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 War Reprint, No. 6 
 
 A Selection from 
 
 President Wilson's War Addresses 
 
 1917-1918 
 
 PHILADELPHIA 
 
 McKINLEY PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 1918 
 
 Price, 20 cents 
 
 -t^P* 
 
 LA 
 
WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 Address to Senate Upon Terms of Peace in Europe, 
 
 January 22, 1917 - - - - - - 3 
 
 Address to Congress Upon Germany's Renewal of Submarine 
 
 War Against Merchant Ships, February 3, 191 7 - 5 
 
 Address to Congress Advising that War Be Declared Against 
 
 Germany, April 2, 1917 - 7 
 
 Proclamation Calling Upon All to Speak, Act, and Serve 
 
 Together, April 16, 1917 - - - - - 10 
 
 Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917 - - - - 12 
 
 Address to Congress Upon War Aims and Peace Terms, 
 
 January 8, 1918 ______ 14. 
 
 Address to Congress Upon German and Austrian Peace 
 
 Utterances, February 11, 1918 - - - 16 
 
 Address Delivered at Opening of the Third Liberty Loan 
 
 Campaign, April 6, 1918 - - - - - 19 
 

 PRESIDENT WILSONS WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 A Selection from President Wilson's Addresses 
 
 Address to the Senate, Upon Terms of Peace in 
 Europe, January 22, 1917. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Senate: 
 
 On the eighteenth of December last I addressed 
 an identic note to the governments of the nations now 
 at war requesting them to state, more definitely than 
 (»j they had yet been stated by either group of bel- 
 ligerents, the terms upon which they would deem it 
 possible to make peace. I spoke on behalf of hu- 
 manity and of the rights of all neutral nations like 
 our own, many of whose most vital interests the war 
 puts in constant jeopardy. The Central Powers 
 united in a reply which stated merely that they were 
 ready to meet their antagonists in conference to dis- 
 cuss terms of peace. The Entente Powers have re- 
 plied much more definitely and have stated, in gen- 
 eral terms, indeed, but with sufficient definiteness to 
 imply details, the arrangements, guarantees, and acts 
 of reparation which they deem to be the indispen- 
 sable conditions of a satisfactory settlement. We 
 are that much nearer a definite discussion of the 
 peace which shall end the present war. We are that 
 much nearer the discussion of the international con- 
 cert which must thereafter hold the world at peace. 
 In every discussion of the peace that must end this 
 war it is taken for granted that that peace must be 
 followed by some definite concert of power which will 
 make it virtually impossible that any such catastro- 
 phe should ever overwhelm us again. Every lover of 
 mankind, every sane and thoughtful man must take 
 that for granted. 
 
 I have sought this opportunity to address you be- 
 cause I thought that I owed it to you, as the council 
 associated with me in the final determination of our 
 international obligations, to disclose to you without 
 reserve the thought and purpose that have been tak- 
 ing form in my mind in regard to the duty of our 
 Government in the days to come when it will be 
 necessary to lay afresh and upon a new plan the 
 foundations of peace among the nations. 
 
 It is inconceivable that the people of the United 
 States should play no part in that great enterprise. 
 To take part in such a service will be the opportu- 
 nity for which they have sought to prepare them- 
 selves by the very principles and purposes of their 
 polity and the approved practices of their Govern- 
 ment ever since the days when they set up a new 
 nation in the high and honorable hope that it might 
 in all that it was and did show mankind the way to 
 liberty. They cannot in honor withhold the service 
 to which they are now about to be challenged. They 
 do not wish to withhold it. But they owe it to them- 
 selves and to the other nations of the world to state 
 the conditions under which they will feel free to ren- 
 der it. 
 
 That service is nothing less than this, to add their 
 authority and their power to the authority and force 
 of other nations to guarantee peace and justice 
 throughout the world. Such a settlement cannot now 
 be long postponed. It is right that before it comes 
 this Government should frankly formulate the condi- 
 tions upon which it would feel justified in asking our 
 people to approve its formal and solemn adherence 
 to a League for Peace. I am here to attempt to state 
 those conditions. 
 
 The present war must first be ended ; but we owe 
 it to candor and to a just regard for the opinion of 
 mankind to say that, so far as our participation in 
 guarantees of future peace is concerned, it makes a 
 great deal of difference in what way and upon what 
 terms it is ended. The treaties and agreements 
 which bring it to an end must embody terms which 
 will create a peace that is worth guaranteeing and 
 preserving, a peace that will win the approval of 
 mankind, not merely a peace that will serve the sev- 
 eral interests and immediate aims of the nations en- 
 gaged. We shall have no voice in determining what 
 those terms shall be, but we shall, I feel sure, have 
 a voice in determining whether they shall be made 
 lasting or not by the guarantees of a universal cove- 
 nant, and our judgment upon what is fundamental 
 and essential as a condition precedent to permanency 
 should be spoken now, not afterwards when it may be 
 too late. 
 
 No covenant of co-operative peace that does not 
 include the peoples of the New World can suffice to 
 keep the future safe against war ; and yet there is 
 only one sort of peace that the peoples of America 
 could join in guaranteeing. The elements of that 
 peace must be elements that engage the confidence 
 and satisfy the principles of the American govern- 
 ments, elements consistent with their political faith 
 and with the practical convictions which the peoples 
 of America have once for all embraced and under- 
 taken to defend. 
 
 I do not mean to say that any American govern- 
 ment would throw any obstacle in the way of any 
 terms of peace the governments now at war might 
 agree upon, or seek to upset them when made, what- 
 ever they might be. I only take it for granted that 
 mere terms of peace between the belligerents will 
 not satisfy even the belligerents themselves. Mere 
 agreements may not make peace secure. It will be 
 absolutely necessary that a force be created as a 
 guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so 
 much greater than the force of any nation now en- 
 gaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected 
 that no nation, no probable combination of nations 
 could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to 
 be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure 
 by the organized major force of mankind. 
 
WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 
 
 The terms of the immediate peace agreed upon will 
 determine whether it is a peace for which such a 
 guarantee can be secured. The question upon which 
 the whole future peace and policy of the world de- 
 pends is this : Is the present war a struggle for a 
 just and secure peace, or only for a new balance of 
 power? If it be only a struggle for a new balance 
 of power, who will guarantee, who can guarantee, 
 the stable equilibrium of the new arrangement? Only 
 a tranquil Europe can be a stable Europe. There 
 must be, not a balance of power, but a community 
 of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized 
 common peace. 
 
 Fortunately we have received very explicit assur- 
 ances on this point. The statesmen of both of the 
 groups of nations now arrayed against one another 
 have said, in terms that could not be misinterpreted, 
 that it was no part of the purpose they had in mind 
 to crush their antagonists. But the implications of 
 these assurances may not be equally clear to all — 
 may not be the same on both sides of the water. I 
 think it will be serviceable if I attempt to set forth 
 what we understand them to be. 
 
 They imply, first of all, that it must be a peace 
 without victory. It is not pleasant to say this. I 
 beg that I may be permitted to put my own inter- 
 pretation upon it and that it may be understood that 
 no other interpretation was in my thought. I am 
 seeking only to face realities and to face them with- 
 out soft concealments. Victory would mean peace 
 forced upon the loser, a victor's terms imposed upon 
 the vanquished. It would be accepted in humilia- 
 tion, under duress, at an intolerable sacrifice, and 
 would leave a sting, a resentment, a bitter memory 
 upon which terms of peace would rest, not per- 
 manently, but only as upon quicksand. Only a 
 peace between equals can last. Only a peace the 
 very principle of which is equality and a common 
 participation in a common benefit. The right state 
 of mind, the right feeling between nations, is as 
 necessary for a lasting peace as is the just settle- 
 ment of vexed questions of territory or of racial and 
 national allegiance. 
 
 The equality of nations upon which peace must be 
 founded if it is to last must be an equality of rights ; 
 the guarantees exchanged must neither recognize nor 
 imply a difference between big nations and small, 
 between those that are powerful and those that are 
 weak. Right must be based upon the common 
 strength, not upon the individual strength, of the 
 nations upon whose concert peace will depend. 
 Equality of territory or of resources there of course 
 cannot be ; nor any other sort of equality not gained 
 in the ordinary peaceful and legitimate development 
 of the peoples themselves. But no one asks or ex- 
 pects anything more than an equality of rights. Man- 
 kind is looking now for freedom of life, not for 
 equipoises of power. 
 
 And there is a deeper thing involved than even 
 equality of right among organized nations. No 
 peace can last, or ought to last, which does not recog- 
 
 nize and accept the principle that governments de- 
 rive all their just powers from the consent of the 
 governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand 
 peoples about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if 
 they were property. I take it for granted, for in- 
 stance, if I may venture upon a single example, that 
 statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be 
 a united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and 
 that henceforth inviolable security of life, of wor- 
 ship, and of industrial and social development should 
 be guaranteed to all peoples who have lived hitherto 
 under the power of governments devoted to a faith 
 and purpose hostile to their own. 
 
 I speak of this, not because of any desire to exalt 
 and abstract political principle which has always been 
 held very dear by those who have sought to build up 
 liberty in America, but for the same reason that I 
 have spoken of the other conditions of peace which 
 seem to me clearly indispensable — because I wish 
 frankly to uncover realities. Any peace which does 
 not recognize and accept this principle will inevitably 
 be upset. It will not rest upon the affections or the 
 convictions of mankind. The ferment of spirit of 
 whole populations will fight subtly and constantly 
 against it, and all the world will sympathize. The 
 world can be at peace only if its life is stable, and 
 there can be no stability where the will is in rebel- 
 lion, where there is not tranquillity of spirit and a 
 sense of justice, of freedom, and of right. 
 
 So far as practicable, moreover, every great people 
 now struggling towards a full development of its re- 
 sources and of its powers should be assured a direct 
 outlet to the great highways of the sea. Where this 
 cannot be done by the cession of territory, it can no 
 doubt be done by the neutralization of direct rights 
 of way under the general guarantee which will as- 
 sure the peace itself. With a right comity of ar- 
 rangement no nation need be shut away from free 
 access to the open paths of the world's commerce. 
 
