The University of Chicago War Papers - Americans and the World-Crisis #261116

I will not apologize for this dangerous way of speaking. Always, of course, human affairs are matters, not of impersonal forces, but of intensely personal people. It especially behooves everyone who interprets the present crisis as I do to give this literal fact full force. For safety's sake, therefore, I will translate this convenient academic manner of speaking, to which I shall revert, into less convenient, but also less misleading, literal form: The world is divided today between a group of nations whose units have delivered themselves over to the dictation Of an artificial, arbitrary, anti-moral, militar istically imposed code, according to which force is the arbiter of right, and another group of nations driven by the instinct of self preservation into championship of a morality which makes its appeal to justice as its standard — to the level of which appeal I freely admit they might not have risen for many generations if they had not confronted the alternative of choosing between a self assertion better than their previous best selves and consent that the foundations of all international morality should be destroyed. Among the most indelible memory-pictures in my mind is a series reproducing incidents, trifling in themselves, but eloquent as reflections of popular feeling, which occurred in Bangor, Maine, on the day and the following days after the message had come over the wire: A madman has murdered Abraham Lincoln.