The President on "Our Interests"

1916

The characteristic aberration of Mr. Wilson's mind and his self-complacent disregard of traditional American principles are never more clearly shown than when he discusses American interests and the relationship of them to the interests of the world at large. It is a favorite theme with him, lending itself with facility to that fashion of phrase-making which forms so dominant a part of his public utterances, and in dealing with it he displays not only the self-complacency to which we have already referred, but also a degree of inconsistency which is actually bewildering.

It was only the other day that in a public address at the capital he rang the changes of emphasis upon the proposition that we should never exert the physical force of America for our own interests, but only for the interests of humanity, or for our own only when they were identical with those of humanity at large. He was, of course, entitled to that view of the case as his own. But how presumptuous an error it was to declare that to be the traditional American policy, established by the fathers of the republic, is suggested by simple reference to Washington's Farewell Address, in which Americans are exhorted to adopt and maintain a course of policy under which we may choose peace or war as our interests, guided by justice, shall dictate"!.

Again, speaking of the European War, Mr. Wilson has said that Americans have "no part of interest in the policies which seem to have brought the conflict on." We are not sure that even his epochal "too proud to fight" comment upon the Lusitania massacre was more repugnant to humane feeling. We have, then, no interest in the protection of small nations from oppression and spoliation; no interest in the respecting of neutrality; no interest in the faithful observance of treaty obligations; no interest in the substitution of justice for brute force. Those would be astounding declarations for America to make in the twentieth century! Why, even a pagan comedian twenty centuries ago declared that because he was a man he was interested in everything that concerned humanity. Have we fallen below Terence's code of ethics? We should like to bracket by the side of Mr. Wilson's inhuman disclaimer of interest the studied statement of England's poet-statesman, Wordsworth, that "every independent nation is interested in the maintenance of the national independence of every other country." By the side of such a proposition how sordid appears Mr. Wilson's plea of "no interest"! — The Boston Transcript.

—The Fryeburg Post, Fryeburg, Maine, Sept. 12, 1916, p. 8.