 And the paths of the sea must alike in law and in 
 fact be free. The freedom of the seas is the sine qua 
 non of peace, equality, and co-operation. No doubt 
 a somewhat radical reconsideration of many of the 
 rules of international practice hitherto thought to be 
 established may be necessary in order to make the 
 seas indeed free and common in practically all cir- 
 cumstances for the use of mankind, but the motive 
 for such changes is convincing and compelling. 
 There can be no trust or intimacy between the peo- 
 ples of the world without them. The free, constant, 
 uuthreatened intercourse of nations is an essential 
 part of the process of peace and of development. It 
 need not be difficult either to define or to secure the 
 freedom of the seas if the governments of the world 
 sincerely desire to come to an agreement concern- 
 ing it. 
 
 It is a problem closely connected with the limita- 
 tion of naval armaments and the co-operation of the 
 navies of the world in keeping the seas at once free 
 and safe. And the question of limiting naval arma- 
 ments opens the wider and perhaps more difficult 
 
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 question of the limitation of armies and of all pro- 
 grams of military preparation. Difficult and deli- 
 cate as these questions are, they must be faced with 
 the utmost candor and decided in a spirit of real 
 accommodation if peace is to come with healing in its 
 wings, and come to stay. Peace cannot be had with- 
 out concession and sacrifice. There can be no sense 
 of safety and equality among the nations if great 
 preponderating armaments are henceforth to con- 
 tinue here and there to be built up and maintained. 
 The statesmen of the world must plan for peace and 
 nations must adjust and accommodate their policy to 
 it as they have planned for war and made ready for 
 pitiless contest and rivalry. The question of arma- 
 ments, whether on land or sea, is the most imme- 
 diately and intensely practical question connected 
 with the future fortunes of nations and of mankind. 
 
 I have spoken upon these great matters without re- 
 serve and with the utmost explicitness because it has 
 seemed to me to be necessary if the world's yearning 
 desire for peace was anywhere to find free voice and 
 utterance. Perhaps I am the only person in high au- 
 thority amongst all the peoples of the world who is 
 at liberty to speak and hold nothing back. I am 
 speaking as an individual, and yet I am speaking 
 also, of course, as the responsible head of a great 
 government, and I feel confident that I have said 
 what the people of the United States would wish me 
 to say. May I not add that I hope and believe that 
 I am in effect speaking for liberals and friends of 
 humanity in every nation and of every program of 
 liberty? I would fain believe that I am speaking 
 for the silent mass of mankind everywhere who have 
 as yet had no place or opportunity to speak their 
 real hearts out concerning the death and ruin they 
 see to have come already upon the persons and the 
 homes they hold most dear. 
 
 And in holding out the expectation that the peo- 
 ple and Government of the United States will join 
 the other civilized nations of the world in guarantee- 
 ing the permanence of peace upon such terms as I 
 have named I speak with the greater boldness and 
 confidence because it is clear to every man who can 
 think that there is in this promise no breach in either 
 our traditions or our policy as a nation, but a fulfil- 
 ment, rather, of all that we have professed or striven 
 for. 
 
 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 polity over any other na- 
 tion or people, but that every people should be left 
 free to determine its own polity, its own way of de- 
 velopment, unhindered, urithreatened, unafraid, the 
 little along with the great and powerful. 
 
 I am proposing that all nations henceforth avoid 
 entangling alliances which would draw them into 
 competitions of power: catch them in a net of in- 
 trigue and selfish rivalry, and disturb their own 
 affairs with influences intruded from without. There 
 is no entangling alliance in a concert of power. 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. 
 
 I am proposing government by the consent of the 
 governed; that freedom of the seas which in inter- 
 national conference after conference representatives 
 of the United States have urged with the eloquence 
 of those who are the 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. 
 
 These are American principles, American policies. 
 We could stand for no others. And they are also the 
 principles and policies of forward looking men and 
 women everywhere, of every modern nation, of every 
 enlightened community. They are the principles of 
 mankind and must prevail. 
 
 Address to Congress Upon Germany's Renewal of 
 
 Submarine War Against Merchant Ships 
 
 February 3, 1917. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Congress: 
 
 The Imperial German Government on the thirty- 
 first of January announced to this Government and 
 to the governments of the other neutral nations that 
 en and after the first day of February, the present 
 month, it would adopt a policy with regard to the use 
 of submarines against all shipping seeking to pass 
 through certain designated areas of the high seas to 
 which it is clearly my duty to call your attention. 
 
 Let me remind the Congress that on the eighteenth 
 of April last, in view of the sinking on the twenty- 
 fourth of March of the cross-channel passenger 
 steamer Sussex by a German submarine, without sum- 
 mons or warning, and the consequent loss of the lives 
 of several citizens of the United States who were pas- 
 sengers aboard her, this Government addressed a note 
 to the Imperial German Government in which it made 
 the following declaration: 
 
 If it is still the purpose of the Imperial Government to 
 prosecute relentless and indiscriminate warfare against ves- 
 sels of commerce by the use of submarines without regard 
 to what the Government of the United States must consider 
 the sacred and indisputable rules of international law and 
 the universally recognized dictates of humanity, the Gov- 
 ernment of the United States is at last forced to the con- 
 clusion that there is but one course it can pursue. Unless 
 the Imperial Government should now immediately declare 
 and effect an abandonment of its present methods of sub- 
 marine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying ves- 
 sels, the Government of the United States can have no 
 choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the German 
 Empire altogether. 
 
 In reply to this declaration the Imperial German 
 Government gave this Government the following as- 
 surance: 
 
 The German Government is prepared to do its utmost to 
 confine the operations of war for the rest of its duration 
 to the fighting forces of the belligerents, thereby also in- 
 suring the freedom of the seas, a principle upon which the 
 German Government believes, now as before, to be in agree- 
 ment with the Government of the United States. 
 
WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 
 
 The German Government, guided by this idea, notifies the 
 Government of the United States that the German naval 
 forces have received the following orders: In accordance 
 with the general principles of visit and search and destruc- 
 tion of merchant vessels recognized by international law, 
 such vessels, both within and without the area declared as 
 naval war zone, shall not be sunk without warning and 
 without saving human lives, unless these ships attempt to 
 escape or offer resistance. 
 
 " But," it added, " neutrals cannot expect that 
 Germany, forced to fight for her existence, shall, for 
 the sake of neutral interest, restrict the use of an 
 effective weapon if her enemy is permitted to continue 
 to apply at will methods of warfare violating the rules 
 of international law. Such a demand would be incom- 
 patible with the character of neutrality, and the Ger- 
 man Government is convinced that the Government of 
 the United States does not think of making such a 
 demand, knowing that the Government of the United 
 States has repeatedly declared that it is determined 
 to restore the principle of the freedom of the seas, 
 from whatever quarter it has been violated." 
 
 To this the Government of the United States re- 
 plied on the eighth of May, accepting, of course, the 
 assurances given, but adding, 
 
 The Government of the United States feels it necessary 
 to state that it takes it for granted that the Imperial Ger- 
 man Government does not intend to imply that the main- 
 tenance of its newly announced policy is in any way con- 
 tingent upon the course or result of diplomatic negotiations 
 between the Government of the United States and any 
 other belligerent Government, notwithstanding the fact that 
 certain passages in the Imperial Government's note of the 
 4th instant might appear to be susceptible of that construc- 
 tion. In order, however, to avoid any possible misunder- 
 standing, the Government of the United States notifies the 
 Imperial Government that it cannot for a moment enter- 
 tain, much less discuss, a suggestion that respect by German 
 naval authorities for the rights of citizens of the United 
 States upon the high seas should in any way or in the 
 slightest degree be made contingent nipon the conduct of 
 any other Government affecting the rights of neutrals and 
 noncombatants. Responsibility in such matters is single, 
 not joint: absolute, not relative. 
 
 To this note of the eighth of May, the Imperial 
 German Government made no reply. 
 
 On the thirty-first of January, the Wednesday of 
 the present week, the German Ambassador handed to 
 the Secretary of State, along with a formal note, a 
 memorandum which contains the following statement: 
 
 The Imperial Government, therefore, does not doubt that 
 the Government of the United States will understand the 
 situation thus forced upon Germany by the Entente-Allies' 
 brutal methods of war and by their determination to 
 destroy the Central Powers, and that the Government of 
 the United States will further realize that the now openly 
 disclosed intentions of the Entente-Allies give back to Ger- 
 many the freedom of action which she reserved in her note 
 addressed to the Government of the United States on May 
 4, 1916. 
 
 Under these circumstances Germany will meet the illegal 
 measures of her enemies by forcibly preventing after Febru- 
 ary 1, 1917, in a zone around Great Britain, France, Italy, 
 and in the Eastern Mediterranean all navigation, that of 
 neutrals included, from and to England and from and to 
 
 France, etc., etc. All ships met within the zone will be 
 sunk. 
 
 I think that you will agree with me that, in view 
 of this declaration, which suddenly and without prior 
 intimation of any kind deliberately withdraws the sol- 
 emn assurance given in the Imperial Government's 
 note of the fourth of May, 1916, this Government has 
 no alternative consistent with the dignity and honor 
 of the United States but to take the course which, in 
 its note of the eighteenth of April, 1916, it announced 
 that it would take in the event that the German Gov- 
 ernment did not declare and effect an abandonment of 
 the methods of submarine warfare which it was then 
 employing and to which it now purposes again to re- 
 sort. 
 
 I have, therefore, directed the Secretary of State to 
 announce to His Excellency the German Ambassador 
 that all diplomatic relations between the United States 
 and the German Empire are severed, and that the 
 American Ambassador at Berlin will immediately be 
 withdrawn; and, in accordance with this decision, to 
 hand to His Excellency his passports. 
 
