As I was at the White House nearly every day I had an opportunity to
learn what the President would say to callers and friends, although I
was seldom privileged to use the information. Even now I do not recall
a single statement which ever gave me the impression that the President
sided with one group of belligerents.

The President's sincerity and firm desire for neutrality was emphasised
in his appeal to "My Countrymen."

"The people of the United States," he said, "are drawn from many
nations, and chiefly from the nations now at war. It is natural and
inevitable that there should be the utmost variety of sympathy and
desire among them with regard to the issues and circumstances of the
conflict. Some will wish one nation, others another, to succeed in the
momentous struggle. It will be easy to excite passion and difficult to
allay it. Those responsible for exciting it will assume a heavy
responsibility, responsibility for no less a thing than that the people
of the United States, whose love of their country and whose loyalty to
the government should unite them as Americans all, bound in honour and
affection to think first of her and her interests, may be divided in
camps of hostile opinion, hot against each other, involved in the war
itself in impulse and opinion, if not in action.

"My thought is of America. I am speaking, I feel sure, the earnest
wish and purpose of every thoughtful American that this great country
of ours, which is of course the first in our thoughts and in our
hearts, should show herself in this time of peculiar trial a nation fit
beyond others to exhibit the fine poise of undisturbed judgment, the
dignity of self-control, the efficiency of dispassionate action; a
nation that neither sits in judgment upon others nor is disturbed in