match against the torpedo. From the early days of the war there had been two opposing streams of influence moving through our people. In the one direction flowed the stream of pacifism, carrying the hopes of the advocates of disarmament, arbitration, and human brotherhood; in the other direction flowed the stream of preparedness, carrying the warnings of the soldier and the statesman against national impotence and its consequent humiliation of insult and defeat. Over against the peace foundations and international societies of various sorts, there began to be formed leagues and associations for the strengthening of America's defenses. In December, 1914, a group of two hundred and fifty business men of New York organized the National Security League, whose object was to obtain exact information as to the adequacy of our military and naval defenses and to rouse public opinion all over the country to the necessity for rendering ourselves secure against possible attack from any foreign foe.1 Senator Chamberlain, chairman of the Committee on Military Affairs, proposed a bill shortly afterwards for the creation of a Council of National Defense, consisting of the Secretaries of State, War, and Navy, and the chairmen of the Committees on Appropriations, Military and Naval Affairs, and Foreign Relations in both Houses of Congress. A. P. Gardner of Massachusetts, the leader of the preparedness movement in the House, said: "For a dozen years I have sat here like a coward in silence and listened while men have told us how the United States could safely depend on the state militia and the naval reserves. All the time I knew that it was not true."

It is impossible to say just when the President became convinced that we should have to take part in the war. According to his private secretary, Mr. Tumulty, he believed it from the

1 In August, 1915, the more radical members of this organization founded the National Defense Society, which condemned the Democratic administration for its remissness in the matter of preparedness. Four months later the still more radical American Rights Committee urged the immediate entrance of the United States into the war.

first. But as late as February 24, 1916, the President wrote to Senator Stone of Missouri, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations: "You are right in assuming that I shall do everything in my power to keep the United States out of the war. For many anxious months I have striven for that object . . and so far I have succeeded. I do not doubt that I shall continue to succeed." Perhaps the President's real conviction on the subject lay somewhere between the pessimism expressed to Tumulty and the optimistic letter to the senator. At any rate, he began soon after the inauguration of the submarine campaign to assume a different tone from that taken in his message of December, 1914, when he rejoiced that we were not ready, and never should be ready, to put into the field "a nation of men trained to arms." His speeches in the spring of 1915 have a vague and mystic note of warning in them, "like the Greek chorus of Eschylus, announcing doom." On the day of the dispatch of the third Lusitania note (July 21) he wrote to the Secretaries of War and Navy, asking for their advice on a program of national defense to be incorporated into his next message to Congress. And in that message he declared: "If ever our citizens are to fight effectively upon a sudden summons, they must know how modern fighting is done . . . and the government must be their servant in this matter." He recommended the increase of our standing army by about 40 per cent (from 108,000 to 142,000 men), with a reserve army of 400,000 "disciplined citizens," and a naval program for five years, calling for the construction of ten battleships, sixteen cruisers, fifty destroyers, and one hundred submarines. Late in January, 1916, he set out for the Middle West on a tour to advocate preparedness. He spoke at Pittsburgh, Cleveland,

1"One day in August, just after the Great War had begun,” says Tumulty, "he said to me, 'We cannot remain isolated in this war, for soon the contagion of it will spread until it reaches our shores."" Again, after his return from the Capitol on the day he delivered his war message to Congress (April 2, 1917), he sat "pale and silent" with his secretary in the cabinet room for a long time, and finally remarked, "Tumulty, from the very beginning I saw the end of this horrible thing, but I could not move faster than the mass of our people would permit" (J. P. Tumulty, "Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him," pp. 228, 256).

Milwaukee, Chicago, Des Moines, Topeka, Kansas City, and St. Louis in almost identical language, and the burden of his message was the "danger at this present moment to our national life." The people had laid on him, he said, the double obligation of keeping them out of war and keeping the national honor unstained. "Do you not see," he said at Cleveland, "that the time may come when it is impossible to do both of these things?" At St. Louis he said, "Speaking with all solemnity, I assure you that there is not a day to be lost." On his return to Washington he lost a valuable cabinet member on the army issue. Secretary of War Garrison advocated a wholly Federal army, such as the President had recommended to Congress; but Chairman Hay of the Committee on Military Affairs of the House preferred to have the government utilize the national guard, or militia, which was raised and officered by the states. When the President refused to accept his Secretary's plan of a "continental army" (without as yet committing himself to the Hay plan), Garrison resigned (February 10), and was shortly afterwards replaced by Newton D. Baker, the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio.

