It has strangled truth and paralyzed the power and wish to face it, and has set up monstrous and irreconcilable myths of self-justification. It has mutilated the human spirit. It has become a thing which passeth all understanding. STRIKING HANDS [Sidenote: We must join in throwing off this tyranny.] We have heard the call from overseas of those who have appealed to men and women of good-will in all nations to join with them in throwing off this tyranny upon life. We must go further; we must throw open a peace which shall be other than a shadow of old wars and a prelude to new. We do more than plead with men to stay their hands from killing. We hail living men. As peace-lovers, we are charged with the sanctity of human life; as democrats and freemen we are charged with its sovereignty. By the eight million natives of the warring States living among us without malice or assault one upon another, let us leave the occasions of fighting no longer for idle war boards to decide. By the blow our forebears struck at barbarism when they took vengeance out of private hands, let us wrest the manufacture of armaments and deadly weapons from the gun-mongers and powder-makers who gain by it. By those electric currents that have cut the ground from under the old service of diplomacy, and spread the new intelligence, let us put the ban upon intrigue and secret treaties. For we hold that not soldiers, nor profit-takers, nor diplomats, but the people who suffer and bear the brunt of war should determine whether war must be; that with ample time for investigation and publicity of its every cause and meaning, with recourse to every avenue for mediation and settlement abroad, war should come only by the slow process of self-willing among men and women who solemnly publish and declare it to be a last and sole resort. [Sidenote: America must lead the nations.] With our treated borderland, 3000 miles in length without fort or trench from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which has helped weld us for a century of unbroken peace with our neighbors to the north, we would spread faith not in entrenched camps but in open boundaries. With the pacts of our written constitutions before us which bind our own sovereign States in amity, we are convinced that treaty-making may be lifted to a new and inviolable estate, and lay the foundations for that world organization which for all time shall make for peace upon earth and good-will among men. With our experience in lesser conflicts in industrial life, which have none the less embraced groups as large as armies, have torn passions and rasped endurance to the uttermost, we can bear testimony that at the end of such strife as cleaves to the heart of things, men are disposed to lay the framework of their relations in larger molds than those which broke beneath them.