t Britain had armed all
merchant vessels of British ownership and had given them secret orders
to attack any submarine of the enemy they might encounter upon the seas,
and that the Imperial German Government felt justified in the
circumstances in treating all armed merchantmen of belligerent ownership
as auxiliary vessels of war, which it would have the right to destroy
without warning. The law of nations has long recognized the right of
merchantmen to carry arms for protection and to use them to repel
attack, though to use them, in such circumstances, at their own risk;
but the Imperial German Government claimed the right to set these
understandings aside in circumstances which it deemed extraordinary.
Even the terms in which it announced its purpose thus still further to
relax the restraints it had previously professed its willingness and
desire to put upon the operations of its submarines carried the plain
implication that at least vessels which were not armed would still be
exempt from destruction without warning and that personal safety would
be accorded their passengers and crews; but even that limitation, if it
was ever practicable to observe it, has in fact constituted no check at
all upon the destruction of ships of every sort.

Again and again the Imperial German Government has given this Government
its solemn assurances that at least passenger ships would not be thus
dealt with, and yet it has again and again permitted its undersea
commanders to disregard those assurances with entire impunity. Great
liners like the _Lusitania_ and the _Arabic_ and mere ferryboats like
the _Sussex_ have been attacked without a moment's warning, sometimes
before they had even become aware that they were in the presence of an
armed vessel of the enemy, and the lives of non-combatants, passengers
and crew, have been sacrificed wholesale, in a manner which the
Government of the United States cannot but regard as wanton and without
the slightest color of justification. No limit of any kind has in fact
been set to the indiscriminate pursuit and destruction of merchantmen of
all kinds and nationalities within the waters, constantly extending in
area, where these operations have been carried on; and the roll of
Americans who have lost their lives on ships thus attacked and destroyed
has grown month by month until the ominous toll has mounted into the
hundreds.

One of the latest and most shocking instances of this method of warfare