FDR

But neither do we want peace so much, that we are willing to pay for it by permitting him to attack our naval and merchant ships while they are on legitimate business.

No matter what it takes, no matter what it costs, we will keep open the line of legitimate commerce in these defensive water.

The United States will not make that fatal mistake.

One peaceful nation after another has met disaster because each refused to look the Nazi danger squarely in the eye until it had actually had them by the throat.

Normal practices of diplomacy--note writing--are of no possible use in dealing with international outlaws who sink our ships and kill our citizens.

There has now come a time when you and I must see the cold inexorable necessity of saying to these inhuman, unrestrained seekers of world conquest and permanent world domination by the sword: "You seek to throw our children and our…

The danger is here now--not only from a military enemy but from an enemy of all law, all liberty, all morality, all religion.

The Nazi danger to our Western world has long ceased to be a mere possibility.

And I am sure that even now the Nazis are waiting to see whether the United States will by silence give them the green light to go ahead on this path of destruction.

This was one determined step towards creating a permanent world system based on force, on terror and on murder.

No tender whisperings of appeasers that Hitler is not interested in the Western Hemisphere, no soporific lullabies that a wide ocean protects us from him--can long have any effect on the hard-headed, far-sighted and realistic American…

It is now clear that Hitler has begun his campaign to control the seas by ruthless force and by wiping out every vestige of international law, every vestige of humanity.

Unrestricted submarine warfare in 1941 constitutes a defiance--an act of aggression--against that historic American policy.

Our policy has applied from the earliest days of the Republic--and still applies--not merely to the Atlantic but to the Pacific and to all other oceans as well.

That has been our policy, proved time and time again, in all of our history.

It means that no nation has the right to make the broad oceans of the world at great distances from the actual theatre of land war, unsafe for the commerce of others.

Generation after generation, America has battled for the general policy of the freedom of the seas.

I think it must be explained over and over again to people who like to think of the United States Navy as an invincible protection, that this can be true only if the British Navy survives.

He must first destroy the bridge of ships which we are building across the Atlantic and over which we shall continue to roll the implements of war to help destroy him, to destroy all his works in the end.

To be ultimately successful in world mastery, Hitler knows that he must get control of the seas.

For Hitler's advance guards--not only his avowed agents but also his dupes among us--have sought to make ready for him footholds, and bridgeheads in the New World, to be used as soon as he has gained control of the oceans.

This Nazi attempt to seize control of the oceans is but a counterpart of the Nazi plots now being carried on throughout the Western Hemisphere--all designed toward the same end.

The Atlantic Ocean which has been, and which should always be, a free and friendly highway for us would then become a deadly menace to the commerce of the United States, to the coasts of the United States, and even to the inland cities of…

Under Nazi control of the seas, no merchant ship of the United States or of any other American Republic would be free to carry on any peaceful commerce, except by the condescending grace of this foreign and tyrannical power.

For with control of the seas in their own hands, the way can obviously become clear for their next step--domination of the United States--domination of the Western Hemisphere by force of arms.