representatives, that they are ready to agree to a settlement based upon justice and the reparation of the wrongs their rulers have done.  They have done a wrong to Belgium which must be repaired.  They have established a power over other lands and peoples than their own,—­over the great Empire of Austria-Hungary, over hitherto free Balkan states, over Turkey, and within Asia,—­which must be relinquished.

Germany’s success by skill, by industry, by knowledge, by enterprise we did not grudge or oppose, but admired, rather.  She had built up for herself a real empire of trade and influence, secured by the peace of the world.  We were content to abide the rivalries of manufacture, science, and commerce that were involved for us in her success and stand or fall as we had or did not have the brains and the initiative to surpass her.  But at the moment when she had conspicuously won her triumphs of peace she threw them away, to establish in their stead what the world will no longer permit to be established, military and political domination by arms, by which to oust where she could not excel the rivals she most feared and hated.  The peace we make must remedy that wrong.  It must deliver the once fair lands and happy peoples of Belgium and northern France from the Prussian conquest and the Prussian menace, but it must also deliver the peoples of Austria-Hungary, the peoples of the Balkans, and the peoples of Turkey, alike in Europe and in Asia, from the impudent and alien dominion of the Prussian military and commercial autocracy.

We owe it, however, to ourselves to say that we do not wish in any way to impair or to rearrange the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  It is no affair of ours what they do with their own life, either industrially or politically.  We do not purpose or desire to dictate to them in any way.  We only desire to see that their affairs are left in their own hands, in all matters, great or small.  We shall hope to secure for the peoples of the Balkan peninsula and for the people of the Turkish Empire the right and opportunity to make their own lives safe, their own fortunes secure against oppression or injustice and from the dictation of foreign courts or parties.

And our attitude and purpose with regard to Germany herself are of a like kind.  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 the 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.