has desired to give to our mis- 
 sion the supreme honor of welcoming it in its 
 midst, your friendly words will reach the farther- 
 most points where men are fighting and suffering. 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 135 
 
 And in the trenches, at the foot of the majestic 
 Alps, there, where the struggle is bitterest and 
 where death is ever present, a thrill of joy and 
 of hope will be felt- — the joy of a sincere union, 
 the hope of certain victor}^ 
 
GREETINGS FROM BELGIUM 
 
 Baron Ludovic Moncheur, 
 
 Former Belgian Minister to the United States, 
 
 Head of the Belgian Mission to the 
 
 United States 
 
 Delivered before the Senate of the United States, 
 June 22nd, 1917 
 
GREETINGS FROM BELGIUM 
 
 LUDOVIC MONCHEUR 
 
 You all know the unspeakable evils which have 
 befallen my unfortunate country — the unpro- 
 voked invasion, accompanied by a deliberate 
 system of terror, the burning of many of our 
 thriving cities, and of innumerable villages, the 
 massacre of thousands of our peaceful citizens, 
 the pillage and devastation of our country. 
 
 Then followed the iron hand of foreign domi- 
 nation, enormous war contributions exacted from 
 all the nine provinces of Belgium, ruinous requi- 
 sitions of all sorts from our people, the seizure 
 of the raw material of industry, and even the 
 theft of our machinery which was sent into the 
 country of our enemy for his own use, so that 
 now the silence of death reigns in our industrial 
 centers which before had been the most active in 
 Europe. 
 
 You also know, gentlemen, the way in which 
 this regime of oppression has been carried out — 
 eighty thousand Belgians condemned in the space 
 of one year to various penalties for having dis- 
 pleased the invader, as, for example, the noble 
 Burgomaster of Brussels, who has been in im- 
 prisonment for the past two years for trying to 
 uphold the principle of civic liberty which for 
 centuries has been so ideal to all Belgians. 
 139 
 
140 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 You have learned also of the deportation of 
 our workmen into Germany — a crime the horrors 
 of which, according to the opinion of one of our 
 countrymen, should cause more indignation 
 throughout the entire world than all the previous 
 outrages against the sacred principles of justice 
 and humanity. 
 
 But Belgium, even in the midst of the terrible 
 misfortunes which have been brought upon her 
 by her fidelity to treaties and by respect for her 
 plighted word, does not regret her decision, and 
 there is not a single Belgian worthy of the name 
 who does not now, as on the first day of the war, 
 approve the judgment of our Government that 
 it is better to die, if need be, rather than to live 
 without honor. Like Patrick Henry, all Belgians 
 say, *'Give me liberty or give me death." 
 
 This sentiment will be shared by all the citizens 
 of the great American nation, who responded 
 with such enthusiasm and with such unanimity 
 to the noble words of your President, when, in 
 terms which held the world spellbound, he pro- 
 claimed the imprescriptible right of justice over 
 force. 
 
 The courage of my fellow-countrymen has 
 been strengthened, also, by the sympathy for our 
 misfortunes which has been manifested through- 
 out your great land. American initiative has be- 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 141 
 
 stowed most generous help upon our starving 
 population, and in offering from this tribune the 
 expression of gratitude of every Belgian heart, 
 I wish, also to render special homage to that 
 admirable organization the Commission for Relief 
 in Belgium, which has done so much to save our 
 people from starvation. 
 
 Yes, gentlemen, the sympathy of America gives 
 us new courage, and while King Albert, who 
 since the fateful day when our territory was vio- 
 lated, has remained steadfastly at the front, con- 
 tinues the struggle with indomitable energy at 
 the head of our army intrenched upon the last 
 strip of soil that remains to us, while the Queen, 
 that worthy companion of a great sovereign, ex- 
 pends her unceasing efforts to comfort and 
 relieve the victims cf battle, exciting enthusiasm 
 by her contempt for the danger to which she 
 exposes herself day by day, on the other side of 
 the enemy's lines of steel stand the Belgian 
 people, bowed beneath the yoke but never con- 
 quered, maintaining their unshaken patriotism in 
 spite of the enemy as well as in spite of his iron 
 rule. The Belgian population, a martyr whose 
 courage is upheld by our great Cardinal Mercier, 
 awaits silently in the sacred union of all parties 
 the final hour of deliverance. 
 
