ditors and
publishers everywhere will give as prominent publication and as wide
circulation as possible to this appeal. I venture to suggest, also, to
all advertising agencies that they would perhaps render a very
substantial and timely service to the country if they would give it
widespread repetition. And I hope that clergymen will not think the
theme of it an unworthy or inappropriate subject of comment and homily
from their pulpits.

The supreme test of the nation has come. We must all speak, act, and
serve together!

WOODROW WILSON.

THE GERMAN PLOT

[Speech in Washington Monument Grounds, June 14, 1917.]

We know now clearly, as we knew before we ourselves were engaged in the
War, that we are not enemies of the German people, and they are not our
enemies. They did not originate, or desire, this hideous war, or wish
that we should be drawn into it, and we are vaguely conscious that we
are fighting their cause, as they will some day see it themselves, as
well as our own. They themselves are in the grip of the same sinister
power that has stretched its ugly talons out and drawn blood from us.

The War was begun by the military masters of Germany, who have proved
themselves to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men never
regarded nations as peoples of men, women, and children of like blood
and frame as themselves, for whom Governments existed and in whom
Governments had their life. They regarded them merely as serviceable
organizations, which they could, either by force or intrigue, bend or
corrupt to their own purpose. They regarded the smaller States,
particularly, and those peoples, who could be overwhelmed by force, as
their natural tools and instruments of domination.

Their purpose had long been avowed. The statesmen of other nations, to
whom that purpose was incredible, paid little attention, and regarded
what the German professors expounded in their class-rooms and the German
writers set forth to the world as the goal of German policy as rather
the dream of minds detached from practical affairs and the preposterous
private conceptions of Germany's destiny than the actual plans of
responsible rulers. But the rulers of Germany knew all the while what
concrete plans, what well-advanced intrigue, lay at the back of what
professors and writers were saying, and were glad to go forward
unmolested, filling the thrones of the Balkan States with German
princes, putting German officers at the