THE COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION (Established by order of the President April 4, 1917.) Distributed free except that in the case of No. 2 and No. 3 of the Red, White, and Blue Series, the subscriber should forward 15 cents each to cover the cost of printing. I. Red, White, and Blue Series: No. 1. How the War Came to America (English, German, Polish, Bohemian, Italian, Spanish, and Swedish). No. 2. National Service Handbook (primarily for libraries, schools, Y. M. C. A.'s, clubs, fraternal organizations, etc., as a guide and reference work on all forms of war activity-civil, charitable, and military. No, 3. The Battle Line of Democracy. Prose and Poetry of the Great War. No. 4. The President's Flag Day Speech with Evidence of Ger- No. 5. Conquest and Kultur, the Germans' Aims in Their Own II. War Information Series: No. 1. The War Message and Facts Behind It. No. 2. The Nation in Arms, by Secretaries Lane and Baker. Hazen. No. 4. The Great War: from Spectator to Participant. No. 6. American Loyalty by Citizens of German Descent. No. 9. Home Reading Course for Citizen Soldiers. No. 10. First Session of the War Congress, by Charles Merz. III. Official Bulletin: Accurate daily statement of what all agencies of government are doing in war times. Sent free to newspapers and postmasters (to be put on bulletin boards). Subscription price, $5 per year. Address requests and orders to COMMITTEE ON PUBLIC INFORMATION, Washington, D. C. WHY WE ARE FIGHTING GERMANY. By FRANKLIN K. LANE, Secretary of the Interior. WH HY are we fighting Germany? The brief answer is that ours is a war of self-defense. We did not wish to fight Germany. She made the attack upon us; not on our shores, but on our ships, our lives, our rights, our future. For two years and more we held to a neutrality that made us apologists for things which outraged man's common sense of fair play and humanity. At each new offense-the invasion of Belgium, the killing of civilian Belgians, the attacks on Scarborough and other defenseless towns, the laying of mines in neutral waters, the fencing off of the seas-and on and on through the months we said: "This is war-archaic, uncivilized war, but war! All rules have been thrown away: all nobility; man has come down to the primitive brute. And while we cannot justify we will not intervene. It is not our war." Then why are we in? Because we could not keep out. The invasion of Belgium, which opened the war, led to the invasion of the United States by slow, steady, logical steps. Our sympathies evolved into a conviction of self-interest. Our love of fair play ripened into alarm at our own peril. We talked in the language and in the spirit of good faith and sincerity, as honest men should talk, until we discovered that our talk was construed as cowardice. And Mexico was called upon to invade us. We talked as men would talk who cared alone for peace and the advancement of their own material interests, until we discovered that we were thought to be a nation of mere money makers, devoid of all character-until, indeed, we were told that we could not walk the highways of the world without permission of a Prussian soldier; that our ships might not sail without wearing a 38860°-17 3 |