Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
If these self-evident truths are kept before us, and only if they are
so kept before us, we shall have a clear idea of what our foreign
policy in its larger aspects should be. It is our duty to remember that
a nation has no more right to do injustice to another nation, strong or
weak, than an individual has to do injustice to another individual;
that the same moral law applies in one case as in the other. But we
must also remember that it is as much the duty of the Nation to guard
its own rights and its own interests as it is the duty of the
individual so to do. Within the Nation the individual has now delegated
this right to the State, that is, to the representative of all the
individuals, and it is a maxim of the law that for every wrong there is
a remedy. But in international law we have not advanced by any means as
far as we have advanced in municipal law. There is as yet no judicial
way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs
another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the
wrongdoer can be brought. Either it is necessary supinely to acquiesce
in the wrong, and thus put a premium upon brutality and aggression, or
else it is necessary for the aggrieved nation valiantly to stand up for
its rights. Until some method is devised by which there shall be a
degree of international control over offending nations, it would be a
wicked thing for the most civilized powers, for those with most sense
of international obligations and with keenest and most generous
appreciation of the difference between right and wrong, to disarm. If
the great civilized nations of the present day should completely
disarm, the result would mean an immediate recrudescence of barbarism
in one form or another. Under any circumstances a sufficient armament
would have to be kept up to serve the purposes of international police;
and until international cohesion and the sense of international duties
and rights are far more advanced than at present, a nation desirous
both of securing respect for itself and of doing good to others must
have a force adequate for the work which it feels is allotted to it as
its part of the general world duty. Therefore it follows that a
self-respecting, just, and far-seeing nation should on the one hand
endeavor by every means to aid in the development of the various
movements which tend to provide substitutes for war, which tend to
render nations in their actions toward one another, and indeed toward
their own peoples, more responsive to the general sentiment of humane
and civilized mankind; and on the other hand that it should keep
prepared, while scrupulously avoiding wrongdoing itself, to repel any
wrong, and in exceptional cases to take action which in a more advanced
stage of international relations would come under the head of the
exercise of the international police. A great free people owes it to
itself and to all mankind not to sink into helplessness before the
powers of evil.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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