arts of the globe, have indeed been so
many Proclamations of Emancipation for the world's oppressed. Not only
powerful nations shall cease to exploit little nations, but powerful
individuals shall cease to exploit their fellow men. Henceforth no wars
for dominion shall be waged, and to this end secret treaties shall be
abolished. Peoples through their representatives shall make their own
treaties. And just as democracy insures to the individual the greatest
amount of self-determination, nations also shall have self-determination,
in order that each shall be free to make its world contribution. All
citizens have duties to perform toward their fellow citizens; all
democratic nations must be interdependent.

With this purpose America has entered the war. But it implies that our
own household must be swept and cleaned. The injustices and inequalities
existing in our own country, the false standards of worth, the
materialism, the luxury and waste must be purged from our midst.

III

In fighting Germany we are indeed fighting an evil Will--evil because it
seeks to crush the growth of individual and national freedom. Its object
is to put the world back under the thrall of self-constituted authority.
So long as this Will can compel the bodies of soldiers to do its bidding,
these bodies must be destroyed. Until the Will behind them is broken,
the world cannot be free. Junkerism is the final expression of reaction,
organized to the highest efficiency. The war against the Junkers marks
the consummation of a long struggle for human liberty in all lands,
symbolizes the real cleavage dividing the world. As in the French
Revolution and the wars that followed it, the true significance of this
war is social. But today the Russian Revolution sounds the keynote.
Revolutions tend to express the extremes of the philosophies of their
times--human desires, discontents, and passions that cannot be organized.
The French Revolution was a struggle for political freedom; the
underlying issue of the present war is economic freedom--without which
political freedom is of no account. It will not, therefore, suffice
merely to crush the Junkers, and with them militarism and autocracy.
Unless, as the fruit of this appalling bloodshed and suffering, the
democracies achieve economic freedom, the war will have been fought in
vain. More revolutions, wastage and bloodshed will follow, the world
will be reduced to absolute chaos unless, in