WOODROW WILSON.

THE WHITE HOUSE, 28 January, 1915.

ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNITED STATES CHAMBER OF COMMERCE

[Delivered in Washington, February 3, 1915.]

MR. PRESIDENT, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: 

I feel that it is hardly fair to you for me to come in in this casual fashion among a body of men who have been seriously discussing great questions, and it is hardly fair to me, because I come in cold, not having had the advantage of sharing the atmosphere of your deliberations and catching the feeling of your conference.  Moreover, I hardly know just how to express my interest in the things you are undertaking.  When a man stands outside an organization and speaks to it he is too apt to have the tone of outside commendation, as who should say, “I would desire to pat you on the back and say ‘Good boys; you are doing well!’” I would a great deal rather have you receive me as if for the time being I were one of your own number.

Because the longer I occupy the office that I now occupy the more I regret any lines of separation; the more I deplore any feeling that one set of men has one set of interests and another set of men another set of interests; the more I feel the solidarity of the Nation—­the impossibility of separating one interest from another without misconceiving it; the necessity that we should all understand one another, in order that we may understand ourselves.

There is an illustration which I have used a great many times.  I will use it again, because it is the most serviceable to my own mind.  We often speak of a man who cannot find his way in some jungle or some desert as having “lost himself.”  Did you never reflect that that is the only thing he has not lost? He is there.  He has lost the rest of the world.  He has no fixed point by which to steer.  He does not know which is north, which is south, which is east, which is west; and if he did know, he is so confused that he would not know in which of those directions his goal lay.  Therefore, following his heart, he walks in a great circle from right to left and comes back to where he started—­to himself again.  To my mind that is a picture of the world.  If you have lost sight of other interests and do not know the relation of your own interests to those other interests, then you do not understand your own interests, and have lost yourself.  What you want is orientation, relationship to the points of the compass; relationship to the other people in the world; vital connections which you have for the time being severed.