The Speeches

#An Address to the Columbus Chamber of Commerce, September 4, 1919

Mr. Chairman, Governor Campbell,1 and my fellow citizens. (applause) It is with very profound pleasure that I find myself face to face with you. I have for a long time chafed at the confinement of Washington. I have for a long time wished to fulfill the purpose with which my heart was full when I returned to our beloved country, namely, to go out and report to my fellow countrymen concerning those affairs of the world which now need to be settled.

The only people I owe any report to are you and the other citizens of the United States, and it has become increasingly necessary, apparently, that I should report to you. After all the various angles at which you have heard the treaty held up, perhaps you would like to know what is in the treaty. I find it very difficult in reading some of the speeches that I have read to form any conception of that great document.

It is a document unique in the history of the world for many reasons, and I think I cannot do you a better service, or the peace of the world a better service, than by pointing out to you just what this treaty contains and what it seeks to do.

In the first place, my fellow countrymen, it seeks to punish one of the greatest wrongs ever done in history—the wrong which Germany sought to do to the world and to civilization, and there ought to be no weak purpose with regard to the application of the punishment. She attempted an intolerable thing, and she must be made to pay for the attempt.

The terms of the treaty are severe, but they are not unjust. I can testify that the men associated with me at the peace conference in Paris had it in their hearts to do justice and not wrong. But they knew, perhaps with a more vivid sense of what had happened than we could possibly know on this side of the water, the many solemn covenants which Germany had disregarded, the long preparation she had made to overwhelm her neighbors, the utter disregard which she had shown for human rights—for the rights of women and children and those who were helpless.

They had seen their lands devastated by an enemy that devoted itself not only to the effort of victory, but to the effort of terror—seeking to terrify the people whom they fought. And I wish to testify that they exercised restraint in the terms of this treaty. They did not wish to overwhelm any great nation; they acknowledged that Germany was a great nation; and they had no purpose in [8page icon] over-whelming the German people. But they did think that it ought to be burned into the consciousness of men forever that no people ought to permit its government to do what the German government did.

In the last analysis, my fellow countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their government. If their government purposes things that are wrong, they ought to take measures and see to it that that purpose is not executed.

Germany was self-governed. Her rulers had not concealed the purpose that they had in mind, but they had deceived their people as to the character of the methods they were going to use. And I believe, from what I can learn, that there is an awakened consciousness in Germany itself of the deep iniquity of the thing that was attempted.

When the Austrian delegates came before the peace conference, they in so many words spoke of the origination of the war as a crime and admitted in our presence that it was a thing intolerable to contemplate. They knew in their hearts that it had done them the deepest conceivable wrong—that it had put their people and the people of Germany at the judgment seat of mankind. And throughout this treaty, every term that was applied to Germany was meant, not to humiliate Germany, but to rectify the wrong that she had done.

And if you will look even into the severe terms of reparation, for there was no indemnity—no indemnity of any sort was claimed, merely reparation, merely paying for the destruction done, merely making good the losses, so far as the losses could be made good, which she had unjustly inflicted, not upon the governments (for the reparation is not to go to the governments), but upon the people whose rights she had trodden upon with absolute absence of everything that even resembled pity. There is no indemnity in this treaty, but there is reparation, and, even in the terms of reparation, a method is devised by which the reparation shall be adjusted to Germany’s ability to pay it.

I am astonished at some of the statements I see made about this treaty, and the truth is that they are made by persons who have not read the treaty or who, if they have read it, have not comprehended its meaning.

There is a method of adjustment in the treaty by which the reparation shall not be pressed beyond the point which Germany can pay, but she will be pressed to the utmost point that she can pay—which is just, which is righteous. It would be intolerable if there had been anything else. For my fellow citizens, this treaty is not [9page icon] meant merely to end this single war. It is meant as a notice to every government which in the future will attempt this thing that mankind will unite to inflict the same punishment.

There is no national triumph sought to be recorded in this treaty. There is no glory sought for any particular nation. The thought of the statesmen collected around that table was of their people, of the sufferings that they had gone through, of the losses they had incurred—that great throbbing heart which was so depressed, so forlorn, so sad in every memory that it had had of the five tragical years that have just gone by. Let us never forget those years, my fellow countrymen. Let us never forget the purpose—the high purpose, the disinterested purpose—with which America lent its strength, not for its own glory, but for the advance of mankind. And, as I said, this treaty was not intended merely to end this war. It was intended to prevent any similar war.

I wonder if some of the opponents of the League of Nations have forgotten the promises we made our people before we went to that peace table. We had taken by process of law the flower of our youth from every countryside, from every household, and we told those mothers and fathers and sisters and wives and sweethearts that we were taking those men to fight a war which would end business of that sort. And if we do not end it, if we do not do the best that human concert of action can do to end it, we are of all men the most unfaithful—the most unfaithful to the loving hearts who suffered in this war, the most unfaithful to those households bowed in grief, yet lifted with the feeling that the lad laid down his life for a great thing, among other things, in order that other lads might not have to do the same thing.

That is what the League of Nations is for, to end this war justly. And it is not merely to serve notice on governments which would contemplate the same things which Germany contemplated that they will do it at their peril, but also concerting the combination of power which will prove to them that they will do it at their peril. It is idle to say the world will combine against you, because it may not, but it is persuasive to say the world is combined against you, and will remain combined against any who attempt the same things that you attempted. The League of Nations is the only thing that can prevent the recurrence of this dreadful catastrophe and redeem our promises.

And the character of the League is based upon the experience of this very war. I did not meet a single public man who did not admit these things—that Germany would not have gone into this war if she had thought Great Britain was going into it, and that she most certainly would never have gone into this war if she had dreamed [10page icon] America was going into it. And they have all admitted that a notice beforehand that the greatest powers of the world would combine to prevent this sort of thing would have prevented it absolutely.

When gentlemen tell you, therefore, that the League of Nations is intended for some other purpose than this, merely reply this to them: “If we do not do this thing, we have neglected the central covenant that we made to our people.” And there will be no statesmen of any country who can thereafter promise his people any alleviation from the perils of war. The passions of this world are not dead. The rivalries of this world have not cooled. They have been rendered hotter than ever. The harness that is to unite nations is more necessary now than it ever was before, and, unless there is this sureness of combined action before wrong is attempted, wrong will be attempted just so soon as the most ambitious nations can recover from the financial stress of this war.

Now, look what else is in the treaty. This treaty is unique in the history of mankind, because the center of it is the redemption of weak nations. There never was a congress of nations before that considered the rights of those who could not enforce their rights. There never was a congress of nations before that did not seek to effect some balance of power brought about by means of serving the strength and interest of the strongest powers concerned, whereas this treaty builds up nations that never could have won their freedom in any other way. It builds them up by gift, by largess, not by obligation; builds them up because of the conviction of the men who wrote the treaty that the rights of people transcend the rights of governments, because of the conviction of the men who wrote that treaty that the fertile source of war is wrong.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, was held together by military force and consisted of peoples who did not want to live together, who did not have the spirit of nationality as towards each other, who were constantly chafing at the bands that held them. Hungary, though a willing partner of Austria, was willing to be her partner because she could share Austria’s strength for accomplishing her own ambitions, and her own ambitions were to hold under the Jugo-Slavic peoples that lie to the south of her: Bohemia, an unhappy partner—a partner by duress, flowing in all her veins the strongest national impulse that was to be found anywhere in Europe; and, north of that, pitiful Poland, a great nation divided up among the great powers of Europe, torn asunder, kinship disregarded, natural ties treated with contempt, and an obligatory division among sovereigns imposed upon her, a part of her given to Russia, a part of her given to Austria, and a part of her given to Germany, and great bodies of Polish people never permitted to [11page icon] have the normal intercourse with their kinsmen for fear that that fine instinct of the heart should assert itself which binds families together.

Poland never could have won her independence. Bohemia never could have broken away from the Austro-Hungarian combination. The Slavic peoples to the south, running down into the great Balkan Peninsula, had again and again tried to assert their nationality and their independence, and had as often been crushed, not by the immediate power they were fighting, but by the combined power of Europe. The old alliances, the old balances of power, were meant to see to it that no little nation asserted its rights to the disturbance of the peace of Europe, and every time an assertion of rights was attempted they were suppressed by combined influence and force.

And this treaty tears away all that and says these people have a right to live their own lives under the governments which they themselves choose to set up. That is the American principle, and I was glad to fight for it. And when strategic considerations were urged, I said—not I alone, but it was a matter of common counsel—that strategic considerations were not in our thought, that we were not now arranging for future wars but were giving people what belonged to them.

My fellow citizens, I do not think there is any man alive who has a more tender sympathy for the great people of Italy than I have, and a very stern duty was presented to us when we had to consider some of the claims of Italy on the Adriatic, because strategically, from the point of view of future wars, Italy needed a military foothold on the other side of the Adriatic. But her people did not live there except in little spots. It was a Slavic people, and I had to say to my Italian friends that everywhere else in this treaty we have given territory to the people who lived on it, and I do not think that it is for the advantage of Italy, and I am sure it is not for the advantage of the world, to give Italy territory where other people live.

I felt the force of the argument for what they wanted, and it was the old argument that had always prevailed, namely, that they needed it from a military point of view, and I have no doubt that if there is no League of Nations, they will need it from a military point of view. But if there is a League of Nations, they will not need it from a military point of view.

If there is no League of Nations, the military point of view will prevail in every instance, and peace will be brought into contempt. But if there is a League of Nations, Italy need not fear the fact that the shores on the other side of the Adriatic tower above her lower sandy shores on her side of the sea, because there will be no [12page icon] threatening guns there, and the nations of the world will have concerted, not merely to see that the Slavic peoples have their rights, but that the Italian people have their rights as well. I would rather have everybody on my side than be armed to the teeth. And every settlement that is right, every settlement that is based upon the principles I have alluded to, is a safe settlement, because the sympathy of mankind will be behind it.

Some gentlemen have feared with regard to the League of Nations that we will be obliged to do things we don’t want to do. If the treaty were wrong, that might be so, but if the treaty is right, we will wish to preserve right. I think I know the heart of this great people whom I, for the time being, have the high honor to represent, better than some other men that I hear talk. I have been bred, and am proud to have been bred, in the old Revolutionary stock which set this government up, when America was set up as a friend of mankind, and I know, if they do not, that America has never lost that vision or that purpose. But I haven’t the slightest fear that arms will be necessary if the purpose is there. If I know that my adversary is armed and I am not, I do not press the controversy. And if any nation entertains selfish purposes set against the principles established in this treaty and is told by the rest of the world that it must withdraw its claim, it will not press them.

The heart of the treaty then, my fellow citizens, is not even that it punishes Germany. That is a temporary thing. It is that it rectifies the age-long wrongs which characterized the history of Europe. There were some of us who wished that the scope of the treaty would reach some other age-long wrongs. It was a big job, and I don’t say that we wished that it were bigger. But there were other wrongs elsewhere than in Europe and of the same kind which no doubt ought to be righted, and some day will be righted, but which we could not draw into the treaty because we could deal only with the countries whom the war had engulfed and affected. But so far as the scope of our treaty went, we rectified the wrongs which have been the fertile source of war in Europe.

Have you ever reflected, my fellow countrymen, on the real source of revolutions? Men don’t start revolutions in a sudden passion. Do you remember what Thomas Carlyle said about the French Revolution? He was speaking of the so-called Hundred Days’ Terror, which reigned, not only in Paris, but throughout France, in the days of the French Revolution, and he reminded his readers that back of that Hundred Days of Terror lay several hundred years of agony and of wrong. The French people had been deeply and consistently wronged by their government—robbed, their human rights disregarded—and the slow agony of those [13page icon] hundreds of years had after a while gathered into a hot anger that could not be suppressed.

Revolutions don’t spring up overnight. Revolutions gather through the ages; revolutions come from the long suppression of the human spirit. Revolutions come because men know that they have rights and that they are disregarded. And, when we think of the future of the world in connection with this treaty, we must remember that one of the chief efforts of those who made this treaty was to remove that anger from the heart of great peoples, great peoples who had always been suppressed, and always been used, who had always been the tools in the hands of governments, generally of alien governments, not their own. And the makers of the treaty knew that if these wrongs were not removed, there could be no peace in the world, because, after all, my fellow citizens, war comes from the seed of wrong and not from the seed of right. This treaty is an attempt to right the history of Europe, and, in my humble judgment, it is a measurable success.

I say “measurable,” my fellow citizens, because you will realize the difficulty of this. Here are two neighboring peoples. The one people have not stopped at a sharp line, and the settlements of the other people, or their migrations, begun at that sharp line; they have intermingled. There are regions where you can’t draw a national line and say there are Slavs on this side and Italians on that. There is this people there and that people there. It can’t be done. You have to approximate the line. You have to come to it as near to it as you can, and then trust to the processes of history to redistribute, it may be, the people who are on the wrong side of the line. And there are many such lines drawn in this treaty and to be drawn in the Austrian treaty, and where perhaps there are more lines of that sort than in the German treaty.

When we came to draw the line between the Polish people and the German people, not the line between Germany and Poland—there wasn’t any Poland, strictly speaking—the line between the German people and the Polish people, there were districts like the upper part of Silesia, or rather the eastern part of Silesia, which is called Upper Silesia because it is mountainous and the other part is not. High Silesia is chiefly Polish, and, when we came to draw a line to represent Poland, it was necessary to include High Silesia if we were really going to play fair and make Poland up of the Polish peoples wherever we found them in sufficiently close neighborhood to one another.

But it wasn’t perfectly clear that Upper Silesia—that High Silesia—wanted to be part of Poland. At any rate, there were Germans in High Silesia who said that it did not, and therefore we did there [14page icon] what we did in many other places. We said, “Very well, then, we will let the people that live there decide. We will have a referendum within a certain length of time after the war, under the supervision of an international commission, which will have a sufficient armed force behind it to preserve order and see that nobody interferes with the elections. We will have an absolutely free vote, and High Silesia shall go either to Germany or to Poland, as the people in High Silesia prefer.” And that illustrates many other cases where we provided for a referendum, or a plebiscite, as they choose to call it, and are going to leave it to the people themselves, as we should have done, what government they shall live under. It is none of my prerogative to allot peoples to this government and the other. It is nobody’s right to do that allotting except the people themselves, and I want to testify that this treaty is shot through with the American principle of the choice of the governed.

Of course, at times it went further than we could make a practical policy of, because various peoples were keen upon getting back portions of their populations which were separated from them by many miles of territory, and we couldn’t spot the map over with little pieces of separated states. I even had to remind my Italian colleagues that, if they were going to claim every place where there was a large Italian population, we would have to cede New York to them, because there are more Italians in New York than in any Italian city. But I believe—I hope—that the Italians in New York City are as glad to stay there as we are to have them. But I would not have you suppose that I am intimating that my Italian colleagues entered any claim for New York City.

We of all peoples in the world, my fellow citizens, ought to be able to understand the questions of this treaty, and without anybody explaining them to us, for we are made up out of all the peoples of the world. I dare say that in this audience there are representatives of practically all the peoples dealt with in this treaty. You don’t have to have me explain national ambitions to you, national aspirations. You have been brought up on them. You have learned of them since you were children, and it is those national aspirations which we sought to realize, to give an outlet to in this great treaty.

But we do much more than that. This treaty contains, among other things, a Magna Carta of labor—a thing unheard of until this interesting year of grace. There is a whole section of the treaty devoted to arrangements by which the interests of those who labor with their hands all over the world—whether they be men or women or children—are all of them to be safeguarded. And next month there is to meet the first assembly under this section of the League—and let me tell you it will meet whether the treaty is [15page icon] ratified by that time or not. There is to meet an assembly which represents the interests of laboring men throughout the world. Not their political interests—there is nothing political about it. It is the interests of men concerning the conditions of their labor, concerning the character of labor which women shall engage in, the character of labor which children shall be permitted to engage in; the hours of labor; and, incidentally, of course, the remuneration of labor—that labor shall be remunerated in proportion, of course, to the maintenance of the standard of living, which is proper for the man who is expected to give his whole brain and intelligence and energy to a particular task. I hear very little said about this Magna Carta of labor which is embodied in this treaty. It forecasts the day, which ought to have come long ago, when statesmen will realize that no nation is fortunate which is not happy, and that no nation can be happy whose people are not contented—contented in their industry, contented in their lives, and fortunate in the circumstances of their lives.

If I were to state what seems to me to be the central idea of this treaty, it would be this—it is almost a discovery in international conferences—that nations do not consist of their government but consist of their people! That is a rudimentary idea. It seems to us to go without saying, to us in America, but, my fellow citizens, it was never the leading idea in any other international congress that I ever heard of; that is to say, any international congress made up of the representatives of governments. They were always thinking of national policy, of national advantages, of the rivalries of trade, of the advantages of territorial conquest. There is nothing of that in this treaty.

You will notice that even the territories which are taken away from Germany, like her colonies, are not given to anybody. There isn’t a single act of annexation in this treaty. But territories inhabited by people not yet able to govern themselves, either because of economic or other circumstances or the stage of their development, are put under the care of powers who are to act as trustees—trustees responsible in the forum of the world at the bar of the League of Nations, and the terms upon which they are to exercise their trusteeship are outlined. They are not to use those people by way of profit and to fight their wars for them. They are not to permit any form of slavery among them, or of enforced labor. They are to see to it that there are humane conditions of labor with regard, not only to the women and the children, but the men, too. They are to establish no fortifications. They are to regulate the liquor and the opium traffic. They are to see to it, in other words, that the lives of the people whose care they assume—not sovereignty over whom [16page icon] they assume, but whose care they assume—are kept clean and safe and wholesome. There again the principle of the treaty comes out—that the object of the arrangement is the welfare of the people who live there, and not the advantages of the government.

It goes beyond that. And it seeks to gather under the common supervision of the League of Nations the various instrumentalities by which the world has been trying to check the evils that were in some places debasing men, like the opium traffic, like the traffic—for it was a traffic—in men, women, and children, like the traffic in other dangerous drugs, like the traffic in arms among uncivilized people, who could use arms only for their detriment, for sanitation, for the work of the Red Cross. Why, those clauses, my fellow citizens, draw the hearts of the world into league, draw the noble impulses of the world together and make a poem of them.

I used to be told that this was an age in which mind was monarch, and my comment was that, if that were true, then mind was one of those modern monarchs that reigns and does not govern. But, as a matter of fact, we were governed by a great representative assembly made up of the human passions, and that the best we could manage was that the high and fine passions should be in a majority so that they could control the baser passions, so that they could check the things that were wrong. And this treaty seeks something like that. In drawing the humane endeavors together it makes a mirror of the fine passions of the world, of its philanthropic passions, of its passion of pity, of its passion of human sympathy, of its passion of human friendliness and helpfulness—for there is such a passion. It is the passion that has lifted us along the slow road of civilization. It is the passion that has made ordered government possible. It is the passion that has made justice and established the thing in some happy part of the world.

That is the treaty. Did you ever hear of it before? Did you ever know before what was in this treaty? Did anybody before ever tell you what the treaty was intended to do? I beg, my fellow citizens, that you and the rest of those Americans with whom we are happy to be associated all over this broad land will read the treaty for themselves, or, if they won’t take time to do that—for it is a technical document that is hard to read—that they will accept the interpretation of those who made it and know what the intentions were in the making of it.

I hear a great deal, my fellow citizens, about the selfishness and the selfish ambitions of other governments, but I would not be doing justice to the gifted men with whom I was associated on the other side of the water if I didn’t testify that the purposes that I have outlined were their purposes. We differed as to the method [17page icon] very often. We had discussions as to the details, but we never had any serious discussion as to the principles. And, while we all acknowledged that the principles might perhaps in detail have been better, really we are all back of those principles. There is a concert of mind and of purpose and of policy in the world that was never in existence before.

I am not saying that by way of credit to myself or to those colleagues to whom I have alluded, because what happened to us was that we got messages from our people. We were there under instructions, whether they were written down or not, and we did not dare come home without fulfilling those instructions. If I could not have brought back the kind of treaty I brought back, I never would have come back, because I would have been an unfaithful servant, and you would have had the right to condemn me in any way that you chose to use. So that I testify that this is an American treaty, not only, but it is a treaty that expresses the heart of the peoples—of the great peoples—who were associated together in the war against Germany.

I said at the opening of this informal address, my fellow citizens, that I had come to make a report to you. I want to add to that a little bit. I have not come to debate the treaty. It speaks for itself, if you will let it. The arguments directed against it are directed against it with a radical misunderstanding of the instrument itself. Therefore, I am not going anywhere to debate the treaty. I am going to expound it, and I am going, right here, now today, to urge you, in every vocal method that you can use, to assert the spirit of the American people in support of it. Don’t let them pull it down. Don’t let them misrepresent it. Don’t let them lead this nation away from the high purposes with which this war was inaugurated and fought. As I came through that line of youngsters in khaki a few minutes ago, I felt that I could salute it because I had done the job in the way I promised them I would do it. And when this treaty is accepted, men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again. That is the reason I believe in it.

I say “when it is accepted,” for it will be accepted. I have never entertained a moment’s doubt of that, and the only thing I have been impatient of has been the delay. It is not a dangerous delay, except for the temper of the peoples scattered throughout the world who are waiting. Do you realize, my fellow citizens, that the whole world is waiting on America? The only country in the world that is trusted at this moment is the United States, and they are waiting to see whether their trust is justified or not. That has been the ground of my impatience. I knew their trust was justified, but I begrudged the time that certain gentlemen oblige us to take in [18page icon] telling them so. We shall tell them so in a voice as authentic as any voice in history, and in the years to come men will be glad to remember that they had some part in the great struggle which brought this incomparable consummation of the hopes of mankind.

#Remarks on Board the Presidential Train at Richmond, Indiana, September 4, 1919.

I am trying to tell the people what is in the treaty. You would not know what is in it to read some of the speeches I read, and if you will be generous enough to me to read some of the things I say, I hope it will help to clarify a great many matters which have been very much obscured by some of the things which have been said. Because we have now to make the most critical choice we ever made as a nation, and it ought to be made in all soberness and without the slightest tinge of party feeling in it. I would be ashamed of myself if I discussed this great matter as a Democrat and not as an American. I am sure that every man who looks at it without party prejudice and as an American will find in that treaty more things that are genuinely American than were ever put into any similar document before.

The chief thing to notice about it, my fellow citizens, is that it is the first treaty ever made by great powers that was not made in their own favor. It is made for the protection of the weak peoples of the world and not for the aggrandizement of the strong. That is a noble achievement, and it is largely due to the influence of such great people as the people of America, who hold at their heart this principle, that nobody has the right to impose sovereignty upon anybody else; that, in disposing of the affairs of a nation, that nation or people must be its own master and make its own choice. The extraordinary achievement of this treaty is that it gives a free choice to people who never could have won it for themselves. It is for the first time in the history of international transactions an act of systematic justice and not an act of grabbing and seizing.

If you will just regard that as the heart of the treaty—for it is the heart of the treaty—then everything else about it is put in a different light. If we want to stand by that principle, then we can justify [19page icon] the history of America as we can in no other way, for that is the history and principle of America. That is at the heart of it. I beg that, whenever you consider this great matter, you will look at it from this point of view: shall we or shall we not sustain the first great act of international justice? The thing wears a very big aspect when you look at it that way, and all little matters seem to fall away and one seems ashamed to bring in special interests, particularly party interests. What difference does party make when mankind is involved? Parties are intended, if they are intended for any legitimate purpose, to serve mankind, and they are based upon legitimate differences of opinion, not as to whether mankind shall be served or not, but as to the way in which it shall be served; and, so far as those differences are legitimate differences, they justify the differences between parties.

#An Address in the Indianapolis Coliseum, September 4, 1919

Mr. President, my fellow citizens, so great a company as this tempts me to make a speech, (laughter and applause) and yet I want to say to you in all seriousness and soberness that I have not come here to make a speech in the ordinary sense of that term. I have come upon a very sober errand, indeed. I have come to report to you upon the work which the representatives of the United States attempted to do at the conference of peace on the other side of the sea, because, I realize, my fellow citizens, that my colleagues and I, in the task we attempted over there, were your servants. We went there upon a distinct errand, which it was our duty to perform in the spirit which you had displayed in the prosecution of the war and in conceiving the purposes and objects of that war.

I was in the city of Columbus this forenoon, where I was endeavoring to explain to a body of our fellow citizens there just what it was that the treaty of peace contains. For I must frankly admit that, in most of the speeches that I have heard in debate upon the treaty of peace, it would be impossible to form a definite conception of what that instrument means. I want to recall to you for the purposes of this evening the circumstances of the war and the purposes for which our men spent their lives on the other side of the sea.

You will remember that a prince of the House of Austria was [20page icon] slain in one of the cities of Serbia.1 Serbia was one of the small kingdoms of Europe. She had no strength which any of the great powers needed to fear. As we see the war now, Germany and those who conspired with her made a pretext of that assassination in order to make unconscionable demands on the weak and helpless Kingdom of Serbia, not with a view of bringing about an acquiescence in those demands, but with a view to bringing about a conflict in which their purposes, quite separate from the purposes connected with these demands, could be achieved.

I was recalling, my fellow citizens, the circumstances which began the terrible conflict that has just been concluded. So soon as the unconscionable demands of Austria were made on Serbia, the other governments of Europe sent telegraphic messages to Berlin and Vienna asking that the matter be brought into a conference, and the significant circumstance of the beginning of this war is that the Austrian and German governments did not dare to discuss the demands on Serbia or the purpose which they had in view. It is universally admitted on the other side of the water that, if they had ever gone into an international conference on the Austrian demands, the war never would have been begun. There was an insistent demand from London, for example, by the British Foreign Minister that the cabinets of Europe should be allowed time to confer with the governments at Vienna and Berlin, and the governments at Vienna and Berlin did not dare to admit time for discussion.

I am recalling these circumstances, my fellow citizens, because I want to point out to you what apparently has escaped the attention of some of the critics of the League of Nations—that the heart of the League of Nations Covenant does not lie in any of the portions which have been discussed in public debate. The great bulk of the provisions of that Covenant contain these engagements and promises on the part of the states which undertook to become members of it: that in no circumstances will they go to war without first having either submitted the question to arbitration, in which case they agree to abide by the result, or, having submitted the question to discussion by the Council of the League of Nations, in which case they will allow six months for the discussion and engage not to go to war until three months after the Council has announced its opinion upon the subject under dispute. So that the heart of the Covenant of the League is that the nations solemnly covenant not to go to war for nine months after a controversy becomes acute.

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If there had been nine days’ discussion, Germany would not have gone to war. If there had been nine days within which to bring to bear the opinion of the world—the judgment of mankind—upon the purposes of these governments, they never would have dared to execute those purposes. So that what it is important for us to remember is that, when we sent those boys in khaki across the sea, we promised them, we promised the world, that we would not conclude this conflict with a mere treaty of peace. We entered into solemn engagements with all the nations with whom we associated ourselves that we would bring about such a kind of settlement and such a concert of the purpose of nations that wars like this could not again occur. If the war has to be fought over again, then all our high ideals and purposes have been disappointed, for we did not go into this war merely to beat Germany. We went into this war to beat all purposes such as Germany entertained.

And you will remember how the conscience of mankind was shocked by what Germany did—not merely by the circumstances to which I have already adverted, that unconscionable demands were made upon a little nation which could not resist—but that immediately upon the beginning of the war solemn engagements of treaty were cast on one side, and the chief representative of the Imperial government of Germany said that, when national purposes were under discussion, treaties were mere scraps of paper. And immediately upon that declaration the German armies invaded the territories of Belgium, which they had engaged should be inviolate—invaded those territories with the half-avowed purpose that Belgium was necessary to be permanently retained by Germany in order that she should have a proper frontage on the sea and a proper advantage in her contest with the other nations of the world. So that that act, which was characteristic of the beginning of this war, was a violation of the territorial integrity of the Kingdom of Belgium.

We are presently, my fellow countrymen, to have the very great pleasure of welcoming on this side of the sea the Queen and King of the Belgians, (applause) and I, for one, am perfectly sure that we are going to make it clear to them that we have not forgotten the violation of Belgium, that we have not forgotten the intolerable wrongs which were put upon that suffering people.

I have seen their devastated country.2 Where it was not actually laid in ruins, every factory was gutted of its contents. All the machinery by which it would be possible for men to go to work again [22page icon] was taken away, and those parts of the machinery that they could not take away were destroyed by experts who knew how to destroy them. Belgium was a very successful competitor of Germany in some lines of manufacture, and the German armies were sent there to see to it that that competition was put a stop to. Their purpose was to crush the independent action of that little kingdom—not merely to use it as a gateway through which to attack France. And when they got into France, they not only fought the armies of France, but they put the coal mines of France out of commission, so that it will be a decade or more before France can supply herself with coal from her accustomed sources.

You have heard a great deal about Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations. Article X speaks the conscience of the world. Article X is the article which goes to the heart of this whole bad business, for that article says that the members of this League—and that is intended to be all the great nations of the world—engage to respect and to preserve against all external aggression the territorial integrity and political independence of the nations concerned. That promise is necessary in order to prevent this sort of war from recurring, and we are absolutely discredited if we fought this war and then neglect the essential safeguard against it.

You have heard it said, my fellow citizens, that we are robbed of some degree of our sovereign independence of choice by articles of that sort. Every man who makes a choice to respect the rights of his neighbors deprives himself of absolute sovereignty, but he does it by promising never to do wrong, and I cannot, for one, see anything that robs me of any inherent right that I ought to retain when I promise that I will do right.

We engage in the first sentence of Article X to respect and preserve from external aggression the territorial integrity and the existing political independence, not only of the other member states, but of all states. And if any member of the League of Nations disregards that promise, then what happens? The Council of the League advises what should be done to enforce the respect for that Covenant on the part of the nation attempting to violate it, and there is no compulsion upon us to take that advice except the compulsion of our good conscience and judgment. So that it is perfectly evident that if, in the judgment of the people of the United States, the Council adjudged wrong and that this was not an occasion for the use of force, there would be no necessity on the part of the Congress of the United States to vote the use of force. But there could be no advice of the Council on any such subject without a unanimous vote, and the unanimous vote would include our [23page icon] own, and if we accepted the advice we would be accepting our own advice. For I need not tell you that the representatives of the government of the United States would not vote without instructions from their government at home, and that what we united in advising we could be certain that our people would desire to do. There is in that Covenant not one note of surrender of the independent judgment of the government of the United States, but an expression of it, because that independent judgment would have to join with the judgment of the rest.

But when is that judgment going to be expressed, my fellow citizens? Only after it is evident that every other resource has failed, and I want to call your attention to the central machinery of the League of Nations. If any member of that League, or any nation not a member, refuses to submit the question at issue either to arbitration or to discussion by the Council, there ensues automatically by the engagements of this Covenant an absolute economic boycott. There will be no trade with that nation by any member of the League. There will be no interchange of communication by post or telegraph. There will be no travel to or from that nation. Its borders will be closed. No citizen of any other state will be allowed to enter it, and no one of its citizens will be allowed to leave it. It will be hermetically sealed by the united action of the most powerful nations in the world. And if this economic boycott bears with unequal weight, the members of the League agree to support one another and to relieve one another in any exceptional disadvantages that may arise out of it.

And I want you to realize that this war was won not only by the armies of the world, but it was won by economic means as well. Without the economic means, the war would have been much longer continued. What happened was that Germany was shut off from the economic resources of the rest of the globe, and she could not stand it. A nation that is boycotted is a nation that is in sight of surrender. Apply this economic, peaceful, silent, deadly remedy, and there will be no need for force. It is a terrible remedy. It does not cost a life outside the nation boycotted, but it brings a pressure upon that nation which, in my judgment, no modern nation could resist.

I dare say that some of those ideas are new to you, because while it is true, as I said this forenoon in Columbus, that apparently nobody has taken the pains to say what is in this treaty, very few have taken the pains to say what is in the Covenant of the League of Nations. They have discussed three—chiefly, three, out of twenty-six articles, and the other articles contain this heart of the matter—that instead of war there shall be arbitration, instead of war there [24page icon] shall be discussion, instead of war there shall be the closure of intercourse, that instead of war there shall be the irresistible pressure of the opinion of all mankind. If I had done wrong, I would a great deal rather have a man shoot at me than stand me up for the judgment of my fellow men. I would a great deal rather see the muzzle of a gun than the look in their eyes. I would a great deal rather be put out of the world than live in a world boycotted and deserted. The most terrible thing is outlawry. The most formidable thing is to be absolutely isolated. And that is the kernel of this engagement. War is on the outskirts. War is a remote and secondary threat. War is a last resort. Nobody in his senses claims that the Covenant of the League of Nations is certain to stop war, but I confidently assert that it makes war violently improbable, and that, even if we cannot guarantee that it will stop war, we are bound in conscience to do our utmost in order to avoid and prevent it.

I was pointing out, my fellow citizens, this forenoon, that this Covenant is a part of a great document. I wish I had brought a copy of it along with me just to show you its bulk. It is an enormous volume, and almost all the things you hear talked about in that treaty are not the essential things. This is the first treaty in the history of civilization in which great powers have associated themselves together in order to protect the weak. I need not tell you that I speak with knowledge in this matter—knowledge of the purpose of the men with whom the men representing America were associated at the peace table. Everyone I consulted with came there with the same idea—that wars had arisen in the past because the strong had taken advantage of the weak, and that the only way to stop war was to band ourselves together to protect the weak; that this war was an example which gave us the finger pointing to the way of escape; that as Austria and Germany had tried to put upon Serbia, so we must see to it that Serbia and the Slavic nations—peoples associated with her—and the peoples of Rumania and those of Bohemia, and the peoples of Hungary and of Austria, for that matter, should feel assured in the future that the strength of the great powers was behind their liberty and their independence and was not intended to be used, and never should be used, for aggression against them.

And so when you read the Covenant, read the treaty with it. I have no doubt that in this audience there are many men who come from that ancient stock of Poland, for example, men in whose blood there is the warmth of old affections connected with that betrayed and ruined country, men whose memories run back to insufferable wrongs endured by those living in that country. And I call them to witness that Poland never could have won unity and [25page icon] independence by herself. Those gentlemen sitting at Paris presented Poland with a unity she could not have won and an independence which she cannot defend unless the world guarantees it to her. There is one of the most noble chapters in the history of the world—that this war was concluded in order to remedy the wrongs which had beaten so deeply into the experience of the weaker peoples of that great continent. The object of the war was to see to it that there was no more of that sort of wrong done. Now, when you have that picture in your minds—that this treaty was meant to protect those who could not protect themselves—turn the picture and look at it this way.

Those very weak nations are situated through the very tract of country—between Germany and Persia—which Germany had intended to conquer and dominate, and if the nations of the world do not maintain their concert to sustain the independence and freedom of those peoples, Germany will yet have her will upon them. And we shall witness the very interesting spectacle of having spent millions upon millions of American treasure and, what is much more precious, hundreds of thousands of American lives, to do a futile thing, to do a thing which we will then leave to be undone at the leisure of those who are masters of intrigue, at the leisure of those who are masters in combining wrong influences to overcome right influences, of those who are the masters of the very things we hate and mean always to fight.

For, my fellow citizens, if Germany should ever attempt that again, whether we are in the League of Nations or not, we will join to prevent it. We do not stand off and see murder done. We do not profess to be the champions of liberty and then consent to see liberty destroyed. We are not the friends and advocates of free government and yet willing to stand by and see free government die before our eyes. For if the power such as Germany was—but, thank God, no longer is—were to do this thing upon the fields of Europe, then America would have to look to it that she did not do it also upon the fields of the western hemisphere, and we should at last be face to face with a power which at the outset we could have crushed, and which now it is within our choice to keep within the harness of civilization.

I am not arguing this thing with you, my fellow citizens, as if I had any doubt of what the verdict of the American people would be. I haven’t the slightest doubt. I just wanted to have the pleasure of pointing out to you how absolutely ignorant of the treaty and of the Covenant some of the men are who have been opposing it. If they do read the English language, they do not understand the English language as I understand it. If they have really read this [26page icon] treaty and this Covenant, they only amaze me by their inability to understand what is plainly expressed.

So that my errand upon this journey is not to argue these matters, but to recall you to the real issues which are involved. And one of the things that I have most at heart in this report to my fellow citizens is that they should forget what party I belong to and what party they belong to. I am making this journey as a democrat, but I am spelling it with a little “d,” and I don’t want anybody to remember, so far as this errand is concerned, that it is ever spelt with a big “D.” I am making this journey as an American and as a champion of the rights which America believes in; and I need not tell you that, as compared with the importance of America, the importance of the Democratic party and the importance of the Republican party and the importance of every other party is absolutely negligible. Parties, my fellow citizens, are intended to embody in action different policies of government. They are not, when properly used, intended to traverse the principles which underlie government, and the principles which underlie the government of the United States have been familiar to us ever since we were children. You have been bred, I have no doubt, as I have been bred, in the Revolutionary school of American thought. I mean that school of American thought which takes its inspiration from the days of the American Revolution. There were only three million of us then, but we were ready to stand out against the world for liberty. There are more than one hundred million of us now, and we are ready to insist that everywhere men shall be champions of liberty.

I want you to notice another interesting point that has never been dilated upon in connection with the League of Nations. I am now treading upon delicate ground, and I must express myself with caution. There were a good many delegations that visited Paris wanting to be heard by the peace conference who had real causes to present, and which ought to be presented to the view of the world, but we had to point out to them that they did not happen, unfortunately, to come within the area of settlement, that their questions were not questions which were necessarily drawn into the things that we were deciding. We were sitting there with the pieces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in our hands. It had fallen apart. It never was naturally cohesive. We were sitting there with various dispersed assets of the German Empire in our hands, and with regard to every one of them we had to determine what we were going to do, but we did not have our own dispersed assets in our hands. We did not have the assets of the nations which constituted the body of the nations associated against Germany to dispose of, and, therefore, we had often, with whatever regret, to turn [27page icon] away from questions that ought to some day be discussed and settled and upon which the opinion of the world ought to be brought to bear.

I therefore want to call your attention, if you will turn to it when you go home, to Article XI, following Article X, of the Covenant of the League of Nations. That Article XI, let me say, is the favorite article in the treaty, so far as I am concerned. It says that every matter which is likely to affect the peace of the world is everybody’s business, and that it shall be the friendly right of any nation to call attention in the League to anything that is likely to affect the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations, upon which the peace of the world depends, whether that matter immediately concerns the nation drawing attention to it or not.

In other words, at present we have to mind our own business. Under the Covenant of the League of Nations, we can mind other peoples’ business, and anything that affects the peace of the world, whether we are parties to it or not, can by our delegates be brought to the attention of mankind. We can force a nation on the other side of the globe to bring to that bar of mankind any wrong that is afoot in that part of the world which is likely to affect the peace of the world, which is likely to affect the good understanding between nations, and we can oblige them to show cause why it should not be remedied.

There is not an oppressed people in the world which cannot henceforth get a hearing at that forum, and you know, my fellow citizens, what a hearing will mean if the cause of those people is just. The one thing which those who have reason to dread, have most reason to dread, is publicity and discussion, because if you are challenged to give a reason why you are doing a wrong thing it has to be an exceedingly good reason, and if you give a bad reason you confess judgment, and the opinion of mankind goes against you.

At present what is the state of international law and understanding? No nation has the right to call attention to anything that does not directly affect its own affairs. If it does, it cannot only be told to mind its own business, but it risks the cordial relationship between itself and the nation whose affairs it draws into discussion; whereas under Article XI, the very sensible provision is made that the peace of the world transcends all the susceptibilities of nations and governments, and that they are obliged to consent to discuss and explain anything that does affect the understanding between nations.

Not only that, but there is another thing in this Covenant which was one of a number of difficulties that we encountered at Paris. I [28page icon] need not tell you that at every turn in these discussions we came across some secret treaty, some understanding that had never been made public before, some understanding that embarrassed the whole settlement. I think it will not be improper for me to refer to one of those matters. When we came to the settlement of the Shantung question with regard to China, we found that Great Britain and France were under specific treaty obligations to Japan that she should get exactly what she got in the treaty with Germany, and the most that we do—I mean the most that the United States could do—was to urge upon the representatives of Japan the very fatal policy that was involved in such a settlement and obtain from her the promise, which she gave, that she would not take advantage of those portions of the treaty, but would return, without qualification, the sovereignty which Germany had enjoyed in Shantung Province to the Republic of China. We have had repeated assurances since then that Japan intends to fulfill those promises in absolute good faith.

But my present point is that there stood at the very gate of that settlement a secret treaty between Japan and two of the great powers engaged in this war on our side. We could not ask them to disregard those promises. This war had been fought in part because of the refusal to observe the fidelity which is involved in a promise, in a failure to regard the sacredness of treaties. And this Covenant of the League of Nations provides that no secret treaty shall have any validity. It provides in explicit terms that every treaty, every international understanding, shall be registered with the Secretary of the League, that it shall be published as soon as possible after it is there registered, and that no treaty that is not there registered will be regarded by any of the nations engaged in the Covenant. So that we not only have the right to discuss anything, but we make everything open for discussion. And if this Covenant accomplished little more than the abolition of private arrangements between great powers, it would have gone far toward stabilizing the peace of the world and securing the justice which it has been so difficult to secure so long as nations could come to secret understandings with one another.

When you look at the Covenant of the League of Nations thus in the large, you wonder why it is a bogey to anybody. You wonder what influences have made gentlemen afraid of it. You wonder why it is not obvious to everybody, as it is to those who study it with disinterested thought, that this is the central and essential Covenant of the whole peace. As I said this forenoon, I can come through a double row of men in khaki and acknowledge their salutes with a free heart, because I kept my promise to them. I told [29page icon] them when they went to this war that this was a war, not only to beat Germany, but to prevent any subsequent wars of this kind. I can look all the mothers of this country in the face and all the sisters and sweethearts and say, “The boys will not have to do this again.”

You would think to hear some men discuss this Covenant that it is an arrangement for sending men abroad again just as soon as possible. It is the only conceivable arrangement which will prevent our sending our men abroad again very soon. And, if I may use a very common expression, I would say, if it is not to be this arrangement, what arrangement do you suggest to secure the peace of the world? It is a case of “put up or shut up.” Opposition is not going to save the world. Negations are not going to construct the policies of mankind. A great plan is the only thing that can defeat a great plan. The only triumphant ideas in this world are the ideas that are organized for battle. The only thing that equals an organized program is a better program. If this is not the way to secure peace, I beg that the way may be pointed out. If we must reject this way, then I beg that, before I am sent to ask Germany to make a new kind of peace with us, I should be given specific instructions as to what kind of peace it is to be. If the gentlemen who don’t like what was done at Paris think that they can do something better, I beg that they will hold their convention soon and do it now. They cannot in conscience or good faith deprive us of this great work of peace without substituting some other that is better.

And so, my fellow citizens, I look forward with profound gratification to the time, which I believe will now not much longer be delayed, when the American people can say to their fellows in all parts of the world: “We are the friends of liberty; we have joined with the rest of mankind in securing the guarantees of liberty; we stand here with you the eternal champions of what is right, and may God keep us in the covenant that we have formed.”

#A Luncheon Address to the St. Louis Chamber of Commerce, September 5, 1919

Mr. Johnson, Your Honor, Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen: It is with great pleasure that I find myself in St. Louis again, because I have always found it possible in St. Louis to discuss serious questions in a way that gets mind in contact with mind, instead of that other very less desirable thing—passion in contact with passion. I am glad to hear the Mayor say—and I believe it is true—that politics is adjourned. Politics has no place, I mean party politics has no place, my fellow citizens, in the subjects that we are now obliged to discuss and to decide. Politics in the wider sense has a great deal to do with them. The politics of the world, the policy of mankind, the concert of the methods by which the world is to be bettered, that concert of will and of action which will make every nation a nobler instrument of divine Providence—that is world politics.

I have sometimes heard gentlemen discussing the questions that are now before us with a distinction drawn between nationalism and internationalism in these matters. It is very difficult for me to follow their distinction. The greatest nationalist is the man who wants his nation to be the greatest nation, (applause) and the greatest nation is the nation which penetrates to the heart of its duty and mission among the nations of the world. (applause, cheers) With every flash of insight into the great politics of mankind, the nation that has that vision is elevated to a place of influence and power which it cannot get by arms, which it cannot get by commercial rivalry, which it can get by no other way than by that spiritual leadership which comes from a profound understanding of the problems of humanity. (applause) It is in the light of [34page icon] ideas of this sort that I conceive it a privilege to discuss the matters that I have come away from Washington to discuss.

I have come away from Washington to discuss them because, apparently, it is difficult to discuss them in Washington. (laughter, applause) The whole subject is surrounded with mists which it is difficult to penetrate. I brought home with me from the other side of the water a great document, a great human document, but after you hear it talked about in Washington for a while you think that it has just about three or four clauses in it. You fancy that it has a certain Article X in it, that it has something about Shantung in it, that it has something about the Monroe Doctrine in it, that it has something about quitting, withdrawing from the League, showing that you don’t want to play the game. And I don’t hear about anything else in it. Why, my fellow citizens, these are mere details—the incidents of a great human enterprise—and I have sought the privilege of telling you what I conceive that human enterprise to be.

The war that has just been finished was no accident. Any man who had followed the politics of the world up to that critical break must have known that that was the logical outcome of the processes that had preceded it, must have known that the nations of the world were preparing for that very thing and were expecting it.

One of the most interesting things that I realized after I got to the other side of the water was that the mental attitude of the French people with regard to the settlement of this war was largely determined by the fact that for nearly fifty years they had expected it, that for nearly fifty years they had dreaded, by the exercise of German force, the very thing that had happened. And their constant theme was: “We must devise means by which this intolerable fear will be lifted from our hearts. We cannot, we will not, live another fifty years under the cloud of that terror.”