 That hour, gentlemen, will, I am convinced. 
 
142 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 be materially hastened by the powerful aid of the 
 United States, and the time approaches when 
 Belgium, restored to full and complete independ- 
 ence, both politically and economically, will be 
 able to thank in a fitting manner all those who 
 have aided her to emerge from the darkness of 
 the tomb into the glorious light of a new life. 
 
THE NEW RUSSIA 
 
 Professor Boris Bakhmetieff, 
 
 Head of the Russian Mission to the 
 United States 
 
 Delivered before the Senate of the United States 
 June 26th, 1917 
 
THE NEW RUSSIA 
 Boris Bakhmetieff 
 
 At this moment all eyes are turned on Russia. 
 Many hopes and doubts are raised by the tide of 
 events in the greatest of revolutions, at an epoch 
 in the vv^orld's greatest war. The fate of nations, 
 the fate of the world, is at stake. The revolution 
 called for the reconstruction of the very founda- 
 tion of our national life. The creation anew of a 
 country of boundless expanse on distinctly new 
 principles will, of course, take time, and impa- 
 tience should not be shown in the consummation 
 of so grand an event as Russia's entry into the 
 ranks of free nations. 
 
 We should not forget that in this immense 
 transformation, various interests will seek to 
 assert themselves, and, until the work of settle- 
 ment is completed, a struggle among opposing 
 currents is inevitable, and exaggerations cannot 
 be avoided. Attempts on the part of disorganiz- 
 ing elements to take advantage of this moment 
 of transition must be expected and met with 
 calmness and confidence. 
 
 Two considerations make me feel that Russia 
 has passed the stage of the world when the 
 future appeared vague and uncertain. In the 
 first place is the firm conviction of the necessity 
 of legality which is widely developing and firmly 
 145 
 
146 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 establishing itself through the country. This 
 principle is based on the doctrine that govern- 
 ments derive their just power from the consent 
 of the governed, and hence a strong government 
 must be created by the will of the people. My 
 latest advice gives joyful confirmation of the 
 establishment of a firm power, strong in its demo- 
 cratic precepts and activity, strong in the trust 
 reposed in it by the people in its ability to enforce 
 law and order. 
 
 In the second place and no less important is 
 the growing conviction that the issues of the 
 revolution and the future of Russia's freedom are 
 closely connected with the fighting might of the 
 country. It is such power, it is the force of arms 
 which alone can define and make certain the 
 achievements of the revolution against autocratic 
 aggression. There has been a period closely fol- 
 lowing the revolution of almost total suspension 
 of all military activity, a period of what appeared 
 to be disintegration of the army, a period which 
 gave rise to serious doubts and to gloomy fore- 
 bodings. At the same time there ensued unlimited 
 freedom of speech and of the press, which 
 afforded opportunities for expression of the most 
 extreme and anti-national views, from all of 
 which resulted wide-spread rumors throughout 
 the world that Russia would abandon the war 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 147 
 
 and conclude a separate peace with the Central 
 Powers. 
 
 With all emphasis and with deepest conviction, 
 may I reiterate the statement that such rumors 
 were wholly without foundation in fact. Russia 
 rejects with indignation any idea of separate 
 peace. What my country is striving for is the 
 establishment of a firm and lasting peace between 
 democratic nations. Russia is firmly convinced 
 that a separate peace would mean the triumph 
 of German autocracy, would render lasting 
 peace impossible, create the greatest danger for 
 democracy and liberty, and ever be a threatening 
 menace to the new-born freedom of Russia. 
 
 Conscious of its enormous task, the Provisional 
 Government is taking measures to promptly 
 restore throughout the country, conditions of life 
 so deeply disorganized by the inefficiency of the 
 previous rulers, and to provide for whatever is 
 necessary for military success. 
 
 Russia wants the world to be safe for democ- 
 racy. To make it safe means to have democracy 
 rule the world. 
 
