“THE military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, then agents diligently spread sedition among us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance....
“They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions ... and seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles.
“But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always in every accent.... The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a people’s war, a war for freedom and justice and self-government among all the nations of the world.”
From President Wilson’s Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917.
The Wind of Democracy
“WITHOUT doubt, the majority of the German nation is still monarchist. The different peoples of Germany still hold to their princes, more or less, according to the individual character of the sovereigns. But that confidence in the supreme chief of the Empire is still entirely intact is an affirmation which, after three years of war, cannot be maintained.... Confidence in the direction of the Empire has begun to disappear among the German people.... They begin to ask themselves how it happens that nearly all the world is in arms against us, and who is responsible for it.”
Reply of Prince von Hohenlohe to the clerical deputy, Spahn,
in the Reichstag.
