ssible, also, in such
untoward circumstances, to admit Germany to the free economic
intercourse which must inevitably spring out of the other partnerships
of a real peace. But there would be no aggression in that; and such a
situation, inevitable because of distrust, would in the very nature of
things sooner or later cure itself, by processes which would assuredly
set in.

The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in this war will have to be
righted. That of course. But they cannot and must not be righted by the
commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies. The world
will not permit the commission of similar wrongs as a means of
reparation and settlement. Statesmen must by this time have learned that
the opinion of the world is everywhere wide awake and fully comprehends
the issues involved. No representative of any self-governed nation will
dare disregard it by attempting any such covenants of selfishness and
compromise as were entered into at the Congress of Vienna. The thought
of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the world, the people
who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and unsophisticated
standards of right and wrong, is the air all governments must henceforth
breathe if they would live. It is in the full disclosing light of that
thought that all policies must be conceived and executed in this midday
hour of the world's life. German rulers have been able to upset the
peace of the world only because the German people were not suffered
under their tutelage to share the comradeship of the other peoples of
the world either in thought or in purpose. They were allowed to have no
opinion of their own which might be set up as a rule of conduct for
those who exercised authority over them. But the congress that concludes
this war will feel the full strength of the tides that run now in the
hearts and consciences of free men everywhere. Its conclusions will run
with those tides.

All these things have been true from the very beginning of this
stupendous war; and I cannot help thinking that if they had been made
plain at the very outset the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian
people might have been once for all enlisted on the side of the Allies,
suspicion and distrust swept away, and a real and lasting union of
purpose effected. Had they believed these things at the very moment of
their revolution and had they been confirmed in that belief since, the
sad reverses which have recently