Why we are at war : $b messages to the Congress, January to April 1917Wilson, Woodrow
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Why we are at war : $b messages to the Congress, January to April 1917
Wilson, Woodrow
World War, 1914-1918 -- United States
This proclamation and the regulations herein contained shall extend
and apply to all land and water, continental or insular, in any way
within the jurisdiction of the United States.
VI
"SPEAK, ACT AND SERVE TOGETHER"
Message to the American People
April 15, 1917
My Fellow-Countrymen:
The entrance of our own beloved country into the grim and terrible war
for democracy and human rights which has shaken the world creates so
many problems of national life and action which call for immediate
consideration and settlement that I hope you will permit me to address
to you a few words of earnest counsel and appeal with regard to them.
We are rapidly putting our navy upon an effective war footing and are
about to create and equip a great army, but these are the simplest
parts of the great task to which we have addressed ourselves. There is
not a single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are
fighting for. We are fighting for what we believe and wish to be the
rights of mankind and for the future peace and security of the world.
To do this great thing worthily and successfully we must devote
ourselves to the service without regard to profit or material
advantage and with an energy and intelligence that will rise to the
level of the enterprise itself. We must realize to the full how great
the task is and how many things, how many kinds and elements of
capacity and service and self-sacrifice it involves.
WHAT WE MUST DO
These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides
fighting--the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless:
We must supply abundant food for ourselves and for our armies and our
seamen, not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom
we have now made common cause, in whose support and by whose sides we
shall be fighting.
We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to
the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will
every day be needed there, and abundant materials out of our fields
and our mines and our factories with which not only to clothe and
equip our own forces on land and sea, but also to clothe and support
our people, for whom the gallant fellows under arms can no longer
work; to help clothe and equip the armies with which we are
co-operating in Europe, and to keep the looms and manufactories there
in raw material; coal to keep the fires going in ships at sea and in
the furnaces of hundreds of factories across the sea; steel out of which
to make arms and ammunition both here and there; rails for wornout
railways back of the fighting fronts; locomotives and rolling-stock to
take the place of those every day going to pieces; mules, horses,
cattle for labor and for military service; everything with which the
people of England and France and Italy and Russia have usually
supplied themselves, but cannot now afford the men, the materials or
the machinery to make.
GREATER EFFICIENCY
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