Theodore Roosevelt [131]
years, Roosevelt had been a contributing editor of the Outlook, and although his first instinct, when the Germans ravished Belgium, was to protest and then, if necessary, to follow up our protest by a show of force, he wrote in the Outlook an approval of our taking immediately a neutral attitude. Still, he did not let this preclude stern action later. " Neutrality," he said, "may be of prime necessity to maintain peace . . . but we pay the penalty of this action on behalf of peace for ourselves, and possibly for others in the future, by forfeiting our right to do anything on behalf of peace for the Belgians at present." Three years afterwards these sentences of his were unearthed by his enemies and flung against him; but his dominant purpose, from the start, was too well known for any one to accuse him of inconsistency. He assumed, when President Wilson issued his impartial "even in thought" message, that the President must have some secret diplomatic information which would vindicate it.
As the months went on, however, it became clear to him that Mr. Wilson was pursuing towards the European War the same policy of contradictions, of brief paroxysms of boldness, followed by long periods of lassitude, which had marked his conduct of our relations towards the Mexican bandits. He saw only too well, also, into what ignoble depths this policy led us. Magnificent France, throttled Belgium, England willing but not yet ready, devastated Serbia, looked to us for sympathy and help, and all the sympathy they got came from private persons in America, and of help there was none. Meanwhile, the Germans undermined and gangrened the American people. Every ship brought over their slyest and most unscrupulous propagandists, who cooperated with the despicable German professors and other agents already planted here, and opened the sewers of their doctrines. Their spies began to go up and down the land, without check. Count Bernstorff, the German Ambassador, assumed to play with the Administration at Washington as a cat might play with half a score of mice, feeling sure that he could devour them when he chose. A European gentleman, who came from a neutral country, and called on Bernstorff in April, 1915, told me that when he asked the Ambassador how he got on with the United States, he replied: "Very well, indeed; we pay no attention to the Government, but go ahead and do what we please." Within a fortnight the sinking of the Lusitania showed that Bernstorff had not boasted idly.
Roosevelt understood the harm which the German conspiracy was doing among our people, not only by polluting their ideals, but actually strengthening the coils which the propagandists had been winding, to strangle at the favorable moment American independence itself. We discovered then that the process of Germanization had been going on secretly during twenty years. Since England was the chief enemy in the way of German world domination, the German-Americans laid themselves out to render the English odious here. And they worked to such good purpose that the legal officers of the Administration admonished the American people that the English, in holding up merchant vessels laden with cargoes for Germany, committed breaches against international law which were quite as heinous as the sinking by German submarines of ships laden with American non-combatants. They magnified the loss of a cargo of perishable food and set it against the ferocious destruction of neutral human beings. Senator Lodge, however, expressed the clear thought and right feeling of Americans when he said that we were more moved by the thought of the corpse of an innocent victim of the Hun submarines than by that of a bale of cotton.
These enormities, these sins of omission and commission, of which Roosevelt declared our Government guilty, amazed and exasperated him, and from the beginning of 1915 onward, he set himself three tasks. He wished to expose and circumvent German machinations over here. Next, he deemed it a pressing duty to rouse our country to the recognition that we must prepare at
As the months went on, however, it became clear to him that Mr. Wilson was pursuing towards the European War the same policy of contradictions, of brief paroxysms of boldness, followed by long periods of lassitude, which had marked his conduct of our relations towards the Mexican bandits. He saw only too well, also, into what ignoble depths this policy led us. Magnificent France, throttled Belgium, England willing but not yet ready, devastated Serbia, looked to us for sympathy and help, and all the sympathy they got came from private persons in America, and of help there was none. Meanwhile, the Germans undermined and gangrened the American people. Every ship brought over their slyest and most unscrupulous propagandists, who cooperated with the despicable German professors and other agents already planted here, and opened the sewers of their doctrines. Their spies began to go up and down the land, without check. Count Bernstorff, the German Ambassador, assumed to play with the Administration at Washington as a cat might play with half a score of mice, feeling sure that he could devour them when he chose. A European gentleman, who came from a neutral country, and called on Bernstorff in April, 1915, told me that when he asked the Ambassador how he got on with the United States, he replied: "Very well, indeed; we pay no attention to the Government, but go ahead and do what we please." Within a fortnight the sinking of the Lusitania showed that Bernstorff had not boasted idly.
Roosevelt understood the harm which the German conspiracy was doing among our people, not only by polluting their ideals, but actually strengthening the coils which the propagandists had been winding, to strangle at the favorable moment American independence itself. We discovered then that the process of Germanization had been going on secretly during twenty years. Since England was the chief enemy in the way of German world domination, the German-Americans laid themselves out to render the English odious here. And they worked to such good purpose that the legal officers of the Administration admonished the American people that the English, in holding up merchant vessels laden with cargoes for Germany, committed breaches against international law which were quite as heinous as the sinking by German submarines of ships laden with American non-combatants. They magnified the loss of a cargo of perishable food and set it against the ferocious destruction of neutral human beings. Senator Lodge, however, expressed the clear thought and right feeling of Americans when he said that we were more moved by the thought of the corpse of an innocent victim of the Hun submarines than by that of a bale of cotton.
These enormities, these sins of omission and commission, of which Roosevelt declared our Government guilty, amazed and exasperated him, and from the beginning of 1915 onward, he set himself three tasks. He wished to expose and circumvent German machinations over here. Next, he deemed it a pressing duty to rouse our country to the recognition that we must prepare at