Page:America Fallen!.djvu/25

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Council Chamber at Potsdam
13

permanent undoing, I do not believe. Our beloved Fatherland has set up before the eyes of the world a kultur too broad and beneficent, and the influence of that kultur upon the great world outside of Germany has been too profound and will prove too lasting, for God ever to contemplate the fall and passing away of the great German Empire. As surely as gold is purified by fire, so surely shall Germany emerge, freed of all dross and with more splendid potentialities for the future, out of this seven-times heated furnace of the war.

"I ask you to consider that Germany has passed through this supreme ordeal with her vitality unimpaired and her military prestige enhanced. I will even say that she is the stronger for her territorial losses. Alsace and Lorraine have ever been a thorn in the side of Germany—the one impassable barrier to cordial relations with our great French neighbor,