war were literally 'scraps of paper,' it had become a vital
necessity that we should instantly and on a great and adequate scale
prepare for our own defense. Our men, women, and children--not in
isolated cases, but in scores and hundreds of cases--have been murdered
by Germany and Mexico; and we have tamely submitted to wrongs from
Germany and Mexico of a kind to which no nation can submit without
impairing its own self-respect and incurring the contempt of the rest
of mankind. Yet, during these eighteen months not one thing has been
done.... Never in the country's history has there been a more stupendous
instance of folly than this crowning folly of waiting eighteen months
after the elemental crash of nations took place before even making
a start in an effort--and an utterly inefficient and insufficient
effort-for some kind of preparation to ward off disaster in the future.

"If President Wilson had shown the disinterested patriotism, courage,
and foresight demanded by this stupendous crisis, I would have supported
him with hearty enthusiasm. But his action, or rather inaction, has
been such that it has become a matter of high patriotic duty to
oppose him.... No man can support Mr. Wilson without at the same time
supporting a policy of criminal inefficiency as regards the United
States Navy, of short-sighted inadequacy as regards the army,
of abandonment of the duty owed by the United States to weak and
well-behaved nations, and of failure to insist on our just rights when
we are ourselves maltreated by powerful and unscrupulous nations."

Theodore Roosevelt could not, without violating the integrity of his
own soul, go on supporting either positively by word or negatively by
silence the man who had said, on the day after the Lusitania was sunk,
"There is such a thing as a nation being too proud to fight," and who
later called for a "peace without victory." He could have nothing but
scorn for an Administration whose Secretary of War could say, two months
after the United States had actually entered the war, that there was
"difficulty. .. disorder and confusion... in getting things started,"
and could then add, "but it is a happy confusion. I delight in the fact
that when we entered this war we were not like our adversary, ready for
it, anxious for it, prepared for it, and inviting it."

Until America entered the war Roosevelt used his voice and his pen with
all his native energy and fire to convince the American peopl