now if we had tried to go to war under the volunteer system? This
question once solved, our President led us with a breadth of
vision, an efficiency, and on a scale commensurate with the size
of the undertaking in which we at last had become partners.

Perhaps we are a little over indulgent, however, in the treatment
of the German enemy alien within our gates. No American singer or
musician could travel about Germany at will, unwatched by the
police, collecting money from Americans to be used in propaganda,
or things much worse, against America. Americans in Germany are
compelled to report twice daily to the police and cannot leave
their homes at night. November 17, 1917--seven months after we
went to war with Germany--I met Hugo Schmidt, a director of the
Deutsche Bank, riding in Central Park. He lived at the German
Club, saw whom he liked and only reported to the police when he
changed his residence. In January 1918, he was finally interned.

Long before our break with Germany, American consuls and
officials were insulted in the street and in opera houses because
they made use of their own language, not at all because they were
taken for British for every one knew that all British had been
interned.

The wife of our naval attache attended a reception presided over
by a German admiral's wife. She was presented to this high
personage by the wife of a German naval officer, who, in making
the presentation, spoke in English. The admiral's wife rebuked
both the wife of our attache and the officer's wife for daring to
talk English. I am thankful to say that Mrs. Gherardi immediately
left the house to receive later the officially ordered apologies
of the admiral's wife.

And while Americans did not dare use their own language in Berlin
in time of peace between the two countries yet after the outbreak
of war, newspapers in the United States, printed in German, owned
by Germans and German sympathisers, dared to attack America and
her President.

The autocracy always hope to divide us, to make of us a Russia,
torn by Maximalists and Minimalists, by Militarists and
Bolsheviki and, consequently, impotent for war.

In travelling through the United States in August and September
of 1917, although I was on private business, I made speeches in
many cities, such as Minneapolis, and Helena, Billings, Butte and
Missoula in Montana, Spokane, Seattle and Tacoma in Washington,
Portland, Oregon, San Francisco and surrounding country