United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
Peace lies in the hearts of great industrial and agricultural
populations, and we have arranged a government on this side of the water
by which their preferences and their predilections and their interests
are the mainsprings of government itself. And so when we prepare for
national defense we prepare for national political integrity; we prepare
to take care of the great ideals which gave birth to this Government; we
are going back in spirit and in energy to those great first generations
in America, when men banded themselves together, though they were but a
handful upon a single coast of the Atlantic, to set up in the world the
standards which have ever since floated everywhere that Americans
asserted the power of their Government. As I came along the line of the
railway to-day, I was touched to observe that everywhere, upon every
railway station, upon every house, where a flag could be procured, some
temporary standard had been raised from which there floated the stars
and stripes. They seemed to have divined the errand upon which I had
come, to remind you that we must subordinate every individual interest
and every local interest to assert once more, if it should be necessary
to assert them, the great principles for which that flag stands.
Do not deceive yourselves, ladies and gentlemen, as to where the colors
of that flag came from. Those lines of red are lines of blood, nobly and
unselfishly shed by men who loved the liberty of their fellow-men more
than they loved their own lives and fortunes. God forbid that we should
have to use the blood of America to freshen the color of that flag; but
if it should ever be necessary again to assert the majesty and integrity
of those ancient and honorable principles, that flag will be colored
once more, and in being colored will be glorified and purified.
THE SUBMARINE QUESTION
[Address delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress,
April 19, 1916.]
GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS:
A situation has arisen in the foreign relations of the country of which
it is my plain duty to inform you very frankly.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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