There is, I venture to point out, an especial significance just now attaching to this whole matter of drawing the Americans together in bonds of honorable partnership and mutual advantage because of the economic readjustments which the world must inevitably witness within the next generation, when peace shall have at last resumed its healthful tasks.  In the performance of these tasks I believe the Americas to be destined to play their parts together.  I am interested to fix your attention on this prospect now because unless you take it within your view and permit the full significance of it to command your thought I cannot find the right light in which to set forth the particular matter that lies at the very font of my whole thought as I address you to-day.  I mean national defense.

No one who really comprehends the spirit of the great people for whom we are appointed to speak can fail to perceive that their passion is for peace, their genius best displayed in the practice of the arts of peace.  Great democracies are not belligerent.  They do not seek or desire war.  Their thought is of individual liberty and of the free labor that supports life and the uncensored thought that quickens it.  Conquest and dominion are not in our reckoning, or agreeable to our principles.  But just because we demand unmolested development and the undisturbed government of our own lives upon our own principles of right and liberty, we resent, from whatever quarter it may come, the aggression we ourselves will not practice.  We insist upon security in prosecuting our self-chosen lines of national development.  We do more than that.  We demand it also for others.  We do not confine our enthusiasm for individual liberty and free national development to the incidents and movements of affairs which affect only ourselves.  We feel it wherever there is a people that tries to walk in these difficult paths of independence and right.  From the first we have made common cause with all partisans of liberty on this side the sea, and have deemed it as important that our neighbors should be free from all outside domination as that we ourselves should be.  We have set America aside as a whole for the uses of independent nations and political freemen.

Out of such thoughts grow all our policies.  We regard war merely as a means of asserting the rights of a people against aggression.  And we are as fiercely jealous of coercive or dictatorial power within our own nation as of aggression from without.  We will not maintain a standing army except for uses which are as necessary in times of peace as in times of war; and we shall always see to it that our military peace establishment is no larger than is actually and continuously needed for the uses of days in which no enemies move against us.  But we do believe in a body of free citizens ready and sufficient to take care of themselves and of the governments which they have set up to serve them.  In our constitutions themselves we have commanded that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed,” and our confidence has been that our safety in times of danger would lie in the rising of the nation to take care of itself, as the farmers rose at Lexington.