The worst that can happen to the detriment of the German people is this, that if they should still, after the war is over, continue to be obliged to live under ambitious and intriguing masters interested to disturb the peace of the world, men or classes of men whom the other peoples of the world could not trust, it might be impossible to admit them to the partnership of nations which must henceforth guarantee the world’s peace.  That partnership must be a partnership of peoples, not a mere partnership of governments.  It might be impossible, also, in such untoward circumstances, to admit Germany to the free economic intercourse which must inevitably spring out of the other partnerships of a real peace.  But there would be no aggression in that; and such a situation, inevitable because of distrust, would in the very nature of things sooner or later cure itself, by processes which would assuredly set in.

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 towards an ordered and stable government of free men might have been avoided.  The Russian people have been poisoned by the very same falsehoods that have kept the German people in the dark, and the poison has been administered by the very same hands.  The only possible antidote is the truth.  It cannot be uttered too plainly or too often.