The Senate Judiciary Committee has just recommended the passage of a law in which, among many excellent propositions to put down disloyalty, there has been adroitly inserted a provision that any one who uses “contemptuous or slurring language about the President” shall be punished by imprisonment for a long term of years and by a fine of many thousand dollars. This proposed law is sheer treason to the United States. Under its terms Abraham Lincoln would have been sent to prison for what he repeatedly said of Presidents Polk, Pierce, and Buchanan. Under its terms President Wilson would be free to speak of Senator-elect Lenroot as he has spoken, but Senator Lenroot would not be free truthfully to answer President Wilson. It is a proposal to make Americans subjects instead of citizens. It is a proposal to put the President in the position of the Hohenzollerns and Romanoffs. Government by the people means that the people have the right to do their own thinking and to do their own speaking about their public servants. They must speak truthfully and they must not be disloyal to the country, and it is their highest duty by truthful criticism to make and keep the public servants loyal to the country.
Any truthful criticism could and would be held by partisanship to be slurring or contemptuous. The Delaware House of Representatives has just shown this. It came within one vote of passing a resolution demanding that the Department of Justice proceed against me because, in my recent speeches in Maine, I “severely criticized the conduct of our National Government.” I defy any human being to point out a statement in that speech which was not true and which was not patriotic, and yet the decent and patriotic members of the Delaware legislature were only able to secure a majority of one against the base and servile partisanship of those who upheld the resolution.
I believe the proposed law is unconstitutional. If it is passed, I shall certainly give the Government the opportunity to test its constitutionality. For whenever the need arises I shall in the future speak truthfully of the President in praise or in blame, exactly as I have done in the past. When the President in the past uttered his statements about being too proud to fight and wishing peace without victory, and considering that we had no special grievance against Germany, I spoke of him as it was my high duty to speak. Therefore, I spoke of him truthfully and severely, and I cared nothing whether or not timid and unpatriotic and short-sighted men said that I spoke slurringly or contemptuously. In as far as the President in the future endeavors to wage this war efficiently and to secure the peace of overwhelming victory, I shall heartily support him. But if he wages it inefficiently or if he should now champion a peace without victory, or say that we had no grievance against Germany, I would speak in criticism of him precisely as I have spoken in the past. I am an American and a free man. My loyalty is due to the United States, and therefore it is due to the President, the Senators, the Congressmen, and all other public servants only and to the degree in which they loyally and efficiently serve the United States.
WOMEN AND THE WAR
April 12, 1918
A Kansas woman has just written me in part as follows: “I have given my all, my two sons, gladly and proudly, as volunteers to my country, for they enlisted last August. But my heart grows sick at the confusion and blunders and apathy. I thank The Star for printing that poem of the Minnesota mother. It appeals to all of us mothers who stay at home and pray and work as we can.”
I think more continually of such mothers of soldiers as this Kansas woman, than I do even of the soldiers themselves. They have high and gallant souls. They are the spiritual heirs of the mothers and wives of Washington’s Continentals and of the mothers and wives of the soldiers of Grant and Lee. I am proud beyond measure that I am their fellow countryman. In everything that I do or say, I seek to make and to keep this land a land in which their daughters can dwell in honorable safety and to make our common citizenship such that both their sons and daughters shall hold their heads high because they are Americans.
But exactly as I revere such women, so I condemn the women whose short-sightedness or frivolous love of ease and vapid pleasure or whose timid fear of danger and labor makes them fit companions for those unworthy men whose lives represent merely the shirking of duty. The mother who, by perpetual complaint and lamentation about unavoidable hardships and risks, seeks to weaken the heart of her soldier son stands no higher than the money-getting or ease-loving man who dodges the draft. The woman who cares so little for the honor of America and the interests of civilization as now to wish a peace without victory is no better than the men in uniform who seek soft positions of safety among the slickers and slackers.
The things that are best worth having in life must be paid for whether by forethought or by toil or by downright facing of danger. This is true in peace. It is even more true in war. It is just as true of women as of men.
All wise and good women and all wise and good men abhor war. Washington and Lincoln abhorred war. But no man or woman is either wise or good unless he or she abhors some things even more than war, exactly as Washington and Lincoln abhorred them. We are none of us fit to be free men in a republic if we are not willing to fight when the Republic is wronged as Germany has wronged this country. We are none of us entitled to say that we love mankind if we are not willing to do battle against the Turk and the German in order to right such wrongs as have been perpetrated on Belgium and Armenia. And we deserve to be brayed in a mortar if we are ever again guilty of such folly as that of which we have been guilty by our foolish failure to prepare our strength in efficient fashion during the last three and a half years.