“ Beginning long before the war in Prussian opposition to every effort that was made by other nations and our own to do away with warfare, the story of the autocracy has been one of vast preparations for war combined with an attitude of arrogant intolerance toward all other points of view, all other systems of governments, all other hopes and dreams of men.
With a fanatical faith in the destiny of German Kultur as the system that must rule the world, the Imperial Government's actions have through years of boasting, double dealing, and deceit tended toward aggression upon the rights of others. ”

“ But now at this crucial time for our nation, on the eve of our entrance into the war, the free men of all the world were thrilled and heartened by the news that the people of Russia had risen to throw off their Government and found a new democracy; and the torch of freedom in Russia lit up the last dark phases of the situation abroad. Here, indeed, was a fit partner for the League of Honor. The conviction was finally crystallized in American minds and hearts that this war across the sea was no mere conflict between dynasties, but a stupendous civil war of all the world ”

“ We are speaking of no selfish material rights, but of rights which our hearts support and whose foundation is that righteous passion for justice upon which all law, all structures alike of family, of State, and of mankind must rest, as upon the ultimate base of our existence and our liberty.
I cannot imagine any man with American principles at his heart hesitating to defend these things. ”

“ Thousands have already suffered this fate, but hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million or more, will die this way before spring unless relief comes quickly and bountifully from abroad, for Russia cannot cope with the emergency alone. Unless Russia's allies or neutrals begin at once to pour into Russia a stream of food to fill the stomachs of these hungry, homeless ones, this will be the bitterest winter in Russian history, a winter whose horrors will far transcend the terrible winter of 1812, when Napoleon ravaged Poland and sacked Moscow. ”

“ The first response from the country to the act of Congress in declaring a state of war came in the form of offers of services from the people, and for weeks there poured into the War Department an almost bewildering stream of letters and visitors offering service of every kind. Without distinction of age, sex, or occupation, without distinction of geographical location or sectional difference, the people arose with but one thought in their mind, that of tendering themselves, their talents, and their substance for the best use the country could make of them in the emergency. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ America does not desire war with Germany.
We do not desire any hostile conflict with the Imperial German Government. We are the sincere friends of the German people, and earnestly desire to remain at peace with the Government which speaks for them. We shall not believe that they are hostile to us unless and until we are obliged to believe it; and we purpose nothing more than the reasonable defense of the undoubted rights of our people. ”

“ Most Americans of German birth are loyal to the United States.
We shall happily still have an opportunity to prove that friendship in our daily attitude and actions toward the millions of men and women of German birth and native sympathy who live among us and share our life, and we shall be proud to prove it toward 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. ”

“ Shells rained on us like hailstones. The German artillery started a barrage behind us that looked almost like a [143] wall of flame; so we knew that there was no hope whatever of help reaching us.
Our men dropped off one by one. The walls of our trench were battered to greasy sand heaps. The dead lay everywhere. Soon only Wedgewood, another chap, and myself were left.
"They've cleaned us out now. The whole battalion's gone," he said.
As far as we could see along the line there was nothing left, not even trenches—just churned-up earth and mutilated bodies. ”

“ The powers that were had, as early as Friday, been so silly as to send armored motor cars screeching up and down the Nevsky. Now they began installing machine guns where they could play on the crowd. Up to this time I had been a neutral, if disgusted, spectator, but now I hoped the police and the whole imperial régime would pay bitterly for their insolence and stupidity. The few corpses I encountered during the day on the Nevsky could not even add to the feeling. They were the mere casualties of a movement that was beginning to attain large proportions.
Many soldiers firing blanks. ”

“ There are many pathetic things in war—soldiers wasted with disease, blasted in arm and leg with explosive shell, withered in eye and lung by the terrible gas; but none of these things is so moving as the sight of little children, homeless, parentless, and with clothing worn and torn by travel, sleeping in empty freight cars, cold railway stations, or on the very blizzard-swept sidewalks of Russian cities, and slowly dying because they have no food. ”

“ I am proposing, as it were, that the nations should with one accord adopt the doctrine of President Monroe as the doctrine of the world; that no nation should seek to extend its policy over any other nation or people, but that every [217] people should be left free to determine its own polity, its own way of development, unhindered, unthreatened, unafraid, the little along with the great and powerful. ”

“ When all unite to act in the same sense and with the same purpose, all act in the common interest and are free to live their own lives under a common protection.
Seas must be free.
"I am proposing government by the consent of the governed; that freedom of the seas which in international conference after conference representatives of the United States have urged with the eloquence of those who are convinced disciples of liberty, and that moderation of armaments which makes of armies and navies a power for order merely, not an instrument of aggression or of selfish violence. ”

