In such a program our ideals, the ideals of justice and humanity and
liberty, the principle of the free self-determination of nations, upon
which all the modern world insists, can play no part. They are rejected
for the ideals of power, for the principle that the strong must rule the
weak, that trade must follow the flag, whether those to whom it is taken
welcome it or not, that the peoples of the world are to be made subject
to the patronage and overlordship of those who have the power to enforce
it.
That program once carried out, America and all who care or dare to stand
with her must arm and prepare themselves to contest the mastery of the
world--a mastery in which the rights of common men, the rights of women
and of all who are weak, must for the time being be trodden underfoot
and disregarded and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and right
begin again at its beginning. Everything that America has lived for and
loved and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious realization
will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates of mercy once more
pitilessly shut upon mankind!
The thing is preposterous and impossible; and yet is not that what the
whole course and action of the German armies have meant wherever they
have moved? I do not wish, even in this moment of utter disillusionment,
to judge harshly or unrighteously. I judge only what the German arms
have accomplished with unpitying thoroughness throughout every fair
region they have touched.