You could not be either misguided or mistaken, however, if you had not blindly accepted as true the statement of facts and the statement of international law as promulgated by a foreign government and its emissaries rather than the statements of fact and the statements of law promulgated by your own government. What right have you to doubt the utterances of our President, who is serving this country with that singleness of purpose which has always distinguished the acts of our presidents?
What right have you to believe the utterances of emissaries, who have been sent from abroad with a singleness of purpose to serve their own government at whatever cost to ours by sowing discord and falsehood among our people and who are trespassing upon our forbearance and are violating obligations which we believe a visitor to our shores owes to our people?
To put it in another way, may I not ask you, as a citizen, what reason or right you have to believe or expect that a foreign country and its emissaries are safe advisers for the citizens of the United States to consult or follow? And may I not also ask you, what there is in the life of President Wilson as a man and his record as a president that warrants you or any American citizen or newspaper in believing or asserting that he is not a man to believe or a safe president and counselor to follow? These questions answer themselves.
This country is now confronted with a crisis. Notwithstanding the wave of popular indignation that has been
aroused in this country, the President is straining every nerve to preserve peace and still maintain the honor and dignity of this country. You, and others that have been uttering the same charges that you have, have made the task more difficult than it otherwise would be. There appears to be a feeling in some foreign countries that our country is divided.
A short while ago, a prominent citizen of a foreign country, whose utterances are recognized as semi-official, stated in substance that, while his country was a unit, that that was more than could be said of the United States in all cases.
In the Milwaukee Journal of Wednesday, May 12th, a translated article from the Frankfurter Zeitung was quoted as stating “that because of the fact that we have naturalized German citizens and a number of natural-born Americans of German descent that a war between this country and Germany would be impossible because of the necessity of placing these citizens in the detention camp and that it would require our entire army to watch over them.”
These statements can only mean that the belief is entertained in that country that, in case of certain eventualities, this country would be divided and that certain of our citizens would side with Germany against our government. Such a belief if indeed prevalent in that country is a serious obstacle to a peaceful termination of our negotiations in the present crisis.
But to those of us who have read the history of the Revolutionary War, of the rebellion, and of every other war in which we have been engaged as a nation—those of us who love and admire our German friends and neighbors, who are familiar with their spirit of American citizenship and patriotism, who have lived amongst them and have felt and feel one with them, know that these statements are unfounded and we resent them as a base calumny upon some of our most respected citizens. It is an insult to American citizenship. It in effect amounts to a charge of disloyalty and treason against some of our best citizens. Such a statement should be publicly resented, however, first of all by those against whom this slander is directed, not because their loyalty and patriotism is doubted here, but because it is doubted elsewhere. It is necessary for the world to understand and know
that America is united as one man. This will do more to keep us out of war than all the clamor and all the pressure that can be brought to bear upon our President to abandon our neutrality and to violate our international obligations.