BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

A PROCLAMATION.

[Thanksgiving-1914.]

It has long been the honoured custom of our people to turn in the fruitful autumn of the year in praise and thanksgiving to Almighty God for his many blessings and mercies to us as a nation. The year that is now drawing to a close since we last observed our day of national thanksgiving has been, while a year of discipline because of the mighty forces of war and of change which have disturbed the world, also a year of special blessing for us.

It has been vouchsafed to us to remain at peace, with honour, and in some part to succour the suffering and supply the needs of those who are in want. We have been privileged by our own peace and selfcontrol in some degree to steady the counsels and shape the hopes and purposes of a day of fear and distress. Our people have looked upon their own life as a nation with a deeper comprehension, a fuller realization of their responsibilities as well as of their blessings, and a keener sense of the moral and practical significance of what their part among the nations of the world may come to be.

The hurtful effects of foreign war in their own industrial and commercial affairs have made them feel the more fully and see the more clearly their mutual interdependence upon one another and has stirred them to a helpful cooperation such as they have seldom practiced before. They have been quickened by a great moral stimulation. Their unmistakable ardour for peace, their earnest pity and disinterested sympathy for those who are suffering, their readiness to help and to think of the needs of others, has revealed them to themselves as well as to the world.

Our crops will feed all who need food; the self-possession of our people amidst the most serious anxieties and difficulties and the steadiness and resourcefulness of our business men will serve other nations as well as our own.

The business of the country has been supplied with new instrumentalities and the commerce of the world with new channels of trade and intercourse. The Panama Canal has been opened to the commerce of the nations. The two continents of America have been bound in closer ties of friendship. New instrumentalities of international trade have been created which will be also new instrumentalities of acquaintance, intercourse, and mutual service. Never before have the people of the United States been so situated for their own advantage or the advantage of their neighbours or so equipped to serve themselves and mankind.

Now, THEREFORE, I, WOODROW WILSON, President of the United

States of America, do hereby designate Thursday the twenty-sixth of November next as a day of thanksgiving and prayer, and invite the people throughout the land to cease from their wonted occupations and in their several homes and places of worship render thanks to Almighty God.

In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington this twenty-eighth day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and [SEAL.] fourteen, and of the Independence of the United States of America the one hundred and thirty-ninth.

By the President:

WOODROW WILSON.

ROBERT LANSING, Acting Secretary of State.

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

A PROCLAMATION.

[Dispersion of Unlawful Assemblages in Arkansas.]

Whereas by reason of unlawful obstructions, combinations and assemblages of persons, it has become impracticable in the judgment of the President to enforce by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings the laws of the United States within the State of Arkansas and especially within the Western Federal District and in the neighborhood of the towns of Hartford, Midland and Fort Smith in said district;

And whereas for the purpose of enforcing the faithful execution of the laws of the United States and protecting property in the charge of the courts of the United States, the President deems it necessary to employ a part of the military forces of the United States, in pursuance of the statute in that case made and provided;

Now, therefore, I, Woodrow Wilson, President of the United States, do hereby admonish all persons who may be or come within the state, district or towns aforesaid against doing, countenancing, encouraging or taking any part in such unlawful obstructions, combinations and assemblages, and I hereby warn all persons in any manner connected therewith to disperse and retire peaceably to their respective abodes on or before twelve o'clock noon of the sixth day of November instant.

Those who disregard this warning and persist in taking part with a riotous mob in forceably resisting and obstructing the execution of the laws of the United States or interfering with the functions of the Government or destroying or attempting to destroy property in the custody of the courts of the United States or under its directions can not be regarded otherwise than as public enemies.

Troops employed against such combinations and assemblages of persons will act with all the moderation and forbearance consistent with the accomplishment of their duty in the premises; but all citizens must realize that, if they mingle with or become a part of such riotous assemblages, there will be no opportunity for discrimination in the methods employed in dealing with such assemblages. The only safe course, therefore, for those not intentionally participating in such unlawful procedure is to abide at their homes or, at least, not to go or remain in the neighborhood of such riotous assemblages.

In testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand and caused the seal of the United States to be affixed.

Done at the City of Washington, this third day of November in the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and fourteen, and of [SEAL.] the Independence of the United States the one hundred and thirty-ninth.

By the President:

WOODROW WILSON.

ROBERT LANSING, Acting Secretary of State.

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

A PROCLAMATION.

[Neutrality-Great Britain and Turkey.]

