ry 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 program 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 of the world:
that no nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nat