Chapter XL: Appendix: A

PRESIDENT WILSON'S SPEECH

TO THE UNITED STATES CONGRESS--11TH DAY OF FEBRUARY, 1918.

On the above mentioned date, Mr. Wilson, the President of the great American Republic, delivered the following speech to the Congress, in Washington. This noble and statesmanlike utterance met with the unanimous and enthusiastic approval of the members of both Houses, and was highly applauded, not only in the United States, but over all the truly civilized world. It reads thus:--

"On the eighth of January, I had the honor of addressing you on
the objects of the war as our people conceive them. The Prime
Minister of Great Britain had spoken in similar terms on the
fifth of January. To these addresses the German Chancellor
replied on the 24th and Count Czernin for Austria on the same
day. It is gratifying to have our desire so promptly realized
that all exchanges of view on this great matter should be made
in the hearing of all the world.

"Count Czernin's reply, which is directed chiefly to my own
address, on the eighth of January, is uttered in a very friendly
tone.

"He finds in my statement a sufficiently encouraging approach to
the views of his own government to justify him in believing that
it furnishes a basis for a more detailed discussion of purposes
by the two governments. He is represented to have intimated that
the views he was expressing had been communicated to me
beforehand and that I was aware of them at the time he was
uttering them; but in this I am sure he was misunderstood. I had
received no intimation of what he intended to say. There was, of
course, no reason why he should communicate privately with me. I
am quite content to be one of his public audiences.

"Count von Hertling's reply is, I may say, very vague and very
confusing. It is full of equivocal phrases and leads, it is not
clear where. But it is certainly in a very different tone from
that of Count Czernin and apparently of an opposite purpose. It
confirms, I am sorry to say, rather than removes, the
unfortunate impression made by what we had learned of the
conferences at Brest-Litovsk. His discussion and acceptance of
our general principles leads him to no practical conclusions. He
refuses to apply them to the substantiate items which must
constitute the body of any final settlement. He is jealous of
international action and of international council. He accepts,
he says, the principle of public diplomacy, but he appears to
insist that it be confined at any rate in this case, to
generalities and that the several particular questions of
territory and sovereignty, the several questions upon whose
settlement must depend the acceptance of peace by the
twenty-three states now engaged in the war, must be discussed
and settled, not in general council but severally by the nations
most immediately concerned by interest of neighbourhood. He
agrees that the seas should be free, but looks askance at any
limitation to that freedom by international action in the
interest of the common order. He would, without reserve, be glad
to see economic barriers removed between nation and nation, for
that could in no way impede the ambitions of the military party
with whom he seems constrained to keep on terms. Neither does he
raise objection to a limitation of armaments. That matter will
be settled of itself, he thinks, by the economic conditions
which must follow the war. But the German colonies, he demands,
must be returned without debate. He will discuss with no one but
the representatives of Russia what disposition shall be made of
the peoples and the lands of the Baltic provinces; with no one
but the Government of France the "conditions" under which French
territory shall be evacuated and only with Austria what shall be
done with Poland. In the determination of all questions
affecting the Balkan states he defers, as I understand him, to
Austria and Turkey and with regard to the agreements to be
entered into concerning the non-Turkish peoples of the present
Ottoman Empire, to the Turkish authorities themselves. After a
settlement all around effected in this fashion, by individual
barter and concession, he would have no objection, if I
correctly interpret his statement, to a league of nations which
would undertake to hold the balance of power steady against
external disturbance.

"It must be evident to everyone who understands what this war
has wrought in the opinion and temper of the world that no
general peace, no peace worth the infinite sacrifices of these
years of tragical suffering, can possibly be arrived at in any
such fashion. The method the German Chancellor proposes is the
method of the Congress of Vienna. We cannot and will not return
to that. What is at stake now is the peace of the world. What we
are striving for is a new international order based upon broad
and universal principles of right and justice--no mere peace of
shreds and patches. Is it possible that Count von Hertling does
not see that, does not grasp it, is in fact living in his
thought in a world dead and gone? Has he utterly forgotten the
Reichstag resolutions of the 19th of July, or does he
deliberately ignore them? They spoke of the conditions of a
general peace, not of national aggrandizement or of arrangements
between state and state. The peace of the world depends upon
just settlement of each of the several problems to which I
adverted in my recent address to Congress. I, of course, do not
mean that the peace of the world depends upon the acceptance of
any particular set of suggestions as to the way in which those
problems are to be dealt with. I mean only that those problems,
each and all, affect the whole world; that unless they are dealt
with in a spirit of unselfish and unbiassed justice, with a view
to the wishes, the natural connections, the racial aspirations,
the security and peace of mind of the peoples involved, no
permanent peace will have been attained. They cannot be
discussed separately or in corners. None of them constitutes a
private or separate interest from which the opinion of the world
may be shut out. Whatever affects the peace affects mankind,
and nothing settled by military force, if settled wrong, is
settled at all. It will presently have to be re-opened.

"Is Count von Hertling not aware that he is speaking in the
court of mankind, that all the awakened nations of the world now
sit in judgment on what every public man, of whatever nation,
may say on the issues of a conflict which has spread to every
region of the world? The Reichstag resolutions of July 19
themselves frankly accepted the decisions of that court. There
shall be no annexations, no contributions, no punitive damages.
Peoples are not to be handed about from one sovereignty to
another by an international conference or an understanding
between rivals and antagonists. National aspirations must be
respected; peoples may now be dominated and governed only by
their own consent. "Self-determination," is not a mere phrase.
It is an imperative principle of action, which statesmen will
henceforth ignore at their peril. We cannot have general peace
for the asking, or by the mere arrangements of a peace
conference. It cannot be pieced together out of individual
understandings between powerful states. All the parties to this
war must join in the settlement of every issue anywhere involved
in it because what we are seeking is a peace that we can all
unite to guarantee and maintain whether it be right and fair, an
act of justice, rather than a bargain between sovereigns.

