Eight months have elapsed since I last had the honor of addressing you.
They have been months crowded with events of immense and grave
significance for us. I shall not undertake to retail or even to
summarize those events. The practical particulars of the part we have
played in them will be laid before you in the reports of the Executive
Departments. I shall discuss only our present outlook upon these vast
affairs, our present duties, and the immediate means of accomplishing
the objects we shall hold always in view.
I shall not go back to debate the causes of the war. The intolerable
wrongs done and planned against us by the sinister masters of Germany
have long since become too grossly obvious and odious to every true
American to need to be rehearsed. But I shall ask you to consider again
and with a very grave scrutiny our objectives and the measures by which
we mean to attain them; for the purpose of discussion here in this place
is action, and our action must move straight towards definite ends. Our
object is, of course, to win the war; and we shall not slacken or suffer
ourselves to be diverted until it is won. But it is worth while asking
and answering the question, When shall we consider the war won?
From one point of view it is not necessary to broach this fundamental
matter. I do not doubt that the American people know what the war is
about and what sort of an outcome they will regard as a realization of
their purpose in it. As a nation we are united in spirit and intention.
I pay little heed to those who tell me otherwise. I hear the voices of
dissent,--who does not? I hear the criticism and the clamor of the
noisily thoughtless and troublesome. I also see men here and there fling
themselves in impotent disloyalty against the calm, indomitable power of
the nation. I hear men debate peace who understand neither its nature
not the way in which we may attain it with uplifted eyes and unbroken
spirits. But I know that none of these speaks for the nation. They do
not touch the heart of anything. They may safely be left to strut their
uneasy hour and be forgotten.
But from another point of view I believe that it is necessary to say
plainly what we here at the seat of action consider the war to be for
and what part we mean to play in the settlement of its searching issues.
We are the spokesmen of the American people and they have a right to
know whether their purpose is ours. They desire peace by the overcoming
of evil, by the defeat once for all of the sinister forces that
interrupt peace and render it impossible, and they wish to know how
closely our thought runs with theirs and what action we propose. They
are impatient with those who desire peace by any sort of
compromise,--deeply and indignantly impatient,--but they will be equally
impatient with us if we do not make it plain to them what our objectives
are and what we are planning for in seeking to make conquest of peace by
arms.
I believe that I speak for them when I say two things: First, that this
intolerable Thing of which the masters of Germany have shown us the ugly
face, this menace of combined intrigue and force which we now see so
clearly as the German power, a Thing without conscience or honor or
capacity for covenanted peace, must be crushed and, if it be not
utterly brought to an end, at least shut out from the friendly
intercourse of the nations; and, second, that when this Thing and its
power are indeed defeated and the time comes that we can discuss
peace,--when the German people have spokesmen whose word we can believe
and when those spokesmen are ready in the name of their people to accept
the common judgment of the nations as to what shall henceforth be the
bases of law and of covenant for the life of the world,--we shall be
willing and glad to pay the full price for peace, and pay it
ungrudgingly. We know what that price will be. It will be full,
impartial justice,--justice done at every point and to every nation that
the final settlement must affect, our enemies as well as our friends.
You catch, with me, the voices of humanity that are in the air. They
grow daily more audible, more articulate, more persuasive, and they come
from the hearts of men everywhere. They insist that the war shall not
end in vindictive action of any kind; that no nation or people shall be
robbed or punished because the irresponsible rulers of a single country
have themselves done deep and abominable wrong. It is this thought that
has been expressed in the formula "No annexations, no contributions, no
punitive indemnities." Just because this crude formula expresses the
instinctive judgment as to right of plain men everywhere it has been
made diligent use of by the masters of German intrigue to lead the
people of Russia astray--and the people of every other country their
agents could reach, in order that a premature peace might be brought
about before autocracy has been taught its final and convincing lesson,
and the people of the world put in control of their own destinies.
