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READY FOR WAR AGAINST GERMANY -
WILSON'S WAR MESSAGE
War Message
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Woodrow Wilson.
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Wilson's War Message.
It follows the full text transcript of
Woodrow Wilson's War Message, delivered at
Washington D.C. - April 2, 1917.
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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 the
enemies of Germany within the Mediterranean.
That had seemed to be the object of the German
submarine warfare earlier in the war, but since
April of last year the Imperial Government had
somewhat restrained the commanders of its
undersea craft in conformity with its promise
then given to us that passenger boats should not
be sunk and that due warning would be given to
all other vessels which its submarines might
seek to destroy when no resistance was offered
or escape attempted, and care taken that their
crews were given at least a fair chance to save
their lives in their open boats. The precautions
taken were meager and haphazard enough, as was
proved in distressing instance after instance in
the progress of the cruel and unmanly business,
but a certain degree of restraint was observed.
The new policy has swept every restriction
aside. Vessels of every kind, whatever their
flag, their character, their cargo, their
destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly
sent to the bottom: without warning and without
thought of help or mercy for those on board, the
vessels of friendly neutrals along with those of
belligerents. Even hospital ships and ships
carrying relief to the sorely bereaved and
stricken people of Belgium, though the latter
were provided with safe conduct through the
proscribed areas by the German Government itself
and were distinguished by unmistakable marks of
identity, have been sunk with the same reckless
lack of compassion or of principle. I was for a
little while unable to believe that such things
would in fact be done by any government that had
hitherto subscribed to the humane practices of
civilized nations. International law had its
origin in the attempt to set up some law which
would be respected and observed upon the seas,
where no nation had right of dominion and where
lay the free highways of the world.... This
minimum of right the German Government has swept
aside under the plea of retaliation and
necessity and because it had no weapons which it
could use at sea except these which it is
impossible to employ as it is employing them
without throwing to the winds all scruples of
humanity or of respect for the understandings
that were supposed to underlie the intercourse
of the world. I am not now thinking of the loss
of property involved, immense and serious as
that is, but only of the wanton and wholesale
destruction of the lives of noncombatants, men,
women, and children, engaged in pursuits which
have always, even in the darkest periods of
modern history, been deemed innocent and
legitimate. Property can be paid for; the lives
of peaceful and innocent people cannot be. The
present German submarine warfare against
commerce is a warfare against mankind.
It is a war against all nations. American ships
have been sunk, American lives taken, in ways
which it has stirred us very deeply to learn of,
but the ships and people of other neutral and
friendly nations have been sunk and overwhelmed
in the waters in the same way. There has been no
discrimination. The challenge is to all mankind.
Each nation must decide for itself how it will
meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must
be made with a moderation of counsel and a
temperateness of judgment befitting our
character and our motives as a nation. We must
put excited feeling away. Our motive will not be
revenge or the victorious assertion of the
physical might of the nation, but only the
vindication of right, of human right, of which
we are only a single champion.
When I addressed the Congress on the
twenty-sixth of February last I thought that it
would suffice to assert our neutral rights with
arms, our right to use the seas against unlawful
interference, our right to keep our people safe
against unlawful violence. But armed neutrality,
it now appears, is impracticable. Because
submarines are in effect outlaws when used as
the German submarines have been used against
merchant shipping, it is impossible to defend
ships against their attacks as the law of
nations has assumed that merchantmen would
defend themselves against privateers or
cruisers, visible craft giving chase upon the
open sea. It is common prudence in such
circumstances, grim necessity indeed, to
endeavor to destroy them before they have shown
their own intention. They must be dealt with
upon sight, if dealt with at all. The German
Government denies the right of neutrals to use
arms at all within the areas of the sea which it
has proscribed, even in the defense of rights
which no modern publicist has ever before
questioned their right to defend. The intimation
is conveyed that the armed guards which we have
placed on our merchant ships will be treated as
beyond the pale of law and subject to be dealt
with as pirates would be. Armed neutrality is
ineffectual enough at best; in such
circumstances and in the face of such
pretensions it is worse than ineffectual: it is
likely only to produce what it was meant to
prevent; it is practically certain to draw us
into the war without either the rights or the
effectiveness of belligerents. There is one
choice we cannot make, we are incapable of
making: we will not choose the path of
submission and suffer the most sacred rights of
our Nation and our people to be ignored or
violated. The wrongs against which we now array
ourselves are no common wrongs; they cut to the
very roots of human life.
