It is possible to sift truth.  I have known some things to go out on the wires as true when there was only one man or one group of men who could have told the originators of the report whether it was true or not, and they were not asked whether it was true or not for fear it might not be true.  That sort of report ought not to go out over the wires.

There is generally, if not always, somebody who knows whether that thing is so or not, and in these days above all other days we ought to take particular pains to resort to the one small group of men or to the one man, if there be but one, who knows whether those things are true or not.

The world ought to know the truth, but the world ought not at this period of unstable equilibrium to be disturbed by rumor, ought not to be disturbed by imaginative combinations of circumstances or, rather, by circumstances stated in combination which do not belong in combination.  For we are holding—­not I, but you and gentlemen engaged like you—­the balances in your hand.  This unstable equilibrium rests upon scales that are in your hands.  For the food of opinion, as I began by saying, is the news of the day.  I have known many a man go off at a tangent on information that was not reliable.  Indeed, that describes the majority of men.  The world is held stable by the man who waits for the next day to find out whether the report was true or not.

We cannot afford, therefore, to let the rumors of irresponsible persons and origins get into the atmosphere of the United States.  We are trustees for what I venture to say is the greatest heritage that any nation ever had, the love of justice and righteousness and human liberty.  For fundamentally those are the things to which America is addicted and to which she is devoted.

There are groups of selfish men in the United States, there are coteries where sinister things are purposed, but the great heart of the American people is just as sound and true as it ever was.  And it is a single heart; it is the heart of America.  It is not a heart made up of sections selected out of other countries.

So that what I try to remind myself of every day when I am almost overcome by perplexities, what I try to remember, is what the people at home are thinking about.  I try to put myself in the place of the man who does not know all the things that I know and ask myself what he would like the policy of this country to be.  Not the talkative man, not the partisan man, not the man that remembers first that he is a Republican or Democrat, or that his parents were Germans or English, but who remembers first that the whole destiny of modern affairs centres largely upon his being an American first of all.

If I permitted myself to be a partisan in this present struggle I would be unworthy to represent you.  If I permitted myself to forget the people who are not partisans I would be unworthy to represent you.  I am not saying that I am worthy to represent you, but I do claim this degree of worthiness—­that before everything else I love America.