Intervention, implying as it does military subjugation, is revolting to the people of the United States, notwithstanding the provocation to that course has been great, and should be resorted to, if at all, only as a last resort. The stubborn resistance of the President and his advisers to every demand and suggestion to enter upon it, is creditable alike to them and to the people in whose name he speaks. As to Germany, this paragraph of the Democratic platform might almost have been written into President Wilson’s message to Congress of April 2, 1917, so clearly does it set forth the spirit in which America entered into the war: We believe that every people has the right to choose the sovereignty under which it shall live; that the small states of the world have a right to enjoy from other nations the same respect for their sovereignty and for their territorial integrity that great and powerful nations expect and insist upon, and that the world has a right to be free from every disturbance of its peace that has its origin in aggression or disregard of the rights of peoples and nations, and we believe that the time has come when it is the duty of the United States to join with the other nations of the world in any feasible association that will effectively serve these principles, to maintain inviolate the complete security of the highway of the seas for the common and unhindered use of all nations. The impression was very general in the East that the West was apathetic or indifferent both as to the irresponsible and hostile acts of Mexicans and the growing insolence of the Imperial German Government with reference to American rights on the seas. Any such assumption was unfair at the time, and has since been disproved by the promptness and vigor with which the West responded to the call to arms. But the West had no intention of being stampeded. A Democratic President whose intellectual processes and manner of speech were radically different from those at least of his immediate predecessors, was exercising a Lincoln-like patience in his efforts to keep the country out of war. From the time the Mexican situation became threatening one might meet anywhere in the West Republicans who thought that the honor and security of the nation were being trifled with; that the President’s course was inconsistent and vacillating; and even that we should have whipped Mexico into subjection and maintained an army on her soil until a stable government had been established. These views were expressed in many parts of the West by men of influence in Republican councils, and there were Democrats who held like opinions.