But I shall not attempt to
review it. It speaks for itself and will be of increasing influence as
the years go by. This is not the time for retrospect. It is time,
rather, to speak our thoughts and purposes concerning the present and
the immediate future.
Although we have centered counsel and action with such unusual
concentration and success upon the great problems of domestic
legislation to which we addressed ourselves four years ago, other
matters have more and more forced themselves upon our attention, matters
lying outside our own life as a nation and over which we had no control,
but which, despite our wish to keep free of them, have drawn us more and
more irresistibly into their own current and influence.
It has been impossible to avoid them. They have affected the life of
the whole world. They have shaken men everywhere with a passion and an
apprehension they never knew before. It has been hard to preserve calm
counsel while the thought of our own people swayed this way and that
under their influence. We are a composite and cosmopolitan people. We
are of the blood of all the nations that are at war.
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