Minute Men campaign, so that today 50,000 of them are receiving budgets of material and going out through moving picture houses all over the land preaching the gospel of America's Justice. We organized the speaking of the country, trying to bring some order out of oratorical chaos. We have brought men of every nationality from the trenches to speak to the people, and we have sent men from coast to coast, so that people might be brought face to face with the truth, not by controversialists, but by those who had seen, by those who actually knew what war meant, those who knew what defeat meant, and those who knew the necessity of victory. These were the fundamentals of the case, of which we tried to build foundations upon which to erect our house of truth.

Then there was the necessity also of giving people information. There has been nothing so distressing to me as this absurd assumption on the part of a large number of people that the Committee on Public Information is a censorship and interested in suppression rather than expression. We do not touch censorship at any point, because censorship in the United States is a voluntary agreement managed and enforced by the press itself. The desires of the government with respect to the concealment of its plans, its policies, the movement of troops, the departure of troops, and so on, go to the press upon a simple card that bears this paragraph: "These requests go to the press without larger authority than the necessity of the war-making branches. Their enforcement is a matter for the press itself." I am very glad and very proud to be able to say that this voluntary censorship has a greater force than could ever have been obtained by any law.

At every point we have tried to stimulate discussion, even to organize discussion. Aside from the disclosure of military secrets of importance, aside from any protest that is liable to weaken the will of the country to continue this war, or that may interfere with the prosecution of this war, we stand for the freest discussion that any people in the world ever had. I can conceive of no greater tragedy than that, out of stupid rages, out of the elevation of the mob spirit above reason, discussion should be stifled.

Just as we assembled historians to prepare pamphlets, trained speakers to form the Four Minute Men, so did we gather together the artists of the country to draw posters, and under the leadership of Charles Dana Gibson, the billboards of the country are filling

with posters as beautiful as they are effective. We mobilized the advertising experts of the nation, and today every great advertising man in the United States is working for the Committee on Public Information, preparing the matter that goes into periodicals and on the billboards, and contributing millions in free space to the national service.

We have realized the necessity for specialized service. It was soon seen that we had to devise departments that would prepare matter for the rural press, for the religious press, for the labor press, for the magazines, and so on. We had to gather together the essayists and the brilliant novelists of the land-it was a proposition of touching up the high lights-to lay before the people the truth. Today 50,000 men and women are giving their time without money, without thought of reward, to the service of the government. Whenever the Committee on Public Information is attacked I think of these thousands of volunteers who are giving so freely of their service, and any slur at them is a blow in the back, a cowardly assault upon those who are serving behind the lines with as much devotion as the soldiers in the trenches.

Aside from the English speaking people of the United States, we have had to pay attention to the foreign language groups. Somebody once said that people do not live by bread alone; they live mostly by catch phrases. For long we have had the theory in this country that we could dismiss our responsibilities to the foreigner by glib references to the melting pot, but every man of intelligence knows that the melting pot has not melted for years. Foreigners came to this country with their eyes upturned to the flag, with the hope that they were coming to a land of promise, and we let them land at the dock without an outstretched hand to meet them. In one month that I remember, twenty thousand agricultural workers drifted into sweatshops in industrial centres near the seaboard, while all the rich acreage of the west called to them. No aid was given to them whereby they could buy railroad tickets to help bring them in touch with opportunity. They were simply dumped into the Ghettos of the big cities. We let sharks prey on them, we let poverty swamp them, we did not teach them English, and we forced them to establish their own foreign language church and their own foreign language institutions, and today when we need them and call upon them, we find we are called upon to pay for the utter neglect of the last twenty-five years.

We lost Russia. Why? Because thousands of people went back from the Ghetto of New York to Russia, and all they ever knew of America was the wretchedness and sordidness of the East Side, and they told them in Russia that America was a lie, a fake democracy, that there was no truth in us. They described America as they saw it, never having had a chance to come in touch with the bright promise of the land.

It was our task to repair the blunders of the past. We went into every foreign language group-among Hungarians, among the Greeks, among the Poles, among the Jugo-Slavs, the CyechoSlovaks, and a score of other nationalities that were seldom heard of before until this war came.

