Colonel House to Woodrow Wilson

I am so impressed with the importance of the situation that I am troubling you again.

I doubt whether you know how thoroughly I am saturated with information from the other side. By seeing the number of people I see, and by reading as closely as I do, I feel that I have a picture that is fairly accurate.

I believe you have an opportunity to take the peace negotiations out of the hands of the Pope and hold them in your own. Governmental Germany realizes that no one excepting you is in a position to enforce peace terms. The Allies must succumb to your judgment and Germany is not much better off. Badly as the Allied cause is going, Germany is in a worse condition. It is a race now of endurance, with Germany as likely to go under first as either of the Entente powers.

Germany and Austria are a seething mass of discontent. The Russian revolution has shown the people their power, and it has put the fear of God in to the hearts of the Imperalists.

A statement from you regarding the aims of this country would bring about almost revolution in Germany in the event the existing government dared to oppose them. The mistake has been made over and over again in the Allied countries, in doing and saying the things that best helped the militarists. The German people are told, and believe, that the Allies desire not only to dismember them, but to make it economically impossible to live after the war. They are therefore welded together with their backs to the wall.

A statement from you setting forth the real issues would have an enormous effect, and would probably bring about such an upheaval in Germany as we desire. While the submarine campaign gives them hope, it is a deferred hope, and the Government, not less than the people, are fearful what may happen in the interim. What is needed, it seems to me, is a firm tone, full of determination, but yet breathing a spirit of liberalism and justice, that will make the people of the Central Powers feel safe in your hands. You could say again that our people had entered this fight with fixed purpose and high courage, and would continue to fight until a new order of liberty and justice for all people was brought about, and some agreement reached by which such another war could never again occur.

You can make a statement that will not only be the undoing of autocratic Germany, but one that will strengthen the hands of the Russian liberals in their purpose to mold their country into a mightly republic.

I pray that you may not lose this great opportunity.