t victory. It is
not pleasant to say this. I beg that I may be permitted to put my own
interpretation upon it and that it may be understood that no other
interpretation was in my thought. I am seeking only to face realities
and to face them without soft concealments. Victory would mean peace
forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It
would be accepted in humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable
sacrifice, and would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory upon
which terms of peace would rest, not permanently, but only as upon
quicksand. Only a peace between equals can last. Only a peace the very
principle of which is equality and a common participation in a common
benefit. The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is
as necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of vexed
questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance.

The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded if it is to
last must be an equality of rights; the guarantees exchanged must
neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small,
between those that are powerful and those that are weak. Right must be
based upon the common strength, not upon the individual strength, of the
nations upon whose concert peace will depend. Equality of territory or
of resources there of course cannot be; nor any other sort of equality
not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development of the
peoples themselves. But no one asks or expects anything more than an
equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for freedom of life, not for
equipoises of power.

And there is a deeper thing involved than even equality of right among
organized nations. No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not
recognize and accept the principle that governments derive all their
just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right anywhere
exists to hand peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they
were property. I take it for granted, for instance, if I may venture
upon a single example, that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there
should be a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that
henceforth inviolable security of life, of worship, and of industrial
and social development should be guaranteed to all peoples who have
lived hitherto under the power of governments devoted to a faith and
purpose hostile to their own.

I speak of this, not be