The farmers, it seems to me, have occupied hitherto a singular position of disadvantage. They have not had the same freedom to get credit on their real assets that others have had who were in manufacturing and commercial enterprises, and while they sustained our life, they did not in the same degree with some others share in the benefits of that life.--_From President Wilson's remarks on signing the Rural Credits Bill, July 17, 1916._ [Illustration: (C) _Paul Thompson_ 1918: The President acknowledging greetings at a military review] Meanwhile secret agents had discovered an attempt by the German Foreign Office to enlist Mexican and Japanese support in the prospective war against America by promising annexations in the Southwest and on the Pacific Coast. Publication of this on March 1 converted a good many Americans of the interior who had hitherto been slow to recognize the seriousness of the German danger; and as the submarine campaign continued and no European neutrals followed the American example, the sentiment in favor of declaration of war grew every day. But for the President this involved considerable logical difficulty. From the first he had striven to maintain "impartiality of thought," or at least of speech. He had said that the war was no concern of America's; it would be the task of long historical research to assign the responsibility for its outbreak; that "with its causes and objects we are not concerned. The obscure foundations from which its tremendous flood has burst forth we are not interested to search for and explore." It was a war which should be ended by a peace without a victory. Whatever meaning the President attached to these statements when he made them, the meaning attached to them by the public was a serious obstacle to the man who was going to have to lead the nation into war. But he solved the dilemma by a change of base which affected the whole political complexion of the war thereafter, which introduced a new and overriding issue--an issue which, addressing Congress on April 2, he introduced to the world in his most famous phrase and the most effective of his speeches. America, he said, had no quarrel with the German people; that people had not made the war. But the Germans were ruled by an autocratic Government which had made neutrality impossible, which had shown itself "the natural foe of liberty." That Government had forced America to take up the sword for the freedom of peoples--of all peoples, even of the German people. America must fight "to make the world safe for democracy." On April 6, 1917, Congress declared war. _America at War, 1917-1918_