nt they interfere or conflict with the most advantageous
immediate use of our military and naval force." If this doctrine shall
now prevail in Europe, the foundations of modern civilization and of all
friendly and beneficial commerce the world over will be undermined.

The sinking of the Lusitania, therefore, makes perfectly clear the
nature of the problem with which the three Allies in Europe are now
struggling. They are resisting with all the weapons of war a nation
which declares that its promises are good only till it is, in its own
judgment, under the military necessity of breaking them.

The neutral nations are looking on at this tremendous conflict between
good-faith nations and no-faith nations with intense anxiety and sorrow,
but no longer in any doubt as to the nature of the issue. The sinking of
the Lusitania has removed every doubt; because that was a deliberate act
in full sight of the world, and of a nature not to be obscured or
confused by conflicting testimonies or questions about possible
exaggeration of outrages or about official responsibility for them. The
sinking of the Lusitania was an act which outraged not only the existing
conventions of the civilized world in regard to naval warfare, but the
moral feelings of present civilized society.

The neutral nations and some of the belligerent nations feel another
strong objection to the present German way of conducting war on land and
sea, namely that it brutalizes the soldier and the sailor to an
unprecedented degree. English French, and Russian soldiers on the one
side can contend with German, Austrian and Turkish soldiers on the other
with the utmost fierceness from trenches or in the open, use new and old
weapons of destruction, and kill and wound each other with equal ardor
and resolution, and yet not be brutalized or degraded in their moral
nature, if they fight from love of country or with self-sacrificing
loyalty to its spiritual ideals; but neither soldiers nor sailors can
attack defenseless noncombatants, systematically destroy towns and
villages, and put to death captured men, women, and children without
falling in their moral nature before the brutes. That he obeyed orders
will not save from moral ruin the soldier or sailor who does such deeds.
He should have refused to obey such orders and taken the consequences.
This is true even of the privates, but more emphatically of the
officers. The white race has often been proud of the way in whic