I will not touch upon the general character of the declaration. The government which your congress will create will be able to introduce changes in inessential points.

I will speak decisively against our demand for peace being ultimative. Ultimativity may prove ruinous for our entire cause. We cannot demand that any insignificant deviation from our requirements give the imperialist governments the opportunity to say that it was impossible to enter into peace negotiations because of our uncompromisingness.

We will distribute our appeal everywhere; everyone will know about it. It will be impossible to conceal the conditions put forward by our workers' and peasants' government.

It is impossible to conceal our workers' and peasants' revolution, which has overthrown the government of bankers and landowners.

Under ultimativity, governments may not respond; under our formulation they will be obliged to respond. Let everyone know what their governments think. We do not want secrecy. We want the government always to be under the control of public opinion in its country.

What will a peasant in some remote province say if, because of our ultimativity, he does not know what the other government wants? He will say: comrades, why have you excluded the possibility of any peace conditions being proposed? I would discuss them, I would examine them, and then I would instruct my representatives to the Constituent Assembly on how to act. I am prepared to fight by revolutionary means for just conditions if the governments do not agree, but there may be such conditions for certain countries that I am prepared to propose that these governments continue the struggle themselves further. The complete realization of our ideas depends only on the overthrow of the entire capitalist system. This is what a peasant could say to us, and he would accuse us of excessive inflexibility and of pettifogging, when what we need above all is to reveal all the filthiness, all the villainy of the bourgeoisie and its crowned and uncrowned executioners placed at the head of government.

We must not, we dare not, give the governments the opportunity to hide behind our uncompromisingness and conceal from the peoples why they are being sent to the slaughter. This is a drop, but we must not, we dare not, refuse this drop which wears away the stone of bourgeois conquest. Ultimativity will ease the position of our opponents. We will show all our conditions to the people. We will confront all governments with our conditions, and let them give answer to their peoples. We will submit all peace proposals for the approval of the Constituent Assembly.

There is one more point to which you, comrades, must pay close attention. Secret treaties must be published. The articles concerning annexations and indemnities must be annulled. There are various articles, comrades — indeed, marauding governments not only agreed to plunder, but among such agreements they also included economic agreements and various other articles concerning neighbourly relations.

We do not bind ourselves with treaties. We will not allow ourselves to be ensnared by treaties. We reject all articles concerning plunder and violence, but all articles where neighbourly conditions and economic agreements are concluded, we will readily accept; we cannot reject them. We are proposing an armistice for three months; we choose a long period because the peoples are exhausted, the peoples crave rest from this bloody slaughter lasting its fourth year. We must understand that it is necessary for the peoples to discuss the conditions of peace, to express their will through parliament, and for this a period must be given. We therefore demand a prolonged armistice so that the army in the trenches may rest from this nightmare of endless killing, but we do not reject proposals for shorter armistices; we will consider them and we will have to accept them, even if we are offered an armistice for a month or a month and a half. Our proposal for an armistice also must not be ultimative, for we will not give our enemies the opportunity to conceal all the truth from the peoples by hiding behind our uncompromisingness. It must not be ultimative, for it is criminal for a government to be unwilling to agree to an armistice. And if we make our proposal for an armistice non-ultimative, then by doing so we will force the governments in the eyes of the peoples to become criminals, and peoples will not stand on ceremony with such criminals. We are objected to with the argument that our non-ultimativity will reveal our impotence; but it is time to cast aside all bourgeois falsehood in talk about the strength of the people. Strength, in the bourgeois conception, is when the masses go blindly to the slaughter, obedient to the dictates of imperialist governments. The bourgeoisie only recognizes a state as strong when it can, with all the might of the governmental apparatus, throw the masses where the bourgeois rulers want them thrown. Our conception of strength is different. In our view, a state is strong through the consciousness of the masses. It is strong when the masses know everything, can judge everything, and go to everything consciously. We have nothing to fear in speaking the truth about exhaustion, for what state is not now exhausted, what people does not speak openly about this? Take Italy, where on the basis of this exhaustion there was a prolonged revolutionary movement demanding an end to the slaughter. Is it not the case that in Germany mass demonstrations of workers are occurring where slogans are raised for the cessation of war? Is not the mutiny of the German fleet, which was so mercilessly suppressed by the executioner Wilhelm and his lackeys, caused by exhaustion? If such phenomena are possible in such a disciplined country as Germany, where they are beginning to speak of exhaustion, of the cessation of war, then we have nothing to fear in speaking openly of the same thing, for this is the truth, equally valid for us and for all warring and even non-warring countries.