The terror had been there all the time, and the war was its flame and consummation, and it had been expected, because the politics of Europe were based upon a definite conception. That conception was that the strong had all the rights and that all that the weak could enjoy was what the strong permitted them to enjoy; that no nation had any right that could not be asserted by the exercise of force; and that the real politics of Europe consisted in determining how many of the weak elements of the European combination of families of nations should be under the influence and control of one set of nations; how many of those elements should be under the influence and control of another set of nations.

One of the centers of all the bad business was in the town of Constantinople. I don’t believe that intrigue was ever anywhere [35page icon] else reduced to such a consummate art or practiced with such ardor and stealth as in Constantinople. And that was because Constantinople was the key to the weak part of Europe. That was where the pawns were, not the kings and the queens and the castles and the bishops and the rest of the game—of the chess game—of politics, but the little pawns. They made the openings for the heavier pieces. Their maneuvers determined the arrangement of the board, and those who controlled the pawns controlled the outcome of the whole plot to checkmate and to match, and to capture, and to take advantage. The shrewdest politicians in the diplomatic service of the several nations were put at Constantinople to run the game, which consisted in maneuvering the weak for the advantage of the strong. And every international conference that preceded the conference at Paris, which is still in process, has been intended to complete and to consummate the arrangements for that game. For the first time in the history of mankind, the recent conference at Paris was convened to destroy that system and substitute another. (applause)

I take it, my fellow citizens, that when you look at that volume that contains the treaty of peace with Germany in the light of what I have been saying to you, you will read it with greater interest than you have hitherto attached to it. It is the charter and constitution of a new system for the world, (applause) and that new system is based upon an absolute reversal of the principles of the old system. The essential object of that treaty is to establish the independence and protect the integrity of the weak peoples of the world. (applause) I hear some gentlemen, who are themselves incapable of altruistic purposes, say, “Oh, but that is altruistic. It is not our business to take care of the weak nations of the world.” No, but it is our business to prevent war, and if we don’t take care of the weak nations of the world, there will be war. (applause) These gentlemen assume the role of being very practical men, and they say, “We don’t want to get into war to protect every little nation in the world.” Very well, then, let them show me how they will keep out of war by not protecting them, (applause) and let them show me how they will prove that, having gone into an enterprise, they are not absolutely contemptible quitters if they don’t see the game through. (applause) They joined all the rest of us in the profession of fine purposes when we went into the war, and what were the fine purposes that they professed? It was not merely to defeat Germany. It is not a handsome enterprise for any great nation to go into a war merely to reduce another nation to obedience. They went in, and they professed to go in, to see to it that nobody after Germany’s defeat should repeat the experiment which Germany [36page icon] had tried. (applause) And how do they propose to do that? To leave the material that Germany was going to make her dominating empire out of helpless and at their mercy.

What was the old formula of Pan-Germanism? From Bremen to Baghdad, wasn’t it? Well, look at the map. What lies between Bremen and Baghdad? After you get past the German territory, there is Poland. There is Bohemia, which we have made into Czechoslovakia. There is Hungary, which is now divided from Austria and does not share Austria’s strength. There is Rumania. There is Yugoslavia. There is broken Turkey; and then Persia and Baghdad. The route is open. The route is wide open, and we have undertaken to say, “This route is closed!” It has been closed. If you do not close it, you have no choice but some day or other to enter into exactly the same sort of war that we have just gone through. Those gentlemen are dreaming. They are living in a past age which is gone and all but forgotten when they say that we can mind our own business.

Our own business? Is there any merchant present here or any manufacturer or any banker who can say that our interests are separate from the interests of the rest of the world, commercially, industrially, financially? There is not a man in any one of those professions who doesn’t admit that our industrial fortunes are tied up with the industrial fortunes of the rest of the world. He knows that, and when he draws a picture to himself—if he is frank—of what some gentlemen propose, this is what he sees: America minding her own business and having no other—(laughter and applause) despised, suspected, distrusted. And on the other side of the water, the treaty and its operation—interrupted? Not at all!

We are a great nation, my fellow citizens, but the treaty is going to be applied just the same whether we take part in it or not. And part of its application—at the center of its application—stands that great problem of the rehabilitation of Germany industrially. I say the problem of her rehabilitation because unless she is rehabilitated she cannot pay the reparation. And the Reparation Commission created by the treaty was created for the purpose of seeing that Germany pays the reparation, (applause) and it was admitted in all our conferences that, in order to do that, steps must be taken to enable Germany to pay the reparation, which means her industrial and commercial rehabilitation. Not only that, but some of you gentlemen know we used to have trade with Germany. All of that trade is going to be in the hands and under the control of the Reparation Commission. I humbly asked leave to appoint a member to look after our interests, and I was rebuked for it.

I am looking after the industrial interests of the United States. I [37page icon] would like to see the other men who are. They are forgetting the industrial interests of the United States, and they are doing things that will cut us off, and our trade off from the normal channels, because the Reparation Commission can determine where Germany buys, what Germany buys, and how much Germany buys. The Reparation Commission can determine in what instruments of credit she temporarily expresses her debt. It can determine how those instruments of credit shall be used for the basis of the credit which must underlie international exchanges. It is going to stand at the center of the financial operations of the world. Now, is it minding our business to keep out of that? On the contrary, it is handing our business over to people who are not particularly interested in seeing that it prospers. These are facts which I can appropriately address to a chamber of commerce because they are facts which nobody can controvert and which yet seem often to be forgotten. The broader aspects of this subject are seldom brought to your attention. It is the little picayune details here and there.

That brings me, my fellow citizens, to the guarantee of this whole thing. We said that we were going to fight this war for the purpose of seeing to it that the mothers and sisters and fathers of this land, and the sweethearts and wives, did not have to send their lads over on the other side of the sea to fight any more, and so we took part in an arrangement by which justice was to be secured throughout the world. The rest of the world, partly at our suggestion, said “Yes,” and said it gladly; said, “Yes, we will go into the partnership to see that justice is maintained.” And then I come home and hear some gentlemen say, “But will we?” Are we interested in justice? The treaty of peace, as I have just said to you, is based upon the protection of the weak against the strong, and there is only one force that can protect the weak against the strong, and that is the universal concert of the strength of mankind. That is the League of Nations.

But I beg that you will not conceive of the League of Nations as a combination of the world for war, for that is exactly what it is not. It is a combination of the world for arbitration and discussion. I was taking the pains the other day to make a sort of table of contents of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and I found that two thirds of its provisions were devoted to setting up a system of arbitration and discussion in the world.

Why, these are the facts, my fellow citizens. The members of the League agree that no one of them will ever go to war about anything without first doing one or other of two things: without either submitting the question to arbitration, in which case they agree to abide by the decision of the arbitrators absolutely, or submitting it [38page icon] to discussion by the Council of the League of Nations, in which case they agree that, no matter what the opinion expressed by the Council may be, they will allow six months for the discussion, and, whether they are satisfied with the conclusion or not, will not go to war in less than three months after the rendering of the opinion. I think we can take it for granted that the preliminaries would take two or three months, in which case you have a whole year of discussion even when you do not get arbitration. And I want to call you to witness that in almost every international controversy which has been submitted to thorough canvass by the opinion of the world it has become impossible for the result to be war. War is a process of heat. Exposure is a process of cooling; and what is proposed in this is that every hot thing shall be spread out in the cooling air of the opinion of the world and, after it is thoroughly cooled off, then let the nations concerned determine whether they are going to fight about it or not.

And notice the sanction. Any member of the League which breaks these promises with regard to arbitration or discussion is to be deemed thereby to have committed an act of war against the other members of the League, not merely to have done an immoral thing, but, by refusing to obey those processes, to have committed an act of war and put itself out of court. And you know what then happens. You say, “Yes, we form an army and go to fight them.” Not at all. We shut their doors and lock them in. We boycott them. Just so soon as that is done they cannot ship cargoes out or receive them shipped in. They cannot send a telegraphic message. They cannot send or receive a letter. Nobody can leave their territory and nobody can enter their territory. They are absolutely boycotted by the rest of mankind.

I don’t think that after that it will be necessary to do any fighting at all. What brought Germany to her knees was not only the splendid fighting of the incomparable men who met her armies, but that her doors were locked and she could not get supplies from any part of the world. There were a few doors open, doors to some Swedish ore, for example, that she needed for making munitions, and that kept her going for a time; but the Swedish door would be shut this time. There would not be any door open, and that brings a nation to its sense just as suffocation removes from the individual all inclination to fight.

Now, that is the League of Nations—an agreement to arbitrate and discuss, and an agreement that if you do not arbitrate and discuss, you shall be absolutely boycotted and starved out. There is hardly a European nation, my fellow citizens, that is of a fighting inclination which has enough food to eat without importing food, [39page icon] and it will be a very persuasive argument that it has nothing to eat, because you cannot fight on an empty stomach any more than you can worship God on an empty stomach.

When we add to that some other very interesting particulars, I think the League of Nations becomes a very interesting thing indeed. You have heard of Article X, and I am going to speak about that in a minute, but read Article XI, because, really, there are other articles in the Covenant! Article XI says—I am not quoting its language, but its substance—that anything that is likely to affect the peace of the world or the good understanding upon which the peace of the world depends shall be everybody’s business; that any nation, the littlest nation at the table, can stand up and challenge the right of the strongest nation there to keep on in a course of action or policy which is likely to disturb the peace of the world, and that it shall be its “friendly right” to do so. Those are the words. It cannot be regarded as an hostile or unfriendly act. It is its friendly right to do that, and if you will not give the secret away, I wrote those words myself. I wanted it to be our friendly right, and everybody’s friendly right, to discuss everything that is likely to affect the peace of the world, because that is everybody’s business. It is everybody’s business to see that nothing happens that does disturb the peace of the world.

And there is added to this this very interesting thing: there can hereafter be no secret treaties. There were nations represented around that board—I mean the board at which the Commission on the League of Nations sat, where fourteen nations were represented—there were nations represented around that board who had entered into many a secret treaty and understanding, and they made not the least objection to promising that hereafter no secret treaty should have any validity whatever. The provision of the Covenant is that every treaty or international understanding shall be “registered,” I believe the word is, with the General Secretary of the League, that the General Secretary shall publish it in full just so soon as it is possible for him to publish it, and that no treaty shall be valid which is not thus registered. It is like our arrangements with regard to mortgages on real estate, that until they are registered nobody else need pay any attention to them. So with the treaties. Until they are registered in this office of the League, nobody, not even the parties themselves, can insist upon their execution. You have cleared the deck thereby of the most dangerous thing and the most embarrassing thing that has hitherto existed in international politics.

It was very embarrassing, my fellow citizens, when you thought you were approaching an ideal solution of a momentous question, [40page icon] to find that some of your principal colleagues had given the whole thing away. And that leads me to speak just in passing of what has given a great many people unnatural distress. I mean the Shantung settlement, the settlement with regard to a portion of the province of Shantung in China. Great Britain and, subsequently, France, as everybody now knows, in order to make it more certain that Japan would come into the war and so assist to clear the Pacific of the German fleets, had promised that any rights that Germany had in China should, in the case of the victory of the Allies, pass to Japan. There was no qualification in the promise. She was to get exactly what Germany had, and so the only thing that was possible was to induce Japan to promise—and I want to say in all fairness, for it wouldn’t be fair if I didn’t say it, that Japan did very handsomely make the promises which were requested of her—that she would retain in Shantung none of the sovereign rights which Germany had enjoyed there, but would return the sovereignty without qualification to China and retain in Shantung Province only what other nationalities had already had elsewhere—economic rights with regard to the development and administration of the railroad and of certain mines which had become attached to the railway. That is her promise, and, personally, I haven’t the slightest doubt that she will fulfill that promise. She cannot fulfill it right now because the thing doesn’t come into operation until three months after the treaty is ratified, so that we must not be too impatient about it. But she will fulfill those promises.

And suppose that we said we wouldn’t assent. England and France must assent, and if we are going to get Shantung Province back for China and those gentlemen don’t want to engage in foreign wars, how are they going to get it back? Their idea of not getting into trouble seems to be to stand for the greatest possible number of unworkable propositions. It is all very well to talk about standing by China, but how are you standing by China when you withdraw from the only arrangements by which China can be assisted? If you are China’s friend, but don’t go into the Council where you can act as China’s friend—if you are China’s friend, then put her in a position where these concessions which have been made need not be carried out! If you are China’s friend, scuttle and run! That is not the kind of American I am.

Now, just a word about Article X. Permit me, if you will, to recur to what I said at the opening of these somewhat disjointed remarks. I said that the treaty was intended to destroy one system and substitute another. That other system was based upon the principle that no strong power need respect the territorial integrity or the political independence of any weak power. I need not [41page icon] confine the phraseology to that. It was based upon the principle that no power is obliged to respect the territorial integrity or the political independence of any other power if it has the force necessary to disregard it. So that Article X cuts at the very heart, and is the only instrument that will cut to the very heart, of the old system. Remember that if this Covenant is adopted by the number of nations, which it probably will be adopted by, it means that every nation except Germany and Turkey, because we have already said we would let Austria come in (Germany has to undergo a certain period of probation to see whether she has really experienced a change of heart and effected a genuine change of constitutional provision)—it means that all the nations of the world, except one strong and one negligible one, agree that they will respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other nations of the world. You would think from some of the discussions that the emphasis is on the word “preserve.”

We are partners with the rest of the world in respecting the territorial integrity and political independence of the others. They are all under solemn bond themselves to respect and preserve those things, and if they don’t preserve them, if they don’t respect them and preserve them, what happens? The Council of the League then advises the several members of the League what it is necessary to do. I can testify from having sat at the board where the instrument was drawn that advice means advice. I supposed it did before I returned home, but I found some gentlemen doubted it. Advice means advice, and the advice cannot be given without the concurrent vote of the representative of the United States. “Well,” but somebody says, “suppose we are a party to the quarrel?” I cannot suppose that, because I know that the United States is not going to disregard the territorial integrity or political independence of any other nation. But for the sake of the argument, suppose that we are a party. Very well, then, the scrap is ours anyway. For what these gentlemen are afraid of is that we are going to get into trouble. If we are a party, we are in trouble already, and if we are not a party, we can control the advice of the Council by our vote. And, my friends, that is a little like an open and shut game! And I am not afraid of advice which we give ourselves. And yet that is the whole of the bugaboo which these gentlemen have been parading before you.

The solemn thing about Article X is the first sentence, not the second sentence. The first sentence says that we will respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of other nations. And let me stop a [42page icon] moment on the words “external aggression.” Why were they put in? Because every man who sat at that board held that the right of revolution was sacred and must not be interfered with. Any kind of a row can happen inside, and it is nobody’s right to interfere. The only thing that there is any right to object to or interfere with is external aggression, by some outside power undertaking to take a piece of territory or to interfere with the internal political arrangements of the country which is suffering from the aggression. Because territorial integrity does not mean that you cannot invade another country; it means that you cannot invade it and stay in it. I haven’t impaired the territorial integrity of your backyard if I walk into it, but I very much impair it if I insist upon staying there and won’t get out. And the impairment—the integrity contemplated in this article is the kind of integrity which is violated if there is a seizure of territory, if there is an attempted annexation, if there is an attempted continuing domination either of the territory itself or the methods of government inside of that territory.1

When you read Article X, therefore, you will see that it is nothing but the inevitable, logical center of the whole system of the Covenant of the League of Nations. And I stand for it absolutely. If it should ever in any important respect be impaired, I would feel like asking the Secretary of War to get the boys who went across the water to fight together on some field where I could go and see them. And I would stand up before them and say: “Boys, I told you before you went across the seas that this is a war against wars, and I did my best to fulfill the promise, but I am obliged to come to you in mortification and shame and say I have not been able to fulfill the promise. You are betrayed. You fought for something that you did not get.” And the glory of the armies and the navies of the United States is gone like a dream in the night, and there ensues upon it, in the suitable darkness of the night, the nightmare of dread which lay upon the nations before this war came. And there will come some time, in the vengeful Providence of God, another struggle in which, not a few hundred thousand fine men from America will have to die, but as many millions as are necessary to accomplish the final freedom of the peoples of the world.2

#An Address in the St. Louis Coliseum, September 5, 1919

Mr. Chairman, Governor Gardner, my fellow countrymen. We have met upon an occasion which is much too solemn—(a photographic bomb is discharged) this is much too solemn an occasion, my fellow countrymen, to care how we look. We ought to care how we think. (applause) And I have come here tonight to ask permission to discuss with you some of the very curious aberrations of thinking that have taken place in this country of late. I have sought—I think I have sought without prejudice—to understand the point of view of the men who have been opposing the treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations. Many of them are men whose judgment and whose patriotic feeling I have been accustomed to admire and respect. And yet I must admit to you, my fellow countrymen, that it is very hard for me to believe that they have followed their line of thinking to its logical and necessary conclusion. Because when you reflect upon their position, it is either that we ought to reject this treaty altogether or that we ought to change it in such a way as will make it necessary to reopen negotiations with Germany and reconsider the settlements of the peace in many essential particulars. We cannot do the latter alone, and other nations will not join us in doing it. The only alternative is to reject the peace and to do what some of our fellow countrymen have been advising us to do—stand alone in the world.

I am going to take the liberty tonight of pointing out to you what this alternative means. I know the course of reasoning which is either uttered or implied in this advice when it is given us by some of the men who propose this course. They believe that the United States is so strong, so financially strong, so industrially strong, if necessary so physically strong, (scattered applause) that it can impose its will upon the world if it is necessary for it to stand out against the world. And they believe that the processes of peace can be processes of domination and antagonism, instead of processes of cooperation and good feeling. I therefore want to point out to you that only those who are ignorant of the world can believe that any nation, even so great a nation as the United States, can stand alone and play a signal part in the history of mankind. (applause)

Begin with a single circumstance, for I have not come here tonight to indulge in any kind of oratory. I have come here tonight to present to you certain hard facts which I want you to take home with you and think about. I suppose that most of you realize that [44page icon] it is going to be very difficult for the other nations that were engaged in this war to get financially on their feet again. I dare say you read the other day the statement of Mr. Herbert Hoover’s opinion—an opinion which I always greatly respect—that it will be necessary for the United States immediately to advance four or five billion dollars for the rehabilitation of credit and industry on the other side of the water, and I must say to you that I learned nothing in Paris which would lead me to doubt that conclusion. And I think the statement of the sum is a reasonable and conservative statement. If the world is going bankrupt, if credit is going to be destroyed, if the industry of the rest of the world is going to be interrupted, our market is confined to the United States. Trade will be impossible, except within our own borders. If we are to save our own markets and rehabilitate our own industries, we must save the financial situation of the world and rehabilitate the markets of the world. Very well, what do these gentlemen propose? That we should do that, for we cannot escape doing it.

Face to face with a situation of this kind, we are not, let us assume, partners in the execution of this treaty. But what is one of the central features of the execution of this treaty? It is the application of the reparation clauses. Germany can’t pay for this war unless her industries are revived, and the treaty of peace sets up a great commission known as the Reparation Commission, in which it was intended that there should be a member from the United States as well as from other countries.

And the business of this commission will be in part to see that the industries of Germany are revived in order that Germany may pay this great debt which she owes to civilization. That Reparation Commission can determine the currents of trade, the conditions of credit, of international credit; it can determine how much Germany is going to buy, where it is going to buy and how it is going to pay for it. And if we must, to save ourselves, contribute to the financial rehabilitation of the world, then without being members of this partnership, we must put our money in the hands of those who want to get the markets that belong to us. That is what these gentlemen call playing a lone hand. It is indeed playing a lone hand. It is playing a hand that is frozen out! (applause) We must contribute the money which other nations are to use in order to rehabilitate their industry and credit, and we must make them our antagonists and rivals and not our partners! I put that proposition to any businessman, young or old, in the United States and ask him how he likes it, and whether he considers that a useful way for the United States to stand alone. We have got to carry this burden of reconstruction whether we will or not or be ruined, and the [45page icon] question is, shall we carry it and be ruined anyhow? For that is what these gentlemen propose—that at every point we shall be embarrassed by the whole financial affairs of the world being in the hands of other nations.

As I was saying at the luncheon that I had the pleasure of eating with the Chamber of Commerce today, the whole aspect of the matter is an aspect of ignorance. The men who propose these things do not understand the selfish interests of the United States, (applause) because here is the rest of the picture: hot rivalries, burning suspicions, jealousies, arrangements made everywhere if possible to shut us out, because if we won’t come in as equals, we ought to be shut out. If we are going to keep out of this thing in order to prey upon the rest of the world, then I think we ought to be frozen out of it. (applause)

That is not the temper of the United States, and it is not like the United States to be ignorant enough to think any such thoughts, because we know that partners profit and enemies lose the game. (applause) But that is not all of the picture, my fellow citizens. If every nation is going to be our rival, if every nation is going to dislike and distrust us—and that will be the case—because having trusted us beyond measure the reaction will occur beyond measure. (applause) As it stands now, they trust us, they look to us, they long that we shall undertake anything for their assistance rather than that any other nation should undertake it. And if we say, “No, we are in this world to live by ourselves and get what we can out of it by any selfish processes,” then the reaction will change the whole heart and attitude of the world toward this great, free, justice-loving people. And after you have changed the attitude of the world, what have you produced? Peace? Why, my fellow citizens, is there any man here or any woman, let me say is there any child here, who does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? (applause) The real reason that the war that we have just finished took place was that Germany was afraid that her commercial rivals were going to get the better of her, and the reason why some nations went into the war against Germany was that they thought that Germany would get the commercial advantage of them. The seed of the jealousy, the seed of the deep-seated hatred was hot, successful commercial and industrial rivalry.

Why, what did the Germans do when they got into Belgium? I have just seen that suffering country. Most of the Belgian factories are standing. You don’t witness in Belgium what you witness in France, except upon certain battlefields—factories destroyed, whole towns wiped out. No, the factories are there, the streets are [46page icon] clear, the people are there. But go in the factories. Every piece of machinery that could be taken away has been taken away. If it was too big to take away, experts directed the way in which it should be injured so that it could never be used again. And that was because there were textile industries and iron industries in Belgium which the Germans hated the Belgians for having, because they were better than the Germans and outdid them in the markets of the world. This war, in its inception was a commercial and industrial war. It was not a political war. (applause)

Very well then, if we must stand apart and be the hostile rivals of the rest of the world, then we must do something else. We must be physically ready for anything to come. We must have a great standing army. We must see to it that every man in America is trained to arms. We must see to it that there are munitions and guns enough for an army that means a mobilized nation; that they are not only laid up in store, but that they are kept up to date; that they are ready to use tomorrow; that we are a nation in arms; because you can’t be unfriendly to everybody without being ready that everybody shall be unfriendly to you.

And what does that mean? Reduction of taxes? No. Not only the continuation of the present taxes but the increase of the present taxes. And it means something very much more serious than that. We can stand that, so far as the expense is concerned, if we care to keep up the high cost of living and enjoy the other luxuries that we have recently enjoyed. But, what is much more serious than that is we have got to have the sort of organization which is the only kind of organization that can handle armies of that sort. We may say what we please of the German government that has been destroyed, my fellow citizens, but it was the only sort of government that could handle an armed nation. (applause) You can’t handle an armed nation by vote. You can’t handle an armed nation if it is democratic, because democracies don’t go to war that way. (applause) You have got to have a concentrated, militaristic organization of government to run a nation of that sort. You have got to think of the President of the United States, not as the chief counselor of the nation, elected for a little while, but as the man meant constantly and every day to be the commander in chief of the armies and navy of the United States, ready to order it to any part of the world where the threat of war is a menace to his own people.

And you can’t do that under free debate. You can’t do that under public counsel. Plans must be kept secret. Knowledge must be accumulated by a system which we have condemned, because we have called it a spying system. The more polite call it a system of intelligence. (laughter) And you can’t watch other nations with [47page icon] your unassisted eye. You have got to watch them by secret agencies planted everywhere.

Let me testify to this, my fellow citizens. I not only did not know it until we got into this war, but I did not believe it when I was told that it was true, that Germany was not the only country that maintained a secret service. Every country in Europe maintained it, because they had to be ready for Germany’s spring upon them, and the only difference between the German secret service and the other secret services was that the German secret service found out more than the others did. (applause and laughter) And therefore Germany sprang upon the other nations at unawares, and they were not ready for it.

And you know what the effect of a military nation is upon social questions. You know how impossible it is to effect social reform if everybody must be under orders from the government. You know how impossible it is, in short, to have a free nation if it is a military nation and under military orders. You may say, “You have been on the other side of the water and got bad dreams.” I have got no dreams at all. I am telling you the things, the evidence of which I have seen with wakened eyes and not with sleeping eyes. And I know that this country, if it wishes to stand alone, must stand alone as part of a world in arms. (applause) Because, ladies and gentlemen, I don’t say it because I am an American and my heart is full of the same pride that fills yours with regard to the power and spirit of this great nation, but merely because it is a fact which I think everybody would admit, outside of America, as well as inside of America—the organization contemplated by the League of Nations without the United States would merely be an alliance and not a League of Nations. (applause) It would be an alliance in which the partnership would be between the more powerful European nations and Japan, and the other party, to the world arrangement, the antagonist, the dissociated party, the party to be standing off and to be watched by the alliance, would be the United States of America. There can be no League of Nations in the true sense without the partnership of this great people. (applause)

And with the partnership of this great people, let us mix the selfish with the unselfish. If you don’t want me to be too altruistic, let me be very practical. If we are partners, let me predict we will be the senior partner. The financial leadership will be ours. The industrial primacy will be ours. The commercial advantage will be ours. And the other countries of the world will look to us, and, shall I say, are looking to us for leadership and direction? (applause) Very well, then, if I am to compete with the critics of this League [48page icon] and of this treaty as a selfish American, I say I want to get in and get in as quick as I can. I want to be inside and know how the thing is run and help to run it. So that you have the alternative—armed isolation or peaceful partnership.

Can any sane man hesitate as to the choice, and can any sane man ask a question, which is the way of peace? I have heard some men say with an amazing ignorance (laughter and applause) that this was, that the Covenant of the League of Nations was, an arrangement for war. (laughter) Very well, the other arrangement—what would it be? (laughter) An arrangement for peace? For kindliness? For cooperation? Would everybody beckon us to their markets? Would everybody come to us and say, “Tell us how to use your money?” Would everybody come to us and say, “Tell us how much of your goods you want us to to take; tell us how much of what Germany is producing you would like when we want it?” I cannot bring my credulity up to that point. (laughter, growing applause) I have reached years of discretion, (laughter, applause) and I have met some very young men who knew a great deal more than some very old men. (applause)

I want you, therefore, after seeing this very ugly picture that I have painted, for it is an ugly picture—it is a picture from which one turns away with distaste and disgust and says, “That isn’t America; it isn’t like anything we have conceived”—I want you to look at the other side. I wonder if some of the gentlemen who are commenting upon this treaty ever read it! (applause) If anybody will tell me which of them hasn’t, I will send him a copy. (a great cry of “read, read,” laughter) Because it is written in two languages. On this side is the English and on that side is the French, and since it is evident that some men don’t understand English, I will hope that they understand French. (laughter) There are excellent French dictionaries by which they can dig out the meaning, if they cannot understand English. (laughter) It is the plainest English that you would desire, particularly the Covenant of the League of Nations. There isn’t a phrase of doubtful meaning in the whole document.

And what is the meaning? It is that the Covenant of the League of Nations is a covenant of arbitration and discussion. (applause) Had anybody ever told you that before? I dare say that everybody you have heard talk about this has discussed Article X. Well, there are twenty-five other articles in it, and all of them are about something else. They discuss how soon and how quick we can get out of it. Well, I am not a quitter for one. (applause and cheering, prolonged and renewing) We can get out just so soon as we want to, but we don’t want to get out just as soon as we get in. And then [49page icon] they talk about the Monroe Doctrine, when it expressly says that nothing in that instrument shall be construed as affecting in any way the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. It says so in so many words. And all the other things they talk about draw your attention from the essential matter. The essential matter, my fellow citizens, is this: every member of that League—and it will include all the fighting nations of the world, except Germany—the only nations that will not be admitted into it promptly are Germany and Turkey, and I take it that we needn’t discuss it. (applause). We can at any rate postpone Turkey until Thanksgiving. (laughter)

All the fighting nations of the world are in it, and what do they promise? This is the center of the document. They promise that they never will go to war without first submitting the questions at issue to arbitration and absolutely abiding by the decision of the arbitrators, or, if they are not willing to submit it to arbitration, submit it to discussion by the capital Council of the League; that they will give the Council of the League six months in which to consider it, and that, if they do not like the opinion of the Council, they will wait three months after the opinion is rendered before going to war. And I tell you, my fellow citizens, that any nation that is in the wrong and waits nine months before it goes to war never will go to war. (applause)

“Ah,” but somebody says, “suppose they don’t abide by that?” Because all the arguments you hear are based upon the assumption that we are going to break the Covenant, that bad faith is the accepted rule. There has not been any such bad faith among nations in recent times except the flagrant bad faith of the nation we have just been fighting, (applause) and that bad faith is not likely to be repeated in the immediate future. (applause) Suppose somebody does not abide by this engagement, then what happens? War? No, not war. Something much more terrible than war—absolute boycott of the nation. (applause) The doors are closed upon her, so that she can’t ship anything out or receive anything. She can’t send a letter out or receive one in. No telegraphic message can cross her borders. No person can cross her borders. She is absolutely closed, (applause) and all the fighting nations of the world agree to join in that boycott. (applause) My own judgment is that war will not be necessary after that. If it is necessary, then it is perfectly evident that the nation is one of the nations that wants to run amuck, and if any nation wants to run amuck in modern civilization, we must all see that the outlaw is captured.

I was saying in one of the first speeches I made upon this little expedition of mine that I was very happy in the circumstances that there was no politics in this business. I mean no party politics, and [50page icon] I invited that audience, and I invite you, to forget all about parties. Forget that I am a Democrat. Forget that some of you are Republicans. Forget all about that. That has nothing to do with it. And this afternoon a book I had forgotten all about—one of the campaign books of the last political campaign—was put in my hands, and I found in that book the platforms of the two parties. And in both those platforms they advocated just such an arrangement as the League of Nations. (applause) When I was on the other side of the water, I did not know that I was taking, obeying orders from both parties, but I was. And I am very happy in that circumstance, because I can testify to you that I did not think anything about parties when I was on the other side of the water. (applause) I am just as much in my present office the servant of my Republican fellow citizens as I am the servant of my Democratic fellow citizens. I am trying to be what some gentlemen don’t know how to be—just a simple, plain-thinking, plain-speaking, out-and-out American. (applause)

Now, I want you to understand that I didn’t leave Washington and come out on this trip because I doubted what was going to happen. I didn’t. For one thing, I wanted to have the pleasure of leaving Washington, (applause) and for another thing I wanted to have the very much greater pleasure of feeling the inspiration that I would get from you. (applause) Things get very lonely in Washington sometimes. (applause) The real voices of the great people of America sometimes sound faint and distant in that strange city! You hear politics until you wish that both parties were smothered in their own gas. (applause) And I wanted to come out here and hear some plain Americans, hear the kind of talk that I am accustomed to talk, the only kind of talk that I can understand, and the only kind of atmosphere with which I can fill my lungs wholesomely. And, then, incidentally, there is a hint in some quarters that the American people had not forgotten how to think. (applause)

There are certain places where talk doesn’t count for anything. I am inclined to think that one of those places is the fashionable dinner table. I have never heard so many things that weren’t so anywhere else. In the little circles of fashion and wealth, information circulates the more freely the less true it is. For some reason, there is a preference for the things that are incredible. I admit there is a certain intellectual excitement in believing the things that you know are incredible. It is very much duller to believe only the things that you know are so. But the spicy thing, the unusual thing, the thing that runs athwart the normal and wholesome currents of society—those are the things that one can talk about with [51page icon] an unusual vocabulary and have a lot of fun in expounding. But they are not the things that make up the daily substance of thinking on the part of a wholesome nation like yourselves.

And this nation went into this war to see it through to the end, (applause) and the end has not come yet. This is the beginning, not of the war, but of the processes which are going to render a war like this impossible. (applause) There are no other processes than these that are proposed in this great treaty. It is a great treaty, it is a treaty of justice, of rigorous and severe justice, but don’t forget that there are many other parties to this treaty than Germany and her opponents. There is rehabilitated Poland. There is rescued Bohemia. There is redeemed Yugoslavia. There is rehabilitated Rumania. All the nations that Germany meant to crush and reduce to the status of tools in her own hand have been redeemed by this war and given the guarantee of the strongest nations of the world that nobody shall invade their liberty again. (applause) If you don’t want to give them that guarantee, then you make it certain that without your guarantee the attempt will be made again. And if another war starts like this one, are you going to keep out of it? If you keep out of this arrangement, that sort of war will come soon. Go into it, and it never will come. (applause)

We are in the presence, therefore, of the most solemn choice that this people was ever called upon to make. That choice is nothing less than this: shall America redeem her pledges to the world? America is made up of the peoples of the world. All the best bloods of the world flow in her veins, all the old affections, all the old and sacred traditions of peoples of every sort through the wide world circulate in her veins, and she has said to mankind at her birth: “We have come to redeem the world by giving it liberty and justice.” Now we are called up before the tribunal of mankind to redeem that immortal pledge.

#An Address in Convention Hall in Kansas City, September 6, 1919

Mr. Chairman, my fellow citizens, it is very inspiring to me to stand in the presence of so great a gathering of my fellow citizens and have the privilege of performing the duty I have come to perform. And that duty is to report to my fellow citizens concerning the work of the peace conference. And every day it seems to me to become more necessary to report, because so many people who are talking about it do not understand what it is.

I came back from Paris bringing one of the greatest documents of human history. One of the things that made it great was that it was penetrated throughout with the principles to which America has devoted her life. Let me hasten to say that one of the most delightful circumstances of the work on the other side of the water was that I discovered that what we called American principles had penetrated to the heart and to the understanding, not only of the [67page icon] great peoples of Europe, but to the hearts and understandings of the great men who were representing the peoples of Europe. When these principles were written into this treaty, they were written there by common consent and by common conviction. But it remains true, nevertheless, my fellow citizens, that principles were written into that treaty which were never written into any great international understanding before, and that they had their natural birth and origin in this country to which we have devoted our life and service.

I have no hesitation in saying that in spirit and essence it is an American document. And if you will bear with me—for this great subject is not a subject for oratory, it is a subject for examination and discussion—if you will bear with me, I will remind you of some of the things that we have long desired and which are at last accomplished in this treaty. I think that I can say that one of the things that America has had most at heart throughout her existence has been that there should be substituted for the brutal processes of war the friendly processes of consultation and arbitration. And that is done in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

I am very anxious that my fellow citizens should realize that that is the chief topic of the Covenant of the League of Nations—the greater part of its provisions. The whole intent and purpose of the document are expressed in provisions by which all the member states agree that they will never go to war without first having done one or the other of two things, either submit the matter in controversy to arbitration, in which case they agree to abide by the verdict, or submit it to the decision of the Council of the League of Nations. And for that purpose, they consent to allow six months for the discussion and, whether they like the opinion expressed or not, they will not go to war for three months after that opinion has been expressed. So, whether you get arbitration or not, you have nine months’ discussion.

And I want to remind you that that is the central principle of some thirty treaties entered into between the United States of America and some thirty other sovereign nations, all of which were confirmed by the Senate of the United States. (applause) We have such an agreement with France. We have such an agreement with Great Britain. We have such an agreement with practically every great nation except Germany, which refused to enter into such an agreement, because, my fellow citizens, Germany knew that she intended something that did not bear discussion, and that, if she had submitted the purposes which led to this war to so much as one month’s discussion, she never would have dared go into the enterprise against mankind which we finally did get into. 68page icon And, therefore, I say that this principle of discussion is the principle already adopted by America.

And what is the compulsion to do this? The compulsion is this, that if any member state violates that promise to submit either to arbitration or discussion, it is thereby ipso facto deemed to have committed an act of war against all the rest. Then, you will ask, do we at once take up arms and fight them? No, we do something very much more terrible than that. We absolutely boycott them. It is provided in the instrument that there shall be no communication ever between them and the rest of the world. They shall receive no goods, and they shall ship no goods. They shall receive no telegraphic messages, and they shall send none. They shall receive no mail, and no mail will be received from them. The nationals, the citizens, of the member states will never enter their territory until the matter is adjusted, and their citizens cannot leave their territory. It is the most complete boycott ever conceived in a public document, and I want to say to you with confident prediction that there will be no more fighting after that.

Gentlemen talk as if the most terrible outcome of this great combination of all of the fighting peoples of the world was going to be to fight; whereas, as a matter of fact, the essence of the document is to the effect that the processes shall be peaceful, and peaceful processes are more deadly than the processes of war. Let any merchant put it to himself, that if he enters into a covenant and then breaks it and the people all around him absolutely desert his establishment and will have nothing more to do with him—ask him after that if it will be necessary to send the police. The most terrible thing that can happen to an individual, and the most conclusive thing that can happen to a nation, is to be read out of decent society. (applause)

There was another thing that we wished to accomplish which is accomplished in this document. We wanted disarmament, and this document provides in the only possible way for disarmament—by common agreement. Observe, my fellow citizens, that, as I said just now, every great fighting nation in the world is to be a member of this partnership except Germany, and inasmuch as Germany has accepted a limitation of her army to 100,000 men, I don’t think for the time being she may be regarded as a great fighting nation. Here in the center of Europe a great nation of more than 60,000,000 that has agreed not to maintain an army of more than 100,000 men, and all around her the rest of the world in concerted partnership to see that no other nation attempts what she attempted, and agreeing among themselves that they will not impose [69page icon] this limitation of armament upon Germany merely, but they will impose it upon themselves.

And you know, my fellow citizens, what armaments mean: great standing armies and great stores of war material. They don’t mean merely burdensome taxation, they don’t mean merely compulsory military service, which saps the economic strength of the nation; but they mean also the building of a military class.

Again and again, my fellow citizens, in the conference at Paris we were face to face with this circumstance—that, in dealing with a particular civil government, we found that they would not dare to promise what their general staff was not willing that they should promise, and that they were dominated by the military machine which they had created, nominally for their own defense, but really, whether they willed it or not, for the provocation of war. And so soon as you have a military class, it does not make any difference what your form of government is. If you are determined to be armed to the teeth, you must obey the orders and directions of the one man who can control the great machinery of war. Elections are of minor importance, because they determine the political policy, and back of that political policy is the constant pressure of the men trained to arms, enormous bodies of disciplined men around them, unlimited supplies of military stores, and wondering if they are never going to be allowed to use their education and skill and ravage some great people with the force of arms. That is the meaning of armament. It is not merely the cost of it, although that is overwhelming, but it is the spirit of it. This country has never had and I hope, in the Providence of God, never will have, that spirit. (great applause) And there is no other way to dispense with great armaments except by the common agreement of the fighting nations of the world. And here is the agreement: they promise disarmament, and promise to agree upon a plan.

But there was something else we wanted that is accomplished by this treaty. We wanted to destroy autocratic authority everywhere in the world. We wanted to see to it that there was no place in the world where a small group of men could use their fellow citizens as pawns in a game; that there was no place in the world where a small group of men, without consulting their fellow citizens, could send their fellow citizens to battle and death in order to accomplish some dynastic scheme, some political plan that had been conceived in private, some object that had been prepared for by universal, worldwide, intrigue. That is what we wanted to accomplish.

The most startling thing that developed itself at the opening of [70page icon] our participation in this war was not the military preparation of Germany—we were familiar with that, though we had been dreaming that she would not use it—but her political preparation—to find that every community in the civilized world was penetrated by her intrigue. The German people did not know that, but it was known in Wilhelmstrasse, where the central offices of the German government were, and Wilhelmstrasse was the master of the German people. And this war, my fellow citizens, has emancipated the German people as well as the rest of the world. (applause) We don’t want to see anything like that happen again, because we know that democracies will sooner or later have to destroy that form of government, and if we don’t destroy it now the job is still to be done. And by a combination of all the great fighting peoples of the world, to see to it that the aggressive purposes of such governments cannot be realized, you cannot any longer have the situation where they will have little groups of men to contrive the downfall of civilization in private conference.

But I want to say something about that that has a different aspect, and perhaps you will regard it as a slight digression from the discussion which I am asking you to be patient enough to follow. My fellow citizens, it doesn’t make any difference what kind of a minority governs you, if it is a minority, and the thing we must see to is that no minority anywhere masters the majority. That is at the heart, my fellow citizens, of the tragical things that are happening in that great country which we long to help and can find no way that is effective to help. I mean the great realm of Russia. The men who are now largely in control of the affairs of Russia represent nobody but themselves. They have again and again been challenged to call a constitutional convention. They have again and again been challenged to prove that they had some kind of a mandate, even from a single class of their fellow citizens, and they dare not attempt it. They have no mandate from anybody. There are only thirty-four of them, I am told, and there were more than thirty-four men who used to control the destinies of Europe from Wilhelmstrasse. There is a closer monopoly of power in Petrograd and Moscow than there ever was in Berlin, and the thing that is intolerable is not that the Russian people are having their way, but that another group of men more cruel than the Czar himself is controlling the destinies of that great people.

And I want to say here and now that I am against the control of any minority anywhere. Search your own economic history, and what have you been uneasy about? Now and again you have said there were small groups of capitalists who were controlling the industry and therefore the development of the United States. [71page icon] Seriously, my fellow citizens, if that is so, and I sometimes have feared that it was, we must break up that monopoly. I am not now saying that there is any group of our fellow citizens who are consciously doing anything of the kind, and I am saying that these allegations must be proved. But if it is proved that any class, any group, anywhere, is, without the suffrage of their fellow citizens, in control of our affairs, then I am with you to destroy the power of that group.

We have got to be frank with ourselves, however. If we don’t want a minority government as they have in Germany, we must see to it that we don’t have it in the United States. If you don’t want little groups of selfish men to plot the future of Europe, we must not allow little groups of selfish men to plot the future of America. Any man that speaks for a class must prove that he also speaks for all his fellow citizens and for mankind, and then we will listen to him. The most difficult thing in a democracy, my fellow citizens, is to get classes, where they definitely exist, to understand one another and unite, and you have not got a great democracy until they do understand one another and unite. If we are in for seeing that there are no more Czars and no more Kaisers, then let us do a thorough job and see that nothing of that sort occurs anywhere.

Then there was another thing we wanted to do, my fellow citizens, that is done in this document. We wanted to see that helpless peoples were nowhere in the world put at the mercy of unscrupulous enemies and masters. There is one pitiful example which is in the hearts of all of us. I mean the example of Armenia. There was a Christian people, helpless, at the mercy of a Turkish government which thought it the service of God to destroy them. And at this moment, my fellow citizens, it is an open question whether the Armenian people will not, while we sit here and debate, be absolutely destroyed. When I think of words piled upon words, of debate following debate, when these unspeakable things that cannot be handled until the debate is over are happening, in these pitiful parts of the world, I wonder that men do not wake up to the moral responsibility of what they are doing. Great peoples are driven out upon a desert, where there is no food and can be none, and they are driven to die, and then men, women, and children thrown into a common grave, so imperfectly covered up that here and there is a pitiful arm stretched out to heaven, and there is no pity in the world. When shall we wake up to the moral responsibility of this great occasion?

And, so, my fellow citizens, there are other aspects to that matter. Not all the populations that are having something that is not a square deal live in Armenia. There are others, and one of the glories of the great document which I brought back with me is this, [72page icon] that everywhere in the area of settlement covered by the political questions involved in that treaty, people of that sort have been given their freedom and guaranteed their freedom.

But the thing does not end there, because the treaty includes the Covenant of the League of Nations. And what does that say? That says that it is the privilege of any member state to call attention to anything, anywhere, that is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. And every people in the world that have not got what they think they ought to have is thereby given a world forum in which they can bring the thing to the bar of mankind. An incomparable thing, a thing that never was dreamed of before! A thing that was never conceived of, that was never possible before—that it should not be regarded as an unfriendly act on the part of the representatives of one nation to call attention to something that was being done within the confines of another empire which was disturbing the peace of the world and good understanding between nations.

There never before has been provided a world forum in which the legitimate grievances of peoples entitled to consideration can be brought to the common judgment of mankind. And if I were the advocate of any suppressed or oppressed people, I surely could not ask any better forum to stand up before the world and challenge the other party to make good its excuses for not acting in that case. That compulsion is the most tremendous moral compulsion that could be devised by organized mankind.

I think I can take it for granted that you never have realized what a scope this great treaty has. You have been asked to look at so many little spots in it with a magnifying glass that you do not know how big it is, (applause) what a great enterprise of the human spirit it is, what a thoroughly American document it is. It is the first great international agreement in the history of mankind where the principle adopted has not given power to the strong but the right to the weak. (applause)

To reject that treaty, to alter that treaty, is to impair one of the first charters of mankind. And yet there are men that deliberate the question with passion, with private passion, with party passion, who think only of some immediate advantage to themselves or to a group of their fellow countrymen, and who look at the thing with the jaundice eyes of those who have some private purpose of their own. When at last, in the annals of mankind they are gibbeted, they will regret that the gibbet is so high.

I would not have you think that I am trying to characterize those who conscientiously object to anything in this great document. I [73page icon] take off my hat to any man who is conscientious, and there are men who are conscientiously opposed to it, though they will pardon me if I say ignorantly opposed. (applause) I have no quarrel with them. It has been a pleasure to confer with some of them and to tell them as frankly, as I would have told my most intimate friend, the whole inside of my mind and of every other mind that I knew anything about that had been concerned with the conduct of affairs at Paris, in order that they might understand this thing and go with the rest of us in the consummation of what is necessary for the peace of the world. (applause) I have no intolerant spirit in the matter, I assure you, but I also assure you that from the bottom of my feet to the top of my head I have got a fighting spirit about it.

