We are provincials no longer. The tragic events of the thirty months of
vital turmoil through which we have just passed have made us citizens of
the world. There can be no turning back. Our own fortunes as a nation
are involved whether we would have it so or not.
And yet we are not the less Americans on that account. We shall be the
more American if we but remain true to the principles in which we have
been bred. They are not the principles of a province or of a single
continent. We have known and boasted all along that they were the
principles of a liberated mankind. These, therefore, are the things we
shall stand for, whether in war or in peace:
That all nations are equally interested in the peace of the world and in
the political stability of free peoples, and equally responsible for
their maintenance; that the essential principle of peace is the actual
equality of nations in all matters of right or privilege; that peace
cannot securely or justly rest upon an armed balance of power; that
governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed and that no other powers should be supported by the common
thought, purpose or power of the family of nations; that the seas should
be equally free and safe for the use of all peoples, under rules set up
by common agreement and consent, and that, so far as practicable, they
should be accessible to all upon equal terms; that national armaments
shall be limited to the necessities of national order and domestic
safety; that the community of interest and of power upon which peace
must henceforth depend imposes upon each nation the duty of seeing to it
that all influences proceeding from its own citizens meant to encourage
or assist revolution in other states should be sternly and effectually
suppressed and prevented.
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