With a profound sense of the solemn and even
tragical character of the step I am taking and
of the grave responsibilities which it involves,
but in unhesitating obedience to what I deem my
constitutional duty, I advise that the Congress
declare the recent course of the Imperial German
Government to be in fact nothing less than war
against the government and people of the United
States; that it formally accept the status of
belligerent which has thus been thrust upon it,
and that it take immediate steps not only to put
the country in a more thorough state of defense
but also to exert all its power and employ all
its resources to bring the Government of the
German Empire to terms and end the war.
What this will involve is clear. It will involve
the utmost practicable cooperation in counsel
and action with the governments now at war with
Germany, and, as incident to that, the extension
to those governments of the most liberal
financial credit, in order that our resources
may so far as possible be added to theirs. It
will involve the organization and mobilization
of all the material resources of the country to
supply the materials of war and serve the
incidental needs of the Nation in the most
abundant and yet the most economical and
efficient way possible. It will involve the
immediate full equipment of the navy in all
respects but particularly in supplying it with
the best means of dealing with the enemy's
submarines. It will involve the immediate
addition to the armed forces of the United
States already provided for by law in case of
war at least five hundred thousand men, who
should, in my opinion, be chosen upon the
principle of universal liability to service, and
also the authorization of subsequent additional
increments of equal force so soon as they may be
needed and can be handled in training. It will
involve also, of course, the granting of
adequate credits to the Government, sustained, I
hope, so far as they can equitably be sustained
by the present generation, by well conceived
taxation. I say sustained so far as may be
equitable by taxation because it seems to me
that it would be most unwise to base the credits
which will now be necessary entirely on money
borrowed. It is our duty, I most respectfully
urge, to protect our people so far as we may
against the very serious hardships and evils
which would be likely to arise out of the
inflation which would be produced by vast loans.
In carrying out the measures by which these
things are to be accomplished we should keep
constantly in mind the wisdom of interfering as
little as possible in our own preparation and in
the equipment of our own military forces with
the duty- for it will be a very practical
duty-of supplying the nations already at war
with Germany with the materials which they can
obtain only from us or by our assistance. They
are in the field and we should help them in
every way to be effective there.
I shall take the liberty of suggesting, through
the several executive departments of the
Government, for the consideration of your
committees, measures for the accomplishment of
the several objects I have mentioned. I hope
that it will be your pleasure to deal with them
as having been framed after very careful thought
by the branch of the Government upon which the
responsibility of conducting the war and
safeguarding the Nation will most directly fall.
While we do these things, these deeply momentous
things, let us be very clear, and make very
clear to all the world what our motives and our
objects are. My own thought has not been driven
from its habitual and normal course by the
unhappy events of the last two months, and I do
not believe that the thought of the Nation has
been altered or clouded by them. I have exactly
the same things in mind now that I had in mind
when I addressed the Senate on the twenty-second
of January last, the same that I had in mind
when I addressed the Congress on the third of
February and on the twenty-sixth of February.
Our object now, as then, is to vindicate the
principles of peace and justice in the life of
the world as against selfish and autocratic
power and to set up amongst the really free and
self-governed peoples of the world such a
concert of purpose and of action as will
henceforth insure the observance of those
principles Neutrality is no longer feasible or
desirable where the peace of the world is
involved and the freedom of its peoples, and the
menace to that peace and freedom lies in the
existence of autocratic governments backed by
organized force which is controlled wholly by
their will, not by the will of their people. We
have seen the last of neutrality in such
circumstances. We are at the beginning of an age
in which it will be insisted that the same
standards of conduct and of responsibility for
wrong done shall be observed among nations and
their governments that are observed among the
individual citizens of civilized states.
