triumph for you.  And you have remade the ancient and demoralized Democratic party.  Four years ago it consisted of a protest and of the wreck wrought by Mr. Bryan’s long captaincy.  This rebirth, with a popular majority, is an historical achievement—­of your own.

You have relaid the foundation and reset the pillars of a party that may enjoy a long supremacy for domestic reasons.  Now, if you will permit me to say so, from my somewhat distant view (four years make a long period of absence) the big party task is to build up a clearer and more positive foreign policy.  We are in the world and we’ve got to choose what active part we shall play in it—­I fear rather quickly.  I have the conviction, as you know, that this whole round globe now hangs as a ripe apple for our plucking, if we use the right ladder while the chance lasts.  I do not mean that we want or could get the apple for ourselves, but that we can see to it that it is put to proper uses.  What we have to do, in my judgment, is to go back to our political fathers for our clue.  If my longtime memory be good, they were sure that their establishment of a great free Republic would soon be imitated by European peoples—­that democracies would take the place of autocracies in all so-called civilized countries; for that was the form that the fight took in their day against organized Privilege.  But for one reason or another—­in our life-time partly because we chose so completely to isolate ourselves—­the democratic idea took root in Europe with disappointing slowness.  It is, for instance, now perhaps for the first time, in a thoroughgoing way, within sight in this Kingdom.  The dream of the American Fathers, therefore, is not yet come true.  They fought against organized Privilege exerted from over the sea.  In principle it is the same fight that we have made, in our domestic field, during recent decades.  Now the same fight has come on a far larger scale than men ever dreamed of before.

It isn’t, therefore, for merely doctrinal reasons that we are concerned for the spread of democracy nor merely because a democracy is the only scheme of organization yet wrought out that keeps the door of opportunity open and invites all men to their fullest development.  But we are interested in it because under no other system can the world be made an even reasonably safe place to live in.  For only autocracies wage aggressive wars.  Aggressive autocracies, especially military autocracies, must be softened down by peace (and they have never been so softened) or destroyed by war.  The All-Highest doctrine of Germany to-day is the same as the Taxation-without-Representation of George III—­only more virulent, stronger, and farther-reaching.  Only by its end can the German people recover and build up their character and take the permanent place in the world that they—­thus changed—­will be entitled to.  They will either reduce Europe to the vassalage of a military autocracy, which may