ircumstances. We are at
the beginning of an age in which it will be insisted that the same
standards of conduct and of responsibility for wrong done shall be
observed among nations and their governments that are observed among the
individual citizens of civilized states.

NO QUARREL WITH GERMANS

"We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards
them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse
that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their
previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars
used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were
nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in
the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were
accustomed to use their fellow-men as pawns and tools.

"Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies
or set the course of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of
affairs which will give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest.

"Such designs can be successfully worked out only under cover and where
no one has the right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans
of deception or aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to
generation, can be worked out and kept from the light only within the
privacy of courts or behind the carefully guarded confidences of a
narrow and privileged class. They are happily impossible where public
opinion commands and insists upon full information concerning all the
nation's affairs.

MENACE OF INTRIGUES

"A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a
partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be
trusted to keep faith within or observe its covenants. It must be a
league of honor, a partnership of opinion.

"Intrigue would eat its vitals away; the plottings of inner circles
who could plan what they would and give account to no one, would be a
corruption seated at its very heart.

"Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a
common end and prefer the interest of mankind to any narrow interest of
their own.

WELCOME TO FREE RUSSIA

"Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope
for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things
that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?

"Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been