ica after the war if they had worked in factories making munitions for the Allies. These penalties would not only have been those prescribed by the law for helping enemies of the monarchy, but much more so those of public opinion, as in the case of a man who had made munitions for the Allies who should go back to his home village perhaps to inherit the property of men who had been killed by those munitions. Naturally, these considerations, if brought to their attention, might have caused a certain number of AustroHungarian subjects to leave their employment in American munition factories, and I had been of the opinion that Dr. Dumba's plans were designed only to give aid to needy workingmen who had given up their work and had not yet found other employment. The small sum of money suggested in this connection, I be

lieve only $15,000, would have been absolutely insufficient to finance a strike.

Besides, I am quite certain that if, on second thought, Dr. Dumba had come to the conclusion that his ideas were not in accord with the duties and obligations toward the United States Government imposed by his position here he would have withdrawn himself. Therefore, even if appearances at first should be against him, I am especially sorry that the whole matter of sending this letter has been done in such a rush. I am confident that the Imperial and Royal Government has not the slightest desire for any complications or difficulties with the United States, for it puts too much value on the cordial and friendly relations which have always existed between the two Governments and which have been emphasized of late.

I

WISH to make one comment on the statement so frequently made that we must stand by the President. I heartily subscribe to this on condition and only on condition that it is followed by the statement so long as the President stands by the country.

It is defensible to state that we stand by the country, right or wrong; it is not defensible for any free man in a free republic to state that he will stand by any official right or wrong, or by any exofficial.

Even as regards the country, while I believe that once war is on, every citizen should stand by the land, yet in any crisis which may or may not lead up to war, the prime duty of the citizen is, by criticism and advice, even against what he may know to be the majority opinion of his fellow citizens, to insist that the nation take the right course of action.

There is even a stronger reason for demanding of every loyal citizen that, after the President has been given ample time to act rightly and has either not acted at all or has acted wrongly, he shall be made to feel that the citizens whom he has been elected to serve demand that he be loyal to the honor and to the interests of the land.

The President has the right to have said of him nothing but what is true; he should have sufficient time to make his policy clear; but as regards supporting him in all public policy, and above all in international policy, the right of any President is only to demand public support because he does well; because he serves the public well, and not merely because he is President.

Presidents differ, just like other folks. No man could effectively stand by President Lincoln unless he had stood against President Buchanan. If, after the firing on Sumter, President Lincoln had in a public speech announced that the believers in the Union were too proud to fight, and if instead of action there had been three months of admirable elocutionary correspondence with Jefferson Davis, by midsummer the friends of the Union would have followed Horace Greeley's advice, to let the erring sisters go in peace— for peace at that date was put above righteousness by some mistaken souls, just as it is at the present day.

The man who believes in peace at any price or in substituting all inclusive arbitration treaties for an army and navy should instantly move to China. If he stays here, then more manly people will have to defend him, and he is not worth defending. Let him get out of the country as quickly as possible. To treat elocution as a substitute for action, to rely upon high-sounding words unbacked by deeds, is proof of a mind that dwells only in the realm of shadow and of sham.

THIS NATION'S NEEDS Colonel Roosevelt's speech follows in full:

I wish to congratulate all who have been at this Plattsburg camp and at the similar camps throughout the country upon the opportunity they have had to minister to their own self-respect by fitting themselves to serve the country if the need should arise. You have done your duty. In doing it you have added to your value as citizens. You have the

right to hold your heads higher because you are fulfilling the prime duty of free

men.

No man is fit to be free unless he is not merely willing but eager to fit himself to fight for his freedom, and no man can fight for his freedom unless he is trained to act in conjunction with his fellows. The worst of all feelings to arouse in others is the feeling of contempt. Those men have mean souls who desire that this nation shall not be fit to defend its own rights and that its sons shall not possess a high and resolute temper. But even men of stout heart need to remember that when the hour for action has struck no courage will avail unless there has been thorough training, thorough preparation in advance.

The greatest need for this country is a first-class navy. Next, we need a thoroughly trained regular or professional army of 200,000 men if we have universal military service; and of at least half a million men if we do not have such universal military service.

