AMERICA'S INTERNATIONAL IDEALS
the purpose of protecting neutral rights and interests during the European conflict, but to look forward to a basis of permanent world peace and to give the world an example of how the conception of international co-operation may be made practical. Whether the United States shall undertake to call such a conference depends entirely upon the progress of events which no man can foresee. It is quite evident, however, that in the hands of the United States, as the greatest of neutral Powers rests a signal obligation to the other neutral nations for the maintenance of international law and the guaranteeing that civilization shall be protected, so far as possible, from the effects of the anarchic situation now prevailing in the Old World.
Through all that America shall do beckons the ideal of international democracy: a democracy where the rights of every nation shall have a voice, and yet where the rights of no one nation shall be achieved through the ignoring of the rights of others: a democracy of nations in which the small nations shall be guaranteed their integrity with the same surety as the larger nations guard their own integrity as sacred and inviolable. We cannot afford to see the smaller nations perish merely because they cannot marshal instruments of destruction so rapidly, extensively, and efficiently as the world's larger states. If history has taught us anything with regard to the sources of civilization, it is, as Vice-Chancellor H. A. L. Fisher says, that "almost everything which is most precious in our civilization has come from small states, the Old Testament, the Homeric poems, the Attic and the Elizabethan drama, the art of the Italian Renaissance, the common law of England." With the ideal of this sort of an international democracy in mind,
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