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