signing the Rural Credits Bill, July 17, 1916._

[Illustration: (C) _Paul Thompson_
1918: The President acknowledging greetings at a
military review]

Meanwhile secret agents had discovered an attempt by the German Foreign
Office to enlist Mexican and Japanese support in the prospective war
against America by promising annexations in the Southwest and on the
Pacific Coast. Publication of this on March 1 converted a good many
Americans of the interior who had hitherto been slow to recognize the
seriousness of the German danger; and as the submarine campaign
continued and no European neutrals followed the American example, the
sentiment in favor of declaration of war grew every day.

But for the President this involved considerable logical difficulty.
From the first he had striven to maintain "impartiality of thought," or
at least of speech. He had said that the war was no concern of
America's; it would be the task of long historical research to assign
the responsibility for its outbreak; that "with its causes and objects
we are not concerned. The obscure foundations from which its tremendous
flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for and explore."
It was a war which should be ended by a peace without a victory.
Whatever meaning the President attached to these statements when he
made them, the meaning attached to them by the public was a serious
obstacle to the man who was going to have to lead the nation into war.
But he solved the dilemma by a change of base which affected the whole
political complexion of the war thereafter, which introduced a new and
overriding issue--an issue which, addressing Congress on April 2, he
introduced to the world in his most famous phrase and the most
effective of his speeches. America, he said, had no quarrel with the
German people; that people had not made the war. But the Germans were
ruled by an autocratic Government which had made neutrality impossible,
which had shown itself "the natural foe of liberty." That Government
had forced America to take up the sword for the freedom of peoples--of
all peoples, even of the German people. America must fight "to make the
world safe for democracy." On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war.

_America at War, 1917-1918_

Once committed to war, the President found behind him a nation more
thoroughly united than could ever have been hoped in the dark days of
1915. Again, as in the week after the