Whereas a state of war unhappily exists between Great Britain and Turkey; And Whereas the United States is on terms of friendship and amity with the contending powers, and with the persons inhabiting their several dominions;

[Here follows the identical preamble and warning against voilation of quoted law as in the proclamation of neutrality in the case of hostilities between Austria-Hungary and Servia, Germany and Russia, and Germany and France. See pages 7969, 7970, 7971, 7972 and 7973.Ed.] Done at the City of Washington this sixth day of November in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and fourteen [SEAL.] and of the independence of the United States of America the one hundred and thirty-ninth.

By the President:

WOODROW WILSON.

ROBERT LANSING, Acting Secretary of State.

SECOND ANNUAL ADDRESS

[Delivered at a Joint Session of the two Houses of Congress, December 8, 1914.]

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS:

The session upon which you are now entering will be the closing session of the Sixty-third Congress, a Congress, I venture to say, which will long be remembered for the great body of thoughtful and constructive work which it has done, in loyal response to the thought and needs of the country. I should like in this address to review the notable record and try to make adequate assessment of it; but no doubt we stand too near the work that has been done and are ourselves too much part of it to play the part of historians toward it.

Our program of legislation with regard to the regulation of business is now virtually complete. It has been put forth, as we intended, as a whole, and leaves no conjecture as to what is to follow. The road at last lies clear and firm before business. It is a road which it can travel without fear or embarrassment. It is the road to ungrudged, unclouded success. In it every honest man, every man who believes that the public interest is part of his own interest, may walk with perfect confidence.

Moreover, our thoughts are now more of the future than of the past. While we have worked at our tasks of peace the circumstances of the whole age have been altered by war. What we have done for our own land and our own people we did with the best that was in us, whether of character or of intelligence, with sober enthusiasm and a confidence in the principles upon which we were acting which sustained us at every step of the difficult undertaking; but it is done. It has passed from our hands. It is now an established part of the legislation of the country. Its usefulness, its effects will disclose themselves in experience. What chiefly strikes us now, as we look about us during these closing days of a year which will be forever memorable in the history of the world, is that we face new tasks, have been facing them these six months, must face them in the months to come,-face them without partisan feeling, like men who have forgotten everything but a common duty and the fact that we are representatives of a great people whose thought is not of us but of what America owes to herself and to all mankind in such circumstances as these upon which we look amazed and anxious.

War has interrupted the means of trade not only but also the processes of production. In Europe it is destroying men and resources wholesale and upon a scale unprecedented and appalling. There is reason to fear that the time is near, if it be not already at hand, when several of the countries of Europe will find it difficult to do for their people what they have hitherto been always easily

able to do,-many essential and fundamental things. At any rate, they will need our help and our manifold services as they have never needed them before; and we should be ready, more fit and ready than we have ever been.

It is of equal consequence that the nations whom Europe has usually supplied with innumerable articles of manufacture and commerce of which they are in constant need and without which their economic development halts and stands still can now get only a small part of what they formerly imported and eagerly look to us to supply their all but empty markets. This is particularly true of our own neighbors, the States, great and small, of Central and South America. Their lines of trade have hitherto run chiefly athwart the seas, not to our ports but to the ports of Great Britain and of the older continent of Europe. I do not stop to inquire why, or to make any comment on probable causes. What interests us just now is not the explanation but the fact, and our duty and opportunity in the presence of it. Here are markets which we must supply, and we must find the means of action. The United States, this great people for whom we speak and act, should be ready, as never before, to serve itself and to serve mankind; ready with its resources, its energies, its forces of production, and its means of distribution.

It is a very practical matter, a matter of ways and means. We have the resources, but are we fully ready to use them? And, if we can make ready what we have, have we the means at hand to distribute it? We are not fully ready; neither have we the means of distribution. We are willing, but we are not fully able. We have the wish to serve and to serve greatly, generously; but we are not prepared as we should be. We are not ready to mobilize our resources at once. We are not prepared to use them immediately and at their best, without delay and without waste.

To speak plainly, we have grossly erred in the way in which we have stunted and hindered the development of our merchant marine. And now, when we need ships, we have not got them. We have year after year debated, without end or conclusion, the best policy to pursue with regard to the use of the ores and forests and water powers of our national domain in the rich States of the West, when we should have acted; and they are still locked up. The key is still turned upon them, the door shut fast at which thousands of vigorous men, full of initiative, knock clamorously for admittance. The water power of our navigable streams outside the national domain also, even in the eastern States, where we have worked and planned. for generations, is still not used as it might be, because we will and we won't; because the laws we have made do not intelligently balance encouragement against restraint. We withhold by regulation.

I have come to ask you to remedy and correct these mistakes and