strength the forces of justice and liberalism are gathering out
of this war. They are employing Liberals in their enterprises. Let them
once succeed, and these men, now their tools, will be ground to powder
beneath the weight of the great military Empire; the Revolutionists of
Russia will be cut off from all succour and the cooeperation of Western
Europe, and a counter-revolution will be fostered and supported; Germany
herself will lose her chance of freedom, and all Europe will arm for the
next final struggle.

The sinister intrigue is being no less actively conducted in this
country than in Russia and in every country of Europe into which the
agents and dupes of the Imperial German Government can get access. That
Government has many spokesmen here, in places both high and low. They
have learned discretion; they keep within the law. It is opinion they
utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their
masters, and they declare that this is a foreign war, which can touch
America with no danger either to her lands or institutions. They set
England at the center of the stage, and talk of her ambition to assert
her economic dominion throughout the world. They appeal to our ancient
tradition of isolation, and seek to undermine the Government with false
professions of loyalty to its principles.

But they will make no headway. Falsehood betrays them in every accent.
These facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere more plainly than
in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts, not
sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is
that this is a peoples' war for freedom, justice and self-government
among all the nations of the world, a war to make the world safe for the
peoples who live upon it, the German people included, and that with us
rests the choice to break through all these hypocrisies, the patent
cheats and masks of brute force, and help set the world free, or else
stand aside and let it be dominated through sheer weight of arms and the
arbitrary choices of the self-constituted masters by the nation which
can maintain the biggest armies, the most irresistible armaments, a
power to which the world has afforded no parallel, in the face of which
political freedom must wither and perish.

For us there was but one choice. We have made it, and woe be to that
man, or that group of men, that seeks to stand in our way in this day of
high resolution, when every p