LABOR MUST BE FREE

[Address to the American Federation of Labor Convention, Buffalo, New York, November 12, 1917.]

MR. PRESIDENT, DELEGATES OF THE AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: 

I esteem it a great privilege and a real honor to be thus admitted to your public counsels.  When your executive committee paid me the compliment of inviting me here I gladly accepted the invitation because it seems to me that this, above all other times in our history, is the time for common counsel, for the drawing together not only of the energies but of the minds of the Nation.  I thought that it was a welcome opportunity for disclosing to you some of the thoughts that have been gathering in my mind during these last momentous months.

CRITICAL TIME IN HISTORY

I am introduced to you as the President of the United States, and yet I would be pleased if you would put the thought of the office into the background and regard me as one of your fellow-citizens who has come here to speak, not the words of authority, but the words of counsel; the words which men should speak to one another who wish to be frank in a moment more critical perhaps than the history of the world has ever yet known; a moment when it is every man’s duty to forget himself, to forget his own interests, to fill himself with the nobility of a great national and world conception, and act upon a new platform elevated above the ordinary affairs of life and lifted to where men have views of the long destiny of mankind.

I think that in order to realize just what this moment of counsel is it is very desirable that we should remind ourselves just how this war came about and just what it is for.  You can explain most wars very simply, but the explanation of this is not so simple.  Its roots run deep into all the obscure soils of history, and in my view this is the last decisive issue between the old principle of power and the new principle of freedom.

WAR STARTED BY GERMANY

The war was started by Germany.  Her authorities deny that they started it, but I am willing to let the statement I have just made await the verdict of history.  And the thing that needs to be explained is why Germany started the war.  Remember what the position of Germany in the world was—­as enviable a position as any nation has ever occupied.  The whole world stood at admiration of her wonderful intellectual and material achievements.  All the intellectual men of the world went to school to her.  As a university man I have been surrounded by men trained in Germany, men who had resorted to Germany because nowhere else could they get such thorough and searching training, particularly in the principles of science and the principles that underlie modern material achievement.  Her men of science had made her industries perhaps the most competent industries of the world, and the label “Made in Germany” was a guarantee of good workmanship and of sound material.  She had access to all the markets of the world, and every other nation who traded in those markets feared Germany because of her effective and almost irresistible competition.  She had a “place in the sun.”