We have a right to protest against war.
By that opportunity, now ours as never before, to weigh the case against war and to draw the counts from burning words spoken by those who protest and who are of all peoples—we make single judgment and complete indictment.
By that good fortune which has placed us outside the conflict; by that ill fortune by which the belligerent and his rights have heretofore bestrode the world; by mine-strewn channels, and by international codes which offer scant redress—we speak as people of a neutral nation.
By the unemployed of our water-fronts, and the augmented misery of our cities; by the financial depression which has curtailed our school building and crippled our works of good-will; by the sluicing of human impulse among us from channels of social development to the back-eddies of salvage and relief—we have a right to speak.
By the hot anger and civil strife that we have known; by our pride, vain-glory, and covetousness; by the struggles we have made for national integrity and defense of our hearthstones; by our consciousness that every instinct and motive and ideal at work in this war, however lofty or however base, has had some counterpart in our national history and our current life—we can speak a common language.
By that comradeship among nations which has made for mutual understanding; by those inventions which have bound us in communication and put the horrors of war at our doors; by the mechanical contrivances which multiply and intensify those horrors; by the quickening human sympathies which have made us sensitive to the hurts of others—we can speak as fellow-victims of this great oppression.
By our heritage from each embattled nation; by our debt to them for languages and faiths and social institutions; for science, scholarship and invention; by the broken and desolated hearts that will come to us when the war ends; by our kinships and our unfeigned friendships—we can speak as brothers.
By all these things, we hold the present opportunity for conscience-searching and constructive action to be an especial charge upon us; upon the newcomers among us from the fatherlands; and upon the joint youth of all the peoples of the two Americas.