mocracy, for the right of those who submit to authority
to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties
of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of
free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the
world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and
our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with
the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is
privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave
her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God
helping her, she can do no other.

TO THE COUNTRY

[President Wilson's Address to his Fellow-Countrymen, April 16, 1917.]

MY FELLOW-COUNTRYMEN:

The entrance of our own beloved country into the grim and terrible war
for democracy and human rights which has shaken the world creates so
many problems of national life and action which call for immediate
consideration and settlement that I hope you will permit me to address
to you a few words of earnest counsel and appeal with regard to them.

We are rapidly putting our navy upon an effective war footing and are
about to create and equip a great army, but these are the simplest parts
of the great task to which we have addressed ourselves. There is not a
single selfish element, so far as I can see, in the cause we are
fighting for. We are fighting for what we believe and wish to be the
rights of mankind and for the future peace and security of the world. To
do this great thing worthily and successfully we must devote ourselves
to the service without regard to profit or material advantage and with
an energy and intelligence that will rise to the level of the enterprise
itself. We must realize to the full how great the task is and how many
things, how many kinds and elements of capacity and service and
self-sacrifice, it involves.

These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides
fighting,--the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless:

We must supply abundant food for ourselves and for our armies and our
seamen not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom we
have now made common cause, in whose support and by whose sides we shall
be fighting.

We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to
the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will every
day be needed there, and a