Declares Germany Has Repudiated Her Peace Avowals and Will Be Met With
"Force to the Utmost"
_President Wilson delivered an address at Baltimore on April 6,
1918, in which he denounced the terms which the Central Powers
had exacted from Russia and Rumania, and defined the attitude of
the United States toward all peace proposals offered on such a
basis. The text of his speech in full is as follows:_
Fellow-citizens: This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Germany's
challenge to fight for our right to live and be free, and for the sacred
rights of freemen everywhere. The nation is awake. There is no need to
call to it. We know what the war must cost, our utmost sacrifice, the
lives of our fittest men, and, if need be, all that we possess.
The loan we are met to discuss is one of the least parts of what we are
called upon to give and to do, though in itself imperative. The people
of the whole country are alive to the necessity of it and are ready to
lend to the utmost, even where it involves a sharp skimping and daily
sacrifice to lend out of meagre earnings. They will look with
reprobation and contempt upon those who can and will not, upon those who
demand a higher rate of interest, upon those who think of it as a mere
commercial transaction. I have not come, therefore, to urge the loan. I
have come only to give you, if I can, a more vivid conception of what it
is for.
The reasons for this great war, the reason why it had to come, the need
to fight it through, and the issues that hang upon its outcome, are more
clearly disclosed now than ever before. It is easy to see just what this
particular loan means, because the cause we are fighting for stands more
sharply revealed than at any previous crisis of the momentous struggle.
The man who knows least can now see plainly how the cause of justice
stands, and what the imperishable thing he is asked to invest in. Men in
America may be more sure than they ever were before that the cause is
their own, and that, if it should be lost, their own great nation's
place and mission in the world would be lost with it.