The challenge was not accepted while it remained a "scrap of paper. But when this challenge of war was vitalized by deeds of war, when in accordance with its terms of defiance American ships were sunk and American lives were taken under the American flag by the Government of Germany within an ocean area on which the rights of this country are as indefeasible as its rights to its own territory, but over which the German Government had invasively assumed exclusive sovereignty, then Congress accepted the challenge of war. There was no possible alternative. This self-constituted enemy of ours, after long fostering a policy of conquest, had actually invaded Belgium and France pursuant to that policy. By that long-fostered policy, he had proved his invasive intent. By his actual invasion he had transmuted invasive intent into invasive action. By his diplomatic negotiations with Mexico and his operations within the United States he had disclosed his invasive intent toward the United States itself as one of the objectives of his general policy. By throwing his invasive battle line out upon the ocean to the twentieth meridian, in the direction of the United States, with a threat to the United States, he confirmed his hostile intent toward this country. His destruction of American ships and American lives under the American flag within that ocean area was the overt act of his aggressive war upon the United States. For us to have ignored the manifest intent after it had been vitalized by the overt act would have been to surrender at discretion. So our war with the autocratic German Government, if it involved no ideals at all of the loftier or less selfish type, would nevertheless be justified as a necessary war of national self-defense. We are resisting invasion as truly as if our call to arms had been to check hostile army marching northward through Mexico or southward from Quebec. And in sending. soldiers to France to help the French, the British, and the Belgians drive the invader away from their home countries and back into his, we are defending our own home country under the same necessity as if we were advancing into Canada or Mexico to meet an approaching army of conquest. While the German Kaiser is in France or Belgium he is a menace to the United States, now that he has demonstrated his hostile intent toward this country; and no peace can be made with safety to our independence until he has left the places he has invaded and gone back to his own frontiers. It might possibly have been better to assent to his conquering the world, nation by nation, until our turn came, than to enter into the awful carnage which resistance to his foul ambitions demands; but that was not the question. We were not confronted with a problem of war or no war. Our problem was one of resisting conquest now, in a war in Europe and with allies, or later on in our own country and without allies. |