John Lind to Woodrow Wilson
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My dear President
I cannot tell you how pleased and gratified I was to receive your kind and more than generous letter of January 29th. My work seems so barren of results and sometimes I think so inconsequential that I almost get discouraged, for I have been used to accomplish — in the past. Your approval and the consciousness of doing the best I can is my only consolation.
I apologize for the insistent mandatory form in which I have frequently expressed my views in my recent communications. My sole excuse is that I wished to impress upon your Secretary in the strongest possible way my conviction that we have reached a point when execution is as important as judgment.
I sincerely hope that you will not regard my cablegram of last night as inconsistent with the views that I have heretofore expressed. I have no information from the north except the garbled reports which appear in the Mexico City papers. According to these reports the campaign of the revolutionists has virtually been abandoned. This I do not believe for a moment, but I hear only one side and see no results and I see and fully appreciate the object and the probable consequences of the activity of Carden and other Europeans. In this situation I feel it my duty to express my views unequivocally as to the alternative course which it seems to me that we cannot flinch from pursuing if the revolutionists canonot or will not do the work.
I have sincerely hoped that the liberation of Mexico might be accomplished by indirect means, but there has been no moment since September that I have not been conscious of the possibility that the work may devolve on us. I have, however, been very solicitous that before such contingency be reached the ground should be fully prepared so as to make the physical work as light as possible and the political aspect of it a moral necessity — a necessity forced upon us by the appeals of the Mexicans themselves and by the united voice of Europe. I prefer to have Europe clamor for us to do that which our honor and our interest would compel us to do even against her protest. We have reached that point. As to the political effect of such action at home I have neither fear nor doubt. Our people will fight for either right or interest. When the two, right and interest, go hand in hand woe to the man who stands in the way. That is our nature and that is our history.
Sincerely and loyally yours,
John Lind
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