On the day of Garrison's resignation the German government announced that after February 29 its submarines would treat armed merchantmen as auxiliary vessels of war, liable to destruction without warning. Petitions poured in upon the President and Congress to preserve us from almost certain war by prohibiting American citizens from sailing on armed belligerent vessels. Resolutions to that effect were introduced into Congress by Senator Gore of Oklahoma and Representative McLemore of Texas. But the President held firmly to his position taken in the Lusitania notes. "Once accept a single abandonment of right," he wrote to Senator Stone, "and many other humiliations would follow. . . . What we are contending for in this matter is of the very essence of the things that have made America a sovereign nation. She cannot yield them without conceding her own impotency." He demanded an immediate vote on the resolutions in order that the country might know who stood by the administration. The resolutions were tabled by large majorities in both Houses (Senate, 68 to 14; House, 276 to 142).

The President was learning to speak in a new tone. When a German submarine sank the French passenger boat Sussex in the English Channel on March 24, with a loss of American lives, he sent not a remonstrance but an ultimatum to the Kaiser's government: "Unless the Imperial German Government should now immediately declare and effect an abandonment of its present methods of submarine warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, the government of the United States can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the German Empire altogether." On May 4 the German government replied that no more merchant ships would be sunk "without warning and without saving human lives."

The Sussex ultimatum marked the fifth and final stage of our neutrality. The threat of the rupture of diplomatic relations with one of the belligerent powers, if it continued its present methods of warfare, was essentially a threat of war; for almost invariably the recall of ambassadors has been the immediate prelude to hostilities between two great powers. Henceforth it depended on Germany alone, by her observance or her breach of the Sussex pledge, to keep the United States neutral or to provoke us to war. During the remainder of the year 1916 it looked as if we had won a notable diplomatic victory -and security. The German submarine activities, while not suspended, were desultory. This was not wholly due to the American protest. From the first, many high officials in the German Empire (including the chancellor, Von Bethmann-Hollweg) had been opposed to the ruthless submarine campaign, as likely to cost Germany more in the ill will of neutral nations than it could gain for her in the destruction of hostile commerce. Early

1 There was a string attached to the German promise, in the expression of the expectation that the United States in return would force Great Britain to observe the principles laid down in our notes of 1914 and 1915 on her detention of cargoes, and failing which the German government "would be faced by a new [!] situation, in which it must reserve to itself complete liberty of decision." But President Wilson brushed aside this condition by the reply that he "could not for a moment entertain, much less discuss," the suggestion that Germany's respect for the rights of our citizens on the high seas "should in any way or in the slightest degree be made contingent upon the conduct of any other government."

in 1916 the chief advocate of the unrestricted submarine warfare, Admiral von Tirpitz, had been obliged to yield the naval portfolio to the more moderate Von Capelle, and the Germans attempted to end the war by a series of drives on the French front. The Crown Prince failed in his tremendous fifty-day battle against Verdun, and some weeks later an allied counteroffensive on the Somme cost the Germans over fifteen hundred thousand men. Considerable opposition to the war developed in the Reichstag during the summer. The Minority Social Democrats under the lead of Haase and Ledebour broke with the government and demanded a negotiated peace. On December 16 the German emperor proposed a conference of the representatives of the belligerent powers at some neutral spot to discuss the possibility of ending the war. But the Allies regarded it as a "sham proposal," designed to sow dissension among them. They refused the invitation. Lloyd George, who had become prime minister of England a week before the Kaiser's offer, had declared that "only a crushing military victory" would bring the peace for which the Allies were fighting. Premier Briand of France agreed with him. "Peace can come," he said, "only out of our victory." When the German emperor was ready to sue for peace, he might ask the Allies' terms.

President Wilson's position was strengthened in the spring of 1916 by his diplomatic victory in the Sussex affair and by his political victory in the tabling of the Gore and McLemore resolutions. He had become the open champion of preparedness, marching at the head of parades in Washington and New York. He was speaking no longer with the mystic vagueness of a Greek chorus, but in clear and even defiant terms. He was urging upon Congress a military and naval program fully adequate to our national defense. He confessed in the opening speech of his Western tour, at New York (January 27, 1916), that he had "learned much in fourteen months," and had changed his mind on the question of preparedness. But his opponents attributed his "belated efforts to regain the prestige which he had lost by indecision and delay" to the persistent denunciation of his policies by "red-blooded Americans" like