 Notwithstanding this unexpected action of the Ger- 
 man Government, this sudden and deeply deplorable 
 renunciation of its assurances, given this Government 
 at one of the most critical moments of tension in the 
 relations of the two governments, I refuse to believe 
 that it is the intention of the German authorities to do 
 in fact what they have warned us they will feel at 
 liberty to do. I cannot bring myself to believe that 
 they will indeed pay no regard to the ancient friend- 
 ship between their people and our own or to the sol- 
 emn obligations which have been exchanged between 
 them and destroy American ships and take the lives 
 of American citizens in the wilful prosecution of the 
 ruthless naval program they have announced their 
 intention to adopt. Only actual overt acts on their 
 part can make me believe it even now. 
 
 If this inveterate confidence on my part in the so- 
 briety and prudent foresight of their purpose should 
 unhappily prove unfounded ; if American ships and 
 American lives should in fact be sacrificed by their 
 naval commanders in heedless contravention of the 
 just and reasonable understandings of international 
 law and the obvious dictates of humanity, I shall take 
 the liberty of coming again before the Congress, to 
 ask that authority be given me to use any means that 
 may be necessary for the protection of our seamen 
 and our people in the prosecution of their peaceful 
 and legitimate errands on the high seas. I can do 
 nothing less. I take it for granted that all neutral 
 governments will take the same course. 
 
 We do not desire any hostile conflict with the Im- 
 perial 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. We wish to 
 serve no selfish ends. We seek merely to stand true 
 
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 alike in thought and in action to the immemorial prin- 
 ciples of our people which I sought to express in my 
 address to the Senate only two weeks ago — seek 
 merely to vindicate our right to liberty and justice 
 and an unmolested life. These are the bases of peace, 
 not war. God grant we may not be challenged to de- 
 fend them by acts of wilful injustice on the part of 
 the Government of Germany ! 
 
 Address to Congress Advising that War Be 
 Declared Against Germany, April 2, 1917. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Congress: 
 
 I have called the Congress into extraordinary ses- 
 sion 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 sub- 
 marines 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 con- 
 trolled by the enemies of Germany within the Medi- 
 terranean. 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 meagre 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, what- 
 ever their flag, their character, their cargo, their des- 
 tination, 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 hos- 
 pital ships and ships carrying relief to the sorely be- 
 reaved 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 re- 
 spected and observed upon the seas, where no nation 
 had right of dominion and where lay the free high- 
 
 ways of the world. By painful stage after stage has 
 that law been built up, with meagre enough results, 
 indeed, after all was accomplished that could be ac- 
 complished, but always with a clear view, at least, 
 of what the heart and conscience of mankind de- 
 manded. This minimum of right the German Govern- 
 ment 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 de- 
 struction 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 chal- 
 lenge 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 char- 
 acter and our motives as a nation. We must put ex- 
 cited 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 as- 
 sumed 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 en- 
 deavor 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 intima- 
 tion is conveyed that the armed guards which we have 
 placed on our merchant ships will be treated as be- 
 yond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as 
 pirates would be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual 
 
WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 
 
 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 with- 
 out either the rights or the effectiveness of belliger- 
 ents. There is one choice we cannot make, we are in- 
 capable 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 unhesi- 
 tating 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 re- 
 sources to bring the Government of the German Em- 
 pire to terms and end the war. 
 
 What this will involve is clear. It will involve the 
 utmost practicable co-operation 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 re- 
 spects 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 five hundred thousand men, 
 who should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the princi- 
 ple of universal liability to service, and also the au- 
 thorization 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 taxa- 
 tion because it seems to me that it would be most un- 
 wise 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 men- 
 tioned. 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 safe- 
 guarding 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 Feb- 
 ruary and on the twenty-sixth of February. Our ob- 
 ject 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 hence- 
 forth ensure the observance of those principles. Neu- 
 trality 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 responsibility 
 for wrong done shall be observed among nations and 
 their governments that are observed among the indi- 
 vidual 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 pro- 
 voked 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 
 
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 designs can be successfully worked out only under 
 cover and where no one has the right to ask ques- 
 tions. Cunningly contrived plans of deception or 
 aggression, carried, it may be, from generation to gen- 
 eration, can be worked out and kept from the light 
 only within the privacy of courts or behind the care- 
 fully 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 main- 
 tained 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 cir- 
 cles who could plan what the}' would and render ac- 
 count 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 inti- 
 mate relationships of her people that spoke their nat- 
 ural 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 native 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 pres- 
 ent war it has filled our unsuspecting communities and 
 even our offices of government with spies and set 
 criminal intrigues everywhere afoot against our na- 
 tional 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 in- 
 dustries of the country have been carried on at the 
 instigation, with the support, and even under the per- 
 sonal direction of official agents of the Imperial Gov- 
 ernment 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 gener- 
 ous 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 Govern- 
 ment that did what it pleased and told its people noth- 
 ing. 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 in- 
 tercepted 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, follow- 
 ing 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 pur- 
 pose, there can be no assured security for the demo- 
 cratic governments of the world. We are now about 
 to accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to lib- 
 erty 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 ee the facts with 
 no veil of false pretence 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 democ- 
 racy. 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 man- 
 kind. 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 de- 
 fend our right and cur honor. The Austro-Hun- 
 garian Government has, indeed, avowed its unquali- 
 fied endorsement and acceptance of the reckless and 
 lawless submarine warfare adopted now without dis- 
 guise 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 post- 
 poning a discussion of our relations with the authori- 
 ties at Vienna. We enter this war only where we are 
 clearly forced into it because there are no other means 
 of defending our rights. 
 
10 
 
 WAR REPRINTS, XO. 6. 
 
 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 dis- 
 advantage 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 sin- 
 cere friends of the German people, and shall desire 
 nothing so much as the early re-establishment of inti- 
 mate relations of mutual advantage between us — how- 
 ever 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 coun- 
 tenance except from a lawless and rralignant few. 
 
 It is a distressing and oppressive duty, gentlemen 
 of the Congress, which I have performed in thus ad- 
 dressing 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, civiliza- 
 tion 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 sub- 
 mit to authority to have a voice in their own govern- 
 ments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, 
 for a universal dominion of right by such a concert 
 of free people 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 for- 
 tunes, 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. 
 
 Proclamation Calling Upon All to Speak, Act 
 and Serve Together. 
 April 16, 1917. 
 My Fellow-Countrymen: 
 
 The entrance of our own beloved country into the 
 grim and terrible war for democracy and human 
 rights which has shaken the world creates so many 
 
 problems of national life and action which call for im- 
 mediate consideration and settlement that I hope you. 
 will permit me to address to you a few words- of 
 earnest counsel and appeal with regard to them. 
 
 We are rapidly putting our navy upon an efficient 
 war footing, and are about to create and equip a. 
 great army, but these are the simplest parts of the 
 great task to which we have addressed ourselves. 
 There is not a single selfish element, so far as- 1 can: 
 see, in the cause we are fighting for. We are fight- 
 ing for what we believe and wish to be the rights of. 
 mankind and for the future peace and security of the 
 world. To do this great thing worthily and success- 
 fully we must devote ourselves to the service without 
 regard to profit or material advantage and with an. 
 energy and intelligence that will rise to the level of 
 the enterprise itself. We must realize to the full how 
 great the task is and how many things, how many 
 kinds and elements of capacity and service and self- 
 sacrifice, it involves. 
 
 These, then, are the things we must do, and do well, 
 besides fighting — the things without which mere fight- 
 ing would be fruitless: 
 
 We must supply abundant food for ourselves and 
 for our armies and our seamen not only, but also for 
 a large part of the nations with whom we have now 
 made common cause, in whose support and by whose 
 sides we shall be righting; 
 
 We must supply ships by the huiodreds out of our 
 shipyards to carry to the other side of the sea, sub- 
 marines or no submarines, what will every day be 
 needed there, and abundant materials out of our fields 
 and our mines and our factories with which not only 
 to clothe and equip our own forces on land and sea, but 
 also to clothe and support our people for whom the 
 gallant fellows under arms can no longer work, to help 
 clothe and equip the armies with which we are co-oper- 
 ating in Europe, and to keep the looms and manufac- 
 tories there in raw material ; coal to keep the fires going 
 in ships at sea and in the furnaces of hundreds of fac- 
 tories across the sea ; steel out of which to make arms 
 and ammunition both here and there; rails for worn- 
 out railways back of the fighting fronts ; locomotives 
 and rolling stock to take the place of those every day 
 going to pieces ; mules, horses, cattle for labor and for 
 military service ; everything with which the people of 
 England and France and Italy and Russia have 
 usually supplied themselves but cannot now afford the 
 men, the materials, or the machinery to make. 
 
 It is evident to every thinking man that our indus- 
 tries, on the farms, in the shipyards, in the mines, in 
 the factories, must be made more prolific and more 
 efficient than ever, and that they must be more 
 economically managed and better adapted to the par- 
 ticular requirements of our task than they have been ; 
 and what I want to say is that the men and the women 
 who devote their thought and their energy to these 
 things will be serving the country and conducting the 
 fight for peace and freedom just as truly and just as 
 effectively as the men on the battlefield or in the 
 trenches. The industrial forces of the country, men 
 and women alike, will be a great national, a great 
 
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 11 
 
 international, Service Army — a notable and honored 
 host engaged in the service of the nation ^nd the 
 world, the efficient friends and saviors of free men 
 everywhere. Thousands, nay, hundreds of thousands, 
 of men otherwise liable to military service will of 
 right and of necessity be excused from that service 
 and assigned to the fundamental, sustaining work of 
 -the fields and factories and mines, and they will be as 
 much part of the great patriotic forces of the nation 
 as the men under fire. 
 
