ut warning and without thought of help or mercy for
those on board, the vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of
belligerents. Even hospital ships and ships carrying relief to the
sorely bereaved and stricken people of Belgium, though the latter were
provided with safe conduct through the proscribed areas by the German
Government itself and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of
identity, have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or
of principle.

"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."

Here the President referred to the short-lived expedient of armed
neutrality adopted to meet the challenge:

"When I addressed the Congress on the 26th 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.

"The German Government denies the right of neutrals to use arms at all
within the areas of the sea which it has proscribed, even in the
defense of rights which no modern publicist has ever before questioned
their right to defend. The intimation is conveyed that the armed
guards which we have placed on our merchant ships will be treated as
beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt with as pirates would
be. Armed neutrality is ineffectual enough at best; in such
circumstances and in the face of such pretensions it is worse than
ineffectual; it is likely only to produce what it was meant to
prevent; it is practically certain to draw us into the war without
either the rights or the effectiveness of belligerents. There is one
choice we cannot make, we are incapable of making; we will not choose
the path of submission--"

The President's audience had listened in silence up to this point.
There was more of the sentence; but Congress did not wait to hear it.
At the word "submission," Chief Justice White of the Supreme Court
raised his hands in a resounding clap, which was the signal for a
deafening roar of approval alike from congressmen, senators,