This war-technique compromises the outlines of American strategy because instead of making for a negotiated peace it has had the entirely unexpected result of encouraging those forces in the Allied countries who desire _la victoire intégrale_, the “knockout blow.” In the President’s war-message the country was assured that the principles of the negotiated peace remained quite unimpaired. The strategy that underlay this, it will be remembered, was to appeal to the Teutonic peoples over the heads of their rulers with terms so liberal that the peoples would force their governments to make peace. The strategy of the American government was, while prosecuting the war, to announce its war-aims and to persuade the Allies to announce their war-aims in such terms as would split the peoples of the Central Powers from their governments, thus bringing more democratic régimes that would provide a fruitful basis for a covenant of nations. We entered the war with no grievances of our own. It was our peculiar rôle to continue the initiative for peace, both by unmistakably showing our own purpose for a just peace based on some kind of international organization and by wielding a steady pressure on the Entente governments to ratify our programme. If we lost this initiative for peace, or if we were unable or unwilling to press the Entente toward an unmistakable liberalism, our strategy broke down and our justification for entering the war became seriously impaired. For we could then be charged with merely aiding the Entente’s ambiguous scheme of European reorganization.