ands, it
may be millions, of our men, the young, the
strong, the capable men of the nation, to go forth
and die beneath it on fields of blood far
away--for what? For some unaccustomed thing? For
something for which it has never sought the fire
before? American armies were never before sent
across the seas. Why are they sent now? For some
new purpose, for which this great flag has never
been carried before, or for some old, familiar,
heroic purpose for which it has seen men, its own
men, die on every battlefield upon which Americans
have borne arms since the Revolution?

These are questions which must be answered. We are
Americans. We in our turn serve America, and can
serve her with no private purpose. We must use her
flag as she has always used it. We are accountable
at the bar of history and must plead in utter
frankness what purpose it is we seek to serve.

FORCED INTO WAR

It is plain enough how we were forced into the
war. The extraordinary insults and aggressions of
the Imperial German Government left us no
self-respecting choice but to take up arms in
defense of our rights as a free people and of our
honor as a sovereign Government. The military
masters of Germany denied us the right to be
neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities
with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to
corrupt the opinion of our people in their own
behalf. When they found that they could not do
that, their agents diligently spread sedition
among us and sought to draw our own citizens from
their allegiance--and some of those agents were
men connected with the official embassy of the
German Government itself here in our own capital.
They sought by violence to destroy our industries
and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite
Mexico to take up arms against us and to draw
Japan into a hostile alliance with her--and that,
not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from
the Foreign Office in Berlin. They impudently
denied us the use of the high seas and repeatedly
executed their threat that they w