Speech or Document 14

MURDER ON THE HIGH SEAS

On the ninth of May, 1915, two days after the Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by a German submarine, Colonel Roosevelt made the following statement in the press:

THE German submarines have established no effective blockade of the British and French coast lines.  They have endeavored to prevent the access of French, British and neutral ships to Britain and France by attacks upon them which defy every principle of international law as laid down in innumerable existing treaties, including The Hague Conventions.  Many of these attacks have represented pure piracy; and not a few of them have been accompanied by murder on an extended scale.  In the case of the Lusitania the scale was so vast that the murder became wholesale.

A number of American ships had already been torpedoed in similar fashion.  In two cases American lives were lost.  When the Lusitania sank some twelve hundred non-combatants, men, women and children, were drowned, and more than a hundred of these were Americans.  Centuries have passed since any war vessel of a civilized power has shown such ruthless brutality toward non-combatants, and especially toward women and children.  The Moslem pirates of the Barbary Coast behaved at times in similar fashion, until the civilized nations joined in suppressing them; and the other pirates who were outcasts from among these civilized nations also at one time perpetrated similar deeds, until they were sunk or hung.  But none of these old-time pirates committed murder on so vast a scale as in the case of the Lusitania.

The day after the tragedy the newspapers reported in one column that in Queenstown there lay by the score the bodies of women and children, some of the dead women still clasping the bodies of the little children they held in their arms when death overwhelmed them.  In another column they reported the glee expressed by the Berlin journals at this “great victory of German naval policy." It was a victory over the defenseless and the unoffending, and its signs and trophies were the bodies of the murdered women and children.

Our treaties with Prussia in 1785, 1799, and 1828, still in force in this regard, provide that if one of the contracting parties should be at war with any other power the free intercourse and commerce of the subjects or citizens of the party remaining neutral with the belligerent powers shall not be interrupted.  Germany has treated this treaty as she has treated other scraps of paper.

But the offense goes far deeper than this.  The action of the German submarines in the cases cited can be justified only by a plea which would likewise justify the wholesale poisoning of wells in the path of a hostile army, or the shipping of infected rags into the cities of a hostile country; a plea which would justify the torture of prisoners and the reduction of captured women to the slavery of concubinage.  Those who advance such a plea will accept but one counter plea — strength, the strength and courage of the just man armed.

When those who guide the military policy of a state hold up to the soldiers of their army the Huns, and the terror once caused by the Huns, for their imitation, they thereby render themselves responsible for any Hunnish deed which may follow.  The destruction of cities like Louvain and Dinant, the scientific vivisection of Belgium as a warning to other nations, the hideous wrongdoing to civilians, men, women and children in Belgium and nothern France, in order thereby to terrorize the civilian population — all these deeds, and those like them, done on the land, have now been paralleled by what has happened on the sea.

In the teeth of these things, we earn as a nation measureless scorn and contempt if we follow the lead of those who exalt peace above righteousness, if we heed the voices of those feeble folk who bleat to high heaven that there is peace when there is no peace.  For many months our government has preserved between right and wrong a neutrality which would have excited the emulous admiration of Pontius Pilate— the arch-typical neutral of all time.  We have urged as a justification for failing to do our duty in Mexico that to do so would benefit American dollars.  Are we now* to change faces and advance the supreme interest of American dollars as a justification for continuance in the refusal to do the duty imposed on us in connection with the world war?

Unless we act with immediate decision and vigor we shall have failed in the duty demanded by humanity at large, and demanded even more clearly by the self-respect of the American Republic.

We did not act with immediate decision and vigor.  We did not act at all.  The President immediately after the sinking made a speech in which occurred his sentence about our “being too proud to fight." This was accepted, very properly, by foreign nations as the statement of our official head that we ranked in point of national spirit and power with China.  I then published the following interview:

“I think that China is entitled to draw all the comfort she can from this statement, and it would be well for the United States to ponder seriously what the effect upon China has been of managing her foreign affairs during the last fifteen years on the theory thus enunciated.