And if anybody dares to defeat this great experiment, then they must gather together the counselors of the world and do something better. (applause) If there is a better scheme, I, for one, will subscribe to it, (applause) but I want to say now, as I said the other night, it is a case of “put up or shut up.” Negation will not save the world. Opposition constructs nothing. Opposition is the specialty of those who are Bolshevistically inclined. And again I assure you I am not comparing any of my respected colleagues to Bolsheviki; but I am merely pointing out that the Bolshevistic spirit lacks every element of constructive opposition. They have destroyed everything, and they have proposed nothing. And, while there is a common abhorrence for political Bolshevism, I hope there won’t be any such a thing growing up in our country as international Bolshevism, the Bolshevism that destroys the constructive work of men who have conscientiously tried to cement the good feeling of the great peoples of the world.

The magnificent thing about the League of Nations is that it is to include the great peoples of the world, all except Germany. Germany is one of the great peoples of the world. I would be ashamed not to say that those 60,000,000 industrious and inventive and accomplished people are one of the great peoples of the world. They have been put upon. They have been misled. Their minds have been debased by a false philosophy. And they have been taught things that the human spirit ought to reject, but they will come out of that nightmare, that phantasma, and they will again be a great people. And when they are out of it, when they have got over that dream of conquest and of oppression, when they have shown that their government really is based upon new principles and upon democratic principles, then we, all of us at Paris, agreed that they should be admitted to the League of Nations.

In the meantime, her onetime partner, Austria, is to be admitted. [74page icon] Hungary, I dare say, will be admitted. The only nations of any consequence outside of the League of Nations—unless we choose to stand out and get in line with Germany—are Germany and Turkey, and we are just now looking for the pieces of Turkey. She has so been thoroughly disintegrated that the process of assembling the parts is becoming exceedingly difficult, and the chief controversy is who shall attempt that very difficult and perilous job?

Is it not a great vision, my fellow citizens—this of the thoughtful world combined for peace, and this of all the great peoples of the world associated to see that justice is done, that the strong who intend wrong are restrained and that the weak who cannot defend themselves are made secure?

We have a problem ahead of us that ought to interest us in this connection. We have promised the people of the Philippine Islands that we will set them free, and it has been one of our perplexing questions how we should make them safe after we set them free. Under this arrangement, they will be safe from the outset. They will become members of the League of Nations, and every great nation in the world will be obliged to respect and preserve against external aggression from any quarter the territorial integrity and political independence of the Philippines. It simplifies one of the most perplexing problems that has faced the American public. But it does not simplify our problems merely, gentlemen. It illustrates the triumph of the American spirit. I do not want to attempt any flight of fancy, but I can fancy those men of the first generation, that so thoughtfully set this great government up—the generation of Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and the Adamses—I can fancy their looking on with a sort of enraptured amazement that the American spirit should have made conquest of the world.

I wish you could have seen the faces of some of the people that talked to us over there about the arrival of the American troops. At first they didn’t know that we were going to be able to send so many. But they got something from the first troops that changed the whole aspect of the war. One of the most influential ladies in Paris, the wife of a member of the cabinet, told us that on the Fourth of July of last year that she and others had attended the ceremonies with very sad hearts and merely out of courtesy to the United States, because they did not believe that the arrival of the United States troops was going to be effective. But she said, “After we had been there and seen the faces of those men in khaki, seen the spirit of their swing and attitude and seen the vision that was in their eyes, we came away knowing that victory was in sight.”

What Europe saw in our boys was not merely men under arms, indomitable men under arms, but men with an ideal in their eyes, [75page icon] men who had come a long way from home to defend other people’s homes—men who had forgotten the convenience of everything that personally affected them and had turned away from the longing love of the people who were dear to them and gone across the broad sea to rescue the nations of the world from an intolerable oppression.

I tell you, my fellow citizens, the war was won by the American spirit. Orders were picked up on the battlefield, German orders, directing the commanders not to let the Americans get hold of a particular position, because you never could get them out again. (applause) And you know what one of our American wits said, that it took only half as long to train an American army as any other, because you only had to train them to go one way. (applause) And it is true that they never thought of going any other way, and when they were restrained, because they were told it was imprudent or dangerous, they were impatient. They said, “We didn’t come over here to wait, we came over here to fight,” and their very audacity, their very indifference to danger, changed the morale of the battlefield. They were not fighting prudently; they were fighting to get there. And America in this treaty has realized, my fellow countrymen, what those gallant boys we are so proud of fought for. The men who make this impossible or difficult will have a lifelong reckoning with the men who won the war. I have consorted with those boys. I have been proud to call myself their commander in chief. I didn’t run the business. They didn’t need anybody to run it. All I had to do was to turn them loose!

And now for a final word, my fellow citizens. If anything that I have said has left the impression on your mind that I have the least doubt of the result, please dismiss the impression. And if you think that I have come out on this errand to fight anybody—anybody—please dismiss that from your mind. I have not come to fight or antagonize any individual, or body of individuals. I have, let me say without the slightest affectation, the greatest respect for the Senate of the United States. But, my fellow citizens, I have come out to fight for a cause. That cause is greater than the Senate. It is greater than the government. It is as great as the cause of mankind, and I intend, in office or out, to fight that battle as long as I live. (applause) My ancestors were troublesome Scotchmen, and among them were some of that famous group that were known as the Covenanters. Very well, here is the Covenant of the League of Nations. I am a Covenanter!

#An Address in the Des Moines Coliseum, September 6, 1919

Mr. Chairman1 and fellow countrymen, you make my heart very warm with your generous welcome, and I want to express my unaffected gratitude to your chairman for having so truly struck the note of an occasion like this. He has used almost the very words that were in my thought—that the world is inflamed and profoundly disturbed, and we are met to discuss the measures by which its spirit can be quieted and its affairs turned to the right courses of human life. My fellow countrymen, the world is desperately in need of the settled conditions of peace, and it cannot wait much longer. It is waiting upon us. That is the thought, that is the burdensome thought, upon my heart tonight, that the world is waiting for the verdict of the nation to which it looked for leadership and which it thought would be the last that would ask the world to wait.

My fellow citizens, the world is not at peace. I suppose that it is difficult for one who has not had some touch of the hot passion of the other side of the sea to realize how all the passions that have been slumbering for ages have been uncovered and released by the tragedy of this war. We speak of the tragedy of this war, but the tragedy that lay back of it was greater than the war itself, because back of it lay long ages in which the legitimate freedom of men was suppressed. Back of it lay long ages of recurrent war in which little groups of men, closeted in capitals, determined whether the sons of the land over which they ruled should go out upon the field and shed their blood. For what? For liberty? No, not for liberty, but for the aggrandizement of those who ruled them. And this had been slumbering in the hearts of men. They had felt the suppression of it. They had felt the mastery of those whom they had not chosen as their masters. They had felt the oppression of laws which did not admit them to the equal exercise of human rights. And now all of this is released and uncovered and men glare at one another and say, “Now we are free, and what shall we do with our freedom?”

What happened in Russia was not a sudden and accidental thing. The people of Russia were maddened with the suppression of Czarism. When at last the chance came to throw off those chains, they threw them off, at first with hearts full of confidence and hope. And then they found out that they had been again [77page icon] deceived. There was no assembly chosen to frame a constitution for them, or, rather, there was an assembly chosen to choose a constitution for them and it was suppressed and dispersed. And a little group of men just as selfish, just as ruthless, just as pitiless, as the agents of the Czar himself assumed control and exercised their power by terror and not by right.

And in other parts of Europe the poison spread—the poison of disorder, the poison of revolt, the poison of chaos. And do you honestly think, my fellow citizens, that none of that poison has got in the veins of this free people? Do you not know that the world is all now one single whispering gallery? Those antenna of the wireless telegraph are the symbols of our age. All the impulses of mankind are thrown out upon the air and reach to the ends of the earth. And quietly upon steamships, silently under the cover of the postal service, with the tongue of the wireless and the tongue of the telegraph, all the suggestions of disorder are spread through the world. And money, coming from nobody knows where, is deposited by the millions in capitals like Stockholm, to be used for the propaganda of disorder and discontent and dissolution throughout the world. And men look you calmly in the face in America and say they are for that sort of revolution, when “that sort of revolution” means government by terror, government by force, not government by vote. It is the negation of everything that is American; but it is spreading, and, so long as disorder continues, so long as the world is kept waiting for the answer to the question of the kind of peace we are going to have and what kind of guarantees are to be behind that peace, that poison will steadily spread, more and more rapidly, spread until it may be that even this beloved land of ours will be distracted and distorted by it.

That is what is concerning me, my fellow countrymen. I know the splendid steadiness of the American people, but, my fellow citizens, the whole world needs that steadiness, and the American people are the makeweight in the fortunes of mankind. How long are we going to debate into which scale we will throw that magnificent equipoise that belongs to us? How long shall we be kept waiting for the answer whether the world may trust or despise us?

They have looked to us for leadership. They have looked to us for example. They have built their peace upon the basis of our suggestions. That great volume that contains the treaty of peace is drawn along the specifications laid down by the American government, and now the world stands at amaze because an authority in America hesitates whether it will endorse an American document or not.

You know what the necessity of peace is. Why, my fellow [78page icon] countrymen, political liberty can exist only when there is peace. Social reform can take place only when there is peace. The settlement of every question that concerns our daily life waits for peace.

I have been receiving delegations in Washington of men engaged in the service of the government temporarily in the administration of the railways, and I have had to say to them: “My friends, I cannot tell what the railways can earn until commerce is restored to its normal courses. Until I can tell what the railroads can earn, I cannot tell what the wages that the railroads can pay will be. I cannot suggest what the increase of freight and passenger rates will be to meet these increases in wages, if the rates must be increased. I cannot tell yet whether it will be necessary to increase the rates or not, and I must ask you to wait.”

But they are not the only people that have come to see me. There are all sorts of adjustments necessary in this country. I have asked representatives of capital and labor to come to Washington next month and confer—confer about the fundamental thing of our life at present, that is to say, the conditions of labor. Do you realize, my fellow citizens, that all through the world the one central question of civilization is, “What shall be the conditions of labor?” The profoundest unrest in Europe is due to the doubt prevailing as to what shall be the conditions of labor, and I need not tell you that that unrest is spreading to America.

And in the midst of the treaty of peace is a Magna Carta, a great guarantee for labor—that labor shall have the councils of the world devoted to the discussion of its conditions and of its betterment. And labor all over the world is waiting to know whether America is going to take part in those conferences or not. The confidence of the men who sat at Paris was such that they put it in the document that the first meeting of the labor conference under that part of the treaty should take place in Washington upon the invitation of the President of the United States.

I am going to issue that invitation, whether we can attend the conference or not. But think of the mortification! Think of standing by in Washington itself and seeing the world take counsel upon the fundamental matters of civilization without us. The thing is inconceivable, but it is true.

The world is waiting—waiting to see, not whether we will take part, but whether we will serve and lead, for it has expected us to lead. I want to say that the most touching and thrilling thing that ever happened to me was that which happened almost every day when I was in Paris. Delegations from all over the world came to me to solicit the friendship of America. They frankly told us that they were not sure of anybody else that they could trust, but that [79page icon] they did absolutely trust us to do them justice and to see that justice was done them. Why, some of them came from countries which I have, to my shame, to admit that I never heard of before, and I had to ask as privately as possible what language they spoke. Fortunately, they always had an interpreter, but I always wanted to know at least what family of languages they were speaking. But the touching thing was that from the ends of the earth, from little pocketed valleys, where I did not know that a separate people lived, there came men—men of dignity, men of intellectual parts, men entertaining in their thought and in their memories a great tradition, some of the oldest people of the world—and they came and sat at the feet of the youngest nation of the world and said, “Teach us the way to liberty.”

That is the attitude of the world, and reflect, my fellow countrymen, upon the reaction, the reaction of despair, that would come if America said: “We do not want to lead you. You must do without our advice. You must shift without us.”

How are you going to bring about a peace, peace for which everything waits? We cannot bring it about by doing nothing. I have been very much amazed and very much amused, if I could be amused in such criticial circumstances, to see that the statesmanship of some gentlemen consists in the very interesting proposition that we do nothing at all. I had heard of standing pat before, but I never had before heard of standpatism going to the length of saying it is none of our business, and we do not care what happens to the rest of the world.

Your chairman made a profoundly true remark just now. The isolation of the United States is at an end, not because we chose to go into the politics of the world, but because, by the sheer genius of this people and the growth of our power, we have become a determining factor in the history of mankind. And after you have become a determining factor you cannot remain isolated, whether you want to or not. Isolation ended by the processes of history, not by the processes of our independent choice, and the processes of history merely fulfilled the prediction of the men who founded our republic. Go back and read some of the immortal sentences of the men that assisted to frame this government and see how they set up a standard to which they intended that the nations of the world should rally. They said to the people of the world; “Come to us; this is the home of liberty; this is the place where mankind can learn how to govern their own affairs and straighten out their own difficulties.” And the world did come to us.

Look at your neighbor. Look at the statistics of the people of your state. Look at the statistics of the people of the United States. They [80page icon] have come, their hearts full of hope and confidence, from practically every nation in the world, to constitute a portion of our strength and our hope and a contribution to our achievement.

Sometimes I feel like taking off my hat to some of those immigrants. I was born an American. I could not help it, but they chose to be Americans. They were not born Americans. They saw this star in the West rising over the heads of the world, and they said: “That is the star of hope and the star of salvation. We will set our footsteps toward the West and join that great body of men whom God has blessed with the vision of liberty.” I honor those men. I say: “You made a deliberate choice which showed that you saw what the drift and history of mankind was.”

I am very grateful, I may say in parentheses, that I did not have to make that choice. I am grateful that, ever since I can remember, I have breathed this blessed air of freedom. I am grateful that every instinct in me, every drop of blood in me, remains and stands up and shouts out the traditions of the United States. But some gentlemen are not shouting now about that. They are saying, “Yes, we made a great promise to mankind, but it will cost too much to redeem it.”

My fellow citizens, that is not the spirit of America, and you cannot have peace, you cannot have even your legitimate part in the business of the world unless you are partners with the rest. If you are going to say to the world, “We will stand off and see what we can get out of this,” the world will see to it that you do not get anything out of it. If it is your deliberate choice that, instead of being friends, you will be rivals and antagonists, then you will get just exactly what rivals and antagonists always get—just as little as can be grudgingly vouchsafed you.

And yet you must keep the world on its feet. Is there any businessman here who would be willing to see the world go bankrupt and the business of the world stop? Is there any man here who does not know that America is the only nation left by the war in a position to see that the world does go on with its business? And is it your idea that if we lend our money, as we must, to men whom we have bitterly disappointed, that that money will bring back to us the largesse to which we are entitled?

I do not like to argue this thing on this basis, but if you want to talk business, I am ready to talk business. If it is a matter of how much you are going to get from your money, you will not get half as much as antagonists as you will get as partners. So think that over, if you have none of that thing that is so lightly spoken of, known as altruism. And, believe me, my fellow countrymen, the only people in the world who are going to reap the harvest of the [81page icon] future are people who can entertain ideals, who can follow ideals to the death.

I was saying to another audience today that one of the most beautiful stories I know is the story that we heard in France about the first effect of the American soldiers when they got over there. The French did not believe at first, the British did not believe, that we could finally get 2,000,000 men over there. The most that they hoped at first was that a few American soldiers would restore their morale, for let me say that their morale was gone.

The beautiful story to which I referred is this—the testimony that all of them rendered was that they got their morale back the minute they saw the eyes of those boys. Here were not only soldiers. There was no curtain in the front of the retina of those eyes. They were American eyes. They were eyes that had seen visions. They were eyes the possessors of which had brought with them a great ardor for a supreme cause, and the reason those boys never stopped was that their eyes were lifted to the horizon. They saw a city not built with hands. They saw a citadel toward which their steps were bent where dwelt the oracles of God himself. And on the battlefield were found German orders to commanders here and there to see to it that the Americans did not get lodgment in particular places, because if they ever did you never could get them out. They had gone to Europe to go the whole way towards the realization of the teaching which their fathers had handed down to them. There never were crusaders that went to the Holy Land in the old ages that we read about that were more truly devoted to a holy cause than these gallant, incomparable sons of America.

So my fellow citizens, you have got to make up your minds, because, after all, it is you who are going to make up the minds of this country. I do not owe a report or the slightest responsibility to anybody but you. I do not mean only you in this hall, though I am free to admit that this is just as good a sample of America as you can find anywhere, and the sample looks mighty good to me. I mean you and the millions besides you—thoughtful, responsible American men and women all over this country. They are my bosses, and I am mighty glad to be their servant.

I have come out upon this journey not to fight anybody but to report to you, and I am free to predict that if you credit the report there will be no fighting. It is not only necessary that we should make peace with Germany and make peace with Austria, and see that reasonable peace is made with Turkey and Bulgaria—that is not only not all of it, but it is a very dangerous beginning if you do not add something to it.

I said just now that the peace with Germany, and the same is [82page icon] true of the pending peace with Austria, was made upon American specifications, not unwillingly. Do not let me leave the impression on your mind that the representatives of America in Paris had to insist and force their principles upon the rest. That is not true. Those principles were accepted before we got over there, and the men I dealt with carried them out in absolutely good faith. But they were our principles, and at the heart of them lay this, that there must be a free Poland, for example.

I wonder if you realize what that means. We had to collect the pieces of Poland. For a long time one piece had belonged to Russia, and we cannot get a clear title to that yet. Another part belonged to Austria. We got a title to that. Another part belonged to Germany, and we have settled the title to that. But we found Germany also in possession of other pieces of territory occupied predominantly or exclusively by patriotic Poles, and we said to Germany, “You will have to give that up, too; that belongs to Poland.” Not because it is ground, but because those people there are Poles and want to be part of Poland, and it is not our business to force any sovereignty upon anybody who does not want to live under it. And when we had determined the boundaries of Poland, we set it up and recognized it as an independent republic. There is a Minister, a diplomatic representative of the United States, at Warsaw2 right now in virtue of our formal recognition of the Republic of Poland.

But upon Poland center some of the dangers of the future. And south of Poland is Bohemia, which we cut away from the Austrian combination. And below Bohemia is Hungary, which can no longer rely upon the assistant strength of Austria, and below her is an enlarged Rumania. Alongside of Rumania is the new Slavic kingdom,3 that never could have won its own independence, which had chafed under the chains of Austria-Hungary, but never could throw them off. We have said: “The fundamental wrongs of history center in these regions. These people have the right to govern their own country and control their own fortunes.” That is at the heart of the treaty, but, my fellow citizens, this is at the heart of the future.

The businessmen of Germany did not want the war that we have passed through. The bankers and the manufacturers and the merchants knew that it was unspeakable folly. Why? Because Germany, by her industrial genius, was beginning to dominate the world economically, and all she had to do was to wait about two more generations when her credit, her merchandise, her enterprise, would have covered all of the parts of the world that the great [83page icon] fighting nations did not control. The formula of Pan-Germanism, you remember, was Bremen to Baghdad—Bremen on the North Sea to Baghdad in Persia.

These countries that we have set up as a new home of liberty lie right along that road. If we leave them there without the guarantee that the combined force of the world will assure their independence and their territorial integrity, we have only to wait a short generation, when our recent experience will be repeated. We did not let Germany dominate the world this time. Are we then? If Germany had known then that all the other fighting nations of the world would combine to prevent her action, she never would have dreamed of attempting it. If Germany had known—this is the common verdict of every man familiar with the politics of Europe—if Germany had known that England would go in, she never would have started it. If she had known that America would come in, she never would have dreamed of it. And now the only way to make it certain that there never will be another world war like that is that we should assist in guaranteeing the peace and its settlement.

It is a very interesting circumstance, my fellow countrymen, that the League of Nations will contain all the great nations of the world, and the little ones, too, except Germany, and Germany is merely put on probation. We have practically said to Germany: “If it turns out that you really have had a change of heart and have gotten the nonsense out of your system; if it really does turn out that you have substitute a genuine self-governing republic for a kingdom where a few men on Wilhelmstrasse plotted the destiny of the world, then we will let you in as partners, because you will be respectable.”

And in the meantime, accepting the treaty, Germany’s army is reduced to 100,000 men, and she has promised to give up all the war material over and above what is necessary for 100,000 men. For a nation of 60,000,000! She has surrendered to the world. She has said: “Our fate is in your hands. We are ready to do what you tell us to do.” And the rest of the world is combined, and the interesting circumstance is that the rest of the world, excluding us, will continue combined if we do not go into it. Some gentlemen seem to think they can break up this treaty and prevent this League by not going into it. Not at all.

I can give you an interesting circumstance. There is the settlement, that you have heard so much discussed, about that rich and ancient province of Shantung in China. I do not like that settlement any better than you do, but these were the circumstances. In order to induce Japan to come into the war and clear the Pacific of the German power, England and France bound themselves [84page icon] without any qualification to see to it that Japan got anything in China that Germany had, and that Japan would take it away from her, upon the strength of which promise Japan proceeded to take Kiaochow and occupy the portions of Shantung Province which had been ceded by China for a term of years to Germany. And the most that could be got out of it was that, in view of the fact that America had nothing to do with it, the Japanese were ready to promise that they would give up every item of sovereignty which Germany would otherwise have enjoyed in Shantung Province and return it without restriction to China, and that they would retain in the province only the economic concessions such as other nations already had elsewhere in China—though you do not hear anything about that—concessions in the railway and the mines which had become attached to the railway for operative purposes.

But suppose that you say that is not enough. Very well, then, stay out of the treaty, and how will that accomplish anything? England and France are bound and cannot escape their obligation. Are you going to institute a war against Japan and France and England to get Shantung back for China? That is an enterprise which does not commend itself to the present generation.

I am putting it in brutal terms, my fellow citizens, but that is the fact. By disagreeing to that provision, we accomplish nothing for China. On the contrary, we stay out of the only combination of the councils of nations in which we can be of service to China. With China as a member of the League of Nations, and Japan as a member of the League of Nations, and America as a member of the League of Nations, there confronts every one of them that now famous Article X, by which every member of the League agrees to respect and preserve the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the other member states.

Do not let anybody persuade you that you can take that article out and have a peaceful world. That cuts at the root of the German war. That cuts at the root of the outrage against Belgium. That cuts at the root of the outrage against France. That pulls that vile, unwholesome upas tree4 of Pan-Germanism up by the roots, and it pulls all other “pans” up, too. Every land-grabbing nation is served notice: “Keep on your own territory. Mind your own business. That territory belongs to those people, and they can do with it what they please, provided they do not invade other people’s rights by the use they make of it.”

So my fellow citizens, the thing is going to be done whether we [85page icon] are in it or not. If we are in it, then we are going to be the determining factor in the development of civilization. If we are out of it, we ourselves are going to watch every other nation with suspicion, and we will be justified, too; and we are going to be watched with suspicion. Every movement of trade, every relationship of manufacture, every question of raw materials, every matter that affects the intercourse of the world, will be impeded by the consciousness that America wants to hold off and get something which she is not willing to share with the rest of mankind. I am painting the picture for you, because I know that it is as intolerable to you as it is to me. But do not go away with the impression, I beg you, that I think there is any doubt about the issue. The only thing that can be accomplished is delay. The ultimate outcome will be the triumphant acceptance of the treaty and the League.

And let me pay the tribute which it is only just that I should pay to some of the men who have been, I believe, misunderstood in this business. It is only a handful of men, my fellow citizens, who are trying to defeat the treaty or to prevent the League. The great majority, in official bodies and out, are scrutinizing it, as it is perfectly legitimate that they should scrutinize it, to see if it is necessary that they should qualify it in any way. And my knowledge of their conscience, my knowledge of their public principles, makes me certain that they will sooner or later see that it is safest, since it is all expressed in the plainest English that the English dictionary affords, not to qualify it—to accept it as it is. Because I have been a student of the English language all my life, and I do not see a single obscure sentence in the whole document. Some gentlemen either have not read it or do not understand the English language. But, fortunately, on the right-hand page it is printed in English, and on the left-hand page it is printed in French. Now, if they do not understand English, I hope they will get a French dictionary and dig out the meaning on that side. The French is a very precise language, more precise than the English language, I am told. I am not on a speaking acquaintance with it, but I am told that it is the most precise language in Europe, and that any given phrase in French always means the same thing. That cannot be said of English. So, in order to satisfy themselves, I hope these gentlemen will master the French version and then be reassured that there are no lurking monsters in that document; there are no sinister purposes; that evrything is said in the frankest way.

For example, they have been very much worried at the phrase that nothing in the document shall be taken as impairing in any way the validity of such regional understandings as the Monroe Doctrine. And they said: “Why put in ‘such regional [86page icon] understandings as’”? What other understandings are there? Have you got something up your sleeve? Is there going to be a Monroe Doctrine in Asia? Is there going to be a Monroe Doctrine in China? Why, my fellow citizens, the phrase was written in perfect innocence. The men that I was associated with said: “It is not wise to put a specific thing that belongs only to one nation in a document like this. We do not know of any other regioal understanding like it; we never heard of any other; we never expect to hear of any other. But there might some day be some other, and so we will say ‘such regional understandings as the Monroe Doctrine,’” and their phrase was intended to give right of way to the Monroe Doctrine in the western hemisphere.

I reminded the Committee on Foreign Relations of the Senate the other day that the conference I held with them was not the first conference I had held about the League of Nations. When I came back to this, our own dear country in March last, I held a conference at the White House with the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, and they made various suggestions as to how the Covenant should be altered in phraseology. I carried those suggestions back to Paris, and every one of them was accepted. I think that is a sufficient guarantee that no mischief was intended. And the whole document is of the same plain, practical, explicit sort. And it secures peace, my fellow citizens, in the only way in which peace can be secured.

I remember, if I may illustrate a very great thing with a very trivial thing, I had two acquaintances who were very much addicted to profanity. Their friends were distressed about it. It subordinated a rich vocabulary, which they might otherwise have cultivated, and so we induced them to agree that they never would swear inside the corporate limits, that if they wanted to swear they would go out of town. The first time the passion of anger came upon them, they rather sheepishly got in a street car and went out of town to swear, and by the time they got out of town they did not want to swear.

And that very homely story illustrates in my mind the value of discussion. Let me remind you that every fighting nation in the world is going to belong to this League, because we are going to belong to it, and all the fighting nations make this solemn engagement with each other, that they will not resort to war in the case of any controversy until they have done one or other of two things—until they have either submitted the question at issue to arbitration, in which case they promise to abide by the verdict, whatever it may be, or, if they do not want to submit it to arbitration, have submitted it to discussion by the Council of the League.

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They agree to give the Council six months to discuss the matter, to supply the Council with all the pertinent facts regarding it, and that, after the opinion of the Council is rendered, they will not then go to war if they are dissatisfied with the opinion until three more months have elapsed. They give nine months in which to spread the whole matter before the judgment of mankind. And if they violate this promise, if any one of them violates it, the Covenant prescribes that that violation shall in itself constitute an act of war against the other members of the League.

But it does not provide that there shall be war. On the contrary, it provides for something very much more effective than war. It provides that that nation, that covenant-breaking nation, shall be absolutely cut off from intercourse of every kind with the other nations of the world; that no merchandise shall be shipped out of it or into it; that no postal messages shall go into it or come out of it; that no telegraphic messages shall cross its borders; and that the citizens of the other member states shall not be permitted to have any intercourse or transactions whatever with its citizens or its citizens with them. There is not a single nation in Europe that can stand that boycott for six months. There is not a single nation in Europe that is self-sufficing in its resources of food or anything else that can stand that for six months. And in those circumstances we are told that this Covenant is a covenant of war. It is the most drastic covenant of peace that was ever conceived, and its processes are the processes of peace. The nation that does not abide by its covenants is taboo, is put out of the society of covenantrespecting nations.

So that this is a covenant of arbitration and discussion, of compulsory arbitration or discussion, and just so soon as you discuss matters, my fellow citizens, peace looks in at the window. Did you ever really sit down and discuss matters with your neighbor when you had a difference and come away in the same temper that you went in? One of the difficulties in our labor situation is that there are some employers who will not meet their employees face to face and talk with them. And I have never known an instance in which such a meeting and discussion took place that both sides did not come away in a softened temper and with an access of respect for the other side. The processes of frank discussion are the processes of peace not only, but the processes of settlement, and those are the processes which are set up for all the powerful nations of the world.

I want to say that this is an unparalleled achievement of thoughtful civilization. To my dying day, I shall esteem it the crowning privilege of my life to have been permitted to put my [88page icon] name to a document like that; and in my judgment, my fellow citizens, when passion is cooled and men take a sober, second thought, they are all going to feel that the supreme thing that America did was to help bring this about and then put her shoulder to the great chariot of justice and of peace which was going to lead men along in that slow and toilsome march—toilsome and full of the kind of agony that brings bloody sweat—but nevertheless going up a slow toilsome incline to those distant heights upon which will shine at last the serene light of justice, suffusing a whole world in blissful peace.

#An Address in the Auditorium in Omaha, September 8, 1919

Mr. Chairman and my fellow citizens: I never feel more comfortable in facing my fellow citizens than when I can realize that I am not representing a peculiar cause, that I am not speaking for a single group of my fellow citizens, that I am not the representative of a party, but the representative of the people of the United States. I went across the water with that happy consciousness. And in all the work that was done on the other side of the sea, where I was associated with distinguished Americans of both political parties, we all of us constantly kept at our heart the feeling that we were expressing thoughts of America, that we were working for the things that America believed in. And I have come here to testify that this treaty contains the things that America believes in.

I brought a copy of the treaty along with me, for I fancy that, in view of the criticisms that you have heard of it, you thought it consisted of only four or five clauses. Only four or five clauses out of this volume were picked out for criticism. Only four or five phrases in it are called to your attention by some of the distinguished orators who oppose its adoption. Why, my fellow citizens, this is one of the great charters of human liberty, and the man who picks flaws in it—or, rather, picks out the flaws that are in it, for there are flaws in it—forgets the magnitude of the thing, forgets the majesty of the thing, forgets that the counsels of more than twenty nations combined and were rendered unanimous in the adoption of this great instrument. Let me remind you of what everybody admits who has read the document. Everybody admits that it is a complete settlement of the matters which led to this war, and that it contains the complete machinery which provides that they shall be settled.

You know that one of the greatest difficulties in our own [98page icon] domestic affairs is unsettled land titles. Suppose that somebody were mischievously to tamper with the land records of the State of Nebraska, and that there should be a doubt as to the line of every farm. You know what would happen in six months. All the farmers would be sitting on their fences with shotguns. Litigation would penetrate every community, hot feeling would be generated, contests not only of lawyers, but contests of force would ensue.

Very well, one of the interesting things that this treaty does is to settle the land titles of Europe, and to settle them in this way—on the principles that every land belongs to the people that live on it. This is actually the first time in human history that that principle was ever recognized in a similar document, and yet that is the fundamental American principle. The fundamental American principle is the right of the people that live in the country to say what shall be done with that country. We have gone so far in our assertions of popular right that we not only say that the people have a right to have a government that suits them, but that they have a right to change it in any respect at any time. Very well, that principle lies at the heart of this treaty.

There are peoples in Europe who never before could say that the land they lived on was their own, and the choice that they were to make of their lives was their own choice. I know there are men in Nebraska who come from that country of tragical history, the now restored Republic of Poland. And I want to call your attention to the fact that Poland is here given her complete restitution; and not only is she given the land that formerly belonged to the Poles, but she is given the lands which were occupied by Poles, are now occupied by Poles but had been permitted to remain under other sovereignties. She is given those lands on a principle that all our hearts approve of. Take what in Europe they call High Silesia, the mountainous, the upper portions of the district of Silesia. The very great majority of the people in High Silesia are Poles. But the Germans contested the statement that most of them were Poles. We said: “Very well, then, it is none of our business; we will let them decide. We will put sufficient armed forces into High Silesia to see that nobody tampers with the processes of the election, and then we will hold a referendum there, and those people can belong to either Germany or Poland, as they prefer, and not as we prefer.” And wherever there was a doubtful district we applied the same principles, that the people should decide and not the men sitting around the peace table at Paris. So that when these referendums are completed, the land titles of Europe will be settled, and every country will belong to the people that live on it to do with what [99page icon] they please. You seldom hear of this aspect of this treaty, my fellow citizens.

You have heard of the council that the newspapermen call the “Big Four.” We had a very much bigger name for ourselves than that. We called ourselves the “Supreme Council of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers,” but we had no official title, and sometimes there were five of us instead of four. But those represented, with the exception of Germany, of course, the great fighting nations of the world. They could have done anything with this treaty that they chose to do, because they had the power to do it. And they chose to do what had never been chosen before—to renounce every right of sovereignty in that settlement to which the people concerned did not assent. That is the great settlement which is represented in this volume.

And it contains, among other things, a great charter of liberty for the workingmen of the world. For the first time in history, the counsels of mankind are to be drawn together and concerted for the purpose of defending the rights and improving the conditions of working people—men, women, and children—all over the world. Such a thing as that was never dreamed of before. And what you are asked to discuss in discussing the League of Nations is the method of seeing that this thing is not interfered with. There is no other way to do it than by a universal league of nations, and what is proposed is a universal league of nations. Only two nations are for the time being left out. One of them is Germany, because we did not think that Germany was ready to come in, because we felt that she ought to go through a period of probation. She says that she made a mistake. We now want her to prove it by not trying it again. She says that she has abolished all the old forms of government by which little secret councils of men, sitting nobody knew exactly where, determined the fortunes of that great nation and, incidentally, tried to determine the fortunes of mankind. But we want her to prove that her constitution is changed and that it is going to stay changed.

And then who can, after those proofs are produced, say “No” to a great people, 60,000,000 strong, if they want to come in on equal terms with the rest of us and do justice in international affairs? I want to say that I did not find any of my colleagues in Paris disinclined to do justice to Germany. But I hear that this treaty is very hard on Germany. When an individual has committed a criminal act, the punishment is hard, but the punishment is not unjust. And this nation permitted itself, through unscrupulous governors, to commit a criminal act against mankind, and it is to undergo the [100page icon] punishment, not more than it can endure, but up to the point where it can pay it must pay for the wrong that it has done.

But the things prescribed in this treaty will not be fully carried out if any one of the great influences that brought that result about is withheld from its consummation. Every great fighting nation in the world is on the list of those who are to constitute the League of Nations. I say every great nation, because America is going to be included among them, and the only choice, my fellow citizens, is whether we will go in now or come in later with Germany; whether we will go in as founders of this covenant of freedom or go in as those who are admitted after they have made a mistake and repented.

I wish I could do what is impossible in a great company like this. I wish I could read that Covenant to you, because I do not believe, if you have not read it yourself and have only listened to certain speeches that I have read, that you know anything that is in it. Why, my fellow citizens, the heart of that Covenant is that there shall be no war.

To listen to some of the speeches that you may have listened to or read, you would think that the heart of it was that it was an arrangement for war. On the contrary, this is the heart of that treaty: the bulk of it is concerned with arrangements under which all the members of the League—that means everybody but Germany and dismembered Turkey—agree that they never will go to war without first having done one or the other of two things—either submitted the question at issue to arbitration, in which case they agree absolutely to abide by the verdict, or, if they do not care to submit it to arbitration, submit it to discussion by the Council of the League of Nations, in which case they must give six months for the discussion and wait three months after the rendering of the decision, whether they like it or not, before they go to war. They agree to cool off for nine months before they yield to the heat of passion which might otherwise have hurried them into war.

And if they do not do that, it is not war that ensues. It is something that will interest them and engage them very much more than war. It is an absolute boycott of the nation that disregards the Covenant. The boycott is automatic, and just so soon as it applies, then this happens. No goods can be shipped out of that country; no goods can be shipped into it. No telegraphic message may pass either way across its borders. No package of postal matter—no letter—can cross its borders either way. No citizen of any member of the League can have any transactions of any kind with any citizen of that nation. It is the most complete isolation and boycott ever conceived, and there is not a nation in Europe that can live for six [101page icon] months without importing goods out of other countries. After they have thought about the matter for six months, I predict that they will have no stomach for war.

But all that you are told about in this Covenant, so far as I can learn, is that there is an Article X. I will repeat Article X to you; I think I can repeat it verbatim, the heart of it at any rate. Every member of the League promises to respect and preserve as against external aggression—not as against internal revolution—the territorial integrity and existing political independence of every other member of the League. And if it is necessary to enforce this promise—I mean, for the nations to act in concert with arms in their hands to enforce it—then the Council of the League shall advise what action is necessary. Some gentlemen who doubt the meaning of English words have thought that advice did not mean advice, but I do not know anything else that it does mean, and I have studied English most of my life and speak it with reasonable correctness. The point is this. The Council cannot give that advice without the vote of the United States, unless it is a party to the dispute. But, my fellow citizens, if you are a party to the dispute, you are in the scrap anyhow. If you are a party, then the question is not whether you are going to war or not, but merely whether you are going to war against the rest of the world or with the rest of the world.

And the object of war in that case will be to defend that central thing that I began by speaking about. That is the guarantee of the land titles of the world which have been established by this treaty. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Yugoslavia—all those nations which never had a vision of independent liberty until now—have their liberty and independence guaranteed to them. And if we do not guarantee them, then we have this interesting choice. I hear gentlemen say that we went into the recent war because we were forced into it, and their preference now is to wait to be forced in again. They do not pretend that we can keep out; they merely pretend that we ought to keep out until we are ashamed not to go in.

And this is the Covenant of the League of Nations that you hear objected to—the only possible guarantee against war. I would consider myself recreant to every mother and father, every wife and sweetheart in this country, if I consented to the ending of this war without a guarantee that there would be no other. You say, “Is it an absolute guarantee?” No, there is no absolute guarantee against human passion; but even if it were only 10 per cent of a guarantee, wouldn’t you rather have 10 per cent guarantee against war than none? If it only creates a presumption that there will not be war, wouldn’t you rather have that presumption than live under the [102page icon] certainty that there will be war? For, I tell you, my fellow citizens, I can predict with absolute certainty that, within another generation, there will be another world war if the nations of the world—if the League of Nations—does not prevent it by concerted action.

But I didn’t come here this morning, I remind myself, so much to expound upon the treaty as to talk about these interesting things that we hear about that are called reservations. A reservation is an assent with a “but” to it. We agree—but. Now, I want to call your attention to some of these buts. I will take them, as far as I can remember the order, in the order in which they deal with clauses of the League itself.

In the first article of the Covenant, it is provided that a nation can withdraw from the League on two years’ notice, provided that, at the time of its withdrawal—that is to say, at the expiration of the two years—it has fulfilled all its international obligations and all its obligations under the Covenant. But some of our friends are very uneasy about that. They want to sit close to the door and with their hand on the knob, and they want to say: “We are in this thing, but we are in it with infinite timidity, and we are in it only because you overpersuaded us and wanted us to come in. But we are going to sit here and try this door every once and a while and see that it isn’t locked. And just as soon as we see anything we don’t like, we are going to scuttle.” (laughter and applause)

Now, what is the trouble? I want you to put this to every man you know who makes this objection, what is he afraid of? Is he afraid that, when the United States wishes to withdraw, it will not have fulfilled its international obligations? Is he willing to bring that indictment against this beloved country? My fellow citizens, we never did fail to fulfill any obligation we have made; (applause) and, God guiding and helping us, we never will. I, for one, am not going to admit in any connection the slightest doubt that, if we ever choose to withdraw, we will then have fulfilled our obligations.

Because, if we make reservations, as they are called, about this, what do we do? This Covenant does not set up any tribunal to judge whether we have fulfilled our obligations at that time or not. There is only one thing to restrain us, and that is the opinion of mankind. Are these gentlemen such poor patriots that they are afraid the United States will cut a poor figure in the opinion of mankind? And do they think that they can bring this great people to withdraw from that League if at that time their withdrawal would be condemned by the opinion of mankind? We have always been at pains to earn the respect of mankind, and we shall always be at pains to retain it. (applause) I, for one, am too proud as an American to say that any doubt will ever hang upon our right to [103page icon] withdraw upon the condition of the fulfillment of our international obligations. (applause)

I have already adverted to the difficulties under Article X and will not return to those. That difficulty is merely as I represented it just now. They don’t want to go in as partners, they want to go in as late joiners, because they all admit that in a war which imperils the just arrangements of mankind, America, the greatest, richest, freest people of the world, must take sides with the cause. We cannot live without taking sides. We devoted ourselves to justice and liberty when we were born, and we are not going to get senile and forget it. (applause)

But they don’t like the way in which the Monroe Doctrine is mentioned. Well, I wouldn’t stop on a question of style. The Monroe Doctrine is adopted. It is swallowed, hook, line, and sinker, (applause) and, being carefully digested into the central organism of the whole instrument, I don’t care what language they use about it. The language is entirely satisfactory as far as I know, I mean as far as I understand the English language. That puzzles me, my fellow citizens. The English language seems to have gotten some new meaning in it since I studied it that bothers these gentlemen. I don’t know what dictionaries they studied. But the Monroe Doctrine is expressly authenticated in this document, for the first time in history, by all the great nations of the world, and it was put there at our request. (applause) When I came back to this dear country in March, I brought the first draft—the provisional draft—of the Covenant of the League. And I submitted it to the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate of the United States, and I explained and I discussed it with them. They made a number of suggestions, and I carried every one of those suggestions to Paris, and every one of them was adopted. (applause)

Now apparently they want me to go back to Paris and say, “I am much obliged to you, but we don’t like the language used.” Now I suggest that if they don’t like that language there is another language in here. That page is English (illustrating); this page is French (illustrating)—it is the same thing. Now, if the English don’t suit them, let them engage the services of some French scholar and see if they like the French better. It is the same thing—done in perfect good faith and nobody trying to fool anybody else. This is the genuine work of honest men. (applause)

And the fourth matter of their concern is about domestic questions, and so they want to put in a reservation enumerating certain questions as domestic questions, which everybody on both sides of the water admit are domestic questions. That seems to me, to say the least, to be the work of supererogation. It doesn’t seem to me [104page icon] to be necessary to specify what everybody admits, but they are so careful—I believe the word used to be so “meticulous”—that they want to put in clearly what is implied in the whole instrument. “Well,” you say, “why not?” Well, why not, my fellow citizens? The conference at Paris will still be sitting when the Senate of the United States has acted upon this treaty—well, perhaps I oughtn’t to say that so confidently, for no man not in on the secrets of providence can tell how long it will take the United States Senate to do anything. (laughter and applause) But I realize that, in the normal course of human fatigue, the Senate will have acted upon this treaty before the conference in Paris gets through with the Austrian treaty and Bulgarian treaty and Turkish treaty. Why, they will still be there on the job.

Now, when you take a contract—every lawyer will follow me on this—if you take a contract and change the words, even though they don’t change the sense, you have to get the other parties to accept those words. Isn’t that true? Therefore every reservation will have to be taken back to all the signatories of this treaty, and I want you to notice that that includes Germany. We will have to ask Germany’s consent to read this treaty the way we understand it. Now I want to tell you that we didn’t ask Germany’s consent with regard to the meaning of any one of those terms while we were in Paris. We told her what they meant and said, “Sign here.” (applause and laughter) Are there any patriotic Americans who desire the method changed? (cries of “No”) Do they want me to ask the Germans if I may read the treaty to them expressed in the words the United States Senate thinks it ought to have been written in?

So, you see, reservations come down to this, that they want to change the language of the treaty without changing its meaning. And, let me say, there are indications—I am not judging from official dispatches, but from the newspapers—that people are not in as good a humor over in France now as they were when I was there, and it is going to be more difficult to get a new agreement from now on than it was before. And after dealing with some of those gentlemen, I found that they were as ingenious as any American in attaching unexpected meanings to plain words. I do not want, therefore, having gone through the mill on the existing language, to go through it again on changed language.

But I must not turn away from this great subject without attention to the Shantung clause, the provision with regard to the transfer of certain German rights in the province of Shantung, China, to Japan. I frankly said to my Japanese colleagues at the conference—therefore I can without impropriety say it here—that I was very deeply dissatisfied with that part of the treaty. But, my fellow [105page icon] citizens, Japan agreed at that very time, and as part of the understanding upon which these clauses were put into the treaty, that she would relinquish every item of sovereignty that Germany had enjoyed to China, and that she would retain what other nations have elsewhere in China—certain economic concessions with regard to the railways and the mines, which she was to operate under a corporation and subject to the laws of China. As I say, I wish she could have done more. But suppose, as some have suggested, that we dissent from that clause in the treaty. You can’t sign all of a treaty but one part, my fellow citizens. It is like the President’s veto. He can’t veto provisions in a bill. He has got either to sign the bill or veto the bill. We can’t sign the treaty with the Shantung provision out of it, and if we could, what sort of service would that be doing China?

Let us state the facts with brutal frankness. England and France are bound by solemn treaty, entered into before the conference at Paris, before we entered the war, to give Japan what she gets in this treaty in the province of Shantung. They cannot in honor withdraw from that promise. They cannot consent to a peace treaty which does not contain these provisions with regard to Shantung. England and France, therefore, will stand behind Japan, and if we are not signatories to the treaty and not parties, she will get all that Germany had in Shantung, more than she will get under the promises which she made to us. And the only way we can get it away from her is by going to war with Japan and Great Britain and France. Does that look like a workable proposition? Is that doing China a service? Whereas, if we go into this treaty, we are members of the League, China is a member of the League, Japan is a member of the League, and under Article X, Japan promises, and we guarantee, that the territorial integrity and political independence of China will be respected and preserved. (applause) That is the way to serve China. That is the only possible way in the circumstances to serve China.

Therefore we cannot rewrite this treaty. We must take it or leave it, and after all the rest of the world has signed it, we will find it very difficult to make any other kind of a treaty. As I took the occasion of saying the other night, it is a case of “put up or shut up.” The world cannot breathe in the atmosphere of negations. The world cannot deal with nations who say, “We won’t play!” The world cannot have anything to do with an arrangement in which every nation says, “We will take care of ourselves.”