 I take the liberty, therefore, of addressing this 
 word to the farmers of the country and to all who 
 work on the farms : The supreme need of our own 
 nation and of the nations with which we are co- 
 operating is an abundance of supplies, and especially 
 of food stuffs. The importance of an adequate food 
 supply, especially for the present year, is superlative. 
 Without abundant food, alike for the armies and the 
 peoples now at war, the whole great enterprise upon 
 which we have embarked will break down and fail. 
 The world's food reserves are low. Not only during 
 the present emergency but for some time after peace 
 shall have come both our own people and a large pro- 
 portion of the people of Europe must rely upon the 
 harvests in America. Upon the farmers of this coun- 
 try, therefore, in large measure, rests the fate of the 
 war and the fate of the nations. May the nation not 
 count upon them to omit no step that will increase the 
 production of their land or that will bring about the 
 most effectual co-operation in the sale and distribution 
 of their products ? The time is short. It is of the 
 most imperative importance that everything possible 
 be done and done immediately to make sure of large 
 harvests. I call upon young men . nd old alike and 
 upon the able-bodied boys of the land to accept and 
 act upon this duty — to turn in hosts to the farms and 
 make certain that no pains and no labor is lacking in 
 this great matter. 
 
 I particularly appeal to the farmers of the South 
 to plant abundant food stuffs as well as cotton. They 
 can show their patriotism in no better or more con- 
 vincing way than by resisting the great temptation of 
 the present price of cotton and helping, helping upon 
 a great scale, to feed the nation and the peoples 
 everywhere who are fighting for their liberties and for 
 our own. The variety of their crops will be the visi- 
 ble measure of their comprehension of their national 
 duty. 
 
 The Government of the United States and the gov- 
 ernments of the several States stand ready to co- 
 operate. They will do everything possible to assist 
 farmers in securing an adequate supply of seed, an 
 adequate force of laborers when they are most needed, 
 at harvest time, and the means of expediting ship- 
 ments of fertilizers and farm machinery, as well as of 
 the crops themselves when harvested. The course of 
 trade shall be as unhampered as it is possible to make 
 it, and there shall be no unwarranted manipulation 
 of the nation's food supply by those who handle it on 
 its way to the consumer. This is our opportunity to 
 demonstrate the efficiency of a great Democracy and 
 we shall not fall short of it! 
 
 This let me say to the middlemen of every sort, 
 whether they are handling our food stuffs or our raw 
 materials of manufacture or the products of our mills 
 and factories: The eyes of the country will be espe- 
 cially upon you. This is your opportunity for signal 
 service, efficient and disinterested. The country ex- 
 pects you, as it expects all others, to forego unusual 
 profits, to organize and expedite shipments of supplies 
 of every kind, but especially of food, with an eye to 
 the service you are rendering and in the spirit of those 
 who enlist in the ranks for their people, not for them- 
 selves. I shall confidently expect you to deserve and 
 win the confidence of people of every sort and sta- 
 tion. 
 
 To the men who run the railways of the country, 
 whether they be managers or operative employees, let 
 me say that the railways are the arteries of the na- 
 tion's life and that upon them rests the immense re- 
 sponsibility of seeing to it that those arteries suffer no 
 obstruction of any kind, no inefficiency or slackened 
 power. To the merchant let nie suggest the motto, 
 " Small profits and quick service ; " and to the ship- 
 builder the thought that the life of the war depends 
 upon him. The food and the war supplies must be 
 carried across the seas no matter how many ships are 
 sent to the bottom. The places of those that go dowif 
 must be supplied and supplied at once. To the miner 
 let me say that he stands where the farmer does : the 
 work of the world waits on him. If he slackens or 
 fails, armies and statesmen are helpless. He also is 
 enlisted in the great Service Army. The manufac- 
 turer does not need to be told, I hope, that the nation 
 looks to him to speed and perfect every process ; and 
 I want only to remind his employees that their ser- 
 vice is absolutely indispensable and is counted on by 
 every man who loves the country and its liberties. 
 
 Let me suggest, also, that everyone who creates or 
 cultivates a garden helps, and helps greatly, to solve 
 the problem of the feeding of the nations ; and that 
 every housewife who practices strict economy puts 
 herself in the ranks of those who serve the nation. 
 This is the time for America to correct her unpardon- 
 able fault of wastefulness and extravagance. Let 
 every man and every woman assume the duty of care- 
 ful, provident use and expenditure as a public duty, 
 as a dictate of patriotism which no one can now ex- 
 pect ever to be excused or forgiven for ignoring. 
 
 In the hope that this statement of the needs of the 
 nation and of the world in this hour of supreme crisis 
 may stimulate those to whom it comes and remind all 
 who need reminder of the solemn duties of a time snch 
 as the world has never seen before, I beg that all 
 editors and publishers everywhere will give as promi- 
 nent publication and as wide circulation as possible to 
 this appeal. I venture to suggest, also, to all adver- 
 tising agencies that they would perhaps render a very 
 substantial and timely service to the country if they 
 would give it widespread repetition. And I hope 
 that clergymen will not think the theme of it an un- 
 worthy or inappropriate subject of comment and 
 homily from their pulpits. 
 
12 
 
 WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 
 
 The supreme test of the nation has come. We must 
 all speak, act, and serve together ! 
 
 Woodrow Wilson. 
 
 Flag Day Address, Washington, D. C. 
 June 14, 1917. 
 My Fellow Citizens: 
 
 We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag 
 which we honor and under which we serve is the 
 emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and pur- 
 pose as a nation. It has no other character than that 
 which we give it from generation to generation. The 
 choices are ours. It floats in majestic silence above 
 the hosts that execute those choices, whether in peace 
 or in war. And yet, though silent, it speaks to us — 
 speaks to us of the past, of the men and women who 
 went before us and of the records they wrote upon it. 
 We celebrate the day of its birth ; and from its birth 
 until now it has witnessed a great history, has floated 
 on high the symbol of great events, of a great plan 
 of life worked out by a great people. We are about 
 to carry it into battle, to lift it where it will draw 
 the fire of our enemies. We are about to bid 
 thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be millions, 
 of our men, the young, the strong, the capable men of 
 the nation, to go forth and die beneath it on fields of 
 blood far away — for what? For some unaccustomed 
 thing? For something for which it has never sought 
 the fire before? American armies were never before 
 sent across the seas. Why are they sent now? For 
 some new purpose, for which this great flag has never 
 been carried before, or for some old, familiar, heroic 
 purpose for which it has seen men, its own men, die 
 on every battlefield upon which Americans have borne 
 arms since the Revolution ? 
 
 These are questions which must be answered. We 
 are Americans. We in our turn serve America, and can 
 serve her with no private purpose. We must use her 
 flag as she has always used it. We are accountable 
 at the bar of history and must plead in utter frank- 
 ness what purpose it is we seek to serve. 
 
 It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. 
 The extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Im- 
 perial 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 gov- 
 ernment. The military masters of Germany denied 
 us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspect- 
 ing communities with vicious spies and conspirators 
 and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in 
 their own behalf. M'hen they found that they could 
 not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition 
 amongst 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 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 Ber- 
 lin. They impudently denied us the use of the high 
 
 seas and repeatedly executed their threat that they 
 would send to their death any of our people who ven- 
 tured 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 circum- 
 stances 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 en- 
 gaged that we are not the enemies of the German peo- 
 ple, 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. 
 
 The war was begun by the military masters of Ger- 
 many, who proved to be also the masters of Austria- 
 Hungary. These men have never regarded nations 
 as peoples, men, women, and children of like blood 
 and frame as themselves, for whom governments ex- 
 isted and in whom governments had their life. They 
 have regarded them merely as serviceable organiza- 
 tions which they could by force or intrigue bend or 
 corrupt to their own purpose. They have regarded 
 the smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who 
 could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural tools 
 and instruments of domination. Their purpose has 
 long been avowed. The statesmen of other nations, 
 to whom that purpose was incredible, paid little at- 
 tention ; regarded what German professors expounded 
 in their classrooms and German writers set forth to 
 the world as the goal of German policy as rather the 
 dream of minds detached from practical affairs, as 
 preposterous private conceptions of German destiny, 
 than as the actual plans of responsible rulers ; but the 
 rulers of Germany themselves knew all the while what 
 concrete plans, what well advanced intrigues lay back 
 of what the professors and the writers were saying, 
 and were glad to go forward unmolested, filling the 
 thrones of Balkan states with German princes, put- 
 ting German officers at the service of Turkey to drill 
 her armies and make interest with her government, 
 developing plans of sedition and rebellion in India and 
 Egypt, setting their fires in Persia. The demands 
 made by Austria upon Servia were a mere single step 
 in a plan which compassed Europe and Asia, from 
 Berlin to Bagdad. They hoped those demands might 
 not arouse Europe, but they meant to press them 
 whether they did or not, for they thought themselves 
 ready for the final issue of arms. 
 
 Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German 
 
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 13 
 
 military power and political control across the very 
 center of Europe and beyond the Mediterranean into 
 the heart of Asia; and Austria-Hungary was to be as 
 much their tool and pawn as Servia or Bulgaria or 
 Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. Austria- 
 Hungary, indeed, was to become part of the central 
 German Empire, absorbed and dominated by the same 
 forces and influences that had originally cemented the 
 German states themselves. The dream had its heart 
 at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere else ! 
 It rejected the idea of solidarity of race entirely. 
 The choice of peoples played no part in it at all. It 
 contemplated binding together racial and political 
 units which could be kept together only by force — 
 Czechs, Magyars, Croats, Serbs, Roumanians, Turks, 
 Armenians — the proud states of Bohemia and Hun- 
 gary, the stout little commonwealths of the Balkans, 
 the indomitable Turks, the subtle peoples of the East. 
 These peoples did not wish to be united. They 
 ardently desired to direct their own affairs, would be 
 satisfied only by undisputed independence. They 
 could be kept quiet only by the presence or the con- 
 stant threat of armed men. They would live under a 
 common power only by sheer compulsion and await 
 the day of revolution. But the German military 
 statesmen had reckoned with all that and were ready 
 to deal with it in their own way. 
 
