There must be not merely preparedness in things material; there must
be preparedness in soul and mind. To prepare a great army and navy
without preparing a proper national spirit would avail nothing. And
if there is not only a proper national spirit but proper national
intelligence, we shall realize that even from the standpoint of the
army and navy some civil preparedness is indispensable. For example, a
plan for national defense which does not include the most far-reaching
use and co-operation of our railroads must prove largely futile. These
railroads are organized in time of peace. But we must have the most
carefully thought out organization from the national and centralized
standpoint in order to use them in time of war. This means first that
those in charge of them from the highest to the lowest must understand
their duty in time of war, must be permeated with the spirit of
genuine patriotism; and second, that they and we shall understand that
efficiency is as essential as patriotism; one is useless without the
other.
Again: every citizen should be trained sedulously by every activity at
our command to realize his duty to the nation. In France at this moment
the workingmen who are not at the front are spending all their energies
with the single thought of helping their brethren at the front by what
they do in the munition plant, on the railroads, in the factories. It
is a shocking, a lamentable thing that many of the trade unions of
England have taken a directly opposite view. I am not concerned with
whether it be true, as they assert, that their employers are trying to
exploit them, or, as these employers assert, that the labor men are
trying to gain profit for those who stay at home at the cost of their
brethren who fight in the trenches. The thing for us Americans to
realize is that we must do our best to prevent similar conditions from
growing up here. Business men, professional men, and wage workers alike
must understand that there should be no question of their enjoying any
rights whatsoever unless in the fullest way they recognize and live up
to the duties that go with those rights. This is just as true of the
corporation as of the trade union, and if either corporation or trade
union fails heartily to acknowledge this truth, then its activities
are necessarily anti-social and detrimental to the welfare of the
body politic as a whole. In war time, when the welfare of the nation
is at stake, it should be accepted as axiomatic that the employer is
to make no profit out of the war save that which is necessary to the
efficient running of the business and to the living expenses of himself
and family, and that the wage worker is to treat his wage from exactly
the same standpoint and is to see to it that the labor organization to
which he belongs is, in all its activities, subordinated to the service
of the nation.
Now there must be some application of this spirit in times of peace or
we cannot suddenly develop it in time of war. The strike situation in
the United States at this time is a scandal to the country as a whole
and discreditable alike to employer and employee. Any employer who
fails to recognize that human rights come first and that the friendly
relationship between himself and those working for him should be one of
partnership and comradeship in mutual help no less than self-help is
recreant to his duty as an American citizen and it is to his interest,
having in view the enormous destruction of life in the present war, to
conserve, and to train to higher efficiency alike for his benefit and
for its, the labor supply. In return any employee who acts along the
lines publicly advocated by the men who profess to speak for the I. W.
W. is not merely an open enemy of business but of this entire country
and is out of place in our government.
You, Knights of Columbus, are particularly fitted to play a great part
in the movement for national solidarity, without which there can be
no real efficiency in either peace or war. During the last year and a
quarter it has been brought home to us in startling fashion that many
of the elements of our nation are not yet properly fused. It ought
to be a literally appalling fact that members of two of the foreign
embassies in this country have been discovered to be implicated in
inciting their fellow-countrymen, whether naturalized American citizens
or not, to the destruction of property and the crippling of American
industries that are operating in accordance with internal law and
international agreement. The malign activity of one of these embassies
has been brought home directly to the ambassador in such shape that
his recall has been forced. The activities of the other have been set
forth in detail by the publication in the press of its letters in
such fashion as to make it perfectly clear that they were of the same
general character. Of course, the two embassies were merely carrying
out the instructions of their home governments.
Nor is it only the German and Austrians who take the view that as a
matter of right they can treat their countrymen resident in America,
even if naturalized citizens of the United States, as their allies
and subjects to be used in keeping alive separate national groups
profoundly anti-American in sentiment if the contest comes between
American interests and those of foreign lands in question. It has
recently been announced that the Russian government is to rent a house
in New York as a national center to be Russian in faith and patriotism,
to foster the Russian language and keep alive the national feeling in
immigrants who come hither. All of this is utterly antagonistic to
proper American sentiment, whether perpetrated in the name of Germany,
of Austria, of Russia, of England, or France or any other country.