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
with the whole world for stage and in co-operation 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 provincials 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, therefore, are the
things we shall stand for, whether in war or in peace: