stage has that law been built up, with meager
enough results, indeed, after all was accomplished that could be
accomplished, but always with a clear view, at least, of what the heart
and conscience of mankind demanded.

SWEEPS RIGHT ASIDE.

"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 those 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 this is, but only of the wanton and wholesale destruction 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 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 human right, of which we are only a
single champion.

ARMED NEUTRALITY IMPRACTICABLE.

"When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth of February last I
thought 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 d