But the fact that a wrong use has been made of a just idea is no reason
why a right use should not be made of it. It ought to be brought under
the patronage of its real friends. Let it be said again that autocracy
must first be shown the utter futility of its claims to power or
leadership in the modern world. It is impossible to apply any standard
of justice so long as such forces are unchecked and undefeated as the
present masters of Germany command. Not until that has been done can
Right be set up as arbiter and peace-maker among the nations. But when
that has been done,--as, God willing, it assuredly will be,--we shall at
last be free to do an unprecedented thing, and this is the time to avow
our purpose to do it. We shall be free to base peace on generosity and
justice, to the exclusion of all selfish claims to advantage even on the
part of the victors.
Let there be no misunderstanding. Our present and immediate task is to
win the war, and nothing shall turn us aside from it until it is
accomplished. Every power and resource we possess, whether of men, of
money, or of materials, is being devoted and will continue to be devoted
to that purpose until it is achieved. Those who desire to bring peace
about before that purpose is achieved I counsel to carry their advice
elsewhere. We will not entertain it. We shall regard the war as won only
when the German people say to us, through properly accredited
representatives, that they are ready to agree to a settlement based upon
justice and the reparation of the wrongs their rulers have done. They
have done a wrong to Belgium which must be repaired. They have
established a power over other lands and peoples than their own,--over
the great Empire of Austria-Hungary, over hitherto free Balkan states,
over Turkey, and within Asia,--which must be relinquished.
Germany's success by skill, by industry, by knowledge, by enterprise we
did not grudge or oppose, but admired, rather. She had built up for
herself a real empire of trade and influence, secured by the peace of
the world. We were content to abide the rivalries of manufacture,
science, and commerce that were involved for us in her success and stand
or fall as we had or did not have the brains and the initiative to
surpass her. But at the moment when she had conspicuously won her
triumphs of peace she threw them away, to establish in their stead what
the world will no longer permit to be established, military and
political domination by arms, by which to oust where she could not excel
the rivals she most feared and hated. The peace we make must remedy that
wrong. It must deliver the once fair lands and happy peoples of Belgium
and northern France from the Prussian conquest and the Prussian menace,
but it must also deliver the peoples of Austria-Hungary, the peoples of
the Balkans, and the peoples of Turkey, alike in Europe and in Asia,
from the impudent and alien dominion of the Prussian military and
commercial autocracy.
We owe it, however, to ourselves to say that we do not wish in any way
to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It is no affair
of ours what they do with their own life, either industrially or
politically. We do not purpose or desire to dictate to them in any way.
We only desire to see that their affairs are left in their own hands, in
all matters, great or small. We shall hope to secure for the peoples of
the Balkan peninsula and for the people of the Turkish Empire the right
and opportunity to make their own lives safe, their own fortunes secure
against oppression or injustice and from the dictation of foreign courts
or parties.
And our attitude and purpose with regard to Germany herself are of a
like kind. We intend no wrong against the German Empire, no interference
with her internal affairs. We should deem either the one or the other
absolutely unjustifiable, absolutely contrary to the principles we have
professed to live by and to hold most sacred throughout our life as a
nation.
The people of Germany are being told by the men whom they now permit to
deceive them and to act as their masters that they are fighting for the
very life and existence of their Empire, a war of desperate self-defense
against deliberate aggression. Nothing could be more grossly or wantonly
false, and we must seek by the utmost openness and candor as to our real
aims to convince them of its falseness. We are in fact fighting for
their emancipation from fear, along with our own,--from the fear as well
as from the fact of unjust attack by neighbors or rivals or schemers
after world empire. No one is threatening the existence or the
independence or the peaceful enterprise of the German Empire.
The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German people is this,
that if they should still, after the war is over, continue to be obliged
to live under ambitious and intriguing masters interested to disturb the
peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the other peoples of the
world could not trust, it might be impossible to admit them to the
partnership of nations which must henceforth guarantee the world's
peace. That partnership must be a partnership of peoples, not a mere
partnership of governments. It might be impossible, also, in such
untoward circumstances, to admit Germany to the free economic
intercourse which must inevitably spring out of the other partnerships
of a real peace. But there would be no aggression in that; and such a
situation, inevitable because of distrust, would in the very nature of
things sooner or later cure itself, by processes which would assuredly
set in.
