efend 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 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 once to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is virtually
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 not common wrongs; they cut to the very
roots of human life.

A CONSTITUTIONAL DUTY.

"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
co-operation 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 credits, 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 resou