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Show "FORCED INTO WAR" PRESIDENT WILSON Chief Executive Lays Blame for Conflict Upon Germany. Declares American People Had No Choice But to Take Up Arms Duplicity Du-plicity and Intrigues of the Kaiser's Government Forced the Conflict in Which the Nation Is Engaged. Washington, June 15. President Yilson in his Flag day speech, set forth the aims of the United States in the present war, practically as fol- lows : My Fellow Citizens : We meet to celebrate Flag Day because this flag which we honor and under which we serve is the emblem of our unity, our power, our thought and purpose as a nation. It has no other character than that which we give it from generation to generation. The choices are ours. It floats in majestic silence above the hosts that execute those choices, whether in peace or in war. And yet, though silent, it speaks to us speaks to us of the past, of the men and women wom-en who went before us and of the records rec-ords they wrote upon it. We celebrate the day of its birth ; and from its birth until now it has witnessed a great history, his-tory, has floated on high the symbol of great events, of a great plan of life worked out by a great people. We are about to carry it into battle, to lift it where it will draw the fire of our enemies. en-emies. We are about to bid thousands, hundreds of thousands, it may be millions mil-lions of our men, the young, the strong, the capable men of the nation, to go forth and die beneath it on fields of blood far away for what? For some unaccustomed thing? For something for which it has never sought the fire before? American armies were never before sent across the seas. Why are they sent now? For some new purpose, pur-pose, for which this great flag has never nev-er been carried before, or for some old, familiar, heroic purpose for which it has seen men, its own men, die on every ev-ery battlefield upon which Americans have borne arms since the Revolution? These are questions which must be answered. We are Americans. We in our turn serve America, and can serve her with no private purpose. We must use her flag as she has always used it. We are accountable at the bar of history his-tory and must plead in utter frankness what purpose it is we seek to serve. No Choice But War's Arbitrament. It is plain enough how we were forced into the war. The extraordinary extraordi-nary insults and aggressions of the imperial im-perial German government left us no self-respecting choice but to take up arms in defense of our rights as a free people and of our honor as a sovereign government. The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. neu-tral. They filled our unsuspecting communities com-munities with vicious spies and conspirators con-spirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. be-half. When they found that they could not do that, their agents diligently spread sedition amongst us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance, and some -of those agents were men connected with the official embassy of the German government itself it-self here in our own capital. They sought by violence to destroy our industries in-dustries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us and to draw Japan into in-to a hostile alliance with her and that, not by indirection, but by direct suggestion from the foreign office in Berlin. They impudently denied us the use of the high seas and repeatedly repeated-ly executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our people who ventured; to approach the coasts of Europe. And many of our own people were corrupted. Men began be-gan to look upon their own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in their ' hot resentment and surprise whether there was any community in which hostile Intrigue did not lurk. What great nation in such circumstances would not have taken up arms? Much -as we had desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice. This flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we withheld our hand. Relations With German People. But tlurt is only part of the story. We know now as clearly as we knew before we were ourselves engaged that we are not enemies of the German people peo-ple and that they are not our enemies. They did not originate or desire this hideous war or wish that we should be drawn into it; and we are vaguely conscious con-scious that we are fighting their cause, as they will some day see it, as well as our own! They are themselves in the grip of the same sinister power that has now at last stretched its ugly talons tal-ons out and drawn blood from us. The whole world is in the grip of that power pow-er and is trying out the great battle which shall determine whether it is to he brought under its 'mastery or fling itself fj-ee. The war was begun by the military masters of Germany, who proved to be also the masters of Austria-Hungary. These men have never regard eu dh- I lions as peoples, men, women, fl-od j children of like Mood and frame us themselves, fur wlnnii governments existed ex-isted and in whom governments hud their life. They have regarded them merely as serviceable organizations which they could by force or intrigue bend or corrupt to their own pu1710.se. They have regarded the smaller states, in particular, and the peoples who could be overwhelmed by force, as their natural tools and instruments of domination. Their purpose has long been avowed. Military Masters Dominate Germany. Their plan was to throw a broad belt of German military power and political control across the very center of Europe Eu-rope and beyond the Mediterranean into in-to the heart of Asia ; and Austria-Hungary was to be as much their tool and pawn as Serbia or Bulgaria or Turkey or the ponderous states of the East. The dream had its heart at Berlin. It could have had a heart nowhere else ! It rejected the idea of solidarity of race entirely. The choice of peoples played no part in it at all. They ardently ar-dently desired to direct their own affairs, af-fairs, would be satisfied only by undisputed undis-puted independence. They could be kept quiet only by the presence or the constant threat of armed men. The German military statesmen had reckoned reck-oned with all that and were ready to deal with it in their own way. Deceitful Cry for Peace. Is it not easy to understand the eagerness eag-erness for peace that has been manifested mani-fested from Berlin ever since the snare was set and sprung? Peace, peace, peace has been the talk of her foreign office for now a year and more ; not peace upon her own Initiative, but upon up-on the initiative of the nations over which she now deems herself to hold the advantage. Through all sorts of channels it has come to me, and in all sorts of guises, but never with the terms disclosed which the German government gov-ernment would be willing to accept. That government still holds a valuable part of France, though with slowly relaxing re-laxing grasp, and practically the whole of Belgium. It cannot go further; it dare not go back. It wishes to close its bargain before It is too late The military masters under whom Germany is bleeding see very clearly to what point Fate has brought them. If they fall back or are forced back an inch, their power both abroad and at home will fall to pieces like a house of cards. -If they can secure se-cure peace now with the immense advantages ad-vantages still in their hands which they have up to this point apparently gained, they will have justified themselves them-selves before the German people ; they will have gained by force what they promised to gain by it: an immense expansion of German power, an immense im-mense enlargement of German industrial indus-trial and commercial opportunities. If they fail, their people will thrust them aside ; a government accountable to the people themselves will be set up in Germany as it has been in England, in the United States, in France, and in all the great countries of the modern mod-ern time except Germany. If they succeed suc-ceed they are safe and Germany and the world are undone ; if they fail Germany Ger-many Is saved and the world will be at peace. If they succeed, we and all the rest of the world must remain armed, as they will remain, and must make ready for the next step of aggression ag-gression ; if they fail, the world may unite for peace, and Germany may be of the union. Practiced Campaign of Deceit. . The present particular aim of the masters of Germany is to deceive all those who throughout the world stand for the rights of peoples and the self-government self-government of nations; for they see what immense strength the forces of justice and of liberalism are gathering out of this war. The sinister intrigue Is being no less actively conducted in this country than in Russia and in every country in Europe Eu-rope to which the agents and dupes of the imperial German government can get access. Is a People's War. 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 amongst all the nations na-tions of the world, a war to make the world safe for the peoples who live in it and have made it their own, the German people themselves included; and that with us rests the choice to break through all these hypocrisies and patent cheats and masks of brute force and help set the world free, or else stand aside and let it be dominated a long age through by sheer weight of arms and the arbitrary choices of self-constituted self-constituted masters, by the nation which can maintain the biggest armies and the most Irresistible armaments a power to which the world has afforded af-forded no parallel and in the face of which political freedom must wither and perish. For us there Is but one choice. We have made it. Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way in this day of high resolution when every principle we hold dearest is to be vindicated and made secure for the salvation of the nations. We are ready to plead at the bar of history, and on" flag shall wear a new luster. |