. This
minimum of right the German Government has swept aside under the plea of
retaliation and necessity and because it had no weapons which it could
use at sea except these which it is impossible to employ as it is
employing them without throwing to the winds all scruples of humanity or
of respect for the understandings that were supposed to underlie the
intercourse of the world. I am not now thinking of the loss of property
involved, immense and serious as that is, but only of the wanton and
wholesale destruction of the lives of noncombatants, men, women, and
children, engaged in pursuits which have always, even in the darkest
periods of modern history, been deemed innocent and legitimate. Property
can be paid for; the lives of peaceful and innocent people can not be.
The present German submarine warfare against commerce is a warfare
against mankind.

It is a war against all nations: American ships have been sunk, American
lives taken, in ways which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of,
but the ships and people of other neutral and friendly nations have been
sunk and overwhelmed in the waters in the same way. There has been no
discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide
for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be
made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment
befitting our character and our motives as a nation. 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.

When I addressed the Congress on the twenty-sixth of February last I
thought that it would suffice to assert our neutral rights with arms,
our right to use the seas against unlawful interference, our right to
keep our people safe against unlawful violence. But armed neutrality, it
now appears, is impracticable. Because submarines are in effect outlaws
when used as the German submarines have been used against merchant
shipping, it is impossible to defend ships against their attacks as the
law of nations has assumed that merchantmen would defend themselves
against privateers or cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the open
sea. It is common prudence in such circumstances, grim necessity indeed,
to endeavor to destroy them before they have shown their own intention.
They must be dealt with upon sight, if dea