The wrongs, the very deep wrongs, committed in this war will have to
be righted. That of course. But they cannot and must not be righted
by the commission of similar wrongs against Germany and her allies.
The world will not permit the commission of similar wrongs as a means
of reparation and settlement. Statesmen must by this time have
learned that the opinion of the world is everywhere wide awake and
fully comprehends the issues involved. No representative of any
self-governed nation will dare disregard it by attempting any such
covenants of selfishness and compromise as were entered into at the
congress of Vienna.
The thought of the plain people here and everywhere throughout the
world, the people who enjoy no privilege and have very simple and
unsophisticated standards of right and wrong, is the air all
governments must henceforth breathe if they would live. It is in the
full disclosing light of that thought that all policies must be
conceived and executed in this midday hour of the world's life.
German rulers have been able to upset the peace of the world only
because the German people were not suffered, under their tutelage, to
share the comradeship of the other peoples of the world either in
thought or in purpose. They were allowed to have no opinion of their
own which might be set up as a rule of conduct for those who
exercised authority over them. But the congress that concludes this
war will feel the full strength of the tides that run now in the
hearts and consciences of free men everywhere. Its conclusions will
run with those tides.
All these things have been true from the very beginning of this
stupendous war; and I cannot help thinking that if they had been made
plain at the very outset the sympathy and enthusiasm of the Russian
people might have been once for all enlisted on the side of the
Allies, suspicion and distrust swept away, and a real and lasting
union of purpose effected. Had they believed these things at the very
moment of their revolution, and had they been confirmed in that
belief since, the sad reverses which have recently marked the
progress of their affairs toward an ordered and stable government of
free men might have been avoided.