TRIBUTE TO WASHINGTON 
 
 Viscount Kikujiro Ishii, 
 
 Head of the Japanese Mission to the 
 United States 
 
 Delivered before the Tomb of Washington, 
 August 26th, 1917 
 
TRIBUTE TO WASHINGTON 
 
 KiKUJIRO ISHII 
 
 In the name of my gracious sovereign, the 
 Emperor of Japan, and representing all the lib- 
 erty-loving people who own his sway, I stand 
 to-day in this sacred presence, not to eulogize 
 the name of Washington, for that were presump- 
 tion, but to offer the simple tribute of a people's 
 reverence and love. 
 
 Washington was an American, but America, 
 great as she is, powerful as she is, certain as she 
 IS of her splendid destiny, can lay no exclusive 
 claim to this immortal name. Washington is now 
 a citizen of the world; to-day he belongs to all 
 mankind. And so men come here from the ends 
 of the earth to honor his memory and to reiterate 
 their faith in the principles to which his great life 
 was devoted. 
 
 Japan claims entrance to this holy circle. She 
 yields to none in reverence and respect; nor is 
 there any gulf between the ancient East and the 
 new-born West too deep and wide for the hearts 
 and the understandings of her people to cross. 
 It is fitting, then, that men who love liberty 
 and justice better than they love life, that men 
 who know what honor is, should seek this shrine 
 and here, in the presence of these sacred ashes, 
 rededicate themselves to the service of humanity. 
 151 
 
152 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 It Is a fitting place, at this time, when all the 
 world is filled with turmoil and suffering, for 
 comrades in a holy cause to gather and here 
 renew their fealty to a righteous purpose, firm in 
 the determination that the struggle must go on 
 until the world is free from menace and aggres- 
 sion. 
 
 Japan is proud to place herself beside her noble 
 allies in this high resolve, and here, in the pres- 
 ence of these deathless ashes, she reaffirms her 
 devotion to the cause and the principles for which 
 they wage battle, fully determined to do her 
 whole part in securing for the world the blessings 
 of liberty, justice, and lasting peace. 
 
 As the representative of my people, then, I 
 place this wreath upon the tomb of Washington 
 with reverent hands; and in so doing it is my 
 proud privilege to again pledge my country to 
 those principles of right and justice which have 
 given immortality to the name of Washington. 
 
THE MESSAGE TO THE POPE 
 
 Hon. Woodrow Wilson, 
 
 August 27, 1917. 
 
 Although this message is not an address but a written 
 communication, no collection of statements relative 
 to the World War would be complete without it. It 
 summarizes with wonderful clearness the reasons 
 why the Allies must carry on the conflict to the point 
 where German Autocracy is crushed. 
 
THE MESSAGE TO THE POPE 
 WooDROw Wilson 
 
 Every heart that has not been blinded and 
 hardened by this terrible war must be touched 
 by this moving appeal of His Holiness the Pope, 
 must feel the dignity and force of the humane 
 and generous motives which prompted it, and 
 must fervently wish that we might take the path 
 of peace he so persuasively points out. But it 
 would be folly to take it if it does not in fact 
 lead to the goal he proposes. Our response must 
 be based upon the stern facts and upon nothing 
 else. It is not a mere cessation of arms he de- 
 sires; it is a stable and enduring peace. This 
 agony must not be gone through with again, and 
 it must be a matter of very sober judgment what 
 will insure us against it. 
 
 His Holiness in substance proposes that we re- 
 turn to the status quo ante bellum, and that then 
 there be a general condonation, disarmament, 
 and a concert of nations based upon an accept- 
 ance of the principle of arbitration; that by a 
 similar concert freedom of the seas be estab- 
 lished; and that the territorial claims of France 
 and Italy, the perplexing problems of the Balkan 
 states, and the restitution of Poland be left to 
 such conciHatory adjustments as may be possible 
 155 
 
156 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 in the new temper of such a peace, due regard 
 being paid to the aspirations of the peoples whose 
 poHtical fortunes and affihations will be involved. 
 It is manifest that no part of this program can 
 be successfully carried out unless the restitution 
 of the status quo ante furnishes a firm and satis- 
 factory basis for it. The object of this war is to 
 deliver the free peoples of the world from the 
 menace and the actual power of a vast military 
 establishment controlled by an irresponsible gov- 
 ernment which, having secretly planned to dom- 
 inate the world, proceeded to carry the plan out 
 without regard either to the sacred obligations 
 of treaty or the long-established practices and 
 long-cherished principles or international action 
 and honor; which chose its own time for the 
 war; delivered its blow fiercely and suddenly; 
 stopped at no barrier either of law or of mercy ; 
 swept a whole continent within the tide of blood 
 — not the blood of soldiers only, but the blood of 
 innocent women and children also and of the 
 helpless poor; and now stands balked but not 
 defeated, the enemy of four-fifths of the world. 
 This power is not the German people. It is the 
 ruthless master of the German people. It is no 
 business of ours how that great people came 
 under its control or submitted with temporary 
 zest to the domination of its purpose; but it is 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 157 
 
 our business to see to it that the history of the 
 rest of the world is no longer left to its handling. 
 
