but this was using a process or reasoning which had underlain the German invasion of Belgium, the sinking of the Lusitania, and the deportation of the Belgians. His logical process was not hard to follow. His German mind reasoned that Germany was at war, that war is fought in order to be won; that everything which contributed to victory was therefore justified, and that omission of any act tending to victory would be in a German statesman a betrayal of his right and duty. Zimmermann was the man who, after the war, when he read reports of the probable Entente peace terms, remarked, "We supposed we were dealing with gentlemen."

Reasoning of this sort, in its broad aspects, was not essentially different from the principles on which other Governments proceeded, but it was different in the merciless completeness with which Berlin applied it. The German Government had become a victim of its own policy of "thorough." It had lost sense of proportion in morals as in practical wisdom. Since it thought it was necessary for German armies to march through Belgium, therefore right and duty had dictated to it the assault on Liége, Louvain, and Dinant. Beyond that German logic could not go or see. It did not see, or it chose to overlook, the power of Great Britain and the anger which its acts would arouse in the neutral world. It had argued that, since American munitions were being used against the soldiers of the Fatherland, therefore the Lusitania had to be destroyed. If it was a right and duty to sink a freighter with tens of thousands of shells in her hold, it was also a right and duty to sink anything that had shells on board or was supposed to have them. But the Lusitania carried no shells. No attempt was made to strike a balance between the ammunition suspected to be in the Lusitania's cargo and the number of men, women and children known to be in her cabins. Nor was any attempt made, from the point of view of cold reason, to strike a balance between the military advantage of the destruction of the Lusitania and the military disadvantage of arousing an outraged America to take sides against Germany. The mere necessity for it was the compelling German argument. Germany could not see why any nation fighting for self-preservation was not justified in picking up any

weapon of defense that lay ready to hand; its mind did not grasp the fact that, even in the matter of self-preservation, there are acts against which the soul of man rebels. Germans forgot that the soul has its claims against logic, that there are things which even great States must not do, and doing, do at their peril.

That same lack of sense of proportion, that application of mechanical reasoning to great world questions, appeared in Zimmermann's proposed overtures of Germany to Mexico and Japan. What German statesmen failed to recognize was the enormous risk they were taking in order to gain at best a puny advantage. On the one hand, they would have secured the mobilization of several thousand American troops on the Mexican border; on the other, the wrath of a nation which could bring forward against Germany fiftyfold the money, munitions and men that Carranza could draw from us against herself. And besides there was always the chance of a discovery of the scheme before actual war came, and that was actually what did come to pass. It was a case again of mechanistic German logic working without any appreciation of what Bismarck called, and set great value on, the "imponderables." Germany once more was the victim of her own "efficiency" as applied with thoroughness and determination, but with a minimum of mentality. Perhaps even she, as well as the neutral word, would some day be able to see that, as a writer of old times has said, "The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong."

Germany, however, may have had greater hopes of alarming the timid element in America than of forming an alliance with Mexico and Japan, since the German mind accords much real power in the bogey man. The result in any case was to clear the minds and rouse the spirit of such men in this country as had not already recognized the fact that Germany was already warring against the United States, and that to yield to her demands would be to make a weak and foolish surrender. Even German-American papers found it hard to defend Germany's action in this matter. Some actually attacked it, while others argued that she was justified from military and international points of view, but most admitted that Zimmermann had shown himself

possest of mediocre diplomatic ability. Even Count Zu Reventlow, the most inflexible of Junker journalists, discerned that American sentiment, hitherto divided, "was now solidly behind the President." A survey of the daily American press undertaken by the Literary Digest confirmed the accuracy of this Berlin judgment. It was notably true of the Middle West, which had not fully shared the indignation aroused in our Eastern population by the sinking of the Lusitania. Many in that section had argued that, if Americans chose to risk their lives by sailing on British ships, it was their own affair; the country should not go to war merely for them. But when the Zimmermann note came out, even the Middle West saw that the time for war had come. Besides unifying sentiment all over the country, the Zimmermann note proved a real eye-opener. "Let us be grateful to Zimmermann,' said the New York Tribune, "for he has contributed largely to our knowledge and understanding of the German method and the German idea." Unwittingly, he had performed what the New York Journal of Commerce called "a service of lasting value to the cause of humanity in the revelation. made of German perfidy and mendacity-of the impossibility of any civilized power living on terms of amity with such a Government."

