Presidents -- United States -- Messages; United States -- Politics and government -- Sources
is a mere truism to say that every nation, whether in America or
anywhere else, which desires to maintain its freedom, its independence,
must ultimately realize that the right of such independence can not be
separated from the responsibility of making good use of it.
In asserting the Monroe Doctrine, in taking such steps as we have taken
in regard to Cuba, Venezuela, and Panama, and in endeavoring to
circumscribe the theater of war in the Far East, and to secure the open
door in China, we have acted in our own interest as well as in the
interest of humanity at large. There are, however, cases in which,
while our own interests are not greatly involved, strong appeal is made
to our sympathies. Ordinarily it is very much wiser and more useful for
us to concern ourselves with striving for our own moral and material
betterment here at home than to concern ourselves with trying to better
the condition of things in other nations. We have plenty of sins of our
own to war against, and under ordinary circumstances we can do more for
the general uplifting of humanity by striving with heart and soul to
put a stop to civic corruption, to brutal lawlessness and violent race
prejudices here at home than by passing resolutions about wrongdoing
elsewhere. Nevertheless there are occasional crimes committed on so
vast a scale and of such peculiar horror as to make us doubt whether it
is not our manifest duty to endeavor at least to show our disapproval
of the deed and our sympathy with those who have suffered by it. The
cases must be extreme in which such a course is justifiable. There must
be no effort made to remove the mote from our brother's eye if we
refuse to remove the beam from our own. But in extreme cases action may
be justifiable and proper. What form the action shall take must depend
upon the circumstances of the case; that is, upon the degree of the
atrocity and upon our power to remedy it. The cases in which we could
interfere by force of arms as we interfered to put a stop to
intolerable conditions in Cuba are necessarily very few. Yet it is not
to be expected that a people like ours, which in spite of certain very
obvious shortcomings, nevertheless as a whole shows by its consistent
practice its belief in the principles of civil and religious liberty
and of orderly freedom, a people among whom even the worst crime, like
the crime of lynching, is never more than sporadic, so that individuals
and not classes are molested in their fundamental rights--it is
inevitable that such a nation should desire eagerly to give expression
to its horror on an occasion like that of the massacre of the Jews in
Kishenef, or when it witnesses such systematic and long-extended
cruelty and oppression as the cruelty and oppression of which the
Armenians have been the victims, and which have won for them the
indignant pity of the civilized world.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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