"The United States has no desire to interfere in European
affairs or to act as arbiter in European territorial disputes.
We would disdain to take advantage of any internal weakness or
disorder to impose her own will upon another people. She is
quite ready to be shown that the settlements she has suggested
are not the best or the most enduring. They are only her own
provisional sketch of principles, and of the way in which they
should be applied. But she entered this war because she was made
a partner, whether she would or not, in the sufferings and
indignities inflicted by the military masters of Germany,
against the peace and security of mankind; and the conditions of
peace will touch her as nearly as they will touch any other
nation to which is entrusted a leading part in the maintenance
of civilization. She cannot see her way to peace until the
causes of this war are removed, its renewal rendered, as nearly
as may be, impossible.

"This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights of small
nations and of nationalities which lacked the union and the
force to make good their claim to determine their own
allegiances and their own forms of political life. Covenants
must now be entered into which will render such things
impossible for the future; and those covenants must be backed by
the united force of all the nations that love justice and are
willing to maintain it at any cost. If territorial settlements
and the political relations of great populations which have not
the organized power to resist are to be determined by the
contracts of the powerful governments which consider themselves
most directly affected, as Count von Hertling proposes, why may
not economic questions also? It has come about in the altered
world in which we now find ourselves that justice and the rights
of peoples affect the whole field of international dealing as
much as access to raw materials and fair and equal conditions of
trade. Count von Hertling wants the essential basis of
commercial and industrial life to be safeguarded by common
agreement and guarantee, but he cannot expect that to be
conceded him if the other matters to be determined by the
articles of peace are not handled in the same way as it was in
the final accounting. He cannot ask the benefit of common
agreement in the one field without according it in the other. I
take it for granted that he sees that separate and selfish
compacts with regard to trade and the essential materials of
manufacture would afford no foundation for peace. Neither, he
may rest assured, will separate and selfish compacts with regard
to the provinces and peoples.

"Count Czernin seems to see the fundamental elements of peace
with clear eyes and does not seek to obscure them. He sees that
an independent Poland, made up of all the indisputably Polish
peoples who lie contiguous to one another, is a matter of
European concern and must of course be conceded; that Belgium
must be evacuated and restored, no matter what sacrifices and
concessions that may involve; and that national aspirations must
be satisfied, even within his own empire, in the common interest
of Europe and mankind. If he is silent about questions which
touch the interest and purpose of his Allies more nearly than
they touch those of Austria only, it must, of course, be because
he feels constrained, I suppose, to defer to Germany and Turkey
in the circumstances. Seeing and conceding, as he does, the
essential principles involved and the necessity of candidly
applying them, he naturally feels that Austria can respond to
the purpose of peace as expressed by the United States with less
embarrassment than could Germany. He would probably have gone
much farther had it not been for the embarrassments of Austria's
alliance and of her dependence upon Germany.

"After all the test of whether it is possible for either
Government to go any further in this comparison of views is
simple and obvious. The principles to be applied are:

"First, that each part of the final settlement must be based on
the essential justice of the particular case, and upon such
adjustments as are most likely to bring a peace that will be
permanent.

"Second, that peoples and provinces are not to be bartered about
from sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were mere chattels
and pawns in a game, even the great game, now for ever
discredited, of the balance of power; but that,

"Every territorial settlement involved in this war must be made
in the interest and for the benefit of the populations concerned
and not as a part of any mere adjustment of compromise of claims
amongst rival states; and,

"Fourth, that all well defined national aspirations shall be
accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be accorded them
without introducing new or perpetuating old elements of discord,
and antagonism that would be likely in time to break the peace
of Europe and consequently of the world.

"A general peace entered upon such foundations can be discussed.
Until such a peace can be secured we have no choice but to go
on. So far as we can judge, these principles that we regard as
fundamental are already everywhere accepted as imperative
except among the spokesmen of the military and annexationist
party in Germany. If they have anywhere else been rejected, the
objectors have not been sufficiently numerous or influential to
make their voices audible. The tragic circumstance is that this
one party in Germany is apparently willing and able to send
millions of men to their death to prevent what all the world now
sees to be just.

"I would not be a true spokesman of the people of the United
States if I did not say once more that we entered this war upon
no small occasion, and that we can never turn back from a course
chosen upon principle. Our resources are in part mobilized now,
and we shall not pause until they are mobilized in their
entirety. Our armies are rapidly going to the fighting front,
and will go more rapidly. Our whole strength will be put into
this state of emancipation--emancipation from the threat and
attempted mastery of selfish groups of autocratic
rulers--whatever the difficulties and present partial delays. We
are indomitable in our power of independent action, and can in
no circumstances consent to live in a world governed by intrigue
and force. We believe that our own desire for a new
international order under which reason and justice and the
common interests of mankind shall prevail, is the desire of
enlightened men everywhere. Without that new order the world
will be without peace, and human life will lack tolerable
conditions of existence and development. Having set our hand to
the task of achieving it, we shall not turn back.

"I hope that it is not necessary for me to add that no word of
what I have said is intended as a threat. That is not the
temper of our people. I have spoken thus only that the whole
world may know the true spirit of America--that men everywhere
may know that our passion for justice and for self-government is
no mere passion of words, but a passion which, once set in act,
must be satisfied. The power of the United States is a menace to
no nation or people. It will be never used in aggression or for
the aggrandizement of any selfish interest of our own. It
springs out of freedom and is for the service of freedom."