nding up and shouting and expressing
their opinions just now, but are waiting to find out and support the
duty of America. I am just as sure of their solidity and of their
loyalty and of their unanimity, if we act justly, as I am that the
history of this country has at every crisis and turning point
illustrated this great lesson.

We are the mediating nation of the world. I do not mean that we
undertake not to mind our own business and to mediate where other people
are quarreling. I mean the word in a broader sense. We are compounded of
the nations of the world. We mediate their blood, we mediate their
traditions, we mediate their sentiments, their tastes, their passions;
we are ourselves compounded of those things.

We are, therefore, able to understand all nations; we are able to
understand them in the compound, not separately, as partisans, but
unitedly, as knowing and comprehending and embodying them all. It is in
that sense that I mean that America is a mediating nation. The opinion
of America, the action of America, is ready to turn and free to turn in
any direction.

Did you ever reflect upon how almost all other nations, almost every
other nation has through long centuries been headed in one direction?
That is not true of the United States. The United States has no racial
momentum. It has no history back of it which makes it run all its
energies and all its ambitions in one particular direction; and America
is particularly free in this, that she has no hampering ambitions as a
world power.

If we have been obliged by circumstances or have considered ourselves to
be obliged by circumstances, in the past to take territory which we
otherwise would not have thought of taking, I believe I am right in
saying that we have considered it our duty to administer that territory,
not for ourselves, but for the people living in it, and to put this
burden upon our consciences not to think that this thing is ours for our
use, but to regard ourselves as trustees of the great business for those
to whom it does really belong, trustees ready to hand over the cosmic
trust at any time when the business seems to make that possible and
feasible. That is what I mean by saying we have no hampering ambitions.

We do not want anything that does not belong to us. Isn't a nation in
that position free to serve other nations, and isn't a nation like that
ready to form some part of the assessing opinion of the world?

My interest in the