wn on, by circumstances, not by our own purpose or desire, to a
more active assertion of our rights as we see them and a more
immediate association with the great struggle itself. But nothing
will alter our thought or our purpose. They are too clear to be
obscured. They are too deeply rooted in the principles of our
national life to be altered. We desire neither conquest nor
advantage. We wish nothing that can be had only at the cost of
another people. We have always professed unselfish purpose and we
covet the opportunity to prove that our professions are sincere.

THE SPIRIT OF CO-OPERATION

There are many things still to do at home, to clarify our own
politics and give new vitality to the industrial processes of our own
life, and we shall do them as time and opportunity serve; but we
realize that the greatest things that remain to be done must be done
with the whole world for stage and in co-operation with the wide and
universal forces of mankind, and we are making our spirits ready for
those things. They will follow in the immediate wake of the war
itself and will set civilization up again. We are provincials no
longer. The tragical events of the thirty months of vital turmoil
through which we have just passed have made us citizens of the world.
There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation are
involved, whether we would have it so or not.

And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall be
the more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we
have been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a
single continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were
the principles of a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the
things we shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:

OUR NATIONAL PLATFORM

That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and
in the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible
for their maintenance;

That the essential principle of peace is the actual equality of
nations in all matters of right or privilege;

That peace cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of
power;

That Governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common
thought, purpose or power of the family of nations;

That the seas should be equally free and safe for the use of all
peoples, under rules set up by common agreement