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Updated: May 5, 2025
On the 25th of December this reply was given. The diplomats of the Teuton Allies expressed agreement with our democratic formula of peace without annexations and indemnities, on the basis of self-determination of peoples.
Prudence required some measure of lip service to the "ideals" of foolish Americans and hypocritical Englishmen; but it would be stupid to believe that there is much room in the world, as it really is, for such affairs as the League of Nations, or any sense in the principle of self-determination except as an ingenious formula for rearranging the balance of power in one's own interests.
The workers of Europe have come to the conclusion that the world should belong to those who build it; that the good things of life should be the property of those who produce them. They see only one course open before them to declare that those who will not work, shall not eat. The right of self-determination is the international expression of this challenge.
Wilson proclaimed while the war was still in progress, for he had declared, in an address delivered on February 11, 1918, before a joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives, that "self-determination is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative principle of action which statesmen will henceforth ignore at their peril."
And, therefore, improved constitutions, and improved book instruction now miscalled education are not progress: they are at best only fruits and signs thereof. For they are outward, material; and progress, I say, is inward. The self-help and self-determination of the independent soul that is the root of progress; and the more human beings who have that, the more progress there is in the world.
Lang also sharply and correctly points out the insufficiency of Strauss's "The Old Faith and the New," as well as the conflict between his metaphysical naturalism which only leads to the struggle for existence, and his demand of self-submission to the universe, and of the moral and spiritual self-determination of man as of a being which goes beyond nature.
Take that one word Sin, for instance: all those who have studied the subject from nature and not from books know perfectly well that a certain fraction of what is so called is nothing more or less than a symptom of hysteria; that another fraction is the index of a limited degree of insanity; that still another is the result of a congenital tendency which removes the act we sit in judgment upon from the sphere of self-determination, if not entirely, at least to such an extent that the subject of the tendency cannot be judged by any normal standard.
Man sins because he is open to impressions from external things, and only superior natures are strong enough to preserve their rational self-determination in spite of this.
The fate of the disputed territories on the Adriatic was to be the outcome of self-determination. Poland's claims were to be left to the self-determination of the Silesian and Ruthenian populations. Rumania was told that her suit must remain in abeyance until it could be tested by the same principle, which would be applied in the form of a plebiscite.
Feb. 11 President Wilson, in address to congress, gives four additional peace principles, including self-determination of nations; Bolsheviki declare war with Germany over, but refuse to sign peace treaty. Feb. 13 Bolo Pasha sentenced to death in France for treason.
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