rmined 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 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.

PEACE THROUGH FREE PEOPLES

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 it 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 render 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 interests of mankind to
any narrow interest of their own.

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 know it best to have been always in
fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in
all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural
instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.

Autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as
it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in
fact Russian in origin, in character or purpose; and now it has been
shaken and the great, generous Russian people have been added, in all
their native majesty and might, to the forces that are fighting for
freedom in the world, for justice and for pea