Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 94, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 April 1916 — WHAT DOES IT MEAN? [ARTICLE]

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

President Wilson seems determine! in his decision to cause a break between the United States and Germany. Today he goes before congress to present the final statement concerning Germany's submarine warfare before sending a note to Germany that newspapers say may -e----sult in a severance of all diplomatic relations with that country. He is urging the cause of “humanity” an! gradually bringing the United States to a condition that may make us an involuntary party to the great world war.

We do not believe that President Wilson realizes what he is doing or what it means to the people of the United States. We claim for ourselves entire neutrality, the kind that would take no chances of being involved even in our national sympathies in the oonflict that is raging across the Atlantic. That Is what President Wilson urged from the start was the duty of every American, but we can not believe that President Wilson and his advisers have been true to the course they urged all American citizens to pursue. It is a late hour to say that had our president and his secretary of state been statesmen of far seeing they might early in the foreign war have defined a general policy relating o -the belligerents that would have made the Lusitania incident ‘mpossible, but they did not see and in the absence of and the allies adopted a policy of siezing neutral cargoes and mail rhips and stripping them of everything that international law guarantees to eutral countries. England established a blockade of German ports and established a guardianship of the seas. We protested feebly and continued to ship to England everything needed to prosecute the war. We went further by allowing J. Pierpont Morgan to act as the financial agent of the allies in this country, to float a half billion loan, contract for supplies and see that they were manufactured and shipped, and thus place ourselves in a position that threatened our neutrality and which was gradually destroying the equal and even neutrality we were enjoined to maintain. Truly, there was unquestioned right to ship munitions to the allies and we could, argue that - American citizens had a right under international law to take passage on ships laden with munitions, notwithstanding the fact that Germany in retaliation of the blockade had announced its intention to prosecute a submarine war against its enemies. But is it so important to be a stickler for our rights and the rights of international law with one nation when by a simple sacrifice, that of warning Americans to remain off these vessels, we could have been really neutral and make the only concession since the war to Germany. Every German in the United States who dared to express any sympathy for the Fatherland was branded a hyphenated traitor," but the other day the papers of the country published the names of 500 college professors who had sent a message of sympathy to the allies. .Some American citizen, loyal to the last drop of blood to the American cause, sends $lO to his dear old mother in Germany, thinking that perhaps she needs it, and the money is stolen by England when avessel carrying United States mail is overhauled and then we allow the allies to buy American sympathy by borrowing $500,000,000, parceled throughout our land in small amounts at attractive interest and largely smuggled away from taxation, and we claim to be neutral. And all the time that American citizens are being killed and their properties confiscated and dynamited in Mexico and raiding parties come over to the American side of the international border and kill women and children, we truckh>with *». ban Jit leader like Carranza and refuse to take action to speedily perform the punitive act against a nation of bandits iby a ridiculous pursuit into a place where the gravest dangers threaten after one man who possibly has the protection of the pseudo president we so confidingly trust. And then are led into a diplomatic, controversy of great danger with a nation that wants to be our friend rather than "Issue a simple warning to Ameiican citizens to stay out of the war zone or to travel on neutral vessels if compelled to go. The editor of The Republican has no sympathies in .he foreign war. By birth and ancestry the, writer is an American. No hyphens blind us and no relations of any kind make us partisan. There is but one nation in the final analysis and that is America and we would guard its neutrality so zealously that heaven itself could not discern any favor, for the foreign war dent Wilson be backed up by congress and should' this country eventually be forced into opposition to Germany, as we fear it may by the unneutral acts that have official sanction, there would be none more determined than ithe writer to stand by the United

States, but now the subject is free for discussion and believing President Wilson is not maintaining the noutrlity he recommended to the people and that his attitude toward Germany is not meeting the approval of our cosmopolitan nation we have pointed out some unneutral happenings and hope that President Wilson will not drag us into the foreign conflict. We feel just as Porter Emerson Browne expressed himself in a recent article in McClure’s. He said that had Roosevelt been the president of the United States and Von Tirpitz had suggested to the Kaiser -the iblowipg up Of the Lusitania the Kaiser would have replied; ’’Look here, Tirp, there ris a guy at the head of the United States who would he over here at a single bound* have his hands in your whiskers and both feet in my bread basket if you start anything of that kind. Yon MfiK-fiSkjSL; here and don’t come back until you have some suggestion that don’t threaten to get him warm under the collar.” Let us be neutral and v® w™ be real Americans, the kind who will he of service should: a crisis come.