“ Germany is forcing the United States into war.
But now at last, with the breaking of friendly relations with the German Government, we were relieved of the oppressive duty of endeavoring to maintain a judicial detachment from the rights and wrongs involved in the war. We were no longer the outside observers striving to hold an even balance of judgment between disputants. One party by direct attack upon our rights and liberties was forcing us into the conflict. ”

“ The revolutionists take the arsenal.
All day, from the time the arsenal fell into their hands, the revolutionists felt their strength growing, and from noon on no attack was led against them. At first the soldiers simply gave up their guns and mixed in the crowd, but they grew bolder, too, when they saw the workmen forming into regiments and marching up the Fourshtatzkaya, still fumbling with the triggers of their rifles to see how they met the enemy at the next corner. ”

“ For, if, with all other neutrals, we refused to sell munitions to belligerents, we could never in time of a war of our own obtain munitions from neutrals, and the nation which had accumulated the largest reserves of war supplies in time of peace would be assured of victory.
The militarist State that invested its money in arsenals would be at a fatal advantage over the free people who invested their wealth in schools. To write into international law that neutrals should not trade in munitions would be to hand over the world to the rule of the nation with the largest armament factories. ”

“ War's terrible cost.
But the case of Rumania was far different. She knew with a terrible certainty that the moment she entered the war she would be the target for attack on a frontier over twelve hundred kilometres long. The world criticized her for remaining neutral, and yet one wonders how many countries would have staked their national future as Rumania did when she entered the war. In a short fourteen months she has seen more than one half of her army destroyed, her fertile plains pass into the hands of her enemies, and her great oil industry almost wiped out. ”

“ Those who believed that the obvious and daily exhibition of power which takes place in an autocracy is necessary for national strength, discovered that a finer, and freer, and greater national strength subsists in a free people, and that the silent processes of democracy, with their normal accent on the freedom of individuals, nevertheless afford springs of collective action and inspiration for self-sacrifice as wide and effective as they are spontaneous. ”

“ Whenever the Russian lines retracted before the unbearable pounding of the terrible German guns, they left only a desert for the Kaiser's men to cross.
Loss too great to be compensated by gain.
War is not a parlor game. A great deal of destruction is inevitable in the nature of war, and sometimes in wars of the past commanders have deliberately laid waste large sections of beautiful country to handicap the enemy, and the results have justified this destruction. A ten per cent social and economic loss is gladly borne by a nation at war for a ninety per cent military gain. ”

“ Rumania is now feeling for the first time the pressure of war and the bitterness of defeat; but Rumania must realize that her defeats are but incidents in the greater campaign; for behind her stands great Russia, who will see to it that her brave little ally, who has come into the war for a just cause, does not ultimately suffer for daring to espouse this cause for which we are all fighting. ”

“ I am merely repeating the statement made to me over and over again by many German soldiers when I say that the men in the ranks are thoroughly tired of the war, that [165] they have abandoned all thought of conquest, and that they fight on only because they believe that their homes and families are at stake.
On that Autumn morning when the first German troops came into Roubaix they came flushed with victory, full of confidence in their strength, marching with their eyes fixed on Paris and London. They sang aloud as they swung through our streets. They sing no more. ”

“ For the evil it has effected has ranged far out of Europe—out upon the open seas, where its submarines, in defiance of law and the concepts of humanity, have blown up neutral vessels and covered the waves with the dead and the dying, men and women and children alike. ”

“ With the memory of a great naval battle fresh in our minds we must all realize how rich a harvest of death the sea has reaped. We in these islands from time immemorial had paid a heavy toll to the sea for our insular security, but, speaking as the friend of a friend, I can say that the sea never executed a heavier toll than when Lord Kitchener, coffined in a British man-of-war, passed to the Great Beyond. ”

“ With the advent of the United States into the war, there has appeared not only one of the world's greatest builders, but the world's greatest customer for supplies and human necessaries. We have not only to equip, house, and supply our own army, but meet the demands arising from the drainage of the resources of the entente allies. ”

“ One of the things that have 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. ”

“ In times of peace and prosperity the sudden impoverishment of such a large mass of people would tax the relief and charity of Russia to the limit; but now, when all food prices are from one hundred to three hundred per cent higher than before the war—when even the well-to-do have difficulty to get enough bread, sugar, and coal—it is inevitable that thousands of these homeless ones should starve and freeze to death. ”

“ 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 with enmity toward 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. ”

“ The two questions which moved the soul of the English people to its deepest depth were, undoubtedly, what part the country was going to take when it was realized that war was inevitable, and, after that, who was to preside at the War Office. There might have been hesitation on the one point; on the other there was none, and the silent, deep determination with which the people waited to be told that Lord Kitchener was to be Secretary of State [191] for War can only be realized by those who went through those anxious days. ”