We have no quarrel with the German people. We
have no feeling towards them but one of sympathy
and friendship. It was not upon their impulse
that their government acted in entering this
war. It was not with their previous knowledge or
approval. It was a war determined upon as wars
used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy
days when peoples were nowhere consulted by
their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in
the interest of dynasties or of little groups of
ambitious men who were accustomed to use their
fellow men as pawns and tools.
Self-governed nations do not fill their neighbor
states with spies or set the course of intrigue
to bring about some critical posture of affairs
which will give them an opportunity to strike
and make conquest. Such designs can be
successfully worked out only under cover and
where no one has the right to ask questions.
Cunningly contrived plans of deception or
aggression, carried, it may be, from generation
to generation, can be worked out and kept from
the light only within the privacy of courts or
behind the carefully guarded confidences of a
narrow and privileged class. They are happily
impossible where public opinion commands and
insists upon full information concerning all the
nation's affairs.
A steadfast concert for peace can never be
maintained except by a partnership of democratic
nations. No autocratic government could be
trusted to keep faith within it or observe its
covenants. It must be a league of honor, a
partnership of opinion. Intrigue would eat its
vitals away; the plottings of inner circles who
could plan what they would and render account to
no one would be a corruption seated at its very
heart. Only free peonies can hold their purpose
and their honor steady to a common end and
prefer the interests of mankind to any narrow
interest of their own.
Does not every American feel that assurance has
been added to our hope for the future peace of
the world by the wonderful and heartening things
that have been happening within the last few
weeks in Russia? Russia was known by those who
knew it best to have been always in fact
democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of
her thought, in all the intimate relationships
of her people that spoke their natural instinct,
their habitual attitude towards life. The
autocracy that crowned the summit of her
political structure, long as it had stood and
terrible as was the reality of its power, was
not in fact Russian in origin, character, or
purpose; and now it has been shaken off and the
great, generous Russian people have been added
in all their naive majesty and might to the
forces that are fighting for freedom in the
world, for justice, and for peace. Here is a fit
partner for a League of Honor.
One of the things that has served to convince us
that the Prussian, autocracy was not and could
never be our friend is that from the very outset
of the present war it has filled our
unsuspecting communities and even our offices of
government with spies and set criminal intrigues
everywhere afoot against our national unity of
counsel, our peace Within and without, our
industries and our commerce. Indeed it is now
evident that its spies were here even before the
war began; and it is unhappily not a matter of
conjecture but a fact proved in our courts of
justice that the intrigues which have more than
once come perilously near to disturbing the
peace and dislocating the industries of the
country have been carried on at the instigation,
with the support, and even under the personal
direction of official agents of the Imperial
Government accredited to the Government of the
United States. Even in checking these things and
trying to extirpate them we have sought to put
the most generous interpretation possible upon
them because we knew that their source lay, not
in any hostile feeling or purpose of the German
people towards us (who were, no doubt, as
ignorant of them as we ourselves were), but only
in the selfish designs of a Government that did
what it pleased and told its people nothing. But
they have played their part in serving to
convince us at last that that Government
entertains no real friendship for us and means
to act against our peace and security at its
convenience. That it means to stir up enemies
against us at our very doors the intercepted
note to the German Minister at Mexico City is
eloquent evidence.
We are accepting this challenge of hostile
purpose because we know that in such a
Government, following such methods, we can never
have a friend; and that in the presence of its
organized power, always lying in wait to
accomplish we know not what purpose, there can
be no assured security for the democratic
Governments of the world. We are now about to
accept gauge of battle with this natural foe to
liberty and shall, if necessary, spend the whole
force of the nation to check and nullify its
pretensions and its power. We are glad, now that
we see the facts with no veil of false pretense
about them to fight thus for the ultimate peace
of the world and for the liberation of its
peoples, the German peoples included: for the
rights of nations great and small and the
privilege of men everywhere to choose their way
of life and of obedience.
