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 On one occasion he declared: "Our first and primary obligation is the maintenance of our own sovereignty." Repeatedly he asserted that we were under an equally binding obligation to respect the sovereignty of others, and pronounced in most sweeping terms for the Golden Rule in international affairs. "There is not a privilege that we enjoy that we would dream of denying to any other nation in the world." "We ask nothing that we are not willing to accord." "The basis of honor is . . . the treatment of others as we would wish to be treated ourselves."

Far from holding that the Monroe Doctrine gives America a right to dictate in the affairs of its neighbors, under any pretext, he asserted that it precluded us, equally with all other nations, from exercising such dictation. In the Senate Address on the terms of a democratic peace (January 22, 1917) he offered this final characterization of his proposals :

”I am proposing, as it were, that all nations should henceforth adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world: that no nation should seek to extend its polity 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 way along with the great and powerful."

At the beginning of 1918 the President put the same sentiment in the form of a pledge to Latin American countries, to be transmitted to them by the head of the United Press :

"She (the United States) is offering in every proposal that she makes to give the most sacred pledges on her own part that she will in no case be the aggressor against either the political independence or the territorial integrity of any other State or Nation, at the same time that she is proposing AND INSISTING upon similar pledges from all the nations of the world."

Bear in mind that these cannot be taken merely as expressions of a personal view, as pronouncements of abstract ideals to be realized at some indefinite time in the future, as hopes of a leader of a political party, or even merely of statements of policy of an elected Executive. They are the pledges of a people—of every part of the people, at least, that endorsed our "war for democracy." They constitute a solemn contract, sealed with the blood of our seventy-five thousand dead, binding the nation collectively and individually.

Not only does the international program to which we pledged ourselves in the European war preclude us from any form of