The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in this war will have to be
righted. That of course. But they cannot and must not be righted by the
commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies. The world
will not permit the commission of similar wrongs as a means of
reparation and settlement. Statesmen must by this time have learned that
the opinion of the world is everywhere wide awake and fully comprehends
the issues involved. No representative of any self-governed nation will
dare disregard it by attempting any such covenants of selfishness and
compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The thought
of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people
who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated
standards of right and wrong, is the air all governments must henceforth
breathe if they would live. It is in the full disclosing light of that
thought that all policies must be conceived and executed in this midday
hour of the world's life. German rulers have been able to upset the
peace of the world only because the German people were not suffered
under their tutelage to share the comradeship of the other peoples of
the world either in thought or in purpose. They were allowed to have no
opinion of their own which might be set up as a rule of conduct for
those who exercised authority over them. But the congress that concludes
this war will feel the full strength of the tides that run now in the
hearts and consciences of free men everywhere. Its conclusions will run
with those tides.
All these things have been true from the very beginning of this
stupendous war; and I cannot help thinking that if they had been made
plain at the very outset the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian
people might have been once for all enlisted on the side of the Allies,
suspicion and distrust swept away, and a real and lasting union of
purpose effected. Had they believed these things at the very moment of
their revolution and had they been confirmed in that belief since, the
sad reverses which have recently marked the progress of their affairs
towards an ordered and stable government of free men might have been
avoided. The Russian people have been poisoned by the very same
falsehoods that have kept the German people in the dark, and the poison
has been administered by the very same hands. The only possible antidote
is the truth. It cannot be uttered too plainly or too often.
From every point of view, therefore, it has seemed to be my duty to
speak these declarations of purpose, to add these specific
interpretations to what I took the liberty of saying to the Senate in
January. Our entrance into the war has not altered our attitude towards
the settlement that must come when it is over. When I said in January
that the nations of the world were entitled not only to free pathways
upon the sea but also to assured and unmolested access to those pathways
I was thinking, and I am thinking now, not of the smaller and weaker
nations alone, which need our countenance and support, but also of the
great and powerful nations, and of our present enemies as well as our
present associates in the war. I was thinking, and am thinking now, of
Austria herself, among the rest, as well as of Serbia and of Poland.
Justice and equality of rights can be had only at a great price. We are
seeking permanent, not temporary, foundations for the peace of the world
and must seek them candidly and fearlessly. As always, the right will
prove to be the expedient.
What shall we do, then, to push this great war of freedom and justice to
its righteous conclusion? We must clear away with a thorough hand all
impediments to success and we must make every adjustment of law that
will facilitate the full and free use of our whole capacity and force
as a fighting unit.
One very embarrassing obstacle that stands in our way is that we are at
war with Germany but not with her allies. I therefore very earnestly
recommend that the Congress immediately declare the United States in a
state of war with Austria-Hungary. Does it seem strange to you that this
should be the conclusion of the argument I have just addressed to you?
It is not. It is in fact the inevitable logic of what I have said.
Austria-Hungary is for the time being not her own mistress but simply
the vassal of the German Government. We must face the facts as they are
and act upon them without sentiment in this stern business. The
government of Austria-Hungary is not acting upon its own initiative or
in response to the wishes and feelings of its own peoples but as the
instrument of another nation. We must meet its force with our own and
regard the Central Powers as but one. The war can be successfully
conducted in no other way. The same logic would lead also to a
declaration of war against Turkey and Bulgaria. They also are the tools
of Germany. But they are mere tools and do not yet stand in the direct
path of our necessary action. We shall go wherever the necessities of
this war carry us, but it seems to me that we should go only where
immediate and practical considerations lead us and not heed any others.
The financial and military measures which must be adopted will suggest
themselves as the war and its undertakings develop, but I will take the
liberty of proposing to you certain other acts of legislation which seem
to me to be needed for the support of the war and for the release of our
whole force and energy.
It will be necessary to extend in certain particulars the legislation
of the last session with regard to alien enemies; and also necessary, I
believe, to create a very definite and particular control over the
entrance and departure of all persons into and from the United States.
