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ever we are called upon to act in the field of the world's affairs.

For it is character we are going to express, not power merely. The United States is not in love with the aggressive use of power. It despises the aggressive use of power. There is not a foot of territory belonging to any other nation which this Nation covets or desires. There is not a privilege which we ourselves enjoy that we would dream of denying any other nation in the world. If there is one thing that the American people love and believe in more than another it is peace and all the handsome things that belong to peace. I hope that you will bear me out in saying that I have proved that I am a partisan of peace. I would be ashamed to be belligerent and impatient when the fortunes of my whole country and the happiness of all my fellow countrymen were involved. But I know that peace is not always within the choice of the Nation, and I want to remind you, and remind you very solemnly, of the double obligation you have laid upon me. I know you have laid it upon me because I am constantly reminded of it in conversation, by letter, in editorial, by means of every voice that comes to me out of the body of the Nation. You have laid upon me this double obligation: "We are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep us out of this war, but we are relying upon you, Mr. President, to keep the honor of the Nation unstained."

Do you not see that a time may come when it is impossible to do both of these things? Do you not see that if I am to guard the honor of the Nation,

I am not protecting it against itself, for we are not going to do anything to stain the honor of our own country. I am protecting it against things that I can not control, the action of others. And where the action of others may bring us I can not foretell. You may count upon my heart and resolution to keep you out of the war, but you must be ready if it is necessary that I should maintain your honor. That is the only thing a real man loves about himself. Some men who are not real men love other things about themselves, but the real man believes that his honor is dearer than his life; and a nation is merely all of us put together, and the Nation's honor is dearer than the Nation's comfort and the Nation's peace and the Nation's life itself. So that we must know what we have thrown into the balance; we must know the infinite issues which are impending every day of the year, and when we go to bed at night and when we rise in the morning, and at every interval of the rush of business, we must remind ourselves that we are part of a great body politic in which are vested some of the highest hopes of the human race.

Why is it that all nations turn to us with the instinctive feeling that if anything touches humanity it touches us? Because it knows that ever since we were born as a Nation we have undertaken to be the champions of humanity and of the rights of men. Without that ideal there would be nothing that would distinguish America from her predecessors in the history of nations. Why is it that men who loved liberty have crowded to these shores? Why is it that we greet them as they

enter the great harbor at New York with that majestic Statue of Liberty holding up a torch whose visionary beams are meant to spread abroad over the waters of the world, and to say to all men, "Come to America where mankind is free and where we love all the works of righteousness and of peace."

LETTER TO SENATOR STONE, FEBRUARY 24, 1916, IN REPLY TO A LETTER OF

THE SAME DATE

The right of Americans to travel upon British passenger steamers going to and from Europe was admitted by the authorities and people of the United States, but the expediency of the exercise of the right was doubted by some in view of the danger to which ships were exposed in that part of the high seas surrounding Great Britain which Germany, on February 4, 1915, had declared to be a war zone, and the waters of which were infested with its submarines attacking indiscriminately enemy or neutral ships, or enemy ships with neutral persons and cargo aboard. Senator William J. Stone, Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs, addressed a letter to the President on this subject dated February 24, 1916. In reply to this communication, President Wilson wrote the following letter.

MY DEAR SENATOR:

I very warmly appreciate your kind and frank letter of to-day, and feel that it calls for an equally frank reply.

You are right in assuming that I shall do everything in my power to keep the United States out of war. I think the country will feel no uneasiness about my course in that respect. Through many anxious months I have striven for that object, amid difficulties more manifold than can have been apparent upon the surface, and so far I have succeeded. I do not doubt that I shall continue to succeed. The course which the Central European powers have announced their intention of following in the future with regard to undersea warfare seems for the moment to threaten insuperable obstacles, but its apparent meaning is so manifestly incon

sistent with explicit assurances recently given us by those powers with regard to their treatment of merchant vessels on the high seas that I must believe that explanations will presently ensue which will put a different aspect upon it. We have had no reason to question their good faith or their fidelity to their promises in the past, and I for one feel confident that we shall have none in the future.

But in any event our duty is clear. No nation, no group of nations, has the right, while war is in progress, to alter or disregard the principles which all nations have agreed upon in mitigation of the horrors and sufferings of war; and if the clear rights of American citizens should very unhappily be abridged or denied by any such action, we should, it seems to me, have in honor no choice as to what our own course should be.

For my own part, I cannot consent to any abridgment of the rights of American citizens in any respect. The honor and self-respect of the Nation is involved. We covet peace, and shall preserve it at any cost but the loss of honor. To forbid our people to exercise their rights for fear we might be called upon to vindicate them would be a deep humiliation indeed. It would be an implicit, all but an explicit, acquiescence in the violation of the rights of mankind everywhere and of whatever nation or allegiance. It would be a deliberate abdication of our hitherto proud position as spokesman, even amid the turmoil of war, for the law and the right. It would make everything this Government has attempted and everything that it has accomplished during this terrible struggle of nations meaningless and futile.

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