dignity in the discharge of his high duties we have watched with admiration. We see in you the happy union of the gifts of a scholar with those of a statesman. You came from a studious, academic quiet into the full stream of an arduous life, and your deliverances have combined breadth of view and grasp of world problems with the mastery of a lofty diction recalling that of your great orators of the past and of our own.

You come as the official head and spokesman of a mighty Commonwealth bound to us by the closest ties. Its people speak the tongue of Shakespeare and Milton. Our literature is yours as yours is also ours, and men of letters in both countries have joined in maintaining its incomparable glories.

To you, not less than to us, belong the memories of our national heroes

from King Alfred down to the days of Philip Sidney and Drake, of Raleigh and Blake and Hampden, and the days when the political life of the English stock in America was just beginning. You share with us the traditions of free self-government as old as the Magna Carta.

We recognize the bond of still deeper significance in the common ideals which our people cherish. First among those ideals you value and we value freedom and peace. Privileged as we have been to be the exponents and the examples in national life of the principles of popular self-government based upon equal laws, it now falls to both of us alike to see how these principles can be ap

plied beyond our own borders for the good of the world.

It was love of liberty, respect for law, good faith and the sacred rights of humanity that brought you to the Old World to help in saving it from the dangers that were threatening around, and that arrayed those soldier citizens of yours, whose gallantry we have admired, side by side with ours in the war.

You have now come to help in building up new States amid the ruins of those that the war has shattered and in laying the solid foundations of a settlement that may stand firm because it will rest upon the consent of the emancipated nationalities. You have eloquently expressed the hope of the American people, as it is our hope, that some plan may be devised to attain the end you have done so much to promote by which the be averted, relieving the nations of risk of future wars may, if possible, the intolerable burden which fear of

war has laid

upon

them.

The British Nation wishes all success to the deliberations on which you and we and the great free nations allied with us are now to enter, moved by disinterested good will and a sense of duty commensurate with the power which we hold as a solemn trust.

The American and British peoples have been brothers in arms, and their arms have been crowned with victory. We thank with all our hearts your valiant soldiers and sailors for their

splendid part in that victory, as we thank the American people for their noble response to the call of civilization and humanity. May the same

brotherly spirit inspire and guide our united efforts to secure for the world the blessings of an ordered freedom and an enduring peace.

In asking you to join with me in drinking the health of the President, I wish to say with what pleasure we welcome Mrs. Wilson to this country.

I drink to the health of the PresiIdent of the United States and Mrs. Wilson and to the happiness and prosperity of the great American Nation.

PRESIDENT WILSON'S RESPONSE President Wilson, in reply, said:

I am deeply complimented by the gracious words which you have uttered. The welcome which you have given me and Mrs. Wilson has been so warm, so natural, so evidently from the heart, that we have been more than pleased. We have been touched by it, and I believe that I correctly interpret that welcome as embodying not only your own generous spirit toward us personally, but also as expressing for yourself and the great nation over which you preside that same feeling for my people, for the people of the United States.

For you and I, Sir-I temporarily -embody the spirit of two great nations, and whatever strength I have and whatever authority, I possess it only so long and so far as I express the spirit and purpose of the American people.

Every influence that the American people have over the affairs of the world is measured by their sympathy with the aspirations of freemen everywhere.

America does love freedom, and I believe that she loves freedom unselfishly. But if she does not she will not and can not have the influence to which she justly aspires.

I have had the privilege, Sir, of conferring with the leaders of your own Government and with the spokesmen of the Governments of France and of Italy, and I am glad to say that I have the same conceptions that they have of the significance and scope of the duty on which we have

met.

We have used great words, all of us have used the great words "Right" and "Justice," and now we are to prove whether or not we understand these words, and how they are to be applied to the particular settlements which must conclude this war. And we must not only understand them, but we must have the courage to act upon our understanding.

Yet, after I have uttered the word "Courage," it comes into my mind that it would take more courage to resist the great moral tide now running in the world than to yield to it, than to obey it.