Is it possible—is it possible, for the sinister thing has been suggested to me—that there is a group of individuals in this country who has conceived it as desirable that the United States should [106page icon] exercise its power alone, should arm for the purpose, should be ready for the enterprise and undertake to dominate the world by arms? There are indications that there are groups of citizens in this country who do not find that an intolerable program. Are we going to substitute for Pan-Germanism a sinister Pan-Americanism? The thing is intolerable. It is hideous. No man dare propose that in plain words to any American audience anywhere. (applause) The heart of this people is pure. The heart of this people is true. This great people loves liberty. It loves justice. It would rather have liberty and justice than wealth and power. It is the great idealistic force of history, and the idealism of America is what has made conquest of the spirits of man.

While I was in Paris, men of every race, from every quarter of the globe, sought interviews with us in order to tell us how absolutely they believed in America, how all their thoughts, all their pleas for help, all their hope of political salvation, reached out toward America. (applause) And my heart melted within me. I said to some of the simpler sort among them: “I pray you that you will not expect the impossible. America cannot do all the things you are expecting her to do. The most I can promise is that we will do everything we can.”

And we are going to redeem that promise, not because I made it, but because when I made it, I spoke the hopes and heart of the United States. If I felt that I personally in any way stood in the way of this settlement, I would be glad to die that it might be consummated, because I have a vision, my fellow citizens, that, if this thing should by some mishap not be accomplished, there would arise from that upon the fair name of this people a stain which never could be effaced, which would be intolerable to every man who knew America and was ready with stout heart to uphold it.

I said just now, before opening, that I was happy to forget on a campaign like this what party I belonged to, and I hope you will not think I am recalling what party I belong to if I say how proud I have been to stand alongside of Senator Hitchcock in this fight. I would be just as glad to stand by Senator Norris if he would let me. But I refer to Senator Hitchcock because I know this is his home town, because of my personal regard for him, because I want to be the brother, the comrade, and coworker of every man who will work for this great cause. And it heartens me when I find, as I found in Des Moines and I find here, that there are more Republicans on the committees that meet me than Democrats. That may be in proportion to the population, (laughter) but, nevertheless, I judge from what I see of these gentlemen that they are, at any rate, very favorable specimens, and that I can take it for granted, [107page icon] because of what I see in my dealing with them, that they do represent some of the permanent and abiding influences of great communities like this. (applause) Why, the heart of America beats in these great prairies and on these hillsides. Sometimes in Washington you seem very far away. The voices that are most audible in Washington are not voices that anybody cares to listen to for very long, (laughter) and it is refreshing to me to get out among the great body of my fellow citizens and feel the touch of the hand and contact of the shoulder and the impulse of mass movement which is going to make conquest, spiritual conquest, of the world. (applause)

#An Address in the Coliseum in Sioux Falls, September 8, 1919.

Governor Norbeck1 and my fellow citizens: I must admit that, every time I face a great audience of my fellow countrymen on this trip, I am filled with a feeling of peculiar solemnity, because I believe, my fellow countrymen, that we have come to one of the turning points in the history of the world. And what I, as an American, covet for this great country is that, on every great occasion, when mankind’s fortunes are hung in the balance, America may have the distinction of leading the way. (applause)

In order to enable you to realize some part of what is my thought tonight, I am going to ask you to turn your thoughts back to the tragedy through which we have just passed. A little incident as we came along in the train today brought very close home to me the things that have been happening. A very quiet lady came up with a little crowd at a way station to shake hands with me, and she had no sooner taken my hand than she turned away and burst into tears. I asked a neighbor what was the matter, and he said that she had meant to speak to me of her son who was dead in France, but that the words would not come from her lips. And all over this country, my fellow citizens, there are women who have given up their sons, wives who have given up their husbands, young women who have given up their sweethearts, to die on the other side of the sea for a great cause which was not the peculiar cause of America, but the cause of mankind and of civilization itself. (applause)

I love to repeat what the people on the other side of the water [108page icon] said about those boys of ours. They told us that they didn’t look like any of the other soldiers, that they didn’t seem to be merely soldiers, that they seemed to be crusaders, that there was something in their eyes that they had never seen in the eyes of any other army. And I was reminded of what I had so often seen on former journeys across the seas: going over in the steerage, bright-eyed men, who had been permeated with the atmosphere of free America; coming back, among the immigrants coming from the old countries—dull-eyed men, tired-looking men, discouraged-looking men. They were all of them going both ways, men who had come from across the sea, but going out they were going with the look of America in their eyes to visit the old people at home. Coming back, they had the fatigue of Europe in their eyes and had not yet got the feeling that penetrates every American, that there is a great future for all men, that he is master of his own fortune, and that he need be governed by no man whom he does not choose as his master.

And that is what these people saw in the eyes of the American boys who carried their arms across the sea. There was America in every one of those lively eyes, and they were not looking merely at the fields of France, or merely seeking to defeat Germany, but were seeking to defeat everything that Germany’s action represented, and to see to it that there never would be such a thing again. (applause)

I want to remind you, my fellow countrymen, that that war was not an accident. That war didn’t just happen. That was not some sudden cause which brought on the conflagration. On the contrary, Germany had been preparing for that war for generations. Germany had been preparing every resource and perfecting every skill, developing every invention, which would enable her to master the European world and to dominate the rest of the world. Everybody had been looking on. Everybody had known. For example, it was known in every war office in Europe, and in the War Department at Washington, that the Germans not only had a vast supply of great field guns, but that they had ammunition enough for every one of those guns to war out the guns. And yet we were living in a fool’s paradise. We thought that Germany meant what she said—that she was armed for defense, and that she never would use that great store of guns against her fellow men.

Why, my friends, it was foreordained the minute Germany conceived these purposes that she should do the thing which she did in 1914. The assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince in Serbia was not what started the war. They were ready to start it and merely made that an occasion and an excuse. Before they started [109page icon] it, Serbia had yielded to practically every demand they made of her, and they would not let the rest of the world know that Serbia had yielded, because they did not want to miss the occasion to start the war.

They were afraid that other nations would prepare. They were afraid that they had given too much indication of what they were going to do, and they did not want to wait. What immediately happened, when the other foreign offices of Europe learned of what was going on, was that from every other foreign office, so far as I have been able to learn, messages went to Berlin instructing their representatives to suggest to the German government that the other governments be informed, and that an opportunity be obtained for a discussion, so as to see if war could not be avoided. And Germany didn’t dare to discuss her purposes for twenty-four hours.

Now, I have brought back from Europe with me, my fellow citizens, a treaty in which Germany is disarmed (applause) and in which all the other nations of the world agree never to go to war (applause) without first of all having done one or other of two things, either having submitted the question in dispute to arbitration, in which case they will abide by the verdict, or, if they do not care to submit it to arbitration, having submitted it to discussion by the League of Nations; that they will allow six months for the discussion; that they will publish all the facts to all the world; and that not until three months after the expiration of the six will they go to war. (applause) There is a period of nine months of cooling off, and Germany did not dare cool off for nine days! (applause) If Germany had dreamed that anything like the greater part of the world would combine against her, she never would have begun the war, and she didn’t dare to let the opinions of mankind crystallize against her by the discussion of the purposes which she had in mind.

So what I want to point out to you tonight is that we are making a fundamental choice. You have either got to have the old system, of which Germany was the perfect flower, or you have got to have a new system. You cannot have a new system unless you supply a substitute, an adequate substitute, for the old. And I want to say that when certain of our fellow citizens take the position that we do not want to go into any combination at all, but want to take care of ourselves, all I have to say to them is that that is exactly the German position.

Germany through the mouth of her Emperor, Germany through the mouths of her orators, Germany through the pens of her writers of all sorts said: “Here we stand, ready to take care of ourselves. [110page icon] We will not enter into any combination. We are armed for self-defense, and no nation dares interfere with our rights.”

That, it appears, is the American program in the eyes of some gentlemen. And I want to tell you that, within the last two weeks, the pro-German element in this country has lifted its head again. It is again heartened. It again has air in its lungs. It again says, “Ah, now we see a chance when America and Germany will stand outside this League and take care of themselves.” Not take care of themselves as partners—I do not mean to intimate that—but where America will play the same role that Germany played, under that old order which brought us through that agony of bloody sweat, that great agony in which the whole world seemed to be caught in the throes of a crisis, when for a long time we did not know whether civilization itself was going to survive or not.

And do not believe, my fellow countrymen, that civilization is saved now. There were passions let loose upon the field of the world by that war which have not grown quiet yet, which will not grow quiet for a long time, and every element of disorder, every element of chaos, is hoping that there may be no steadying hand from a council of nations to hold the order of the world steady until we can make the final arrangements of justice and of peace. The treaty of peace with Germany is very much more than a treaty of peace with Germany. The German part of it takes a good many words, because there are a great many technical details to be arranged, but that is not the heart of the treaty. The heart of the treaty is that it undoes the injustice that Germany did; that it not only undoes the injustice that Germany did, but it enables the world to see that such injustice will in the future be impossible.

And not forgetting, but remembering with intense sympathy, the toiling mass of mankind, the conference at Paris wrote into the heart of that treaty a great charter of labor. I think that those of us who live in this happy land can have little conception of the conditions of labor in some of the European countries up to the period of the outbreak of this war. And one of the things that that treaty proposes to do is to organize the opinion of all nations to assist in the betterment and the release of the great forces of labor throughout the world. It is a laboring man’s treaty in the sense that it is the average man’s treaty.

Why, my fellow citizens, the thing that happened at Paris was absolutely and literally unprecedented. There never was a gathering of the leading statesmen of the world before who did not sit down to divide the spoils, to make the arrangements the most advantageous that they could devise for their own strong and powerful governments. Yet this gathering of statesmen sat themselves [111page icon] down to do something which a friend of mine the other day very aptly described as establishing the land titles of the world, because the principle underlying the treaty was that every land belonged to the native stock that lived in it, and that nobody has the right to impose the sovereignty of any alien government on anybody was for the first time recognized in the councils of international deliberation. In this League of Nations Covenant, which some men ask you to examine in a spot here and there with a magnifying glass, there lies at the heart of it this great principle: nobody has the right to take any territory any more.

You will see what our situation was. The Austrian Empire, for example, had gone to pieces, and here we were with the pieces on the table. The Austrian treaty is not yet completed, but it is being made on the same principle as the German, and will serve as an illustration. In the old days, they would have compacted it between armies. They did not do that this time. They said: “This piece belongs to the Poles and to nobody else. This piece belongs to the Bohemians and to nobody else. This piece belongs to Rumania, though she never could have got it for herself; we are going to turn it over to her, though other people want it. This piece belongs to the Slavs, who live in the northern Balkans—the Yugoslavs, as we have come to know them to be—and they shall have what belongs to them.”

When we turned to the property of Germany, which she had been habitually misgoverning—I mean the German colonies, particularly the colonies in Africa—there were many nations who would like to have had those rich, undeveloped portions of the world. But none of them got them. We adopted the principle of trusteeship. We said: “We will put you in charge of this, that, and the other piece of territory, and you will make an annual report to us. We will deprive you of your trusteeship whenever you administer it in a way which is not approved by our judgment, and we will put upon you this primary limitation—that you shall do nothing that is to the detriment of the people who live in that territory. You shall not enforce labor on it, and you shall apply the same principles of humanity to the work of their women and children that you apply at home. You shall not allow the illicit trade in drugs and in liquors. You shall not allow men who want to make money out of powder and shot to sell arms and ammunition to those who can use them to their own disadvantage. You shall not make those people fight in your armies. The country is theirs, and you must remember that and treat it as theirs.” There is no more annexation. There is no more land grabbing. There is no more extension of sovereignty. It is an absolute reversal of history, an absolute [112page icon] revolution in the way in which international affairs are treated. And it is all in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

The old system was, be ready. And we can be ready. I have heard gentlemen say, “America can take care of herself.” Yes, she can take care of herself. Every man would have to train to arms. We would have to have a great standing army. We would have to have accumulations of military material such as Germany used to have. We would enjoy the luxuries of taxes even higher than we pay now. We could accumulate our force, and then our force would have to be directed by some kind of sufficiently vigorous central power. You would have a military government in spirit if not in form. No use having a fighting nation if there is not somebody to command it! If you want to turn your President from a representative of the civil purposes of this country, you can turn him into a commander in chief, ready to fight the world.

But if you did nobody would recognize America in those strange and altered circumstances. All the world would stand at amaze and say, “Has America forgotten everything that she ever professed?” The picture is one that every American repudiates, and I challenge any man who has that purpose at the back of his thought to avow it. If he comes and tells you that America must stand alone and take care of herself, ask him how it is going to be done. And he will not dare tell you, because you would show him the door and say, “We do not know any such American.”

Yet we cannot do without force. You cannot establish land titles, as I have expressed it, and not maintain them. Suppose that the land titles of South Dakota were disturbed. Suppose the farm lines were moved, say, ten feet. You know what would happen. Along every fence line you would see farmers perching with guns on their knees. The only reason they are not perching now is that there are land deeds deposited in a particular place, and the whole majesty and force and judicial system of the State of South Dakota are behind the titles.

Very well, we have got to do something like that internationally. You cannot set up Poland, whom all the world through centuries has pitied and sympathized with, as the owner of her property and not have somebody take care that her title deeds are respected. You cannot establish freedom, my fellow citizens, without force. And the only force you can substitute for an armed mankind is the concerted force of the combined action of mankind through the instrumentality of all the enlightened governments of the world. This is the only conceivable system that you can substitute for the old order of things which brought the calamity of this war upon us and would assuredly bring the calamity of another war upon us.

[113page icon]
Your choice is between the League of Nations and Germanism. I have told you what I mean by Germanism—taking care of yourselves, being armed and ready, having a chip on your shoulder, thinking of nothing but your own rights and never thinking of the rights of anybody else, thinking that you were put into this world to see that American might was asserted and forgetting that American might ought never to be used against the weak, ought never to be used in an unjust cause, ought never to be used for aggression, ought to be used with the heart of humanity beating behind it.

Sometimes people call me an idealist. Well, that is the way I know I am an American. America, my fellow citizens—I do not say it in disparagement of any other great people—America is the only idealistic nation in the world. When I speak practical judgments about business affairs, I can only guess whether I am speaking the voice of America or not. But when I speak the ideal purposes of history, I know that I am speaking the voice of America, because I have saturated myself since I was a boy in the records of that spirit, and everywhere in them there is this authentic tone of the love of justice and the service of humanity.

If, by any mysterious influence of error, America should not take the leading part in this new enterprise of concerted power, the world would experience one of those reversals of sentiment, one of those penetrating chills of reaction, which would lead to a universal cynicism. For if America goes back upon mankind, mankind has no other place to turn. It is the hope of nations all over the world that America will do this great thing.

Yet I find some gentlemen so nervous about doing right that their eyes rest very uneasily on the first article of the Covenant of the League of Nations, and they say, “That says that we can get out after two years’ notice, if we have fulfilled all our international obligations at that time. Now, we want to make it perfectly clear that we will get out when we want to.”

You cannot make it perfectly clear in the way they want it, unless you make it perfectly clear at the outset that you want to get out. You cannot choose the seat by the door and keep fumbling with the knob without creating the impression that you are going to get out in a minute; that you do not like the company you are in; that you do not like the job; that you are by constitution and disposition a scuttler!

If America goes into this thing, she is going to stay in, and she is going to stay in in order to see that justice is done. She can see to it, because if you read this Covenant of the League, nothing material can be done under that League without a unanimous vote of [114page icon] the Council. America can determine what action is going to be taken. No action that is against her policy or against her will can be taken, unless her judgment is rendered in some case where she is one of the disputants. But, my fellow citizens, if she is one of the disputants, she is in trouble anyhow. If the war that they are trying to avert is her war, then I do not see that she is any more benefited by being out of the League than in it. On the contrary, if she is in the League, she has at least the good offices of other friendly states to see that some accommodation is reached.

And she is doing exactly what she has done already. Some gentlemen forget that we already have nearly thirty treaties with the leading nations of the world. Yes, and to do the very thing that is in this Covenant. Only we agree to take twelve months to discuss everything, whereas the League gives nine months. The American choice would be twelve. We promise not to fight without first talking.

I want to call here a great many witnesses to this circumstance, for I am sure by looking at you that you know something about it. What is the certain way to have difficulty between capital and labor? It is to refuse to sit down in the same room and talk it over. I cannot understand why one man or set of men should refuse to discuss claims or grievances with another set of men, unless they know to begin with that they are wrong. I am very averse from discussing anything when I know I have got the wrong end. But when I think I have got either the right end or as good an end as the other fellow, then I am perfectly willing to discuss it. There is an old saying accredited to a rather cynical politician of what I hope I may regard as the older school, who said to his son, “John, do not bother your head about lies; they will take care of themselves. But if you ever hear my denying anything, you may be sure it is so.” The only thing we are afraid of, the only thing we dodge, is the truth. If we see facts coming our way, it is just as well to get out of the way. Always take this attitude, my friends, toward facts: always try to see them coming first, so that they will not catch you at unawares.

So with all matters, grading up from the smallest to the greatest. Human beings can get together by discussion, and it is the business of civilization to get together by discussion and not by fighting. That is civilization. The only reason this country is civilized is because we do not let two men who have a difference fight one another. We say: “Wait a minute; we have arranged for that. Just around the corner there you will find a courthouse. On certain days the court is sitting. Go and state the matter to those men, and neither before nor after the decision shall you touch one another.”

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That is civilization. You have got the ordered processes of consultation and discussion. You have got to act by rule, and justice consists in applying the same rule to everybody, not one rule to the rich man and another to the poor, not one rule to the employer and another to the employee, but the same rule to the strong and to the weak.

That is exactly what is attempted in this treaty. I cannot understand the psychology of men who are resisting it. I cannot understand what they are afraid of, unless it is that they know physical force and do not understand moral force. Moral force is a great deal more powerful than physical. Govern the sentiments of mankind and you govern mankind. Govern their fears, govern their hopes, determine their fortunes, get them together in concerted masses, and the whole thing sways like a team. Once get them suspecting one another, once get them antagonizing one another, and society itself goes to pieces. We are trying to make a society instead of a set of barbarians out of the governments of the world. I sometimes think, when I wake in the night, of all the wakeful nights that anxious fathers and mothers and friends have spent during those weary years of this awful war. And I seem to hear the cry, the inarticulate cry, of mothers all over the world, millions of them on the other side of the sea and thousands of them on this side of the sea: “In God’s name, give us the sensible and hopeful and peaceful processes of right and of justice!”

America can stay out, but I want to call you to witness that the peace of the world cannot be established without America. America is necessary to the peace of the world. And reverse the proposition: the peace and good will of the world are necessary to America. Disappoint the world, center its suspicion upon you, make it feel that you are hot and jealous rivals of the other nations, and do you think you are going to do as much business with them as you would otherwise do?

I do not like to put the thing on that plane, my fellow countrymen, but if you want to talk business, I can talk business. If you want to put it on the low plane of how much money you can make, you can make more money out of friendly traders than out of hostile traders. You can make more money out of men who trust you than out of men who fear you. You can bring about a state of mind where by every device possible foreign markets will be closed to you, and men will say: “No, the wheat of America tastes bitter; we will eat the wheat of Argentina; we will eat the wheat of Australia, for that is the wheat of friendship, and this is the wheat of antagonism. We do not want to wear clothes made out of American cotton; we are going to buy just as much cotton from India as we can. [116page icon] We are going to develop new cotton fields. America is up to something; we do not know just what, and we are going to shut and lock every door we can against her.” You can get the world in that temper. Do you think that would be profitable? Do you think there is money in that?

But I am not going to dwell upon that side of it. I am just as sure of what you are thinking as I am of what I am thinking. We are not thinking of money. We would rather retain the reputation of America than have all the money in the world. I am not ready to die for money, and neither are you. But you are ready and I am ready to die for America. A friend of mine made a very poignant remark to me one day. He said: “Did you ever see a family that hung it’s son’s yardstick or ledger or spade up over the mantlepiece?” But how many of you have seen the lad’s rifle, his musket, hung up? Well, why? A musket is a barbarous thing. The spade and the yardstick and the ledger are the symbols of peace and steady business. Why not hang them up? Because they do not represent self-sacrifice. They do not glorify you. They do not dignify you in the same sense that the musket does, because when you took that musket at the call of your country you risked everything and knew you could not get anything. The most that you could do was to come back alive, but after you came back alive there was a halo about you. That boy was in France! That boy served his country and served a great cause! That boy risked everything to see that the weak peoples of the world were redeemed from intolerable tyranny! Here comes—ah, how I wish I were going to be in Washington on the seventeenth—here comes, do you not hear it, the tread of the First Division—those men, along with their comrades, to whom the eyes of all Europe turn! All Europe took heart when they saw that brilliant flag unfurled on French soil.

Did you ever hear that thrilling song that is being sung so much now of the blind Frenchman wishing to know if the Americans had come, bidding his son watch at the window. “Look, my lad, what are they carrying? What are the colors? Are they red stripes upon a field of white? Is there a piece of heaven in the corner? Is that piece of heaven full of stars? Ah, the Americans have come! Thank God, the Americans have come!”

That is what we have at our hearts, my fellow citizens, and we hang the musket up, or the sword, over the mantlepiece. And if the lad is gone and dead, we share the spirit of a noble lady, who said to me, without the glimmer of a tear in her eye: “I have had the honor of losing a son upon the fields of France. I have had the honor, not the pain. I have had the distinction of losing a son of mine upon the field of honor.” It is that field of honor that we are [117page icon] going to redeem. We are not going to redeem it with blood any more, but we are going to make out of the councils of the people of the world councils of peace and of justice and of honor.

#An Address in St. Paul to a Joint Session of the Legislature of Minnesota, September 9, 1919

Mr. Speaker,1 Mr. Governor,2 gentlemen of the legislature, ladies and gentlemen. I esteem it an unusual privilege to stand in this place today and address the members of this great body, because the errand upon which I have left Washington is so intimate a matter of the life of our own nation, as well as of the life of the world.

And yet I am conscious, standing in this presence, that perhaps the most appropriate things I could allude to are those which affect us immediately. I know that you have been called together in special session for special purposes. And one of those purposes you have already achieved, and I rejoice with you (applause) in the adoption of the suffrage amendment. Another purpose, I understand, is for you to consider the high cost of living, and the high cost of living is one of those things which is so complicated, ramifying in so many directions, that it seems that we can’t do anything in particular about it without knowing how the particulars affect the whole. It is dangerous to play with a complicated piece of machinery, piece by piece, unless you know how the pieces are related to each other.

And the cost of living is a world condition. It is due to the fact that the manpower has been sacrificed on the agony of the battlefield and that all the processes of industry have either been slackened or diverted. Production of foodstuffs, production of clothing, production of all the necessaries of life has either been slackened or it has been turned into channels which are not immediately useful to the general civil population. Great factories, as I need not tell you, which in our country were devoted to the uses of peace, have recently been converted in such fashion as to serve the processes of war. And it will take a certain length of time to restore them to their old adjustments, to turn their machinery to the old uses again, to lead labor so that it will not be concentrated upon the manufacture of munitions and the other stuffs necessary for war, but will be devoted to the general processes of production so necessary to our life.

Back of all that—and I do not say this merely for an argument, but because it is true—back of that lies the fact that we have not yet learned what the basis of peace is going to be. The world is not going to settle down, my fellow citizens, until it knows what part [126page icon] the United States is going to play in the peace. The strain upon the finances of other governments of the world has been all but a breaking strain. I imagine it will be several generations before foreign governments can finally adjust themselves to carrying the overwhelming debts which have been accumulated in this war. The United States has accumulated a great debt, but not in proportion to those that other countries have accumulated, when you reckon our wealth as compared with theirs.

We are the only nation in the world that is likely in the immediate future to have a sufficient body of free capital to put the industrial world, here and elsewhere, on its feet again. Until the industrial world is put on its feet you cannot finally handle the question of the cost of living, because the cost of living in the last analysis depends upon the thing we are always talking about but do not know how to manage—the law of supply and demand.

It depends upon manufacture and distribution. It depends upon all the normal processes of the industrial and commercial world. It depends upon international credit. It depends upon shipping. It depends upon the multiplication of transportation facilities domestically. Our railroads at this moment are not adequate to moving the commerce of this country. Every here and there they run through a little neck—for example, the Pennsylvania System at Pittsburgh—where everything is congested and you are squeezing a great commerce through a little aperture. Terminal facilities at the ports are not adequate. The problem grows the more you think of it.

What we have to put our minds to is the international problem, first of all—to set the commerce of the world going again and the manufacturing of the world going again. And we have got to do that largely. Then we have got to see that our own production and our own methods of finance and our own commerce are quickened in every way possible, and that we, sitting in legislatures like this and in the Congress of the United States, have to see to it, if you will permit a vulgar expression, that no one monkeys with the machinery.

I understand that one of the excellent suggestions mentioned by your Governor is that you look into the cold storage. Well, there are other kinds of storage besides cold storage. There are other ways of covering the reserve stocks of goods. You do not have to keep everything cold, though you can keep the cold hand of control on it. You can manage by a contract that isn’t put on paper to see that goods are doled out so as not to bring the highest prices. The communities of the United States are entitled to see that these dams are removed and that the waters that are going to fructify the world [127page icon] flow in their normal courses. It is not easy. It is not always pleasant. You do not like to look censoriously into the affairs of your fellow citizens too much or too often, but it is necessary to look with a very unsympathetic eye at some of the processes which are retarding distribution and the supply which is going to meet the demand.

Not only that, but we have got to realize that we are face to face with a great industrial problem which does not center in the United States. It centers elsewhere, but we share it with the other countries of the world. That is the relation between capital and labor, between those who employ and those who are employed. And we might as well sit up straight and look facts in the face, gentlemen. The laboring men of the world are not satisfied with their relations with their employers. Of course, I do not mean to say that dissatisfaction is universal dissatisfaction, because there are situations in many instances of satisfaction, but I am now speaking of the general relations between capital and labor. Everywhere there is dissatisfaction, much more on the other side of the water than on this side.

And one of the things that have to be brought about for mankind can be brought about by what we do in this country, because, as a matter of fact, if I may refer for a moment to the treaty of peace, there is a part of that treaty which sets up an international method of consultation about the conditions of labor. It is a splendid instrument locked up in that great document. I have called it frequently the Magna Carta of labor, for it is that, and the standards set up, for standards are stated, are the standards of American labor so far as they could be adopted in a general conference. The point I wish to make is that the world is looking to America to set the standards with regard to the conditions of labor and the relations between labor and capital, and it is looking to us because we have been more progressive in those matters, though sometimes we have moved very slowly and with undue caution.

As a result of our progressiveness, the ruling influences among our working men are conservative in the sense that they see that it is not in the interest of labor to break up civilization, and progressive in the sense that they see that a constructive program has to be adopted. By a progressive I do not mean a man who is ready to move, but a man who knows where he is going when he moves. A man who has got a workable program is the only progressive, because if you have not got a workable program you cannot make it good and you cannot progress.

Very well, then, we have got to have a constructive program with regard to labor. And the minute we get it we will relieve the strain [128page icon] all over the world, because the world will accept our standards and follow our example. I am not dogmatic about this matter. I can’t presume that I know how it should be done. I know the principle upon which it should be done. The principle is that the interests of capital and the interests of labor are not different but are the same, and men of business sense ought to know how to work out an organization which will express that identity of interest. Where there is identity of interest there must be community of interest. You can’t any longer regard labor as a commodity. You have got to regard it as a means of association—the association of physical skill and physical vigor with the enterprise which is managed by those who represent capital. And when you do, the production of the world is going to go forward by leaps and bounds.

Why is it that labor organizations jealously limit the amount of work that their men can do? Because they are driving hard bargains with you; they don’t feel that they are your partners at all. And so long as labor and capital are antagonistic, production is going to be at its minimum. Just so soon as they are sympathetic and cooperative, it is going to bound, and that will be one of the means of bringing down the cost of living. In other words, my fellow citizens, we can do something, we can do a great deal, along the lines of your Governor’s recommendation and along the lines that I took the liberty of recommending to the Congress of the United States. But we must remember that we are only beginning the push, that we are only learning the job, and that its ramifications extend into all the relationships of international credit and international industry. We ought to give our thought to this, gentlemen. America, though we do not like to admit it, has been very provincial in regard to the world’s business. When we had to engage in banking transactions outside of the United States, we generally did it through English bankers or, more often, through German bankers. You did not find American banks in Shanghai and Calcutta and all around the circle of the world. You found every other bank there; you found French banks and English banks and German banks and Swedish banks. You did not find American banks. American bankers have not, as a rule, handled international exchange, and here, all of a sudden, as if by the turn of the hand, because of the sweeping winds of this war which have destroyed so many things, we are called upon to handle the bulk of international exchange. We have got to learn it, and we have got to learn it fast. We have got to have American instrumentalities in every part of the world if American money is going to rehabilitate the world, as American money must.

If you want to trade you have got to have somebody to trade with. [129page icon] If you want to carry your business to the ends of the world, there must be business at the ends of the world to tie in with. And if the business of the world lags, your industries lag and your prosperity lags. We have no choice but to be the servants of the world if we would be our own servants. I do not like to put it on that ground because that is not the American ground. America is ready to help the world, whether it benefits her or not. She did not come into the world, she was not created by the great men who set her government up, in order to make money out of the rest of mankind. She was set up in order to rehabilitate the rest of mankind, and the dollar of American money spent to free those who have been enslaved is worth more than a million dollars put in any American pocket.

It is in this impersonal way that I am trying to illustrate to you how the problem that we are facing in the high cost of living is the end and the beginning and a portion of a world problem, and the great difficulty, just now, my fellow citizens, is in getting some minds adjusted to the world. One of the difficulties that are being encountered about the treaty and the League of Nations, if I may be permitted to say so—and perhaps I can say so the more freely here because I do not think this difficulty exists in the mind of either senator from this state—(applause) the difficulty is not prejudice so much but that thing which is so common and so inconvenient—just downright ignorance. Ignorance, I mean, of the state of the world and of America’s relation to the state of the world.

We cannot change that relation. It is a fact. It is a fact bigger than anybody of us, and one of the advantages that the United States has it ought not to forfeit; it is made up out of all the thinking peoples of the world. We do not draw our principles from any one nation; we are made up out of all the sturdy stocks of the round world. We have gotten uneasy because some other kinds of stocks tried to come in. But the bulk remains the same. We are made up out of the hard-headed, hard-fisted, practical and yet idealistic, and forward-looking peoples of the world. And we of all people ought to have an international understanding, an ability to comprehend what the problem of the world is and what part we ought to play in that problem. We have got to play our part, and we can play it either as members of the board of directors or as outside spectators. We can play it inside or on the curb, and you know how inconvenient it is to play on the curb.

There is one thing that I respect more than any other, and that is a fact. I remember, when I was Governor of the State of New Jersey, I was very urgently pressing some measures which a particular member of the Senate of the state, whom I knew and liked [130page icon] very much, was opposed to. His constituents were very much in favor of it, and they sent an influential committee down personally to change his vote; and after he had voted for the measure they brought him, looking a little sheepish, into my office to be congratulated. Well, he and I kept as straight faces as we could, and I congratulated him very warmly, and then with a very heavy wink he said to me behind his hand, “Governor, they never get me if I see ’em coming first.”

Now, that is not a very high political principle, but I commend that principle to you with regard to facts. Never let them get you if you see them coming first. And any man with open eyes can see the facts coming, coming in serried ranks, coming in overwhelming power, not to be resisted by the United States or any other nation. The facts are marching, and God is marching with them. You cannot resist them. You must either welcome them or subsequently, with humiliation, surrender to them. It is welcome or surrender. It is acceptance of great world conditions and great world duties or scuttle now and come back afterwards.

But I am not arguing this with you, because I do not believe it is necessary in the State of Minnesota. I am merely telling you. It is like the case of the man who met two of his fellow lawyers and asked them what they were discussing. They said, “We were discussing who is the leading member of the bar of this country,” and the other said, “Why, I am.” They said, “How do you prove it?” He said, “I don’t have to prove it, I admit it.” I think that that is the state of mind of the thoughtful persons of our country, and they, thank God, are the chief portions of it, with regard to the great crisis that we are face to face with now.

It has been a privilege, gentlemen, to be permitted in this informal way to disclose to you some part of the thought which I am carrying about with me as really a great burden, because I have seen the disturbed world on the other side of the water. I know the earnest hope and beautiful confidence with which they are looking toward us, and my heart is full of the burden of it. It is a great responsibility for us to carry. We will have to have infinite intelligence and infinite diligence in business to fulfill the expectations of the peoples of the world; and yet that is our duty, our inescapable duty, and we must concert together to perform it.

Everywhere I have been on this trip the majority of the committee that has received me has consisted of Republicans, and nothing has pleased me so much, because I should be ashamed of myself if I permitted any partisan thought to enter into this great matter. If I were a scheming politician and anybody wished to present me with the peace of the world as a campaign issue, it would be very [131page icon] welcome, because there could be no issue easier to win on. But everybody knows that that is not a worthy thought, everybody knows that we are all Americans. Scratch a Democrat or a Republican, and underneath it is the same stuff. And the labels rub off upon the slightest effort—not the memories, the recollections; some of them are very stubborn, but it is the principle that matters. The label does not make much difference. The principle is just the same, and the only thing we differ about is the way to carry out the principle. Back of all lies that wonderful thing, that thing which the foreigner was amazed to see in the faces of our soldiers—that incomparable American spirit which you do not see the like of anywhere; that universal brightness of expression, as if every man knows there was a future and that he had something to do with molding it, instead of that dull, expressionless face which means that there is nothing but a past and a burdensome present. You do not see that in the American face. The American face mirrors the future, and, my fellow citizens, the American purpose mirrors the future of the world.

#An Address in the Minneapolis Armory, September 9, 1919.

Your Honor, your Excellency,1 my fellow countrymen: I have come here to discuss a very solemn question, and I shall have to ask your patience while you bear with me in discussing somewhat in detail the very great matter which now lies, not only before the consideration of the people of the United States, but before the consideration of the people of the world. You have heard so many little things about the treaty that perhaps you would like to hear some big things about it.

To hear some gentlemen, you would think it was an arrangement for the inconvenience of the United States, whereas, as a matter of fact, my fellow citizens, it is a world settlement, the first ever attempted, attempted upon broad lines which were first laid down in America. For, my fellow citizens, what does not seem to me realized in this blessed country of ours is the fact that the world is in revolution. I do not mean in active revolution. I mean that it is in a state of mind which may bring about the dissolution of [132page icon] governments if we do not enter into a world settlement which will really in fact and in power establish justice and right.

The old order of things the rest of the world seemed to have got in some sense used to. The old order of things was not to depend upon the general moral judgment of mankind, not to base policies upon international right, but to base policies upon international power. So there were drawn together groups of nations which stood armed, facing one another, which stood drawing their power from the vitality of people who did not wish to be subordinated to them, drawing their vitality from the energy of great peoples who did not wish to devote their energy to force, but wished to devote their energy to peace. The world thought it was inevitable. This group of nations thought that it represented another set of principles, and that the best that could be accomplished in the world was this thing that they used to call the balance of power.

Notice the phrase. Not the balance that you try to maintain in a court of justice, not the scales of justice, but the scales of force—one great force balanced against another force. Every bit of the policy of the world, internationally speaking, was made in the interest of some national advantage on the part of the stronger nations of the world. It was either the advantage of Germany or the advantage of Great Britain or the advantage of Italy or the advantage of Japan. I am glad to say that I am not justified in adding that the policy of the world was ever conceived by us upon the basis of the advantage of America. We wished always to be the mediators of justice and of right, but we thought that the cool spaces of the ocean to the east and the west of us would keep us from the infections that came, arising like miasmatic mists out of that arrangement of power and of suspicion and of dread.

I believe, my fellow countrymen, that the only people in Europe who instinctively realized what was going to happen and what did happen in 1914 was the French people. It has been my privilege to come into somewhat intimate contact with that interesting and delightful people, and I realize now that, for nearly fifty years, ever since the settlement which took Alsace-Lorraine away from them in 1871, they have been living under the constant dread of the catastrophe which at last came. And their thought throughout this conference was that they must concert some measure, must draw together some kind of cooperative force, which would take this intolerable dread from their hearts, that they could not live another fifty years expecting what would come at last.

But the other nations took it lightly. There were wise men in Great Britain, there were wise men in the United States, who pointed out to us not only what they suspected, but what we all [133page icon] knew with regard to the preparations for the use of force in Europe. Nobody was ignorant of what Germany was doing. What we shut our eyes against deliberately was the probability that she would make the use of her preparation that she did finally make of it. Her military men published books and told us what they were going to do with it, but we dismissed them. We said: “The thing is a nightmare. The man is a crank. It cannot be that he speaks for a great government. The thing is inconceivable and cannot happen.” Very well, could not it happen? Did not it happen? Are we satisfied now what the balance of power means? It means that the stronger force will sometimes be exercised or an attempt be made to exercise it to crush the other powers.

The great nations of the world have been asleep, but, God knows, the other nations have not been asleep. I have seen representatives of peoples over there who for generations through, in the dumbness of unutterable suffering, have known what the weight of those armaments and the weight of that power meant. The great Slavic people, the great Rumanian people, the people who were constantly under the pressure of that power, the great Polish people—they all knew, but they were inarticulate; there was no place in the world where they dared speak out. Now the catastrophe has come. Blood has been spilt in rivers, the flower of the European nations has been destroyed, and at last, the voiceless multitudes of men are awake, and they have made up their minds that rather than have this happen again, if the governments cannot get together, they will destroy the governments.

I am not speaking revolution, my friends. I believe that the most disastrous thing that can happen to the under man, to the man who is suffering, to the man who has not had his rights, is to destroy public order, for that makes it certain he never can get his rights. I am far from intimating that, but I am intimating this: that the people of the world are tired of every other kind of experiment except the one we are going to try. I have called it an experiment; I frankly admit that it is, but it is a very promising experiment, because there is not a statesman in the world who does not know that his people demand it. He is not going to change his mind. He is not going to change his direction. He is not speaking what he wants, it may be, but he is speaking what he knows he must speak, and that there is no turning back, that the world has turned a corner that it will never turn again. The old order is gone, and nobody can build it up again.

In the meantime, what are men doing! I want you to reflect upon this, my fellow countrymen, because this is not a speechmaking occasion; this is a conference. I want you men to reflect [134page icon] upon what I am about to call your attention to. The object of the war was to destroy autocratic power; that is to say, to make it impossible that there should be anywhere, as there was on Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin, a little group of military men who could brush aside the bankers, brush aside the merchants, brush aside the manufacturers, brush aside the Emperor himself, and say: “We have perfected a machine with which we can conquer the world. Now stand out of the way, we are going to conquer the world.” There must not be that possibility any more. There must not be men anywhere in any private place who can plot the mastery of civilization.

But in the meantime look at the pitiful things that are happening. There is not a day goes by, my fellow citizens, that my heart is not heavy to think of our fellow beings in that great, pitiful Kingdom of Russia, without form, without order, without government. Look what they have done. They have permitted a little handful of men—I am told there are only thirty-four of them constituting the real Bolshevist government—to set up a minority government just as autocratic and just as cruelly unmerciful as the government of the Czar ever was. The danger to the world, my fellow citizens, against which we must absolutely lock the door in this country, is that some governments of minorities may be set up here as elsewhere. We will brook the control of no minority in the United States. For my own part, I would as leave live under one autocracy as another; I would as leave obey one group as another; I would as leave be the servant of one minority as another. But I do not intend to be the servant of any minority. As I have told you, the mass of men are awake. They are not going to let the world sink back into that old slough of misused authority again.

Very well, then, what are we discussing? What are we debating in the United States? Whether we will take part in guiding and steadying the world or not. And some men hesitate. It is the only country in the world whose leadership and guidance will be accepted. If we do not give it, we may look forward, my fellow citizens, to something like a generation of doubt and of disorder, which it will be impossible to pass through without the wreckage of a very considerable part of our slowly constructed civilization. America and her determinations now constitute the balance of moral force in the world, and if we do not use that moral force we will be of all peoples the most derelict. We are in the presence of this great choice, in the presence of this fundamental choice, whether we will stand by the mass of our own people and the mass of mankind.

Pick up the great volume of the treaty. It is a great volume. It is [135page icon] as thick as that (illustrating). You would think it just had three or four articles in it to hear some men talk about it. It is a thick volume, containing the charter of the new order of the world. I took the pains to write down here some of the things that it provides for, and if you will be patient I will read them, because I can make it more brief that way.

It provides for the destruction of autocratic power as an instrument of international control, admitting only self-governing nations to the League of Nations. Had you ever been told that before? No nation is admitted to the League of Nations whose people do not control its government. That is the reason that we are making Germany wait. She says that henceforth her people are going to control her government, but we have got to wait and see. If they do control it, she is as welcome to the League as anybody else, because we are not holding nations off. We are holding selfish groups of men off. We are not saying to peoples, “We do not want to be your comrades and serve you along with the rest of our fellow beings,” but we are saying: “It depends upon your attitude. If you take charge of your own affairs, then come into the game and welcome.” The League of Nations sends autocratic governments to Coventry. This is the first point.

It provides for the substitution of publicity, discussion, and arbitration for war. That is the supreme thing that it does. I will not go into details now, but every member of the League promises not to go to war until there has been a discussion and a cooling off of nine months. And, as I have frequently said on this tour, if Germany had submitted to discussion for nine days she never would have dared to go to war. Though every foreign office in Europe begged her to do so, she would not grant twenty-four hours for a meeting of the representatives of the governments of the world to ask what it was all about, because she did not dare tell what it was all about.

Nine months’ cooling off is a very valuable institution in the affairs of mankind. And you have got to have a very good cause if you are willing that all your fellow men should know the whole case, for that is provided for, and talk about it for nine months. Nothing is more valuable, if you think your friend is a fool, than to induce him to hire a hall. If you think he is a fool the only way to prove it is to let him address a mass of his fellow citizens and see how they like his ideas. If they like them and you do not, it may be that you are the fools! The proof is presented at any rate.

Instead of using force after the period of discussion, something very much more effective than force is proposed, namely, an absolute boycott of the nation that does not keep its covenant. And [136page icon] when I say an absolute boycott, I mean an absolute boycott. There cannot be any kind of intercourse with that nation. It cannot sell or buy goods. It cannot receive or send messages or letters. It cannot have any transactions with the citizens of any member of the League. And when you consider that the League is going to consist of every considerable nation in the world, except Germany, you can see what that boycott will mean. There is not a nation in the world, except this one, that can live without importing goods for nine months, and it does not make any difference to us whether we can or not, because we always fulfill our obligations, and there will never be a boycott for us.

It provides for placing the peace of the world under constant international oversight, in recognition of the principle that the peace of the world is the legitimate and immediate interest of every nation. Why, as it stands at present, my fellow citizens, if there is likely to be trouble between two nations other than the United States, it is considered an unfriendly and hostile act for the United States to intervene. This Covenant is the right of the United States, and not the right of the United States merely, but the right of the weakest nation in the world, to bring anything that the most powerful nation in the world is doing that is likely to disturb the peace of the world under the scrutiny of mankind. (Voice in audience, “And that is right!”) My friend in the audience says that is right, and it undoubtedly is, because the peace of the world is everybody’s business. Yet this is the first document that ever recognized that principle.

This is an effective Covenant. It is carried out by the attitude of the Irishman who went into one of those antique institutions known as the saloon and saw two men fighting in the corner. He went up to the bartender and he said, “Is this a private fight, or can everybody get in?”

Now, in the true Irish spirit, we are abolishing private fights, and we are making it the law of mankind that it is everybody’s business and everybody can get in. The consequence is that there will be no attempt at private fights.

It provides for disarmament on the part of the great fighting nations of the world.

It provides in detail for the rehabilitation of oppressed peoples, and that will remove most of the causes of war.

It provides that there shall be no more annexations of territory anywhere, but that those territories whose people are not ready to govern themselves shall be entrusted to the trusteeship of the nations that can take care of them, the trustee nation to be responsible in annual reports to the League of Nations; that is to say, to [137page icon] mankind in general, subject to removal and restricted in respect to anything that might be done to that population which would be to the detriment of the population itself. So that you cannot go into darkest Africa and make slaves of those poor people, as some governments at times have done.

It abolishes enforced labor. It takes the same care of the women and children of those unschooled races that we try to take of the women and children of ours. Why, my fellow citizens, this is the great human document of all time.

It provides that every secret treaty shall be invalid. It sweeps the table of all private understandings and enforces the principle that there shall be no private understandings of any kind that anybody is bound to respect. One of the difficulties in framing this treaty was that, after we got over there private—secret—treaties were springing up on all sides like a noxious growth. You had to guard your breathing apparatus against the miasma that arose from some of them. But they were treaties, and the war had been fought on the principle of the sacredness of treaties. We could not propose that solemn obligations, however unwisely undertaken, should be disregarded. But we could do the best that was possible in the presence of those understandings and then say, “No more of this; no more secret understandings.” And the representative of every great nation in the world assented without demur—without the slightest difficulty.

I do not think you realize what a change of mind has come over the world. As we used to say in the old days, some men that never got it before have got religion.

It provides for the protection of dependent peoples.

It provides that high standards of labor, such as are observed in the United States, shall be extended to the workingman everywhere in the world.

It provides that all the great human instrumentalities, like the Red Cross, like the conventions against the opium trade, like the regulation of the liquor traffic with debased and ignorant people, like the prohibition of the selling of arms and ammunition to people who can use them only to their own detriment, shall be under the common direction and control of the League of Nations. Now, did you ever hear of all these things before? That is the treaty, my fellow citizens, and I can only conjecture that some of the men who are fighting the treaty either never read it themselves or are taking it for granted that you will not read it. I say without hesitation that no international agreement has ever before been drawn up along those lines—of the universal consideration of right and the interest of humanity.