At present a single army corps from Germany or Japan (which, if subtracted from the efficient fighting forces of either would not even be felt) could at any time be ferried across the ocean and take New York or San Francisco and destroy them or hold them to ransom with absolute impunity, and the United States at present would be helpless to do more than blame some scapegoat for what was really the fault of our people as a whole in failing to prepare in advance against the day of disaster.

But the professional navy and the professional army are not enough. Free citizens should be able to do their own fighting. The professional pacifist is as much out of place in a democracy as is the poltroon himself; and he is no better citizen than the poltroon. Probably no body of citizens in the United States during the last five years have wrought so efficiently for national decadence and international degradation as the professional pacifists, the peace-at-any-price men, who have tried to teach our people that silly all-inclusive arbitration treaties and the utterance of fatuous platitudes

at peace congresses are substitutes for adequate military preparedness.

These people are seeking to Chinafy this country. A high Japanese military officer recently remarked to a gentleman of my acquaintance that the future dominion over the seas and lands of the Pacific lay with Japan, because China was asleep and America was falling asleep, and in this world the future lay with the nations of patriotic and soldierly spirit. If the United States were to follow the lead of the professional pacifists and to permit itself to be Chinafied, this observer's opinion would be quite correct.

It is an abhorrent thing to make a wanton or an unjust war. It is an abhorrent thing to trespass on the rights of the weak. But it is an utterly contemptible thing to be unable and unwilling to fight for one's own rights in the first place, and then, if possessed of sufficient loftiness of soul, to fight for the rights of the weak who are wronged. The greatest service that has ever been rendered markind has been rendered by the men who have not shrunk from righteous war in order to bring about righteous peace, by soldier-statesmen of the type of Washington, by statesmen of the type of Abraham Lincoln, whose work was done by soldiers. The men of the Revolution and the men of the civil war, and the women who raised these men to be soldiers are the men and women to whom we owe a deathless debt of gratitude.

This means that all our young men should be trained so that at need they can fight. Under the conditions of modern warfare it is the wildest nonsense to talk of men springing to arms in mass unless they have been taught how to act and how to use the arms to which they spring.

For thirteen months America has played an ignoble part among the nations. We have tamely submitted to seeing the weak, whom we had covenanted to protect, wronged. We have seen our own men, women, and children murdered on the high seas, without action on our part. We have treated elocution as a substitute for action. During this time our Govern

ment has not taken the smallest step in the way of preparedness to defend our own rights. Yet these thirteen months have made evident the lamentable fact that force is more dominant now in the affairs of the world than ever before; that the most powerful of modern military nations is utterly brutal and ruthless in its disregard of international morality, and that righteousness divorced from force is utterly futile. Reliance upon high-sounding words unbacked by deeds is proof of a mind that dewlls only in the realm of shadow and sham.

This camp has lasted two months. It has done immense good to you who have been able to come here-although, by the way, you must not think that it has more than marked the beginning of training you to your duties. But you have been able to come because you are either yourself fairly well-to-do or else because you happen to serve employers who are both public-spirited and fairly well-to-do, and who give you holidays with pay.

The Government has not paid a dollar for this camp. Inasmuch as we as a nation have done nothing whatever for national defense during the last thirteen months, the time when during all our history it was most necessary to prepare for self-defense, it is well that private individuals should have tried, however insufficiently, to provide some kind of substitute for proper governmental action. The army officers and enlisted men have put all good Americans under a fresh debt by what they have done in connection with this camp, and we owe much to the private citizens who have advanced the money without which the camp could not have been held.

But you men have had to buy your own uniforms; you have had to spend money in fifty different ways; in other words, you have had to pay for the privilege of learning how to serve your country. This means that for every one man like yourselves who can afford to come here there are a hundred equally good American citizens, equally patriotic, who would like to come and are unable to. It is undemocratic that the young farmer, that the young hired man on a farm, that the hardworking clerk or mechanic

or day laborer, all of whom wish to serve the country as much as you do and are as much entitled to the benefit of this camp as you are, should be unable to attend such a camp.

They cannot attend to it unless the nation does as Switzerland has done and gives the opportunity for every generous and right-thinking American to learn by, say, six months' actual service in one year or two years how to do his duty to the country if the need arises-and the Americans who are not right-thinking should be made to serve anyhow, for a democracy has full right to the service of its citizens.

