Wilson's praise of Germany's imaginary
love of justice and humanity as a death-warrant for themselves.
They could not believe that he who wrote such words, or the
American people who swallowed them, could ever be roused to give
succor to the Allies in their desperation.
Three years later I asked Roosevelt what he would have done, if
he had been President in May, 1915. He said, in substance, that,
as soon as he had read in the New York newspaper* the
advertisement which Bernstorff had inserted warning all American
citizens from taking passage on the Lusitania, he would have sent
for Bernstorff and asked him whether the advertisement was
officially acknowledged by him. Even Bernstorff, arch-liar that
he was, could not have denied it. "I should then have sent to the
Department of State to prepare his passports; I should have
handed them to him and said, 'You will sail on the Lusitania
yourself next Friday; an American guard will see you on board,
and prevent your coming ashore.' The breaking off of diplomatic
relations with Germany," Roosevelt added, "would probably have
meant war, and we were horribly unprepared.
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