 And they have actually carried the greater part of 
 that amazing plan into execution ! Look how things 
 stand. Austria is at their mercy. It has acted, not 
 upon its own initiative or upon the choice of its own 
 people, but at Berlin's dictation ever since the war 
 began. Its people now desire peace, but cannot have 
 it until leave is granted from Berlin. The so-called 
 Central Powers are in fact but a single Power. Ser- 
 via is at its mercy, should its hands be but for a mo- 
 ment freed. Bulgaria has consented to its will, and 
 Roumania is overrun. The Turkish armies, which 
 Germans trained, are serving Germany, certainly not 
 themselves, and the guns of German warships lying 
 in the harbor of Constantinople remind Turkish 
 statesmen every day that they have no choice but to 
 take their orders from Berlin. From Hamburg to 
 the Persian Gulf the net is spread. 
 
 Is it not easy to understand the eagerness for peace 
 that has been manifested from Berlin ever since the 
 snare was set and sprung? Peace, peace, peace has 
 been the talk of her Foreign Office for now a year 
 and more ; not peace upon her own initiative, but upon 
 the initiative of the nations over which she now deems 
 herself to hold the advantage. A little of the talk 
 has been public, but most of it has been private. 
 Through all sorts of channels it has come to me, and 
 in all sorts of guises, but never with the terms dis- 
 closed which the German Government would be will- 
 ing to accept. That government has other valuable 
 pawns in its hands besides those I have mentioned. 
 It still holds a valuable part of France, though with 
 slowly relaxing grasp, and practically the whole of 
 Belgium. Its armies press close upon Russia and 
 overrun Poland at their will. It cannot go further ; 
 it dare not go back. It wishes to close its bargain 
 
 before it is too late and it has little left to offer for 
 the pound of flesh it will demand. 
 
 The military masters under whom Germany is 
 bleeding see very clearly to what point Fate has 
 brought them. If they fall back or are forced back 
 an inch, their power both abroad and at home will 
 fall to pieces like a house of cards. It is their power 
 at home they are thinking about now more than their 
 power abroad. It is that power which is trembling 
 under their very feet ; and deep fear has entered their 
 hearts. They have but one chance to perpetuate their 
 military power or even their controlling political influ- 
 ence. If they can secure peace now with the im- 
 mense advantages still in their hands which they have 
 up to this point apparently gained, they will have jus- 
 tified themselves before the German people ; they will 
 have gained by force what they promised to gain by 
 it: an immense expansion of German power, an im- 
 mense enlargement of German industrial and commer- 
 cial opportunities. Their prestige will be secure, and 
 with their prestige their political power. If they fail, 
 their people will thrust them aside ; a government ac- 
 countable to the people themselves will be set up in 
 Germany as it has been in England, in the United 
 States, in France, and in all the great countries of the 
 modern time except Germany. If they succeed they 
 are safe and Germany and the world are undone; if 
 they fail Germany is saved and the world will be at 
 peace. If they succeed, America will fall within the 
 menace. We and all the rest of the world must re- 
 main armed, as. they will remain, and must make 
 ready for the next step in their aggression ; if they 
 fail, the world may unite for peace and Germany may 
 be of the union. 
 
 Do you not now understand the new intrigue, the 
 intrigue for peace, and why the masters of Germany 
 do not hesitate to use any agency that promises to 
 effect their purpose, the deceit of the nations? Their 
 present particular aim is to deceive all those who 
 throughout the world stand for the rights of peoples 
 and the self-government of nations ; for they see what 
 immense strength the forces of justice and of liberal- 
 ism are gathering out of this war. They are employ- 
 ing liberals in their enterprise. They are using men, 
 in Germany and without, as their spokesmen whom 
 they have hitherto despised and oppressed, using them 
 for their own destruction — socialists, the leaders of 
 labor, the thinkers they have, hitherto sought to 
 silence. Let them once succeed and these men, now 
 their tools, will be ground to power beneath the weight 
 of the great military empire they will have set up; 
 the revolutionists in Russia will be cut off from all 
 succor or co-operation in western Europe and a coun- 
 ter revolution fostered and supported; Germany her- 
 self will lose her chance of freedom; and all Europe 
 will arm for the next, the final struggle. 
 
 The sinister intrigue is being no less actively con- 
 ducted in this country than in Russia and in every 
 country in Europe to which the agents and dupes of 
 the Imperial German Government can get access. 
 That government has many spokesmen here, in places 
 high and low. They have learned discretion. They 
 
H 
 
 WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 
 
 keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, 
 not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of 
 their masters ; declare this a foreign war which can 
 touch America with no danger to either her lands or 
 her institutions; set England at the centre of the 
 stage and talk of her ambition to assert economic 
 dominion throughout the world; appeal to our ancient 
 tradition of isolation in the politics of the nations ; 
 and seek to undermine the government with false pro- 
 fessions of loyalty to its principles. 
 
 But they will make no headway. The false betray 
 themselves always in every accent. It is only friends 
 and partisans of the German Government whom we 
 have already identified who utter these thinly dis- 
 guised loyalties. The facts are patent to all the 
 world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than 
 in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal 
 with facts and not with sophistries ; and the great 
 fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a 
 People's War, a war for freedom and justice and self- 
 gcvernment amongst all the nations of the world, a 
 war to make the world safe for the peoples who live 
 upon it and have made it their own, the German peo- 
 ples themselves included; and that with us rests the 
 choice to break through all these hypocricies and 
 patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set 
 the world free, or else stand aside and let it be domi- 
 nated a long age through by sheer weight of arms and 
 the arbitrary choices of self-constituted masters, by 
 the nation which can maintain the biggest armies and 
 the most irresistible armaments — a power to which 
 the world has afforded no parallel and in the face of 
 which political freedom must wither and perish. 
 
 For us there is but one choice. We have made it. 
 Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand 
 in our way in this day of high resolution when every 
 principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made 
 secure for the salvation of the nations. We are ready 
 to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear 
 a new lustre. Once more we shall make good with 
 our lives and fortunes the great faith to which we 
 were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face 
 of our people. 
 
 Address to Congress Upon the War Aims and 
 
 Peace Terms of the United States 
 
 January 8, 1918. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Congress: 
 
 Once more, as repeatedly before, the spokesmen of 
 the Central Empires have indicated their desire to 
 discuss the objects of the war and the possible basis 
 of a general peace. Parleys have been in progress at 
 Brest-Litovsk between Russian representatives and 
 represenatives of the Central Powers to which the 
 attention of all the belligerents has been invited for 
 the purpose of ascertaining whether it may be possible 
 to extend these parleys into a general conference with 
 regard to terms of peace and settlement. 
 
 The Russian representatives presented not only a 
 perfectly definite statement of the principles upon 
 which they would be willing to conclude peace, but 
 
 also an equally definite program of the concrete appli- 
 cation of those principles. The representatives of 
 the Central Powers, on their part, presented an out- 
 line of settlement which, if much less definite, seemed 
 susceptible of liberal interpretation until their specific 
 program of practical terms was added. That pro- 
 gram proposed no concessions at all either to the 
 sovereignty of Russia or to the preferences of the 
 populations with whose fortunes it dealt, but meant, 
 in a word, that the Central Empires were to keep 
 every foot of territory their armed forces had occu- 
 pied — every province, every city, every point of van- 
 tage — as a permanent addition to their territories and 
 their power. 
 
 It is a reasonable conjecture that the general prin- 
 ciples of settlement which they at first suggested 
 originated with the more liberal statesmen of Germany 
 and Austria, the men who have begun to feel the force 
 of their own people's thought and purpose, while the 
 concrete terms of actual settlement came from the 
 military leaders who have no thought but to keep what 
 they have got. The negotiations have been broken 
 off. The Russian representatives were sincere and in 
 earnest. They cannot entertain such proposals of 
 conquest and domination. 
 
 The whole incident is full of significance. It is 
 also full of perplexity. With whom are the Russian 
 representatives dealing? For whom are the repre- 
 sentatives of the Central Empires speaking? Are 
 they speaking for the majorities of their respective 
 parliaments or for the minority parties, that military 
 and imperialistc minority which has so far dominated 
 their whole policy and controlled the affairs of Tur- 
 key and of the Balkan states which have felt obliged 
 to become their associates in this war? 
 
 The Russian representatives have insisted, very 
 justly, very wisely, and in the true spirit of modern 
 democracy, that the conferences they have been hold- 
 ing with the Teutonic and Turkish statesmen should 
 be held within open, not closed, doors, and all the 
 world has been audience, as was desired. To whom 
 have we been listening, then? To those who speak 
 the spirit and intention of the resolutions of the Ger- 
 man Reichstag of the 9th of July last, the spirit and 
 intention of the Liberal leaders and parties of Ger- 
 many, or to those who resist and defy that spirit and 
 intention and insist upon conquest and subjugation? 
 Or are we listening, in fact, to both, unreconciled and 
 in open and hopeless contradiction? These are very 
 serious and pregnant questions. Upon the answer to 
 them depends the peace of the world. 
 
 But, whatever the results of the parleys at Brest- 
 Litovsk, whatever the confusions of counsel and of 
 purpose in the utterances of the spokesmen of the 
 Central Empires, they have again attempted to ac- 
 quaint the world with their objects in the war and 
 have again challenged their adversaries to say what 
 their objects are and what sort of settlement they 
 would deem just and satisfactory. There is no good 
 reason why that challenge should not be responded to, 
 ;ind responded to with the utmost candor. We did not 
 wait for it. Not once, but again and again, we have 
 
PRESIDENT WILSONS WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 15 
 
 laid our whole thought and purpose before the worlds 
 not in general terms only, but each time with suffi- 
 cient definition to make it clear what sort of definite 
 terms of settlement must necessarily spring out of 
 them. Within the last week Mr. Lloyd George has 
 spoken with admirable candor and in admirable spirit 
 for the people and Government of Great Britain. 
 
