“It is plain enough how we were forced into war,” President Wilson declared in his Flag Day Address of June 14, 1917. “The extraordinary insults and aggressions of the Imperial 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. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinions of our people in their own behalf. 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 in our own capital. “They sought by violence to destroy our industries and arrest our commerce. They tried to incite Mexico to take up arms against us and to draw Japan into 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 executed their threat that they would send to their death any of our people who ventured to approach the coasts of Europe. “Many of our own people were corrupted. Men began to look upon their own neighbors with suspicion and to wonder in their hot resentment 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 desired peace, it was denied us, and not of our own choice. The flag under which we serve would have been dishonored had we withheld our hand.” The President of the United States stated America’s case against Germany mildly. Evidence of the bad faith of the government of Germany to the government of the United States is piled in the archives of the State Department in Washington. The honest efforts of our government to establish honest relations with them were met by German officials with quibbles, misrepresentations, counter-accusations, and continuing, deliberate delays. German high officials kept us in humiliating waiting while German official agents in this country, protected by the rules of diplomatic immunity from criminal prosecution, used their trust to conspire against our internal peace. Agents of the German Embassy placed spies through the length and breadth of our country. They put their agents at work in Japan and in Latin America while they were professing to be our friends. They bought newspapers and employed speakers for the purpose of rousing distrust of us in those countries. They incited insurrection in Cuba, in Haiti, and in Santo Domingo. They did their best to arouse against us the Danish West Indies. They spread suspicion of us and our motives in South America. They conducted an attack upon the Monroe Doctrine such as no other nation had ever attempted.