But I, for one, am glad to attempt the answer again and again, in the hope that I may make it clearer and clearer that my one thought is to satisfy those who struggle in the ranks and are, perhaps above all others, entitled to a reply whose meaning no one can have any excuse for misunderstanding, if he understands the language in which it is spoken or can get someone to translate it correctly into his own. And I believe that the leaders of the Governments with which we are associated will speak, as they have occasion, as plainly as I have tried to speak. I hope that they will feel free to say whether they think that I am in any degree mistaken in my interpretation of the issues involved or in my purpose with regard to the means by which a satisfactory settlement of those issues may be obtained. Unity of purpose and of counsel are as imperatively necessary in this war as was unity of command in the battlefield; and with perfect unity of purpose and counsel will come assurance of complete victory. It can be had in no other way. "Peace drives" can be effectively neutralized and silenced only by showing that every victory of the nations associated against Germany brings the nations nearer the sort of peace which will bring security and reassurance to all peoples and make the recurrence of another such struggle of pitiless force and bloodshed forever impossible, and that nothing else can. Germany is constantly intimating the "terms" she will accept; and always finds that the world does not want terms. It wishes the final triumph of justice and fair dealing.

ATTITUDE OF THE UNITED STATES TOWARD

MEXICO

WOODROW WILSON

[ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE WHITE HOUSE TO THE MEXICAN EDITORS, JUNE 7, 1918]

Gentlemen, I have never received a group of men who were more welcome than you are, because it has been one of my distresses during the period of my Presidency that the Mexican people did not more thoroughly understand the attitude of the United States toward Mexico.1 I think I can assure you, and I hope you have had every evidence of the truth of my assurance, that that attitude is one of sincere friendship. And not merely the sort of friendship which prompts one not to do his neighbor any harm, but the sort of friendship which earnestly desires to do his neighbor service.

My own policy, the policy of my own administration, toward Mexico was at every point based upon this principle, that the internal settlement of the affairs of Mexico was none of our business; that we had no right to interfere with or to dictate to Mexico in any particular with regard to her own affairs. Take one aspect of our relations which at one time may have been difficult for you to understand: When we sent troops into Mexico,2 our sincere desire was nothing else than to assist you to get rid of a man who was making the settlement of your affairs for the time being impossible. We had no desire to use our troops for any other purpose, and I was in

hopes that by assisting in that way and then immediately withdrawing I might give substantial proof of the truth of the assurances that I had given your Government through President Carranza.

And at the present time it distresses me to learn that certain influences, which I assume to be German in their origin, are trying to make a wrong impression throughout Mexico as to the purposes of the United States, and not only a wrong impression, but to give an absolutely untrue account of things that happen. You know the distressing things that have been happening just off our coasts. You know of the vessels that have been sunk. I yesterday received a quotation from a paper in Guadalajara which stated that thirteen of our battleships had been sunk off the capes of the Chesapeake. You see how dreadful it is to have people so radically misinformed. It was added that our Navy Department was withholding the truth with regard to these sinkings. I have no doubt that the publisher of the paper published that in perfect innocence without intending to convey wrong impressions, but it is evident that allegations of that sort proceed from those who wish to make trouble between Mexico and the United States.

Now, gentlemen, for the time being, at any rate—and I hope it will not be a short time-the influence of the United States is somewhat pervasive in the affairs of the world, and I believe that it is pervasive because the nations of the world which are less powerful than some of the greatest nations are coming to believe that cur sincere desire is to do disinterested servivce. We are the champions of those nations which have not had a military

standing which would enable them to compete with the strongest nations in the world, and I look forward with pride to the time, which I hope will soon come, when we can give substantial evidence, not only that we do not want anything out of this war, but that we would not accept anything out of it, that it is absolutely a case of disinterested action. And if you will watch the attitude of our people, you will see that nothing stirs them so deeply as assurances that this war, so far as we are concerned, is for idealistic objects. One of the difficulties that I experienced during the first three years of the war -the years when the United States was not in the war— was in getting the foreign offices of European nations to believe that the United States was seeking nothing for herself, that her neutrality was not selfish, and that if she came in she would not come in to get anything substantial out of the war, any material object, any territory, or trade, or anything else of that sort. In some of the foreign offices there were men who personally knew me and they believed, I hope, that I was sincere in assuring them that our purposes were disinterested, but they thought that these assurances came from an academic gentleman removed from the ordinary sources of information and speaking the idealistic purposes of the cloister. They did not believe that I was speaking the real heart of the American people, and I knew all along that I was. Now I believe that everybody who comes into contact with the American people knows that I am speaking their purposes.

4

The other night in New York, at the opening of the campaign for funds for our Red Cross, I made an

address. I had not intended to refer to Russia, but I was speaking without notes, and in the course of what I said my own thought was led to Russia, and I said that we meant to stand by Russia just as firmly as we would stand by France or England or any other of the allies. The audience to which I was speaking was not an audience from which I would have expected an enthusiastic response to that. It was rather too well dressed. It was not an audience, in other words, made of the class of people whom you would suppose to have the most intimate feeling for the sufferings of the ordinary man in Russia, but that audience jumped into the aisles, the whole audience rose to its feet, and nothing that I had said on that occasion aroused anything like the enthusiasm that that single sentence aroused. Now, there is a sample, gentlemen. We can not make anything out of Russia. We can not make anything out of standing by Russia at this time-the most remote of the European nations, so far as we are concerned, the one with which we have had the least connections in trade and advantage -and yet the people of the United States rose to that suggestion as to no other that I made in that address. That is the heart of America, and we are ready to show you by any act of friendship that you may propose our real feelings toward Mexico.

Some of us, if I may say so privately, look back with regret upon some of the more ancient relations that we have had with Mexico long before our generation; and America, if I may so express it, would now feel ashamed to take advantage of a neighbor. So I hope that you can carry back to your homes something better than the