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. Such designs can
be successfully worked out 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.

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