It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraordinary
insults and aggressions of the Imperial German Government left us no
self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights
as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign Government. The
military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They
filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and
conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their
own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, their agents
diligently spread sedition among us and sought to draw our own
citizens from their allegiance--and some of those agents were men
connected with the official embassy of the German Government itself
here in our own capital. They sought by violence to destroy our own
industries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to
take up arms against us and to draw Japan into a hostile alliance
with her--and that, not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from
the Foreign Office in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use of
the seas and repeatedly executed their threat that they would send to
their death any of our people who ventured to approach the coasts of
Europe. And many of our own people were corrupted. Men began to look
upon their own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder, in their hot
resentment and surprise, whether there was any community in which
hostile intrigue did not lurk. What great nation, in such
circumstances, would not have taken up arms? Much as we had desired
peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice. This flag under
which we serve would have been dishonored had we withheld our hand.
But that is only part of the story. We know now as clearly as we knew
before we were ourselves engaged that we are not the enemies of the
German people and that they are not our enemies. They did not
originate or desire this hideous war or wish that we should be drawn
into it; and we are vaguely conscious that we are fighting their
cause, as they will some day see it, as well as our own. They are
themselves in the grip of the same sinister power that has now at
last stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood from us. The whole
world is at war because the whole world is in the grip of that power
and is trying out the great battle which shall determine whether it
is to be brought under its mastery or fling itself free.