The other night in New York at the opening of the campaign for
funds for our Red Cross I made an address. I had not intended to
refer to Russia, but was speaking without notes, and in the course
of what I said my own thought was led to Russia, and I said that
we meant to stand by Russia just as firmly as we would stand by
France or England or any other of our allies.
The audience to which I was speaking was not an audience from
which I would have expected an enthusiastic response to that. It
was rather too well dressed. It was an audience, in other words,
made up of a class of people who would not have the most intimate
feeling for the sufferings of the ordinary man in Russia; but that
audience jumped to its feet in enthusiasm. Nothing else that I
said on that occasion aroused anything like the enthusiasm that
single sentence aroused.
Now that is a sample, gentlemen. We cannot make anything out of
Russia. We cannot make anything out of our standing by Russia
at this time--the remotest of European nations so far as we are
concerned, the one with which we have had the least connections in
trade and advantage--and yet the people of the United States rose
to that suggestion as to no other that I made in that address.
That is part of America as we are ready to show it by any act of
friendship toward Mexico. Some of us, if I may speak so privately,
look back with regret upon some of the more ancient relations
that we have had with Mexico long before our generation; and
America, if I may now so accept it, would now feel ashamed to take
advantage of her neighbor.