Legislation should be enacted defining as a criminal offense every
wilful violation of the presidential proclamations relating to alien
enemies promulgated under section 4067 of the Revised Statutes and
providing appropriate punishments; and women as well as men should be
included under the terms of the acts placing restraints upon alien
enemies. It is likely that as time goes on many alien enemies will be
willing to be fed and housed at the expense of the Government in the
detention camps and it would be the purpose of the legislation I have
suggested to confine offenders among them in penitentiaries and other
similar institutions where they could be made to work as other criminals
do.
Recent experience has convinced me that the Congress must go further in
authorizing the Government to set limits to prices. The law of supply
and demand, I am sorry to say, has been replaced by the law of
unrestrained selfishness. While we have eliminated profiteering in
several branches of industry it still runs impudently rampant in others.
The farmers, for example, complain with a great deal of justice that,
while the regulation of food prices restricts their incomes, no
restraints are placed upon the prices of most of the things they must
themselves purchase; and similar inequities obtain on all sides.
It is imperatively necessary that the consideration of the full use of
the water power of the country and also the consideration of the
systematic and yet economical development of such of the natural
resources of the country as are still under the control of the federal
government should be immediately resumed and affirmatively and
constructively dealt with at the earliest possible moment. The pressing
need of such legislation is daily becoming more obvious.
The legislation proposed at the last session with regard to regulated
combinations among our exporters, in order to provide for our foreign
trade a more effective organization and method of cooeperation, ought by
all means to be completed at this session.
And I beg that the members of the House of Representatives will permit
me to express the opinion that it will be impossible to deal in any but
a very wasteful and extravagant fashion with the enormous appropriations
of the public moneys which must continue to be made, if the war is to be
properly sustained, unless the House will consent to return to its
former practice of initiating and preparing all appropriation bills
through a single committee, in order that responsibility may be
centered, expenditures standardized and made uniform, and waste and
duplication as much as possible avoided.
Additional legislation may also become necessary before the present
Congress again adjourns in order to effect the most efficient
cooerdination and operation of the railway and other transportation
systems of the country; but to that I shall, if circumstances should
demand, call the attention of the Congress upon another occasion.
If I have overlooked anything that ought to be done for the more
effective conduct of the war, your own counsels will supply the
omission. What I am perfectly clear about is that in the present session
of the Congress our whole attention and energy should be concentrated on
the vigorous, rapid, and successful prosecution of the great task of
winning the war.
We can do this with all the greater zeal and enthusiasm because we know
that for us this is a war of high principle, debased by no selfish
ambition of conquest or spoliation; because we know, and all the world
knows, that we have been forced into it to save the very institutions we
live under from corruption and destruction. The purposes of the Central
Powers strike straight at the very heart of everything we believe in;
their methods of warfare outrage every principle of humanity and of
knightly honor; their intrigue has corrupted the very thought and spirit
of many of our people; their sinister and secret diplomacy has sought to
take our very territory away from us and disrupt the Union of the
States. Our safety would be at an end, our honor forever sullied and
brought into contempt were we to permit their triumph. They are striking
at the very existence of democracy and liberty.
It is because it is for us a war of high, disinterested purpose, in
which all the free peoples of the world are banded together for the
vindication of right, a war for the preservation of our nation and of
all that it has held dear of principle and of purpose, that we feel
ourselves doubly constrained to propose for its outcome only that which
is righteous and of irreproachable intention, for our foes as well as
for our friends. The cause being just and holy, the settlement must be
of like motive and quality. For this we can fight, but for nothing less
noble or less worthy of our traditions. For this cause we entered the
war and for this cause will we battle until the last gun is fired.
I have spoken plainly because this seems to me the time when it is most
necessary to speak plainly, in order that all the world may know that
even in the heat and ardor of the struggle and when our whole thought is
of carrying the war through to its end we have not forgotten any ideal
or principle for which the name of America has been held in honor among
the nations and for which it has been our glory to contend in the great
generations that went before us. A supreme moment of history has come.
The eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is
laid upon the nations. He will show them favor, I devoutly believe, only
if they rise to the clear heights of His own justice and mercy.