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Now, it is said that that is all very well, but we need not go in. Well, of course we need not. There is perfect freedom of the will. I am perfectly free to go to the top of this building and jump off, but if I do I will not take very much interest in human affairs. The nation is at liberty in one sense to do anything it pleases to discredit itself; but this is absolutely as certain as I stand here, that it never will do anything to discredit itself. Our choice in this great enterprise of mankind that I have tried to outline to you is only this: shall we go in and assist as trusted partners or shall we stay out and act as suspected rivals?

We have got to do one or the other. We have got to be either provincials or statesmen. We have got to be either ostriches or eagles. The ostrich act I see being done all around me. I see gentlemen burying their heads in something and thinking that nobody sees that they have submerged their thinking apparatus. That is what I mean by being ostriches. What I mean by being eagles I need not describe to you. I mean leaving the mists that lie close along the ground, getting upon strong wing into those upper spaces of the air where you can see with clear eyes the affairs of mankind, see how the affairs of America are linked with the affairs of men everywhere, see how the whole world turns with outstretched hands to this blessed country of ours and says, “If you will lead, we will follow.” God helping us, my fellow countrymen, we will lead when they follow. The march is still long and toilsome to those heights upon which there rests nothing but the pure light of the justice of God, but the whole incline of affairs is toward those distant heights. And this great nation, in serried ranks, millions strong—presently hundreds of millions strong—will march at the fore of the great procession, breasting those heights with its eyes always lifted to the eternal goal!

#An Address in the St. Paul Auditorium, September 9, 1919.

Mr. Chairman,1 my fellow countrymen, I am very happy that the Mayor sounded the note that he has just sounded, because by some sort of divination he realized what was in my heart tonight. I do not feel since I have left Washington this time that I am on an [139page icon] ordinary errand. I do not feel that I am on a political errand, even in the broad sense of that term. I feel rather that I am going about to hold counsel with my fellow countrymen concerning the most honorable and distinguished course which our great country can take at this turning point in the history of the world. And the Mayor was quite right when he said that this is a conference concerning the true interpretation of the American spirit. I believe, I hope without an undue touch of national pride, that it is only the American spirit that can be the true mediator of peace.

The theme that I find uppermost in my thought tonight is this: we are all actuated, my fellow countrymen, by an intense consciousness and love of America. I do not think that it is fancy on my part; it is based upon long experience that in every part of the world I can recognize an American the minute I see him. And yet that is not because we are all of one stock. We have more people of various origin than any people in the world. We come from all the great Caucasian races of the world. We are made up out of all the nations and peoples who have stood from time to time at the center of civilization. In this part of the country, it is doubtful whether in some of our great cities 50 per cent of the people come from parents born in America. One of the somewhat serious jests which I allowed myself to indulge on the other side of the water was with my Italian colleagues when they were claiming the city of Fiume upon the Adriatic because of its Italian population, and other cities scattered here and there whose surrounding population was not Italian but in whom an Italian element played an important part. I said: “That is not a sufficient argument for the extension of Italian sovereignty to these people, because there are more Italians in New York City than in any city in Italy, and I doubt if you would feel justified in suggesting that the sovereignty of Italy be extended over the city of New York.” I advert to this, my fellow citizens, merely as one illustration, that could be multiplied a hundredfold, of the singular makeup of this great nation.

I do not know how it happens that we are all Americans, we are so different in origin, we are so different in memories. The memory of America does not go very far back as measured by the distances of history, and a great many millions of our people carry in their hearts the traditions of other peoples, the traditions of races never bred in America. And yet we are all unmistakably and even in appearance American, and nothing else. And there is only one possible explanation for that, my fellow citizens, and that is that there is in the practice and in the tradition of this country a set of principles which, however imperfectly, get into the consciousness of every man who lives in this country.

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One of the chief elements that make an American is this, that in almost every other country there is some class that dominates, or some governmental authority that determines the course of policy, or some ancient system of land laws that limits the freedom of land tenure, or some ancient custom which puts a man into a particular groove in the land in which he lives. And there is none of that in America. Every man in America, if he behaves himself, knows that he stands on the same footing as every other man in America, and, thank goodness, we are in sight of the time when every woman will know that she stands upon the same footing. We do not have to ask anybody’s leave what we shall think or what we shall do or how we shall vote. We do not have to get the approval of a class as to our behavior. We do not have to square ourselves with standards that have been followed ever since our great-grandfathers. We are much more interested in becoming great-grandfathers than in having had great-grandfathers, because our view is to the future. America does not march, as so many other peoples march, looking back over its shoulder. It marches with its eyes not only forward, but with its eyes lifted to the distances of history, to the great events which are slowly culminating, in the providence of God, in the lifting of civilization to new levels and new achievements. That is what make us Americans.

And yet I was mistaken a moment ago when I said we are nothing else, because there are a great many hyphens left in America. For my part, I think the most un-American thing in the world is a hyphen. I don’t care what it is that comes before the word “American.” It may be a German-American, or it may be an Italian-American, or a Swedish-American, or an Anglo-American, or an Irish-American. It don’t make any difference what comes before the “American,” it ought not to be there, and every man that comes to take counsel with me with a hyphen in his conversation, I take no interest in whatever. The entrance examination, to use my own parlance, into my confidence is: “Do you put America into your thoughts?” If you put it first, always first, unquestionably first, then we can sit down together and talk, but not otherwise.

Now, I want you distinctly to understand that I am not quarreling with the affectionate memories of the people who have drawn their origin from other countries. I no more blame a man for dwelling with fond affection upon the traditions of some great race not bred in America than I blame a man for remembering with reverence his mother and father and his forebears that bred him and that gave him a chance in the world. I am not quarreling with those affections; I am talking about purposes. Every purpose is for the future, and the future must be for America.

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We have got to choose now, my fellow citizens, what kind of future it is going to be for America. I think that what I have said justifies me in adding that this nation was created to be the mediator of peace, because it draws its blood from every civilized stock in the world and is ready by sympathy and understanding to understand the peoples of the world—their interests, their rights, their hopes, their destiny. America is the only nation in the world that has that equipment. Every other nation is set in the mold of a particular breeding. We are set in no mold at all. Every other nation has certain prepossessions which run back through all the ramifications of an ancient history. We have nothing of the kind. We know what all peoples are thinking, and yet we, by a fine alchemy of our own, combine that thinking into an American plan and an American purpose. America is the only nation which can sympathetically lead the world in organizing peace.

Constantly, when I was on the other side of the water, delegations representing this, that, and the other peoples of Europe or of Asia came to visit me to solicit the interest of America in their fortunes. And, without exception, they were able to tell me that they had kinsmen in America. Some of them, I am ashamed to say, came from countries I had never heard of before, and yet even they were able to point, not to a handful, not to a few hundreds, but to several thousand kinsmen in America. I never before knew that they came, but they are here, and they are our interpreters—the interpreters on our behalf of the interests of the people from whom they spring.

They came to America as sort of advanced couriers of those people. They came in search of the Golden West. They came in search of the liberty that they understood reigned among that free and happy people. They were drawn by the lure of justice, by the lure of freedom, out of lands where they were oppressed, suppressed, where life was made impossible for them upon the free plane that their hearts had conceived. They said, “Yonder is our star in the West,” and then the word went home: “We have found the land. They are a free people that are capable of understanding us. You go to their representatives in Paris and put your case before them, and they will understand.” What a splendid thing that is, my fellow countrymen! I want you to keep this in your minds as a conception of the question that we are now called upon to decide.

You hear some men talk about the League of Nations, and you would suppose it was a trap set for America. You would suppose it was an arrangement whereby we entered into an alliance with other great powers of Europe to make war some time. But it bears no resemblance to any such description. It is a great method of [142page icon] common counsel with regard for the common interests of mankind. We shall not be drawn into war; we shall be drawn into consultation, and we will be the most trusted adviser in the whole group. Consultation, discussion, is written all over the whole face of the Covenant of the League of Nations. For the heart of it is that nations promise not to go to war until they have consulted, until they have discussed, until all the facts in the controversy have been laid before the court which represents the common opinion of mankind.

That is the League of Nations. Nothing can be discussed there that concerns our domestic affairs. Nothing can be discussed there that concerns the domestic affairs of any other people, unless something is occurring in some nation which is likely to disturb the peace of the world. And any time any question arises which is likely to disturb the peace of the world, then the Covenant makes it the right of any member, strong or weak, big or little, of that universal council of nations to bring that matter up for clarification and discussion.

Can you imagine anything more calculated to put war off, not only to put if off, but to make it violently improbale? When a man wants to fight he doesn’t go and discuss the matter with the other fellow. He goes and hits him, and then somebody else has to come in and either join the fight or break it up.

I used a very homely illustration the other night, which perhaps it may not be amiss for me to use again. I had two friends who were becoming more and more habitually profane. Their friends did not like it. They not only had the fundamental scruple that it was wrong, but they also thought, as I heard a very refined lady say, “It was not only wrong but, what was worse, it was vulgar.” They did not like to see their friends adjourning all the rest of their vocabulary and using only those words. So they made them enter into a solemn agreement—I ought to say they lived in a large city—that they would not swear inside the corporate limits; that if they got in a state of mind which made it necessary to explode in profanity they would get out of town and swear.

The first time the passion came upon them, they recalled their promise and they got sheepishly on a streetcar and made for the town limits, and I need hardly tell you that, when they got there, they no longer wanted to swear. They had cooled off. The long spaces of the town, the people going about their ordinary business, nobody paying any attention to them, the world seeming to be at peace when they were at war, all brought them to a realization of the smallness of the whole business, and they turned around and came into town again.

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Comparing great things with small, that will suffice as a picture of the advantage of discussion in international matters as well as in individual matters, because it was universally agreed on the other side of the water that if Germany had allowed the other governments to confer with her twenty-four hours about the recent war, it could not have taken place. We know why. It was an unconscionable war. She did not dare discuss it. You cannot afford to discuss a thing when you are in the wrong, and the minute you feel that the whole judgment of the world is against you, you have a different temper in affairs altogether.

This is a great process of discussion that we are entering into, and my point tonight—it is the point I want to leave with you—is that we are the people of all people in the world intelligently to discuss the difficulties of the nations which we represent, although we are Americans. We are the predestined mediators of mankind. I am not saying this in any kind of national pride or vanity. I believe that is mere historic truth, and I try to interpret circumstances in some intelligent way. If that is the kind of people we are, it must have been intended that we should make some use of the opportunities and powers that we have.

Really, then, when I hear gentlemen saying we must keep out of this thing and take care of ourselves, I think to myself: “Take care of ourselves? Where did we come from? Is there nobody else in the world that we care for? Have we no sympathies that do not run out into the great field of human experience everywhere? Is that what America is, with her mixture of blood?” Why, my fellow citizens, that is a fundamental misconception of what it is to be an American, and these gentlemen are doing a harm which they do not realize.

I want to testify to you here tonight, my fellow countrymen, because I have the means of information, that, since it has seemed to be uncertain whether we are going to play this part of leadership in the world—this part of leadership in accommodation—the old intrigues have started up in this country again. That intrigue which we universally condemn—that hyphen which looked to us like a snake, the hyphen between “German” and “American”—has reared its head again. And you hear the “his-s-s” of its purpose, and what is that purpose? It is to keep America out of the concert of nations, in order that America and Germany, being out of that concert, may some time, in their mistaken dream, unite to dominate the world, or at any rate, the one to assist the other in holding the nations of the world off while its ambitions are realized.

There is no conjecture about this, my fellow citizens. We know the former purposes of German intrigue in the country, and they [144page icon] are being revived. Why? We haven’t reduced very materially the number of the German people, Germany remains the great power of Central Europe. She has more than 60,000,000 people now (she had nearly 70,000,000 before Poland and other provinces were taken away). She has now more than 60,000,000 people. You cannot change the temper and expectations of a people by five years of war, particularly by five years of war in which they are not conscious of the wrong they did or the wrong way in which they did it. And they are expecting the time of the revival of their power, and, along with the revival of their power goes their extraordinary capacity, their unparalleled education, their great capacity in commerce and finance and manufacture.

The German bankers and the German merchants and the German manufacturers did not want this war. They were making conquest of the world without it. They knew that it would spoil their plans, not advance them. And it has spoiled their plans, but they are there yet with their capacity, with their conception of what it is to serve the world materially and so subdue the world psychologically. All of that is still there, my fellow countrymen, and, if America stays out, then the rest of the world will have to watch Germany and watch America, and when there are two dissociated powers there is danger that they will have the same purposes.

There can be but one intelligible reason for America staying out of this, and that is that she does not want peace, that she wants war some time and the advantage which war will bring to her. And I want to say now and here that the men who think that by that thought they are interpreting America are making the sort of mistake upon which it will be useful for them to reflect in obscurity for the rest of their lives.

This is a peaceful people. This is a liberty-loving people, and liberty is suffocated by war. Free institutions cannot survive the strain of prolonged military administration. In order to live tolerable lives, you must lift the fear of war and the practice of war from the lives of nations. America is evidence of the fact that no great democracy ever entered upon an aggressive international policy. I want you to know, if you will be kind enough to read the Covenant of the League of Nations—most of the people that are arguing against it are taking it for granted that you have never read it—take the pains to read it, and you will find that no nation is admitted to the League of Nations that cannot show that it has the institutions which we call free. Nobody is admitted except the self-governing nations, because it was the instinctive judgment of every man who sat around that board that only a nation whose government was its servant and not its master could be trusted to [145page icon] preserve the peace of the world. There are not going to be many other kinds of nations long, my fellow citizens. The people of this world—not merely the people of America, for they did the job long ago—have determined that there shall be no more autocratic governments.

And in their haste to get rid of one of them, they set up another. I mean in pitiable Russia. I wish we could learn the lesson of Russia so that it would be burned into the consciousness of every man and woman in America. And that lesson is that nobody can be free where there is not public order and authority. What has happened in Russia is that an old and distinguished and skillful autocracy has had put in its place an amateur autocracy—a little handful of men exercising without the slightest compunction of mercy or pity the bloody terror that characterized the worst days of the Czar.

That is what must happen if you knock things to pieces. Liberty is a thing of slow construction. Liberty is a thing of universal cooperation. Liberty is a thing which you must build up by habit. Liberty is a thing which is rooted and grounded in character. And the reason I am so certain that the leadership of the world, in respect of order and progress, belongs to America is that I know that these principles are rooted and grounded in the American character.

It isn’t our intellectual capacity, my fellow citizens, that has given us our place in the world, though I rate that as high as the intellectual capacity of any other people that ever lived, but it is the heart that lies back of the mind that makes America. (applause)

Ask this question to yourselves. I have no doubt this room is full of mothers and fathers and wives and sweethearts who sent their loved young men to France. What did you send them there for? What made you proud that they were going? What made you willing that they should go? Did you think they were seeking to aggrandize America some way? Did you think they were going to take something for America that had belonged to somebody else? Did you think they were going into a quarrel which they had provoked and must maintain?

The question answers itself. You were proud that they should go because they were going on an errand of self-sacrifice, in the interests of mankind. Ah, when these youngsters grow old who have come back from the fields of France, what a halo there will be about their brows! They saved the world! They are of the same stuff as those old veterans of the Civil War! They saved a nation.

Now mind you, I was born and bred in the South, but I can pay that tribute with all my heart to the men who saved the Union. It ought to have been saved. It was the greatest thing that men had [146page icon] conceived up to that time. Now we come to a greater thing—to the union of great nations in conference upon the interests of peace. That is the fruitage, the fine and appropriate fruitage, of what these men achieved upon the fields of France.

I saw many fine sights in Paris, many gallant sights, many sights that quickened the pulse; but my pulse never beat so fast as when I saw groups of our boys swinging along the street. They looked as if they owned something, and they did. They owned the finest thing in the world—the thing that we are going to bring to the others. They owned the ideals and conceptions that will govern the world. And on this errand that I am going about on, I feel that I am doing what I can to complete what they so gallantly began. I should feel recreant, my fellow citizens, if I did not do all that is in my power to do to complete the ideal work which those youngsters so gallantly began.

This was a war to make similar wars impossible, and merely to win this war and stop at that is to make it certain that we shall have to fight another and a final one. I hear opponents of the League of Nations say that this does not guarantee peace. No, nothing guarantees us against human passion and error. But I would like to put this business proposition to you: if it increases the probability of peace by, let us say, 10 per cent, don’t you think it is worthwhile? (“Yes,” cheers) And in my judgment, it increases it about 90 per cent. Henceforth the genius of the world will be devoted to accommodating the counsels of mankind and not confusing them; not supplying heat but supplying light; not putting friction into the machine, but easing the friction off and combining the parts of the great machinery of civilization so that they will run in smooth harmony and perfection.

My fellow citizens, the tasks of peace that are ahead of us are the most difficult tasks to which the human genius has ever been devoted. I will state the fundamental task, for it is the fundamental task. It is the relationship between those who toil with their hands and those who direct that toil. I will not say the relationship between capital and labor; that means something slightly different. I say the relationship between those who organize enterprise and those who make enterprise go by the skill and labor of their hands.

There is at present, to say the least, a most unsatisfactory relationship between those two, and we must devote our national genius to working out a method of association between the two which will make this nation the nation to solve triumphantly and for all time the fundamental problem of peaceful production.

You ask, “What has that got to do with the League of Nations?” I dare say that you do not know because I have never heard [147page icon] anybody tell you that the great charter, the new international charter, of labor is in the treaty of peace and associated with the League of Nations. A great machinery of consultation is set up there, not merely about international political affairs, but about standards of labor, about the relationships between managers and employees, about the standards of life and the conditions of labor, about the labor of women and of children, about the humane side and the business side of the whole labor problem.

And the first conference is going to sit in Washington next month; not the conference which some of you might have heard of, which I have just called of our own people, but an international conference to consider the interests of labor all over the world. I don’t know—nobody knows—whether the Senate will have stopped debating by that time or not. I heard a member of the Senate say that nobody knew except God Almighty! But whether it has finished or not, the conference is going to sit, and if it has not finished, the only question that will be left unsettled is whether we are going to sit inside of it or outside of it. The conference at Paris voted, in their confidence in the American people, that the first meeting should be held in Washington and should be called by the President of the United States. They supposed in their innocence that the President of the United States represented the people of the United States. And in calling this conference, as I have called it, I am confident that I am representing the people of the United States. After I have bidden the delegates welcome, perhaps I can have a chair just outside the door and listen.

I am jesting, my fellow citizens, but there is a little sadness in the jest. Why do we wait to do a great thing? Why do we wait to fulfill the destiny of America? Why do we make it possible that anybody should think we are not coming in now, but are going to wait until later and come in with Germany? I suppose there is a certain intellectual excitement and pleasure in debate, but I do not experience any when great issues like this are pending, and I would be very sad, indeed, if I did not have an absolutely unclouded confidence in the result.

I had the great good fortune to be born an American; I have saturated myself in the traditions of our country; I have read all the great literature that interprets the spirit of our country; and, when I read my own heart with regard to these great purposes, I feel confident that it is a sample American heart. Therefore I have the most unbounded confidence in the result. All that is needed is that you should be vocal and audible. I know what you want. Say it and get it. I am your servant; all the men elected to go to Washington are your servants. It is not our privilege to follow our private [148page icon] convictions. It is our duty to represent your convictions and execute your purposes, and therefore all that is needed is a consciousness. Tell me that you do not want to do what I am urging and I will go home. (Cries of “No” and “Go to it.” The crowd rose and cheered.) But tell me, as your faces and your voices tell me, that you do want what I want, and I will be heartened for the rest of my journey. And I will say to the folks all the way from here to the Pacific, “Minnesota is up and on her tiptoes and behind you. Let’s all of us get in the great team which is to redeem the destinies of mankind.”

Our fathers of the Revolutionary age had a vision, my fellow citizens. There were only 3,000,000 Americans then, in a little strip of settlements on the Atlantic coast. Now the great body of American citizens extends from ocean to ocean, more than a hundred millions strong. These are the people of whom the founders of the republic were dreaming—those great hosts of free men and women who should come in the future and who should say to all the world: “Here are the testaments of liberty. Here are the principles of freedom. Here are the things which we must do in order that mankind may be released from the intolerable things of the past.”

And there came a day at Paris when representatives of all the great governments of the world accepted the American specifications upon which the terms of the treaty of peace were drawn. Shall we have our treaty, or shall we have somebody else’s? (shouts of “ours!” “ours”) Shall we keep the primacy of the world, or shall we abandon it?

#An Address at Bismarck, September 10, 1919.

Governor Frazier,1 my fellow countrymen: I esteem it a great privilege to stand in your presence and to continue the discussion that I have been attempting in other parts of the country of the great matter which is pending for our determination. I say it is pending for our determination, because, after all, it is a question for the men and women of the United States. I believe that the gentlemen at Washington are trying to assess the opinion of the United States and trying to express it.

It seems very strange from day to day, as I go about, that I should be discussing the question of peace. It seems very strange that, after six months spent in Paris, where the minds of more than twenty nations were brought together and where, after the most profound consideration of every question and every angle of every question concerned, an extraordinary agreement should have been reached, an extraordinary concurrence of minds should have been reached, and that, while every other country concerned has stopped debating the thing, America is debating it.

It seems very strange to me, my fellow countrymen, because, as [154page icon] a matter of fact, we are debating the question of peace or war. There is only one way to have peace, and that is to have it by the concurrence of the minds of the world. America can’t bring about peace by herself. No other nation can bring about peace by itself. The agreement of a small group of nations cannot bring about peace.

The world is not at peace. It is not, except in certain disturbed quarters, actually using military means of war, but the mind of the world is not at peace. The mind of the world is waiting for the verdict, and the verdict they are waiting for is this: shall we have in the future the same dangers, the same suspicions, the same distractions, and shall we expect that, out of these dangers and distractions, armed conflict will arise? Or shall we expect that the world will be willing to sit down at the conference table to talk the thing over; to delay all use of force until the world is willing to express its judgment on the matter at issue? Because if this be not the solution, if the world is not to substitute discussion for war, then the world is not now in a state of mind to have peace, even for the time being.

While victory has been won, my fellow countrymen, it is won only over the force of a particular group of nations. It has not been won over the passions of those nations, but over the passions of the nations that were set against us. This treaty, which I have brought back with me, is a great world settlement, and it tries to deal with some of the elements of passion which were likely at any time to blaze out in the world, and now have blazed out and set the world on fire.

The trouble was at the heart of Europe. At the heart of Europe there were suffering peoples, inarticulate but with hearts on fire against the iniquities practiced against them; held in the grip of military power, submitting to nothing but force; their spirits insurgent. And so long as that condition existed, there could not be the expectation of continued peace. And this great settlement at Paris for the first time in the world considered the cry of the people and did not listen to the pleas of governments. It did not listen to dynastic claims. It did not read over the whole story of rival territorial ambitions, but it said: “The door is closed on that. These lands belong to the stocks, the ancient stocks, of people that live upon them. We are going to give them to those people. The land always should have been yours; it is now yours, and you can govern it as you please.”

That is the principle that is at the heart of this treaty, but if that principle cannot be maintained, then there will ensue from the passions in the hearts of those peoples a despair which will bring [155page icon] about universal chaos. Men in despair do not construct governments. Men in despair destroy governments. Men whose whole affairs are so upset, whose whole systems of living are so disrupted that they cannot get food, that they cannot get clothing, that they cannot turn to any authority that can give them anything certain—they cannot construct governments. There are words of a preacher that interested me very deeply, on the sequence of the petitions in the Lord’s Prayer. He called attention to the fact that the first petition was, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and he pointed out that our Saviour probably knew better than anybody else that a man cannot serve God or his fellow men on an empty stomach, that he has got to be physically sustained. When a man has got an empty stomach, most of all when those he loves are starving, he is not going to serve anybody, he is going to serve himself by the quickest way he can find.

Now you say, “What has this got to do with the adoption by the United States Senate of the treaty of peace?” It has this to do with it, my fellow citizens, that the whole world is waiting upon us, and if we stay out of it, if we qualify our assent in any essential way, the world will say, “Then there can be no peace, for that great nation in the West is the only makeweight which will hold these scales steady.” I hear counsels of selfishness uttered. I hear men say, “Very well, let us stay out and take care of ourselves and let the rest of the world take care of itself.” I do not agree with that from the point of view of sentiment. I would be ashamed to agree with it from the point of view of sentiment, and I think I have intelligence enough to know that it would not work, even if I wanted it to work.

Are we disconnected from the rest of the world? Take a single item. If Europe is disordered, who is going to buy wheat? There is more wheat produced in this country than we can consume and more foodstuffs, and there will be no market that anybody can count upon until there is a settled peace. Men are not going to buy until they know what is going to happen tomorrow, for the reason that they cannot get any money amidst a disordered organization of industry and in the absence of those processes of credit which keep business going.

We have managed in the process of civilization, my fellow citizens, to make a world that cannot be taken to pieces. The pieces are intricately dovetailed and fitted with one another, and unless you assemble them as you do, the intricate parts of a great machine, the pieces won’t work. I believe that, with the exception of the United States, there is not a country in the world that could live without imports. There are only one or two countries that can [156page icon] live without importing foodstuffs. There are no countries that I know of that can live in their ordinary way without importing manufactured goods and raw materials—raw materials of many kinds.

Take that great kingdom, for example, for which I have the greatest admiration—the great Kingdom of Italy. There are great factories there, but they have to get all the raw material that they manufacture from the outside. There is no coal in Italy, no fuel. They have to get all their coal from outside. And, at the present moment, because the world is holding its breath and waiting, the great coal fields of Central Europe are not producing except to about 40 per cent of their capacity. So that the coal in Silesia and the coal in Bohemia is not being shipped out, and industries are checked and chilled and drawn in, and starvation comes nearer, unemployment becomes more and more universal.

At this moment there is nothing brought to my attention more often at Washington than the necessity for shipping out our fuel and our raw materials to start the world again. If we do not start the world again, then we check and stop to that extent our own industries and our exports, of course. You cannot disentangle the United States from the rest of the world. If the rest of the world goes bankrupt, the business of the United States is in a way to be ruined.

I do not like to put the thing upon this basis, my fellow citizens, because this is not the American basis. America was not founded to make money; it was founded to lead the world on the way to liberty, and now, while we debate, all the rest of the world is saying: “Why does America hesitate? We want to follow her. We shall not know which way to go unless she leads. We want the direction of her business genius. We want the suggestion of her experience, and she hesitates. She does not know whether she wants to go in or not.” Oh, while she does, my fellow citizens, some among us do not know whether we must go in or not.

But we know. (applause) There is no more danger of the American people staying out of this great thing than there is of our reversing all the precedents of our history, forgetting all the blood that has been spilled, so much precious blood, to the state. But, in the meantime, the delay is endangering the whole world and us, of course, along with the rest, because we are a very big and, in my opinion, an extremely important part of the world.

I have told many times, but I must tell you again, of the experience that I had in Paris. Almost every day of the week that I was not imperatively engaged otherwise I was receiving delegations. Delegations from where? Not merely groups of men from France and other nearby regions, but groups of men from all over the [157page icon] world, as I have several times admitted, from some parts of the world that I never heard the names of before. I do not think they were in my geography when I was in school. If they were, I had forgotten them. Did you ever hear of Azerbaijan, for example? A very dignified group of fine-looking men came in from Azerbaijan. I did not dare ask them where it was, but I looked it up secretly afterwards and found that it was a very prosperous valley region lying south of the Caucasus and that it had a great and ancient civilization.

I knew from what these men said to me that they knew what they were talking about, though I did not know anything about their affairs. They knew, above all things else, what America stood for. And they had come to me, figuratively speaking, with outstretched hands and said, “We want the guidance and the help and the advice of America.” And they all said that, until my heart grew fearful, and I said to one group of them: “I beg that you will not expect the impossible. America cannot do the things that you are asking her to do. We will do the best we can. We will stand as your friends. We will give you every sort of aid that we can give you, but please do not expect the impossible.” They believe that America can work miracles merely by being America and asserting the principles of America throughout the globe. And that kind of assertion, my fellow citizens, is the process of peace, and that is the only possible process of peace.

When I say, therefore, that I have come here this morning actually to discuss the question with you whether we shall have peace or war, you may say, “There is no war; the war is over.” The fighting is over, but there is not peace, and there cannot be peace without the assistance of America. The assistance of America comes just at the center of the whole thing that was planned in Paris. You have heard some men talk about separating the Covenant of the League of Nations from the treaty.

I intended to bring a copy of the treaty with me. It is a volume as thick as that, and the very first thing in it is the League of Nations Covenant. By common consent, that was put first, because by common consent that is the only thing that will make the rest of the volume work. That was not the opinion at the beginning of the conference. There were a great many cynics on that side of the water who smiled indulgently when you spoke hopefully of drawing the nations together in a common concert of action, but before we got through there was not a man who hadn’t come, as a hard, practical judgment, to the conclusion that we couldn’t do without it, that you couldn’t make a world settlement without setting up an organization that would see that it was carried out, and that you [158page icon] couldn’t compose the mind of the world unless that settlement included an arrangement by which discussion should be substituted for war.

If the war we have just had had been preceded by discussion, it never would have happened. Every foreign office in Europe urged through its Minister at Berlin that no action should be taken until there should be an international conference of other governments and learn what if any processes of mediation they might propose. And Germany did not dare delay it for twenty-four hours. If she had, she never would have gone into it. You daren’t lay a bad case before mankind. You daren’t kill the young men of the world for a dishonest purpose. And we have let thousands of our lads go to their death in order to convince, not Germany merely, but any other nation that may have in the back of its thought a similar enterprise, that the world doesn’t mean to permit any iniquity of that sort. And if it had been displayed as an iniquity in open conference for not less than nine months, as the Covenant of the League of Nations provides, it never could have happened.

And when your attention is called to certain features of this treaty—the only features to which your attention ever is called by those who are opposed to it—you are left with the impression that it is an arrangement by which war is just on the hair trigger. You are constantly told about Article X. Now, Article X has no operative force in it unless we vote that it shall operate. I will tell you what Article X is—I think I can repeat it almost verbatim. Under Article X every member of the League undertakes to respect and preserve the territorial integrity—to protect and preserve as against external aggression—the territorial integrity and the existing political independence of the other members of the League. So far so good. The second sentence provides that, in case of necessity, the Council of the League shall advise what steps are necessary to carry out the obligations of that promise; that is to say, what force is necessary, if any. Now the Council cannot give that advice without a unanimous vote. It can’t give the advice, therefore, without the affirmative vote of the United States, unless the United States is a party to the controversy in question.

Let us see what that means. Do you think that the United States is likely to seize somebody else’s territory? Do you think that the United States is likely to disregard the first sentence of the article? And if she is not likely to begin an aggression of that sort, who is likely to begin it against her? Is Mexico going to invade us and appropriate Texas? Is Canada going to come down with her nine or ten millions and overwhelm the hundred millions of the United States? Who is going to grab our territory, and, above all things [159page icon] else, who is going to propose, who is going to entertain the idea, after the rest of the world has said, “No; we are all pledged to see that you don’t do that.”

But suppose that somebody does attempt to grab our territory, or that we do attempt to grab somebody else’s territory? Then the war is ours anyhow. So what difference does it make what advice the Council gives? So that unless it is our war, we can’t be dragged into a war without our own consent. If that is not an open and shut security, I don’t know of any. And yet that is Article X.

I don’t recognize this Covenant when I hear some other men talking about it. I spent hours and hours in the presence of the representatives of thirteen other nations examining every sentence of it, up and down and crosswise, and tried to keep out of it anything that interfered with the essential sovereignty of any member of the League. I carried over with me in March all the suggestions made by the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate, and they were all accepted. And yet I come back and find that I don’t understand what the document means. And I am told that plain sentences, which I thought were written in unmistakable language, mean something that I never heard of and that nobody else ever entertained as a purpose.

But whatever you may think of Article X, my fellow citizens, it is the heart of the treaty. You either have got to take it or you have got to throw the world back into that old contest over land titles, which would upset the state of North Dakota or any other part of the world.

Suppose there were no guarantee of any land titles in North Dakota! I can fancy how every farmer and every man with a city lot would go armed. He would hire somebody, if he was too sleepy to sit up all night, to see that nobody trespassed and took squatter’s possession of his unsecured land.

And we have been trying to do something analogous to that with the territories of Europe—to fix land titles, and, then having fixed them, we have got to have Article X. Under Article X these titles are established, and we all join to guarantee their maintenance. There is no other way to quiet the world, and if the world is not quieted, then America is sooner or later involved in the maelstrom. My fellow citizens, we sometimes forget what a powerful nation the United States is. Do you suppose we can ask the other nations of the world to forget that we are out of the arrangement? Do you suppose that we can stay out of the arrangement without being suspected and intrigued against and hated by all the rest of them? And do you think that that is an advantageous basis for international transactions? Any way you take this question, you are led [160page icon] straight around to this alternative—either this treaty with this Covenant or a disturbed world and certain war. There is no escape from it.

America recalls, I am sure, all the assurances that she has given to the world in the years past. Some of the very men who are now opposing this peace Covenant were most eloquent in support of an international government which would be carried to the point where the exercise of independent sovereignty would be almost stopped. They put it into measures of Congress. Last November, in the naval appropriation bill, by unanimous vote of the committee, they put in the provision that, after the building program had been authorized by Congress, the President could cancel any of it the moment he had been able to induce the other governments of the world to set up an international tribunal which would settle international difficulties.2 They actually had the matter so definitely in mind that they authorized the President not to carry out an act of Congress with regard to the building of great ships if he could get an arrangement similar to the arrangement which I have now laid before them, because their instinctive judgment is, my instinctive judgment and yours is, that we have no choice, if we want to stop war but to take the steps that are necessary to stop it.

And if we don’t enter into this Covenant, what is our situation? Our situation is exactly the situation of Germany herself, except that we are not disarmed and Germany is disarmed. We have joined with the rest of the world to defeat the purpose that Germany had in mind. We now hesitate to sign the treaty that is supposed to disarm Germany. She is disarmed, nevertheless, because the other nations will enter into it. And there is planted in their heart, planted in the hearts of those 60,000,000 people, maybe the thought that, some day, by gathering their forces and a change of circumstances, they may have another chance. And the only other nation that they can look to is the United States. The United States has repudiated the treaty. The United States has said: “Yes, we sent 2,000,000 men over there to accomplish this, but we do not like it now and we will not guarantee it. We are going to set up such a situation that some day we may send 2,000,000 more men over there. We promised the mothers and the fathers and the wives and the sweethearts that those men were fighting there that these [161page icon] things should not happen again, but we are going to arrange it so that it may happen again.” And so the two nations that will stand and play a lone hand in the world would be Germany and the United States.

I am not saying this to you, my fellow citizens, because I believe it is likely. I know it is not. I am not in the least troubled about that, but I do want you to share fully with me the thought that I have brought back from Europe. I know what I am talking about when I say that America is the only nation whose guarantee will suffice to substitute discussion for war, and I rejoice in the circumstance. I rejoice that the time has come when America can fulfill her destiny. Her destiny was expressed much more in her open doors when she said to the oppressed all over the world: “Come and join us. We will give you freedom. We will give you opportunity. We have no governments that can act as your masters. Come and join us to conduct a free government which is our own.” And they came in thronging millions, and their genius was added to ours; their sturdy capacity multiplied and increased the capacity of the United States. And now, with the blood of every great people in our veins, we turn to the rest of the world and say: “We still stand ready to redeem our promise. We still believe in liberty. We still mean to exercise every force that we have and, if need be, spend every dollar that is ours to vindicate the standards of justice and of right.”

It is a noble purpose. It is a noble principle. My pulses quicken at the thought of it. I am glad to have lived in a day when America can redeem her pledges to the world, when America can prove that her leadership is the leadership that leads out of these age-long troubles, these age-long miseries, into which the world will not sink back, but which, without our assistance, it may struggle out of only through a long period of bloody revolution.

The peoples of Europe are in a revolutionary frame of mind. They do not believe in the things that have been practiced upon them in the past, and they mean to have new things practiced.

In the meantime, they are, some of them, like pitiful Russia, in danger of doing a most extraordinary thing—substituting one kind of autocracy for another. Russia repudiated the Czar, who was cruel at times, and set up her present masters, who are cruel all the time and pity nobody, who seize everybody’s property and feed only the soldiers that are fighting for them. And now, according to the papers, they are likely to brand every one of those soldiers so that he may not easily, at any rate, escape their clutches and desert. Branding their servants and making slaves of a great and lovable people! There is no people in the world fuller of the naive [162page icon] sentiments of good will and of fellowship than the people of Russia, and they are in the grip of a cruel autocracy that, in spite of the challenge of every friendly government of Europe to do so, they dare not have an election and assemble a constituent assembly. They dare not appeal to the people. They know that their mastery would end the minute the people took charge of their own affairs.

Do not let us expose any of the rest of the world to the necessity of going through any such terrible experiences as that, my fellow citizens. We are at present helpless to assist Russia, because there are no responsible channels through which we can assist her. Our heart goes out to her, but the world is in disorder, and while it is in disorder—here we debate!

#An Address from the Rear Platform at Mandan, North Dakota, September 10, 1919

I am glad to get out to see the real folks, to feel the tough of their hands, and know, as I have come to know, how the nation stands together in the common purpose to complete what the boys did who carried their guns with them over the sea. We may think that they finished that job, but they will tell you they did not; that unless we see to it that peace is made secure, they will have the job to do over again, and we, in the meantime, will rest under a constant apprehension that we may have to sacrifice the flower of our youth again. The whole country has made up its mind that it shall not happen. And presently, after a reasonable time is allowed for unnecessary debate, we will get out of this period of doubt and unite the whole force and influence of the United States to steady the world in the lines of peace. And it will be the proudest thing and finest thing that America ever did. She was born to do these things, and now she is going to do them.

I am very much obliged to you for coming out.

#An Address in the Billings Auditorium, September 11, 1919.

Mr. Mayor, Judge Pierson, my fellow countrymen, it is with genuine pleasure that I face this company and realize that I am in the great state of Montana. I have long wanted to visit this great state and come in contact with its free and vigorous population, and I want to thank Judge Pierson for the happy word that he used in speaking about my errand. He said that I had come to consult with you. That is exactly what I have come to do. I have come to consult with you in the light of certain circumstances which I want to explain to you—circumstances which affect not only this great nation, which we love, and of which we try to constitute an honorable part, but also affect the whole world. I wonder when we speak of the whole world whether we have a true conception of the fact that the human heart beats everywhere the same.

Nothing impressed me so much on the other side of the water as the sort of longing for sympathy which those people exhibited. [171page icon] The people of France, following the misery and terror they have suffered at the hands of the enemy, are never so happy as when they realize that we across the sea, at a great distance, feel with them the keen arrows of sorrow that have penetrated their hearts, and they are glad that our boys went over there and helped rescue them from the terror that lay upon them day and night.

And what I have come to say to you today, my friends, is this: we are debating the treaty of peace with Germany, and we are making a mistake, I take the liberty of saying, in debating it as if it were an ordinary treaty with some particular country, a treaty we could ourselves modify without conflicting with the affairs of the world; whereas, as matters are, it is not merely a treaty with Germany. Matters were drawn into this treaty which affected the peace and happiness of the whole continent of Europe, and not of the continent of Europe merely, but of the farthermost populations in Africa, people we hardly know about in the usual affairs of our country, where the influence of German policy had existed, and everywhere that influence had to be guarded, had to be rejected, had to be altered. What I want to impress upon you today is that it is the treaty of nations. And it is this treaty or no treaty. It is this treaty because there can be no other.

Consider the circumstances. For the first time in the world some twenty nations sent men—thoughtful and responsible men—to consult together at the capital of France to effect a settlement of the affairs of the world. And I want to render my testimony that these gentlemen entered upon their deliberations with great openness of mind. Their discussions were characterized by the utmost candor. And they realized, my fellow citizens, what, as a student of history I venture to say, no similar body ever acknowledged before—that they were nobody’s masters. They did not have the right to vary a line to any nation’s advantage in determining on the settlements and the basis of peace, but that they were the servants of their people and the servants of the people of the world. This settlement, my fellow citizens, is the first international settlement intended for the happiness and safety of men and women throughout the world. This is indeed and in truth a people’s treaty. It is the first people’s treaty. And I venture to say that no parliament or congress will attempt to alter it. (applause)

It is a people’s treaty, notwithstanding the fact that it is also a treaty with Germany. And while it is a treaty with Germany, in no sense is it an unjust treaty, as some have characterized it. My fellow citizens, Germany tried to commit a crime against civilization, and this treaty is justified as a measure to make Germany pay for the crime up to her full capacity for payment. (applause) Some of [172page icon] the very gentlemen who are now characterizing this treaty as harsh are the same men who less than twelve months ago were criticizing the administration at Washington, in the fear that we would compromise with Germany and let her off from the payment of the utmost that she could pay in retribution for what she had done. They were pitiless then; they are pitiful now. (applause)

It is meet, my fellow citizens, that we should not forget what this war means. I am amazed at the indications that we are forgetting what we went through. There are some indications that, on the other side of the water, they are about to forget what they went through. I venture to say that there are thousands of parents—fathers, mothers, wives, sisters, and sweethearts in this country who are never going to forget what they went through. Thousands of our gallant youth lie buried in France.

Buried for what? For the protection of America? America was not directly attacked. For the salvation of mankind everywhere, and not alone for the salvation of America. It is the noblest errand that troops ever went on. I appeared once in the presence of a little handful of men whom I revere, who fought in the Civil War. And it seems to me that they fought for the greatest principle of their day, and now with what reverence we look upon those men who fought for the safety of the nation! I say this although I was born below the Mason and Dixon Line. We revere the men who saved the Union.

We are not going to deny those sentiments to the boys who were in this war. Don’t you think that when they are old men, a halo will seem to be about them, because they were crusaders for the liberty of the civilized world?

One of the hardest things for me to do during this war, as for many another man in this country, was merely to try to advise and direct and not take a gun and go myself. When I feel the pride that I often have felt in having been the commander in chief of these gallant armies and those splendid boys at sea, I think, “Ah, that is fine, but, oh, to have been one of them and to have accomplished this great thing which has been accomplished!”

The fundamental feature of this treaty is—and a fundamental feature never before acknowledged—the principle that had its birth and growth in this country—that the countries of the world belong to the people who live in them, (applause) and that they have a right to determine their own affairs, their own form of government, their own polity, and that no body of statesmen, sitting anywhere in the world, no matter whether they represent the overwhelming physical force of the world or not, has the right to assign any great people to a sovereignty under which it does not care to live.

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This is the great treaty which is being debated. This is the treaty which is being examined with a microscope. This is the treaty which is being pulled about and about which suggestions are made as to changes of phraseology. Why, my friends, are you going to be narrow-minded enough and near-sighted enough as to look that way at a great charter of human liberty?

The thing is impossible. Then you can never have any treaty, because you can never get together again the elements which made it up. You cannot do it by dealing with separate governments. You cannot assemble the forces again that were back of it. You cannot bring the agreement upon which it rests into force again. It was the laborious work of many, many months of the most intimate conference. It has very, very few compromises in it and is, most of it, laid down in straight lines according to American specifications. The choice is either to accept this treaty or play a lone hand.

What does that mean? To play a lone hand now means that we must always be ready to play by ourselves. It means that we must always be armed, that we must always be ready to mobilize the man strength and the manufacturing resources of the country. That means that we must continue to live under, not diminishing, but increasing taxes. It means that we shall devote our thought and the organization of our government to being strong enough to beat any nation in the world. An absolute reversal of all the ideals of American history!

If you are going to play a lone hand, the hand that you play must be upon the handle of the sword. You cannot play a lone hand and do your civil business except with the other hand—one hand incidental for the business of peace, the other hand constantly for the assertion of force. It is either this treaty or a lone hand, and the lone hand must have a weapon in it. The weapon must be all the young men of the country trained to arms, and the business of the country must pay the piper, must pay for the whole armament, the arms and the men. That is the choice.

And do you suppose, my fellow citizens, that any nation is going to stand for that? We are not the only people who are sick of war. We are not the only people who have made up our minds that our government must devote its attention to peace and to justice and to right. The people all over the world have made up their minds as to that. We need peace more than we ever needed it before. We need ordered peace, calm peace, settled peace, assured peace—for what have we to do? We have to reregulate the fortunes of men. I mean that we have to reconstruct the machinery of civilization. I use the words deliberately—we have to reconstruct the machinery of civilization.

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The central fact of the modern world is universal unrest, and the unrest is not due merely to the excitement of a recent war. The unrest is not due merely to the fact of recent extraordinary circumstances. It is due to a universal conviction that the conditions under which men live and labor are not satisfactory. It is a conviction all over the world that there is no use talking about political democracy unless you have also industrial democracy.

You know what this war interrupted in the United States. We were searching our own hearts; we were looking closely at our own methods of doing business. A great many were convinced that the control of the business of this country was in too few hands. Some were convinced that the credit of the country was controlled by small groups of men, and the great Federal Reserve Act and the great Land Bank Act were passed in order to release the resources of the country on a broader and more generous scale. We had not finished dealing with monopolies. We have not finished dealing with monopolies. With monopolies there can be no industrial democracy. With the control of the few, of whatever kind or class, there can be no democracy of any sort. The world is finding that out, in some portions of it in blood and terror.

Look what has happened in Russia, my fellow citizens. I find, wherever I go in America, that my fellow citizens feel as I do—an infinite pity for that great people, an infinite longing to be of some service to them. Everybody who has mixed with the Russian people tells me that they are among the most lovable people in the world—a very gentle people, a very friendly people, a very simple people, and in their local life a very democratic people, people who easily trust you, and who expect you to be trustworthy as they are. And yet this people is delivered into the hands of an intolerable tyranny. It came out of one tyranny to get into a worse. A little group of some thirty or forty men are the masters of that people at present. Nobody elected them. They chose themselves. They maintain their power by the sword, and they maintain the sword by seizing all the food of the country and letting only those who will fight for them eat, and the rest of them can starve. And because they can command no loyalty, we are told by the newspapers that they are about to brand the men under arms for them, so that they will be forever marked as their servants and slaves. That is what pitiful Russia has got in for, and there will be many a bloody year, I am afraid, before she finds herself again.

