I for my own part don't like the idea of having surprises. I would like the people to be surprised if we didn't do our duty, but not surprised that we did do it. Of course, I don't mean that Mr. Lloyd George meant that we would surprise everybody by doing our duty, but I don't just know how to interpret his idea of it, because I have said the same thing to the British representatives all along as I informally expressed it to Lord Reading, that we had been and always would be doing our damnedest, and there could not be a more definite American expression of purpose than that. As to another matter (I am just giving you things to think about and not things to say, if you will be kind enough to take it that way). That speech I made on Saturday I hope was correctly understood. We are fighting, as I understand it, for justice to everybody and are ready to stop just as soon as justice to everybody is everybody's programme. I have the same opinion privately about, I will not say the policy, but the methods of the German Government that some gentlemen have who see red all the time, but that is not a proper part of my thought. My thought is that if the German Government insist that the thing shall be settled unjustly, that is to say by force, then of course we accept that and will settle it by force. Whenever we see sincere symptoms of their desire to settle it by justice, we will not only accept their suggestions but we will be glad and eager to accept them, as I said in my speech. I would be ashamed to use the knock-down and drag-out language; that is not the language of liberty, that is the language of braggadocio. For my part, I have no desire to march triumphantly into Berlin. If they oblige us to march triumphantly into Berlin, then we will do it if it takes twenty years. But the world will come to its senses some day, no matter how mad some parts of it may be now, and this is my feeling, that we ought when the thing is over to be able to look back upon a course which had no element in it which we need be ashamed of. So it is so difficult in any kind of a speech, this kind or any other, to express two things that seem to be going in opposite directions that I wasn't sure that I had succeeded in expressing them on Saturday—the sincere willingness to discuss peace whenever the proposals are themselves sincere and yet at the same time the determination never to discuss it until the basis laid down for the discussion is justice. By that I mean justice to everybody. Nobody has the right to get anything out of this war, because we are fighting for peace if we mean what we say, for permanent peace. No injustice furnishes a basis for permanent peace. If you leave a rankling sense of injustice anywhere, it will not only produce a running sore