vastating achievement of
bleeding herself before she could extend beckoning hands to American
mediation.

In the autumn of 1915 the President inaugurated his campaign for
national defense, or "preparedness," bred by the dangers more or less
imminent while the European War lasted. "We never know what to-morrow
might bring forth," he warned. In a series of speeches throughout the
country he impressed these views on the people:

The United States had no aggressive purposes, but must be prepared to
defend itself and retain its full liberty and self-development. It
should have the fullest freedom for national growth. It should be
prepared to enforce its right to unmolested action. For this purpose a
citizen army of 400,000 was needed to be raised in three years, and a
strengthened navy as the first and chief line of defense for
safeguarding at all costs the good faith and honor of the nation. The
nonpartisan support of all citizens for effecting a condition of
preparedness, coupled with the revival and renewal of national
allegiance, he said, was also imperative, and Americans of alien
sympathies who were not responsive to such a call on their patriotism
should be called to account.

This, in brief, constituted the President's plea for preparedness. But
such a policy did not involve nor contemplate the conquest of other
lands or peoples, nor the accomplishment of any purpose by force
beyond the defense of American territory, nor plans for an aggressive
war, military training that would interfere unduly with civil
pursuits, nor panicky haste in defense preparations.

The President took a midway stand. He stood between the pacifists and
the extremists, who advocated the militarism of Europe as the
inevitable policy for the United States to adopt to meet the dangers
they fancied.

The country's position, as the President saw it, was stated by him in
a speech delivered in New York City:

"Our thought is now inevitably of new things about which formerly we
gave ourselves little concern. We are thinking now chiefly of our
relations with the rest of the world, not our commercial relations,
about those we have thought and planned always, but about our
political relations, our duties as an individual and independent force
in the world to ourselves, our neighbors and the world itself.

"Within a year we have witnessed what we did not believe possible, a
great European conflict involving many of the greatest nations of the
wo