re, arranging to order the
machines to make those guns from America. Not all of them--you got
your share, but only a share, a glorious share. So that America has
also had her training. She has been making guns, making ammunition,
giving us machinery to prepare both; she has supplied us with steel,
and she has all that organization, and all that wonderful facility,
adaptability, and resourcefulness of the great people which inhabits
that great continent. Ah! It was a bad day for military autocracy in
Prussia when it challenged the great republic of the west. We know
what America can do, and we also know that now she is in it she will do
it. She will wage an effective and successful war.

There is something more important. She will insure a beneficent peace.
To this I attach great importance. I am the last man to say that the
succor which is given to us from America is not something in itself to
rejoice in, and to rejoice in greatly. But I do not mind saying that I
rejoice even more in the knowledge that America is going to win the
right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are being
discussed. That conference will settle the destiny of nations--the
course of human life--for God knows how many ages. It would have been
tragic for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all
the influence, all the power, and the right which she has now won by
flinging herself into this great struggle.

I can see peace coming now--not a peace which will be the beginning of
war, not a peace which will be an endless preparation for strife and
bloodshed, but a real peace. The world is an old world. It has never
had peace. It has been rocking and swaying like an ocean, and
Europe--poor Europe!--has always lived under the menace of the sword.
When this war began two-thirds of Europe were under autocratic rule.
It is the other way about now, and democracy means peace. The
democracy of France did not want war; the democracy of Italy hesitated
long before they entered the war; the democracy of this country shrank
from it--shrank and shuddered--and never would have entered the caldron
had it not been for the invasion of Belgium. The democracies sought
peace; strove for peace. If Prussia had been a democracy there would
have been no war. Strange things have happened in this war. There are
stranger things to come, and they are coming rapidly.

There are times in history when this world spins so leisur