The Lusitania was Germany’s deliberate action. She arrogantly commanded us in a few newspaper advertisements not to sail on the Lusitania—as though she owned us and the sea. After the deed, she struck medals in commemoration of it. German church bells rang to glorify it. A German holiday was created to celebrate it. German preachers there and in America preached sermons lauding it. It was a national act, nationally planned, nationally ratified. From that day we were at war. Let those who like, of whatever station, say “We are not at war with the German people.” That is not true. The German people, the German rank and file, not their leaders alone, were back of all these deeds and ratified them absolutely on both sides of the Atlantic. From that day, too, the issue might really have been known. I went into the elevator of a building in my city, a copy of a newspaper in my hand with the black headline of the Lusitania across the page. The German operator of the elevator saw it as I turned it toward him silently. “Vell, they vere varned!” he said, and grinned. That incident shows Germany in America, then and now, covert, sinister, sneering, confident, exultant. You could not find an answer you would dare speak to such a man. There is no deed that you could do. I pulled together, and only said, “It will cost Germany the war.” And so it did. But we did not go to war; we tried to keep out of the war. The daily page of red horrors fresh from Europe taught us what war meant at this day of the world. Women naturally did not like the thought of casting their sons into that brutal hell. And then arose the female-men, the pacifists, forgetting their sex, forgetting their country, forgetting the large and lasting game of humanity’s good, which cannot count present cost, but must plan for the long game of the centuries. With the pacifists suddenly and silently rose the hidden army of German espionage and German sympathy in our own country, quick to see that here was their chance! Millions of German gold now came pouring across to finance this break in America’s forces. Her high ministers to our Government began their treachery, forgetful of all ambassadorial honor, perjuring themselves and their country. The war was on, on both sides the Atlantic now. And still America did not know, and still America did not go to war. We dreaded it, held back from it, month after month—some, as it seems to many, wrongly and unhappily even did what they could to capitalize the fact that we were not at war. But the hidden serpent raised its head and began to strike—to strike so openly, in so long a series of overt acts, that now our civil courts and the great national machinery of justice in Washington became literally helpless in their endeavors at resistance.