A WAR FOR DEMOCRACY (Message to Congress, April 2, 1917) WOODROW WILSON [Woodrow Wilson (1856- ), President of the United States since 1913, was educated at Princeton, the University of Virginia, and at Johns Hopkins, and later taught history and political science at Bryn Mawr, Wesleyan, and Princeton. From 1902 to 1910 he served as President of Princeton University. He was then elected Governor of New Jersey. His most important writings are "Congressional Government" (1885), "The State" (1889), "History of the American People" (1902), and a life of Washington. The best examples of his essays are "Ideals of America" (Atlantic Monthly for December, 1902) and "When a Man Comes to Himself" (1915). The present selection is from his Message to Congress on April 2, 1917, in which he recommended the declaration of war against Germany. Its sentence, "The world must be made safe for democracy," has become the rallying cry of all the nations fighting Germany, and best expresses the causes and underlying aims of American participation in the World War.] GENTLEMEN OF THE CONGRESS: I have called the Congress into extraordinary session because there are serious, very serious, choices of policy to be made, and made immediately, which it was neither right nor constitutionally permissible that I should assume the responsibility of making. On the third of February last I officially laid before you the extraordinary announcement of the Imperial German Government that on and after the first day of February it was its purpose to put aside all restraints of law or of humanity and use its submarines to sink every vessel that sought to approach either the ports of Great Britain and Ireland or the western coasts of Europe or any of the ports controlled by |