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 vexed
questions of territory or of racial and national allegiance.
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.
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