The Constitution divided the government into three branches: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. In order that no one of them might have too much power, the duties of each were determined and divided. The executive, of which the President is chief, could do certain deeds and duties. The judicial had the final determination of the right of enacting certain laws, saying whether or not later laws, made by Congress, conformed to the original Constitution. But to the legislative, represented by two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, the Constitution granted certain very clear powers. Among these powers was the power to declare war. In autocracies monarchs declare war; but in a democracy such as ours it is right and just that the power of declaring war should rest with that body most directly responsive to the people of the nation. The Congress is such a body. The Constitution therefore gave to Congress the right of war declaration; and nothing better illustrates the difference between autocracy and democracy than the fact that the Emperor of Germany had thrust his country into war three days before the German _Reichstag_, which is the limited popular assembly of the empire, knew officially of its existence, while the President of the United States had to summon Congress into special session for consideration of the war problem. On the second day of April, 1917, the President went before the Congress which he had summoned. Beneath the dome of the white Capitol in the city of Washington, while a world waited breathlessly for the verdict of the great nation, he read his message to the men who represent the people of the United States. In that message he set down the case of the United States against Germany. Only twice before in the history of America--at the beginning of the War of the Revolution and at the beginning of the war between the States--had there been so momentous an occasion. Upon the men assembled in the Senate and the House of Representatives depended the honor, the future of the nation, and the honor and the future of democracy. “It is a war,” the President read to them, “against all nations.... The challenge is to all mankind. Each nation must decide for itself how it will meet it. The choice we make for ourselves must be made with a moderation of counsel and a temperateness of judgment befitting our character and our motives as a nation. We must put excited feelings away. Our motive will not be revenge or the victorious assertion of the physical might of the nation, but only the vindication of right, of human right, of which we are only a single champion.” In that spirit the Congress listened. In that spirit they heard the voice of the man who was speaking not for himself but for our United States, not for our generation alone but for the generations who have passed and the generations who will come, when he said: