Page:The Lusitania's Last Voyage (lusitaniaslastvo00lauriala).djvu/127

There was a problem when proofreading this page.

The Lusitania's Last Voyage

pleased if the ship, which for many months past has been of aid to the enemy and has done us harm, could have been destroyed without the necessity of this catastrophe befalling its passengers. But must we not, we whose throat the enemy is seeking to cut, we whose defeat by hunger and by lack of war material nearly every one would witness complacently as an unavoidable fate, must we not defend ourselves from this dreadful danger, which still threatens us, with all our might and with all the means that the German spirit can invent and which the honor of the German people recognizes as legitimate weapons? Were not those who now raise outcries because the German weapons are better than their own the very ones who proclaimed war to the knife and opened it with their blockade? Or have they a right to accuse us, those who allowed their friends and relatives to entrust themselves to a ship

( 105 )