and powerful as to repeat for all
the world what Rome did for Europe two thousand years ago. Either we
must have human unity by a league of existing states or by an Imperial
Conquest. The former is now the declared Aim of our country and its
Allies; the latter is manifestly the ambition of the present rulers of
Germany. Whatever the complications may have been in the earlier stages
of the war, due to treaties that are now dead letters and agreements
that are extinct, the essential issue now before every man in the world
is this: Is the unity of mankind to be the unity of a common freedom, in
which every race and nationality may participate with complete
self-respect, playing its part, according to its character, in one great
world community, or is it to be reached--and it can only be so reached
through many generations of bloodshed and struggle still, even if it can
be ever reached in this way at all--through conquest and a German
hegemony?

While the rulers of Germany to-day are more openly aggressive and
imperialist than they were in August, 1914, the Allies arrayed against
them have made great progress in clearing up and realizing the instincts
and ideals which brought them originally into the struggle. The German
government offers the world to-day a warring future in which Germany
alone is to be secure and powerful and proud. _Mankind will not endure
that_. The Allies offer the world more and more definitely the scheme of
an organized League of Free Nations, a rule of law and justice about the
earth. To fight for that and for no other conceivable end, the United
States of America, with the full sympathy and co-operation of every
state in the western hemisphere, has entered the war. The British
Empire, in the midst of the stress of the great war, has set up in
Dublin a Convention of Irishmen of all opinions with the fullest powers
of deciding upon the future of their country. If Ireland were not
divided against herself she could be free and equal with England
to-morrow. It is the open intention of Great Britain to develop
representative government, where it has not hitherto existed, in India
and Egypt, to go on steadfastly increasing the share of the natives of
these countries in the government of their own lands, until they too
become free and equal members of the world league. Neither France nor
Italy nor Britain nor America has ever tampered with the shipping of
other countries except in time of war, and the trad