"It is a problem closely connected with the limitation of naval armament and the co-operation of the navies of the world in keeping the seas at once free and safe. And the question of limiting naval armaments opens the wider and perhaps more difficult question of the limitation of armies and of all programs of military preparation. * * * There can be no sense of safety and equality among the nations if great preponderating armaments are henceforth to continue here and there to be built up and maintained.
How peace must be made secure.
"Mere agreements may not make peace secure. It will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of the permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force of any nation now engaged or any alliance hitherto formed or projected that no nation, no probable combination of nations, could face or withstand it. If the peace presently to be made is to endure, it must be a peace made secure by the organized major force of mankind."
Entente peoples welcome President Wilson's views.
The German note to Mexico.
If there were any doubt in our minds as to which of the great alliances was the more in sympathy with these ideals, it was removed by the popular response abroad to this address of the President. For, while exception was taken to some parts of it in Britain and France, it was plain that so far as the peoples of the Entente were concerned the President had been amply justified in stating that he spoke for all forward-looking, liberal-minded men and women. It was not so in Germany. The people there who could be reached, and whose hearts were stirred by this enunciation of the principles of a people's peace, were too few or too oppressed to make their voices heard in the councils of their nation. Already, on January 16, 1917, unknown to the people of Germany, Herr Zimmermann, their Secretary of Foreign Affairs, had secretly dispatched a note to their Minister in Mexico, informing him of the German intention to repudiate the Sussex pledge and instructing him to offer to the Mexican Government New Mexico and Arizona if Mexico would join with Japan in attacking the United States.
Sinister German intrigues in the New World.
In the new year of 1917, as through our acceptance of world responsibilities so plainly indicated in the President's utterances in regard to a league of nations we felt ourselves now drawing nearer to a full accord with the Powers of the Entente; and, as on the other hand, we found ourselves more and more outraged at the German Government's methods of conducting warfare and their brutal treatment of people in their conquered lands; as we more and more uncovered their hostile intrigues against the peace of the New World; and, above all, as the sinister and anti-democratic ideals of their ruling class became manifest in their manoeuvres for a peace of conquest—the Imperial German Government abruptly threw aside the mask.
The new submarine war zone proclaimed.
On the last day of January, 1917, Count Bernstorff handed to Mr. Lansing a note, in which his Government announced its purpose to intensify and render more ruthless the operations of their submarines at sea, in a manner against which our Government had protested from the beginning. The German Chancellor also stated before the Imperial Diet that the reason this ruthless policy had not been earlier employed was simply because the Imperial Government had not then been ready to act. In brief, under the guise of friendship and the cloak of false promises, it had been preparing this attack.