This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Germany's challenge to
fight for our right to live and be free, and for the sacred rights of
freemen everywhere. The nation is awake. There is no need to call to it.
We know what the war must cost, our utmost sacrifice, the lives of our
fittest men, and, if need be, all that we possess.
The loan we are met to discuss is one of the least parts of what we are
called upon to give and to do, though in itself imperative. The people
of the whole country are alive to the necessity of it, and are ready to
lend to the utmost, even where it involves a sharp skimping and daily
sacrifice to lend out of meagre earnings. They will look with
reprobation and contempt upon those who can and will not, upon those who
demand a higher rate of interest, upon those who think of it as a mere
commercial transaction. I have not come, therefore, to urge the loan. I
have come only to give you, if I can, a more vivid conception of what it
is for.
The reasons for this great war, the reason why it had to come, the need
to fight it through, and the issues that hang upon its outcome, are more
clearly disclosed now than ever before. It is easy to see just what this
particular loan means, because the cause we are fighting for stands more
sharply revealed than at any previous crisis of the momentous struggle.
The man who knows least can now see plainly how the cause of justice
stands, and what is the imperishable thing he is asked to invest in. Men
in America may be more sure than they ever were before that the cause is
their own, and that, if it should be lost, their own great nation's
place and mission in the world would be lost with it.
I call you to witness, my fellow-countrymen, that at no stage of this
terrible business have I judged the purposes of Germany intemperately. I
should be ashamed in the presence of affairs so grave, so fraught with
the destinies of mankind throughout all the world, to speak with
truculence, to use the weak language of hatred or vindictive purpose. We
must judge as we would be judged. I have sought to learn the objects
Germany has in this war from the mouths of her own spokesmen, and to
deal as frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me. I have laid
bare our own ideals, our own purposes, without reserve or doubtful
phrase, and have asked them to say as plainly what it is that they seek.
We have ourselves proposed no injustice, no aggression. We are ready,
whenever the final reckoning is made, to be just to the German people,
deal fairly with the German power, as with all others. There can be no
difference between peoples in the final judgment, if it is indeed to be
a righteous judgment. To propose anything but justice, even-handed and
dispassionate justice, to Germany at any time, whatever the outcome of
the war, would be to renounce and dishonor our own cause, for we ask
nothing that we are not willing to accord.
It has been with this thought that I have sought to learn from those who
spoke for Germany whether it was justice or dominion and the execution
of their own will upon the other nations of the world that the German
leaders were seeking. They have answered--answered in unmistakable
terms. They have avowed that it was not justice, but dominion and the
unhindered execution of their own will. The avowal has not come from
Germany's statesmen. It has come from her military leaders, who are her
real rulers. Her statesmen have said that they wished peace, and were
ready to discuss its terms whenever their opponents were willing to sit
down at the conference table with them. Her present Chancellor has
said--in indefinite and uncertain terms, indeed, and in phrases that
often seem to deny their own meaning, but with as much plainness as he
thought prudent--that he believed that peace should be based upon the
principles which we had declared would be our own in the final
settlement.
At Brest-Litovsk her civilian delegates spoke in similar terms;
professed their desire to conclude a fair peace and accord to the
peoples with whose fortunes they were dealing the right to choose their
own allegiances. But action accompanied and followed the profession.
Their military masters, the men who act for Germany and exhibit her
purpose in execution, proclaimed a very different conclusion. We can not
mistake what they have done--in Russia, in Finland, in the Ukraine, in
Rumania. The real test of their justice and fair play has come. From
this we may judge the rest.
They are enjoying in Russia a cheap triumph in which no brave or gallant
nation can long take pride. A great people, helpless by their own act,
lies for the time at their mercy. Their fair professions are forgotten.
They nowhere set up justice, but everywhere impose their power and
exploit everything for their own use and aggrandizement, and the peoples
of conquered provinces are invited to be free under their dominion!
Are we not justified in believing that they would do the same things at
their western front if they were not there face to face with armies
whom even their countless divisions cannot overcome? If, when they have
felt their check to be final, they should propose favorable and
equitable terms with regard to Belgium and France and Italy, could they
blame us if we concluded that they did so only to assure themselves of a
free hand in Russia and the East?
Their purpose is, undoubtedly, to make all the Slavic peoples, all the
free and ambitious nations of the Baltic Peninsula, all the lands that
Turkey has dominated and misruled, subject to their will and ambition,
and build upon that dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy
that they can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy--an
empire as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which it will
overawe--an empire which will ultimately master Persia, India, and the
peoples of the Far East.
In such a program our ideals, the ideals of justice and humanity and
liberty, the principle of the free self-determination of nations, upon
which all the modern world insists, can play no part. They are rejected
for the ideals of power, for the principle that the strong must rule the
weak, that trade must follow the flag, whether those to whom it is taken
welcome it or not, that the peoples of the world are to be made subject
to the patronage and overlordship of those who have the power to enforce
it.
That program once carried out, America and all who care or dare to stand
with her must arm and prepare themselves to contest the mastery of the
world--a mastery in which the rights of common men, the rights of women
and of all who are weak, must for the time being be trodden underfoot
and disregarded and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and right
begin again at its beginning. Everything that America has lived for and
loved and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious realization
will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates of mercy once more
pitilessly shut upon mankind!
The thing is preposterous and impossible; and yet is not that what the
whole course and action of the German armies has meant wherever they
have moved? I do not wish, even in this moment of utter disillusionment,
to judge harshly or unrighteously. I judge only what the German arms
have accomplished with unpitying thoroughness throughout every fair
region they have touched.
What, then are we to do? For myself, I am ready, ready still, ready even
now, to discuss a fair and just and honest peace at any time that it is
sincerely purposed--a peace in which the strong and the weak shall fare
alike. But the answer, when I proposed such a peace, came from the
German commanders in Russia and I cannot mistake the meaning of the
answer.
I accept the challenge. I know that you accept it. All the world shall
know that you accept it. It shall appear in the utter sacrifice and
self-forgetfulness with which we shall give all that we love and all
that we have to redeem the world and make it fit for free men like
ourselves to live in. This now is the meaning of all that we do. Let
everything that we say, my fellow-countrymen, everything that we
henceforth plan and accomplish, ring true to this response till the
majesty and might of our concerted power shall fill the thought and
utterly defeat the force of those who flout and misprize what we honor
and hold dear.
Germany has once more said that force, and force alone, shall decide
whether justice and peace shall reign in the affairs of men, whether
right as America conceives it or dominion as she conceives it shall
determine the destinies of mankind. There is, therefore, but one
response possible from us: Force, force to the utmost, force without
stint or limit, the righteous and triumphant force which shall make
right the law of the world and cast every selfish dominion down in the
dust.