Cunningly contrived plans of deception or aggression, carried, it may
be, from generation to generation, can be worked out and kept from the
light only within the privacy of courts or behind the carefully
guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged class. They are happily
impossible where public opinion commands and insists upon full
information concerning all the nation's affairs.


PEACE THROUGH FREE PEOPLES

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a
partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic Government could be
trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be
a league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its
vitals away, the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they
would and render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its
very heart. Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor
steady to a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any
narrow interest of their own.

Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope
for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening
things that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia?

Russia was known by those who know it best to have been always in fact
democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all
the intimate relationships of her people that spoke their natural
instinct, their habitual attitude toward life.

Autocracy that crowned the summit of her political structure, long as