alaba_, _Gulflight_, _Sussex_,
_California_--the names were etched in his brain in letters of grief.
And now, since the "barred-zone" decree ...

He straightened in his chair. Like a garment the mood of anguish slipped
from him. He snapped on the green desk light and turned to his personal
typewriter. As he did so, from some old student day a phrase flashed
into his mind--the words of Martin Luther, the Thuringian peasant and
university professor, who four hundred years before had nailed his
theses on the church door at Wittenberg:

"_Gott helfe mir, ich kann nicht anders_."

They chimed a solemn refrain in his heart as he inserted a fresh sheet
of paper behind the roller and resumed his writing....

"_With a profound sense of the solemn and even tragical character of the
step I am taking and of the grave responsibilities which it
involves_.... _I advise that the Congress declare the recent course of
the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war
against the Government and people of the United States_...."

The typewriter clicked industriously. The face bent intently over the
keys was grave and quiet, but as the paper unrolled before him some of
his sadness seemed to pass away. A vision of his country, no longer
divided in petty schisms, engrossed in material pursuits, but massed in
one by the force and fury of a valiant ideal, came into his mind.

"It is for humanity," he whispered to himself. "_Ich kann nicht
anders_...."

"_We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward
them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse
that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their
previous knowledge or approval_.... _Self-governed nations do not fill
their neighbour states with spies, or set the course of intrigue to
bring about some critical posture of affairs which will give them an
opportunity to strike and make conquest.... A steadfast concert for
peace can never be maintained except by a partnership of democratic
nations_....

"_Only free peoples can hold their purpose and their honour steady to
a common end and prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow
interest of their own_."

With the gathering of the dusk the rain had stopped. He rose from his
chair and walked to the window. The sky had cleared; in the west shone a
faint band of clear apple green in which burned one lucent star.
Distantly he could hear the murm