Moreover, taxes of that sort will not be paid until June of next year, and the Treasury must anticipate them. It must use the money they are to produce before it is due. It must sell short-time certificates of indebtedness. In the Autumn a much larger sale of long-time bonds must be effected than has yet been attempted. What are the bankers to think of the certificates if they do not certainly know where the money is to come from which is to take them up? and how are investors to approach the purchase of bonds with any sort of confidence or knowledge of their own affairs if they do not know what taxes they are to pay and what economies and adjustments of their business they must effect? I cannot assure the country of a successful administration of the Treasury in 1918 if the question of further taxation is to be left undecided until 1919.
The consideration that dominates every other now, and makes every other seem trivial and negligible, is the winning of the war. We are not only in the midst of the war, we are at the very peak and crisis of it. Hundreds of thousands of our men, carrying our hearts with them and our fortunes, are in the field, and ships are crowding faster and faster to the ports of France and England with regiment after regiment, thousand after thousand, to join them until the enemy shall be beaten and brought to a reckoning with mankind. There can be no pause or intermission. The great enterprise must, on the contrary, be pushed with greater and greater energy. The volume of our might must steadily and rapidly be augmented until there can be no question of resisting it. If that is to be accomplished, gentlemen, money must sustain it to the utmost. Our financial program must no more be left in doubt or suffered to lag than our ordnance program or our ship program or our munition program or our program for making millions of men ready. These others are not programs, indeed, but mere plans upon paper, unless there is to be an unquestionable supply of money.
A TAX ON PROFITEERING
That is the situation, and it is the situation which creates the duty; no choice or preference of ours. There is only one way to meet that duty. We must meet it without selfishness or fear of consequences. Politics is adjourned. The elections will go to those who thing[?think?] least of it; to those who go to the constituencies without explanations or excuses, with a plain record of duty faithfully and disinterestedly performed. I for one, am always confident that the people of this country will give a just verdict upon the service of the men who act for them when the facts such that no man can disguise or conceal them. There is no danger of deceit now. An intense and pitiless light beats upon every man and every action in this tragic plot of war that is now upon the stage. If lobbyists hurry to Washington to attempt to turn what you do in the matter of taxation to their protection or advantage, the light will beat also upon them. There is abundant fuel for the light in the records of the Treasury with regard to profits of every sort. The profiteering that cannot be got at by the restraints of conscience and love of country can be got at by taxation. There is such profiteering now, and the information with regard to it is available and indisputable.
I am advising you to act upon this matter of taxation now, gentlemen, not because I do not know that you can see and interpret the facts and the duty they impose just as well and with as clear a perception of the obligation involved as I can, but because there is a certain solemn satisfaction in sharing with you the responsibilities of such a time. The world never stood in such a case before. Men never before had so clear and so moving a vision of duty. I know that you will begrudge the work to be done here by us no more than the men begrudge us theirs who lie in the trenches and sally forth to their death. There is a stimulating comradeship knitting us all together. And this task to which I invite your immediate consideration will be performed under favorable influences, if we will look to what the country is thinking and expecting and care nothing at all for what is being said and believed in the lobbies of Washington hotels, where the atmosphere seems to make it possible to believe what is believed nowhere else.
SPIRIT OF THE NATION
Have you not felt the spirit of the nation rise and its thought become a single and common thought since these eventful days came in which we have been sending our boys to the other side? I think you must read that thought, as I do, to mean this, that the people of this country are not only united in the resolute purpose to win this war, but are ready and willing to bear any burden and undergo any sacrifice that it may be necessary for them to bear in order to win it. We need not be afraid to tax them, if we lay taxes justly. They know that the war must be paid for, that it is they who must pay for it, and, if the burden is justly distributed and the sacrifice made a common sacrifice from which none escapes who can bear it at all, they will carry it cheerfully and with a sort of solemn pride. I have always been proud to be an American, and was never more proud than now, when all that we have said and all that we have foreseen about our people is coming true. The great days have come when the only thing that they ask for or admire is duty, greatly and adequately. done; when their only wish for America is that she may share the freedom she enjoys, when a great, compelling sympathy wells up in their hearts for men everywhere who suffer and are oppressed, and when they see at last the high uses for which their wealth has been piled up and their mighty power accumulated, and, counting neither blood nor treasure, now that their final day of opportunity has come, rejoice to spend and to be spent through a long night of suffering and terror in order that they and men everywhere may see the dawn of a day of righteousness and justice and peace. Shall we grow weary when they bid us act?
The President's Appeal for Economy
Secretary McAdoo, realizing that to carry the war through to a successful issue may test this nation's resources to the extreme limit of endurance and self-denial, inaugurated a campaign in the middle of May, 1918, for fuller conservation of food, fuel, labor, and money. In support of this campaign President Wilson issued the following signed letter on May 29: