President Wilson, at West Point, said: "Militarism does not consist in the existence of any army, not even in the existence of a very great army. Militarism is a spirit. It is a point of view. It is a system. It is a purpose. The purpose of militarism is to use armies for aggression. The spirit of militarism is the opposite of the civilian spirit, the citizen spirit. In a country where militarism prevails, the military man looks down upon the civilian, regards him as inferior, thinks of him as intended for his, the military man's support and use, and just as long as America is America that spirit and point of view is impossible with us. There is as yet in this country, so far as I can discover, no taint of the spirit of militarism."
The people of Germany have given up their sons, paid enormous taxes which kept them poor but made landowners rich, all for the sake of the military whims of their superiors.
Any American would say, like President Wilson, "I would rather belong to a poor nation that was free than to a rich nation that had ceased to be in love with liberty. But we shall not be poor if we love liberty, because the nation that loves liberty truly sets every man free to do his best and be his best, and that means the release of all the splendid energies of a great people who think for themselves."
Thus, it is clear that America fights to serve. The Germans fight to get, even as their word "kriegen," used by them to mean "make war," really means "to get." For them, making war is never with the idea of service, but with the idea of getting. They desire many things for Germany, and to get them, they have used the most brutal force. Not for a moment would they stop to listen to the opinions of mankind throughout the world.
President Wilson spoke with authority, when he said: "I have not read history without observing that the greatest forces in the world and the only permanent forces are the moral forces. We have the evidence of a very competent witness, namely, the first Napoleon, who said that as he looked back in the last days of his life upon so much as he knew of human history, he had to record the judgment that force had never accomplished anything that was permanent. Force will not accomplish anything that is permanent, I venture to say, in the great struggle which is now going on on the other side of the sea. The permanent things will be accomplished afterward, when the opinion of mankind is brought to bear upon the issues, and the only thing that will hold the world steady is this same silent, insistent, all-powerful opinion of mankind. Force can sometimes hold things steady until opinion has time to form, but no force that was ever exerted except in response to that opinion was ever a conquering and predominant force."
By the opinions of mankind, he meant ideals, of which he had already said: "The pushing things in this world are ideals, not ideas. One ideal is worth twenty ideas."
Thus, in behalf of the great American nation, he calls upon the young Americans of to-day to follow the true spirit of their country. To them all he says, "You are just as big as the things you do, just as small as the things you leave undone. The size of your life is the scale of your thinking."
When this great American president who believed that moral force was always greater than physical force and who taught that America's mission in the world was to serve all mankind and finally to make them free; when he perceived after every other means had failed, that only physical force could affect Germany and that "the sore spot" in the world must be healed, as a cancer is, with the surgeon's knife; then he appeared in person, on April 2, 1917, before the Congress of the United States and read his great war message. Following his advice, Congress declared on April 6 that a state of war existed with Germany.
The message was in substance as follows:
Gentlemen of the Congress: