It means, next, that room must be found and kept for
the independent existence and the free development of the smaller
nationalities, [cheers,] each with a corporate consciousness of its own.
The Recognition of Nationality.
Belgium, Holland, and Switzerland and the Scandinavian countries,
Greece, and the Balkan States, they must be recognized as having exactly
as good a title as their more powerful neighbors--more powerful in
strength and in wealth--exactly as good a title to a place in the sun.
[Prolonged cheers and some laughter.] And it means, finally, or it ought
to mean, perhaps by a slow and gradual process, the substitution for
force, for the clash of competing ambition, for grouping and alliances
and a precarious equipoise, the substitution for all these things of a
real European partnership, based on the recognition of equal right and
established and enforced by a common will. [Cheers.] A year ago that
would have sounded like a Utopian idea. It is probably one that may not
or will not be realized either today or tomorrow. If and when this war
is decided in favor of the Allies, it will at once come within the
range, and, before long, within the grasp of European statesmanship.
[Cheers.] I go back for a moment, if I am not keeping you too long, ["Go
on,"] to the peculiar aspects of the actual case upon which I have
dwelt, because it seems to me that they ought to make a special appeal
to the people of Ireland.
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