of the world the peace and security that surrounded that historic group at Mount Vernon.

Then the President with the marines about him, and beyond them thousands of American citizens, began to read the Declaration of the Independence of the World. It is so simple in language that even children of twelve years of age may understand nearly all of it, and it is so deep and noble in thought that even the greatest scholars and statesmen will find it worthy of close study. It will stand forever with Washington's Farewell Address and Lincoln's Gettysburg Speech as a great American document. It is as follows, except that the four ends for which the world is fighting are restated in briefer form:

Gentlemen of the Diplomatic Corps and my Fellow-Citizens:

I am happy to draw apart with you to this quiet place of old counsel in order to speak a little of the meaning of this day of our nation's independence. The place seems very still and remote. It is as serene and untouched by hurry of the world as it was in those great days long ago, when General Washington was here and held leisurely conference with the men who were to be associated with him in the creation of a nation.

From these gentle slopes, they looked out upon the world and saw it whole, saw it with the light of the future upon it, saw it with modern eyes that turned away from a past which men of liberated spirits could no longer endure. It is for that reason that we cannot feel, even here, in the immediate presence of this sacred tomb, that this is a place of death. It was a place of achievement. A great promise that was meant for all mankind was here

given plan and reality. The associations by which we are here surrounded are the inspiriting associations of that noble death which is only a glorious consummation. From this green hillside we also ought to be able to see with comprehending eyes the world that lies around us and conceive anew the purpose that must set men free.

It is significant - significant of their own character and purpose and of the influences they were setting afoot - that Washington and his associates, like the barons at Runnymede, spoke and acted, not for a class but for a people. It has been left for us to see to it that it shall be understood that they spoke and acted, not for a single people only, but for all mankind. They were thinking not of themselves and of the material interests which centered in the little groups of landholders and merchants and men of affairs with whom they were accustomed to act, in Virginia and the colonies to the north and south of here, but of a people which wished to be done with classes and special interests and the authority of men whom they had not themselves chosen to rule over them.

They entertained no private purpose, desired no peculiar privilege. They were consciously planning that men of every class should be free and America a place to which men out of every nation might resort who wished to share with them the rights and privileges of freemen. And we take our cue from them do we not? We intend what they intended.

We here in America believe our participation in this present war to be only the fruitage of what they planted. Our case differs from theirs only in this, that it is our inestimable privilege to concert with men out of every nation what shall make not only the liberties of America secure, but the liberties of every other people as well. We are happy in the thought that we are permitted to do what they would have done had they been in

our place. There must now be settled once for all what was settled for America in the great age upon whose inspiration we draw to-day.

This is surely a fitting place from which calmly to look out upon our task that we may fortify our spirits for its accomplishment. And this is the appropriate place from which to avow, alike to the friends who look on and to the friends with whom we have the happiness to be associated in action, the faith and purpose with which we act.

This, then, is our conception of the great struggle in which we are engaged. The plot is written plain upon every scene and every act of the supreme tragedy. On the one hand stand the peoples of the world - not only the peoples actually engaged, but many others also who suffer under mastery but cannot act; peoples of many races and every part of the world the peoples of stricken Russia still, among the rest, though they are for the moment unorganized and helpless. Opposed to them, masters of many armies, stand an isolated, friendless group of governments who speak no common purpose, but only selfish ambitions of their own by which none can profit but themselves, and whose peoples are fuel in their hands; governments which fear their people and yet are for the time their sovereign lords, making every choice for them and disposing of their lives and fortunes as they will, as well as of the lives and fortunes of every people who fall under their power-governments clothed with the strange trappings and the primitive authority of an age that is altogether alien and hostile to our own. The past and the present are in deadly grapple and the peoples of the world are being done to death between them.

There can be but one issue. The settlement must be final. There can be no compromise. No half-way decision would be tolerable. No half-way decision is conceivable. These are the

ends for which the associated peoples of the world are fighting and which must be conceded them before there can be peace:

1. Every power anywhere that can secretly and of its own single choice bring war upon the world must be bound or destroyed.

2. All questions must be settled in accordance with the wishes of the people concerned.

3. The same respect for honor and for law that leads honorable men to hold their promises as sacred and to keep them at any cost must direct the nations in dealing with one another.

4. A league of nations must be formed strong enough to insure the peace of the world.

These great objects can be put into a single sentence. What we seek is the reign of law, based upon the consent of the governed and sustained by the organized opinion of mankind.

These great ends cannot be achieved by debating and seeking. to reconcile and accommodate what statesmen may wish, with their projects for balances of power and national opportunity. They can be realized only by the determination of what the thinking peoples of the world desire, with their longing hope for justice and for social freedom and opportunity.

I cannot but fancy that the air of this place carries the accents of such principles with a peculiar kindness. Here were started forces which the great nation against which they were primarily directed at first regarded as a revolt against its rightful authority, but which it has long since seen to have been a step in the liberation of its own peoples as well as of the people of the United States; and I stand here now to speak speak proudly and with confident hope of the spread of this revolt, this liberation, to the great stage of the world itself! The blinded rulers of Prussia have aroused forces they know little of forces which, once aroused, can never be crushed to earth again; for they have at their heart an inspiration and a purpose which are deathless and of the very stuff of triumph!

K

A KING OF HEROES

ING" is not a word that will go out of use when the world has been won for democracy. We shall still use it much as we do now, when we say, "He is a prince" or "He is a king among men"; for there are still good kings, as well as bad ones. Some countries that are really democratic prefer to keep kings as reminders of their past and as ornaments of their present.

England is really more democratic than the United States and yet England has a king; and as some one has said, he is a king and a democrat and a king of democrats. This was well shown by his letter to the first American soldiers who marched through London in April, 1918, on their way to the battle line in France. Each soldier was handed an envelope bearing the inscription, "A message to you from his majesty, King George V." In the envelope was the letter shown on the opposite page, from a democratic king to the American soldiers in the army of democracy.

No autocratic king or kaiser desires to shake the hand of each of his soldiers or to become in any way one of them. To an autocrat, to the German Kaiser,