lt question of the
limitation of armies and of all programmes of military preparation.
Difficult and delicate as these questions are, they must be faced
with the utmost candor and decided in a spirit of real accommodation
if peace is to come with healing in its wings, and come to stay.
Peace cannot be had without concession and sacrifice. There can
be no sense of safety and equality among the nations if great
preponderating armaments are henceforth to continue here and there
to be built up and maintained. The statesmen of the world must plan
for peace and nations must adjust and accommodate their policy
to it as they have planned for war and made ready for pitiless
contest and rivalry. The question of armaments, whether on land
or sea is the most immediately and intensely practical question
connected with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind.

"I have spoken upon these great matters without reserve and with
the utmost explicitness because it has seemed to me to be necessary
if the world's yearning desire for peace was anywhere to find free
voice and utterance. Perhaps I am the only person in high authority
amongst all the peoples of the world who is at liberty to speak
and hold nothing back. I am speaking as an individual, and yet I
am speaking also, of course, as the responsible head of a great
government, and I feel confident that I have said what the people
of the United States would wish me to say. May I not add, that I
hope and believe that I am in effect speaking for liberals and
friends of humanity in every nation and of every programme of liberty?
I would fain believe that I am speaking for the silent mass of
mankind everywhere who have as yet had no place or opportunity
to speak their real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they
see to have come already upon the persons and the homes they hold
most dear.

"And in holding out the expectation that the people and Government
of the United States will join the other civilized nations of the
world in guaranteeing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I
have named I speak with the greater boldness and confidence because
it is clear to every man who can think that there is in this promise
no breach in either our traditions or our policy as a nation, but
a fulfilment, rather, of all that we have professed or striven
for.

"I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord
adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine o