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
defence of rights which no modern publicist has ever before 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 to produce what it was meant to prevent; it is practically
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.

"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 defence, 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 organisation and mobilisation of all the material
resources of the country to supply the materials of war and serve the
incidental needs of the nation in the most abundant and yet the most
economical and efficient way possible.

"It will involve the immediate full equipment of the navy in all
respects, but particularly in supplying it with the