w no
methods of encouraging business but the old methods. When it changes its
leaders and its purposes and brings its ideas up to date it will have
the right to ask the American people to give it power again; but not
until then. A new age, an age of revolutionary change, needs new
purposes and new ideas.

In foreign affairs we have been guided by principles clearly conceived
and consistently lived up to. Perhaps they have not been fully
comprehended because they have hitherto governed international affairs
only in theory, not in practice. They are simple, obvious, easily
stated, and fundamental to American ideals.

We have been neutral not only because it was the fixed and traditional
policy of the United States to stand aloof from the politics of Europe
and because we had had no part either of action or of policy in the
influences which brought on the present war, but also because it was
manifestly our duty to prevent, if it were possible, the indefinite
extension of the fires of hate and desolation kindled by that terrible
conflict and seek to serve mankind by reserving cur strength and our
resources for the anxious and difficult days of restoration and healing
which must follow, when peace will have to build its house anew.

The rights of our own citizens of course became involved: that was
inevitable. Where they did this was our guiding principle: that property
rights can be vindicated by claims for damages and no modern nation can
decline to arbitrate such claims; but the fundamental rights of humanity
cannot be. The loss of life is irreparable. Neither can direct
violations of a nation's sovereignty await vindication in suits for
damages. The nation that violates these essential rights must expect to
be checked and called to account by direct challenge and resistance. It
at once makes the quarrel in part our own. These are plain principles
and we have never lost sight of them or departed from them, whatever the
stress or the perplexity of circumstance or the provocation to hasty
resentment. The record is clear and consistent throughout and stands
distinct and definite for anyone to judge who wishes to know the truth
about it.

The seas were not broad enough to keep the infection of the conflict out
of our own politics. The passions and intrigues of certain active groups
and combinations of men amongst us who were born under foreign flags
injected the poison of disloyalty into our own most critical affairs,
la