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WOODROW WILSON ADDRESSING CONGRESS
WITH HIS 14 POINTS SPEECH
Fourteen Points
Go here for more about
Woodrow Wilson.
Go here for more about
Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points
speech.
It follows the full text transcript of
Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points speech, delivered at
Washington D.C. - January 8, 1918.
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It will be our
wish and purpose that the processes of peace,
when they are begun, shall be absolutely open
and that they shall involve and permit
henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. |
The day of
conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is
also the day of secret covenants entered into in
the interest of particular governments and
likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the
peace of the world. It is this happy fact, now
clear to the view of every public man whose
thoughts do not still linger in an age that is
dead and gone, which makes it possible for every
nation whose purposes are consistent with
justice and the peace of the world to avow nor
or at any other time the objects it has in view.
We entered this war because violations of right
had occurred which touched us to the quick and
made the life of our own people impossible
unless they were corrected and the world secure
once for all against their recurrence. What we
demand in this war, therefore, is nothing
peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be
made fit and safe to live in; and particularly
that it be made safe for every peace-loving
nation which, like our own, wishes to live its
own life, determine its own institutions, be
assured of justice and fair dealing by the other
peoples of the world as against force and
selfish aggression.
All the peoples of
the world are in effect partners in this
interest, and for our own part we see very
clearly that unless justice be done to others it
will not be done to us.
The program of the
world's peace, therefore, is our program; and
that program, the only possible program, as we
see it, is this:
I. Open
covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after
which there shall be no private
international understandings of any kind but
diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and
in the public view.
II. Absolute freedom of navigation upon the
seas, outside territorial waters, alike in
peace and in war, except as the seas may be
closed in whole or in part by international
action for the enforcement of international
covenants.
III. The removal, so far as possible, of all
economic barriers and the establishment of
an equality of trade conditions among all
the nations consenting to the peace and
associating themselves for its maintenance.
IV. Adequate guarantees given and taken that
national armaments will be reduced to the
lowest point consistent with domestic
safety.
V. A free, open-minded, and absolutely
impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,
based upon a strict observance of the
principle that in determining all such
questions of sovereignty the interests of
the populations concerned must have equal
weight with the equitable claims of the
government whose title is to be determined.
VI. The evacuation of all Russian territory
and such a settlement of all questions
affecting Russia as will secure the best and
freest cooperation of the other nations of
the world in obtaining for her an unhampered
and unembarrassed opportunity for the
independent determination of her own
political development and national policy
and assure her of a sincere welcome into the
society of free nations under institutions
of her own choosing; and, more than a
welcome, assistance also of every kind that
she may need and may herself desire. The
treatment accorded Russia by her sister
nations in the months to come will be the
acid test of their good will, of their
comprehension of her needs as distinguished
from their own interests, and of their
intelligent and unselfish sympathy.
VII. Belgium, the whole world will agree,
must be evacuated and restored, without any
attempt to limit the sovereignty which she
enjoys in common with all other free
nations. No other single act will serve as
this will serve to restore confidence among
the nations in the laws which they have
themselves set and determined for the
government of their relations with one
another. Without this healing act the whole
structure and validity of international law
is forever impaired.
VIII. All French territory should be freed
and the invaded portions restored, and the
wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in
the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has
unsettled the peace of the world for nearly
fifty years, should be righted, in order
that peace may once more be made secure in
the interest of all.
IX. A readjustment of the frontiers of Italy
should be effected along clearly
recognizable lines of nationality.
X. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, whose
place among the nations we wish to see
safeguarded and assured, should be accorded
the freest opportunity to autonomous
development.
XI. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro should
be evacuated; occupied territories restored;
Serbia accorded free and secure access to
the sea; and the relations of the several
Balkan states to one another determined by
friendly counsel along historically
established lines of allegiance and
nationality; and international guarantees of
the political and economic independence and
territorial integrity of the several Balkan
states should be entered into.
XII. The Turkish portion of the present
Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure
sovereignty, but the other nationalities
which are now under Turkish rule should be
assured an undoubted security of life and an
absolutely unmolested opportunity of
autonomous development, and the Dardanelles
should be permanently opened as a free
passage to the ships and commerce of all
nations under international guarantees.
XIII. An independent Polish state should be
erected which should include the territories
inhabited by indisputably Polish
populations, which should be assured a free
and secure access to the sea, and whose
political and economic independence and
territorial integrity should be guaranteed
by international covenant.
XIV. A general association of nations must
be formed under specific covenants for the
purpose of affording mutual guarantees of
political independence and territorial
integrity to great and small states alike.
In regard to these
essential rectifications of wrong and assertions
of right we feel ourselves to be intimate
partners of all the governments and peoples
associated together against the Imperialists. We
cannot be separated in interest or divided in
purpose. We stand together until the end.
For such arrangements and covenants we are
willing to fight and to continue to fight until
they are achieved; but only because we wish the
right to prevail and desire a just and stable
peace such as can be secured only by removing
the chief provocations to war, which this
program does remove. We have no jealousy of
German greatness, and there is nothing in this
program that impairs it. We grudge her no
achievement or distinction of learning or of
pacific enterprise such as have made her record
very bright and very enviable.
We do not wish to
injure her or to block in any way her legitimate
influence or power. We do not wish to fight her
either with arms or with hostile arrangements of
trade if she is willing to associate herself
with us and the other peace-loving nations of
the world in covenants of justice and law and
fair dealing.
We wish her only
to accept a place of equality among the peoples
of the world, the new world in which we now
live, instead of a place of mastery.
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