I speak of Russia. Have you seen no symptoms of the spread of that sort of chaotic spirit into other countries? If you had been across the sea with me, you would know that the dread in the mind of every thoughtful man in Europe is that that distemper will [175page icon] spread to their countries, that before there will be settled order, there will be tragical disorder. Have you heard nothing of the propaganda of that sort of belief in the United States? That poison is running through the veins of the world, and we have made the methods of communication throughout the world such that all the veins of the world are open and the poison can circulate. The wireless throws it out upon the air. The cable whispers it underneath the sea. Men talk about it in little groups, men talk about it openly in great groups, not only in Europe, but here also in the United States. There are disciples of Lenin in our own midst. To be a disciple of Lenin means to be a disciple of night, chaos, and disorder. There must be no discord or disorganization. Our immediate duty, therefore, my fellow countrymen, is to see that no minority, no class, no special interest, no matter how respectable, how rich or how poor, shall get control of the affairs of the United States.

The singular thing about the sort of disorder that prevails in Russia is that, while every man is, so to say, invited to take what he can get, he cannot keep it when he gets it, because, even if you had leave to steal it, which is the leave very generously given in Russia at present, you would have to go and get somebody to help you to keep it. Without organization you cannot get any help, so the only thing you can do is to dig a hole and find a cave somewhere. Disordered society is dissolved society. There is no society when there is not settled and calculable order. When you do not know what is going to happen to you tomorrow, you do not much care what is going to happen to you today. These are the things that confront us. The world must be satisfied of justice. The conditions of civilized life must be purified and perfected, and, if we do not have peace, that is impossible. We must clear the decks of this matter we are now discussing. This is the best treaty that can possibly be gotten, and, in my judgment, it is a mighty good treaty, for it has justice, the attempt at justice at any rate, at the heart of it.

Suppose that you were feeling that there was a danger of a general conflagration in your part of the country. I mean a literal fire. Which would you rather have, no insurance at all or 10 per cent insurance? Don’t you think some insurance is better than none at all? Put the security obtained by this treaty at its minimum, and it is a great deal better than no security at all. And without it there is no security at all, and no man can be sure what his business will be from month to month, or what his life will be from year to year. The leisureliness of some of the debate creates the impression on my mind that some men think there is leisure. There is no leisure in the world, my fellow citizens, with regard to the reform of the [176page icon] conditions under which men live. There is no time for any talk before getting down to the business of what we are going to do.

I dare say that many of you know that I have called a conference to sit in Washington the first week of next month—a conference of men in the habit of managing business and of men engaged in manual labor, what we generally call employers and employees. And I have called them together for the sake of getting their minds together, getting their purposes together, getting them to look at the picture of our life at the same time and in the same light and from the same angles, so that they can see the things that ought to be done. I am trying to apply there what is applied and in a degree covered by the Covenant of the League of Nations—that if there is any trouble, the thing to do is not to fight, but to sit around the table and talk it over. (applause)

The League of Nations substitutes discussion for fighting, and without discussion there will be fighting. One of the greatest difficulties that we have been through in the past is in getting men to understand that fundamental thing.

There is a very interesting story, and a very charming story, told of a great English writer of a past generation. He was a man who stuttered a little bit, and he stuttered out some very acid comment on some man who was not present. One of his friends said, “Why, Charles, I didn’t know you knew him.” “Oh, n-n-no,” he said, “I-I d-d-don’t k-know him; I-I c-c-an’t hate a m-man I-I know.” How much truth there is in that, my fellow countrymen! You cannot hate a fellow you know. I know some crooks that I cannot help liking. I can judge them in cool blood and correctly only when they are not there. They are extremely fetching and attractive fellows; indeed, I suspect that a disagreeable fellow cannot be a successful crook.

But, to speak seriously, conference is the healing influence of civilization, and the real difficulty between classes, when a country is unfortunate enough to have classes, is that they do not understand one another. I myself think that the real barriers in life are the barriers of taste, that some people like one way of doing things and that other people do not like that way of doing things; that one sort of people are not comfortable unless the people they are with are dressed the way they are. I think that goes so much deeper than people realize. It is the absence of the ability to get at the point of view and look through the eyes of the persons with whom you are not accustomed to deal. In order, therefore, to straighten out the affairs of America, in order to calm and correct the ways of the world, the first and immediate requisite is peace, and it is an immediate requisite. We cannot wait. It is not wise to wait, because [177page icon] we ought to devote our best thoughts, the best impulses of our hearts, the clearest thinking of our brains, to correcting the things that are wrong everywhere.

I know, my fellow citizens—at least I have been told—that this western part of the country is particularly pervaded with what is called radicalism. There is only one way to meet radicalism, and that is to deprive it of food, and wherever there is any wrong, there is an abundance of food for radicalism. The only way to keep men from agitating against grievances is to remove the grievances, and as long as things are wrong I do not intend to ask men to stop agitating. I intend to beg that they will agitate in an orderly fashion; I intend to beg that they will use the orderly methods of counsel, and, it may be, the slow processes of correction, which can be accomplished in a self-governing people through political means. Otherwise we will have chaos. But so long as there is something to correct, I say Godspeed to the men who are trying to correct it. That is the only way to meet radicalism. Radicalism means cutting up by the roots. Well, remove the noxious growth, and there will be no cuting up by the roots. Then there will be the wholesome fruitage of an honest life from one end of this country to the other.

In looking over some papers the other day, I was reminded of a very interesting thing. The difficulty which is being found with the League of Nations is that apparently the gentlemen who are discussing it unfavorably are afraid that we will be bound to do something we do not want to do. Now, the only way in which you can have an impartial determination in this world is by consenting to something you don’t want to do. Every time you have a case in court, one or the other of the parties has to consent to do something he does not want to do. There is not a case in court, and there are thousands of cases in the courts, hundreds of thousands every year, in which one of the parties is not disappointed. Yet we regard that as the foundation of civilization—that we will not fight about these things and that when we lose in court we will take our medicine. Very well; I find that the two houses of Congress suggested that there be an international court, and suggested that they were willing to take their medicine. They put it in a place where you would not expect it. They put it in the naval appropriation bill. (applause) And, not satisfied with putting it there once, they put it there several times; I mean in successive years. This is the form of it.

“It is hereby declared to be the policy of the United States to adjust and settle its international disputes through mediation or arbitration (that is, the League of Nations), to the end that war may be honorably avoided. It looks with apprehension and disfavor [178page icon] upon a general increase of armament throughout the world, but it realizes that no single nation can disarm, and that, without a common agreement upon the subject, every considerable power must maintain a relative standing in military strength. In view of the premises, the President is authorized and requested to invite at an appropriate time, no later than the close of the war in Europe (this immediately preceded our entry into the war), all the great governments of the world to send representatives to a conference which shall be charged with the duty of formulating a plan for a court of arbitration or other tribunal to which disputed questions between nations shall be referred for adjudication and peaceful settlement, and to consider the question of disarmament and submit their recommendations to their respective governments for approval. (We now have the League of Nations.) The President is hereby authorized to appoint,” etc. A provision for an appropriation to pay the expenses is also embodied.

Now that they have got it, they do not like it. (laughter, applause) They also provided in this legislation that, if there could be such an assemblage, if there could be such an agreement, the President was authorized to cancel the naval building program authorized by the bill, or so much of it as he thought was wise in the circumstances. They looked forward to it with such a practical eye that they contemplated the possibility of its coming soon enough to stop the building program of that bill. It came much sooner than they expected (applause) and apparently has taken them so much by surprise as to confuse their minds. I suppose that this would be a very dull world if everybody were consistent, but consistency, my fellow citizens, in the sober, fundamental, underlying principles of civilization, is a very serious thing indeed.

If we are, indeed, headed towards peace with the real purpose of our hearts engaged, then we must take the necessary steps to secure it, and we must make the sacrifices necessary to secure it, and not only to discuss it. I repudiate the suggestion, which underlies some of the suggestions I have heard, that the other nations of the world are acting in bad faith, and that only the United States is acting in good faith. (applause) That is not true. I can testify that I was occupied with honorable men on the other side of the water, and I challenge anybody to show where, in recent years, while the opinion of mankind has been effective, there has been the repudiation of an international obligation by France or Italy or Great Britain or by Japan. Japan has kept her engagements, and Japan here engages to unite with the rest of the world in maintaining justice and a peace based upon justice. There can be cited no instances [179page icon] where these governments have been dishonorable, and I need not add that there is, of course, no instance where the United States has not kept faith.

When gentlemen discuss the right to withdraw from the League of Nations and look suspiciously upon the clause which says that we can withdraw upon two years’ notice, if at that time we have fulfilled our international obligations, I am inclined to ask: “What are you worried about? Are you afraid that we will not have fulfilled our international obligations?” I am too proud an American to believe anything of the kind. We never have failed to fulfill our international obligations, and we never will, and our international obligations will always look towards the fulfillment of the highest purposes of civilization. When we came into existence as a nation we promised ourselves and promised the world that we would serve liberty everywhere. We were only 3,000,000 strong then, and shall we, when more than a hundred million strong, now fail to fulfill the promises we made when we were weak? We have served mankind, and we shall continue to serve mankind, for I believe, my fellow men, that we are the flower of mankind so far as civilization is concerned.

But please do not let me leave the impression on your mind that I am arguing with you. I am not arguing this case; I am merely expounding it. I am just as sure what the verdict of this nation is going to be as if already rendered, and what has touched me and convinced me of this, my fellow citizens, is not what big men have told me, not what men of large affairs have said to me—I value their counsel and seek to be guided by it—but by what plain people have said to me, particularly by what women have said to me. When I see a woman plainly dressed, with the marks of labor upon her, and she takes my hand and says, “God bless you, Mr. President; God bless the League of Nations,” I know that the League of Nations has gone to the hearts of those people. (applause)

A woman came up to me the other day and grasped my hand and said, “God bless you, Mr. President!” and then turned away in tears. I asked a neighbor, “What is the matter?” and he said, “She intended to say something to you, Sir, but she lost a son in France.” That woman did not take my hand with a feeling that her son ought not to have been sent to France. I sent her son to France, and she took my hand and blessed me, but she could not say anything more, because the whole well of spirit in her came up into her throat and the thing was unutterable. Down deep in it was the love of her boy, the feeling of what he had done, the justice and the dignity and the majesty of it, and then the hope that through [180page icon] such a poor instrumentality as men like myself could offer, no other woman’s son would ever be called upon to lay his life down for the same thing.

I tell you, my fellow citizens, the whole world is now in the state where you can fancy that there are hot tears upon every cheek, and those hot tears are tears of sorrow. But they are also tears of hope. It is amazing how, through all the sorrows of mankind and all the unspeakable terrors and injustices that have been inflicted upon men, hope springs eternal in the human breast. God knows that men, and governments in particular, have done everything they knew how to kill hope in the human heart, but it has not died. It is the one conquering force in the history of mankind. What I am pleading for, therefore—not with you, for I anticipate your verdict—but what I am pleading for with the Senate of the United States is to be done with debate and release and satisfy the hope of the world.

#An Address in the Marlow Theater in Helena, September 11, 1919.

Governor Stewart and my fellow countrymen: I very heartily echo what Governor Stewart has just said. I am very glad that an occasion has arisen which has given me the opportunity and the pleasure of coming thus face to face, at any rate, with some of the people of the great State of Montana. (applause) I make haste to say to you that I have not come from Washington so much to advise you as to get in touch with you, as to get the feeling of the purposes which are moving you, because, my fellow citizens, I may tell you, as a secret, that some people in Washington lose that touch. They don’t know what the great purposes are that are running through the hearts and minds of the people of this great country. (applause) And, if one stays in Washington too long, one is apt to catch that same remove and numbness which seems to characterize others that are there. (laughter and applause) I like to come out and feel once more the thing that is the only real thing in public affairs, and that is the great movement of public opinion in the United States. (laughter and applause)

And I want to put the case very simply to you tonight, for with all its complexities, with all its many aspects, there is a very simple question when you get to the heart of it. That question is nothing [181page icon] more nor less than this: shall the great sacrifice that we made in this war be in vain, or shall it not? I want to say to you very solemnly that, notwithstanding the splendid achievement of our boys on the other side of the sea—who, I don’t hesitate to say, saved the world—(applause) notwithstanding the noble things they did, their task is only half done, and it remains for us to complete it. I want to explain that to you. I want to explain to you why, if we left the thing where it is and did not carry out the program of the treaty of peace in all its fullness, (applause) men like these would have to die to do the work over again and convince provincial statesmen that the world is one, and that only by an organization of the world can you save the young men of the world. (applause)

As I think upon this theme, there is a picture very distinctly in my mind. On last Memorial Day I stood in an American cemetery in France, just outside Paris, on the slopes of Suresnes.1 The hills slope steeply to a little plain. And when I went out there all the slope of the hill was covered with men in the American uniform, standing, but rising tier on tier as if in a great witness stand. Then below, over a little level space, were simple crosses that marked the resting place of the American dead.

And just by the stand where I spoke was a group of French women who had lost their own sons, but, just because they had lost their own sons and because their hearts went out in thought and sympathy to the mothers on this side of the sea, they had made themselves, so to say, mothers of those graves, and every day had gone to take care of them, every day had strewn them with flowers. And they stood there, their cheeks wetted with tears, while I spoke, not of the French dead, but of the American boys who had died in the common cause.

They seemed to be thrown together on that day in that little spot with the hearts of the world. And I took occasion to say on that day that those who stood in the way of completing the task that those men had died for would some day look back upon it as those have looked back upon the days when they tried to divide this Union and prevent it from being a single nation, united in a single form of liberty. For the completion of the work of those men is this—that the thing that they fought to stop shall never be attempted again.

I call to your minds that we did not go into this war willingly. I was in a position to know. In the Providence of God, the leadership of this nation was entrusted to me during those early years of the war when we were not in it. I was aware through many subtle [182page icon] channels of the movement of opinion in this country. And I know that the thing that this country chiefly desired—that you out here in the West chiefly desired and the thing that of course every living woman had at her heart—was that we should keep out of the war. And we tried to persuade ourselves that European business was not our business. We tried to convince ourselves that, no matter what happened on the other side of the sea, no obligation of duty rested upon us.

And finally we found the currents of humanity too strong for us. We found that a great consciousness was welling up in us that this was not a local cause, this was not a struggle which was to be confined to Europe, or confined to Asia, to which it had spread, but that it was something that involved the very fate of civilization. And there was one great nation in the world that couldn’t afford to stay out. (applause) And now there are gentlemen opposing the ratification of this treaty who, at that time, taunted the administration of the United States that it had lost touch with its international consciousness. They were eager to go in, and now that they have got in, and are caught in the whole network of human consciousness, they want to break out and stay out.

We were caught in this thing by the action of a nation utterly unlike ourselves. What I mean to say is that the German nation—the German people—had no choice whatever as to whether it was to go into that war or not, did not know that it was going into it until its men were summoned to the colors. I remember, not once, but often, sitting at the cabinet table in Washington, and I asked my colleagues what their impression was of the opinion of the country before we went into the war. And I remember one day one of my colleagues said to me, “Mr. President, I think the people of the country would take your advice and do whatever you suggested.” “But,” I said, “that is not what I am waiting for; that is not enough. If they can’t go in with a whoop, there is no use going in. I don’t want them to wait on me. I am waiting on them. I want to know what the conscience of this country is saying. I want to know what ideas are arising in the minds of the people of this country with regard to this war situation.” When I thought I heard this voice, it was then I proposed to the Congress of the United States that we should include ourselves in the challenge that Germany was making to mankind.

We fought Germany in order that there should be a world fit to live in. But the world is not fit to live in, my fellow citizens, if one great government is in a position to do what the German government did—secretly plot war and begin it with the whole strength of its people, without so much as consulting its own people.

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A great war cannot begin with public deliberations. A great war can begin only by private plotting, because the peoples of this world are not asleep, as they used to be. The German people is a great, educated people. All the thoughtful men in Germany, so far as I have been able to learn, who were following peaceful pursuits—the bankers and the merchants and the manufacturers—did not want to go into that war. They said so then, and they have said so since. They have said that they were not consulted. But the masters of Germany were the general military staff. Not even the members of the Reichstag were consulted by the General Staff. And it was these men who nearly brought a complete catastrophe upon civilization itself.

Very well then, it stands to reason, if we would permit anything of that sort to happen again, we are recreant to the men we sent across the seas to fight this war. We are deliberately guilty then of preparing a situation which will inevitably lead to what? What shall I call it? The final war? Alas, my fellow citizens, it might be the final arrest, though I pray only the temporary arrest, of civilization itself.

And America has, if I may take the liberty of saying so, a greater interest in the prevention of that war than any other nation. America is less exhausted by war—she is not exhausted at all. America has paid for the war that has gone by less heavily, in proportion to her wealth, than other nations. America still has capital, capital enough for its own industries and for the industries of the other countries that have to build their industries anew. And the next war would have to be paid for in American blood and American money. The nation of all nations that is most interested to prevent the recurrence of what has already happened is the nation which would assuredly have to bear the brunt of that great catastrophe—(applause) either have to bear it, or stop where we are.

Who is going to take care of the growth of this nation? Who is going to shape the accumulation of physical power of this nation—if you choose to put it in that form? Who is going to reduce the natural resources of this country? Who is going to change the circumstance that we largely feed the rest of the world? Who is going to change the circumstance that many of our resources are unique and indispensable? America is going to grow more and more powerful; and the more powerful she is, the more inevitable it is that she should be entrusted with the peace of the world. (applause)

And now, at last, a miracle has happened. I dare say many of you have in mind the very short course of American history. You remember how, when this nation was born and we were just a little group of 3,000,000 people on the Atlantic coast, how the nations [184page icon] on the other side of the water, the statesmen of that day, regarded us with a certain condescension—looked upon us as a sort of group of hopeful children, pleased for the time being with the conception of absolute freedom and political liberty, far in advance of the other peoples of the world because less experienced than they, less aware of the difficulties of the great task that confronted them. And as the years have gone by, they have watched the growth of this nation with astonishment and for a long time with dismay.

They watched it with dismay until a very interesting and significant thing happened. When we fought Cuba’s battle for her, then they said: “Ah, it is the beginning of what we predicted. She will seize Cuba and, after Cuba, what she pleases to the south of her. It is the beginning of the history we have gone through ourselves.” They ought to have known; they set us the example! And when we actually fulfilled to the letter our promise that we would set helpless Cuba up as an independent government and guarantee her independence, when we carried out that great policy, we astounded and converted the world.

Then began—let me repeat the word began—the confidence of the world in America. And I want to say to you tonight that nothing was more overpowering to me and my colleagues in Paris than the evidence of the absolutely unquestioning confidence of the peoples of the world in the people of America. (applause) We were touched by it, not only touched by it, but I must admit we were frightened by it, because we knew that they were expecting things of us that we could not accomplish. We knew that they were hoping for some miracle of justice, which would set them forward the same hundred years that we have traveled on the progress towards free government. And we knew that it was a slow road. We knew that you could not suddenly transform a people from a people of subjects into a people of self-governing units. I tried—and I perhaps returned a little to my old profession of teacher—to point out to them that some of the things they were expecting of us could not be done now. But they refused to be disabused of their absolute confidence that America could and would do anything that was right for the other peoples of the world. An amazing thing!

And what was more interesting still, my fellow citizens, was this: you know that it happened—I will explain in a moment what I mean by the word “happened”—it happened that America laid down the specifications for the peace. It happened that America proposed the principles upon which the peace with Germany should be built. I used the word “happened” because I have found, and everybody who has looked into the hearts of the people of this country and some of the people on the other side of the water, have [185page icon] found, that the people on the other side of the water, whatever may be said about their governments, have learned their lesson from America before, and they believed in those principles before we promulgated them.

And their statesmen, knowing that their people believed in them, accepted them, accepted them before the American representatives crossed the sea. So that we found them ready to lay down the foundations of that peace along the lines that America had suggested, and all of Europe was aware that what was being done was building up American principle. In such circumstances, we were under a big compulsion to carry the work to the point which had filled our convictions from the first.

Where did the suggestion first come from? Where did the idea first spread that there should be a society of nations? It was first suggested, or it first spread in the United States, and some gentlemen were the chief proponents of it who are now objecting to the adoption of the Covenant of the League of Nations. They went further, some of them, than any portion of that Covenant goes. And now, for some reason, which I must admit is inscrutable to me, they are opposing the very thing into which they put their heart and their genius in building up a great organization to convert the people of the United States, as if they needed conversion, to the great underlying idea. And so all people knew we were doing an American thing when we put the Covenant of the League of Nations at the beginning of the treaty.

One of the most interesting things that happened over there was our dealing with some of the most cynical men I had to deal with—and there were some cynics over there—men who believed in what has come to be known as the late Darwinian idea of “the survival of the fittest.” They said: “In nature, the strong eats up the weak, and in politics, the strong overcomes and dominates the weak. It has always been so, and it is always going to be so.”

When I first got to Paris, they talked about the League of Nations indulgently in my presence and politely. I think some of them had the idea, “Oh, well, we must humor Wilson along so that he won’t make a public fuss about it.” And some of these very men, before our conferences were over, suggested more often than anybody else that some of the most difficult and delicate tasks in carrying out this peace should be left to the League of Nations. (applause) They all admitted that the League of Nations, which they had deemed an ideal dream, was a demonstrable and practical necessity. (applause) This treaty cannot be carried out without the League of Nations.

I have several times said, and perhaps I may say again, that one [186page icon] of the principal things about this treaty is that it establishes the land titles of the world. It says, for example, that Bohemia shall belong to the Bohemians and not to the Austrians or to the Hungarians; that if the Bohemians do not want to live in a monarchy, dual or single, it is their business and not ours, and that they can do what they please with their own government. We have said that the Austrian territories south of Austria and Hungary, occupied by the Yugoslavs, never did belong to Austrians. They always belonged to Slavs, and the Slavs shall have them for their own, and we will guarantee the title.

I have several times asked, “Suppose that the land titles of Montana were clearly enough stated and somewhere recorded, but yet there was no way of enforcing them?” Do you know what would happen? Every one of you would enforce his own land titles. You used to go armed out here long ago. (applause) If this is a poor speech, I hope none of you do tonight. (applause) And you would resume the habit if there was nobody to guarantee your legal titles. You would have to resort to the habit if society should not guarantee them. You have got to see to it that others respect them for your own protection. And that was the condition of Europe and will be the condition of Europe again if these settled land titles which we have laid out are not guaranteed by organized society, and the only organized society that can guarantee them is a society of nations.

But it was not easy to draw the line. It was not a surveyor’s task. There were no well-known points from which to start and to which to go, because we were trying to give the Bohemians, for example, the lines where the Bohemians lived, but the Bohemians did not stop at a straight line. If you wil pardon the expression, they slopped over. And the Germans slopped over into Poland, and in some places there was an almost inextricable mixture of two or more populations. And everybody said that the statistics lied. Because the German statistics with regard to High Silesia, for example, were not true, because the Germans wanted to make it appear that the Germans were in the majority, and the Poles declared that the Poles were in the majority.

And we said: “This is a difficult business. Sitting in Paris, we cannot tell by count how many Poles there are in High Silesia, or how many Germans. And if we could count them, we cannot tell from Paris what they want. High Silesia does not belong to us, it does not belong to anybody but the people who live in it. We’ll do this: we’ll put that territory under the care of the League of Nations for a limited period; we will establish a small armed force there, made up of contingents from the different Allied nations so [187page icon] that none of them will be in control. And then we will hold a referendum, and Upper Silesia shall belong either to Germany or Poland, as the people in Upper Silesia desire.” (applause)

And that is only one case out of half a dozen. The League of Nations is to see to it in regions where the makeup of the populations is doubtful and the desire of the population is as yet uncertain, the League of Nations is to be the instrumentality by which the territories of those various countries are to be delivered to the people to whom they belong. (applause)

No other international conference ever conceived such a purpose, and no earlier conference of that sort would have been willing to carry out such objects. Up to the time of this war, my fellow citizens, it was the firm and fixed conviction of statesmen in Europe that the greater nations ought to dominate, guide, and determine the destiny of the weaker nations. The American principle was rejected. The American principle is that the justice of the weak man is the same as that of the strong; that the weak man has the same legal rights that the strong man has; the justice of the poor man shall be the same as that of the rich, although I am sorry to say the poor man does not always get his rights. (applause) So as between nations the principle of equality is the only principle of justice, and the weak nations have just as many rights and just the same rights as stronger nations. If you do not establish that principle, then this war is going to come again, because this war came by reason of a grievance against a weak nation.

What happened, my fellow citizens? Don’t you remember? The Crown Prince of Austria was assassinated in Serbia. Not assassinated by anybody according to order from the government of Serbia or anybody over whom the government of Serbia had any control, but assassinated by some man who had at his heart the memory of something that was intolerable to him, something that had been done to the people he belonged to. And the Austrian government acted, not immediately, but by suggestion from Berlin, where it is whispered: “We are ready for the World War, and this is a good chance to begin it. The other nations do not believe we are going to begin it. We will begin it and overwhelm France, first of all, before the others can come to their aid.” They sent an ultimatum to Serbia practically demanding that she surrender her sovereign rights, and gave her twenty-four hours to decide. Poor Serbia, in her sudden terror, with the memory of things that had occurred in the past, practically yielded to every demand, but, with regard to a little portion of it, said she would like to talk it over with them, but they did not dare wait. They knew that, if the world ever [188page icon] had the facts of that dispute laid before them, the nations of mankind would overwhelm anybody that undertook to inflict such a grievance against Serbia in such circumstances. But they always chose this little nation. They had always chosen the Balkans as the ground of their entry into war. German agents were planted all through the land, so that when Germany got ready she could use the Balkan states as a base in her game.

And what does the treaty of peace do? The treaty of peace sets all of these nations up in independence again; gives Serbia back what had been torn away from her; sets up the Yugoslav states, or what is known as Jugo-Slavokia—I wish it was—(laughter) and the Bohemian states under the name of Czechoslovakia. And if you leave it at that, you leave those nations just as weak as they were before. By giving them their land titles, you do not make them any stronger. You make them stronger in spirit but not in number. But physically they are no stronger. They may be full of a new enthusiasm, but their love of country cannot now express itself in action. And physically they are no stronger than they were before.

That road that we heard so much of—from Bremen to Baghdad—was wide open. The Germans were traveling that road. Their General Staff uninterruptedly came through there. Merchants and manufacturers and the bankers of Germany were making a conquest of the world. All they had to do was to wait a little while longer, and a German net would have been spread or stretched all through that country, which never could have been withdrawn or broken. But the war spoiled the game of German intrigue which was penetrating all of these countries and controlling them. The dirty center of the entire German net—dirty in every respect—was Constantinople, and from there ramified all the threads that made this web, in the center of which was the venomous spider.

If you leave that road open, if you leave those nations to take care of themselves, knowing that they cannot take care of themselves, then you have committed the unpardonable sin of undoing the victory which our boys won. (applause) You say, “What have we got to do with it?” Let us answer that question, and not from a sentimental point of view at all. Suppose we did not have any hearts under our jackets. Suppose we did not care for these people. Care for them? Why, their kinsmen are everywhere in the communities of the United States; people who love people over there are everywhere in the United States. We are made up out of mankind; we cannot tear our hearts away from them. Our hearts are theirs. But suppose they were not. Suppose we had forgotten everything except the material, commercial, monetary interests of the United States. You cannot get those markets away from Germany if you [189page icon] let her reestablish her old influence there. The 300,000,000 people between the Rhine and the Ural Mountains will be in such a condition that they cannot buy anything, their industries cannot start, unless they surrender themselves to the bankers of Mittel-Europa, that you used to hear about. And the peoples of Italy and France and Belgium, some 80,000,000 strong, who are your natural customers, cannot buy anything in disturbed and bankrupt Europe. If you are going to trade with them, you have got to go partners with them.

When I hear gentlemen talk about America standing for herself, I wonder where they have been living. Has America disconnected herself from the rest of the world? Her ambition has been to connect herself with all the rest of the world commercially, and she is bankrupt unless she does. Look at the actual situation right now, my fellow citizens. The war was a very great stimulation to some of the greatest of the manufacturing industries of this country, and a very interesting thing has been going on. You remember, some of you perhaps painfully remember, that the Congress of the United States put a very heavy tax on excess profits, and a great many men who were making large excess profits said: “All right, we can manage this. These will not be profits; we will spend these in enlarging our plants, advertising, increasing our facilities, spreading our agencies.”

They have got ready for a bigger business than they can do unless they have the world to do it in, and if they have not the world to do it in, there will be a recession of prosperity in this country; there will be unemployment; there will be bankruptcy in some cases. The giant is so big that he will burst his jacket. The rest of the world is necessary to us, if you want to put it on that basis. I do not like to put it on that basis. That is not the American basis. America does not want to feed upon the rest of the world. She wants to feed it and serve it. America, if I may say it without offense to great peoples for whom I have a profound admiration on the other side of the water, is the only national idealistic force in the world, and idealism is going to save the world. Selfishness will embroil it. Narrow selfishness will tie things up into ugly knots that you cannot get open except with a sword. All the human passions, if aroused on the wrong side, will do the world an eternal disservice.

I remember somebody said to me one day, using a familiar phrase, that this was an age in which mind was monarch, and my reply was: “Well, if that is true, mind is one of those modern monarchs that reign and do not govern. As a matter of fact, we are governed by a great popular assembly made up of the passions, and [190page icon] the best that we can manage is that the handsome passions shall be in the majority.” That is the task of mankind—that the handsome passions, the handsome sentiments, the handsome purposes, shall always have a dominating and working majority, so that they will always be able to outvote the baser passions, to defeat all the cupidities and meannesses and criminalities of the world. That is the program of civilization.

The basis of the program of civilization, I want to say with all the emphasis that I am capable of, is Christian and not pagan, and in the presence of this inevitable partnership with the rest of the world, these gentlemen say, “We will not sign the articles of co-partnership.” Well, why not? You have heard, I dare say, only about four things in the Covenant of the League of Nations. I have not heard them talk about anything else. It is a very wonderful document, and you would think there were only four things in it. The things that they talk about are the chance to get out, the dangers of Article X, the Monroe Doctrine, and the risk that other nations may interfere in our domestic affairs. Those are the things that keep them awake at night, and I want very briefly to take those things in their sequence.

I do not like to discuss some of them. If I go to do a thing, I do not say at the beginning, “My chief interest in this thing is how I am going to get out.” I will not be a very trusted or revered partner if it is evident that my fear is that I will continue to be a partner. But we will take that risk. We will sit by the door with our hand on the knob, and sit on the edge of our chair. There is nothing in the Covenant to prevent our going out whenever we please, with the single limitation that we give two years’ notice. The gentlemen who discuss this thing do not object to the two years’ notice. They say, “It says that you can get out after two years’ notice if at that time you have fulfilled your international obligations,” and they are afraid somebody will have the right to say that they have not. That right cannot belong to anybody unless you give it to somebody, and the Covenant of the League does not give it to anybody. It is absolutely left to the conscience of this nation, as to the conscience of every other member of the League, to determine whether at the time of its withdrawal it has fulfilled its international obligations or not. And, inasmuch as the United States always has fulfilled its international obligations, I wonder what these gentlemen are afraid of! There is only one thing to restrain us from getting out, and that is the opinion of our fellow men, and that will not restrain us in any conceivable circumstance if we have followed the honorable course which we always have followed. I would be ashamed [191page icon] as an American to be afraid that, when we wanted to get out, we should not have fulfilled our international obligations.

Then comes Article X, for I am taking the questions in the order in which they come in the Covenant itself. Let me repeat to you Article X nearly verbatim; I am not trying to repeat it exactly as it is written in the Covenant. Every member of the League agrees to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members of the League. There is the guarantee of the land titles. Without that clause, there is no guarantee of the land titles. Without that clause, the heart of the recent war is not cut out. The heart of the recent war was an absolute disregard of the territorial integrity and political independence of the smaller nations. If you do not cut the heart of the war out, that heart is going to live and beat and grow stronger, and we will have the cataclysm again.

Then the article adds that it shall be the duty of the Council of the League to advise the members of the League what steps may be necessary from time to time to carry out this agreement—to advise, not to direct. The Congress of the United States is just as free under that article to refuse to declare war as it is now; and it is very much safer than it is now. The opinion of the world and of the United States bade it to declare war in April 1917. It would have been shamed before all mankind if it had not declared war then. It was not given audible advice by anybody but its own people, but it knew that the whole world was waiting for it to fulfill a manifest moral obligation.

This advice cannot be given, my fellow citizens, without the vote of the United States. The advice cannot be given without a unanimous vote of the Council of the League. The member of the Council representing the United States has to vote aye before the United States or any other country can be advised to go to war under that agreement, unless the United States is herself a party.

What does that mean, unless the United States is going to seize somebody else’s territory or somebody else is going to seize the territory of the United States. I do not contemplate it as a likely contingency that we are going to steal somebody else’s territory. I dismiss that as not a serious probability, and I do not see anybody within reach who is going to take any of ours. But suppose we should turn highwayman, or that some other nation should turn highwayman and stretch its hands out for what belongs to us. Then what difference does it make what advice the Council gives? We are in the scrap anyhow. In those circumstances, Congress is not going to wait to hear what the Council of the League says to [192page icon] determine whether it is going to war or not. The war will be its war.

So that any way you turn Article X, it does not alter in the least degree the freedom and independence of the United States with regard to its action in respect of war. All of that is stated in such plain language that I cannot for the life of me understand how anybody reads it any other way. I know perfectly well that the men who wrote it read it the way I am interpreting it. I know that it is intended to be written that way, and if I am any judge of the English language, they succeeded in writing it that way.

Then they are anxious about the Monroe Doctrine. The Covenant says in so many words that nothing in that document shall be taken as invalidating the Monroe Doctrine. I do not see what more you could say. While the matter was under debate in what was called the Commission on the League of Nations, the body that drew the Covenant up, in which were representatives of fourteen nations, I tried to think of some other language that could state it more unqualifiedly, and I could not think of any other. Can you? Nothing in that document should be taken as invalidating the Monroe Doctrine—I cannot say it any plainer than that—and yet by a peculiar particularity of anxiety these gentlemen cannot believe their eyes; and from one point of view it is not strange, my fellow citizens.

The rest of the world always looked askance on the Monroe Doctrine. It is true, though some people have forgotten it, that President Monroe uttered that doctrine at the suggestion of the British cabinet, and in its initiation, in its birth, it came from Mr. Canning, who was Prime Minister of England2 and who wanted the aid of the United States in checking the ambition of some of the European countries to establish their power in South America.

Notwithstanding that, Great Britain did not like the Monroe Doctrine as we grew so big. It was one thing to have our assistance and another thing for us not to need her assistance. And the rest of the world had studiously avoided on all sorts of interesting occasions anything that could be interpreted as an acknowledgment of the Monroe Doctrine. So I am not altogether surprised that these gentlemen cannot believe their eyes. Here the nations of Europe say that they are entering into an arrrangement no part of which shall be interpreted as invalidating the Monroe Doctrine. I do not have to say anything more about that. To my mind, that is eminently satisfactory, and as long as I am President I shall feel an added freedom in applying, when I think fit, the Monroe Doctrine. [193page icon] I am very much interested in it, and I foresee occasions when it might be appropriately applied.

In the next place they are afraid that other nations will interfere in our domestic questions. There, again, the Covenant of the League distinctly says that if any dispute arises which is found to relate to an exclusively domestic question, the Council shall take no action with regard to it and make no report concerning it. And the questions that these gentlement most often mention, namely the questions of the tariff and of immigration and of naturalization, are acknowledged by every authoritative student of international law without exception to be as, of course, domestic questions.

These gentlemen want us to make an obvious thing painfully obvious by making a list of the domestic questions, and I object to making the list for this reason—that if you make a list you may leave something out. I remind all students of law within the sound of my voice of the old principle of the law that the mention of one thing is the exclusion of other things; that if you meant everything, you ought to have said everything; that if you said a few things, you did not have the rest in mind. I object to making a list of domestic questions, because a domestic question may come up which I did not think of. In every such case the United States would be just as secure in her independent handling of the question as she is now.

Then, outside the Covenant is the question of Shantung. Some gentlemen want to make a reservation or something that they clothe with a handsome name with regard to the Shantung provision, which is that the rights which Germany illicitly got—for she got it by duress—from China shall pass to Japan. While the war was in progress, Great Britain and France expressly, in a written treaty, though a secret treaty, entered into an engagement with Japan that she should have all that Germany had in the province of Shantung. If we repudiate this treaty in that matter, Great Britain and France cannot repudiate the other treaty, and they cannot repudiate this treaty inasmuch as it confirms the other. Therefore, in order to take away from Japan—for she is in physical possession of it now—what Germany had in China, we shall have to fight Japan and Great Britain and France; and at the same time do China no service, because one of the things that is known to everybody is that, when the United States consented, because of this promise of Great Britain and France, to putting that provision in the treaty, Japan agreed that she would not take all of what was given to her in the treaty; that, on the contrary, she would, just as soon as possible, after the treaty was carried out, return every sovereign right or right resembling a sovereign right that Germany had enjoyed in [194page icon] Shantung to the government of China, and that she would retain at Shantung only those economic rights with regard to the administration of the railway and the exploitation of certain mines that other countries enjoy elsewhere in China.

It is not an exceptional arrangement—a very unfortunate arrangement, I think, elsewhere as there, for China—but not an exceptional arrangement. Under it, Japan will enjoy privileges exactly similar and concessions exactly similar to what other nations enjoy elsewhere in China, and nothing more. In addition to that, if the treaty is entered into by the United States, China will for the first time in her history have a forum to which to bring every wrong that is intended against her or that has been committed against her.

When you are studying Article X, my fellow citizens, I beg of you that you will read Article XI. I do not hear that very often referred to. Article XI—I am not going to quote the words of it—makes it the right of any member of the League to call attention to anything, anywhere, that is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. Every aspiring people, every oppressed people, every people whose hearts can no longer stand the strain of the tyranny that has been put upon them, can find a champion to speak for it in the forum of the world.

Until that Covenant is adopted, what is the international law? International law is that, no matter how deeply the United States is interested in something in some other part of the world that she believes is going to set the world on fire or disturb the friendly relations between two great nations, she cannot speak of it unless she can show that her own interests are directly involved. It is a hostile and unfriendly act to call attention to it, and Article XI says, in so many words, that it shall be the friendly right of every nation to call attention to any such matter anywhere; so that if anybody contemplates anything that is an encroachment upon the rights of China, he can be summoned to the bar of the world. I do not know when any nation that could not take care of itself, as unfortunately China cannot, ever had such a human advantage accorded it before. It is not only we, my fellow citizens, who are caught in all the implications of the affairs of the world; everybody is caught in it now, and it is right that anything that affects the world should be made everybody’s business.

The heart of the Covenant of the League of Nations is this: every member of the League promises never to go to war without first having done one or other of two things—either having submitted the matter to arbitration, in which case it agrees absolutely to abide [195page icon] by the award, or having submitted it to discussion by the Council of the League of Nations. If it submits it for discussion by the Council, it agrees to allow six months for the discussion and to lay all the documents and facts in its possession before the Council, which is authorized to publish them. And even if it is not satisfied with the opinion rendered by the Council, it agrees that it will not go to war within less than three months after the publication of that judgment. There are nine months in which the whole matter is before the bar of mankind, and, my fellow citizens, I make this confident prediction—that no nation will dare submit a bad case to that jury. I believe that this covenant is better than 95 per cent insurance against war. Suppose it was only 5 per cent insurance; would not you want it? I ask any mother, any father, any brother, anybody with a heart, “Do not you want some insurance against war, no matter how little?”

And the experience of mankind, from the conferences between employers and employees, is that if people get together and talk things over, it becomes more and more difficult to fight the longer they talk. There is not any subject that has not two sides to it, and the reason most men won’t enter into discussion with antagonists is they are afraid that the other fellows’ side will be stronger than theirs. The only thing that you are afraid of, my fellow citizens, is the truth.

A cynical old politician once said to his son, “John, do not bother your head about lies; they will take care of themselves, but if you ever hear me denying anything you may make up your mind it is so.” The only thing that is formidable is the truth. I learned what I know about Mexico, which is not as much as I should desire, by hearing a large number of liars tell me all about it. At first, I was very much confused, because the narrative did not tally. And then one day, when I had a lucid interval, it occurred to me that that was because what was told me was not true. The truth always matches; it is the lies that don’t match. I also observed that, back of all these confusing contradictions, there was a general mass of facts which they all stated, and I knew that that was the region into which their lying capacity did not extend. They had not had time to make up any lies about that, and the correspondences in their narratives constituted the truth. The differences could be forgotten. So I learned a great deal about Mexico by listening to a sufficiently large number of liars. And the truth is the regnant and triumphant thing in this world. You may trample it under foot, you may blind its eyes with blood, but you cannot kill it, and sooner or later it rises up and seeks and gets its revenge.

It behooves us to remember, my fellow citizens, in these radical [196page icon] days, the men who want to cure the wrongs of government by destroying government are going to be destroyed themselves—destroyed, I mean, by the chaos that they had created by removing the organism of society. And, even if you are strong enough to take anything that you want, you are not, of course, smart enough to keep it. And the next stronger fellow will take it away from you, and the strongest and most audacious group among you will make slaves and tools of you. That is the truth that is going to master society and in any other place that tries Russia’s unhappy example.

I hope you won’t think it inappropriate if I stop here to express my shame as an American citizen at the race riots that have occurred at some places in this country, where men have forgot humanity and justice and orderly society and have run amuck. That constitutes a man, not only the enemy of society, but his own enemy, and the enemy of justice.

I want to say this, too, that a strike of the policemen in a great city, leaving that city at the mercy of an army of thugs, is a crime against civilization. In my judgment, the obligation of a policeman is as sacred as the obligation of a soldier. He is a public servant, not a private employee, and the whole honor and safety of the community is in his hands. He has no right to prefer any private advantage to the public safety. I hope that that lesson will be burned in so that it will never again be forgotten, because the pride of America is that she can exercise self-control. That is what a self-governing nation is—not merely a nation that elects people to do its job for it, but a nation that can keep its head, concert its purposes, and find out how those purposes can be executed.

One of the noblest sentences ever uttered was uttered by Mr. Garfield before he became President. He was a member of Congress, as I remember it, at the time of Mr. Lincoln’s assassination. He happened to be in New York City, and Madison Square was filled with a surging mass of deeply excited people when the news of the murder came. Mr. Garfield was at the old Fifth Avenue Hotel, which had a balcony out over the entrance, and they begged him to go out and say something to the people. He went out and, after he had attracted their attention, he said this beautiful thing: “My fellow citizens, the President is dead, but the government lives and God Omnipotent reigns.”3

America is the place where you cannot kill your government by killing the men who conduct it. The only way you can kill government in America is by making the men and women of America forget how to govern, and nobody can do that. They sometimes [197page icon] find the team a little difficult to drive, but they sooner or later whip it into the harness. And, my fellow citizens, the underlying thought of what I have tried to say to you tonight is the organization of the world for order and peace. Our fortunes are directly involved, and my mind reverts to that scene that I painted for you at the outset—that slope at Suresnes, those voiceless graves, those weeping women—and I say: “My fellow citizens, the pledge that speaks from those graves is demanded of us. We must see to it that those boys did not die in vain. We must fulfill the great mission upon which they crossed the sea.”

#An Address at Coeur d’Alene, September 12, 1919.

Governor Davis, my fellow citizens, it is with the very greatest pleasure that I find myself facing an audience in this great state. I echo the wish of the Governor that it might be our privilege to stay a long time in Idaho and know something more than her fame—know her people, come in contact with her industries, and see the things that we have all so long read about and admired from a distance. But, unfortunately, it is necessary for us to go back to Washington as soon as we can, though it was a great pleasure to escape from Washington. (laughter and applause) Washington is a very interesting place, but it is a very lonely place. (laughter) The people of the United States do not live there, and in order to know what the people of the United States are thinking about and talking about, it is necessary to come and find out for yourself. And that really is my errand.

I have taken pains since I was a boy so to saturate myself in the traditions of America that I generally feel a good deal of confidence that the impulses which I find in myself are American impulses. But no matter how thoroughly American a man may be, he needs constantly to renew his touch with all parts of America and to be sure that his mind is guided, if he be in public station, by the thoughts and purposes of his fellow countrymen. And it was, therefore, with the most earnest desire to get in touch with you and the rest of my fellow countrymen that I undertook this trip, for, my fellow countrymen, we are facing a decision now in which we cannot afford to make a mistake. We must not let ourselves be deceived as to the gravity of that decision or as to the implications of that decision. It will mean a great deal now, but it will mean infinitely more in the future. And America has today, at this moment, nothing less than to prove to the world whether she has meant what she said in the past. (applause)

I must confess that I have been amazed that there are some men in responsible positions who are opposed to the ratification of the treaty of peace with Germany altogether. It is natural that so great a document, full of so many particular provisions, should draw criticisms upon itself for this, that, or the other provision. It is natural that a world settlement—for it is nothing less—should give occasion for a great many differences of opinion with regard to particular features of it. But I must admit that it amazes me that there should be any who should propose that the arrangement should be rejected altogether.

