President Wilson is an idealist, and his idealism commands my deepest respect and admiration. I deny, however, that he represents an “oasis of idealism in an endless desert of materialism,” that is, if the United States of America are understood to be a part of this endless desert. I am sure that in this town, liberated only a few months ago from the Austrian yoke, the expression “materialism” cannot refer to the United States of America. Two million American soldiers were fighting on the Western front when, a few months ago, the armistice was signed; several million more were waiting in America for their turn to join the ranks of the allied armies in France. American industries and American savings made a supreme effort to brace up the allied cause, and the war was won. Go to Paris now and watch the proceedings at the peace conference, as I was doing during the last seven weeks, and you will find that America asks for no territories, for no mandates, and for no onerous compensations. It is the only great power there which preaches moderation, and demands unreservedly full justice for the little nations. Yugoslav Dalmatia, Istria, Goricia, and Fiume had been, in a period of stress, bartered away by some of our allies; America is to-day the only fearless champion of your claims to these Yugoslav lands. American men and women hastened to every front, and there, amid many perils and discomforts, they nursed the sick and the wounded. They fed the hungry and clothed the naked and the destitute. This they did even before America had entered the world war. Need I remind you that it was an American mission which, in 1915, saved Serbia from the destructive ravages of typhus, and that several Americans, victims of these very ravages, are now buried in Serbia’s soil? To-day you will find Americans even in the countries of our former enemies, in Germany, Austria, and Hungary, doing the work of mercy and of charity. The name of Hoover is just as well known and beloved in Vienna and Budapest as it is in Belgium. A country of materialism cannot display that spirit which America has displayed during this war. Let the idealism of President Wilson remind you of American idealism. The phrase “American materialism” is an invention of ill-informed Europe; but the European who has lived in the United States, and has had the good fortune to catch the spirit of America, revolts whenever he hears the untutored European mind utter that phrase. Read the history of the United States from its earliest beginnings, when the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, three hundred years ago, and you will find that idealism runs through it from beginning to end. The Pilgrim fathers themselves were idealists, who undertook the perilous voyage “for the glory of God and the advancement of the Christian faith.”