Three years later I asked Roosevelt what he would have done, if he had been President in May, 1915. He said, in substance, that, as soon as he had read in the New York newspaper* the advertisement which Bernstorff had inserted warning all American citizens from taking passage on the Lusitania, he would have sent for Bernstorff and asked him whether the advertisement was officially acknowledged by him. Even Bernstorff, arch-liar that he was, could not have denied it. "I should then have sent to the Department of State to prepare his passports; I should have handed them to him and said, 'You will sail on the Lusitania yourself next Friday; an American guard will see you on board, and prevent your coming ashore.' The breaking off of diplomatic relations with Germany," Roosevelt added, "would probably have meant war, and we were horribly unprepared. But better war, than submission to a humiliation which no President of this country has ever before allowed; better war a thousand times, than to let the Germans go on really making war upon us at sea, and honeycombing the American people with plots on land, while our Government shamelessly lavishes praise on the criminal for his justice and humanity and virtually begs his pardon." * The advertisement was printed in the New York Times of April 23, 1915. Thus believed Roosevelt in the Lusitania crisis, and many others of us agreed with him. The stopping of German intrigues here, the breaking-off of diplomatic relations, would have been of inestimable benefit to this country. It would have caused every American to rally to the country's defense. It would have forced the reluctant Administration to prepare a navy and an army. It would have sifted the patriotic sheep from the sneaking and spying goats. It would have brought immense comfort to the Allies and corresponding despondency to the Huns. For Germany plunged into the war believing that England would remain neutral. When England came in, to redeem her word of honor, Germany's frantic purpose was to have us keep neutral and supply her with food and munitions. Had she known that there was any possibility of our actively joining the Allies, she would have hastened to make peace. Our first troops could have reached France in the early spring of 1916. They would not have been, of course, shock troops, but their presence in France would have been an assurance to the Allies that we were coming with all our force, and the Germans would soon have understood that this meant their doom. By the summer of 1916, the war would have been over.