We intend no wrong against the German Empire, no interference with
her internal affairs. We should deem either the one or the other
absolutely unjustifiable, absolutely contrary to the principles we
have professed to live by and to hold most sacred throughout our life
as a nation.
The people of Germany are being told by the men whom they now permit
to deceive them and to act as their masters that they are fighting
for very life and existence of their empire, a war of desperate
self-defense against deliberate aggression. Nothing could be more
grossly or wantonly false, and we must seek, by the utmost openness
and candor as to our real aims, to convince them of its falseness. We
are, in fact, fighting for their emancipation from fear, along with
our own, from the fear as well as from the fact of unjust attack by
neighbors or rivals or schemers after world empire. No one is
threatening the existence or the independence or the peaceful
enterprise of the German Empire.
The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German people is
this, that if they should still, after the war is over, continue to
be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing masters interested
to disturb the peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the
other peoples of the world could not trust, it might be impossible to
admit them to the partnership of nations which must henceforth
guarantee the world's peace. That partnership must be a partnership
of peoples, not a mere partnership of governments.
It might be impossible, also, in such untoward circumstances, to
admit Germany to the free economic intercourse which must inevitably
spring out of the other partnerships of a real peace. But there would
be no aggression in that; and such a situation, inevitable because of
distrust, would in the very nature of things sooner or later cure
itself, by processes which would assuredly set in.