 There is no confusion of counsel among the adver- 
 saries of the Central Powers, no uncertainty of prin- 
 ciple, no vagueness of detail. The only secrecy of 
 counsel, the only lack of fearless frankness, the only 
 failure to make definite statement of the objects of 
 the war, lies with Germany and her allies. The issues 
 of life and death hang upon these definitions. No 
 statesman who has the least conception' of his respon- 
 sibility ought for a moment to permit himself to con- 
 tinue this tragical and appalling outpouring of blood 
 and treasure unless he is sure beyond a peradventure 
 that the objects of the vital sacrifice are part and par- 
 cel of the very life of Society and that the people for 
 whom he speaks think them right and imperative as 
 he does. 
 
 There is, moreover, a voice calling for these defini- 
 tions of principle and of purpose which is, it seems 
 to me, more thrilling and more compelling than any 
 of the many moving voices with which the troubled air 
 of the world is filled. It is the voice of the Russian 
 people. They are prostrate and all but helpless, it 
 would seem, before the grim power of Germany, which 
 has hitherto known no relenting and no pity. Their 
 power, apparently, is shattered. And yet their soul 
 is not subservient. They will not yield either in 
 principle or in action. Their conception of what is 
 right, of what is humane and honorable for them to 
 accept, has been stated with a frankness, a largeness 
 of view, a generosity of spirit, and a universal human 
 sympathy which must challenge the admiration of 
 every friend of mankind ; and they have refused to 
 compound their ideals or desert others that they them- 
 selves may be safe. 
 
 They call to us to say what it is that we desire, in 
 what, if in anything, our purpose and our spirit differ 
 from theirs ; and I believe that the people of the 
 United States would wish me to respond, with utter 
 simplicity and frankness. Whether their present 
 leaders believe it or not, it is our heartfelt desire and 
 hope that some way may be opened whereby we may 
 be privileged to assist the people of Russia to attain 
 their utmost hope of liberty and ordered peace. 
 
 It will be our wish and purpose that the processes 
 of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely 
 open and that they shall involve and permit hence- 
 forth no secret understandings of any kind. The day 
 of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also 
 the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest 
 of particular governments and likely at some unlooked- 
 for moment to upset the peace of the world. It is 
 this happy fact, now clear to the view of every public 
 man whose thoughts do not still Lnger in an age that 
 is dead and gone, which makes it possible for every 
 nation whose purposes are consistent with justice and 
 the peace of the world to avow now or at any other 
 time the objects it has in view. 
 
 We entered this war because violations of right had 
 occurred which touched us to the quick and made the 
 life of our own people impossible unless they were 
 corrected and the world secure once for all against 
 their recurrence. 
 
 What we demand in this war, therefore, is nothing 
 peculiar to ourselves. It is that the world be made fit 
 and safe to live in; and particularly that it be made 
 safe for every peace-loving nation which, like our 
 own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own in- 
 stitutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by 
 the other peoples of the world as against force and 
 selfish aggression. 
 
 All the peoples of the world are in effect partners 
 in this interest, and for our own part we see very 
 clearly that unless justice be done to others it will 
 not be done to us. The program of the world's peace, 
 therefore, is our program ; and that program, the only 
 possible program, as we see it, is this : 
 
 1. Open covenants of peace, openly ar- 
 rived at, after which there shall be no pri- 
 vate international understandings of any 
 kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always 
 frankly and in the public view. 
 
 2. Absolute freedom of navigation upon 
 the seas, outside territorial waters, alike in 
 peace and in war, except as the seas may be 
 closed in whole or in part by international 
 action for the enforcement of international 
 covenants. 
 
 3. The removal, so far as possible, of all 
 economic barriers and the establishment of 
 an equality of trade conditions among all the 
 nations consenting to the peace and associat- 
 ing themselves for its maintenance. 
 
 4. Adequate guarantees given and taken 
 that national armaments will be reduced to 
 the lowest points consistent with domestic 
 safety. 
 
 5. A free, open-minded, and absolutely 
 impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, 
 based upon a strict observance of the princi- 
 ple that in determining all such questions 
 of sovereignty the interests of the popula- 
 tions concerned must have equal weight with 
 the equitable claims of the government 
 whose title is to be determined. 
 
 6. The evacuation of all Russian territory 
 and such a settlement of all questions affect- 
 ing Russia as will secure the best and freest 
 co-operation of the other nations of the 
 world in obtaining for her an unhampered 
 and unembarrassed opportunity for the. inde- 
 pendent determination of her own political 
 development and national policy and assure 
 her of a sincere welcome into the society of 
 free nations under institutions of her own 
 choosing; and, more than a welcome, assist- 
 ance also of every kind that she may need 
 and may herself desire. The treatment ac- 
 corded Russia by her sister nations in the 
 months to come will be the acid test of their 
 good will, of their comprehension of her 
 
16 
 
 WAR REPRINTS. NO. 6. 
 
 needs as distinguished from their own in- 
 terests, and of their intelligent and un- 
 selfish sympathy. 
 
 7. Belgium, the whole world will agree, 
 must be evacuated and restored, without any 
 attempt to limit the sovereignty which she 
 enjoys in common with all other free nations. 
 No other single act will serve as this will 
 serve to restore confidence among the nations 
 in the laws which they have themselves set 
 and determined for the government of their 
 relations with one another. Without this 
 healing act the whole structure and validity 
 of international law is forever impaired. 
 
 8. All French territory should be freed 
 and the invaded portions restored, and the 
 wrong done to France by Prussia in 1871 in 
 the matter of Alsace-Lorraine, which has 
 unsettled the peace of the world for nearly 
 fifty years, should be righted, in order that 
 peace may once more be made secure in the 
 interest of all. 
 
 9. A readjustment of the frontiers of 
 Italy should be effected along clearly recog- 
 nizable lines of nationality. 
 
 10. The peoples of Austria-Hungary, 
 whose place among the nations we wish to 
 see safeguarded and assured, should be ac- 
 corded the freest opportunity of autonomous 
 development. 
 
 11. Rumania, Serbia, and Montenegro 
 should be evacuated ; occupied territories 
 restored ; Serbia accorded free and secure 
 access to the sea ; and the relations of the 
 several Balkan states to one another deter- 
 mined by friendly counsel along historically 
 established lines of allegiance and national- 
 ity; and international guarantees of the po- 
 litical and economic independence and ter- 
 ritorial integrity of the several Balkan 
 states should be entered into. 
 
 12. The Turkish portions of the present 
 Ottoman Empire should be assured a secure 
 sovereignty, but the other nationalities 
 which are now under Turkish rule should be 
 assured an undoubted security of life and an 
 absolutely unmolested opportunity of au- 
 tonomous development, and the Dardanelles 
 should be permanently opened as a free 
 passage to the ships and commerce of all na- 
 tions under international guarantees. 
 
 13. An independent Polish state should 
 be erected which should include the terri- 
 tories inhabited by indisputably Polish 
 populations, which should be assured a free 
 and secure access to the sea, and whose 
 political and economic independence and ter- 
 ritorial integrity should be guaranteed by 
 international covenant. 
 
 14. A general association of nations must 
 be formed under specific covenants for the 
 purpose of affording mutual guarantees of 
 
 political independence and territorial in- 
 tegrity to great and small states alike. 
 
 In regard to these essential rectifications of wrong 
 and assertions of right we feel ourselves to be inti- 
 mate partners of all the governments and peoples as- 
 sociated together against the imperialists. We can- 
 not be separated in interest or divided in purpose. 
 We stand together until the end. 
 
 For such arrangements and covenants we are will- 
 ing to fight and to continue to fight until they are 
 achieved ; but only because we wish the right to pre- 
 vail and desire a just and stable peace such as can be 
 secured only by removing the chief provocations to 
 war, which this program does remove. 
 
 We have no. jealousy of German greatness, and 
 there is nothing in this program that impairs it. We 
 grudge her no achievement or distinction of learning 
 or of pacific enterprise such as have made her record 
 very bright and very enviable. We do not wish to in- 
 jure her or to block in any way her legitimate influ- 
 ence or power. We do not wish to fight her either 
 with arms or with hostile arrangements of trade if she 
 is willing to associate herself with us and the other 
 peace-loving nations of the world in covenants of jus- 
 tice and law and fair dealing. 
 
 We wish her only to accept a place of equality 
 among the peoples of the world — the new world in 
 which we now live — instead of a place of mastery. 
 
 Neither do we presume to suggest to her any alter- 
 ation or modification of her institutions. But it is 
 necessary, we must frankly say, and necessary as a 
 preliminary to any intelligent dealings with her on 
 our part, that we should know whom her spokesmen 
 speak for when they speak to us, whether for the 
 Reichstag majority or for the military party and the 
 men whose creed is imperial domination. 
 
 We have spoken now, surely, in terms too concrete 
 to admit of any further doubt or question. An evi- 
 dent principle runs through the whole program I have 
 outlined. It is the principle of justice to all peo- 
 ples and nationalities, and their right to live on equal 
 terms of liberty and safety with one another, whether 
 they be strong or weak. 
 
 Unless this principle be made its foundation no part 
 of the structure of international justice can stand. 
 The people of the United States could act upon no 
 other principle ; and to the vindication of this princi- 
 ple they are ready to devote their lives, their honor, 
 and everything that they possess. The moral climax 
 of this the culminating and final war for human lib- 
 erty has come, and they are ready to put their own 
 strength, their own highest purpose, their own integ- 
 rity and devotion to the test. 
 
 Address to Congress Upon the German and 
 
 Austrian Peace Utterances 
 
 February 11, 1918. 
 
 Gentlemen of the Congress: 
 
 On the eighth of January I had the honor of ad- 
 dressing you on the objects of the war as our people 
 conceive them. The Prime Minister of Great Britain 
 had spoken in similar terms on the fifth of January. 
 
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 ir 
 
 To these addresses the German Chancellor replied on 
 the twenty-fourth and Count Czernin, for Austria, on 
 the same day. It is gratifying to have our desire so 
 promptly realized that all exchanges of view on this 
 great matter should be made in the hearing of all the 
 world. 
 