Such service would be an immense benefit to the man industrially. It would not only help the nation, but it would help each individual who undergoes the training. Switzerland has universal military service, and it is the most democratic and least militaristic of countries, and a much more orderly and less homicidal country than our own.

Camps like this are schools of civic virtue as well as of military efficiency. They should be universal and obligatory for all our young men. Every man worth his salt will wish to come to them.

As for the professional pacifists and the poltroons and college sissies who organize peace-at-any-price societies, and the mere money-getters and mere moneyspenders, they should be made to understand that they have got to render whatever service the country demands. They must be made to submit to training in doing their duty. Then if, in the event of war, they prove unfit to fight, at any rate they can be made to dig trenches and kitchen sinks, or do whatever else a debauch of indulgence in professional pacificism has left them fit to do. Both the professional pacifists and the professional hyphenated American need to be taught that it is not for them to decide the conditions under which they will fight. They will fight whoever the nation decides to fight, and whenever the nation deems a war necessary.

Camps like this are the best possible antidotes to hyphenated Americanism. The worst thing that could befall this country would be to have the American

nation become a tangle of jangling nationalities, a knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, and French-Americans. If divided in such

fashion, we shall most certainly fall. We can stand as a nation only if we are genuinely united.

The events of the past year have shown us that in any crisis the hyphenated American is an active force against America, an active force for wrongdoing. The effort to hoist two flags on the same flagpole always means that one flag is hoisted underneath, and the hyphenated American invariably hoists the flag of the United States underneath. We must all be Americans and nothing else. You in this camp include men of every creed and every national origin—Jew and Gentile, Catholic and Protestant, men of English and Irish, German and French, Slavonic and Latin, and Scandinavian descent. But you are all Americans, and nothing else. You have only one nationality. You acknowledge but one country. You are loyal to only one flag.

There exists no finer body of American citizens in this country than those citizens of German birth or descent who are in good faith Americans and nothing else.

We could create an entire national Administration, from the President down to the last Cabinet officer, every one of whose members would be of German blood and some of them of German birth, but all of them Americans and nothing else, all of them Americans of such a type that the men who feel as I do could heartily and without reserve support them in all our international relations. But the Americans of German blood who are of this type are not hyphenated Americans. They are not German-Americans. They are just plain Americans like the rest of us. The professional German-American has shown himself within the last twelve months to be an enemy to this country as well as to humanity. The recent exposures of the way in which these German-Americans have worked together with the emissaries of the German Government-often by direct corruptionagainst the integrity of American institutions and against America doing its international duty should arouse scornful

indignation in every American worth calling such. The leaders among the professional German - Americans have preached and practiced what comes perilously near to treason against the United States.

Under The Hague Convention it was our bounden duty to take whatever action was necessary to prevent and, if not to prevent, then to undo, the hideous wrong that was done to Belgium. We have shirked this duty. We have shown a spirit so abject that Germany has deemed it safe to kill our women and children on the high seas. As for the export of munitions of war, it would be a base abandonment of morality to refuse to make these shipments. Such a refusal is proposed only to favor the nation that sank the Lusitania and the Arabic and committed the crime against Belgium, the greatest international crime committed since the close of the Napoleonic contests a century ago. It is not a lofty thing, on the contrary it an evil thing, to practice a timid and selfish neutrality between right and wrong. It is wrong for an individual. It is still more wrong for a nation. But it is worse in the name of neutrality to favor the nation that has done evil.

As regards the export of munitions of war, the morality of the act depends upon the use to which the munitions are to be put. It was wrong to subjugate Belgium. It is wrong to keep her in subjugation. It is an utterly contemptible thing not to help in every possible way to undo this wrong. The manufacturers of cannon, rifles, cartridges, automobiles, or saddlery who refuse to ship them for use by the armies that are striving to restore Belgium to its own people should be put on a roll of dishonor.

Exactly the same morality should obtain internationally that obtains nationally. It is right for a private firm to furnish arms to the policeman who puts down the thug, the burglar, the white slaver, and the blackhander. It is wrong to furnish the blackhander, the burglar, and the white slaver with weapons to be used against the policeman. The analogy holds true in international life.

Germany has herself been the greatest