You know how many intimations come to us from one of the central powers
that it is more anxious for peace than the chief central power, and you
know that it means that the people in that central power know that if
the war ends as it stands they will in effect themselves be vassals of
Germany, notwithstanding that their populations are compounded of all
the peoples of that part of the world, and notwithstanding the fact that
they do not wish in their pride and proper spirit of nationality to be
so absorbed and dominated. Germany is determined that the political
power of the world shall belong to her. There have been such ambitions
before. They have been in part realized, but never before have those
ambitions been based upon so exact and precise and scientific a plan of
domination.
May I not say that it is amazing to me that any group of persons should
be so ill-informed as to suppose, as some groups in Russia apparently
suppose, that any reforms planned in the interest of the people can live
in the presence of a Germany powerful enough to undermine or overthrow
them by intrigue or force? Any body of free men that compounds with the
present German Government is compounding for its own destruction. But
that is not the whole of the story. Any man in America or anywhere else
that supposes that the free industry and enterprise of the world can
continue if the Pan-German plan is achieved and German power fastened
upon the world is as fatuous as the dreamers in Russia. What I am
opposed to is not the feeling of the pacifists, but their stupidity. My
heart is with them, but my mind has a contempt for them. I want peace,
but I know how to get it, and they do not.