 Count Czernin's reply, which is directed chiefly to 
 my own address of the eighth of January, is uttered 
 in a very friendly tone. He finds in my statement a 
 sufficiently encouraging approach to the views of his 
 own Government to justify him in believing that it 
 furnishes a basis for a more detailed discussion of 
 purposes by the two Governments. He is represented 
 to have intimated that the views he was expressing 
 had been communicated to me beforehand and that I 
 was aware of them at the time he was uttering them; 
 but in this I am sure he was misunderstood. I had 
 received no intimation of what he intended to say. 
 There was, of course, no reason why he should com- 
 municate privately with me. I am quite content to be 
 one of his public audience. 
 
 Count von Hertling's reply is, I must say, very 
 vague and very confusing. It is full of equivocal 
 phrases and leads it is not clear where. But it is cer- 
 tainly in a very different tone from that of Count 
 Czernin, and apparently of an opposite purpose. It 
 confirms, I am sorry to say, rather than removes, the 
 unfortunate impression made by what we had learned 
 of the conferences at Brest-Litovsk. His discussion 
 and acceptance of our general principles lead him to 
 no practical conclusions. He refuses to apply them 
 to the substantive items which must constitute the 
 body of any final settlement. He is jealous of inter- 
 national action and of international counsel. He ac- 
 cepts, he says, the principle of public diplomacy, but 
 he appears to insist that it be confined, at any rate 
 in this case, to generalities and that the several par- 
 ticular questions of territory and sovereignty, the 
 several questions upon whose settlement must depend 
 the acceptance of peace by the twenty-three states 
 now engaged in the war, must be discussed and set- 
 tled, not in general council, but severally by the na- 
 tions most immediately concerned by interest or neigh- 
 borhood. He agrees that the seas should be free, but 
 looks askance at any limitation to that freedom by 
 international action in the interest of the common 
 order. He would without reserve be glad to see eco- 
 nomic barriers removed between nation and nation, 
 for that could in no way impede the ambitions of the 
 military party with whom he seems constrained to 
 keep on terms. Neither does he raise objection to a 
 limitation of armaments. That matter will be settled 
 of itself, he thinks, by the economic conditions which 
 must follow the war. But the German colonies, he 
 demands, must be returned without debate. He will 
 discuss with no one but the representatives of Russia 
 what disposition shall be made of the people and the 
 lands of the Baltic provinces; with no one but the 
 Government of France the " conditions " under which 
 French territory shall be evacuated ; and only with 
 Austria what shall be done with Poland. In the de- 
 
 termination of all questions affecting the Balkan 
 states he defers, as I understand him, to Austria and 
 Turkey ; and with regard to the agreements to be en- 
 tered into concerning the non-Turkish peoples of the 
 present Ottoman Empire, to the Turkish authorities 
 themselves. After a settlement all around, effected 
 in this fashion, by individual barter and concession, he 
 would have no objection, if I correctly interpret his 
 statement, to a league of nations which would under- 
 take to hold the new- balance of power steady against 
 external disturbance. 
 
 It must be evident to everyone who understands 
 what this war has wrought in the opinion and temper 
 of the world that no general peace, no peace worth the 
 infinite sacrifices of these years of tragical suffering, 
 can possibly be arrived at in any such fashion. The 
 method the German Chancellor proposes is the method 
 of the Congress of Vienna. We cannot and will not 
 return to that. What is at stake now is the peace of 
 the world. What we are striving for is a new inter- 
 national order based upon broad and universal prin- 
 ciples of right and justice — no mere peace of shreds 
 and patches. Is it possible that Count von Hertling 
 does not see that, does not grasp it. is in fact living 
 in his thought in a world dead and gone ? Has he 
 utterly forgotten the Reichstag Resolutions of the 
 nineteenth of July, or does he deliberately ignore 
 them ? They spoke of the conditions of a general 
 peace, not of national aggrandizement or of arrange- 
 ments between state and state. The peace of the 
 world depends upon the just settlement of each of the 
 several problems to which I adverted in my recent 
 address to the Congress. I, of course, do not mean 
 that the peace of the world depends upon the accept- 
 ance of any particular set of suggestions as to the 
 way in which those problems are to be dealt with. I 
 mean only that those problems each and all affect the 
 whole world ; that unless they are dealt with in a 
 spirit of unselfish and unbiased justice, with a view 
 to the wishes, the natural connections, the racial as- 
 pirations, the security, and the peace of mind of the 
 peoples involved, no permanent peace will have been 
 attained. They cannot be discussed separately or in 
 corners. None of them constitutes a private or 
 separate interest from which the opinion of the world 
 may be shut out. Whatever affects the peace affects 
 mankind, and nothing settled by military force, if 
 settled wrong, is settled at all. It will presently 
 have to be reopened. 
 
 Is Count von Hertling not aware that he is speak- 
 ing in the court of mankind, that all the awakened na- 
 tions of the world now sit in judgment on what every 
 public man. of whatever nation, may say on the issues 
 of a conflict which has spread to every region of the 
 world? The Reichstag Resolutions of July them- 
 selves frankly accepted the decisions of that court. 
 There shall be no annexations, no contributions, no 
 punitive damages. Peoples are not to be handed 
 about from one sovereignty to another by an inter- 
 national conference or an understanding between 
 rivals and antagonists. National aspirations must be 
 
18 
 
 WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 
 
 respected; peoples may now be dominated and gov- 
 erned only by their own consent. " Self-determina- 
 tion " is not a mere phrase. It is an imperative prin- 
 ciple of action, which statesmen will henceforth ignore 
 at their peril. We cannot have general peace for the 
 asking, or by the mere arrangements of a peace con- 
 ference. It cannot be pieced together out of indi- 
 vidual understandings between powerful states. All 
 the parties to this war must join in the settlement of 
 every issue anywhere involved in it; because what we 
 are seeking is a peace that we can all unite to guar- 
 antee and maintain and every item of it must be sub- 
 mitted to the common judgment whether it be right 
 and fair, an act of justice, rather than a bargain be- 
 tween sovereigns. 
 
 The United States has no desire to interfere in Eu- 
 ropean affairs or to act as arbiter in European terri- 
 torial disputes. She would disdain to take advantage 
 of any internal weakness or disorder to impose her 
 own will upon another people. She is quite ready to 
 be shown that the settlements she has suggested are 
 not the best or the most enduring. They are only her 
 own provisional sketch of principles and of the way 
 in which they should be applied. But she entered 
 this war because she was made a partner, whether she 
 would or not, in the sufferings and indignities in- 
 flicted by the military masters of Germany, against 
 the peace and security of mankind; and the condi- 
 tions of peace will touch her as nearly as they will 
 touch any other nation to which is entrusted a leading 
 part in the maintenance of civilization. She cannot 
 see her way to peace until the causes of this war are 
 removed, its renewal rendered as nearly as may be im- 
 possible. 
 
 This war had its roots in the disregard of the rights 
 of small nations and of nationalities which lacked 
 the union and the force to make good their claim to 
 determine their own allegiances and their own forms 
 of political life. Covenants must now be entered into 
 which will render such things impossible for the 
 future; and those covenants must be backed by the 
 united force of all the nations that love justice and 
 are willing to maintain it at any cost. If territorial 
 settlements and the political relations of great popu- 
 lations which have not the organized power to resist 
 are to be determined by the contracts of the powerful 
 governments which consider themselves most directly 
 affected, as Count von Hertling proposes, why may 
 not economic questions also? It has come about in 
 the altered world in which we now find ourselves that 
 justice and the rights of peoples affect the whole field 
 of international dealing as much as access to raw 
 materials and fair and equal conditions of trade. 
 Count von Hertling wants the essential bases of com- 
 mercial and industrial life to be safeguarded by com- 
 mon agreement and guarantee, but he cannot expect 
 that to be conceded him if the other matters to be 
 determined by the articles on peace are not handled 
 in the same way as items in the final accounting. He 
 cannot ask the benefit of common agreement in the 
 one field without according it in the other. I take it 
 for granted that he sees that separate and selfish 
 
 compacts with regard to trade and the essential mate- 
 rials of manufacture would afford no foundation for 
 peace. Neither, he may rest assured, will separate 
 and selfish compacts with regard to provinces and 
 peoples. 
 
 Count Czernin seems to see the fundamental ele- 
 ments of peace with clear eyes and does not seek to 
 obscure them. He sees that an independent Poland, 
 made up of all the indisputably Polish peoples who 
 lie contiguous to one another, is a matter of European 
 concern and must of course be conceded; that Bel- 
 gium must be evacuated and restored, no matter what 
 sacrifices and concessions that may involve ; and that 
 national aspirations must be satisfied, even within his 
 own Empire, in the common interest of Europe and 
 mankind. If he is silent about questions which touch 
 the interest and purpose of his allies more nearly 
 than they touch those of Austria only, it must of 
 course be because he feels constrained, I suppose, to 
 defer to Germany and Turkey in the circumstances. 
 Seeing and conceding, as he does, the essential prin- 
 ciples involved and the necessity of candidly applying 
 them, he naturally feels that Austria can respond to 
 the purpose of peace as expressed by the United 
 States with less embarrassment than could Germany. 
 He would probably have gone much farther had it 
 not been for the embarrassments of Austria's alliances 
 and of her dependence upon Germany. 
 
 After all, the test of whether it is possible for either 
 government to go any further in this comparison of 
 views is simple and obvious. The principles to be 
 applied are these: 
 
 First, that each part of the final settlement must 
 be based upon the essential justice of that particular 
 case and upon such adjustments as are most likely to 
 bring a peace that will be permanent; 
 
 Second, that people and provinces are not to be 
 bartered about from sovereignty to sovereignty as if 
 they were mere chattels and pawns in a game, even 
 the great game, now forever discredited, of the bal- 
 ance of power ; but that 
 
 Third, every territorial settlement involved in this 
 war must be made in the interest and for the benefit 
 of the populations concerned, and not as a part of any 
 mere adjustment or compromise of claims amongst 
 rival states ; and 
 
 Fourth, that all well defined national aspirations 
 shall be accorded the utmost satisfaction that can be 
 accorded them without introducing new or perpetuat- 
 ing old elements of discord and antagonism that would 
 be likely in time to break the peace of Europe and 
 consequently of the world. 
 
