A DIFFICULT QUESTION TO ANSWER
October 18, 1917
A correspondent in Pueblo, Colorado, writes me as follows:
By what logic are we “at peace” with Austria, when she is furnishing troops or artillery to Germany to fight and kill our soldiers on the western front? The same question might apply to Turkey. Remember, too, that we are furnishing money and supplies to Italy, our ally, in her struggle with Austria. The Western folks are looking to you to answer hard questions of this sort for us which we don’t understand.
By what logic are we “at peace” with Austria, when she is furnishing troops or artillery to Germany to fight and kill our soldiers on the western front? The same question might apply to Turkey. Remember, too, that we are furnishing money and supplies to Italy, our ally, in her struggle with Austria. The Western folks are looking to you to answer hard questions of this sort for us which we don’t understand.
Neither I nor any one else can satisfactorily answer the question. A limited liability war in which we fight Germany ourselves and pay money to Italy and Russia to enable them to fight Austria and Turkey, with whom we are at peace, savors of sharp practice and not of statesmanship. It is a good ruleeither to stay out of war or to go into it, but not to try to do both things at once.
Moreover, this matter squarely tests our sincerity when we announced that we went to war to make the world safe for democracy. The phrase must have been used in a somewhat oratorical fashion, anyhow, because we have ourselves within the last year or two made the world entirely unsafe for democracy in the two small and weak republics of Haiti and San Domingo. Therefore, the phrase must have meant that we intended to make the world safe for well-behaved nations, great or small, to enjoy their liberty and govern themselves as they wished. If it did not mean this, the phrase was much worse than an empty flourish, for it was deliberately deceitful. If it did mean this, then we are recreant to our promise unless we at once go to war with Austria and Turkey.
Both these nations are racial conglomerates, in which one or two nationalities tyrannize over other subject nationalities. The world will not and cannot be safe for democracy until the Armenians, the Syrian Christians, and the Arabs are freed from Turkish tyranny, and until the Poles, Bohemians, and Southern Slavs, now under the Austrian yoke, are made into separate, independent nations, and until the Italians of Southwest Austria are restored to Italy and the Rumanians of Eastern Hungary to Rumania.
Unless we propose in good faith to carry out this programme, we have been guilty of a rhetorical shamwhen we pledged ourselves to make the world safe for democracy. The United States must not make promises which it has no intention of performing. We are breaking this promise and incidentally are acting absurdly every day that we continue at nominal peace with Germany’s fellow tyrants and subject allies, Austria and Turkey.