ish Empire is moving toward closer federation. The grand alliance called into existence by the German aggression is now something more than a military coalition. Common ideals are working through it-ideals of local autonomy and joint action. Men are crying that they must be free and that they must be united. They have learned that they can not be free unless they cooperate, that they can not coöperate unless they are free.

I do not wish to underestimate the forces of reaction in our country or in the other nations of the alliance. There are politicians and commercial groups who see in this whole thing nothing but opportunity to secure concessions, manipulate tariffs, and extend the bureaucracies. We shall know how to deal with them. Forces have been let loose which they can no longer control, and out of this immense horror ideas have arisen to possess men's souls. There are times when a prudent statesman must build on a contracted view of human nature. But there are times when new sources of energy are tapped, when the impossible becomes possible, when events outrun our calculations. This may

be such a time. The alliance to which we belong has suddenly grown hot with the new democracy of Russia and the new internationalism of America. It has had an access of spiritual force which opens a new prospect in the policies of the world. We can dare to hope for things which we never dared to hope for in the past. In fact if those forces are not to grow cold and frittered they must be turned to a great end and offered a great hope.

IV.

That great end and that great hope is nothing less than the federation of the world. I know it sounds a little old-fashioned to use that phrase because we have abused it so long in empty rhetoric; but no other idea is big enough to describe the alliance. It is no longer an offensive-defensive military agreement among diplomats. That is how it started, to be sure; but it has grown and is growing into a union of peoples determined to end forever that intriguing, adventurous nationalism which has torn the world for three centuries. Good democrats have always believed that the common interests of men were

greater than their special interests, that ruling classes can be enemies, but that the nations must be partners. Well, this war is being fought by nations. It is the nations who were called to arms, and it is the force of nations that is now stirring the world to its foundations.

mat's war.

The war is dissolving into a stupendous revolution. A few months ago we still argued about the Bagdad corridor, strategic frontiers, colonies. Those were the stakes of the diploThe whole perspective is changed to-day by the revolution in Russia and the intervention of America. The scale of values is transformed, for the democracies are unloosed. Those democracies have nothing to gain and everything to lose by the old competitive nationalism, the old apparatus of diplomacy, with its criminal rivalries in the backward places of the earth. The democracies, if they are to be safe, must coöperate. For the old rivalries mean friction and armament and a distortion of all the hopes of free government. They mean that nations are organized to exploit each other and to exploit themselves. That is the life of what we call autocracy. It establishes its power at home.

by pointing to enemies abroad. It fights its enemies abroad by dragooning the population at home.

That is why practically the whole world is at war with the greatest of the autocracies. That is why the whole world is turning so passionately toward democracy as the only principle on which peace can be secured. Many have feared, I know, that the war against Prussian militarism would result the other way, that instead of liberalizing Prussia the outcome would be a Prussianization of the democracies. That would be the outcome if Prusso-Germany won. That would be the result of a German victory. And that is why we, who are the most peaceful of democracies, are at war. The success of the submarine would give Germany victory. It was and is her one great chance. To have stood aside when Germany made this terrible bid for victory would have been to betray the hope of free government and international union.

V.

There are two ways now in which peace can be made. The first is by political revolution in

Germany and Austria-Hungary. It is not for us to define the nature of that revolution. We can not dictate liberty to the German people. It is for them to decide what political institutions they will adopt, but if peace is to come through revolution, we shall know that it has come when new voices are heard in Germany, new policies are proclaimed, when there is good evidence that there has, indeed, been a new orientation. If that is done, the war can be ended by negotiation.

The other path to peace is by the definite defeat of every item in the program of aggression. This will mean, at a minimum, a demonstration on the field that the German army is not invincible; a renunciation by Germany of all the territory she has conquered; a special compensation to Belgium; and an acknowledgment of the fallacy of exclusive nationalism by an application for membership in the league of nations.

Frontier questions, colonial questions, are now entirely secondary, and beyond this minimum program the United States has no direct interest in the territorial settlement. The objects for which we are at war will be attained if we can