their equipment and extend their operative facilities as much as the
present extraordinary demands upon their use will render desirable
without resorting to the national treasury for the funds. If it is not
possible, it will, of course, be necessary to resort to the Congress for
grants of money for that purpose. The Secretary of the Treasury will
advise with your committees with regard to this very practical aspect of
the matter. For the present, I suggest only the guarantees I have
indicated and such appropriations as are necessary at the outset of this
task. I take the liberty of expressing the hope that the Congress may
grant these promptly and ungrudgingly. We are dealing with great matters
and will, I am sure, deal with them greatly.

THE CONDITIONS OF PEACE

[Address delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress,
January 8, 1918.]

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS:

Once more, as repeatedly before, the spokesmen of the Central Empires
have indicated their desire to discuss the objects of the war and the
possible bases of a general peace. Parleys have been in progress at
Brest-Litovsk between Russian representatives and representatives of the
Central Powers to which the attention of all the belligerents has been
invited for the purpose of ascertaining whether it may be possible to
extend these parleys into a general conference with regard to terms of
peace and settlement. The Russian representatives presented not only a
perfectly definite statement of the principles upon which they would be
willing to conclude peace but also an equally definite program of the
concrete application of those principles. The representatives of the
Central Powers, on their part, presented an outline of settlement which,
if much less definite, seemed susceptible of liberal interpretation
until their specific program of practical terms was added. That program
proposed no concessions at all either to the sovereignty of Russia or to
the preferences of the populations with whose fortunes it dealt, but
meant, in a word, that the Central Empires were to keep every foot of
territory their armed forces had occupied,--every province, every city,
every point of vantage,--as a permanent addition to their territories
and their power. It is a reasonable conjecture that the general
principles of settlement which they at first suggested originated with
the more liberal statesmen of Germany and Austria, the men who have
begun to feel t