man's support and use, and just as long as America is America that spirit and point of view is impossible with us. There is as yet in this country, so far as I can discover, no taint of the spirit of militarism."

The people of Germany have given up their sons, paid enormous taxes which kept them poor but made landowners rich, all for the sake of the military whims of their superiors.

Any American would say, like President Wilson, "I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best, and that means the release of all the splendid energies of a great people who think for themselves."

Thus, it is clear that America fights to serve. The Germans fight to get, even as their word "kriegen," used by them to mean "make war," really means "to get." For them, making war is never with the idea of service, but with the idea of getting. They desire many things for Germany, and to get them, they have used the most brutal force. Not for a moment would they stop to listen to the opinions of mankind throughout the world.

President Wilson spoke with authority, when he said: "I have not read history without observing that the greatest forces in the world and the only

permanent forces are the moral forces. We have the evidence of a very competent witness, namely, the first Napoleon, who said that as he looked back in the last days of his life upon so much as he knew of human history, he had to record the judgment that force had never accomplished anything that was permanent. Force will not accomplish anything that is permanent, I venture to say, in the great struggle which is now going on on the other side of the sea. The permanent things will be accomplished afterward, when the opinion of mankind is brought to bear upon the issues, and the only thing that will hold the world steady is this same silent, insistent, all-powerful opinion of mankind. Force can sometimes hold things steady until opinion has time to form, but no force that was ever exerted except in response to that opinion was ever a conquering and predominant force."

By the opinions of mankind, he meant ideals, of which he had already said: "The pushing things in this world are ideals, not ideas. One ideal is worth twenty ideas."

Thus, in behalf of the great American nation, he calls upon the young Americans of to-day to follow the true spirit of their country. To them all he says, "You are just as big as the things you do, just as small as the things you leave undone. The size of your life is the scale of your thinking."

When this great American president who believed

that moral force was always greater than physical force and who taught that America's mission in the world was to serve all mankind and finally to make them free; when he perceived after every other means had failed, that only physical force could affect Germany and that "the sore spot" in the world must be healed, as a cancer is, with the surgeon's knife; then he appeared in person, on April 2, 1917, before the Congress of the United States and read his great war message. Following his advice, Congress declared on April 6 that a state of war existed with Germany. The message was in substance as follows:

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.

On the third of February last I 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

ranean.

The new policy has swept every restriction aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of belligerents.

Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were provided with safeconduct by the German Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle.

I am not now thinking of the loss of property, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction of the lives of non-combatants, men, women, and children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and lawful. Property can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people cannot be.

The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare against mankind. It is a war against all nations. American ships have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways. which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of, but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been sunk in the waters in the same way. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it.

The choice we make for ourselves must be made after very careful thought. We must put excited feeling away. Our motives will not be revenge or the victorious show of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human rights, of which we are only a single champion. ...

The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all within the areas of the sea which it has proscribed, even in the defense of their rights. The armed guards which we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would be.

There is one choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making; we will not choose the path of submission and suffer the most sacred rights of our nation and our people to be ignored

or violated. The wrongs against which we now array ourselves are not common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human life.

With a profound sense of the solemn step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it involves, but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States; that it formally accept the status of belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it and that it take immediate steps not only to put the country in a more thorough state of defense, but also to exert all its power and employ all its resources to bring the Government of the German Empire to terms and end the war.

While we do these things these deeply momentous things - let us be very clear, and make very clear to all the world what our motives and our objects are. Our object is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the world against selfish and autocratic power and to set up among the really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of purpose and action as will henceforth insure the observance of those principles.

Neutrality is no longer desirable where the peace of the world is involved and the freedom of its peoples; and the menace to that peace and freedom lies in the existence of autocratic governments backed by organized force which is controlled wholly by their will, not by the will of their people.

We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their Government acted in entering this war. It was not with their knowledge or approval.

A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except