66 'WHAT WE SEEK IS THE REIGN OF LAW, BASED UPON THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED AND SUSTAINED BY THE ORGANIZED OPINION OF MANKIND." WOODROW WILSON: Address at Mt. Vernon, July 4, 1918. THE PREFACE HE preface of a work is mostly retrospect and summary, printed first, but conceived and written last. Its virtue is that it gives a writer a chance to overtake events. In the present instance, the virtue is maximal. On September 27, 1918, at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York City, President Wilson made the most recent of his classic statements of the issues between the democracies of the world and the Central Powers. Whatever the motives of the war may have been in the beginning, today, he said, "the common will of mankind has been substituted for the particular purposes of individual states." The war is "a peoples' war, and peoples of all sorts and races, of every degree of power and variety of fortune, are involved in its sweeping processes of change and settlement." Its issues are peoples' issues, and he is at this moment gladly making reply to a challenge of peoples, is answering the demand "of assemblies and associations of many kinds made up of plain workaday people" that their Governments "shall tell them plainly what it is, exactly what it is, that they are seeking in this war, and what they think the items of final settlement shall be." His reply is that the settlement must aim at "secure and lasting peace"; that such a peace has, of course, its price, and that this price must be paid. The price is "impartial justice in every item of the settlement, no matter whose interest is crossed; and not only impartial justice, but also the V 386663 |