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 honor, 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
honor 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 know 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 their natural
instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.
Autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as
it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in
fact Russian in origin, in character or purpose; and now it has been
shaken and the great, generous Russian people have been added, in all
their native majesty and might, to the forces that are fighting for
freedom in the world, for justice and for peace. Here is a fit
partner for a league of honor.
One of the things that have served to convince us that the Prussian
autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very
outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities
and even our offices of Government with spies and set criminal
intrigues everywhere afoot against our national unity of council, our
peace within and without, our industries and our commerce.
Indeed, it is now evident that its spies were here even before the
war began, and it is, unhappily, not a matter of conjecture, but a
fact proved in our courts of justice, that the intrigues which have
more than once come perilously near to disturbing the peace and
dislocating the industries of the country have been carried on at the
instigation, with the support, and even under the personal direction,
of official agents of the Imperial German Government accredited to
the Government of the United States.
Even in checking these things and trying to extirpate them we have
sought to put the most generous interpretation possible upon them
because we knew that their source lay, not in any hostile feeling or
purpose of the German people toward us (who were, no doubt, as
ignorant of them as we ourselves were), but only in the selfish
designs of a Government that did what it pleased and told its people
nothing. But they have played their part in serving to convince us at
last that that Government entertains no real friendship for us and
means to act against our peace and security at its convenience. That
it means to stir up enemies against us at our very doors the
intercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico City is eloquent
evidence.