n and may
yet turn out to be. I am sorry to say that the gravest threats
against our national peace and safety have been uttered within our
own borders. There are citizens of the United States, I blush to
admit, born under other flags, but welcomed by under our generous
naturalization laws to the full freedom and opportunity of America,
who have poured the poison of disloyalty into the very arteries of
our national life; who have sought to bring the authority and good
name of our Government into contempt, to destroy our industries
wherever they thought it effective for their vindictive purposes to
strike at them, and to debase our politics to the uses of foreign
intrigue. Their number is not great as compared with the whole
number of those sturdy hosts by which our nation has been enriched
in recent generations out of virile foreign stocks; but it is great
enough to have brought deep disgrace upon us and to have made it
necessary that we should promptly make use of processes of law
by which we may be purged of their corrupt distempers.

"But the ugly and incredible thing has actually come about and we
are without adequate federal laws to deal with it. I urge you to
enact such laws at the earliest possible moment, and feel that in
doing so I am urging you to do nothing less than save the honor and
self-respect of the nation. Such creatures of passion, disloyalty
and anarchy must be crushed out. They are not many, but they are
infinitely malignant, and the hand of our power should close over
them at once. They have formed plots to destroy property, they have
entered into conspiracies against the neutrality of the Government,
they have sought to pry into every confidential transaction of the
Government in order to serve interests alien to our own. It is
possible to deal with these things very effectually. I need not
suggest the terms in which they may be dealt with."

The message, up to a point, maintained an impartial attitude, for it
not only blamed the German-Americans but continued in the following
words, aimed solely at the many Americans in London and Paris who
disapproved of Wilson's policy of peace and neutrality:

"I wish that it could be said that only a few men, misled by mistaken
sentiments of allegiance to the governments under which they were
born, had been guilty of disturbing the self-possession and
misrepresenting the temper and principles of the country during
these days of terrible war, when it w