And at the present time it distresses me to learn that certain influences, which I assume to be German in their origin, are trying not only to make a wrong impression, but to give an absolutely untrue account of the things that happen.

You know distressing things have been happening just off our coast; you know of vessels that have been sunk. I yesterday received a quotation from a paper in Guadalajara which stated that thirteen of our battleships had been sunk off the Capes of Chesapeake.

You see how dreadful it is to have the people so radically misinformed. It was added that our Navy Department was withholding the facts with regard to these sinkings. I have no doubt that the publisher of the paper printed this in perfect innocence and without intending to convey a wrong impression, but it is evident that allegations of that sort proceed from those who wish to make trouble between Mexico and the United States.

An American patrol under a French officer in the trenches in France. Some of the rifles are equipped for firing grenades
(© Committee on Public Information, from international Film Service)

Pont-à-Mousson, in the Toul sector, showing the Church of St. Laurent. The transparent fabric hung across the street is for the purpose of misleading enemy aerial observers
(French Pictorial Service)

Now, gentlemen, for the time being at any rate, and I hope that it will not be a short time, the influence of the United States is somewhat pervasive in the affairs of the world, and I believe it is pervasive because those nations of the world which are less powerful than some of the greatest nations are coming to believe that our sincere desire is to do disinterested service.

We are the champions of those nations which have not had the military standing which would enable them to compete with the strongest nations in the world, and I look forward with pride to the time which I hope will come when we can give substantial evidence not only that we do not want anything out of this war, but that we would not accept anything out of this war; that it is absolutely a case of disinterested action.

And if you will watch the attitude of our people you will see that nothing stirs them so deeply as the assurances that this war, so far as we are concerned, is for idealistic objects. One of the difficulties that I experienced during the first three years of the war, the years when the United States was not in the war, was in getting the Foreign Offices of the European nations to believe that the United States was seeking nothing for herself, that her neutrality was not selfish, and that if she came in she would not come in to get anything substantial out of the war—any material object, any territory or trade or anything else of that sort.

In some Foreign Offices there were men who personally know me and they believed, I hope, that I was sincere in assuring them that our purposes were disinterested; but they thought that these assurances came from the academic gentleman removed from the ordinary sources of information and speaking the idealistic purposes of a cloister. They did not believe I was speaking the real heart of the American people, and I knew all along that I was. Now I believe every one who comes in contact with American people knows that I am speaking their purposes.

READY TO HELP RUSSIA

The other night in New York at the opening of the campaign for funds for our Red Cross I made an address. I had not intended to refer to Russia, but was speaking without notes, and in the course of what I said my own thought was led to Russia, and I said that we meant to stand by Russia just as firmly as we would stand by France or England or any other of our allies.

The audience to which I was speaking was not an audience from which I would have expected an enthusiastic response to that. It was rather too well dressed. It was an audience, in other words, made up of a class of people who would not have the most intimate feeling for the sufferings of the ordinary man in Russia; but that audience jumped to its feet in enthusiasm. Nothing else that I said on that occasion aroused anything like the enthusiasm that single sentence aroused.

Now that is a sample, gentlemen. We cannot make anything out of Russia. We cannot make anything out of our standing by Russia at this time—the remotest of European nations so far as we are concerned, the one with which we have had the least connections in trade and advantage—and yet the people of the United States rose to that suggestion as to no other that I made in that address.

That is part of America as we are ready to show it by any act of friendship toward Mexico. Some of us, if I may speak so privately, look back with regret upon some of the more ancient relations that we have had with Mexico long before our generation; and America, if I may now so accept it, would now feel ashamed to take advantage of her neighbor.