Think what this implies! Two years and a half of fighting would never have taken place. At least three million lives among the Allied armies would have been saved. Russia would have been spared revolution, chaos, Bolshevism. Some, at least, of the myriads of massacred Armenians would not have been slain. Thousands of square miles of devastated territory would not have been spoiled. A hundred billions of dollars for equipping and carrying on the war would never have been spent. All this is not an idle dream; it is the calm statement of what would probably have happened if President Wilson, after the Lusitania outrage, had dared to break with Germany. History will hold him accountable for those millions of lives sacrificed, for the unspeakable suffering which the people of the ravaged regions had to endure, for the dissolution of Russia, which threatened to throw down the bases of our civilization, and for the waste of incalculable treasure. President Wilson's apologists assert that the country was not ready for him to take any resolute attitude towards Germany in May, 1915. They argue that if he had attempted to do so there would have been great internal dissension, perhaps even civil war, and especially that the German sections would have opposed preparations for war so stubbornly as to have made them impossible. This is pure assumption. The truth is that whenever or wherever an appeal was made to American patriotism, it met with an immediate response. The sinking of the Lusitania created such a storm of horror and indignation that if the President had lifted a finger, the manhood of America, and the womanhood, too, would have risen to back him up. But instead of lifting a finger, he wrote that message to Germany, praising the Germans for their traditional respect for justice and humanity. And a long time had yet to pass before he made the least sign of encouragement to those Americans who would uphold the honor of the United States and would have this, the greatest of Republics, take its due part in defending Democracy against the Huns' attempt to wipe Democracy off the earth forever. Having missed his opportunity then, Mr. Wilson could of course plead that the country was less and less inclined to go to war, because he furnished the pro-German plotters the very respite they had needed for carrying on their work. By unavowed ways they secured a strong support among the members of the National House of Representatives and the Senate. They disguised themselves as pacifists, and they found it easy to wheedle the "lunatic fringe" of native pacifists into working for the domination of William of Hohenzollern over the United States, and for the establishing of his world dominion. The Kaiser's propagandists spread evil arguments to justify all the Kaiser's crimes, and they found willing disciples even among the members of the Administration to repeat and uphold these arguments.