“If the United States is satisfied with occupying some time in the future the precise international position that China now occupies, then the United States can afford to act on this theory.  But it can not so act if it desires to regain the position won for it under Washington and by the men who in the days of Abraham Lincoln wore the blue under Grant and the gray under Lee.

“I very earnestly hope that the President will act promptly.  The proper time for deliberation was prior to sending his message that our Government would hold Germany to a ' strict accountability ' if it did the things which it has now actually done.

“The 150 babies drowned on the Lusitania, the hundreds of women drowned with them — scores of these women and children being Americans — and the American ship, the GulHight, which was torpedoed, offer an eloquent commentary on the actual working of the theory that it is not necessary to assert rights and that a policy of blood and iron can safely be met by a policy of milk and water.

" I see it stated in the dispatches from Washington that Germany now offers to stop the practice of murder on the high seas, committed in violation of the neutral rights she is pledged to preserve, if we will now abandon further neutral rights, which by her treaty she has solemnly pledged herself to see that we exercise without molestation.

“Such a proposal is not even entitled to an answer.  The manufacture and shipments of arms and ammunition to any belligerent is moral or immoral, according to the use to which the arms and munitions are to be put.  If they are to be used to prevent the redress of hideous wrongs inflicted on Belgium then it is immoral to ship them.  If they are to be used for the redress of those wrongs and the restoration of Belgium to her deeply-wronged and unoffending people, then it is eminently moral to send them.

“Without 24 hours' delay this country should and could take effective action.  It should take possession of all the interned German ships, including the German warships, and hold them as a guarantee that ample satisfaction shall be given us.  Furthermore it should declare that in view of Germany's murderous offenses against the rights of neutrals all commerce with Germany shall be forthwith forbidden and all commerce of every kind permitted and encouraged with France, England, Russia, and the rest of the civilized world.

“I do not believe that the firm assertion of our rights means war, but, in any event, it is well to remember there are things worse than war.

“Let us as a nation understand that peace is worth having only when it is the hand-maiden of international righteousness and of national self-respect."

Speech or Document 15

THE ENSLAVEMENT OF THE BELGIANS

A LETTER ADDRESSED TO A MASS MEETING HELD AT CARNEGIE HALL, NEW YORK, ON DECEMBER 15, I9l6, TO PROTEST AGAINST THE BRUTAL TREATMENT OF THE BELGIANS BY THEIR GERMAN “CONQUERORS”

I EARNESTLY wish you all success in your meeting; and all Americans who are proud of the good name of their country and also have in them the capacity for general indignation on behalf of a foully wronged people, must join in hearty thanks to you and your associates.

Germany's campaign of methodically organized atrocities against the unhappy Belgian people has culminated in the transplanting of over a hundred thousand Belgian men into a condition of state-slavery in Germany where their labor is to be used to aid in the conquest of their fellow-countrymen.  Similar transplantings of civilian non-combatants, both men and women, into slavery in Germany have already occurred in Northern France.

This action is paralleled by the action of the Assyrian conquerors of Syria and Palestine; but until the present war broke out it was supposed that such hideous infamies were effectively checked by the system of international law which has grown up under modern Christian civilization.  But Germany has trampled under foot every device of international law for securing the protection of the weak and the unoffending.  She has shown an utter disregard of all considerations of pity, mercy, humanity and international morality.  She has counted upon the terror inspired by her ruthless brutality to protect her from retaliation or interference.

The outrages committed on our own people have been such as the United States has never before been forced to endure, and have included the repeated killing of our men, women and children.  The sinking of the Marina and the Cheming the other day, with the attendant murder of six Americans, was but the most recent in an unbroken chain of injuries and insults, which by comparison make mere wrong to our property interests sink into absolute insignificance.

As long as neutrals keep silent, or speak apologetically, or take refuge in the futilities of the professional pacifists, there will be no cessation in these brutalities.  But surely this last and crowning brutality, which amounts to the imposition of a cruel form of state-slavery on a helpless and unoffending conquered nation, must make our people realize that they imperil their own souls, that they degrade their own manhood, if they do not bear emphatic testimony against the perpetration of such iniquity.

I am glad to be one among the Americans who thus bear testimony.  Yours very truly, THEODORE ROOSEVELT.