sentiment among our people and felt sure that the United States never would come in, no matter how many American lives nor how much American property Germany might destroy, nor how many of our ships German pirates might sink at sea, without warning.  The German government had built up a propaganda in this country that at one time threatened to poison the minds of all our people.  There were some among us who hated England, and wanted to see Germany win for no other reason than that.  Others hated Russia, and so desired Germany to win.  Germany’s secret intrigues in Mexico came near to getting us into a war with that country.  In the face of all these things there was a strong sentiment among our people and even in Congress favorable to Germany.  It is easy now to say that we should have gone to war when the Lusitania was sunk, but pro-German feeling was so noisy and so strong, even though it was held by a minority, that the Congress itself was affected and withheld its hand.

Public sentiment had to be crystalized so that it would stand back of the administration.  With our lack of a secret service capable of coping with the German agents who were busy everywhere and all the time, we were at a disadvantage in gathering evidence to convince our people that the Germans were menacing our very existence.  Even after the secret service was built up it took many months of hard work and several thousand government men to uncover and stamp out their organizations and their ruthless plots.  The slimy tracks of the German ambassador at Washington had to be followed through devious underground channels that no one had suspected.  The embassy had filled the country with German poison gas, and backed the German campaign of wholesale arson.  Germans living here, many of them American born, were busily counteracting public opinion as the evidences accumulated.

Democracies are always at a disadvantage in dealing with monarchies; in the initial stages of war at least.  We have seen it demonstrated that a democracy must become autocratic if it is to carry on a war successfully.  But an American autocracy takes the shape of a temporary delegation of unusual power in conditions that cannot wait for the slow action of ordinary times; and those who exercise it are put in power by the people themselves, to do the people’s will.  It was necessary to consolidate not only the direction of the nation itself, but of our military affairs abroad.  We soon got the home situation in hand, and then the President of the United States threw his influence, backed by all the American people, toward bringing the allied armies and those of the United States under one head in the person of General Foch as Field Marshal.  This was not accomplished until after the great Italian disaster, when it looked as though the Austro-Hungarian armies would crush Italy.  The same may be said of the threatened disaster to the British army early in 1918, when von Hindenburg began his great drive toward Calais and Paris.  Here were Germany, Austria-Hungary, Turkey and Bulgaria, four monarchies dominated by the German government, fighting nearly all the democracies of the world, not considering Russia, which dropped out shortly before the United States effectively entered the war.