o soon as they may
be needed and can be handled in training. It will involve also, of
course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I
hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present
generation, by well conceived taxation.

I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation because it seems
to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be
necessary entirely on money borrowed. It is our duty, I most
respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we may against the
very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise out of
the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.

In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be
accomplished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering
as little as possible in our own preparation and in the equipment of
our own military forces with the duty,--for it will be a very practical
duty,--of supplying the nations already at war with Germany with the
materials which they can obtain only from us or by our assistance. They
are in the field and we should help them in every way to be effective
there.

I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the several executive
departments of the Government, for the consideration of your committees,
measures for the accomplishment of the several objects I have mentioned.
I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as having been
framed after very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon
which the responsibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the
nation will most directly fall.

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very
clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our
objects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and
normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not
believe that the thought of the nation has been altered or clouded by
them. I have exactly the same things in mind now that I had in mind when
I addressed the Senate on the twenty-second of January last; the same
that I had in mind when I addressed the Congress on the third of
February and on the twenty-sixth of February. Our object now, as then,
is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the
world as against selfish, and autocratic power and to set up amongst the
really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert