r as I can see, in the cause we
are fighting for. We are fighting for what we believe and wish to be
the rights of mankind and for the future peace and security of the
world. To do this great thing worthily and successfully we must
devote ourselves to the service without regard to profit or material
advantage and with an energy and intelligence that will rise to the
level of the enterprise itself. We must realize to the full how great
the task is and how many things, how many kinds and elements of
capacity and service and self-sacrifice it involves.
WHAT WE MUST DO
These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, besides
fighting--the things without which mere fighting would be fruitless:
We must supply abundant food for ourselves and for our armies and our
seamen, not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom
we have now made common cause, in whose support and by whose sides we
shall be fighting.
We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to
the other side of the sea, submarines or no submarines, what will
every day be needed there, and abundant materials out of our fields
and our mines and our factories with which not only to clothe and
equip our own forces on land and sea, but also to clothe and support
our people, for whom the gallant fellows under arms can no longer
work; to help clothe and equip the armies with which we are
co-operating in Europe, and to keep the looms and manufactories there
in raw material; coal to keep the fires going in ships at sea and in
the furnaces of hundreds of factories across the sea; steel out of
which to make arms and ammunition both here and there; rails for
wornout railways back of the fighting fronts; locomotives and
rolling-stock to take the place of those every day going to pieces;
mules, horses, cattle for labor and for military service; everything
with which the people of England and France and Italy and Russia have
usually supplied themselves, but cannot now afford the men, the
materials or the machinery to make.
GREATER EFFICIENCY
It is evident to every thinking man that our industries, on the
farms, in the shipyards, in the mines, in the factories, must be made
more prolific and more efficient than ever, and that they must be
more economically managed and better adapted to the particular
requirements of our task than they have been; and what I want to say
is that the men and the women who devote their thought and
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