address before the
Home Club of the Department on June 4, 1917, just when America was
beginning to send forces to Europe, said:

"America is at war in self-defense and because she could not keep out;
she is at war to save herself with the rest of the world from the nation
that has linked itself with the Turk and adopted the methods of Mahomet,
setting itself to make the world bow before policies backed by the
organized and scientific military system.

"Why are we fighting Germany? The brief answer is that ours is a war of
self-defense. We did not wish to fight Germany. She made the attack upon
us; not on our shores, but on our ships, our lives, our rights, our
future. For two years and more we held to a neutrality that made us
apologists for things which outraged man's common sense of fair play and
humanity.

"At each new offense--the invasion of Belgium, the killing of civilian
Belgians, the attacks on Scarborough and other defenseless towns, the
laying of mines in neutral waters, the fencing off of the seas--and on
and on through the months, we said:

"'This is war--archaic, uncivilized war, but war. All rules have been
thrown away; all nobility; man has come down to the primitive brute. And
while we cannot justify, we cannot intervene. It is not our war.'

IN WAR TO DEFEND RIGHTS.

"Then why are we in? Because we could not keep out. The invasion of
Belgium, which opened the war, led to the invasion of the United States
by slow, steady, logical steps. Our sympathies evolved into a conviction
of self-interest. Our love of fair play ripened into alarm at our own
peril.

"We talked in the language and in the spirit of good faith and
sincerity, as honest men should talk, until we discovered that our talk
was construed as cowardice. And Mexico was called upon to cow us.

"We talked as men would talk who cared alone for peace and the
advancement of their own material interests, until we discovered that we
were thought to be a nation of mere moneymakers, devoid of all
character--until, indeed, we were told that we could not walk the
highways of the world without permission of a Prussian soldier, that our
ships might not sail without wearing a striped uniform of humiliation
upon a narrow path of national subservience.

"We talked as men talk who hope for honest agreement, not for war, until
we found that the treaty torn to pieces at Liege was but the symbol of a
policy that made agreements worthless against a pur