and France and Russia. As I pointed out in the very beginning, it is fundamental; but for the insistence upon this weapon by Germany we would probably still be at peace, in spite of the terrible set-back to our moral and political ideals and the dangerous menace to our safety which the defeat of the Allies would have indubitably meant. Yet we should not forget the eloquent words of M. René Viviani, French Minister of Justice, and head of the French War Commission to the United States:

"Yes; doubtless you had your slaughtered dead to avenge, to avenge the insults heaped on your honor. You could not for one moment conceive that the land of Lincoln, the land of Washington, could bow humbly before the imperial eagle. But not for that did you rise; not for your national honor alone; do not say it was for that. You are fighting for the whole world; you are fighting for all liberty; you are fighting for civilization; that is why you have risen in battle." It is against "a whole race so madly intoxicated with conceit that it imagines it is predestined to dominate the world and is amazed to see free men rise and contest its rights. . . . And when in faroff days after this war history shall tell why we fought. . . it will say why all the peoples rose in

battle, why the free allied peoples fought. Not for conquest! They were not nations of prey. No morbid ambitions lay festering in their hearts and consciences. Why then did they fight? To repel the most brutal and insidious of aggressions. They fought for the respect of international treaties trampled under foot by the brutal soldiery of Germany; they fought to raise all peoples of the earth to free breath, to the ideal of liberty for all, so that the world might be habitable for free men or to perish."

That Mr. Wilson has been one of our most peace-loving presidents, history will not dispute. As the foregoing pages abundantly show, opportunity after opportunity was offered the Imperial Government of Germany to renounce lawlessness and to cease invasions of our sovereignty just as real as the landing of an army. The President's peace note of December called in vain for a definition of aims which would deny the intended subjugation of small states or a great German Empire under which liberty would perish. Armed neutrality, or a technical state of war with naval coöperation, money, and supplies would have sufficed if America had gone in only because her honor had been violated, her citizens murdered. But to send to

France our finest men, in unlimited numbers secured on the basis of compulsory service; to pledge all the resources of the country, as did the congressional resolution declaring war -such a readiness for sacrifice means that America is not merely safeguarding her rights, but it means that America, in M. Viviani's phrase again, will "battle till the end for the deliverance of humanity, for the deliverance of democracy." Perhaps Woodrow Wilson waited wisely until the issue had been made translucently clear-until the liberalization of Russia removed the only anomaly and made the battle one of free nations against a would-be assassin of humanity, democracy, and the future peace of the world.

APPENDIX I

PRESIDENT WILSON'S ADDRESS TO CONGRESS, APRIL 2, 1917, ASKING FOR A DECLARATION THAT

A STATE OF WAR EXISTED

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS: I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making.

On the third of February last I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by the enemies of Germany within the Mediter