Because of other peoples, with their rising hope that the world may be freed from government by the soldier.
We are fighting Germany because she sought to terrorize us and then to fool us. We could not believe that Germany would do what she said she would do upon the seas.
We still hear the piteous cries of children coming up out of the sea where the Lusitania went down. And Germany has never asked the forgiveness of the world.
We saw the Sussex sunk, crowded with the sons and daughters of neutral nations.
We saw ship after ship sent to the bottom—ships of mercy bound out of America for the Belgian starving, ships carrying the Red Cross and laden with the wounded of all nations, ships carrying food and clothing to friendly, harmless, terrorized peoples, ships flying the Stars and Stripes—sent to the bottom hundreds of miles from shore, manned by American seamen, murdered against all law, without warning.
We believed Germany's promise that she would respect the neutral flag and the rights of neutrals, and we held our anger and outrage in check. But now we see that she was holding us off with fair promises until she could build her huge fleet of submarines. For when spring came, she blew her promise into the air, just as at the beginning she had torn up that "scrap of paper." Then we saw clearly that there was but one law for Germany, her will to rule.
We are fighting Germany because in this war feudalism is making its last stand against on-coming democracy. We see it now. This is a war against an old spirit, an ancient, outworn spirit. It is a war against feudalism—the right of the castle on the hill to rule the village below. It is a war for democracy—the right of all to be their own masters. Let Germany be feudal if she will. But she must not spread her system over a world that has outgrown it.
We fight with the world for an honest world in which nations keep their word, for a world in which nations do not live by swagger or by threat, for a world in which men think of the ways in which they can conquer the common cruelties of nature instead of inventing more horrible cruelties to inflict upon the spirit and body of man, for a world in which the ambition of the philosophy of a few shall not make miserable all mankind, for a world in which the man is held more precious than the machine, the system, or the State.
Secretary Franklin K. Lane, June 4, 1917.