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The day book. [volume] (Chicago, Ill.) 1911-1917, April 15, 1916, LAST EDITION, Image 21

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Persistent link: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn83045487/1916-04-15/ed-1/seq-21/

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1THE DAY BOOK!
838S5S82S
N D. COCHRAN
EDITOR AND PUBLISHER
gOO 8. TEOIIIA ST. CHICAGO, ILU
TelenhnnPQ Editorial. Monroe 333
I Kiepnones circulation, Monroe 3S26
SUBSCRIPTION By Carrier ln Chi
cago, JO cents a Month By Mall.
United States and Canada, S3 00 a
Year
Entered as second-class matter April
21. 1JH at the postoffice at Chlcasro
111., under the Act of March 3, 187?
WILSON'S SPEECH
By Carl Sandburg.
Woodrow Wilson's speech before
the Common Counsel club in Wash
ington had some of the heart's blood
of the nation's chief executive in it.
Business interests of many kinds
powerful interests with powerful
newspapers and lobbies have used
all the pressure they could bring to
bear the last three years to push Wil
son into a war of conquest in Mex-j.
ico.
An army of 500,000 American men
and boys "crossing Mexico from bor
der to border," laying the Mexican
republic subject to the American re
public, fixing an American suzerainty
over the people of Mexico that's the
demand of newspapers and lobbies.
To this plan Wilson has said no
and no over and over again. It is the
one policy where no enemy of his,
speaking in sincerity, dares to call
him a man of mush. It is the one
policy in the voicing of which Wood
row Wilson has attracted thought
from those people who talk about
"human freedom" as something
more than a schoolroom Joke or an
editorial horse-laugh.
The definite places of men in his
tory are never fixed until years after
the action and turmoil of historic
men's lives are over. If Woodrow
Wilson is some day classed as a man
who shouldered his load 'and handled
his power for masses of people in the-
same way that Abe Lincoln, amid
doubts and accusations, was the lone
somest man in the nation it will be
on the basis of his action in Mexico,
refusing to hand over the federal gov
ernment to the plunderbunch of cap
italists hunting new fields of exploi
tation, and voicing that policy in
pointed and decisive statements like
those before Common Counsel club:
"These are days that search men's
hearts. These are solemn days when
all the moral standards of mankind
are about to be finally tried out.
"I was talking one day with a gen
tleman who was expounding to me
the very familiar idea that somebody
I dare say he would have preferred
to name the persons should act as
guardians and trustees for the people
of the neighboring republic of Mex
ico. I said:
" T defy you to show a single ex
ample in history in which liberty and
prosperity were ever handed down
from above.'
"Prosperity for the great masses of
mankind has never sprung out of the
soil of privilege. Prosperity for the
great masses of mankind has never
been created by the beneficience of
privilege.
"Prosperity and right, prosperity
and liberty have never come by fa
vor; they have always come by right
and the only competent expounders
of right are the men who covet the
opportunity to exercise them. When
I see the crust even so much as
slightly broken over the heads of a
population which has always been
directed by a board of trustees, I
make up my mind that I will thrust
not only my arm but my heart in the
aperture and that only by crushing
every ounce of power that I can use
shall any man ever close that open
ing up again.
"Wherever we use our power we
must use it with this conception al
ways in mind, that we are using it
for the benefit of the persons who are
chiefly interested and not for our owa
benefit."

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