Page:How We Advertised America (1920).djvu/24

 and elsewhere; its representatives were in constant communication by cable and telegraph and letter with the central place here in Washington where there were gathered together men of talent and genius and comprehension, and the inspiration of their appreciation of America had to go out from Washington to all of these outlying places. Sometimes it appeared in the newspapers of neutral capitals, and sometimes it dropped from balloons in written statements that were meant to convey to the enemy not the size of our army, not the dreadfulness of our means of conducting warfare, but the invincible power of our ideas.

So, when the military end came to this war, it was a composite result which was won undoubtedly in part by the superb heroism of the American soldiers and the veteran soldiers of the nations with whom we were associated. Nothing that is said about any other part of it ought to be permitted to take away from these splendid soldiers in their hour of triumph any part of the imperishable glory which they have brought to themselves and to the nation which they have served. But it was this unseen but persuasive and unending flood of ideas that aroused a correct apprehension of the true spirit and idealism of America in the war, and when the armistice was signed and peace came back into the world, it came, led by one hand by the military prowess of the great free peoples, and led by the other hand by the conquering idea of justice and freedom as expressed in America's idealism.

Now we are all facing the future rather than the past. We are thinking of what we are going to get out of this war, and nobody is counting it in gains which can be deposited in a bank; nobody is thinking of it in terms composed of subject peoples, but in terms of the return of law, the reign of justice, and the establishment of that complete morality in the relations of people which we have always observed as necessary in the relations of individuals,