When Germany invaded Belgium ... the people of the United States awoke to their first knowledge of what militarism may mean] There were people in the United States who believed that our country should go to war in defense of Belgium, just as we had gone to war to free Cuba from the dominion of Spain when the rule of Spain on that island became cruelly oppressive. But our government, believing that the war was not a parallel instance, since it had not yet violated those fundamental principles of our national life that had been struck at by Spain, refused to consider such action, and the people fell back into consideration of the causes and progress of the war abroad. It began to be clear, as German forces crossed Belgium and plunged into France, while at the same time German forces swept eastward, that Germany had evolved the definite scheme of world conquest which her later demands and movements have proven. The American people, however, were slow to believe this intention of Germany. Bit by bit only our country began to see that Germany was pushing forward a gigantic plan of territorial aggression, and with all that we heard and some that we believed, we were slow to see how this plan could affect the United States. Because we had lived apart from the rest of the world we would probably have continued to feel that, terrible as the war which Germany had begun was, it was not our war, and that all we were expected to do was to remain genuinely neutral and to give such assistance as the international law permitted neutral nations to give the wounded and stricken. But Germany would not allow us to remain apart. The ruling class of Prussia, headed by the Kaiser, grown mad with power and the desire for more power, put into operation methods that forced us toward war. Germany’s progress into this war had, as we have seen, struck blows at those principles for which America had struggled, the principles of individual freedom, of international peace, of the freedom of the seas. For any one of these ideals the republic might have rushed into war; but it was only when the American people came to know that Germany was plotting not only to overthrow the Monroe Doctrine but actually against the American Government here in the United States that we were roused to desire for conflict to uphold our national honor.