ich we are
fighting here in Europe, and that which Lincoln fought? Has there not
grown up in this continent a new form of slavery, a militarist slavery,
which has not only been crushing out the freedom of the people under
its control, but which in recent years has also been moving toward
crushing out freedom and fraternity in all Europe as well?

Is it not true that it is to the militarist system of government which
centers in Berlin that every open-minded man who is familiar with past
history would point as being the ultimate source of all the expansion
of armaments, of all the international unrest, and of the failure of
all movements toward co-operation and harmony among nations during the
last twenty years?

We were reluctant, and many of us refused to believe that any sane
rulers would deliberately drench Europe in its own blood, so we did not
face the facts until it was almost too late. It was not until August,
1914, that it became clear to us, as it became clear to Lincoln in
1861, that the issue was not to be settled by pacific means, and that
either the machine which controlled the destinies of Germany would
destroy the liberty of Europe or the people of Europe must defeat its
purpose and its prestige by the supreme sacrifice of war. It was the
ultimatum to Serbia and the ruthless attack upon Belgium and France
which followed because the nations of Europe would not tolerate the
obliteration of the independence of a free people without conference
and by the sword, which revealed to us all the implacable nature of the
struggle which lay before us.

It has been difficult for a nation separated from Europe by three
thousand miles of sea and without political connections with its
peoples, to appreciate fully what was at stake in the war. In your
Civil War many of our ancestors were blind. Lord Russell hinted at an
early peace. Even Gladstone declared "we have no faith in the
propagation of free institutions at the point of the sword." It was
left for John Bright, that man of all others who most loved peace and
hated war, to testify that when our statesmen "were hostile or coldly
neutral the British people clung to freedom with an unfaltering trust."
But I think that America now sees that it is human unity and freedom
which are again being fought for in this war.

The American people under Lincoln fought not a war of conquest, but a
war of liberation. We to-day are fighting not a war of conquest, but a
wa