Six days earlier, on the 16th of January, the German secretary of foreign affairs had secretly despatched a communication to the German minister in Mexico, informing him that Germany intended to repudiate its pledge made to the United States to discontinue submarine warfare on neutral ships, and instructing him to offer to the Mexican Government New Mexico and Arizona if Mexico would join with Japan in attacking the United States. On the last day of January, 1917, the German ambassador to the United States, Count Bernstorff, brought to the secretary of state a note in which Germany announced her purpose of intensifying her submarine warfare. The German chancellor stated in Germany that the reason that this policy had not been put into force earlier was simply because his government had not been ready to act. On the 3d of February, 1917, the President announced to both houses of Congress the complete severance of our relations with Germany. Count Bernstorff went to Berlin, and James W. Gerard, American ambassador to Germany, was recalled to this country. Count Bernstorff had begged that no irrevocable decision of war be made until he had the chance to make one final plea for peace to the Kaiser. If he made the plea, he failed. The submarine warfare began again in greater violence. And on the twelfth day of March our government ordered the placing of armed guards on our merchant ships. With the Sixty-fourth Congress dissolved on the 4th of March, we had come to the door of the greatest war in the history of the world. CHAPTER V HOW THE UNITED STATES WENT INTO WAR One hundred and thirty years before the great war of Europe came to the threshold of the United States a group of wise, far-sighted statesmen met in the city of Philadelphia to make a constitution for the governing of the Colonies whose independence had just been won. They desired, above all things, to establish a government which would stand the test of time and remain a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. For months they deliberated, bringing to the meetings all the wisdom, all the ideals, all the visioning they had acquired from long study, and from victorious, righteous warfare. Finally they--the fathers of our republic--completed a document that has governed the United States of America and become to the world a model of democratic government. In this document, which was ratified by the States then existing and which became the law of those States which were admitted to the nation, its makers set down certain rules governing the making of war.