orn up on the ground of military
necessity, evidence of the adoption by Germany of a retrograde policy of
the most alarming sort. That single act on the part of Germany--the
violation of the neutral territory of Belgium--would have determined
American opinion in favor of the Allies, if it had stood alone by
itself--the reason being that American hopes for the peace and order of
the world are based on the sanctity of treaties.

(g) American public opinion, however, has been greatly shocked in other
ways by the German conduct of the war. The American common people see no
justification for the dropping of bombs, to which no specific aim can be
given, into cities and towns chiefly inhabited by non-combatants, the
burning or blowing up of large portions of unfortified towns and cities,
the destruction of precious monuments and treasuries of art, the
strewing of floating mines through the North Sea, the exacting of
ransoms from cities and towns under threat of destroying them, and the
holding of unarmed citizens as hostages for the peaceable behavior of a
large population under threat of summary execution of the hostages in
case of any disorder. All these seem to Americans unnecessary,
inexpedient, and unjustifiable methods of warfare, sure to breed hatred
and contempt toward the nation that uses them, and therefore to make it
difficult for future generations to maintain peace and order in Europe.
They cannot help imagining the losses civilization would suffer if the
Russians should ever carry into Western Europe the kind of war which the
Germans are now waging in Belgium and France. They have supposed that
war was to be waged in this century only against public, armed forces
and their supplies and shelters.

These opinions and prepossessions on the part of the American people
have obviously grown out of the ideals which the early English colonists
carried with them to the American wilderness in the seventeenth century,
out of the long fighting and public discussion which preceded the
adoption of the Constitution of the United States in the eighteenth
century, and out of the peculiar experiences of the free Commonwealths
which make up the United States, as they have spread across the almost
uninhabited continent during the past 125 years.

The experience and the situation of modern Germany have been utterly
different. Germany was divided for centuries into discordant parts, had
ambitious and martial neighbors, and often fel