We Americans should have done, once and for all time, with the diplomacy of lying and deceit.  Fortunately our recent traditions are in harmony with this demand; but we should not depend upon the happy accident of an administration which takes the right attitude.  It should be the open and universal demand of the American people that those who represent us shall place the relations we sustain to other nations permanently on the same plane of frank honesty, generally prevailing among individuals.  Incidentally, any politician or statesman who, at this heart-breaking crisis of the world’s life, dares play party politics with our international relations, should be damned forever by the vote of the American people.

Further, it is our duty to have done with all dream of empire building.  It is not for us:  let us abandon it frankly and forever.  Those dependencies which have come to us through the accidents of our history should be granted autonomous self-government at the earliest moment at which they can safely take it over—­which does not necessarily mean to-morrow.  If they remain affiliated with us it should be only through the voluntary choice of the majority of the population dwelling upon them.

It is, moreover, our duty to lead the world in the effort to form a federation of the nations and establish the aforesaid world court of justice, with the international military and naval police to enforce its judgments.

More than this is demanded:  on the basis of the challenge of our democracy, it is our duty to rise to the point of placing justice higher than commercial interest.  It is a hard demand; but, with the latent idealism in our American life, surely we can rise to it.  For instance, the vexed puzzle of the tariff will never be justly and permanently settled, till it is settled primarily as a problem of moral international relationship, and not as one merely of economic interest and advantage.

For example, a tariff wall between the United States and Canada is as preposterous an absurdity as would be a long line of bristling fortifications along the three thousand and more miles of international boundary.  We are not protecting ourselves from slave labor over there.  They are not protecting themselves from slave labor here.  Barring a few lines of industry, there are the same conditions of labor, production and distribution both sides of the line.  The only reason for a tariff wall is their wish, or our wish, or the wish of each, to gain some advantage at the expense of the other party.  Now every business man knows that any trade that benefits one and injures the other party to it is bad business, as well as bad ethics, in the long run.  Good business benefits both traders all the time.

On the other hand, when it comes to protecting our labor from competition with slave labor in other quarters of the earth, we have not only the right, but the duty to do it.  So when it is a matter of protecting our industries from being swamped by the unloading of vast quantities of goods, produced under the feverish and abnormal conditions, sure to prevail in Europe after the War, we have again, not only the right, but the duty to do it.