THE STERN LESSONS OF SUFFERING

71. We will not renounce Our confidence that the peoples, who have all passed through the school of suffering, will be able to retain the stern lessons learned.

72. And in this hope we are strengthened by the words of men who have had a greater share in the sufferings of the war and who have found generous words to express, together with the insistence on their own need of security against any future aggression, their respect for the vital rights of other peoples and their aversion to any usurping of those rights.

73. It would be vain to expect that this sage judgment, dictated by the experience of history and a high political sense should be -- while men's spirits are still burning white-hot -- generally accepted by public opinion, or even by the majority.

74. Hatred and the impossibility of mutual understanding have given rise in peoples that have fought against each other, to a mist too dense to hope that the hour has already come when a ray of light may shine out to clear the tragic panorama on either side of its dark wall.

75. But one thin We know: that the moment will come, perhaps sooner than the people think, when both sides realize that, all things considered, there is only one way of getting out of the meshes in which war and hate have wrapped the world, namely a return to the solidarity, too long forgotten, a solidarity not restricted to these or those peoples, but universal, founded on the intimate connection of their destiny and rights which belong equally to both.