We organized loyalty leagues in these groups. We had to get speakers in their own language. We had to go into the factories and hold noon meetings. We had slips put in their pay envelopes, and in a hundred other ways we had to drive home the meaning and purposes of democracy. We have pointed out that democracy was not an automatic device but the struggle everlasting; that there is no evil in our national life that cannot be cured at the polling place; that the ballot was their sword, their remedy for every injustice; that all they needed to bring about the 100 per cent perfection for which we struggle was intelligence and education; and that if there were failures it was just as much their fault as it was the fault of the American born. The remedy for everything lies in a better and finer appreciation of the duties of the citizen. While we are driving home the truths of the war, this great Americanization work that we are carrying on is building foundations under the union. That is the thing to do-bring them into closer touch with American life.

What we are doing in this country we are doing in practically every other country on the globe. We are trying to "sell" America. to the world. We have been the most provincial people that ever lived, the most self-satisfied people; we have always been sufficient unto ourselves, and the very fact that other people did not speak our language was accepted at once as a proof of inferiority. We had little touch with other countries, knew very little of them, and they knew less of us. All Europe ever knew about us was our earthquakes and our cyclones and the fact that we lynched darkies in the south-that we were a race of dollar grabbers, a race of money

makers. So we had to begin to develop communication with them, to get in closer touch with them.

Our work has been educational and informative. Much has been said in praise of German propaganda, but from the first our policy has been to find out what the Germans were doing, and then not to do it. Rottenness and corruption and deceit and trickery may win for awhile, but in the long run it always brings about its own inevitable reaction. What we are doing in foreign countries is being done openly. What we are trying to do is to bring home to them the meaning of American life, the purposes of America, our hopes and our ambitions.

We go in first with our news service. I found that the wireless here was not being used to any large extent and immediately began sending a thousand words a day of American news. We send it out from Tuckerton to the Eiffel Tower, and from France it is sent to Switzerland, to Rome, to Madrid and to Lisbon. We send to London and from London to Russia, to Holland and to the Scandinavian countries. From Darien it is flashed to the countries of South America. It goes from New York by telegraph to San Diego, and from San Diego by wireless to Cavite; from Cavite to Shanghai, from Shanghai to Tokio. So we cover the whole world today with our American news. That is the best propaganda possible because it tells them what we are doing and what we are thinking.

We have sent to all these countries great motion picture campaigns, putting them out through the established theatres, or hiring our own theatres. These motion pictures set forth the industrial and social progress of the United States, our schools, condition of labor among women and children, the houses where our working people live, our sanitariums, the way we take care of the sick, our schools, and women voting in enlightened states like Colorado. We show them our war progress, how a democracy prepares for battle, all its thousands of youngsters coming from their homes, clean-eyed, straight-limbed, walking into training camps, and the splendid democracy of it. We show them our factories, our grand fleet, our destroyers and submarines, and we send those pictures all over the world.

We have our representatives trying to find out what the people are most interested in in America, and then we send people from America to these countries to make speaking tours. We find out

what pamphlets will appeal to them and then we send those pamphlets from house to house, and we use airplanes in dropping messages in enemy countries. We had three printing plants in Russia at one time getting out material in all dialects of Austria-Hungary and sent it across by planes and by messengers to all the oppressed nationalities of Austria-Hungary.

So that the work that is carried on by the Committee on Public Information is not a censorship and never has been a censorship. It is a medium of expression. It is the medium through which the government is trying to bring home to all the people of the world what America means and what we fight for.

We do not want a public opinion that is based on the happenings of the moment. We want a public opinion that springs from the heart and soul-that has its root in the rich soil of truth. And this fight is going to win because it is a fight for truth, because we have nothing to be ashamed of. The other day, when asked the question, I said I had no sympathy with the conscientious objector, because I thought this war was holy enough to enlist the devotion of every man, whatever his religion. We waited three years, going to the very ultimate of humility, to prove our devotion to peace, and we drew the sword only when the seas were filled with our dead, when international law was set aside, when torch and bomb were applied to our industries, and when it was seen that the German government was dead to honor and decency. Having drawn the sword, being confident of the high motives for which we stand, we will never sheathe it until the heights of our determination are gained.

We are perfectly willing to have peace discussed. We are never going to shut our ears to peace, but there cannot be mention of any peace that savors of compromise. You can compromise questions of territory, questions of commerce and economic disputes, but you cannot compromise eternal principles. President Wilson's motive for entering this war was to establish certain solemn rights of ours for which every man of us must be willing to die and should be ready to die. This fight we are making all over the world today, this fight for public opinion, is a fight that is not going to be won until every man, woman and child in the United States here at home is made to realize that they are called to the colors as much as the sailor and soldier.