Because, my fellow citizens, this is the issue: we went into this [213page icon] Great War from which we have just issued with certain assurances given ourselves and given to the world, and those assurances cannot be fulfilled unless this treaty is adopted. We told the world, and we assured ourselves, that we went into this war in order to see to it that the kind of purpose represented by Germany in this war should never be permitted to be accomplished by Germany or anybody else. (applause)

Do not let your thoughts dwell too constantly upon Germany. Germany attempted this outrageous thing, but Germany was not the only country that had ever entertained the purpose of subjecting the peoples of the world to its will. And when we went into this war, we said that we sent our soldiers across the sea, not because we thought this was an American fight in particular, but because we knew that the purpose of Germany was against liberty, and that when anybody was fighting liberty it was our duty to go into the contest. (applause) We set this nation up with the profession then that we wanted to set an example of liberty, not only, but to lead the world in the paths of liberty and justice and of right. And, at last, after long reflection, after long hesitation, after trying to persuade ourselves that this was a European war and nothing more, we suddenly looked our own consciences in the face and said: “This is not merely a European war. This is a war which imperils the very principles for which this government was set up, and it is our duty to lend all the force that we have, whether of men or of resources, to the resistance of these designs.”

And it was America—never let anybody forget this—it was America that saved the world, (applause) and those who propose the rejection of the treaty propose that, after having redeemed the world, we should desert the world, for it would be nothing less.

The settlements of this treaty cannot be maintained without the concerted action of all the great governments of the world. I asked you just now not to think exclusively about Germany, but turn your thoughts back to what it was that Germany purposed. Germany did direct her first offense against France and against Belgium, but you know that it was not her purpose to remain in France, although it was part of her purpose to remain in Belgium. She was using her arms against these people so that they could not prevent what she intended elsewhere, and what she intended elsewhere was to make an open line of dominion between her and the Far East. The formula that she adopted was Bremen to Baghdad, the North Sea to Persia—to crush not only little Serbia, whom she first started to crush, but all the Balkan states, get Turkey in her grasp, take all the Turkish and Arabian lands beyond, penetrate the wealthy realms of Persia, open the gates of India, and, by [214page icon] dominating the central trade routes of the world, dominate the world itself.

That was her plan; and what does the treaty of peace do? For I want you to remember, my fellow countrymen, that this treaty is not going to stand by itself. The treaty with Austria has now been signed. It will presently be sent over, and I shall lay that before the Senate of the United States. It will be laid down along exactly the same lines as the treaty with Germany. And the lines of the treaty with Germany suggest this—that we are setting up the very states which Germany and Austria intended to dominate as independent, self-governing units. We are giving them what they never could have got with their own strength, what they could have got only by the united strength of the armies of the world, and which was the only thing that will prevent German domination, which was at first intended. But we have not made them strong by making them independent. We have given them what I have called their land titles. We have said: “These lands that others have tried to dominate and exploit for their own uses belong to you, and we cede them to you in fee simple. They never did belong to anybody else. They were loot. It was brigandage to take them. We give them to you in fee simple.” But what is the use of setting up the titles if we do not guarantee them? (applause) And that guarantee is the only guarantee against the repetition of the war we have gone through just so soon as that great nation, the German nation, 60,000,000 strong, can again recover its strength and its spirit, for east of Germany lie the fertile fields of intrigue and power. At this moment the only people who are dealing with the Bolshevist government in Russia are the Germans. They are fraternizing with the few who exercise control in that distracted country. They are making all their plans that the finances of Russia and the commerce of Russia and the development of Russia shall be as soon as possible in the hands of Germans. And just so soon as she can command that great power, that is also her road to the East and to the domination of the world. If you do not guarantee the titles that you are setting up in these treaties, you leave the whole ground fallow in which again to sow the dragon’s teeth with the harvest of armed men.

That, my fellow citizens, is what Article X, that you hear so much talked about in the Covenant of the League of Nations, does. It guarantees the land titles of the world; and if you do not guarantee the land titles of the world, there cannot be the ordered society in which men can live. (applause) Off here in this beloved continent, with its great free stretches and great free people, we have not realized the cloud of dread and terror under which the people of Europe have lived. I have heard men over there say: “It [215page icon] is intolerable. We would rather die now than live another fifty years under the cloud that has hung over us ever since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1871. Because we have known that this force was gathering, we have known what the purpose was ultimately to be, we have known that dread and terror lay ahead of us, and we cannot and will not live under that cloud any more.”

And America, my fellow citizens, is necessary to the peace of the world. America is absolutely necessary to the peace of the world. Germany realizes that, and I want to tell you now and here—I wish I could proclaim it in tones so loud that they would reach the world—Germany wants us to stay out of this treaty. (applause) Not under any delusion. Not under the delusion that we will turn in sympathy toward her. Not under the delusion that we would seek in any direct or conscious way to serve Germany, but with the knowledge that the guarantees will not be sufficient without America, and that, inasmuch as Germany is out of the arrangement, it will be very useful to Germany to have America out of the arrangement.

Because Germany knows that if America is out of the arrangement, America will lose the confidence and cooperation of all the other nations in the world, and, fearing America’s strength, she wants to see America alienated from the peoples from whom she has been alienated. It is a perfectly reasonable program. She wants to see America isolated. She is isolated. She wants to see one great nation left out of this combination which she never would again dare face. (applause) Evidence is not lacking—nay, evidence is abounding—that the pro-German propaganda has started up in this country coincidently with the opposition to the adoption of this treaty. I want those who have any kind of sympathy with the purposes with which we went into the war now to reflect upon this proposition: are we going to prove the enemy of the rest of the world just when we have proved their savior? The thing is intolerable. The thing is impossible. America has never been unfaithful, and she never will be unfaithful. (applause)

And don’t let anybody delude you, my fellow citizens, with the pose of being an American. If I am an American, I want at least to be an intelligent American. If I am a true American, I will study the true interests of America. If I am a true American, I will have the world vision that America has always had—drawing her blood, drawing her genius, as she has drawn her people, out of all the great constructive peoples of the world. A true American conceives America in the atmosphere and the whole setting of her fortune and her destiny. And America needs the confidence of the rest of the world just as much as other nations do. America needs the [216page icon] cooperation of the rest of the world to release her resources, to make her markets, above all things else to link together the spirits of men who mean to redeem the race from the wrongs that it has suffered.

This is the country par excellence, I mean this western country is par excellence the country of progressivism. I am not now using it with a big “P.” It does not make any difference whether you belong to the Progressive party or not; you belong to the progressive thought, (applause) as I hope every intelligent man belongs to the progressive thought. It is the only thought that the world is going to tolerate. And if you believe in progress, if you believe in progressive reform, if you believe in making the lot of men better, if you believe in purifying politics and enlarging the purposes of public policy, then you have got to have a world in which that will be possible. And if America does not enter with all her soul into this new world arrangement, progressives might as well go out of business, because there is going to be universal disorder, as there is now universal unrest.

Don’t mistake the signs of the times, my fellow countrymen, and don’t think that America is immune. The poison that has spread all through that pitiful nation of Russia is spreading all through Europe. There is not a statesman in Europe who does not dread the infection of it. And just so certainly as those people are disconcerted, thrown back upon their own resources, disheartened, rendered cynical by the withdrawal of the only people in the world they trust, just so certainly there will be universal upsetting of order in Europe.

And if the order of Europe is upset, do you think America is going to be quiet? Have you not been reading in the papers of the intolerable thing that has just happened in Boston? When the police of a great city walk out and leave that city to be looted they have committed an intolerable crime against civilization. (loud and long applause) And if that spirit is going to prevail, where is your program? How can you carry a program out when every man is taking what he can get? How can you carry a program out when there is no authority upon which to base it? How can you carry a program out when every man is looking out for his own selfish interests and refuses to be bound by any law that regards the interests of others? There will be no reform in this world for a generation if the conditions of the world are not now brought to settled order, and they cannot be brought to settled order without the co-operation of America. (applause)

I am not speaking with conjecture, my fellow citizens. I would be ashamed of myself if, upon a theme so great as this, I should [217page icon] seek to mislead you by overstatement of any kind. I know what I am talking about. I spent six months amidst those disturbed peoples on the other side of the water, and I can tell you, now and here, that the only people they depend upon to bring the world to settled conditions are the people of America. (applause) A chill will go to their hearts, a discouragement will come down upon them, a cynicism will take possession of them, which will make progress impossible, if we do not take part, not only, but do not take part with all our might and with all our genius. Everybody who loves justice and who hopes for programs of reform must support the unqualified adoption of this treaty. (applause)

I send this challenge out to the conscience of every man in America—that if he knows anything of the conditions of the world, if he knows anything of the present state of society throughout the world and really loves justice and purposes just reform, he must support the treaty with Germany. I do not want to say that and have it proved by tragedy, for if this treaty should be rejected, if it should be impaired, then, amidst the tragedy of the things that would follow, every man would be converted to the opinion that I am now uttering. But I do not want to see that sort of conversion. I do not want to see an era of blood and chaos to convert men to the only practicable methods of justice.

My fellow citizens, there are a great many things needing to be reformed in America. We are not exempt from those very subtle influences which lead to all sorts of incidental injustices. We ourselves are in danger at this present moment of minorities trying to control our affairs. And, whenever a minority tries to control the affairs of a country, it is fighting against the interest of that country just as much as if it were trying to upset the government. (applause) If you think that you can afford to live in a chaotic world, then speak words of encouragement to the men who are opposing this treaty. But if you want to have your own fortunes held steady, realize that the fortunes of the world must be held steady; that if you want to keep your own boys at home after this terrible experience, you will see that boys elsewhere are kept at home. Because America is not going to refuse, when the other catastrophe comes, again to attempt to save the world, and, having given this proof once, I pray God we may not be given occasion to prove it again!

We went into this war promising every loving heart in this country who had parted with a beloved youngster that we were going to fight a war which would make that sacrifice unnecessary again, and we must redeem that promise or be of all men the most unfaithful. (applause) If I did not go on this errand through the United States, if I did not do everything that was within my power [218page icon] that is honorable to get this treaty adopted, and adopted without qualifications, I never could look another mother in the face upon whose cheeks there were the tears of sorrowful memory with regard to the boy buried across the sea. The moral compulsion laid upon America now is a compelling compulsion and cannot be escaped. And so, my fellow countrymen, because it is a moral issue, because it is an issue in which is mixed up every sort of interest in America, I am not in the least uneasy about the results.

If you put it on the lowest level, you cannot trade with a world disordered, and if you do not trade you draw your own industries within a narrower and narrower limit. This great state, with its untold natural resources, with its great undeveloped resources, will have to stand for a long generation stagnant because there are no distant markets calling for these things. All America will have to wait a long, anxious generation through to see the normal courses of her life restored. And so, if I were putting it upon the lowest conceivable basis of the amount of money we could make, I would say: “We have got to assist in the restoration of order and the maintenance of order throughout the world by the maintenance of the morale of the world.”

You will say, “How? By arms?” That, I suspect, is what most of the opponents of the League of Nations, at any rate, try to lead you to believe, that this is a league of arms. Why, my fellow citizens, it is a league to bring about the things that America has been advocating ever since I was born. It is a league to bring it about that there shall not be war, but that there shall be substituted for it arbitration and the calm settlements of discussion. (applause) That is the heart of the League. The heart of the League is this: every member of the League—and that will mean every fighting nation in the world except Germany—every member of the League agrees that it will never go to war without first having done one or the other of two things—either having submitted the matter in dispute to arbitration, in which case it agrees absolutely to abide by the result, or, having submitted it to consideration by the Council of the League of Nations, in which case it promises to lay all the documents, all the facts, in its possession before the Council and to wait and to give the Council six months in which to consider the matter. And, if it does not like the opinion of the Council at the end of the six months, still to wait three months more before it resorts to arms. (applause)

Why, that is what America has been striving for. That is what the Congress of the United States directed me to bring about. (slight applause) Perhaps you do not know where. It was in an unexpected place—in the naval appropriations bill. (laughter) [219page icon] Congress, authorizing a great building program of ships and the expenditure of vast sums of money to make our navy one of the strongest in the world, paused a moment and declared, in the midst of the appropriation bill, that it was the policy of the United States to bring about disarmament, and that for that purpose it was the policy of the United States to cooperate in the creation of a great international tribunal to which should be submitted questions of international difference and controversy. (slight applause) And it directed the President of the United States, not later than the close of this war, to call together an international conference for that purpose. It even went so far as to make an appropriation to pay the expenses for the conduct of such a conference in the city of Washington. And that is a continuing provision of the naval appropriations bill. When I came back with this Covenant of the League of Nations, I had fulfilled the mandate of the Congress of the United States. (applause) And now they don’t like it. (laughter)

There is only one conceivable reason for not liking it, my fellow citizens, and to me as an American it is not a conceivable reason, and that is that we should wish to do some nation some great wrong. If there is any nation in the world that can afford to submit its purposes to discussion, it is the American nation. (applause) If I belonged to some other nation, there are some things that I know I would not like to see submitted to the discussion of mankind. (laughter) But I do not know anything in the present purposes of the United States that I would not be perfectly willing to lay upon any table of council in the world. And so, in carrying out the mandate of the Congress, I was serving the age-long purpose of this great people, which purpose centers in justice and in peace.

You will say, “Well, why not go in with reservations?” I wonder if you know what that means. If the Senate of the United States passes a resolution of ratification and says that it ratifies on condition that so and so and so and so is understood, that will have to be resubmitted to every signatory of the treaty, and what gravels me is that it will have to be submitted to the German Assembly at Weimar. And that goes against my digestion. (applause) We cannot honorably put anything in that treaty, which Germany has signed and ratified, without Germany’s consent, whereas it is perfectly feasible, my fellow countrymen, if we put interpretations upon that treaty which its language clearly warrants, to notify the other governments of the world that we do understand the treaty in that sense. It is perfectly feasible to do that, and perfectly honorable to do that, because, mark you, nothing can be done under this treaty through the instrumentality of the Council of the League of Nations except by a unanimous vote. The vote of the United States [220page icon] will always be necessary, and it is perfectly legitimate for the United States to notify the other governments beforehand that its vote in the Council of the League of Nations will be based upon such and such an understanding of the provisions of the treaty.

And the treaty is not susceptible of misunderstanding. I do not object to painting the rose or refining fine gold. There isn’t any phrase in the Covenant of the League of Nations that can legitimately be said to be of doubtful meaning. But if the Congress of the United States wants to state the meaning over again in other words and say to the other nations of the world, “We understand the treaty to mean what it says,” I think that is a work of supererogation, but I do not see any moral objection to it. (laughter and applause)

But anything that qualifies the treaty, anything that is a condition to our ratification of it, must be submitted to all the others, and we must go over this process again—this process which took six months of intensive labor, which took six months of very difficult adjustment and arrangement, which quieted jealousies, which allayed suspicions, which set aside controversies, which brought about the most extraordinary union of minds that was ever brought about in so miscellaneous an assembly, divided by so many interests. All that must be gone over again, and in the meantime the world must wait and its unrest grow deeper, and all the pulses of life go slower, waiting to see what is going to happen—all because the United States asks the other governments of the world to accept what they have already accepted in different language.

That is all that it amounts to, I mean all that the reasonable reservations amount to. Some of them amount to staying out altogether, some of them amount to a radical change of the spirit of the instrument, but I am speaking now of those which some men of high conscience and of high public purpose are seriously pressing in order that there may be no misunderstanding. You can avoid any misunderstanding without changing the document. You can avoid a misunderstanding without qualifying the terms of the document, because, as I have said and shall say again and again, America is at liberty as one of the voting members of the partnership to state how she understands the articles of copartnership.

I beg that these things may sink in your thoughts, my fellow countrymen, because we are at a turning point in the fortunes of the world. Out upon these quiet hills and in these great valleys it is difficult sometimes for me to remember the turmoil of the world in which I have been mixing on the other side of the sea. It is difficult for me to remember the surging passions which moved [221page icon] upon the face of the other continents of the world. It is difficult for me to remember the infinite suffering that obtained even in this beloved country. It is difficult for me to remember the delegations from weak peoples that came to me in Paris, figuratively speaking, with outstretched hands, pleading that America should lead the world out of the darkness into the light. It is difficult out here in this great place for anybody, even, I dare say, for these fine fellows in khaki who were over there and saw something of it, to remember the hot strain and terror of the thing. But we must remember it, my fellow citizens, and we must see to it that this strain and terror never come upon the world again. It is with this solemn thought—that we are at a turning point in the destinies of mankind and that America is the makeweight of mankind—that I, with perfect confidence, leave this great question to your unbiased judgment. (applause)

#An Address in the Spokane Armory, September 12, 1919

Mr. Mayor,1 my fellow countrymen, I esteem it a real privilege to stand face to face with a representative audience of this great city, because I have come away from Washington, my fellow countrymen, not to make speeches, but to get into contact with just such bodies of men and women as this and feel that I have exchanged ideas with them with the utmost frankness of which I was capable. I have not come to paint pictures of fancy. I have come to disclose to you what I understand to be facts, and I want so much as possible to get down to the very essence and marrow of the things that we are now talking about.

I don’t think I need tell you, my fellow citizens, that America and the world have come to the point where they must make one of the most critical choices ever made by great bodies of men and nations. They have now to determine whether they will act on the one chance that has ever been offered to insure the peace of the world. (applause) I call it frankly a chance to insure the peace of [225page icon] the world. Nobody can guarantee the world against the ugly passions that sometimes get abroad. Nobody can engage that the world will not again go mad with blood, but I want to put it frankly to you, though the chance should be poor, isn’t it worth taking a chance? (applause) Let men discount the proposed arrangement as much as they will; let us regard it as an insurance policy. If you can get 10 per cent insurance of your fortunes in respect of peace, wouldn’t you rather take it than no insurance at all? (cries of “Yes” and “Of course”) As a matter of fact, I believe, after having sat in conference with men all over the world and finding the attitude of their minds, the character of their purposes, that this is a 98 per cent insurance against war. If the nations of the world will in deed and in truth accept this great Covenant of a League of Nations and agree to put arbitration and discussion always first and war always last, I say that we have an immense insurance against war, and that is exactly what this great Covenant does.

I have found it necessary upon this trip, my fellow citizens—I have actually found it necessary—to tell great audiences what the treaty of peace contains. You never could divine it from the discussion of the men who are opposed to it. (applause) Let me tell you some of the things this treaty does, apart from the Covenant of the League of Nations, which stands by common consent of those who framed it at the beginning of it. Quite apart from the League of Nations, it is the first attempt ever made by an international congress to substitute justice for national advantage. It is the first attempt ever made to settle the affairs of the world according to the wishes of the people in the parts of the world that were being dealt with. It is a treaty that deals with peoples and nations, and not with dynasties and governments. (applause)

Every representative of every great government I met on the other side of the sea acknowledged, as I, of course, acknowledge, that he was master of nobody, that he was the servant of the people whom he represented, and that the people he represented wanted what the people of the United States wanted. They wanted a just, a reasonable, a permanent settlement, and that is what this treaty tried to give them. It substitutes for the aggression, which always was the beginning of war, a settled title on the part of the weak nations, along with the strong, to their own territories—a settled right to determine their own policies, a settled right to realize the national hopes so long suppressed, to free themselves from the oppression so long endured. Europe was full of people under the iron and relentless hand of military power, and that hand has been removed and crushed. This treaty is the means of doing it.

And the guarantee of this treaty is the part of the covenant of [226page icon] nations which you have heard most criticized. I mean the celebrated, the now celebrated, Article X. Article X is an engagement of the most extraordinary kind in history. It is an engagement by all the fighting nations of the world never to fight upon the plan on which they always fought before. They—all of them—agree to respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the others, and they agree that, if there should be any breach of that Covenant, the Council of the League shall advise what steps shall be taken to make the promise good. That is the Covenant with which you have been frightened. Frightened, my fellow citizens? Why, it is the only possible or conceivable guarantee against the wars that have ravaged the world, because those wars have habitually begun by territorial aggression, by the seizure of territory that didn’t belong to the power that was effecting the seizure.

How did this great war begin? It began by the invasion of Belgium, and it was admitted by all German statesmen that they never meant to get out of Belgium. By guaranteeing the territorial integrity of a country, you don’t mean that you guarantee it against invasion. You guarantee it against the invader staying there and keeping the spoils. The integrity is the title, the ownership. You agree never to take territory away from the people to whom it belongs, and you agree never to interfere with the political independence of the people living in the territories whose titles are now made clear by a universal international guarantee.

I therefore want to discuss with you, very frankly indeed, just as frankly as I know how, the difficulty that has been suggested, because I say, not in the spirit of criticism, but in a spirit of intended fairness, that not one of the qualifications which has been suggested in this discussion is justified by the language of the instrument. Let me take them one by one.

In the first article of the Covenant of the League, it is provided that any member state may withdraw from the League upon two years’ notice, provided that, at the time of withdrawal, it has fulfilled its international obligations and its obligations under the Covenant. And gentlemen object that it is not said who shall determine whether it has fulfilled its international obligations and its obligations under the Covenant or not. Having sat at the table where the instrument was drawn, I know that that was not done accidentally, because that is a matter upon which no nation can sit in judgment upon another. That is left to the conscience and to the independent determination of the nation that is withdrawing, and there is only one jury that it need fear, and that is the great embodied jury expressing the opinion of mankind. (applause)

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I want to differentiate myself, particularly, from the men who are afraid of this clause, because I want to record my feelings in the matter that, as an American, I am never afraid that the United States will fail to perform its international obligations. (applause) And, being certain that it will never fail, I have nothing to fear that an occasion will arise when we need be sensitive to the opinion of mankind. (applause) That is the only jury set up in the case, and I am ready to go before that jury at any time. (applause) These gentlemen want to say what the instrument itself says—that we can withdraw when we please. The instrument does not say it in these words. It says it in effect, and the only limitation upon it is that we should not please unless we have done our duty. We never will please, God helping us, to neglect our duty. (applause)

The second difficulty—taking them in the order in which they come in the Covenant itself—is the article I was a moment ago discussing, Article X. Article X says that if the promise to respect and preserve as against external aggression—I left those words out inadvertently—if the promise to respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the member states is broken, then the Council shall advise what is to be done. I do not know any but one meaning for the word “advise,” and I have been very curious and interested to learn how many other meanings have been put into it. In my surprise, I have looked in the dictionary to be sure that I was not mistaken, and, so far as I can find out, “advise” means “advise.” And more than that, and more interesting than that, the advice cannot be given without the affirmative vote of the United States. (applause) There must be a unanimous vote of the Council before there is advice, and the United States is a member of the Council by the constitution of the Council, by the constitution of the League itself, a member now and always a member, so that neither the United States nor any other country can be advised to go to war for the redemption of that promise without the concurrent affirmative vote of the United States. (applause)

And yet I hear gentlemen say that this is an invasion of our sovereignty. Why, my fellow citizens, if it is anything, it is an exaggeration of our sovereignty, because it puts our sovereignty in a way to put a veto on that advice being given to anybody. Our present sovereignty merely extends to making choice as to whether we will go to war or not, but this extends our sovereignty to saying whether other nations shall go to war or not. (applause)

If that does not constitute a very considerable insurance against war, I would like somebody to write a provision which would; because, at every point, my fellow citizens, the opposition of these [228page icon] gentlemen who criticize this instrument is either that they do not understand the Covenant or that they can suggest something better. In fact, I have never heard any of them suggest anything better. In fact, I have never heard any of them suggest anything. (loud applause and cheers) If the world is going to be at peace, it must be this or something better, and I want to say again and again, it is a case of “put up or shut up.” (applause)

And let me make a slight digression here, if I may, to speak about a matter of some delicacy. I have had a great many men say to me, “I am a Republican, but I am in favor of the League of Nations.” Why the “but”? (laughter) So far as I remember, every meeting I have spoken at on this trip has been presided over by a Republican. (applause) And I want to tell you, my fellow citizens, that there is one element in this whole discussion which ought not to be in it. There is, though I say it myself, an element of personal bitterness. And one would suppose that this Covenant of the League of Nations was first thought of, and first invented, and first written by a man named Wilson. (laughter) Now, I wish it were. (laughter) If I had done that, I would be willing to have it recorded that I had done that and nothing else. (applause) But I didn’t do it. And I got the idea twenty years ago. I do not mean I alone, but thousands of my fellow countrymen got the idea years ago, chiefly from Republican public men. (applause) Take men like ex-Senator Burton of Ohio.2 He has been preaching a league of nations for twenty years. Go through the list. I don’t want to mention names, because I do not want to record a gentlemen against himself. (loud applause and continued laughter) But go through the list and you will find most of the leading, thinking minds on the Republican side in favor of this very kind of thing. (applause) And I want to remind every Republican of the criticism that he and his comrades have usually made of the Democratic party and the boast that they have generally made of their party. They said that the Democratic party was a party of negations and not a party of constructive policies, and that the Republican party was a party of constructive policies.

Very well, then, why that “but”? “I am a Republican,” but—“I am in favor of the greatest constructive thing that has ever been suggested!” (laughter and applause) If I were a Republican, I would say, “I am a Republican and therefore I am in favor of a League of Nations.” (applause) But my present point is to dissociate the League of Nations from the present speaker. I did not originate it. It is not my handiwork. It has originated out of the [229page icon] consciences and thought of men who wanted justice and peace for generations. And my relation to it is just what my relation ought to be to every public question—the relationship which a man bears to his fellow citizens when he tries to interpret their thought and their consciences. That is what I conceive to be my part in the League of Nations. I did have a part in some of the phraseology, and every time I did, it was to carry out the ideas that these gentlemen are fighting for.

For example, there is one part of the Covenant—the principal part of it—where it speaks of arbitration and where it provides that any member state failing to keep these covenants—these particular covenants—shall be regarded as thereby ipso facto to have committed an act of war against the other members. The way it originally read was, “Shall thereby ipso facto be demed at war with the other nations.” And I said: “No, I cannot agree to that. That provision would put the United States at war without the consent of the Congress of the United States, and I have no right in this part of the Covenant or any other to assent to a provision which would deprive the Congress of the United States of its free choice whether it makes war or not.” (applause) There, and at every other point in the Covenant where it was necessary to do so, I insisted upon language which would leave the Congress of the United States free, and yet these gentlemen say that the Congress of the United States is deprived of its privilege. (laughter) I fought that battle and won it. It is not necessary for them to fight it over again. (applause and cheers) I have finished about Article X.

You will say, “It is all very well what you say about the word of the United States being necesary to the advice, provided the United States is not one of the parties to the dispute. In that case it cannot vote.” That is very true. But in that case it has got the fight on its hands anyhow, because if it is one of the parties to the dispute, the war belongs to it. It does not have to go into it. Therefore it cannot be forced by the vote into the war. The only thing the vote can do is to force it out of the war.

And I want to ask you to think what it means when it is suggested that the United States may be a party. A party to what? A party to seizing somebody else’s territory? A party to infringing some other country’s political independence? Is any man willing to stand on this platform and say that the United States is likely to do either of those things? I challenge any man to stand up before an American audience and say that that is the danger. “Ah, but somebody else may seek to seize our territory or impair our political independence.” Well, who? Who has an arm long enough, who has an audacity great enough to try to take a single inch of American [230page icon] territory (applause and cheers) or to seek to interfere for one moment with the political independence of the United States? These gentlemen are dreaming of things that can’t happen, (laughter and applause) and I cannot bring myself to feel uneasy about things that I know are not so. The great difficulty in this discussion, as in so many others, is the number of things that men know that are not so. (laughter)

“But the Monroe Doctrine?” I must admit to you, my fellow citizens, I don’t know how the Monroe Doctrine could be any more explicitly accepted than it is in the Covenant of the League of Nations. It says that nothing in the Covenant shall be interpreted as impairing the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. What more could you say? I did try while I was in Paris to define the Monroe Doctrine and get it written into the document, but I will confess to you in confidence that, when I tried to define it, I found that it escaped analysis, (laughter) and that all that you could say was that it was a principle with regard to the interference of foreign powers in the politics of the western hemisphere which the United States is at liberty to apply in any circumstances where it thought it pertinent. Now, that is not a definition. That means that the United States means to play big brother to the western hemisphere in any circumstances where it thinks it wise to play big brother. And therefore, inasmuch as you cannot or would not define the Monroe Doctrine—at least I would not, because I do not know how much we may want to extend it—inasmuch as we do not want to define it, what more could you say than that nothing in that instrument shall impair the validity of the Monroe Doctrine?

I tell you, my fellow citizens, that is the most extraordinary sentence in that treaty, for this reason: up to that time, there was not a nation in the world that was willing to admit the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. (applause) I have made a great many speeches in my life—perhaps too many—but I do not think that I ever put so much of what I hope is the best in me as I put in the speech in the conference on the League of Nations in favor of the Monroe Doctrine.3 And it was upon that occasion that it was embodied, and we have this extraordinary spectacle, of the world recognizing the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. (applause) Yet these gentlemen seem to want something more. What more could you get? Shall we get them to express their belief in the deity of the Monroe Doctrine? (laughter) They accepted it for the first time in the history of the world, and they say that they will do nothing that will [231page icon] interfere with it. And I must submit that it is absolutely irrational to ask for anything more.

But there is the question of domestics—of their interfering with domestic policies—immigration, naturalization, tariffs—matters of that sort. There, again, I can’t understand or feel the weight of the difficulty, because the Covenant says that the Council of the League of Nations, if any international difficulty is brought under discussion, if one of the parties claims and the Council finds that it is a matter of domestic jurisdiction, shall cease to discuss it and shall make no report about it. And the only way you could make the document more clear would be by enumerating domestic questions which you have in mind. Very well. I ask any lawyer here if that would be safe. Mightn’t you be in danger of leaving out something? Mightn’t you be in danger of not mentioning something that would afterwards become important? The danger of making a list is that the mention of the things you mention constitutes the exclusion of the things you do not mention. And, therefore, inasmuch as there is no dispute among any authoritative students of international law that these matters that we are most concerned about—immigration, naturalization, tariffs, and the like—are domestic questions, it is inconceivable that the Council should ever seek to interfere with or to discuss such questions, unless we had ourselves deliberately made them matters of international agreement, when even the opponents of the League admit they would be suitable and proper subjects for discussion.

Those are the matters upon which they are talking about reservations. And the only reservations that I can imagine are reservations which say over again what the Covenant itself says in plain language, and make it necessary that we should go back to Paris and discuss in new language the things which we all will have to admit, if we were more frank or honest, are already in the document. (applause)

But there is another matter. I have forgotten who it was that said it, but I wouldn’t mention his name if I remembered it, (laughter) that this Covenant was an arrangement for the dominance of Great Britain, and he based that upon the fact that in the Assembly of the League there are six representatives of the various parts of the British Empire. Well, I mean there are more than that, because every member of the Assembly has three representatives, but six units of the British Empire are represented, whereas the United States is represented as only one unit. Now let me be didactic for a moment and tell you how the League is constituted. There is an Assembly made up of three members from each of the constituent [232page icon] states, and there is a Council. The Council is the only part of the organization that can take effective action. No powers of action rest with the Assembly at all, but it is only in the Assembly that the British Empire is represented as consisting of six units—for brevity’s sake I will say as having six votes. There is only one occasion when the Assembly can vote at all, and that is when the Council refers a matter in dispute to the Assembly, in which case the Assembly can decide a matter by a majority, provided all the representatives of the nations represented in the Council vote on the side of the majority. So that, alike in the Assembly and in the Council, the one vote of the United States is an absolute veto.

I have said that there was only one occasion upon which the Assembly could vote, and that is literally true. The Council of the League is made up of one representative from each of the five principal Allied and Associated Powers, that is to say, the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, and four other nations selected by the Assembly of the League, four as against five. The present members are Spain, Brazil, Belgium—I am afraid I am at a loss for the other. And in the Council is vested all the active powers of the League. Everything that is done by the League emanates, is formulated and passed by the Council, and a unanimous vote is required.

Indeed, my fellow citizens, that is the only thing that seems to me weak about the League. I am afraid that a unanimous vote will sometimes be very difficult to get. And the danger is not action, but inaction. The danger is not that they will do something that we do not like, but that, upon some critical occasion, they won’t do anything. If there is any weakness in it, it is the safeguard that is thrown around the power of the members of the Council. If a matter in controversy arises and one of the parties demands that it shall be taken out of the Council and put into the Assembly, the Council is obliged so to refer it. But in the final vote in the Assembly, the affirmative action is not valid unless all the states represented in the Council shall also in the Assembly vote in the affirmative. So if we can always veto, always offset with our vote the British six votes, I must say that I look with perfect philosophy upon the difference in number.

The justification for the representation of more than one part of the British Empire is that the British Empire is made up of semi-independent provinces, as no other empire in the world is. You know how Canada, for example, passes her own tariff laws, does what she pleases to inconvenience the trade of the mother country. And her voice in the Assembly is merely a debating voice. The [233page icon] Assembly is a great discussing body. It is a body in which some of the most valuable things that the League is going to do can be done.

And I want to ask of you, after you have read Article X again, to read Article XI. Article XI makes it the right of any member of the League, however weak and small, to call attention to anything, anywhere, that is likely to disturb the peace of the world and draw it into debate, draw it into the open, draw it where everybody can know the facts and talk about it. It is the only time, my fellow countrymen, in the history of the world when the weak and oppressed and restive people have been given a hearing. (applause) Nothing is going to keep this world fit to live in like exposing in public debate every crooked thing that is going on. (applause) If you suspect your friend of being a fool, the best way you can prove it or disprove it is by advising him to hire a hall. Then your judgment will be confirmed or reversed by the popular verdict. (applause and laughter) If you think a policy is good, you will want to talk about it. If you think it is bad, you won’t consent to talk about it. The League of Nations takes everything into public. It makes every secret agreement of every kind invalid; it provides that no treaty hereafter shall be valid unless registered with the Secretary of the League and published. And, after bringing everything into the open, it authorizes the Assembly to discuss anything that is likely to affect the peace and happiness of any part of the world. (applause) So that in every direction where you look, the safeguards of this treaty are thrown around those who are oppressed.

And, my fellow citizens, unless America takes part in that, the world is going to lose heart.

I cannot too often repeat to you how deep the impression made upon me on the other side of the water was that this was the nation upon which the whole world depended to hold the scales of justice even. (applause) If we fail them, God help the world, for then despair will ensue. Despair is just at the door on the other side of the water now. Men do not hope in Europe, as they do in America. They hope tremblingly. They hope fearfully. They do not hope with confidence and self-reliance, as we do on this side of the water. And everywhere in Europe there is that poison of disorder and distress, and shall we take away from this unsteady world the only thing that reassures it?

If we do, then where is the boasted independence of America? Are we indeed independent in our life of the rest of the world? Then why did we go into the war? Germany had not directed her efforts directly, immediately against us. We went in because we were partners with mankind to see that an iniquity was not [234page icon] practiced upon it. (applause) You know how we regard the men who fought the Civil War. They did the greatest thing that was to be done in their day. And now, these boys here, (indicating soldiers) and others like them, (applause) have done the greatest thing that it was possible to do in our day. (applause) As their fathers saved the Union, they saved the world. (loud applause) And we sit and debate whether we will keep true and finish the job or not! Why, my friends, that debate can’t last one minute longer than the moment when this country realizes what it means. It means that, having sent these men to risk their lives and having sent some, whose mothers’ hearts can count, to die in France, in order to redeem the world, we, in cool debate, in distant assemblies, say we will not consent that the world should reap the fruits of their victory! Nothing less than that hangs in the balance. I am ready to fight from now until all the fight has been taken out of me by death to redeem the faith and promise of your action. (long and continued applause)

I leave the verdict with you, and I beg my fellow citizens, my Republican fellow citizens, (laughter and applause) that you will not allow yourselves for one moment, as I do not allow myself for one moment, as God knows my conscience, to think of 1920 when thinking about the redemption of the world. (applause) And I beg that you will cut that “but” out of your sentences, and that you will stand up, as you are entitled to stand up by the history of your party, and say, “I am a Republican and therefore I am for the League of Nations.” I do not admit the indictment, which has been brought against the Democratic party, but I do admit the distinguished history of the Republican party. I do admit that it has been the creator of great constructive policies, and I should be very sorry to see it lose the prestige which it has earned by such policies. I should be very sorry to have any man feel that there was any embarrassment in supporting a great world policy because he belonged to a great constructive party, and that party an American party, the constructive force in the world, the people who have done the most advanced thinking in the world, and the people who, God helping them, will lead and save the world. (applause)

#Remarks in the Tacoma Stadium1, September 13, 1919.

My friends, I am delighted to visit you in this beautiful spot, and I am thrilled with the welcome you have given me. I can make no regular address at the present time, but I can say from my heart how glad I am to see you, and how profoundly touched I am by your welcome. What impresses me most is this charming circle of school children, which is the more important as all our thoughts in America recently are to bring about conditions which mean more for our children. Our work now is to care for the future, so that the [241page icon] world may be a better place for our children, and to this factor we have given much thought in our plans for peace. I again thank you with all my heart for your reception.

#An Address in the Tacoma Armory, September 13, 1919.

Mr. Mayor, Mr. Chairman, Your Excellency,1 my fellow countrymen: It is with very great pleasure that I find myself in your presence. I have long wanted to get away from Washington in order to [242page icon] get into touch with the great body of my fellow citizens. Because I feel, as I am sure you feel, that we have reached one of the most critical periods in the history of the United States. The shadow of the war is not yet lifted from us, my fellow countrymen, and we have just come out of the depths of the valley of death. I thought that it might be useful this morning if I reminded you of a few things, lest we forget. It is so easy, with the strong tides of our life, to be swept away from one situation into another, to forget the real depths of meaning which lie underneath the things that we are merely touching the surface of. Therefore I thought it would not be impertinent on my part if I asked permission to read you the concluding passage of the address in which I requested the government of the United States to accept Germany’s challenge of war:

“We shall fight,” I said, “for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts,—for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free. To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our fortunes, everything that we are and everything that we have, with the pride of those who know that the day has come when America is privileged to spend her blood and her might for the principles that gave her birth and happiness and the peace which she has treasured. God helping her, she can do no other.”

That is the program we started out on. (applause) That is the program which all America adopted without respect of party. And shall we now hesitate to carry it out? Shall we now falter at the very critical moment when we are finally to write our name to the standing pledge which we then took? (cries of “No! No!”)

I want to remind you, my fellow citizens, that many other nations were put under a deeper temptation than we. It would have been possible for little helpless Belgium at any time to make terms with the enemy. Belgium was not prepared to resist. Belgium knew that resistance was useless. Belgium knew that she could get any terms of advantage from Germany that she pleased if she would only submit. And, at the cost of everything that she had, Belgium did nothing less than underwrite civilization. (prolonged applause) I do not know anywhere in history of a more inspiring fact than that. I have seen the fields of Belgium. I have seen great spaces swept of cities and towns as clean as if there had never been anything there except piles of stone. And, further in, in that beautiful country—the factories standing, all the houses there—but [243page icon] thing that could be useful taken out of the factories; the machinery taken out and taken to Germany, because this was a commercial war in part—on Germany’s part—and she feared the competition of the skillful Belgians. She took all of her machinery away. And where it was too bulky to take away, it was all destroyed under the direction of experts—not blown to pieces, but the very part that made it impossible to use without it absolutely destroyed. I have been through great plants there that seemed to the eye to have much of the substantial machinery left, but experts showed me that it could never work again. And Belgium lies prostrate because she fulfilled her pledge to civilization.

Italy could have had her terms at the hands of Austria at almost any period of the war, particularly just before she made her final stand at the Piave River, but she would not compound with the enemy. She, too, had underwritten civilization. And my friends, this passage which I have read to you, which the whole country accepted as its pledge, is but an underwriting of civilization. (applause)

But in order to let you remember what the thing cost, just let me read you a few figures. If I did not have them on official authority, I would deem them incredible. Here is what the war cost those who were engaged against Germany.

It cost Great Britain and her dominions $38,000,000,000. These figures do not include what the different powers loaned each other; they are direct war costs. Great Britain and her dominions, $38,000,000,000; France, $26,000,000,000; the United States, $22,000,000,000; Russia, $18,000,000,000; Italy, $13,000,000,000; and the total, including Belgium, Japan, and other smaller countries, $123,000,000,000. It cost the Central Powers: Germany, $39,000,000,000; Austria-Hungary, $21,000,000,000; Turkey and Bulgaria, $3,000,000,000—a total of $63,000,000,000. A grand total of direct war costs of $186,000,000,000—an incredible sum—to save civilization. Now the question is, are we going to keep it safe? The expenditures of the United States were at the rate of $1,000,000 an hour for two years, $1,000,000 an hour, including the nighttime, for two years.

Battle deaths—and this is the cost that touches our hearts—the battle deaths were Russia, 1,700,000; Germany, 1,600,000; France, 1,385,000; Great Britain, 900,000; Austria, 800,000; Italy, 364,000; the United States, 50,300 dead—a total for all belligerents of 7,450,200 men dead on the field of battle! Seven and a half million! The totals for the wounded are not obtainable at present, but the total wounded for the United States Army was 230,000, excluding those, of course, those who were killed.

[244page icon]
The total of all battle deaths in all the wars of the world from the year 1793 to 1914 were something under 6,000,000; so that, in all the wars of the world for more than 100 years, fewer men died than have been killed upon the field of battle in the last five years. These are terrible facts, my fellow citizens, and we ought never to forget them. We went into this war to do a thing that was fundamental for the world, and what I have come out upon this journey for is to ascertain whether the country has forgotten it or not. I have found out already. (applause) The country has not forgotten it and never will permit any man who stands in the way of the fulfillment of these great pledges ever to forget the sorrowful day when he made the attempt. (applause)

I read you these figures in order to emphasize and set it in a higher light, if I may, a substitute which is offered—a substitute for war, a substitute for turmoil, a substitute for sorrow and despair. That substitute is offered in the Covenant of the League of Nations. (applause) America alone cannot underwrite civilization. All the great free peoples of the world must underwrite it, and only the free peoples of the world can join the League of Nations. The membership is open only to self-governing nations. Germany is for the present excluded, because she must prove that she is self-governing; she must prove that she has changed the processes of her constitution and the purposes of her policy. But when she has proved these things, she can become one of the partners, guaranteeing that civilization shall not suffer again these intolerable things. It is not only a union of free peoples to guarantee civilization; it is something much more than that. It is a League of Nations to advance civilization by substituting something that will make the improvement of civilization possible.

I call you to witness, my fellow citizens, that our civilization is not satisfactory. It is an industrial civilization, and at the heart of it is antagonism between those who labor with their hands and those who direct labor. You cannot compose those differences in the midst of war, and you cannot advance civilization unless you have a peace of which you make the peaceful and fullest use of bringing these elements of civilization together into a common partnership, in which every man will have the same interest in the work of his community that those have who direct the work of the community. (applause)

We have got to have leisure and freedom of mind to settle these things. This was a war against autocracy, and if you have disordered, if you have disquieted populations, if you have insurgent elements in your populations, you are going to have autocracy, because the stronger is going to seize the power, as it has seized it in [245page icon] Russia. I want to declare that I am an enemy of the rulership of any minority, however constituted. (applause) Minorities have often been right, majorities wrong, but minorities cease to be right when they use the wrong means to make their opinions prevail. We must have peaceful means; we must have discussion; we must have frank discussion: we must have friendly discussion. And these are the very things that are offered to us among the nations of the world by the Covenant of the League of Nations. (applause)

I cannot too often remind my fellow citizens of what the real heart and center of that Covenant is. It lies in the provision by which every member of the League—mind you, that means every great nation in the world, except, for the time being, Germany—every member of the League solemnly engages never to go to war without first having either submitted the subject to arbitration, in which case it agrees to abide absolutely by the verdict, or having submitted it for discussion to the Council of the League of Nations, laying all the documents, all the facts, before the Council, and consenting that the Council shall publish all the facts, so as to take the world into its confidence for the formation of a correct judgment concerning it. It agrees that it will allow six months at least for the deliberations of the Council upon the facts, and that, after these deliberations are concluded, if the advice of the Council is not acceptable, they will still not go to war for three months after the rendering of that decision.

In other words, we have the pledge of all the nations of the world that they will sit down and talk everything over that is apt to make trouble amongst them, and that they will talk it over in public, so that the whole illuminating process of public knowledge and public discussion may penetrate every part of the country. And I believe, for my part, that that is a 98 per cent insurance against war. (applause) I take it you want some insurance against war rather than none, and if it is not 98 per cent, I dare say you would rather like 10 per cent. (applause) You would like some insurance rather than none at all, and the experience of the world demonstrates that this is an almost complete insurance.

My fellow citizens, imagine what would have happened if there had been a League of Nations in 1914. What did happen was this: some time after the Crown Prince of Austria had been assassinated in Serbia, after the world had begun to forget even so tragical an incident, the Austrian government was prompted by the government at Berlin to make that the occasion for war. Their thought was: “We are ready. The others are not. Before they can mobilize, before they can bring this matter even under discussion, we will be at their gates. Belgium cannot resist. We solemnly promised not [246page icon] to cross her territories, but promises are scraps of paper. We will get across her territories into France before France can mobilize.” Making a pretense, they therefore made unconscionable demands against Serbia, and notwithstanding the fact that Serbia, with her sense of helplessness, practically yielded to all these demands. They would not even tell the world that she had yielded; they went on with the war. In the meantime, every foreign office was telegraphing to its representative at Berlin, begging that there might be an international conference to see if a settlement could not be effected, but Germany did not dare sit down in conference. It is the common judgment of every statesman I met on the other side of the water that, if this thing had been delayed and discussed, not six months, but six days, it never could have happened.

Here we have all the governments of the world agreeing to discuss anything that is likely to bring about war, because, after the famous Article X there is an Article XI—there are twenty-six articles altogether, although you are not told about any of them except Article X—and Article XI says that it shall be the friendly right of any member of the League, big or little, to bring to the attention of the League—and, therefore, to the attention of the world—anything, anywhere, which is likely to disturb the peace of the world or to disturb the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends.

Wherever there are oppressed nations, wherever there are suffering populations, wherever there is a smoldering flame, the trouble can be uncovered and brought to the bar of mankind, and the whole influence of public opinion the world over will be brought to bear upon it. It is the greatest process of international conference and of international discussion ever conceived, and that is what we are trying to substitute for war. That is what we must substitute for war.

