FELLOW-CITIZENS: 

This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Germany’s challenge to fight for our right to live and be free, and for the sacred rights of freemen everywhere.  The nation is awake.  There is no need to call to it.  We know what the war must cost, our utmost sacrifice, the lives of our fittest men, and, if need be, all that we possess.

The loan we are met to discuss is one of the least parts of what we are called upon to give and to do, though in itself imperative.  The people of the whole country are alive to the necessity of it, and are ready to lend to the utmost, even where it involves a sharp skimping and daily sacrifice to lend out of meagre earnings.  They will look with reprobation and contempt upon those who can and will not, upon those who demand a higher rate of interest, upon those who think of it as a mere commercial transaction.  I have not come, therefore, to urge the loan.  I have come only to give you, if I can, a more vivid conception of what it is for.

The reasons for this great war, the reason why it had to come, the need to fight it through, and the issues that hang upon its outcome, are more clearly disclosed now than ever before.  It is easy to see just what this particular loan means, because the cause we are fighting for stands more sharply revealed than at any previous crisis of the momentous struggle.  The man who knows least can now see plainly how the cause of justice stands, and what is the imperishable thing he is asked to invest in.  Men in America may be more sure than they ever were before that the cause is their own, and that, if it should be lost, their own great nation’s place and mission in the world would be lost with it.

I call you to witness, my fellow-countrymen, that at no stage of this terrible business have I judged the purposes of Germany intemperately.  I should be ashamed in the presence of affairs so grave, so fraught with the destinies of mankind throughout all the world, to speak with truculence, to use the weak language of hatred or vindictive purpose.  We must judge as we would be judged.  I have sought to learn the objects Germany has in this war from the mouths of her own spokesmen, and to deal as frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me.  I have laid bare our own ideals, our own purposes, without reserve or doubtful phrase, and have asked them to say as plainly what it is that they seek.

We have ourselves proposed no injustice, no aggression.  We are ready, whenever the final reckoning is made, to be just to the German people, deal fairly with the German power, as with all others.  There can be no difference between peoples in the final judgment, if it is indeed to be a righteous judgment.  To propose anything but justice, even-handed and dispassionate justice, to Germany at any time, whatever the outcome of the war, would be to renounce and dishonor our own cause, for we ask nothing that we are not willing to accord.