"I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord
adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world;
that no nation should seek to extend its policy over any other nation or
people, but that every people should be left free to determine its own
polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid,
the little along with the great and powerful.
"I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid entangling alliances
which would draw them into competitions of power, catch them in a net of
intrigue and selfish rivalry and disturb their own affairs with
influences intruded from without. There is no entangling alliance in a
concert of power. When all unite to act in the same sense and with the
same purpose, all act in the common interest and are free to live their
own lives under a common protection.
[Sidenote: Seas must be free.]
"I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom
of the seas which in international conference after conference
representatives of the United States have urged with the eloquence of
those who are convinced disciples of liberty, and that moderation of
armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely, not
an instrument of aggression or of selfish violence.
"And the paths of the sea must, alike in law and in fact, be free. The
freedom of the seas is the sine qua non of peace, equality, and
co-operation.
[Sidenote: Question of limiting armaments.]
"It is a problem closely connected with the limitation of naval armament
and the co-operation of the navies of the world in keeping the seas at
once free and safe. And the question of limiting naval armaments opens
the wider and perhaps more difficult question of the limitation of
armies and of all programs of military preparation. * * * There can be
no sense of safety and equality among the nations if great
preponderating armaments are henceforth to continue here and there to be
built up and maintained.
[Sidenote: How peace must be made secure.]
"Mere agreements may not make peace secure. It will be absolutely
necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of
the settlement so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged
or any alliance hitherto formed or projected that no nation, no probable
combination of nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace
presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the
organized major force of mankind."
[Sidenote: Entente peoples welcome President Wilson's views.]
[Sidenote: The German note to Mexico.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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