“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 organised 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 civilised states.

“We have no quarrel with the German people.  We have no feeling toward 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 fellowmen as pawns and tools.

“Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbour 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 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 honour, 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 honour steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

“Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?

“Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate relationships of her people that spoke for their natural instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.