It is certainly desirable that we should remain entirely neutral, and nothing but urgent need would warrant breaking our neutrality and taking sides one way or other.
I am not passing judgment on Germany’s action.... I admire and respect the German people. I am proud of the German blood in my veins. When a nation feels that the issue of a contest in which, from whatever reason, it finds itself engaged will be national life or death, it is inevitable that it should act so as to save itself from death and to perpetuate its life.... What has been done in Belgium has been done in accordance with what the Germans unquestionably sincerely believed to be the course of conduct necessitated by Germany’s struggle for life.
Col. Roosevelt’s neutrality was a subject of newspaper comment, as indicated by an article in the New York “Times” of September 14, 1914, headed: “Roosevelt Neutral--Confers with Oscar Straus Again, Presumably about Mediation--Is the Kaiser’s Friend.” The lines gave the import of a dispatch from Oyster Bay, Roosevelt’s place of residence, and related that “Mr. Straus’s talks with Roosevelt, coupled with the diplomatic activity of Mr. Straus in diplomatic circles in Washington and New York, have given rise to rumors that Roosevelt’s aid is being sought by those who are endeavoring to pave the way for a settlement of the war.”
The true import of Mr. Straus’s mission to Oyster Bay in September, 1914, has not yet been made public, though it precludes the suggestion that it was to persuade Roosevelt to pave the way to a settlement of the war, since Mr. Straus soon revealed himself as one of the most active partisans of the Allies in America. It was within a short time after that visit that Roosevelt reversed himself, and from an avowed neutral became a pronounced militant in the cause of the allied powers, denouncing the invasion of Belgium as an act that compelled the United States legally and morally to take up arms against Germany. Although his contention was persistently opposed by papers like the New York “Sun” and “World,” which showed that the article of the Hague convention which guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium had never been signed by England or France, and therefore was inoperative as to all other signatories.