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 Mediterranean. That had seemed to
be the object of the German submarine warfare earlier in the war, but
since April of last year the Imperial Government had somewhat restrained
the commanders of its undersea craft in conformity with its promise then
given to us that passenger boats should not be sunk and that due warning
would be given to all other vessels which its submarines might seek to
destroy, when no resistance was offered or escape attempted, and care
taken that their crews were given at least a fair chance to save their
lives in their open boats. The precautions taken were meager and
haphazard enough, as was proved in distressing instance after instance
in the progress of the cruel and unmanly business, but a certain degree
of restraint was observed. 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
sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were
provided with safe conduct through the proscribed areas 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 was for a little while unable to believe that such things would in
fact be done by any government that had hitherto subscribed to the
humane practices of civilized nations. International law had its origin
in the attempt to set up some law which would be respected and observed
upon the seas, where no nation had right of dominion and where lay the
free highways of the world. By painful stage after stage has that law
been built up, with meager enough results, indeed, after all was
accomplished that could be accomplished, but always with a clear view,
at least, of what the heart and conscience of mankind demanded. This
minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea of
retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which it could
use at sea except these which it is impossible to employ as it is
employing them without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or
of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the
intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking of the loss of property
involved, 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 legitimate. 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 and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There has been no
discrimination. 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 with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment
befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited
feeling away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion
of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right,
of human right, of which we are only a single champion.
When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth of February last I
thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms,
our right to use the seas against unlawful interference, our right to
keep our people safe against unlawful violence. But armed neutrality, it
now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines are in effect outlaws
when used as the German submarines have been used against merchant
shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks as the
law of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves
against privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open
sea. It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim, necessity
indeed, to endeavor to destroy them before they have shown their own
intention. They must be dealt with upon sight, if dealt with at all.
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 rights which no modern publicist has ever before questioned their
right to defend. The intimation is conveyed that 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. Armed
neutrality is ineffectual enough at best; in such circumstances and in
the face of such pretensions it is worse than ineffectual: it is likely
only to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is practically certain
to draw us into the war without either the rights or the effectiveness
of belligerents. 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 no common wrongs;
they cut to the very roots of human life.
With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the
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.
What this will involve is clear. It will involve the utmost practicable
cooeperation in counsel and action with the governments now at war with
Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension to those governments of
the most liberal financial credits, in order that our resources may so
far as possible be added to theirs. It will involve the organization and
mobilization of all the material resources of the country to supply the
materials of war and serve the incidental needs of the nation in the
most abundant and yet the most economical and efficient way possible. It
will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all respects
but particularly in supplying it with the best means of dealing with the
enemy's submarines. It will involve the immediate addition to the armed
forces of the United States already provided for by law in case of war
at least 500,000 men, who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the
principle of universal liability to service, and also the authorization
of subsequent additional increments of equal force so soon as they may
be needed and can be handled in training. It will involve also, of
course, the granting of adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I
hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained by the present
generation, by well conceived taxation.
I say sustained so far as may be equitable by taxation because it seems
to me that it would be most unwise to base the credits which will now be
necessary entirely on money borrowed. It is our duty, I most
respectfully urge, to protect our people so far as we may against the
very serious hardships and evils which would be likely to arise out of
the inflation which would be produced by vast loans.
In carrying out the measures by which these things are to be
accomplished we should keep constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering
as little as possible in our own preparation and in the equipment of
our own military forces with the duty,--for it will be a very practical
duty,--of supplying the nations already at war with Germany with the
materials which they can obtain only from us or by our assistance. They
are in the field and we should help them in every way to be effective
there.
I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through the several executive
departments of the Government, for the consideration of your committees,
measures for the accomplishment of the several objects I have mentioned.
I hope that it will be your pleasure to deal with them as having been
framed after very careful thought by the branch of the Government upon
which the responsibility of conducting the war and safeguarding the
nation will most directly fall.
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. My own thought has not been driven from its habitual and
normal course by the unhappy events of the last two months, and I do not
believe that the thought of the nation has been altered or clouded by
them. I have exactly the same things in mind now that I had in mind when
I addressed the Senate on the twenty-second of January last; the same
that I had in mind when I addressed the Congress on the third of
February and on the twenty-sixth of February. Our object now, as then,
is to vindicate the principles of peace and justice in the life of the
world as against selfish, and autocratic power and to set up amongst the
really free and self-governed peoples of the world such a concert of
purpose and of action as will henceforth ensure the observance of those
principles. Neutrality is no longer feasible or 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 seen the last of
neutrality in such circumstances. We are at the beginning of an age in
which it will be insisted that the same standards of conduct and of
responsibility for wrong done shall be observed among nations and their
governments that are observed among the individual citizens of civilized
states.
We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling towards
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
previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars
used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were
nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in
the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were
accustomed to use their fellow-men as pawns and tools. Self-governed
nations do not fill their neighbor states with spies or set the course
of intrigue to bring about some critical posture of affairs which will
give them an opportunity to strike and make conquest. Such designs can
be successfully worked out only under cover and where no one has the
right to ask questions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or
aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to generation, can be
worked out and kept from the light only within the privacy of courts or
behind the carefully guarded confidences of a narrow and privileged
class. They are happily impossible where public opinion commands and
insists upon full information concerning all the nation's affairs.
