Congress on the
26th of February to ask authority to arm merchant vessels for purposes of
defense. Again he stressed his unwillingness to enter upon formal warfare
and emphasized the idealistic aspect of the issue: "It is not of material
interests merely that we are thinking. It is, rather, of fundamental
human rights, chief of all the right of life itself. I am thinking not
only of the rights of Americans to go and come about their proper
business by way of the sea, but also of something much deeper, much more
fundamental than that. I am thinking of those rights of humanity without
which there is no civilization.... I cannot imagine any man with American
principles at his heart hesitating to defend these things."

Blinded by prejudice and tradition, a handful of Senators, twelve
"willful men," as Wilson described them, blocked, through a filibuster,
the resolution granting the power requested by the President. But the
storm of popular obloquy which covered them proved that the nation as a
whole was determined to support him in the defense of American rights.
The country was stirred to the depths. The publication of the plans of
Germany for involving the United States in war with Mexico and Japan came
merely as added stimulus. So also of the story of the cruelties heaped by
the Germans on the American prisoners of the _Yarrowdale_. There was so
much of justice in the cause that passion was notable by its absence.
When finally on the 17th of March news came of the torpedoing of the
_Vigilancia_ without warning, America was prepared and calmly eager for
the President's demand that Congress recognize the existence of a state
of war.

The demand was made by Wilson in an extraordinary joint session of
Congress, held on the 2d of April. In this, possibly his greatest speech,
he was careful not to blur the idealistic principles which, since the
spring of 1916, he had been formulating. War existed because Germany by
its actions had thrust upon the United States the status of belligerent.
But the American people must meet the challenge with their purpose
clearly before them. "We must put excited feeling away. Our motive will
not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the
nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we
are only a single champion.... The wrongs against which we now array
ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the very roots of human
life." He went on to define