With our ninety million people drawn from Alpine and Mediterranean, Danubean, Baltic, and Slavic stocks; with a culture blended from these different affluents, we hold that progress lies in the predominance of none; and that the civilization of each nation needs to be refreshed by that cross-breeding with the genius and the type of other human groups, that blending which began on the coast lands and islands of the Ægean Sea where European civilization first drew its sources from the Euphrates and the Nile. [Sidenote: We must lead through our own ideals in the war on war.] With memories of the tyranny which provoked our Revolution, with the travail still upon us by which we in our turn have paid for the enslavement of a people, with the bitterness only now assuaged which marked our period of mistrust and reconstruction, we bear witness that boundaries should be set where not force, but justice and consanguinity direct; and that, however boundaries fall, liberty and the flowering-out of native cultures should be secure. With our fair challenge to the spirit of the East and to the chivalry of the West in standing for the open door in China when that Empire, now turned Republic, was threatened by dismemberment, we call for the freeing of the ports of every ocean from special privilege based on territorial claims, throwing them open with equal chance to all who by their ability and energy can serve new regions to their mutual benefit. With the faith we have kept with Cuba, the regard we have shown for the integrity of Mexico and our preparations for the independence of the Philippine Islands, we urge the framing of a common colonial policy which shall put down that predatory exploitation which has embroiled the West and oppressed the East and shall stand for an opportunity for each latent and backward race to build up according to its own genius. By our full century of ruthless waste of forest, ore and fuel; by the vision which has come to us in these latter days of conserving to the permanent uses of the people, the water power and natural wealth of our public domain, we propose the laying down of a planetary policy of conservation. [Sidenote: For the sake of freedom.] By that tedium and monotony of life and labor for vast companies of people, which when war drums sound, goads the field worker to forsake his harvest and the wage-earner to leap from his bench, we hold that the ways of peace should be so cast as to make stirring appeal to the heroic qualities in men, and give common utterance to the rhythm and beauty of national feeling. By the joy of our people in the conquest of a continent; by the rousing of all Europe, when the great navigators threw open the new Indies and the New World, we stand for such a scheming-out of our joint existence that the achieving instincts among men, not as one nation against another, nor as one class against another, but as one generation after another, shall have freedom to come into their own.