lel and in the face of which political freedom must whither and perish. For us there is but one choice. We have made it. Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations. We are ready to plead at the bar of history, and our flag shall wear a new lustre. Once more we shall make good with our lives and fortunes the great faith to which we were born, and a new glory shall shine in the face of our people. WHY DO WE FIGHT GERMANY? Hon. Franklin K. Lane, Delivered before the Home Club, Interior Department, Washington, D. C., June 4th, 1917. WHY DO WE FIGHT GERMANY? FRANKLIN K. LANE Tomorrow is registration day. It is the duty of all, their legal as well as their patriotic duty, to register if within the class called. There are some who have not clearly seen the reason for that call. To these I would speak a word. Why 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 cow 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 characteruntil, indeed, we are 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 striped uniform of humiliation upon a narrow path of national subservience. We talked as men talk who hope for honest agreement, not for war, until we found that the treaty torn to pieces at Liege was but the symbol of a policy that made agreements worthless against a purpose that knew no word but success. And so we came into this war for ourselves. It is a war to save America-to preserve selfrespect, to justify our right to live as we have. lived, not as some one else wishes us to live. In |