Why We are at War | Page 3

Only a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There must be not only

a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries,
but an organized common peace.
Fortunately, we have received very explicit assurances on this point.
The statesmen of both of the groups of nations now arrayed against one
another have said, in terms that could not be misinterpreted, that it was
no part of the purpose they had in mind to crush their antagonists. But
the implications of these assurances may not be equally clear to
all--may not be the same on both sides of the water. I think it will be
serviceable if I attempt to set forth what we understand them to be.
They imply, first of all, that it must be a peace without victory. It is not
pleasant to say this. I beg that I may be permitted to put my own
interpretation upon it and that it may be understood that no other
interpretation was in my thought.
I am seeking only to face realities and to face them without soft
concealments. Victory would mean peace forced upon the loser, a
victor's terms imposed upon the vanquished. It would be accepted in
humiliation, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and would leave a
sting, a resentment, a bitter memory, upon which terms of peace would
rest, not permanently, but only as upon quicksand.
Only a peace between equals can last; only a peace the very principle of
which is equality and a common participation in a common benefit.
The right state of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as
necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settlement of questions of
territory or of racial and national allegiance.
MUST EQUALIZE RIGHTS OF NATIONS
The equality of nations upon which peace must be founded, if it is to
last, must be an equality of rights; the guarantees exchanged must
neither recognize nor imply a difference between big nations and small,
between those that are powerful and those that are weak.
Right must be based upon the common strength, not upon the
individual strength, of the nations upon whose concert peace will
depend.
Equality of territory or of resources there, of course, cannot be; nor any
other sort of equality not gained in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate
development of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or expects
anything more than an equality of rights. Mankind is looking now for
freedom of life, not for equipoises of power.

And there is a deeper thing involved than even equality of rights among
organized nations. No peace can last, or ought to last, which does not
recognize and accept the principle that Governments derive all their
just powers from the consent of the governed, and that no right
anywhere exists to hand people about from sovereignty to sovereignty
as if they were property.
I take it for granted, for instance, if I may venture upon a single
example, that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a
united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth
inviolable security of life, of worship, and of industrial and social
development should be guaranteed to all peoples who have lived
hitherto under the power of Governments devoted to a faith and
purpose hostile to their own.
I speak of this, not because of any desire to exalt an abstract political
principle which has always been held very dear by those who have
sought to build up liberty in America, but for the same reason that I
have spoken of the other conditions of peace which seem to me clearly
indispensable--because I wish frankly to uncover realities.
CRUSHED PEOPLES WILL REVOLT
Any peace which does not recognize and accept this principle will
inevitably be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the
convictions of mankind. The ferment of spirit of whole populations will
fight subtly and constantly against it, and all the world will sympathize.
The world can be at peace only if its life is stable, and there can be no
stability where the will is in rebellion, where there is not tranquillity of
spirit and a sense of justice, of freedom, and of right.
So far as practicable, moreover, every great people now struggling
toward a full development of its resources and of its powers should be
assured a direct outlet to the great highways of the sea. Where this
cannot be done by the cession of territory, it can no doubt be done by
the neutralization of direct rights of way under the general guarantee
which will assure the peace itself. With a right comity of arrangement
no nation need be shut away from free access to the open paths of the
world's commerce.
And the paths of the sea must