While we do these things, these deeply momentous things, let us be
very clear and make very clear to all the world what our motives and
our objects are. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual
and normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I
do not believe that the thought of the nation has been altered or
clouded by them.
I have exactly the same thing in mind now that I had in mind when I
addressed the Senate on the 22d of January last; the same that I had
in mind when I addressed the Congress on the 3d of February and on
the 26th of February.
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the principles of peace and
justice in the life of the world as against selfish and autocratic
power and to set up amongst the really free and self-governed peoples
of the world such a concert of purpose and of action as will
henceforth insure the observance of those principles.
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 organized 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 civilized 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
fellow-men as pawns and tools.
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor 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.