"'But that does not mean that I believe that the Allied armies should not go to Berlin. What I have at this moment to propose to this conference is that when the day comes--as it surely will--that the German and the Austrian emperors and their high commands say to us, "We yield,"--the Allied armies shall say to them: "Gentlemen, you will yield in Berlin. We go to Berlin. But we go to your capital not as destroyers; we go as saviors of freedom. "'"We shall make no claim upon you in crossing your land. We shall lead our armies--French, English, Italian, American--through your fertile fields, your pleasant villages, into your beautiful capital, without cost or pain or destruction to you. We shall take with us our food, we shall ask no lodging for which we do not give fair return, and we shall pledge our honor that no woman suffer, even by word or look, from those hundreds of thousands of marching men." "'Gentlemen, our armies will do this if we ask it of them. To do it will give this people who have held as a religion the destructive notion of progress and power which has encircled the earth with woe, an exhibit of what free men really are. It will show them as no other act could do that in our interpretation of progress and power, there is no element of compulsion of others or of injury to others. If we can take these hundreds of thousands of men of ours into Berlin and leave no trace of destruction, no story of injustice behind us, we will give the world the greatest exhibit of the control that free men can exercise over themselves that it has ever seen or conceived. We shall prove the Biblical saying that "He that ruleth his spirit is better than he who taketh a city." "'I ask, then, that when Germany yields--as she soon will--we say, "We receive your sword in Berlin." And that we march our armies there for that great ceremony. You will say that this is too much to ask of armies. Gentlemen, I am willing to pledge the American army to that great act of self-control.'