But there are other dangers, my fellow-citizens, which are not past and which have not been overcome, and they are dangers which we cannot control.  We can control irresponsible talkers amidst ourselves.  All we have got to do is to encourage them to hire a hall and their folly will be abundantly advertised by themselves.  But we cannot in this simple fashion control the dangers that surround us now and have surrounded us since this titanic struggle on the other side of the water began.  I say on the other side of the water; you will ask me, “On the other side of which water,” for this great struggle has extended to all quarters of the globe.  There is no continent outside, I was about to say, of this Western Hemisphere which is not touched with it, but I recollected as I began the sentence that a part of our own continent was touched with it, because it involves our neighbors to the north in Canada.  There is no part of the world, except South America, to which the direct influences of this struggle have not extended, so that now we are completely surrounded by this tremendous disturbance and you must realize what that involves.

Our thoughts are concentrated upon our own affairs and our own relations to the rest of the world, but the thoughts of the men who are engaged in this struggle are concentrated upon the struggle itself, and there is daily and hourly danger that they will feel themselves constrained to do things which are absolutely inconsistent with the rights of the United States.  They are not thinking of us.  I am not criticising them for not thinking of us.  I dare say if I were in their place neither would I think of us.  They believe that they are struggling for the lives and honor of their nations, and that if the United States puts its interests in the path of this great struggle, she ought to know beforehand that there is danger of very serious misunderstanding and difficulty.  So that the very uncalculating, unpremeditated, one might almost say accidental, course of affairs may touch us to the quick at any moment, and I want you to realize that, standing in the midst of these difficulties, I feel that I am charged with a double duty of the utmost difficulty.  In the first place, I know that you are depending upon me to keep this Nation out of the war.  So far I have done so, and I pledge you my word that, God helping me, I will if it is possible.  But you have laid another duty upon me.  You have bidden me to see it that nothing stains or impairs the honor of the United States, and that is a matter not within my control; that depends upon what others do, not upon what the Government of the United States does.  Therefore there may at any moment come a time when I cannot preserve both the honor and the peace of the United States.  Do not exact of me an impossible and contradictory thing, but stand ready and insistent that everybody who represents you should stand ready to provide the necessary means for maintaining the honor of the United States.