taken out of your hand; it makes no difference how deep the passion of the Nation lies, that passion may be so overborne by the rush of fortune in circumstances like those which now exist that you feel the sort of-I had almost said resentment that a man feels when his own affairs are not within his own hands. You can imagine the strain upon the feeling of any man who is trying to interpret the spirit of his country when he feels that that spirit can not have its own way beyond a certain point. And one of the greatest points of strain upon me, if I may be permitted to point it out, was this:

There are two reasons why the chief wish of America is for peace. One is that they love peace and have nothing to do with the present quarrel; and the other is that they believe the present quarrel has carried those engaged in it so far that they can not be held to ordinary standards of responsibility, and that, therefore, as some men have expressed it to me, since the rest of the world is mad, why should we not simply refuse to have anything to do with the rest of the world in the ordinary channels of action? Why not let the storm pass, and then, when it is all over, have the reckonings? Knowing that from both these two points of view the passion of America was for peace, I was, nevertheless, aware that America is one of the Nations of the world, not only, but one of the chief Nations of the world-a Nation that grows more and more powerful almost in spite of herself; that grows morally more and more influential even when she is not aware of it; and that if she is to play the part which she most covets, it is necessary that she should act more or less from the point of view of the rest of the world. If I can not retain my moral influence over a man except by occasionally knocking him down, if that is the only basis upon which he will respect me, then for the sake of his soul I

have got occasionally to knock him down. You know how we have read in-isn't it in Ralph Connor's stories of western life in Canada?-that all his sky pilots are ready for a fracas at any time, and how the ultimate salvation of the souls of their parishioners depends upon their using their fists occasionally. If a man will not listen to you quietly in a seat, sit on his neck and make him listen; just as I have always maintained, particularly in view of certain experiences of mine, that the shortest road to a boy's moral sense is through his cuticle. There is a direct and, if I may be permitted the pun, a fundamental connection between the surface of his skin and his moral consciousness. You arrest his attention first in that way, and then get the moral lesson conveyed to him in milder ways that, if he were grown up, would be the only ways you would use.

So I say that I have been aware that in order to do the very thing that we are proudest of the ability to do, there might come a time when we would have to do it in a way that we would prefer not to do it; and the great burden on my spirits, gentlemen, has been that it has been up to me to choose when that time came. Can you imagine a thing more calculated to keep a man awake at nights than that? Because, just because I did not feel that I was the whole thing and was aware that my duty was a duty of interpretation, how could I be sure that I had the right elements of information by which to interpret truly?

What we are now talking about is largely spiritual. You say, "All the people out my way think so and so." Now, I know perfectly well that you have not talked with all the people out your way. I find that out again and again. And so you are taken by surprise. The people of the United States are not asking anybody's leave to do their own thinking, and are not asking anybody to tip

them off what they ought to think. They are thinking for themselves, every man for himself; and you do not know, and, the worst of it is, since the responsibility is mine, I do not know what they are thinking about. I have the most imperfect means of finding out, and yet I have got to act as if I knew. That is the burden of it, and I tell you, gentlemen, it is a pretty serious burden, particularly if you look upon the office as I do that I am not put here to do what I please. If I were, it would have been very much more interesting than it has been. I am put here to interpret, to register, to suggest, and, more than that, and much greater than that, to be suggested to.

Now, that is where the experience that I forecast has differed from the experience that I have had. In domestic matters I think I can in most cases come pretty near a guess where the thought of America is going, but in foreign affairs the chief element is where action is going on in other quarters of the world and not where thought is going in the United States. Therefore, I have several times taken the liberty of urging upon you gentlemen not yourselves to know more than the State Department knows about foreign affairs. Some of you have shown a singular range of omniscience, and certain things have been reported as understood in administrative circles which I never heard of until I read the newspapers. I am constantly taken by surprise in regard to decisions which are said to be my own, and this gives me an uncomfortable feeling that some providence is at work with which I have had no communication at all. Now, that is pretty dangerous, gentlemen, because it happens that remarks start fires. There is tinder lying everywhere, not only on the other side of the water, but on this side of the water, and a man that spreads sparks may be responsible for something a great deal worse than

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burning a town on the Mexican border. Thoughts may be bandits. Thoughts may be raiders. Thoughts may be invaders. Thoughts may be disturbers of international peace; and when you reflect upon the importance of this country keeping out of the present war, you will know what tremendous elements we are all dealing with. We are all in the same boat. If somebody does not keep the processes of peace going, if somebody does not keep their passions disengaged, by what impartial judgment and suggestion is the world to be aided to a solution when the whole thing is over? If you are in a conference in which you know nobody is disinterested, how are you going to make a plan? I tell you this, gentlemen, the only thing that saves the world is the little handful of disinterested men that are in it.

Now, I have found a few disinterested men. I wish I had found more. I can name two or three men with whom I have conferred again and again and again, and I have never caught them by an inadvertence thinking about themselves for their own interests, and I tie to those men as you would tie to an anchor. I tie to them as you would tie to the voices of conscience if you could be sure that you always heard them. Men who have no axes to grind! Men who love America so that they would give their lives for it and never care whether anybody heard that they had given their lives for it; willing to die in obscurity if only they might serve! Those are the men, and nations like those men are the nations that are going to serve the world and save it. There never was a time in the history of the world when character, just sheer character all by itself, told more than it does now. A friend of mine says that every man who takes office in Washington either grows or swells, and when I give a man an office, I watch him carefully to see whether he is

swelling or growing. The mischief of it is that when they swell they do not swell enough to burst. If they would only swell to the point where you might insert a pin and let the gases out, it would be a great delight. I do not know any pastime that would be more diverting, except that the gases are probably poisonous, so that we would have to stand from under. But the men who grow, the men who think better a year after they are put in office than they thought when they were put in office, are the balance wheel of the whole thing. They are the ballast that enables the craft to carry sail and to make port in the long run, no matter what the weather is.

So I have come willing to make this narrative of experience to you. I have come through the fire since I talked to you last. Whether the metal is purer than it was, God only knows; but the fire has been there, the fire has penetrated every part of it, and if I may believe my own thoughts I have less partisan feeling, more impatience of party maneuver, more enthusiasm for the right thing, no matter whom it hurts, than I ever had before in my life. And I have something that it is no doubt dangerous to have, but that I can not help having. I have a profound intellectual contempt for men who can not see the signs of the times. I have to deal with some men who know no more of the modern processes of politics than if they were living in the eighteenth century, and for them I have a profound and comprehensive intellectual contempt. They are blind. They are hopelessly blind; and the worst of it is I have to spend hours of my time talking to them when I know before I start as much as after I have finished that it is absolutely useless to talk to them. I am talking in vacuo.

The business of every one of us, gentlemen, is to realize that if we are correspondents of papers who have not yet