Most persons in this country, including all those who work for peace, agree with you in deploring the vast armaments which European States have been piling up, and will hope with you that after this war they may be reduced—and safely reduced—to slender dimensions. Their existence is a constant menace to peace. They foster that spirit of militarism which has brought these horrors on the world; for they create in the great countries of the Continent a large and powerful military and naval caste which lives for war, talks and writes incessantly of war, and glorifies war as a thing good in itself.
It is (as you say) to the peoples that we must henceforth look to safeguard international concord. They bear the miseries of war, they ought to have the power to arrest the action of those who are hurrying them into it.
To get rid of secret diplomacy is more difficult in Europe than in America, whose relations with foreign States are fewer and simpler, but what you say upon that subject also will find a sympathetic echo here among the friends of freedom and of peace. I am always sincerely yours,

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