There is a great tide running in the hearts of men. The hearts of men have never beaten so singularly in unison before. Men have never before been so conscious of their brotherhood. Men have never before realized how little difference there was between right and justice in one latitude and in another, under one sovereignty and under another.

And it will be our high privilege, I believe, Sir, not only to apply the

moral judgment of the world to the particular settlements which we shall attempt, but also to organize the moral force of the world to preserve those settlements, to steady the forces of mankind, and to make the right and the justice to which great nations like our own have devoted themselves the predominant and controlling force of the world.

There is something inspiring in knowing that this is the errand that we have come on. Nothing less than this would have justified me in leaving the important tasks which fall upon me upon the other side of the

sea-nothing but the consciousness that nothing else compares with this in dignity and importance.

Therefore, it is the more delightful to find myself in the company of a body of men, united in ideal and purpose, and to feel that I am privileged to unite my thoughts with yours in carrying forward these standards which we are so proud to hold so high and to defend.

May I not, Sir, with a feeling of profound sincerity and friendship and sympathy propose your health and the health of the Queen and the prosperity of Great Britain?

In the Guildhall, London, after the ceremony of granting him the freedom of the city, December 28, President Wilson said:

My Lord Mayor: We have come upon times when ceremonies like this have a new significance, which most impresses me as I stand here. The address which I have just heard is most generously and graciously conceived, and the delightful accent of sincerity in it seems like a part of that voice of counsel which is now everywhere to be heard. I feel that a distinguished honor has been conferred upon me by this reception, and I beg to assure you, sir, and your associates of my very profound appreciation; but I know that I am only part of what I may call a great body of circumstances.

I do not believe that it was fancy on my part that I heard in the voice of welcome uttered in the streets of this great city and in the streets of Paris something more than a personal welcome.

It seemed to me that I heard the voice of

one people speaking to another people, and it was a voice in which one could distinguish a singular combination of emotions. There was surely there the deep gratefulness that the fighting was over. There was the pride that the fighting had had such a culmination. There was that sort of gratitude that the nations engaged had produced such men as the soldiers of Great Britain and of the United States and of France and of Italy -men whose prowess and achievements they had witnessed with rising admiration as they moved from culmination to culmination.

But there was something more in itthe consciousness that the business is not yet done, the consciousness that it now rests upon others to see that those lives were not lost in vain.

I have not yet been to the actual battlefield, but I have been with many of the men who have fought the battles, and the other day I had the pleasure of being present at a session of the French Academy when they admitted Marshal Joffre to their membership.

That sturdy, serene soldier stood and uttered not the words of triumph, but the

simple words of affection for his soldiers and the conviction which he summed up in a sentence which I will not try accurately to quote, but reproduce in its spirit. It was that France must always remember that the small and the weak could never live free in the world unless the strong and the great always put their power and their strength in the service of right.

That is the afterthought-the thought that something must be done now; not only to make the just settlements-that, of course-but to see that the settlements remained and were observed and that honor and justice prevail in the world. And as I have conversed with the soldiers I have been more and more aware that they fought for something that not all of them had defined, but which all of them recognized the moment you stated it to them. They fought to do away with an old order and to establish a new one, and the centre and characteristic of the old order was that unstable thing which we used to call the "balance of power," a thing in which the balance was determined by the sword which was thrown in on the one side or the other, a balance which was determined by the unstable equilibrium of competitive interest, a balance which was maintained by jealous watchfulness and an antagonism of interest which, though it was generally latent, was always deep-seated.

The men who have fought in this war have been the men from the free nations who are determined that that sort of thing should end now and forever. It is very interesting to me to observe how from every quarter, from every sort of mind, from every concert of counsel, there comes the suggestion that there must now be not a balance of power, not one powerful group of nations set up against another, but a single overwhelming, powerful group of nations who shall be the trustees of the peace of the world.

It has been delightful in my conferences with the leaders of your government to find how our minds moved along exactly the same line and how our thought was always that the key to the peace was the guarantee of

the peace, not the items of it; that the items would be worthless unless there stood back of them a permanent concert of power for their maintenance. That is the most reassuring thing that has ever happened in the world.