 A general peace erected upon such foundations can 
 be discussed. Until such a peace can be secured we 
 have no choice but to go on. So far as we can judge, 
 these principles that we regard as fundamental are 
 already everywhere accepted as imperative except 
 among the spokesmen of the military and annexation- 
 ist party in Germany. If they have anywhere else 
 been rejected, the objectors have not been sufficiently 
 numerous or influential to make their voices audible. 
 
PRESIDENT WILSON'S WAR MESSAGES. 
 
 19 
 
 The tragical circumstance is that this one party in 
 Germany is apparently willing and able to send mil- 
 lions of men to their death to prevent what all the 
 world now sees to be just. 
 
 I would not be a true spokesman of the people of 
 the United States if I did not say once more that we 
 entered this war upon no small occasion, and that we 
 can never turn back from a course chosen upon princi- 
 ple. Our resources are in part mobilized now, and 
 we shall not pause until they are mobilized in their 
 entirety. Our armies are rapidly going to the fight- 
 ing front, and will go more and more rapidly. Our 
 whole strength will be put into this war of emancipa- 
 tion — emancipation from the threat and attempted 
 mastery of selfish groups of autocratic rulers — what- 
 ever the difficulties and present partial delays. We 
 are indomitable in our power of independent action 
 and can in no circumstances consent to live in a world 
 governed by intrigue and force. We believe that our 
 own desire for a new international order under which 
 reason and justice and the common interests of man- 
 kind shall prevail is the desire of enlightened men 
 everywhere. Without that new order the world 
 will be without peace and human life will lack tolera- 
 ble conditions of existence and development. Having 
 set our hand to the task of achieving it, we shall not 
 turn back. 
 
 I hope that it is not necessary for me to add that 
 no word of what I have said is intended as a threat. 
 That is not the temper of our people. I have spoken 
 thus only that the whole world may know the true 
 spirit of America — that men everywhere may know 
 that our passion for justice and for self-government 
 is no mere passion of words, but a passion which, once 
 set in action, must be satisfied. The power of the 
 United States is a menace to no nation or people. 
 It will never be used in aggression or for the aggrand- 
 izement of any selfish interest of our own. It springs 
 cut of freedom and is for the service of freedom. 
 
 Address Delivered at Baltimore on the Opening 
 
 of the Third Liberty Loan Campaign 
 
 April 6, 1918. 
 
 F elloxv-Ctthens : 
 
 This is the anniversary of our acceptance of Ger- 
 many's challenge to fight for our right to live and be 
 free, and for the sacred rights of free men every- 
 where. The nation is awake. There is no need to 
 call to it. We know what the war must cost, our ut- 
 most 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 con- 
 tempt 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 con- 
 ception 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 is- 
 sues that hang upon its outcome are more clearly dis- 
 closed 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 is 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. 
 
 I call you to witness, my fellow countrymen, that 
 at no stage of this terrible business have I judged the 
 purpose of Germany intemperately. I should be 
 ashamed in the presence of affairs so grave, so fraught 
 with the destinies of mankind throughout all the 
 world, to speak with truculence, to use the weak lan- 
 guage of hatred or vindicative purpose. 
 
 We must judge as we would be judged. I have 
 sought to learn the objects Germany has in this war 
 from the mouths of her own spokesmen and to deal as 
 frankly with them as I wished them to deal with me. 
 I have laid bare our own ideals, our own purposes, 
 without reserve or doubtful phrase, and have asked 
 them to say as plainly what it is that they seek. 
 
 Wc have ourselves proposed no injustice, no ag- 
 gression. We are ready, whenever the final reckon- 
 ing is made, to be just to the German people, deal 
 fairly with the German power as with others. There 
 can be no difference between peoples in the final judg- 
 ment if it is indeed to be a righteous judgment. To 
 propose anything but justice, even-handed and dispas- 
 sionate justice, to Germany at any time, whatever the 
 outcome of the war, would be to renounce and dishonor 
 our own cause. For we ask nothing that we are not 
 willing to accord. 
 
 It has been with this thought that I have sought 
 to learn from those who spoke for Germany whether 
 it was justice or dominion and the execution of their 
 own will upon the other nations of the world that the 
 German leaders were seeking. They have answered, 
 answered in unmistakable terms. They have avowed 
 that it was not justice, but dominion, and the unhin- 
 dered execution of their own will. 
 
 The avowal has not come from Germany's states- 
 men. It has come from her military leaders, who are 
 her real rulers. Her statesmen have said that they 
 wished peace, and were ready to discuss its terms 
 whenever their opponents were willing to sit down at 
 the conference table with them. Her present chan- 
 cellor has said — in indefinite and uncertain terms, in- 
 deed, and in phrases that often seem to deny their 
 own meaning, but with as much plainness as he 
 thought prudent — that he believed that peace should 
 be based upon the principles which we should declare 
 will be our own in the final settlement. 
 
20 
 
 WAR REPRINTS, NO. 6. 
 
 At Brest-Litovsk her civilian delegates spoke in 
 similar tones, professed their desire to conclude a fair 
 peace and accord to the peoples with whose fortunes 
 they were dealing the right to choose their own alle- 
 giance. 
 
 But action accompanied and followed the profes- 
 sion. 
 
 Their military masters, the men who act for Ger- 
 many and exhibit her purpose in execution, pro- 
 claimed a very different conclusion. We cannot mis- 
 take what they have done — in Russia, in Finland, in 
 the Ukraine, in Rumania. The real test of their jus- 
 tice and fair play has come. From this we may judge 
 the rest. 
 
 They are enjoying in Russia a cheap triumph in 
 which no brave or gallant nation can long take pride. 
 A great people, helpless by their own act, lies for the 
 time at their mercy. Their fair professions are for- 
 gotten. They do not here set up justice, but every- 
 where impose their power and exploit everything for 
 their own use and aggrandizement; and the peoples 
 of conquered provinces are invited to be freed under 
 their dominion. 
 
 Are we not justified in believing that they would do 
 the same things at their western front, if they were 
 not there face to face with armies whom even their 
 countless divisions cannot overcome? If, when they 
 have felt their check to be final, they should propose 
 favorable and equitable terms to Belgium and France 
 and Italy, could they blame us if we concluded that 
 they did so only to assure themselves of a free hand 
 in Russia and the east? 
 
 Their purpose is undoubtedly to make all the Slavic 
 peoples, all the free and ambitious nations of the Bal- 
 tic peninsula, all the lands that Turkey has domi- 
 nated and misruled, subject to their will and ambi- 
 tion, and build upon that dominion an empire of force, 
 upon which they fancy that they can then erect an 
 empire of gain and commercial supremacy; an empire 
 as hostile to the Americas as to the Europe which it 
 will overawe; an empire which will ultimately master 
 Persia, India and the peoples of the far east. 
 
 In such a program our ideals, the ideals of justice 
 and humanity and liberty, the principle of the free 
 self-determination of nations upon which all the mod- 
 ern world insists, can play no part. They are re- 
 jected for the ideals of power, for the principle that 
 the strong must rule the weak, that trade must follow 
 the flag, whether those to whom it is taken welcome 
 it or not ; that the peoples of the world are to be made 
 subject to the patronage and overlordship of those 
 who have the power to enforce it. 
 
 That program once carried out, America and all 
 who care or dare to stand with her must arm and 
 prepare themselves to contest the mastery of the 
 world, a mastery in which the rights of common men, 
 the rights of women and of all who are weak, must for 
 the time being be trodden under foot and disregarded, 
 and the old age-long struggle for freedom and right 
 begin again at its beginning. 
 
 Everything that America has lived for and loved 
 and grown great to vindicate and bring to a glorious 
 realization will have fallen in utter ruin and the gates 
 of mercy once more pitilessly shut upon mankind. 
 
 The thing is preposterous and impossible ; and yet 
 is not that the whole course and action the German 
 armies have meant wherever they have moved? I do 
 not wish, even in this moment of utter disillusion- 
 ment, to judge harshly or unrighteously. I judge 
 only what the German arms have accomplished with 
 unpitying thoroughness throughout every fair region 
 they have touched. 
 
 What, then, are we to do? For myself, I am ready, 
 ready still, ready even now, to discuss a fair and just 
 and honest peace at any time that is sincerely pur- 
 posed ; a peace in which the strong and the weak shall 
 fare alike. But the answer, when I proposed such a 
 peace, came from the German commanders in Russia, 
 and I cannot mistake the meaning of the answer. 
 
 I accept the challenge. I know that you will ac- 
 cept it. All the world shall know that you accept it. 
 It shall appear in the utter sacrifice and self-forget- 
 fulness with which we shall give all that we love and 
 all that we have to redeem the world and make it fit 
 for free men like ourselves to live in. 
 
 This now is the meaning of all that we do. Let 
 everything we say, my fellow-countrymen, every- 
 thing that we henceforth plan and accomplish, ring 
 true to this response till the majesty and might of 
 our power shall fill the thought, and utterly defeat the 
 force of those who flout and misprize what we honor 
 and hold dear. 
 
 Germany has once more said that force, and force 
 alone, shall decide whether justice and peace shall 
 reign in the affairs of men; whether right, as America 
 conceives it, or dominion, as she conceives it, shall 
 determine the destinies of mankind. 
 
 There is, therefore, but one response possible from 
 us : Force, force to the utmost, force without stint or 
 limit; the righteous and triumphant force which shall 
 make right the law of the world, and cast every selfish 
 dominion down in the dust. 
 
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