Not even the disclosure of Germany's plot to involve Mexico in war with us was able, however, to prevent a little group of obstructionists in the United States Senate from talking to death at this time a bill giving power to President Wilson to arm merchant ships. This extraordinary procedure occurred on March 4 in the last hours of the life of the Sixty-fourth Congress, when the bill had already passed the House of Representatives by an enormous majority (403 to 13), and, when 76 Senators (more than two-thirds of the entire Senate), had signed a document expressing their willingness and desire to vote for the measure. Under the rules of the Senate, which practically put it into the power of a few Senators, or perhaps a single Senator, to delay action. so long that a vote became impossible in the closing days of a session, the will of the people, of the President, and of both branches of Congress was defeated. President Wilson, in a public statement just after the adjournment of Congress,

declared with indignation that "a little group of wilful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

The little group included five Democrats and seven Republicans. Some of these declared afterward that they were not op sed to the passage of a bill permitting the President to arm ships, but that they were opposed to certain provisions of the bill in question. This, for instance, was the defense made by Senator O'Gorman, of New York. Senator Stone, of Missouri, and Senator La Follette, of Wisconsin, who were concerned in the obstruction. Men who regarded Germany's actual and avowed attitude toward our citizens on the high seas as one of virtual warfare saw in these filibusterers men who, in the very moment of attack, had snatched a weapon of defense from the hand of their Government. Those, on the other hand, who regarded armed neutrality as an invitation to war rather than a defense against it, and who considered no price too high if it brought peace, did not hesitate to make dark allusions to British gold, to a subsidized press, and to the greed of munition-makers.

ALFRED ZIMMERMANN

Colonel Henry Watterson's Louisville Courier-Journal consigned the obstructionists to an "eternity of execration,' and the Chicago Herald saw them "damned to everlasting fame." One of the Senators was hanged in effigy in a State near his own. Another received as a gift thirty pieces of silver. To a third was sent from his own State an iron cross weighing forty pounds made by a blacksmith and bearing an inscription, "Lest the Kaiser forget." State legislatures passed resolutions of condemnation similar in intention.

to that of the Kentucky Senate, which denounced filibusterers as "disloyal, traitorous, and cowardly." At a patriotic mass-meeting held in New York under the auspices of the American Rights League, the venerable Lyman Abbott was greeted with roars of approval when he called the filibustering Senators "Germany's allies," sayi "Germany has made and is making war upon America and her allies in the United States Senate have violated the unwritten law of all honorable assemblages. They have violated their trust to their country and have done their best to deprive us of our rightful protection." "Traitors! "Traitors! Hang them!" shouted back men in the audience. Whatever may have been the motives of the filibusterers, their action evoked much enthusiasm in the German press. The Frankfurter Zeitung hailed them as "fine Americans who remained uncontaminated by Wilson's blind devotion to England." On Senator Stone and Senator La Follette special condemnation was bestowed for having helped to frustrate what critics called President Wilson's plan to "wrest from Congress privileges vested in it by the Constitution."

This episode was often cited afterward, by friends of Mr. Wilson, as justification for his course in dealing with Germany after the Lusitania was sunk-a period now of almost two years. Had Mr. Wilson sent Bernstorff home in May, 1915, and had he asked Congress to declare war on Germany when the Arabic was sunk three months afterward, it was clear to many minds that the country would not have been with him-and notably the Middle West would not. That he had been wise in delaying action until he was certain of support from the whole country the filibustering episode made clearer. When at last war was declared, what remained of a former rather formidable group of pacifists had been rapidly dwindling into a scattered body of ineffective and helpless apologists for their own acts.

What President Wilson would do in the emergency raised by the Senate remained for some days in doubt. At last, by advice from official sources, he decided that merchant ships should be armed even tho the bill had failed. War "within a month" was predicted by former Attorney General Wickersham as a result of arming our merchant ships.