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Show . GETREADY FOR . COMING WAR Prominent Americans Urge Action and Point Out Our Extreme Weakness. NEW YORK. March 20. With a warning that the United States is un- prepared for war with any first-claps power, a committee of the Union League club, headed by Robert Bacon, former ambassador to France, and including in-cluding in its membership many men of prominence, presented at a special meeting tonight a report calling upon the country to get ready for action. Charles E. Hughes presided. "If we go to war with Germany," said the report, "our only real protection protec-tion will be the ships of the Frencn .ind British navies and our own navy, which is under manned. "We have no coast defense Tvhirh would prevent the landing of troops on our shores. We ha e no defense which would prevent the complete and i immediate capture of our coast cities and ammunition factories in the coast.) states of New Jersey and Connecticut, aa well a '-very one of our navj yards. The facility with which a hostile power pow-er could land troops on our shores has' been repeatedly and authoritatively stated. 'Our regular organizations lack many things which are vitally essen-j tlal in modern warfare. We lack ma Chine guns of all types We lack gre nades and bombs. We are without trench mortars of the type in use in Europe. We are without various kinds! of field apparatus. We are short of' modern field wireless We are with- out any of the modern type of heavy! mobile artillery, such as in ceneral usel in Europe "We are short of rifle-- and all field' artillery We have not a field gun for olunteers Our supplies of reserve ammunition are ridiculouslv .small." In opening the meeting Mr. Hughes said: "There is a prineipln Involved in the attacks that have been made and the surres of that principle, I do not ihink it is too much to say. threatens the integrity of our country if thai is successfully maintained, the question ques-tion is not simply of commercial rights. ! rreard these attacks, the method of iheir conduct, as an onslaught on liberty lib-erty and on civilization itself. Ii is tiniH that 'he American people under-i stood it. All organizations exercising! public influence should record their convictions. Germany Making War ElihU Root declared Germany was making war upon the United States. Technically there may not be a war." he said "because it may be that J it takes two to produce war. but Germany Ger-many is making war upon us. and we are all waitinc to pre whether we are to take it lying down It is either war or it is submission to oppression. "My diagnosis of the situation Is that the president wants to heart whether the people of the United I States want him to go on and act He has said so many times. Let us answer an-swer him and tell him that ih American Amer-ican people do not want him to discuss, dis-cuss, to plan or to talk about what is going to be done, but to act " Mr. Root said the multiplying millions mil-lions of the Orient were seeking an outlet for national evolution and that! the only territory left open to them was that which extended from Tierra del Fuego to the Caribbean Sea, pro-i pro-i or ted by nothing but the Monroe doctrine. doc-trine. "That Is what we have to face aftr-r this war is over," he asserted, "and where is our Monroe Doctrine? What is it worth without force behind It? And if the Monroe Doctrine falls: if it is ignored with a German naval station sta-tion in the Caribbean and an Asiatic-naval Asiatic-naval station in Lower California, the Panama canal is as worthless to us for strategic purpoces as the Dardanelles Darda-nelles to Russia today." Mr Root said the letter of Foreign Minister Zimmermann of Germany to Mexico, proposing the alliance of Mexico and Japan for the dismemberment dismember-ment of the United States, revealed a pubtlfl purpose which has been thought out and which is being work-1 cd out. and which will continue to be I worked out until this country stands alone and defenseless against immediate immedi-ate and contiguous superior military power." ( "Now, If our voice can be hearLC-, he declared, in closing, "if we can do, something, anything, to make our government gov-ernment feel that the free and loyal people of America want to assert thei principles of liberty and freedom and I to assert them with the power of ltsi great people, for God's sake let's do I ! 1t!" Resolutions which were adopted in-1 eluded "the Union League club's earnest earn-est support to the president of the United States in making immediate and urgent use of the powers vested in him to forestall and repel German attacks," called for universal military service and asked the American people peo-ple to "face the fact that war with this country exists by the act of Germany Ger-many and that the whole united weight of American loyalty must be concentrated upon effective governmental govern-mental action." |