President Wilson in an address before the League to Enforce Peace, May 27, had said that the United States was ready to join any practical league for preserving peace and guaranteeing the political and territorial integrity of nations.
November 29 our government sent a protest to Germany against the deportation of Belgians.
Almost immediately upon the invasion of Belgium the German authorities, in pursuance of their system of terrorization, shipped to Germany considerable groups of the population.

On October 12,1915, a general order was issued by the German military government in Belgium providing that persons who should "refuse work suitable to their occupation and in the execution of which the military administration is interested," should be subject to one year's imprisonment or to deportation to Germany.

Numerous sentences, both of men and women, were imposed under that order.
The wholesale deportation of Belgian workmen to Germany, which began October 3, 1916, proceeded on different grounds, for, having stripped large sections of the country of machinery and raw materials, the military authorities now came forward with the plea that it was necessary to send the labor after it.

The number of workmen deported is variously estimated at between one and three hundred thousand.
"The rage, the terror, the despair" excited by this measure all over Belgium, our minister, Brand Whitlock, reported, "were beyond anything we had witnessed since the day the Germans poured into Brussels.

I am constantly in receipt of reports from all over Belgium that bear out the stories of brutality and cruelty.
"In tearing away from nearly every humble home in the land a husband and a father or a son and brother, the Germans have lighted a fire of hatred that will never go out.