The manifesto of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic did not secure the support or signature of a single elected representative of any section of the Irish people, or of any man who had won influence by public services for Ireland. Its signatories were a convicted dynamiter, a handful of minor poets, journalists and schoolmasters, a junior corporation official, and a Syndicalist leader. The movement, wrote Mr. Redmond, was insane and anti-patriotic: "Germany plotted it, Germany organized it, Germany paid for it. So far as Germany's share in it is concerned, it is a German invasion of Ireland, as brutal, as selfish, as cynical as Germany's invasion of Belgium." _The Times History of the War._ [Illustration] _THE GRAVES OF ALL HIS HOPES_ [Illustration] "_THE SUSSEX_" "_You need cooling, my friend_" * * * * * I have deemed it my duty, therefore, to say to the Imperial German Government that if it is still its purpose to prosecute relentless and indiscriminate warfare against vessels of commerce by the use of submarines, notwithstanding the now demonstrated impossibility of conducting that warfare in accordance with what the Government of the United States must consider the sacred and undisputable rules of International Law and the universally recognized dictates of humanity, the Government of the United States is at last forced to the conclusion that there is but one course it can pursue and that unless the German Imperial Government should now declare and effect the abandonment of its present methods of warfare against passenger and freight-carrying vessels, this Government can have no choice but to sever diplomatic relations with the Government of the German Empire altogether. PRESIDENT WILSON'S _Address to Congress, April 19, 1916._ [Illustration] "_I THOUGHT YOU SAID YOU WERE TOO PROUD TO FIGHT!_" * * * * * This decision I have arrived at, to break off diplomatic relations with Germany unless her methods of submarine warfare were abandoned, with the keenest regret; the possibility of the action contemplated I am sure all thoughtful Americans will look forward to with unaffected reluctance. But we cannot forget that we are in some sort and by the force of circumstances the responsible spokesmen of the rights of humanity, and that we cannot remain silent while those rights seem in process of being swept utterly away in the maelstrom of this terrible war. We owe it to a due regard for our own rights as a nation, to our sense of duty as a representative of the rights of neutrals the world over, and to a just conception of the rights of mankind to take this stand now with the utmost solemnity and firmness. PRESIDENT WILSON'S _Address to Congress. April 19th, 1916._ [Illustration] "_Indeed, I am the most humane fellow in the world._" * * * * *