AMERICANISM Woodrow Wilson's Speeches on the War-Why He Made Them -and-What They Have Done The President's Principal Utterances in the Compiled, Edited and Annotated BY OLIVER MARBLE GALE CHICAGO THE BALDWIN SYNDICATE PUBLISHERS PUBLIC FOREWORD. One of the most interesting and significant facts noted in glancing back over the course of the war is this: The Central Powers have been getting worse all the time in their political morality, and the Allies have been getting better. The issue between them is now perfectly clear. The Central Powers are seen to be fighting for the glory and success of everything that is hateful to humanity. The Allies know that they themselves are fighting to make the world a fit place to live in. The issue was not so clear at first. It was only as the Allies came to realize the unbelievable evil that Germany stood for that their own purposes were purified and they were consecrated to winning the war for the sake of all humanity. No one, perhaps, has done so much to bring out the real issue as Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States. His calm, clear, steady, eloquent statements of Allied war aims and peace purposes, expressing the ideals which lay in the hearts of free men and women everywhere, have made him the world's accepted leader in the war for world democracy. The addresses, speeches and statements that have changed the face of history, brought him this leadership, and flung a peaceloving nation into the most hideous war of history with joyous, sefless devotion, are printed again in this little book, available to all. They are accompanied by notes, international comments, and a chronology of military and political war events, to bring out their setting, their significence and their consequences. Extracts are included from public statements made by Mr. Wilson before the beginning of the war and during the years before our entrance into it. These reveal the essential democracy of the President, and the unfoldment of the new Americanism. Possibly nothing could recall the course of the war and our own attitude towards it so clearly as reading in retrospect these words of Woodrow Wilson. The book is brought down to include the President's 4th of July speech at the Tomb of Washington. August 1, 1918. OLIVER MARBLE GALE. |