d after very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon
which the responsibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the
nation will most directly fall.

While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be very
clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our
objects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and
normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not
believe that the thought of the nation has been altered or clouded by
them. I have exactly the same things in mind now that I had in mind when
I addressed the Senate on the 22d of January last; the same that I had
in mind when I addressed the Congress on the 3d of February and on the
26th of February. Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the
principles of peace and justice in the life of the world as against
selfish and autocratic power and to set up amongst the really free and
self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and of
action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those principles.
Neutrality is no longer feasible or desirable where the peace of the
world is involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the menace to that
peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed
by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the
will of their people. We have seen the last of neutrality in such
circumstances. 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.

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. Su