A steadfast concert for peace can never be maintained except by a
partnership of democratic nations. No autocratic government could be
trusted to keep faith within it or observe its covenants. It must be a
league of honor, a partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its vitals
away; the plottings of inner circles who could plan what they would and
render account to no one would be a corruption seated at its very heart.
Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honor steady to a
common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow interest of
their own.
Does not every American feel that assurance has been added to our hope
for the future peace of the world by the wonderful and heartening things
that have been happening within the last few weeks in Russia? Russia was
known by those who knew it best to have been always in fact democratic
at heart, in all the vital habits of her thought, in all the intimate
relationships of her people that spoke their natural instinct, their
habitual attitude towards life. The autocracy that crowned the summit of
her political structure, long as it had stood and terrible as was the
reality of its power, was not in fact Russian in origin, character, or
purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the great, generous Russian
people have been added in all their naive majesty and might to the
forces that are fighting for freedom in the world, for justice, and for
peace. Here is a fit partner for a League of Honor.
One of the things that has served to convince us that the Prussian
autocracy was not and could never be our friend is that from the very
outset of the present war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and
even our offices of government with spies and set criminal intrigues
everywhere afoot against our national unity of counsel, our peace within
and without, our industries and our commerce. Indeed it is now evident
that its spies were here even before the war began; and it is unhappily
not a matter of conjecture but a fact proved in our courts of justice
that the intrigues which have more than once come perilously near to
disturbing the peace and dislocating the industries of the country have
been carried on at the instigation, with the support, and even under the
personal direction of official agents of the Imperial Government
accredited to the Government of the United States. Even in checking
these things and trying to extirpate them we have sought to put the most
generous interpretation possible upon them because we knew that their
source lay, not in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German people
towards us (who were, no doubt as ignorant of them as we ourselves
were), but only in the selfish designs of a Government that did what it
pleased and told its people nothing. But they have played their part in
serving to convince us at last that that Government entertains no real
friendship for us and means to act against our peace and security at its
convenience. That it means to stir up enemies against us at our very
doors the intercepted note to the German Minister at Mexico City is
eloquent evidence.
We are accepting this challenge of hostile purpose because we know that
in such a government, following such methods, we can never have a
friend; and that in the presence of its organized power, always lying in
wait to accomplish we know not what purpose, there can be no assured
security for the democratic governments of the world. We are now about
to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to liberty and shall, if
necessary, spend the whole force of the nation to check and nullify its
pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that we see the facts with
no veil of false pretense about them, to fight thus for the ultimate
peace of the world and for the liberation of its peoples, the German
peoples included: for the rights of nations great and small and the
privilege of men everywhere to choose their way of life and of
obedience. The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be
planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no
selfish ends to serve. We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no
indemnities for ourselves, no material compensation for the sacrifices
we shall freely make. We are but one of the champions of the rights of
mankind. We shall be satisfied when those rights have been made as
secure as the faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
Just because we fight without rancor and without selfish object, seeking
nothing for ourselves but what we shall wish to share with all free
peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as
belligerents without passion and ourselves observe with proud punctilio
the principles of right and of fair play we profess to be fighting for.
I have said nothing of the governments allied with the Imperial
Government of Germany because they have not made war upon us or
challenged us to defend our right and our honor. The Austro-Hungarian
Government has, indeed, avowed its unqualified endorsement and
acceptance of the reckless and lawless submarine warfare adopted now
without disguise by the Imperial German Government, and it has therefore
not been possible for this Government to receive Count Tarnowski, the
Ambassador recently accredited to this Government by the Imperial and
Royal Government of Austria-Hungary; but that Government has not
actually engaged in warfare against citizens of the United States on the
seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at least, of postponing a
discussion of our relations with the authorities at Vienna. We enter
this war only where we are clearly forced into it because there are no
other means of defending our rights.
It will be all the easier for us to conduct ourselves as belligerents in
a high spirit of right and fairness because we act without animus, not
in enmity towards a people or with the desire to bring any injury or
disadvantage upon them, but only in armed opposition to an irresponsible
government which has thrown aside all considerations of humanity and of
right and is running amuck. We are, let me say again, the sincere
friends of the German people, and shall desire nothing so much as the
early reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual advantage between
us,--however hard it may be for them, for the time being, to believe
that this is spoken from our hearts. We have borne with their present
government through all these bitter months because of that
friendship,--exercising a patience and forbearance which would otherwise
have been impossible. We shall, happily, still have an opportunity to
prove that friendship in our daily attitude and actions towards the
millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live
amongst us and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove it towards
all who are in fact loyal to their neighbors and to the Government in
the hour of test. They are, most of them, as true and loyal Americans as
if they had never known any other fealty or allegiance. They will be
prompt to stand with us in rebuking and restraining the few who may be
of a different mind and purpose. If there should be disloyalty, it will
be dealt with with a firm hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts its
head at all, it will lift it only here and there and without countenance
except from a lawless and malignant few.
It is a distressing and oppressive duty, Gentlemen of the Congress,
which I have performed in thus addressing you. There are, it may be,
many months of fiery trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful
thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, into the most
terrible and disastrous of all wars, civilization itself seeming to be
in the balance. But the right is more precious than peace, and we shall
fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our
hearts,--for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority
to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties
of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of
free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the
world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and
our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with
the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is
privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave
her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God
helping her, she can do no other.