We shall go forth, when victory is won, to enlighten the world with liberty and with far-seeing statesmanship; but just as the far-sighted physical vision perceives distant objects more clearly than near ones, there is, also, a world vision of duty which overlooks immediate obligations while it discerns universal responsibilities. In this mental view the present is invariably sacrificed to the future, the personal rights to the general security. Yet to the more normal faculty of vision, it would appear that the perfect whole must result from the perfect parts; and that only by preserving our individual liberties can we make a League of Free Nations. International treaties are important, but national morality is vital—for the treaty that is not confirmed by the national honour is only a document.
And now, after a year's thinking, I have come back to the conviction from which I started—that the only substantial groundwork of a republic is the conscience of its citizens. The future of our democracy rests not in the Halls of Congress, but in the cradle; and to build for permanency, we must build, not on theory, but on personal rectitude. We hear a great deal said now, and said unthinkingly, about the personal values not counting in a war that is fought for world freedom. Yet there was never an age, and I say this with certainty, in which personality was of such supreme significance as it is to-day. For this, after all, is the end to which my thinking has brought me—nationalism is nothing, internationalism is nothing, unless it is an expression of individual aspirations and ideals—for the end of both nationalism and internationalism is the ultimate return to racial character. Cultivate the personal will to righteousness, teach the citizen that he is the State, and the general good may take care of itself.
And so our first duty appears to be, not national expansion, but the development of moral fibre. Before we teach other nations to stand alone, we must learn to walk straight; before we sow the seeds of the future, we must prepare our own ground for planting. National greatness is a flower that has often flourished over a sewer of class oppression and official corruption; and the past teaches us that republics, as well as autocracies, may be founded on slavery and buttressed by inequalities. As I look ahead now, I see that we may win freedom for smaller nations, and yet lose our own liberties to a Federal power that is supported by a civilian army of office-holders. For power is never more relentless in exercise than when it has transformed the oppressed of yesterday into the oppressors of to-day; and it is well to remember that democracy means not merely the tyranny of the many instead of the few; it means equal obligations and responsibilities as well as equal rights and opportunities. If we have failed to reach this ideal, it has been because the individual American has grasped at opportunity while he evaded responsibility; and the remedy for the failure lies not in a change of institutions, but in a change of heart. We must realize that America is a faith as well as a fact—that it is, for many, a divine hypothesis. We must realize that it means the forward-looking spirit, the fearless attitude of mind, the belief in the future, the romantic optimism of youth, the will to dare and the nerve to achieve the improbable. This is America, and this is our best and greatest gift to the world—and to the League of Free Nations.
With the end of the war the danger will be threatening; and we must meet it as we met the feebler menace of Prussian militarism—but we must meet it and conquer it with intangible weapons. No nation has ever fought for a greater cause; no nation has ever fought more unselfishly; and no nation has ever drawn its sword in so idealistic a spirit. We have entered this war while our hearts were full, while the high and solemn mood was upon us. If we keep to this mood, if we seek in victory the immaterial, not the material advantage, if our only reward is the opportunity for world service, and our only conquered territory the provinces of the free spirit—if we keep fast to this ideal, and embody its meaning in our national life and actions, then we may save the smaller nations because we have first saved our Republic. For, if it is a day of peril, it is also a day of glory. The seal of blood is upon us, but it is the prophetic mark of the future, and it has sealed us for the union of justice with liberty. We have given our dead as a pledge of the greater America—the America of invisible boundaries. There is but one monument that we can build in remembrance, and that monument is a nobler Republic. If we lose the inspiration of the ideal, if we turn aside from the steady light of democracy to pursue the ignis fatuus of imperialistic enterprise or aggression, then our dead will have died in vain, and we shall leave our building unfinished. For those who build on the dead must build for immortality. Physical boundaries cannot contain them; but in the soul of the people, if we make room for them, they will live on forever, and in the spirit we may still have part and place with them.
And because the collective soul of the race is only the sum total of individual souls, I can discern no way to true national greatness except through the cultivation of citizenship. Experience has proved that there can be no stability either of law or league unless it is sustained by the moral necessity of mankind; and, for this reason, I feel that our first international agreement should be the agreement on a world standard of honour—on a rule of ethical principles in public as well as in private relations. I confess that a paternalism that enfeebles the character appears to me scarcely less destructive than a license that intoxicates. Between the two lies the golden mean of power with charity, of enlightened individualism, of Christian principles, not applied on the surface, but embodied in the very structure of civilization. Though I am not a religious man in the orthodox meaning, the last year has taught me that the world's hope lies not in treaties, but in the law of Christ that ye love one another.
This splendid dream of the perfectibility of human nature may not have led us very far in the past, but at least it has never once led us wrong. There are ideas that flash by like comets, bearing a trail of light; and such an idea is that of world peace and brotherhood. Only those whose eyes are on the heavens behold it; yet these few may become the great adventurers of the spirit, the prophets and seers of the new age for mankind. There has never been a great invention that did not begin as a dream, just as there has never been a great truth that did not begin as a heresy. And, if we look back over history, we find that the sublime moments with men and with nations, are those in which they break free from the anchorage of the past, and set sail toward the unknown seas, on a new spiritual voyage of discovery.
It is thus that I would see America, not as schoolmistress or common scold to the nations, but as chosen leader by example, rather than by authority. I would see her, when this crisis is safely past, keeping still to her onward vision, and her high and solemn mood of service and sacrifice; and it is in the spirit of humility, not of pride, that I would have her stretch the hand of friendship alike to the great and the little peoples. She has had no wiser leaders than the Founders of this Republic, and I would see her return, as far as she can return, to the lonely freedom in which they left her. I would see her enter no world covenant except one that is sustained not by physical force, but by the moral law; and I would, above all, see her follow her own great destiny with free hands and unbandaged eyes. For her true mission is not that of universal pedagogue—her true mission is to prove to the incredulous Powers the reality of her own political ideals—to make Democracy, not a sublime postulate, but a self-evident truth.
I have written as words came to me, knowing that I could write to you freely and frankly, as I could to no one else, of the life of the mind. Your friendship I can trust always, in any circumstances; and it is only by thinking impersonally that I can escape the tyranny of personal things. I have not written of my surroundings over here, because I could tell you only what you have read in hundreds of letters—in hundreds of magazines. It is all alike. One and all, we see the same sights. War is not the fine and splendid thing some of us at home believe it to be. There is dirt and cruelty and injustice in France, as well as glory and heroism. I have seen the good and the evil of the battlefields, just as I have seen the good and the evil of peace, and I have learned that the romance of war depends as much upon the thickness of the atmosphere as upon the square miles of the distance. It is pretty prosaic at close range; yet at the very worst of it, I have seen flashes of an almost inconceivable beauty. For it brings one up against the reality, and the reality is not matter, but spirit.
I am trying to do the best work of my life, and I am doing it just for my country.
God bless you.