The world must be made safe for democracy.
Its peace must be planted upon the tested
foundations of political liberty. We have no
selfish ends to serve.
We desire no conquest, no dominion. We seek no
indemnities for ourselves, no material
compensation for the sacrifices we shall freely
make. We are but one of the champions of the
rights of mankind. We shall be satisfied when
those rights have been made as secure as the
faith and the freedom of nations can make them.
Just because we fight without rancor and without
selfish object, seeking nothing for ourselves
but what we shall wish to share with all free
peoples, we shall, I feel confident, conduct our
operations as belligerents without passion and
ourselves observe with proud punctilio the
principles of right and of fair play we profess
to be fighting for.
I have said nothing of the Governments allied
with the Imperial Government of Germany because
they have not made war upon us or challenged us
to defend our right and our honor. The
Austro-Hungarian Government has, indeed, avowed
its unqualified endorsement and acceptance of
the reckless and lawless submarine warfare
adopted now without disguise by the Imperial
German Government, and it has therefore not been
possible for this Government to receive Count
Tarnowski, the Ambassador recently accredited to
this Government by the Imperial and Royal
Government of Austria-Hungary; but that
Government has not actually engaged in warfare
against citizens of the United States on the
seas, and I take the liberty, for the present at
least, of postponing a discussion of our
relations with the authorities at Vienna. We
enter this war only where we are clearly forced
into it because there are no other means of
defending our rights.
It will be all the easier for us to conduct
ourselves as belligerents in a high spirit of
right and fairness because we act without
animus, not in enmity towards a people or with
the desire to bring any injury or disadvantage
upon them, but only in armed opposition to an
irresponsible government which has thrown aside
all considerations of humanity and of right and
is running amuck. We are, let me say again, the
sincere friends of the German people, and shall
desire nothing so much as the early
reestablishment of intimate relations of mutual
advantage between us,- however hard it may be
for them, for the time being, to believe that
this is spoken from our hearts. We have borne
with their present Government through all these
bitter months because of that
friendship,-exercising a patience and
forbearance which would otherwise have been
impossible. We shall, happily, still have an
opportunity to prove that friendship in our
daily attitude and actions towards the millions
of men and women of German birth and native
sympathy who live amongst us and share our life,
and we shall be proud to prove it towards all
who are in fact loyal to their neighbors and to
the Government in the hour of test. They are,
most of them, as true and loyal Americans as if
they had never known any other fealty or
allegiance. They will be prompt to stand with us
in rebuking and restraining the few who may be
of a different mind and purpose. If there should
be disloyalty, it will be dealt with with a firm
hand of stern repression; but, if it lifts its
head at all, it will lift it only here and there
and without countenance except from a lawless
and malignant few.
It is a distressing and oppressive duty,
Gentlemen of the Congress, which I have
performed in thus addressing you. There are, it
may be many months of fiery trial and sacrifice
ahead of us. It is a fearful thing to lead this
great peaceful people into war, into the most
terrible and disastrous of all wars,
civilization itself seeming to be in the
balance.
But the right is more precious than peace, and
we shall fight for the things which we have
always carried nearest our hearts,-for
democracy, for the right of those who submit to
authority to have a voice in their own
Governments, for the rights and liberties of
small nations, for a universal dominion of right
by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring
peace and safety to all nations and make the
world itself at last free. To such a task we can
dedicate our Eves and our fortunes, every thing
that we are and everything that we have, with
the pride of those who know that the day has
come when America is privileged to spend her
blood and her might for the principles that gave
her birth and happiness and the peace which she
has treasured. God helping her, she can do no
other.
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