United States -- Politics and government -- 1913-1921; World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
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 cooeperation 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:
That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and
in the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for
their maintenance;
That the essential principle of peace is the actual equality of nations
in all matters of right or privilege;
That peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of
power;
That governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common
thought, purpose, or power of the family of nations.
That the seas should be equally free and safe for the use of all
peoples, under rules set up by common agreement and consent, and that,
so far as practicable, they should be accessible to all upon equal
terms;
That national armaments should be limited to the necessities of national
order and domestic safety;
That the community of interest and of power upon which peace must
henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the duty of seeing to it that
all influences proceeding from its own citizens meant to encourage or
assist revolution in other states should be sternly and effectually
suppressed and prevented.
I need not argue these principles to you, my fellow-countrymen: they are
your own, part and parcel of your own thinking and your own motive in
affairs. They spring up native amongst us. Upon this as a platform of
purpose and of action we can stand together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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