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. The currents of our
thoughts as well as the currents of our trade run quick at all seasons
back and forth between us and them. The war inevitably set its mark from
the first alike upon our minds, our industries, our commerce, our
politics and our social action. To be indifferent to it, or independent
of it, was out of the question.
And yet all the while we have been conscious that we were not part of
it. In that consciousness, despite many divisions, we have drawn closer
together. We have been deeply wronged upon the seas, but we have not
wished to wrong or injure in return; have retained throughout the
consciousness of standing in some sort apart, intent upon an interest
that transcended the immediate issues of the war itself.
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