When this war began the thought of a league of nations was indulgently considered as the interesting thought of closeted students. It was thought of as one of those things that it was right to characterize by a name which, as a university man, I have always resented. It was said to be academic, as if that in itself were a condemnation-something that men could think about, but never get. Now we find the practical leading minds of the world determined to get it.

No such sudden and potent union of purpose has ever been witnessed in the world before. Do you wonder, therefore, gentlemen, that in common with those who represent you I am eager to get at the business and write the sentences down? And that I am particularly happy that the ground is cleared and the foundations laid-for we have already accepted the same body of principles. Those principles are clearly and definitely enough stated to make their application a matter which should afford no fundamental difficulty.

And back of us is that imperative yearning of the world to have all disturbing questions quieted, to have all threats against peace silenced, to have just men everywhere come together for a common object. The peoples of the world want peace and they want it now, not merely by conquest of arms, but by agreement of mind.

At the Lord Mayor's luncheon in London, December 28, President Wilson said:

My Lord Mayor, Your Royal Highness, Your Grace, ladies and gentlemen-You have again made me feel, sir, the very wonderful and generous welcome of this great city and you have reminded me of what has perhaps become one of the habits of my life.

You have said that I have broken all precedents in coming across the ocean to join in the counsels of the peace conference, but I think those who have been associated with me in Washington will testify that that is nothing surprising. I said to the members of the press in Washington one evening, that one of the things that had interested me most since I lived in Washington was that every time I did anything perfectly natural it was said to be unprecedented.

It was perfectly natural to break this precedent, natural because the demand for intimate conference took precedence over every other duty. And, after all, the breaking of precedents, though this may sound strange doctrine in England, is the most sensible thing to do. The harness of precedent is sometimes a very sad and harassing trammel. In this case the breaking of precedent is sensible for a reason that is very prettily illustrated in a remark attributed to Charles Lamb. One evening, in a company of his friends, they were discussing a person who was not present and Lamb said, in his hesitating manner: "I h-hate that fellow." "Why Charles," one of his friends said, "I did not know that you knew him." "Oh," he said, "I-I-I d-don't. I can't h-hate a man I know."

IRRESISTIBLE

In the Lowther Street Congrega

And perhaps that simple and attractive remark may furnish a secret for cordial international relationship. When we know one another we cannot hate one another.

I have been very much interested before coming here to see what sort of a person I was expected to be. So far as I can make out I was expected to be a perfectly bloodless, thinking machine, whereas I am perfectly aware that I have in me all the insurgent elements of the human race. I am sometimes, by reason of long Scottish tradition, able to keep these instincts in restraint. The stern Covenanter tradition that is behind me sends many an echo down the years. It is not only diligently to pursue business, but also to seek this sort of comradeship that I feel it is a privilege to have come across the seas, and in the welcome that you have accorded Mrs. Wilson and me you have made us feel that companionship was accessible to us in the most delightful and enjoyable form.

I thank you sincerely for this welcome, sir, and am very happy to join in a love feast which is all the more enjoyable because there is behind it a background of tragical suffering. Our spirits are released from the darkness of the clouds that at one time seemed to have settled upon the world in a way that could not be dispersed, the sufferings of your people, the sufferings of the people of France and the infinite suffering of the people of Belgium. The whisper of grief that has been blown all through the world is now silent, and the sun of hope seems to spread its rays and to charge the earth with a new prospect of happiness. So our joy is all the more elevated because we know that our spirits are now lifted out of that valley.

MORAL FORCE

It is with unaffected reluctance that I

(the town where his grandfather, Thomas Woodrow, once taught and preached, and the girlhood home of his mother), President Wilson spoke as follows on Sunday, December 29:

my grandfather very well, and, remembering him, I can see how he would not approve. I remember what he required of me and remember the stern lesson of duty he spoke. And I remember painfully about things he expected me to know that I did not know.