December 5 1917.

Chancellor Avery on the President's Message.

The President's message is an international message dealing with international conditions in a war involving every continent of the world. It will encourage our French English and Italian allies. It will afford comfort for all peoples struggling for national unity and the right to work out their own destinies. It should instill some measure of sanity into Russia. There is charity and sympathy in it for the misguided peoples with whom we are at war. It helps us to feel that a world fellowship of all right minded people may yet become something more than a day dream. It is an American message. It voices America's unconquerable spirit. It voices America's toleration where toleration is possible. It voices America's inflexible determination to banish from our midst those things that cannot be tolerated while we are engaged in a world struggle. The traitor must feel the iron hand under America's velvet touch. The babbling irreconcilable pacifists must feel that it voices the contempt that all true Americans feel towards them. The President's message is a message of practical idealism. In wonderfully accurate phraseology it gives perhaps the best expression of altruistic political thought to be found anywhere. Compared with the crude proclamations of the Petrograd enthusiasts it is like a marble palace to a mud hovel. It shows our entrance into the world war in its true light as a crusade for justice for humanity and for the establishment in world affairs of those principles which have been exemplified in the private conduct of the best of humankind since the beginning of our era.