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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