File No. 763.72119/483A
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Great Britain ( Page)
4421. The President directs that you lay the following before the leading members of the British Government in strictest confidence and begs that you will press the points it contains with all the earnestness and directness you would use were they your own personal views. He speaks of the leading members of the Government rather than of the Foreign Office because he does not intend this as in any sense an official but only as a personal message and wishes you to ascertain informally what he might expect should he make the proposals here foreshadowed officially to the Foreign Office.
The President knows that peace is intensely desired by the Teutonic powers, and much more by Austria than by any of her allies because the situation is becoming for many reasons much graver for her than for the others. He is trying to avoid breaking with Austria in order to keep the channels of official intercourse with her open so that he may use her for peace. The chief if not the only obstacle is the threat apparently contained in the peace terms recently stated by the Entente Allies that in case they succeeded they would insist upon a virtual dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Austria needs only to be reassured on that point, and that chiefly with regard to the older units of the Empire. It is the President’s view that the large measure of autonomy already secured to those older units is a sufficient guaranty of peace and stability in that part of Europe so far as national and racial influences are concerned and that what Austria regards as the necessities of her development, opportunity, and security to the south of her can be adequately and satisfactorily secured to her by rights of way to the sea given by the common guaranty of the concert which must in any case be arranged if the future peace of the world is to be assured. He does not doubt that Austria can be satisfied without depriving the several Balkan states of their political autonomy and territorial integrity.
The effort of this Government will be constantly for peace even should it become itself involved, although those efforts would not in the least weaken or slacken its vigorous action in such a case. The President still believes and has reason to believe that, were it possible for him to give the necessary assurances to the Government of Austria, which fears radical dismemberment and which thinks that [Page 41] it is now fighting for its very existence, he could in a very short time force the acceptance of peace upon terms which would follow the general lines of his recent address to the Senate regarding the sort of peace the United States would be willing to join in guaranteeing. He is urgently desirous that the Entente Governments should make it possible for him to present such terms and press them for acceptance. The present enthusiastic support which the people of the United States are giving his foreign policy is being given, it is very evident, because they expect him to use the force and influence of the United States, if he must use force, not to prolong the war, but to insist upon those rights of his own and other peoples which he regards and they regard as the bases and the only bases of peace.