Did you ever reflect upon how almost all other nations, almost every other nation has through long centuries been headed in one direction?  That is not true of the United States.  The United States has no racial momentum.  It has no history back of it which makes it run all its energies and all its ambitions in one particular direction; and America is particularly free in this, that she has no hampering ambitions as a world power.

If we have been obliged by circumstances or have considered ourselves to be obliged by circumstances, in the past to take territory which we otherwise would not have thought of taking, I believe I am right in saying that we have considered it our duty to administer that territory, not for ourselves, but for the people living in it, and to put this burden upon our consciences not to think that this thing is ours for our use, but to regard ourselves as trustees of the great business for those to whom it does really belong, trustees ready to hand over the cosmic trust at any time when the business seems to make that possible and feasible.  That is what I mean by saying we have no hampering ambitions.

We do not want anything that does not belong to us.  Isn’t a nation in that position free to serve other nations, and isn’t a nation like that ready to form some part of the assessing opinion of the world?

My interest in the neutrality of the United States is not the petty desire to keep out of trouble.  To judge by my experience I have never been able to keep out of trouble.  I have never looked for it, but I have always found it.  I do not want to walk around trouble.  If any man wants a scrap—­that is, an interesting scrap and worth while—­I am his man.  I warn him that he is not going to draw me into the scrap for his advertisement, but if he is looking for trouble—­that is, the trouble of men in general—­and I can help a little, why, then, I am in for it.  But I am interested in neutrality because there is something so much greater to do than fight, because there is something, there is a distinction waiting for this nation that no nation has ever yet got.  That is the distinction of absolute self-control and self-mastery.

Whom do you admire most among your friends?  The irritable man?  The man out of whom you can get a “rise” without trying?  The man who will fight at the drop of the hat, whether he knows what the hat is dropped for or not?

Don’t you admire and don’t you fear, if you have to contest with him, the self-mastered man who watches you with calm eye and comes in only when you have carried the thing so far that you must be disposed of?  That is the man you respect.  That is the man who you know has at bottom a much more fundamental and terrible courage than the irritable, fighting man.

Now, I covet for America this splendid courage of reserve moral force, and I wanted to point out to you gentlemen simply this:  There is news and news.  There is what is called news from Turtle Bay, that turns out to be falsehood, at any rate in what it is said to signify, and which if you could get the nation to believe it true might disturb our equilibrium and our self-possession.  We ought not to deal in stuff of that kind.  We ought not to permit things of that sort to use up the electrical energy of the wires, because its energy is malign, its energy is not of the truth, its energy is of mischief.