neutrality of the United States is not the petty
desire to keep out of trouble. To judge by my experience I have never
been able to keep out of trouble. I have never looked for it, but I have
always found it. I do not want to walk around trouble. If any man wants
a scrap--that is, an interesting scrap and worth while--I am his man. I
warn him that he is not going to draw me into the scrap for his
advertisement, but if he is looking for trouble--that is, the trouble of
men in general--and I can help a little, why, then, I am in for it. But
I am interested in neutrality because there is something so much
greater to do than fight, because there is something, there is a
distinction waiting for this nation that no nation has ever yet got.
That is the distinction of absolute self-control and self-mastery.

Whom do you admire most among your friends? The irritable man? The man
out of whom you can get a "rise" without trying? The man who will fight
at the drop of the hat, whether he knows what the hat is dropped for or
not?

Don't you admire and don't you fear, if you have to contest with him,
the self-mastered man who watches you with calm eye and comes in only
when you have carried the thing so far that you must be disposed of?
That is the man you respect. That is the man who you know has at bottom
a much more fundamental and terrible courage than the irritable,
fighting man.

Now, I covet for America this splendid courage of reserve moral force,
and I wanted to point out to you gentlemen simply this: There is news
and news. There is what is called news from Turtle Bay, that turns out
to be falsehood, at any rate in what it is said to signify, and which if
you could get the nation to believe it true might disturb our
equilibrium and our self-possession. We ought not to deal in stuff of
that kind. We ought not to permit things of that sort to use up the
electrical energy of the wires, because its energy is malign, its energy
is not of the truth, its energy is of mischief.

It is possible to sift truth. I have known some things to go out on the
wires as true when there was only one man or one group of men who could
have told the originators of the report whether it was true or not, and
they were not asked whether it was true or not for fear it might not be
true. That sort of report ought not to go out over the wires.

There is generally, if not always, somebody who knows whether that thing
is so or not, and in these days a