The Third Liberty Loan

In the great Third Liberty Loan drive, just one statement seems necessary before an American audience. It is simply a question now of the survival of autocracy or democracy. They are in their death grapple. It is a fight to the finish and it is up to us. All the evidences about the city advertising this great loan, and the many speakers that appear before you, do so at the request of the government to thoroughly acquaint the American public with the situation. It is thought that with our hundred and ten million of people fully aroused we are very likely to start something that can be heard in Berlin.

The most convincing reason for this loan, as I see it, is the publication in the daily press of the last few weeks of the war maps of Europe, showing that shadowy and crooked German line, crooked in more senses than one, that all patriotic Americans have been so anxiously watching as it moves slowly mile by mile to the westward. It is our duty to hurry to that war front with all the haste and energy we can summon, and with every resource that our two hundred and fifty billions in national wealth can command, before that shadow crosses the Atlantic.

The latest news from the front is cheering. Our splendid General Pershing with our hundred thousand and our allies are holding that line. Let's do our share and hold it over here and raise this loan. We need every cent of these billions to send the right kind of message to the German Kaiser. We want to say to him that democracy, so handicapped perhaps at the start, can meet autocracy on any ground it chooses. We want to say to him that we intend to sail on all the seas as we have ever done, our only passport to be our own blessed flag flying.