Your nations entered the war successively, but came one and all to the help of threatened right. Like Germany, Great Britain had guaranteed the independence of Belgium. Germany sought to crush Belgium. Great Britain and France both swore to save her. Thus from the very beginning of hostilities there came into conflict the two ideas which for fifty months were to struggle for the domination of the world--the idea of sovereign force, which accepts neither control nor check, and the idea of justice, which depends on the sword only to prevent or repress the abuse of strength. Faithfully supported by her dominions and colonies, Great Britain decided that she could not remain aloof from a struggle in which the fate of every country was involved. She has made, and her dominions and colonies have made with her, prodigious efforts to prevent the war from ending in a triumph for the spirit of conquest and destruction of right. . . . . . . . . . . The intervention of the United States was something more, something greater, than a great political and military event. It was a supreme judgment passed at the bar of history by the lofty conscience of a free people, and their chief magistrate, on the enormous responsibilities incurred in the frightful conduct which was lacerating humanity. It was not only to protect themselves from the audacious aims of German megalomania that the United States equipped fleets and created immense armies, but also, and above all, to defend an ideal of liberty over which they saw the huge shadow of the Imperial eagle encroaching further every day. . . . . . . . . . . While the conflict was gradually extending over the entire surface of the earth, the clanking of chains was heard here and there, and captive nationalities from the depths of their age-long jails, cried out to us for help. Yet more, they escaped to come to our aid. Poland came to life again; sent us troops. The Czecho-Slovaks won their rights to independence in Siberia, in France, in Italy. The Jugo-Slavs, the Armenians, the Syrians, and the Lebanese, the Arabs, all oppressed peoples, all the victims long helpless or resigned of great historic deeds of injustice, all the martyrs of the past, all the outraged consciences, all the strangled liberties, reviewed the clash of arms and turned toward us as their natural defenders. War gradually attained the fulness of its first significance and became, in the fullest sense of the term, a crusade of humanity for right; and if anything can console us, in part at least, for the losses we have suffered, it is assuredly the thought that our victory is also the victory of right. This victory is complete, for the enemy only asked for the armistice to escape from an irretrievable military disaster. In the interests of justice and peace, it now rests with you to reap from this victory its full fruits. . . . . . . . . . .