What were we fighting against? Against the old idea of feudalism that the ruler need respect no rights of the ruled, against the old Bourbon theory that the sovereign need obey none of the laws that govern the rest of humankind, against the principles of Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns that the people exist solely for the benefit of the ruling dynasties. All this Prussia had converted into the principle that the Fatherland is supreme, and that the people must obey the Fatherland in everything; and the autocrats of Prussia had made the Fatherland a savage monster, ruthless, unjust and cruel, devouring all it could to satisfy its greed. If you look back through history you will see that the crimes of all the despots are the crimes of Germany to-day and that whenever men were fighting tyranny, rapacity and cruelty they were fighting the same battle that America and her allies fight to-day. More than that. In fighting for freedom we are fighting for our preservation. The world cannot exist one half slave, the other half free. Let tyranny succeed in Europe and it can only be a short time before it will look hungrily at America. The Menace must be destroyed before it grows so powerful that none can withstand it. “The time has come,” wrote President Wilson shortly after the declaration of war, “to conquer or submit.” Submission would have been to surrender all the principles of the republic, the country to which lovers of liberty had looked for more than a century to prove the actual realization of their dreams. It is the German machine-made government, the autocratic ruling military caste, the idea that might makes right, and that small nations have no rights that big nations need respect, it is all these old and hideous beliefs of the Dark Ages and the era of despots that the liberty-loving nations are fighting to-day. The individual German is, after all, a human being like ourselves, though warped and twisted in his ideas of what is right and wrong by his selfish and barbarous government. The individual German may become a civilized man again, provided he can come to see the monstrous tyranny of his government. And for this reason President Wilson said to Congress in his speech of April 2, 1917, “We have no quarrel with the German people. We have no feeling toward them but one of sympathy and friendship. It was not upon their impulse that their government acted in entering this war. It was not with their previous knowledge or approval. It was a war determined upon as wars used to be determined upon in the old, unhappy days when peoples were nowhere consulted by their rulers and wars were provoked and waged in the interest of dynasties or of little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow-men as pawns and tools.”