Are we not interested in the right decision of this cause? A peaceable people, loving our own way, jealous of interference, we should assuredly present a lamentable spectacle were we called upon to defend ourselves against a predatory enemy. Possibly a more lamentable spectacle of inefficiency combined with corruption than England has given the world the past year! And at last we are becoming aware that our policy of selfish isolation does not mean immunity from attack. We are realizing that those "three thousand miles of cool sea-water" no longer make an effectual barrier against the ingenuity of modern men.
But I would not put the matter on the selfish basis of our own security. It is vastly larger than that. It is, vitally, what manner of world we wish to have for ourselves and our children. At the invasion of Belgium, America gave with splendid unanimity the response: Americans did not want the German world! Since then, alas, it would seem that the clear moral reaction of our people to the demonstration of the world struggle has been gradually weakening: we are becoming confused, permitting insidious reasoners to cloud the issue, listening to the prompting of the beast in our own bellies, hesitating, dividing, excusing, evading the great question--"seeing both sides." As if there were two sides to such a plain issue stripped of all its fallacies and subterfuges and lies! Do we wish to have American life take on the moral and intellectual and artistic color of German ideals? Do we prefer the "old German god" to the culture and humanities we have inherited from the Latin tradition?... "We, too, have sinned." In our blood is all the crude materialism of a triumphant Germany without her discipline and her organization. We, too, are ready to enter the fierce war of commercial rivalry with England and Germany. We, too, believe in the good of economic expansion, though dubious about our own imperialism. Surely no people that ever lived stood hesitating so dangerously at the crossroads as America at this hour. Prudence has prevented us as a nation from pronouncing that moral verdict on the cause which might have had decisive weight in hastening the world decision. But a selfish timidity cannot prevent us individually from realizing the immense importance to us of the decision that is being ground out in the tears and blood of Europe. And no ideal of diplomatic neutrality can prevent Americans who care for anything but their own selfish well-being from doing all in their power to make ours a Latin rather than a Teutonic world.