Austria plainly wanted peace, but by negotiation, since it was dawning upon the Teutonic powers that they could never effect a peace by force of arms. Wouldn't President Wilson kindly open negotiations without delay? But Germany and Austria must be left with the whole vast east under their control. Apparently Count Czernin was willfully blind to the fact that the terms of peace forced upon Russia and Rumania had closed all avenues of peace in the countries of the Allies. President Wilson cleared the air. Peace conversations in the world arena with the German chancellor and the Austrian foreign minister had reached a hopeless stage of sterility. They spoke smooth words; their military leaders committed rapacious deeds that made their words an object-lesson in studied irony. On April 6, 1918, the anniversary of America's entrance into the war, the President took occasion to bring about a very decided turning point in the diplomacy of the war. It was a world-stirring declaration, made at Baltimore to inaugurate the campaign for the Third Liberty Loan, and told the Teutonic powers that their arduous and ever-recurrent peace propaganda had killed itself. "... I have sought to learn from those who spoke for Germany," he said, "whether it was justice or dominion and the execution of their own will upon the other nations of the world that the German leaders were seeking. They have answered--answered in unmistakable terms. They have avowed that it was not justice, but dominion and the unhindered execution of their own will. The avowal has not come from Germany's statesmen. It has come from her military leaders, who are her real rulers.... "We cannot mistake what they have done--in Russia, in Finland, in the Ukraine, in Rumania. The real test of their justice and fair play has come. From this we may judge the rest.... "Their purpose is, undoubtedly, to make all the Slavic peoples, all the free and ambitious nations of the Baltic Peninsula, all the lands that Turkey has dominated and misruled, subject to their will and ambition, and build upon that dominion an empire of force upon which they fancy that they can then erect an empire of gain and commercial supremacy--an empire as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which it will overawe--an empire which will ultimately master Persia, India, and the peoples of the Far East.... "That program once carried out, America and all who care or dare to stand with her must arm and prepare themselves to contest the mastery of the world--a mastery in which the rights of common men, the rights of women and of all who are weak, must for the time being be trodden underfoot and disregarded and the old, age-long struggle for freedom and right begin again at its beginning. Everything that America has lived for and loved and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious realization will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates of mercy once more pitilessly shut upon mankind!