 To deal with such a power by way of peace 
 upon the plan proposed by His Holiness the Pope 
 would, so far as we can see, involve a recupera- 
 tion of its strength and a renewal of its policy; 
 would make it necessary to create a permanent 
 hostile combination of nations against the Ger- 
 man people, who are its instruments ; and would 
 result in abandoning the new-born Russia to the 
 intrigue, the manifold subtle interference, and the 
 certain counter-revolution which would be at- 
 tempted by all the malign influences to which the 
 German Government has of late accustomed the 
 world. Can peace be based upon a restitution 
 of its power or upon any word of honor it could 
 pledge in a treaty of settlement and accommoda- 
 tion? 
 
 Responsible statesmen must now everywhere 
 see, if they never saw before, that no peace can 
 rest securely upon political or economic restric- 
 tions meant to benefit some nations and cripple 
 or embarrass others, upon vindictive action of 
 any sort, or any kind of revenge or deliberate 
 injury. The American people have sufifered in- 
 tolerable wrongs at the hands of the Imperial 
 German Government, but they desire no reprisal 
 upon the German people, who have themselves 
 
158 THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 
 
 suffered all things in this war, which they did 
 not choose. They believe that peace should rest 
 upon the rights of peoples, not the rights of 
 governments — the rights of peoples great or 
 small, weak or powerful — their equal right to 
 freedom and security and self-government and to 
 a participation upon fair terms in the economic 
 opportunities of the world, the German people of 
 course included, if they will accept equality and 
 not seek domination. 
 
 The test, therefore, of every plan of peace is 
 this : Is it based upon the faith of all the peoples 
 involved or merely upon the word of an am- 
 bitious and intriguing government, on the one 
 hand, and of a group of free peoples, on the 
 other? This is a test which goes to the root of 
 the matter; and it is the test which must be ap- 
 plied. 
 
 The purposes of the United States in this war 
 are known to the whole world, to every people 
 to whom the truth has been permitted to come. 
 They do not need to be stated again. We seek 
 no material advantage of any kind. We believe 
 that the intolerable wrongs done in this war by 
 the furious and brutal power of the Imperial 
 German Government ought to be repaired, but 
 not at the expense of the sovereignty of any 
 people — rather a vindication of the sovereignty 
 
THE VOICES OF OUR LEADERS 159 
 
 both of those that are weak and of those that are 
 strong. Punitive damages, the dismemberment 
 of empires, the estabhshment of selfish and ex- 
 clusive economic leagues, we deem inexpedient 
 and in the end worse than futile no proper basis 
 for a peace of any kind, least of all for an endur- 
 ing peace. That must be based upon justice 
 and fairness and the common rights of mankind. 
 We can not take the word of the present rulers 
 of Germany as a guarantee of anything that is 
 to endure, unless explicitly supported by such 
 conclusive evidence of the will and purpose of 
 the German people themselves as the other peoples 
 of the world would be justified in accepting. 
 Without such guarantees treaties of settlement, 
 agreements for disarmament, covenants to set 
 up arbitration in the place of force, territorial 
 adjustments, reconstitutions of small nations, if 
 made with the German Government, no man, no 
 nation could now depend on. We must await 
 some new evidence of the purposes of the great 
 peoples of the Central Powers. God grant it may 
 be given soon and in a way to restore the con- 
 fidence of all peoples everywhere in the faith of 
 nations and the possibility of a covenanted peace. 
 
Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
 Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
 Treatment Date: 2OOI 
 
 Preservationlechnologies 
 
 A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PHESEBVATIOM 
 
 111 Thomson Park Drive 
 Cranberry Township. PA 16066 
 (724) 779-2111 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 007 706 165 4