Page:Dramatic Moments in American Diplomacy (1918).djvu/57

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DRAMATIC MOMENTS
37

this distinction and in directing the fierce publicity of his open diplomacy toward the people over the heads of the Kaiser's star chamber, Woodrow Wilson is putting in practice a diplomatic precedent which is perhaps the greatest single step yet taken toward the liberation of the world from the scourge of national feuds and dynastic wars.

But in making this distinction between rulers and the human beings ruled, in the frank directness of his negotiations, and in the momentous decision by which he took the action which for the first time in history caused the raising of the Stars and Stripes in St. Paul's, London—in these actions for which he will be famous for all time, he was still only following the principles and the train of events laid by Benjamin Franklin in Paris, a long time ago.

Nurtured by the aggressive spirit of our public men from the Civil War to the Spanish War and by politicians anxious about the Irish and the German vote—as well as by a false sense that patriotism demanded an hereditary