The Alaska citizen., 1917-05-14
PROCLAMATION TO AMERICANS
 BY PREGSIDENI |

President Woodrow Wilson today is sued an appeal to the people of the nation. In this appeal the Presi- dent says.
 My Fellow Countrymen:
 The entrance of our beloved coun- try into the grim and terrible war fare for democracy and human rights, which has shaken the world creates so many problems of national life and action which call for immediate consideration and settlement that hope you will permit me to address to you d few words of earnest coun- scl and appeal with regard to them
 We are rapidly putting our navy on an effective war footing, and we are about to equip a great army. But these are the simple parts of the great task to which We have ad- dressed ourselves. There is not a single selfish element, so far as can see, in the cause We are fight ing for; We are fighting for what we believe. what We wish to be the rights of mankind, for the future peace and security of the world.
 To do this great thing worthjly and successfully We must devote our selves to the service without profit or material advantage, with an en- crgy and intelligence that will rise to the level of the enterprise itself.
 These, then, are things we must do and do well, besides fighting, tho things without which mere fighting would be fruitless.
 We must supply abundant food for ourselves, for our armies, and our seamen, not only, but also for a large part of the nations with whom we have now made a com mon cause, in whose support and by whose side we shall be fighting.
 We must supply ships by the hundreds out of our shipyards to carry to the other side of the sea- submarines or no submarines, what will every day be needed there, and abundant materials out of our fields, and our mines and our factories, with which to equip and clothe our own forces on land and sea, but also to clothe and support those people for whom the gallant fellows under arms can no longer work to clothe; we must equip the armies with which we are cooperating in Europe; to keep the looms of the manufactures there in raw materials; coal to keep fires going in the ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of fac tories across the sea; steel out oI which to make arms and ammunj- ton, both here and there; rails fol Worn-out railways; backfiring fronts of locomotives and rolling stocks to take the places of those every day going to pieces; mules, horses and cattle for labor and military pur poses; in fact, everything with which the people of England, France, Italy and Russia have usually supplied themselves but cannot now afford men, materials and machinery to make"
 The President said that the men sustaining work in the fields, fac tories and mines, will be as much a part of the great patriotic forces Of the nation as the men under fire"
 In the appeal to farmers, he said: The supreme need of our own na- ton and nations with which we are cooperating, IS an dDunQdnCe or sup plies, especially foodstuffs. The i'm portance of adequate food supplies, especially for the present year, is superlative. Without abundant food alike for the armies and the peoples now at war, the whole great enter prise upon which we have embarked will break down and fall
 The worlds food reserves are low I particularly appeal to the farmers of the south to plant abundant food stuffs, as well as cotton. They can show their patriotism in no better nor more convincing way than re- sisting the great temptation of the present price of cotton and helping upon a great scale to feed the na- tion and people everywhere, who are fighting for their liberties and for our own.