We must so conduct ourselves that every big nation and every little nation that behaves itself shall never have to think of us with fear, and shall have confidence not only in our justice but in our courtesy. Submission to wrong-doing on our part would be mere weakness and would invite and insure disaster. We must not submit to wrong done to our honor or to our vital national interests. But we must be scrupulously careful always to speak with courtesy and self-restraint to others, always to act decently to others, and to give no nation any justification for believing that it has anything to fear from us as long as it behaves with decency and uprightness. Above all, let us avoid the policy of peace with insult, the policy of unpreparedness to defend our rights, with inability to restrain our representatives from doing wrong to or publicly speaking ill of others. The worst policy for the United States is to combine the unbridled tongue with the unready hand. We in this country have of course come lamentably short of our ideals. Nevertheless, in some ways our ideals have been high, and at times we have measurably realized them. From the beginning we have recognized what is taught in the words of Washington, and again in the great crisis of our national life in the words of Lincoln, that in the past free peoples have generally split and sunk on that great rock of difficulty caused by the fact that a government which recognizes the liberties of the people is not usually strong enough to preserve the liberties of the people against outside aggression. Washington and Lincoln believed that ours was a strong people and therefore fit for a strong government. They believed that it was only weak peoples that had to fear strong governments, and that to us it was given to combine freedom and efficiency. They belonged among that line of statesmen and public servants whose existence has been the negation of the theory that goodness is always associated with weakness, and that strength always finds its expression in violent wrong-doing. Edward the Confessor represented exactly the type which treats weakness and virtue as interchangeable terms. His reign was the prime cause of the conquest of England. Godoy, the Spanish statesman, a century ago, by the treaties he entered into and carried out, actually earned the title of “Prince of Peace” instead of merely lecturing about it; and the result of his peacefulness was the loss by Spain of the vast regions which, she then held in our country west of the Mississippi, and finally the overthrow of the Spanish national government, the setting up in Madrid of a foreign king by a foreign conqueror, and a long-drawn and incredibly destructive war. To statesmen of this kind Washington and Lincoln stand in as sharp contrast as they stand on the other side to the great absolutist chiefs such as Cæsar, Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Cromwell. What was true of the personality of Washington