o freshen the color of that flag; but
if it should ever be necessary again to assert the majesty and integrity
of those ancient and honorable principles, that flag will be colored
once more, and in being colored will be glorified and purified.

THE SUBMARINE QUESTION

[Address delivered at a joint session of the two Houses of Congress,
April 19, 1916.]

GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS:

A situation has arisen in the foreign relations of the country of which
it is my plain duty to inform you very frankly.

It will be recalled that in February, 1915, the Imperial German
Government announced its intention to treat the waters surrounding Great
Britain and Ireland as embraced within the seat of war and to destroy
all merchant ships owned by its enemies that might be found within any
part of that portion of the high seas, and that it warned all vessels,
of neutral as well as of belligerent ownership, to keep out of the
waters it had thus proscribed or else enter them at their peril. The
Government of the United States earnestly protested. It took the
position that such a policy could not be pursued without the practical
certainty of gross and palpable violations of the law of nations,
particularly if submarine craft were to be employed as its instruments,
inasmuch as the rules prescribed by that law, rules founded upon
principles of humanity and established for the protection of the lives
of non-combatants at sea, could not in the nature of the case be
observed by such vessels. It based its protest on the ground that
persons of neutral nationality and vessels of neutral ownership would be
exposed to extreme and intolerable risks, and that no right to close any
part of the high seas against their use or to expose them to such risks
could lawfully be asserted by any belligerent government. The law of
nations in these matters, upon which the Government of the United States
based its protest, is not of recent origin or founded upon merely
arbitrary principles set up by convention. It is based, on the contrary,
upon manifest and imperative principles of humanity and has long been
established with the approval and by the express assent of all civilized
nations.

Notwithstanding the earnest protest of our Government, the Imperial
German Government at once proceeded to carry out the policy it had
announced. It expressed the hope that the dangers involved, at any rate
the dangers to neutral vessels, would be reduced to a mini