Page:Roosevelt in the Kansas City Star.djvu/86

24 either to stay out of war or to go into it, but not to try to do both things at once.

Moreover, this matter squarely tests our sincerity when we announced that we went to war to make the world safe for democracy. The phrase must have been used in a somewhat oratorical fashion, anyhow, because we have ourselves within the last year or two made the world entirely unsafe for democracy in the two small and weak republics of Haiti and San Domingo. Therefore, the phrase must have meant that we intended to make the world safe for well-behaved nations, great or small, to enjoy their liberty and govern themselves as they wished. If it did not mean this, the phrase was much worse than an empty flourish, for it was deliberately deceitful. If it did mean this, then we are recreant to our promise unless we at once go to war with Austria and Turkey.

Both these nations are racial conglomerates, in which one or two nationalities tyrannize over other subject nationalities. The world will not and cannot be safe for democracy until the Armenians, the Syrian Christians, and the Arabs are freed from Turkish tyranny, and until the Poles, Bohemians, and Southern Slavs, now under the Austrian yoke, are made into separate, independent nations, and until the Italians of Southwest Austria are restored to Italy and the Rumanians of Eastern Hungary to Rumania.

Unless we propose in good faith to carry out this programme, we have been guilty of a rhetorical sham