Roosevelt understood the harm which the German conspiracy was doing among our people, not only by polluting their ideals, but actually strengthening the coils which the propagandists had been winding, to strangle at the favorable moment American independence itself. We discovered then that the process of Germanization had been going on secretly during twenty years. Since England was the chief enemy in the way of German world domination, the German-Americans laid themselves out to render the English odious here. And they worked to such good purpose that the legal officers of the Administration admonished the American people that the English, in holding up merchant vessels laden with cargoes for Germany, committed breaches against international law which were quite as heinous as the sinking by German submarines of ships laden with American non-combatants. They magnified the loss of a cargo of perishable food and set it against the ferocious destruction of neutral human beings. Senator Lodge, however, expressed the clear thought and right feeling of Americans when he said that we were more moved by the thought of the corpse of an innocent victim of the Hun submarines than by that of a bale of cotton. These enormities, these sins of omission and commission, of which Roosevelt declared our Government guilty, amazed and exasperated him, and from the beginning of 1915 onward, he set himself three tasks. He wished to expose and circumvent German machinations over here. Next, he deemed it a pressing duty to rouse our country to the recognition that we must prepare at once for war. He saw, as every other sensible person saw, that as the conflict grew more terrible in Europe and spread into Asia and Africa, we should be drawn into it, and that therefore we must make ready. He seconded the plan of General Leonard Wood to organize a camp for volunteers at Plattsburg and other places; and what that plan accomplished in fitting American soldiers to meet and vanquish the Kaiser's best troops, has since been proved. President Wilson, however, would not officially countenance any preparation which, so far as the public was allowed to know his reasons, might be taken by the Germans as an unfriendly act. Finally, Roosevelt labored unceasingly to revive and make militant the ideals of true Americanism.