There is something more important. She will insure a beneficent peace. To this I attach great importance. I am the last man to say that the succor which is given to us from America is not something in itself to rejoice in, and to rejoice in greatly. But I do not mind saying that I rejoice even more in the knowledge that America is going to win the right to be at the conference table when the terms of peace are being discussed. That conference will settle the destiny of nations--the course of human life--for God knows how many ages. It would have been tragic for mankind if America had not been there, and there with all the influence, all the power, and the right which she has now won by flinging herself into this great struggle. I can see peace coming now--not a peace which will be the beginning of war, not a peace which will be an endless preparation for strife and bloodshed, but a real peace. The world is an old world. It has never had peace. It has been rocking and swaying like an ocean, and Europe--poor Europe!--has always lived under the menace of the sword. When this war began two-thirds of Europe were under autocratic rule. It is the other way about now, and democracy means peace. The democracy of France did not want war; the democracy of Italy hesitated long before they entered the war; the democracy of this country shrank from it--shrank and shuddered--and never would have entered the caldron had it not been for the invasion of Belgium. The democracies sought peace; strove for peace. If Prussia had been a democracy there would have been no war. Strange things have happened in this war. There are stranger things to come, and they are coming rapidly. There are times in history when this world spins so leisurely along its destined course that it seems for centuries to be at a standstill; but there are also times when it rushes along at a giddy pace, covering the track of centuries in a year. Those are the times we are living in now. Today we are waging the most devastating war that the world has ever seen; tomorrow--perhaps not a distant tomorrow--war may be abolished forever from the category of human crimes. This may be something like the fierce outburst of winter, which we are now witnessing, before the complete triumph of the sun. It is written of those gallant men who won that victory on Monday--men from Canada, from Australia, and from this old country, which has proved that in spite of its age it is not decrepit--it is written of those gallant men that they attacked with the dawn--fit work for the dawn!--to drive out of forty miles of French soil those miscreants who had defiled it for three years. "They attacked with the dawn." Significant phrase!