“Such designs can be successfully worked out 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.

MENACE OF INTRIGUES

“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 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 give 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 interest of mankind to any narrow interest of their own.

WELCOME TO FREE RUSSIA

“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 knew 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.  The autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, as long as it had stood and terrible as was the reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character or purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian people have 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 has 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 counsel, 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 government accredited to the government of the United States.