Theodore Roosevelt [134]
regions had to endure, for the dissolution of Russia, which threatened to throw down the bases of our civilization, and for the waste of incalculable treasure. President Wilson's apologists assert that the country was not ready for him to take any resolute attitude towards Germany in May, 1915. They argue that if he had attempted to do so there would have been great internal dissension, perhaps even civil war, and especially that the German sections would have opposed preparations for war so stubbornly as to have made them impossible. This is pure assumption. The truth is that whenever or wherever an appeal was made to American patriotism, it met with an immediate response. The sinking of the Lusitania created such a storm of horror and indignation that if the President had lifted a finger, the manhood of America, and the womanhood, too, would have risen to back him up. But instead of lifting a finger, he wrote that message to Germany, praising the Germans for their traditional respect for justice and humanity. And a long time had yet to pass before he made the least sign of encouragement to those Americans who would uphold the honor of the United States and would have this, the greatest of Republics, take its due part in defending Democracy against the Huns' attempt to wipe Democracy off the earth forever.
Having missed his opportunity then, Mr. Wilson could of course plead that the country was less and less inclined to go to war, because he furnished the pro-German plotters the very respite they had needed for carrying on their work. By unavowed ways they secured a strong support among the members of the National House of Representatives and the Senate. They disguised themselves as pacifists, and they found it easy to wheedle the "lunatic fringe" of native pacifists into working for the domination of William of Hohenzollern over the United States, and for the establishing of his world dominion. The Kaiser's propagandists spread evil arguments to justify all the Kaiser's crimes, and they found willing disciples even among the members of the Administration to repeat and uphold these arguments.
They told us, for instance, that their massacre served the victims of the Lusitania right for taking passage on a British steamship. They even wished to pass a law forbidding Americans from traveling on the ocean at all, because, by doing so, they might be blown up by the Germans, and that would involve this country in diplomatic difficulties with Germany. Next, the Germans protested against our selling munitions of war to the Allies. Neither custom nor international law forbade doing this, and the protest stood out in :stark impudence when it came from Germany, the country which, for fifty years and more, had sold munitions to every one who asked and had not hesitated to sell impartially to both antagonists in the Russo-Japanese War. By playing on the sentimentality of this same "lunatic fringe," the German intriguers almost succeeded in driving through a bill to stop this traffic. They knew the true Prussian way of whimpering when bullying did not avail them. And so they not only whimpered about our sending shells over to kill- the German soldiers, but they whimpered also over the dire effects which the Allied blockade produced upon the non-combatant population of Germany. These things went on, not only a whole year, but far into the second after the sinking of the Lusitania. Roosevelt never desisted from charging that the person ultimately responsible for them was President Wilson, and he believed that the President's apparent self-satisfaction would avail him little when he stands at the bar of History.
It may be that an entire people may lose for a time its sense of logic. We have just had the most awful proof that, through a long-continued and deliberate education for that purpose, the German people lost its moral sense and set up diabolical standards in place of those common to all civilized races. We know that religious hysteria has at different times, like the influenza, swept over a nation, or that a society has
Having missed his opportunity then, Mr. Wilson could of course plead that the country was less and less inclined to go to war, because he furnished the pro-German plotters the very respite they had needed for carrying on their work. By unavowed ways they secured a strong support among the members of the National House of Representatives and the Senate. They disguised themselves as pacifists, and they found it easy to wheedle the "lunatic fringe" of native pacifists into working for the domination of William of Hohenzollern over the United States, and for the establishing of his world dominion. The Kaiser's propagandists spread evil arguments to justify all the Kaiser's crimes, and they found willing disciples even among the members of the Administration to repeat and uphold these arguments.
They told us, for instance, that their massacre served the victims of the Lusitania right for taking passage on a British steamship. They even wished to pass a law forbidding Americans from traveling on the ocean at all, because, by doing so, they might be blown up by the Germans, and that would involve this country in diplomatic difficulties with Germany. Next, the Germans protested against our selling munitions of war to the Allies. Neither custom nor international law forbade doing this, and the protest stood out in :stark impudence when it came from Germany, the country which, for fifty years and more, had sold munitions to every one who asked and had not hesitated to sell impartially to both antagonists in the Russo-Japanese War. By playing on the sentimentality of this same "lunatic fringe," the German intriguers almost succeeded in driving through a bill to stop this traffic. They knew the true Prussian way of whimpering when bullying did not avail them. And so they not only whimpered about our sending shells over to kill- the German soldiers, but they whimpered also over the dire effects which the Allied blockade produced upon the non-combatant population of Germany. These things went on, not only a whole year, but far into the second after the sinking of the Lusitania. Roosevelt never desisted from charging that the person ultimately responsible for them was President Wilson, and he believed that the President's apparent self-satisfaction would avail him little when he stands at the bar of History.
It may be that an entire people may lose for a time its sense of logic. We have just had the most awful proof that, through a long-continued and deliberate education for that purpose, the German people lost its moral sense and set up diabolical standards in place of those common to all civilized races. We know that religious hysteria has at different times, like the influenza, swept over a nation, or that a society has