Then, not in immediate connection with the League of Nations Covenant, but in a later part of the treaty, there is what I have ventured to call the Magna Carta of labor. There is the provision for the constant regular international discussion of labor problems, no matter where they arise in the world, for the purpose of lifting the whole level of labor conditions; for the purpose of safeguarding the health of women and of children; for the sake of bringing about those international comities with regard to labor upon which the happiness of mankind so much depends. There is a heart in the midst of the treaty. It is not only made by prudent men, but it is made by men with hearts under their jackets.

I have seen the light of this thing in the eyes of some men whom the world deemed cynical. I have seen men over there, whose [247page icon] emotions are not often touched, with suffused eyes when they spoke of the purposes of this conference, because they realized that, for the first time in the history of mankind, statesmen had got together, not in order to lay plans for the aggrandizement of governments, but in order to lay plans for the liberation of peoples.

And what I want everybody in every American audience to understand is this: the first effective impulse toward this sort of thing came from America. And I want to call your attention to the fact that it came from some of the very men who are now opposing its consummation. They dreamed the dream that has now been realized. They saw the vision twenty, twenty-five, thirty years ago which all mankind are now permitted to see. It is of particular importance to remember, my fellow citizens, at this moment, when some men have dared to introduce party passion into this question, that some of the leading spirits, perhaps I may say the leading spirits, in the conception of this great idea were the leading figures of the great Republican party.

I do not like to mention parties in this discussion. I hope that there is not a real thoughtful, conscientious person in the United States who will determine his or her opinion about this matter with any thought that there is an election in the year 1920. And, just because I want you to realize how absolutely nonpartisan this thing is, I want you to forget, if you please, that I had anything to do with it. I had the great privilege of being the spokesman of this splendid nation at this critical period of her history. But I was her spokesman, not my own, and when I advocated the things that are in this League of Nations, I had the full and proud consciousness that I was only expressing the best thought and the best conscience of my beloved fellow countrymen.

The only things that I have any special personal connection with in the League of Nations Covenant are things that I was careful to have put in there because of the very considerations which are now being urged. I brought the first draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations over to this country in March last. I then held a conference of the frankest sort with the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate. They made a number of suggestions as to alterations and additions. I then took all of those suggestions back to Paris, and every one of them, without exception, was embodied in the Covenant. I had one or two hard fights to get them in.

You are told, my fellow citizens—it is amazing that anybody should say it—that the Covenant does not satisfactorily recognize the Monroe Doctrine. It says in so many words that nothing in that Covenant shall be construed as impairing the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. The point is that, up to that conference, there was [248page icon] not a nation in the world that could be induced to give official recognition to the Monroe Doctrine, and here, in this great turn of the tides of the world, all the great nations of the world are united in recognizing the Monroe Doctrine. It not only is not impaired, but is has the backing of the world. And, at every point where suggestions were made, they were accepted; and the suggestions came for the most part from the Republican side of the committee. I say that because I am particularly interested, my fellow citizens, to have you realize that there is no politics in this business, except that profoundly important politics—the politics of civilization. I have the honor today of speaking under a chairman who, I understand, is a member of the Republican party, and every meeting that I have spoken at on this trip, so far as I remember, has been presided over by a Republican. I am saying these things merely because I want to read the riot act to anybody who tries to introduce politics.

Some very interesting things happened while we were on the other side of the water. One of the most distinguished lawyers in the United States, Mr. Wickersham, of New York, who was the Attorney General in Mr. Taft’s cabinet, came over to Europe, I am told—I did not see him while he was over there—to oppose the things that he understood the American peace commission was trying to accomplish, and what happened to Mr. Wickersham? He was absolutely converted, above all things else, to the necessity for a league of nations not only, but for this League of Nations. He came back to the United States and has ever since, in season and out of season, been preaching in public advocacy of this Covenant. I need not tell you of the conspicuously fine work which his chief, Mr. Taft, has been doing in the same cause.

I am very proud, my fellow citizens, to be associated with these gentlemen. I am very proud to forget party lines, because there is one thing that is so much greater than being a Republican or a Democrat that those names ought never to be mentioned in connection with, and that is being an American. There is only one way to be an American, and that is to fulfill the pledges that we gave the world at our birth, that we have given the world at every turn in our history, and that we have just now sealed with the blood of some of our best young men.

Ah, my fellow citizens, do not forget the aching hearts that are behind discussions like this. Do not forget the forlorn homes from which those boys went and to which they never came back. I have in my heart that if we do not do this great thing now, every woman ought to weep because of the child in her arms. If she has a boy at her breast, she may be sure that, when he comes to manhood, this [249page icon] terrible task will have to be done once more. Everywhere we go, the train when it stops is surrounded with little children, and I look at them almost with tears in my eyes, because I feel my mission is to save them. These glad youngsters with flags in their hands—I pray God that they may never have to carry those flags into battle!

There have been, if I may make a slight digression, some very amusing incidents on this journey. The small boys call me “Woody.” I don’t object to the name at all unless it is intended as a description. They shout their little greetings to “Woody,” their friend, and sometimes they give me things. At Billings, one small boy with a flag proudly gave his banner to me. His little pal had no flag, and he looked very uneasy for a moment. Then he put his hand in his pocket, brought forth a dime, and, with a happy smile, presented me with that. I think about that dime as one might the widow’s mite. Others gave something, but he gave me all he had. After all, though that is merely a passing incident, it is illustrative of the spirit of this country, my fellow citizens.

There is something in this country that is not anywhere else in the world. There is a confident looking forward to better times. There is a confidence that we can work out the most difficult problems. There is none of that heavy leaden discouragement that rests upon some other countries. Have you never crossed the sea in times of peace and noticed the immigrants who were going back to visit their folks, and then, on the return voyage, the immigrants who were coming in for the first time—the extraordinary contrast in the appearance of the two groups? The group going out, having felt the atmosphere of America, their faces bright, a sort of a sense of initiative about it, having been freed to be men and individuals; and those coming back, bearing all sorts of queer bundles, looking a bit anxious, just a little doubtful of the hope with which they are looking forward to the new country. It is the alchemy, the miracle of America, and it is the only country in the world, so far as my observation goes, where that miracle is wrought, and the rest of the world knows that.

The rest of the world implores America’s aid—not her material aid; they are not looking for our dollars; they are not looking for our guns. They are saying, “Show us the road that led you out of the wilderness and made you great, for we are seeking that road.” Now that the great treaty of peace has established the oppressed peoples of the world who were affected by this treaty on their own territory, given them their own freedom, given them command of their own affairs, they are looking to America to show them how to use that new liberty and that new power.

When I was at that wonderful stadium of yours a few minutes [250page icon] ago, a little child, a little girl in white, came and presented me with some kind of a paper—I have not had time to read it yet—from the Poles.2 I dare say that it is of the sort that I have received a great many of—just an expression of a sort of childlike and pitiful thanks that America assisted to free Poland.

Poland never could have freed herself. We not only tore Germany’s hands away from where she meant to make ravage of the rights of the others, but we took those old peoples who had been under her power before and said: “You could not free yourselves, but we believe in liberty. Here is your own land to do with as you please.” I wish that some of the men who are opposing this treaty could get the vision in their hearts of all it has done. It has liberated great populations. It has set up the standards of right and of liberty for the first time, where they were never unfurled before, and then has placed back of them this splendid power of the nations combined.

For without the League of Nations the whole thing is a house of cards. Just a breath of power will blow it down, whereas with the League of Nations it is as strong as Gibraltar. Let them catch this vision; let them take in this conception; let them take counsel of weeping mothers; let them take counsel of bereaved fathers who used to have their sons at their sides and are now alone; let them take counsel of the lonely farms where there used to be a boy to help the old man and now he cannot even get a hired man to help him, and yet he is trying to feed the world; let them realize that the world is hungry, that the world is naked, that the world is suffering, and that none of these things can be remedied until the minds of men are reassured. That is the fundamental fact, my fellow citizens.

If I wanted to have a joint debate with some man who wanted to put our part in this business down on the lowest possible level of how much money we were going to make out of it, I could silence him by showing that, so long as the world was not reassured, its industries will not begin again, that unless its industries begin again, there will be nothing to pay for anything with, that unless its industries begin again there will be no market for the goods of America, and that we will have to rest content with our domestic markets at the very time when we had enlarged our enterprises in order to make peaceful conquest of the world. The very processes of war have driven our industries to a point of expansion where they will be chilled and ruined if they do not presently get a foreign [251page icon] outlet. Therefore, on the lowest basis, you have got to guarantee and underwrite civilization, or you have ruined the United States.

But I do not like to talk about that side of it. I believe in my heart that there is hardly a man in America, if you get really back of his superficial thoughts, who is not man enough to be willing to make the sacrifice to underwrite civilization. It is only sacrifice that tells. Don’t you remember what we used to cry during the Liberty loans, “Lend until it hurts. Give until it hurts.” When I heard, in some western states, that people drew their savings out of banks that were giving them 4 per cent on the savings and invested them in the first Liberty loan that was to yield them 3½ per cent, I said to myself, “That is America.” They were helping the government at a sacrifice. They were not thinking of dollars. They were thinking of the dignity and might and majesty and destiny of the United States, and it is only that vision, my fellow citizens, that will ever lift us out of the slough in which men now are wading.

It is a pitiful spectacle that the great bodies of our fellow citizens should be arrayed against each other. One of the most startling things that I ever realized was months and months ago, when I was trying to moderate and assist in settling some of the difficulties between the railroads and their employees.3 I asked the representatives of the railway brotherhoods to come to the White House, and I asked the presidents of the great railway systems to come to the White House. And I found that each side had a profound suspicion of the other, that the railway presidents were not willing to trust what their men said and the men were not willing to trust what the railway presidents said. When I took over the railroads in the name of the government, I said to a group of fine-spirited men—a group of railway presidents, who were trying to unify the administration of the railroads for the purposes of the war—I said, smilingly, but with a little sadness, “Well, at any rate, gentlemen, these men will trust me, and they do not trust you.” I did not say it with pride; I said it with sorrow. I did not know whether I could justify their trust or not. But I did know that I was willing to talk things over with them whenever anything was the matter, and that if we were equally intelligent and equally conscientious we could get together whenever anything went wrong. I could not help suspecting that this distrust, this mutual distrust, was the wedge that was being driven into society, and society cannot live with a great wedge at the heart of it.

Society cannot get on industrially or socially with any such [252page icon] wedge driven into its heart. We must see that the processes of peace, the processes of discussion, the processes of fairness, the processes of equity, the processes of sympathy penetrate all our affairs. I have never known anybody who had a good cause who was unwilling to discuss it. Whenever I find a man standing out stiffly against consulting with the other side, I know his case is bad. The only unconquerable thing in the world is the truth, and a man who has the truth on his side need not be afraid of anybody.

You know what witty and eloquent old Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once said. He said, “You needn’t fear to handle the truth roughly; she is no invalid.” The truth is the most robust and indestructible and formidable thing in the world. There is a very amusing story of a distinguished lawyer at Charleston, South Carolina, of a very much older generation than ours, who was followed out of the court one day after losing a civil suit by his client, who abused him. He called him a thief and a liar and everything that was disagreeable, and Mr. Petigru paid not the slightest attention to him, until he called him a Federalist, and then he knocked him down. And a friend said to him: “Why, Mr. Petigru, why did you knock him down for that? That was the least offensive thing he said.” “Yes, damn him,” Petigru said, “But it was the only true thing he said.”4

Now the nations of the world have declared that they are not afraid of the truth, that they are willing to have all their affairs that are likely to lead to international complications brought into the open. One of the things that this treaty incidentally does is absolutely to invalidate all secret treaties. Everything is to be open. Everything is to be upon the table around which sit the representatives of all the world, to be looked at from the point of view of everybody—the Asiatic, the African, the American, the European. That is the promise of the future; that is the security of the future. I hope that no attempts will be made to qualify or embarrass the great process which is inevitable, and I confidently predict that some day we shall look back with surprise upon the fact that men in America, above all places, should ever have hesitated to do this great thing.

It has been a privilege, my fellow citizens, to make this simple presentation of a great theme to you, and I am happy in carrying away with me recollections of the generous response you have made to a plea which I can only characterize as a plea which has come from the heart of a true American.

#After-Dinner Remarks in Seattle, September 13, 1919

Mr. Spangler,1 ladies and gentlemen, it was agreed that I should make no address on this occasion, and I am not going to inflict upon you anything that could bear so dignified a name. But when Mr. Spangler asked me if I would extend a word of greeting to the audience, I at once thought of the wonderful greeting that you and your fellow citizens have extended to me. And the fact I have been so warmed in my heart by that greeting would make it indeed ungracious if I did not say how much I have appreciated your welcome and how delightful it is to be associated with you, even for a few hours in this great city of Seattle.

I have been in Seattle before, when I attracted less attention.2 I admired the city then, as I admire it still, and I could see it better then than I have seen it today. Today I have had too much of an escort to be really able to see the new features of the city with which I was not acquainted. I was reminded of some of our experiences on the other side of the water, when we had to be particular not to let anybody know we were going to a particular place for fear we would be escorted by so many persons that we would not see the place. And I have found in Washington that I am not to see the interesting things in Washington until my term is over, because all the officials in any public building feel it necessary to escort me all over the building, and either I will see the things I did not go to see, or I see nothing.

But, jesting aside, my fellow citizens, it was very delightful to see so many friendly faces on these beautiful streets. What I liked about it was not so much the cheers as the facial expressions that accompanied the cheers. They made me feel really welcome, and I could only fancy and hope that it was a reflection in their faces of the way I felt towards them. I suppose that a man in public life must renew himself by direct contact with his fellow citizens to get the feel of the great power of opinion and sentiment that exists, and nothing else heartened me so much as I have crossed the country as to feel the uniformity of sentiment from one ocean to the other.

There is no essential division in the thought or purpose of the American people, and the interesting thing to me is their steadiness. No amount of debate will set them off their balance in their thinking, because their thinking is based upon fundamental impulses of right. What they want to know is not the difficulties, but the duties ahead. If you point the duties out to them, they have a contempt for the difficulties. It is that consciousness we found in [254page icon] moving from one part of this beloved country to another that makes me so profoundly proud to be an American. It was not, indeed, my choice to be an American, because I was born in it, and I suppose that I can’t ascribe any credit to myself for being an American. But I do claim the profoundest pleasure in sharing the sentiments and in having had the privilege for a few short years of trying to express the sentiment of this free nation, to which all the world looks for inspiration and guidance.

That is the dominating thought I had—I won’t say the dominating thought—it is the controlling knowledge that I have. For I learned on the other side of the water that all the world was looking to us for its inspiration, and we will not deny it to them.

#An Address in the Seattle Arena, September 13, 1919

Mr. Chairman, my fellow countrymen, I esteem it a great privilege to have the occasion to stand before this great audience and expound some part of the great question that is now holding the attention of America and the attention of the world.

I was led to an unpleasant consciousness today of the way in which the debate that is going on in America has attracted the attention of the world. I read in today’s papers the comments of one of the men2 who was recently connected with the Imperial Government of Germany, saying that some aspects of this debate seemed to him like the red that precedes a great dawn. He saw in it the rise of a certain renewed sympathy with Germany. He saw in it an opportunity to separate America from the governments and peoples with whom she had associated in the war against German aggression.

And all over this country, my fellow citizens, it is becoming more and more evident that those who were the partisans of Germany are the ones who are principally pleased by some of the aspects of the debate that is now going on. The world outside of America is asking itself the question, “Is America going to stand by us now, or is it at this moment of final crisis going to draw apart and desert us?”

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I can answer that question here and now. It is not going to draw apart, and it is not going to desert the nations of the world. (applause) America responds to nothing so quickly or unanimously as a great moral challenge. It is today more ready to carry through new lines before it than it was even to carry through what it had before it when we took up arms in behalf of the freedom of the world. America is unaccustomed to military tasks, but America is accustomed to fulfilling its pledges and following its visions. (applause) The only thing that causes me uneasiness, my fellow countrymen, is not the ultimate outcome, but the impressions that may be created in the meantime by the perplexed delay. The rest of the world believes absolutely in America and is ready to follow it anywhere, and it is now a little chilled. It now asks: “Is America hesitating to lead? We are ready to give ourselves to her leadership here. Will she not accept the gift?”

And so, my fellow citizens, I think that it is my duty, as I go about the country, not to make speeches in the ordinary acceptance of that word, not to appeal either to the imagination of to the emotions of my fellow citizens, but to undertake everywhere what I want to undertake tonight, and I must ask you to be patient while I undertake it. I want to analyze for you what it is that it is proposed that we should do. Generalities will not penetrate to the heart of this great question. It is not enough to speak of the general purposes of the peace. (applause outside of building) This applause was acceptable but inopportune. Perhaps I might devise some signal when they should cheer on the outside, but if you won’t mind the sounds without, I think we can make some progress toward the heart of the great matter that I want to discuss with you.

I want you to realize just what the Covenant of the League of Nations means. I find that everywhere I go it is desirable that I should dwell upon this great theme, because in so many parts of the country men are drawing attention to little details in a way that destroys the great perspective of the great plan in a way that concentrates attention upon certain particulars which are incidental and not central. And I am going to take the liberty of reading you a list of the things which the nations adhering to the Covenant of the League of Nations undertake. I want to say by way of preface that it seems to me, and I am sure it will seem to you, not only an extraordinarily impressive list, but a list which was never proposed for the councils of the world before.

In the first place, every nation that joins the League, and that in prospect means every great fighting nation in the world, agrees to submit all controversies which are likely to lead to war either to arbitration or to thorough discussion by an authoritative body—the [256page icon] Council of the League of Nations. These great nations, all the most ambitious nations in the world except Germany, all the most powerful nations in the world, as well as the weak ones, all the nations which we have supposed had imperialistic designs, say that they will do either one or the other of two things in case a controversy arises that cannot be settled by ordinary diplomatic correspondence. They will either frankly submit it to arbitration and absolutely abide by the arbitral verdict, or they will submit all the facts, all the documents, and the Council of the League of Nations will be given six months in which to discuss the whole matter and leave to publish the whole matter. And, at the end of six months, will still refrain for three months more from going to war, whether they like the opinion of the Council or not.

In other words, they agree to do a thing which would have made the recent war with Germany absolutely impossible. If there had been a League of Nations in 1914, whether Germany belonged to it or not, Germany would never have dared to attempt the aggressions which she did attempt, because she would have been called to the bar of the opinion of mankind and would have known that, if she did not satisfy that opinion, mankind would unite against her. You had only to expose the German case to public discussion to make it certain that the German case would fail; Germany would not dare attempt to act upon it. It was the universal opinion on the other side of the water when I was over there that, that if Germany had thought that England would have aided France and Russia, she never would have gone in. And if she had dreamed that America would throw her mighty weight into the scale, it would have been inconceivable. The only thing that reassured the deluded German people after we entered the war was the lying statement of her public men that we could not get our troops across the sea, because Germany knew if America ever got within striking distance, the story was done. (great applause and shouts) And here all the nations of the world, except Germany, for the time being at any rate, give notice that they will unite against any nation that has a bad case, and they agree that in their own case they will submit to prolonged discussion.

And there is nothing so chilling as discussion to a hot temper. (laughter and applause) If you are fighting mad and yet I can induce you to talk it over for half an hour, you won’t be fighting mad at the end of the half hour. I know a very wise schoolmaster in North Carolina3 who said that, if any boy in that school fought another, except according to the rules, he would be expelled. There [257page icon] would not be any great investigation; the fact that he had fought would be enough; he would go home; but that if he was so mad that he had to fight, all he had to do was to come to the headmaster and tell him that he wanted to fight. The headmaster would arrange the ring, would see that the fight was conducted according to the Marquess of Queensberry’s rules, with an umpire and a referee, and that the thing was fought to a finish. And the consequence was that there were no fights in that school. (laughter and applause) The whole arrangement was too cold-blooded. By the time all the arrangements had been made, all the fighting audacity had gone out of the contestants.

And that little thing illustrates a great thing. Discussion is destructive when wrong is intended, and all the nations of the world agree to put their case before the judgment of mankind. Why, my fellow citizens, that has been the dream of thoughtful reformers for generation after generation. (applause) Somebody seems to have conceived the notion that I originated the idea of a league of nations. I wish I had. I would be a very proud man if I had. But I did not. I was expressing the avowed aspirations of the American people, avowed by nobody so loudly, so intelligently, or so constantly as the greater leaders of the Republican party. (great applause) When the Republicans take that road, I take off my hat and follow; I don’t care whether I lead or not. I want the great result which I know is at the heart of the people that I am trying to serve.

In the second place, all of these great nations agree to boycott any nation that does not submit a perilous question either to arbitration or to discussion, and to support each other in the boycott. There is no “if” or “but” about that in the Covenant. It is agreed that, just so soon as any member state, or any outside state, for that matter, refuses to submit its case to the public opinion of the world, its doors shall be locked; that no country shall trade with it, no telegraphic message shall leave it or enter it, no letter shall cross its borders either way; there shall be no transactions of any kind between the citizens of the members of the League and the Covenant-breaking state. (applause)

That is the remedy that thoughtful men have advocated for several generations. They have thought, and thought truly, that war was barbarous and that a nation that resorted to war when its cause was unjust was unworthy of being consorted with by free people anywhere. And the boycott is an infinitely more terrible instrument than war. (applause) Excepting our own singularly fortunate country, I cannot think of any other country that can live upon its own resources. And the minute you lock the door, then the pinch of the thing becomes intolerable—not only the physical [258page icon] pinch, not only the fact that you cannot get raw materials and must stop your factories, not only the fact that you cannot get food and your people must begin to starve, not only the fact that your credit is stopped, that your assets are useless—but the still greater pinch that comes when a nation knows that it is sent to Coventry and despised.

The most terrible punishment that ever happened to a condemned man is not that he is put in jail. But if he knows that he was justly condemned, what penetrates his heart is the look in other men’s eyes. It is the soul that is wounded much more poignantly than the body. And one of the things that the German nation has not been able to comprehend is that it has lost for the time being the respect of mankind. And, as Germans, when the doors of truth were opened to them after the war had begun, they began to look aghast at the probable fortunes of Germany. For if the world does not trust them, if the world does not respect them, if the world does not want Germans to come as immigrants any more, what is Germany to do? Germany’s worst punishment, my fellow citizens, is not in the treaty. It is in her relations with the rest of mankind for the next generation. (applause)

And the boycott is what is substituted for war.

In the third place, all the members of this great association pledge themselves to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other member states. That is the famous Article X that you hear so much about. And Article X, my fellow citizens, whether you want to assume the responsibility of it or not, is the heart of the pledge that we have made to the other nations of the world. Only by Article X can we be said to have underwritten civilization. (applause)

The wars that threaten mankind begin by that kind of aggression. For every other nation than Germany, in 1914, treaties stood as solemn and respected covenants. For Germany they were scraps of paper, and when she entered, when her first soldiers were upon the soil of Belgium, her honor was forfeited. That act of aggression, that failure to respect the territorial integrity of a nation whose territory she was especially bound to respect, pointed the hand along that road that is strewn with graves since the beginning of history, that road made red and ugly with the strife of men—the strife behind which lies savage cupidity, the strife behind which lies a disregard for the rights of others, and the thought concentrated upon what we want and mean to get. That is the history of war, and, unless you accept Article X, you do not cut the heart of war out of civilization.

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Belgium did not hesitate to underwrite civilization. (applause) Belgium could have had safety on her own terms if only she had not resisted the German arms—little Belgium, helpless Belgium, ravaged Belgium. Ah, my fellow citizens, I have seen some of the fields of Belgium. I rode with her fine, democratic King over some of those fields. He would say to me, “This is the village of so and so,” and there was no village there—just scattered stones all over the plain, and the plain dug deep every few feet with the holes made by exploding shells. You could not tell whether it was the earth thrown up or the house thrown down from the debris that covered the desert which the war had made.

And then we rode farther in, farther to the east, where there had been no fighting, no active campaigning, and there we saw beautiful green slopes, fields that had once been cultivated, and towns with their factories standing, but standing empty; not empty of workers merely, but empty of machinery. Every piece of machinery in Belgium that they could put on freight cars, they had taken away, and what they could not carry with them they had destroyed, under the devilishly intelligent direction of experts—great bodies of heavy machinery that never could be used again, because somebody had known where the heart of the machine lay, where to put the dynamite. The Belgians there, their buildings there, but nothing to work with, nothing to start life with again. And in the face of all that, Belgium did not flinch for a moment to underwrite the interests of mankind by saying to Germany, “We will not be bought.” (applause)

Italy could have had more by compounding with Austria in the later stages of the war than she is going to get out of the peace settlement now, but she would not compound. She, also, was a trustee for civilization, and she would not sell the birthright of mankind for any sort of material advantage. She underwrote civilization. (applause) And Serbia, the first of the helpless nations to be struck down, her armies driven from her own soil, maintained her armies on other soils, and the armies of Serbia were never dispersed. Whether they could be on their own soil or not, they were fighting for their rights and, through their rights, for the rights of civilized man. (applause) And I believe that America is going to be more willing than any other nation in the world, when it gets its voice heard, to do this same thing that those little nations did.

Why, my fellow citizens, we have been talking constantly about the rights of little nations. There is only one way to maintain the rights of little nations, and that is by the strength of great nations. (applause) And, having begun this great task, we are no quitters; we are going to see it through. (applause and cheers) The red that [260page icon] this German counselor of state saw upon the horizon was not the red of any dawn that will reassure the people who checked the wrong that Germany did. It was the first red glare of the fire that is going to consume the wrong in the world. (applause) And as that moral fire comes creeping on, it is going to purify every field of blood upon which men sacrificed their lives. It is going to redeem France; it is going to redeem Belgium; it is going to redeem devastated Serbia; it is going to redeem the fair land to the north of Italy, and set men on their feet again, to look fate in the face and have again that hope which is the only thing that leads men forward. So this covenant is the heart of the League.

In the next place, every nation agrees to join in advising what shall be done in case one of the members fails to keep that promise. There is where you have been misled, my fellow countrymen. You have been led to believe that the Council of the League of Nations could say to the Congress of the United States, “Here is a war, and here is where you come in.” Nothing of the sort is true. The Council of the League of Nations is to advise what is to be done, and I have not been able to find in the dictionary any meaning of the word “advise,” except “advise.” (laughter and applause) But let us suppose that it means something else; let us suppose there is some legal compulsion upon the advice. The advice can’t be given except by a unanimous vote of the Council and an affirmative vote of the United States. We are a permanent member, or will be a permanent member, of the Council of the League of Nations, and no such advice is ever going to be given unless the United States votes “aye,” with one exception. If we are parties to the dispute, we cannot vote. But, my fellow citizens, I want to remind you, if we are parties to the dispute, we are in the war anyhow—forced into war by the vote of the Council. We are forced into war by our quarrel with the other party, as we would be in any case.

There is no sacrifice in the slightest degree of the independent choice of the Congress of the United States whether it will declare war or not. (applause)

There is a peculiar impression on the part of some persons in this country that the United States is more jealous of its sovereignty than other countries. That provision was not put in there because it was necessary to safeguard the sovereignty of the United States. All the other nations wanted it, were just as keen for their veto as we were keen for ours. So there is not the slightest danger that they will misunderstand that article of the Covenant. There is only danger that some of us who are too credulous will be led to misunderstand it. (applause)

All the nations agree to join in devising a plan for disarmament, [261page icon] general disarmament. You have heard that this Covenant was a plan for bringing on war, but it is going to bring on war by means of disarmament, by establishing a permanent court of international justice. (applause) When I voted for that, I was obeying the mandate of the Congress of the United States. In a very unexpected place, namely, in a naval appropriation bill passed in 1916, it was provided—it was declared—to be the policy of the United States to bring about a general disarmament by common agreement. And the President of the United States was requested to call a conference not later than the close of the then present war for the purpose of consulting and agreeing upon a plan for a permanent court of international justice. And he was authorized, in case such an agreement should be reached, to stop the building program provided for by that naval appropriation bill. So that the Congress of the United States deliberately accepted, not only accepted but directed the President to promote an agreement of this sort for disarmament and a permanent court of international justice is. You know what a permanent court of international justice is. You cannot set up a court without respecting its decrees. You cannot make a toy of it. You cannot make a mockery of it. If, indeed, you want a court, then you must abide by the judgments of the court. And we have declared already that we are willing to abide by the judgments of a court of international justice.

All the nations agree to register their treaties and agree that no treaty that is not registered and published shall be valid. Private agreements and secret treaties are swept from the table, and one of the most dangerous instruments of international intrigue and disturbance is abolished.

They agree to join in the supervision of the government of helpless and dependent people. They agree that no nation shall hereafter have the right to annex any territory merely because people that live on it cannot prevent it, and that, instead of annexation, there shall be trusteeship; under which these territories shall be administered under the supervision of the associated nations of the world. They lay down rules for the protection of dependent persons of that sort, so that they shall not have enforced labor put upon them, so that their women and children shall be protected from unwholesome and destructive forms of labor, that they shall be kept away from the opium traffic and the traffic in arms, and agree that they will never levy armies there. They agree, in other words, to do what no nation ever agreed to do before—to treat subject nations like human beings. (applause)

They agree also to accord and maintain fair and humane conditions of labor for men, women, and children, both in their own [262page icon] countries and in all other countries to which their commercial and industrial relations extend. And, for that purpose, they agree to join in establishing and maintaining the necessary international organization. This great treaty, which we are hesitating to ratify, contains the organization by which the united councils of mankind shall attempt to lift the levels of labor and to see that men who are working with their hands are everywhere treated as they ought to be treated—upon principles of justice and equality. How many laboring men dreamed, when this war began, that four years later it would be possible for all the great nations of the world to enter into a covenant like that?

They agree to entrust the League with the general supervision of all international agreements with regard to traffic in women and children, traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs. They agree to entrust the League with general supervision of the trade in arms and ammunition with the countries in which the control of this traffic is necessary in the common interest. They agree to join in obtaining and maintaining freedom of communications and transit and equitable treatment for commerce in respect of all the members of the League. They agree to cooperate in an endeavor to take steps for the control and the prevention of disease. They agree to encourage and promote the establishment and cooperation of duly authorized voluntary national Red Cross organizations for the improvement of health, the prevention of disease, and mitigation of suffering throughout the world.

I ask you, my fellow citizens, is that not a great peace document and a great humane document? (applause) Is it conceivable that America, the most progressive and humane nation in the world, should refuse to take the same responsibility upon herself that all the other great nations take in supporting this great Covenant?

You say: “It isn’t likely that the treaty will be rejected. It is only likely that there will be certain reservations.” Very well, I want very frankly to tell you what I think about that. If the reservations do not change the treaty, then it is not necessary to make them part of the resolution of ratification. If all that you desire is to say what you understand the treaty to mean, no harm can be done by saying it. But if you want to change the treaty, if you want to alter the phraseology so that the meaning is altered, if you want to put in reservations which give the United States a position of special privilege or a special exemption from responsibility among the members of the League, then it will be necessary to take the treaty back to the conference table.

And, my fellow citizens, the world is not in a temper to discuss this treaty over again. (applause) The world is just now more [263page icon] profoundly disturbed by social and economic conditions than it ever was before. And the world demands that we shall come to some sort of settlement which will let us get down to business and purify and rectify our affairs. (applause) This is not only the best treaty that can be obtained, but I want to say—because I played only a small part in framing it—that it is a sound and good treaty. (applause) And America, above all nations, should not be the nation that puts obstacles in the way of the peace of nations and the peace of mind of the world.

The world hasn’t anywhere at this moment, my fellow countrymen, peace of mind. Nothing has struck me so much in recent months as the unaccustomed anxiety on the faces of the people. I am aware that men do not know what is going to happen, and that they know that it is just as important to them what happens in the rest of the world, almost, as what happens in America. America not only has connections with all the rest of the world, but she has necessary dealings with all the rest of the world. And no man is fatuous enough to suppose that if the rest of the world is disturbed and disordered, the disturbance and disorder are not going to extend to the United States.

The center of our anxiety, my fellow citizens, is in that pitiful country to which our hearts go out—that great mass of mankind whom we call the Russians. (applause) I never had the good fortune to be in Russia, but I know many persons who know that lovable people intimately. They all tell me that there is not a people in the world more generous, more simple, more kind, more naturally addicted to friendship, more passionately attached to peace than the Russian people. And yet, because the grip of terror that the autocratic power of the Czar had upon them, they were unable to bear it and threw it off. And they have come under a terror even greater than that. They have come under the terror of the power of men whom nobody knows how to find. One or two names everybody knows, but the rest—intrigue, terror, informing, spying, military power, the seizure of all the food obtainable in order that the fighting men may be fed and the rest go starved. And these men have been appealed to again and again by the civilized governments of the world to call a constituent assembly and let the Russian people say what sort of government they want to have, and they will not, they dare not, do it.

And that picture is before the eyes of every nation. Shall we get into the clutch of another sort of minority? My fellow citizens, I am going to devote every influence I have and all the authority I have from this time on to see to it that no minority commands the United States. (long and continuous applause and shouts)

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It heartens me, but it does not surprise me, to know that that is the verdict of every man and woman here. But, my fellow citizens, there is no use passing that verdict unless we are going to take part, and a great part, a leading part, in steadying the councils of the world. (applause) Not that we are afraid of anything except the spread of moral defection, and moral defection cannot come except where men have lost faith, lost hope, have lost confidence. And, having seen the attitude of the other peoples of the world towards America, I know that the whole world will lose heart unless America consents to show the way.

It was pitiful, on the other side of the sea, to have delegation after delegation from peoples all over the world come to the house I was living in in Paris and seek conference with me to beg that America would show the way. It was touching. It made me very proud, but it made me very sad—proud that I was the representative of a nation so regarded, but very sad to feel how little of all the things that they had dreamed we could accomplish for them. But we can pledge this, my fellow citizens: we can, having taken a pledge to be faithful to them, redeem the pledge. (applause) And we shall redeem the pledge. (applause)

I look forward to the day when all this debate will seem in our recollection like a strange mist that came over the minds of men here and there in the nation, like a groping in the fog, having lost the way, the plain way, the beaten way, that America had made for itself for generations together. And we shall then know that of a sudden, upon the assertion of the real spirit of the American people, we came to the edge of the mist, and outside lay the sunny country where every question of duty lay plain and clear and where the great tramp, tramp of the American people sounded in the ears of the whole world, and they knew that the armies of God were on their way. (applause)

#A Luncheon Address in Portland, September 15, 1919

Mr. Jackson, ladies and gentlemen: I suppose that you have all heard of the accident to which Mr. Jackson has just alluded. One of the cars carrying some of the newspaper correspondents, who were accompanying my party, met with a very serious accident, and I am afraid the results were rather tragic. That naturally makes me feel somewhat depressed, because I have got to know the fine men who were injured and shall feel that, if I leave them behind, wounded, I shall leave very good friends and very estimable men behind. But I am sure that they would not wish me to omit to say how happy I am to be in the presence of a company like this.

As I return to Portland,1 I can’t help remembering that I learned a great deal in Oregon. I used to prove, when I was a teacher, to my satisfaction—I don’t know whether it was to the satisfaction of my classes or not—that the initiative and referendum would not work. I came to Oregon to find that they did work, (laughter) and [278page icon] have ever since been apologizing for my earlier opinion. Because I have always taken this attitude toward facts—that I never let them get me if I see them coming first. (laughter) There is nothing I respect so much as a fact. There is nothing that is so formidable as a fact. And the real difficulty in all political reform is to know whether you can translate your theories into facts or not, whether you can safely pick out the operative ideas and leave aside the inoperative ideas. For I think you will all agree with me that the whole progress of human affairs is the progress of ideas—not the ideas in the abstract form, but the ideas in the operative form—certain conceptions of justice and of freedom and of right that have got into men’s natures and led those natures to insist upon the realization of those ideas in experience and in action.

And the whole trouble about our civilization, as it looks to me, is that it has grown complex faster than we have adjusted the simpler ideas to the existing circumstances. So that there was a time when men would do in their business what they would not do as individuals. There was a time when they submerged their individual consciences in a corporation and persuaded themselves that it was legitimate for a corporation to do what they individually never would have dreamed of doing. That is what I mean by saying that the organization has become complex faster than our adjustment of the simpler ideas of justice and right to the developing circumstances of our civilization.

Now, I say that because the errand that I am on concerns a subject that lies at the heart of all progress. I think we are all now convinced that we have not reached the right and final organization of our industrial society; that there are many features of our social life that ought to undergo correction; that while we call ourselves democrats—with a little “d,” I mean—while we believe in democratic government, we have not seen yet the successful way of making our life in fact democratic; that we have allowed classes to disclose themselves. We have allowed lines of cleavage to be run through our communities, so that there are antagonisms set up that breed heat, because they breed friction. And the world must have leisure and order in which to see that these things are set right, and the world cannot have leisure and order unless it has a guaranteed peace.

For example, if the United States should conceivably—I think it inconceivable—but if it should conceivably stay out of the League of Nations, it would stay out at this cost: we would have to see that, since we were not going to join our force with other nations, our force was formidable enough to be respected by other nations. We [279page icon] would have to maintain a great army and a great navy. We would have to do something more than that: we would have to concentrate authority sufficiently to be able to use the physical force of the nation quickly upon occasion. All of that is absolutely antidemocratic in its influence. All of that means that we should not be giving ourselves the leisure of thought or the release of material resources necessary to work out our own methods of civilization, our own methods of industrial organization and production and distribution; and our problems are exactly the problems of the rest of the world.

I am more and more convinced, as I come in contact with the men who are trying to think for other countries, as we are trying to think for this one, that our problems are identical, only there is this—I was about to say temporary difference. I hope it will be a permanent difference. The peoples of other countries have lost confidence in their governments. Some of them have lost confidence in their form of government. That point, I hope and believe, has not been reached in the United States. We have not lost confidence in our government. I am not now speaking of our administration. (laughter) I am not thinking of that but of our method of government. We believe that we can manage our own affairs and that we have the machinery through which we can manage our own affairs, and that no clique or special interest is powerful enough to run away with it. And the other countries of the world believe that. They believe that we are successfully organized for justice, and they want to follow the lead. And if we don’t take the lead, then we throw them back upon things in which they have no confidence and in danger of universal disorder and discontent in the midst of which it will be impossible to govern our own affairs with successful and with constant achievement.

So that, whether you will or not, our fortunes are tied in with the rest of the world. And the choice that we have to make now is whether we will receive the influences of the rest of the world and be affected by them, or dominate the influences of the world and lead it. (applause) That is a tremendous choice to make, but it is exactly that tremendous choice that we have to make. And I deeply regret the suggestions which I hear made on some sides that we should take advantage of the present situation in the world, but should not shoulder any of the responsibilities. Do you know of any business or undertaking in which you can get the advantage without assuming the responsibility? What are you going to be? Boys running around the circus tent and peeping under the canvas? Men declining to pay the admission and sitting on the roof and [280page icon] looking in on the game? Or are you going to play your responsible part in the game, knowing that you are trusted as a leader and umpire both? (applause)

Nothing has impressed me more, or impressed me more painfully, if I may say so, than the degree in which the rest of the world trusts us and looks to us. I say “painfully” because I am conscious that they are expecting more than we can perform. They are expecting miracles to be wrought by the influence of the American spirit on the affairs of the world, and miracles cannot be wrought. I have again and again recited to my fellow citizens on this journey how deputations from peoples of every kind and every color and every fortune, from all over the world, thronged to the house in which I was living in Paris to ask the guidance and assistance of the United States. They did not send similar delegations to anybody else, and they did not send them to me except because they thought they had heard in what I had been saying the spirit of the American people uttered. (applause)

Moreover, you must not forget this, almost all of them had kinsmen in America. You must not forget that America is made up out of the world and that there is hardly a race of any influence in the world, hardly a Caucasian race, that has not scores of hundreds, and sometimes millions, of people living in America with whom they are in correspondence, from whom they receive the subtle suggestions of what is going on in American life, and the ideals of American life. Therefore, they feel that they know America from this contact they have had with them, and they want America to be the leading force in the world.

Why, I received delegations there speaking in tongues that I didn’t know anything about. I didn’t know what family they belonged to—what family of languages they belonged to. Fortunately for me they always brought an interpreter along who could speak English. And one of the significant facts was that the interpreter almost always was some rather young man who had lived in America. He didn’t talk English to me; he talked American to me. (laughter and applause) And there are subtle differences, which are distinguishable to me. (laughter) And so there always seemed to be a little link of some sort tying them up with us, tying them up with us in fact, in relationship, in blood, as well as in life, and the world will be turned back to cynicism if America goes back on it.

We daren’t go back on it, because, I ask you even as a business proposition, whether it is most useful to trade with a cynic or an optimist. I don’t like to trade with a man with a grouch. I don’t like to trade with a man who begins with not believing anything that I [281page icon] am telling him. I like to begin with a man who is more or less susceptible to the eloquence which I address to him. (laughter and applause) And a salesman has a much longer job if he approaches a grouch than if he approaches a friend.

This trivial illustration illustrates, my fellow citizens, our relations to the rest of the world. If we don’t do what the rest of the world expects of us, all the rest of the world will have a grouch towards America. You will find it a hard job to reestablish your credit in the world, and back of financial credit lies mental credit. There is not a bit of credit that hasn’t got an element of assessment of character. You don’t limit your credits to men who can put up the collateral, who have the assets. You extend it also to men in whose characters and abilities you can speculate—you think they are going to make good. Your credit is sort of a bet on their capacity, and that is the largest element in the kind of credit that expands enterprise. The credit that merely continues enterprise is based upon assets and past accomplishment, but the credit that expands enterprise is based upon your assessments of character. Now, if you are going to put into the world this germ, I shall call it, of American enterprise and American faith and American vision, then you must be the principal partners in the new partnership which the world is forming. (applause)

I take leave to say, without intending the least disrespect to anybody, that a man who opposes that proposition either has no imagination or no knowledge, or is a quitter. (great applause) America has put her hand to this great enterprise already, in the men she sent overseas, and their part was the negative part merely. They were sent over there to see that a malign influence did not interfere with the just fortunes of the world. They stopped her, but they did not accomplish anything constructive, and what is the use clearing the table if you are going to put nothing on it? What is the use clearing the ground if you are not going to erect any building? What is the use of going to the pains that we went to, to draw up the specifications of the new building and then saying, “We will have nothing to do with its erection?”

For the specifications of this treaty were American specifications, and we have got not only to be the architects, drawing up the specifications, but we have got to be the contractors, too. (laughter and applause) Isn’t it a job that is worthwhile? Isn’t it worthwhile, now that the chance has at last come, in the Providence of God, that we should show the world, demonstrate to the world, that America is what she claimed that she was? (applause) Every drop of blood I have in me gets up and shouts when I think of the opportunity that America has.

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I come of a race that, being bred on barren hills and unfertile plains in Scotland, being obliged to work where work was hard, somehow has the best zest in what it does when the job is hard. (applause) And I was saying the other night—what I find my friend, Mr. Jackson, was kind enough to read—I never take the liberty of assuming that people have read what I have said, (laughter) but Mr. Jackson was kind enough to read what I said about my ancestry and about the implications of it. I come of a certain stock that raised Cain in the northern part of the island of Great Britain (laughter) under the name of the Covenanters. They met in a churchyard—they were church people, and they had a convention out of doors—and on the top of a flat tombstone they signed an immortal document called the “Solemn League and Covenant,” which meant that they were going to stand by their religious principles in spite of the crown of England and the force of England and every other influence—whether of men or the devil, so long as any of them lived. (applause)

Now, I have seen men of all nations sit around a table in Paris and sign a solemn league and covenant. They have become Covenanters, and I remain a Covenanter. (great applause and cheers) We are going to see this job through no matter what influences of evil withstand it. (applause) Nothing has heartened me more on this journey than to feel that that is really the judgment of our fellow citizens.

America is made up, as I have just said, out of all sorts and elements, and it is singularly a homogeneous people, after all—homogeneous in its ideals, not in its blood; homogeneous in its infection which it has caught from a common light; homogeneous in its purpose. Every man has a sort of consciousness that America is put into the world for a purpose that is different in some respects from the purposes conceived by any other national organization.

And so throughout America you have got a conducting medium. You don’t put forth an American idea and find it halted by this man and that and the other, except he be particularly asleep or cantankerous, but it spreads, it spreads by the natural contact of similar ideas and similar ambitions and similar hopes. For, my fellow citizens, the only thing that lifts the world is hope. The only thing that can save the world is such arrangements as will convince the world that hope is not altogether without foundation. It is the spirit that is in us that is unconquerable. You can kill the bodies of insurgent men who are fighting for liberty, but the more of them that you kill, the more you seem to strengthen the spirit that springs up out of the bloody ground where they fell. The only thing in the world that is unconquerable is the thought of men.

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So that, when one looks back to that legendary story of the Middle Ages, of certain men fighting under the semisavage chiefs of that obscure time, who refused to obey the order of their chief because they considered it inconsistent with the traditions of their tribe, he said, “Don’t you know that I have the power to kill you?” They said, “Yes, and don’t you know that we have the power to die cursing you? You can’t cut our spirits in two. You can’t do anything but lay our bodies low and helpless. And if you do, there will spring, like dragon’s teeth out of the earth, armed forces which will overcome you.”

And this is the field of the spirit here in America. This is the field of the single unconquerable force that there is in the world. And when the world learns, as it will learn, that America has put her whole force into the common harness of civilization, then they will know that the wheels are going to turn, the loads are going to be drawn, men are going to begin to ascend those difficult heights of hope which have sometimes seemed so inaccessible. (applause) I am glad for one to have lived to see this day. I have lived to see a day in which, after saturating myself most of my life in the history and traditions of America, I seem suddenly to see a culmination of American hope and history—all the orators seeing their dreams realized, if their spirits are looking on; all the men who spoke the noblest sentiments for America heartened with the sight of a great nation responding to and acting upon those dreams, saying, “At last, the world knows America as the savior of the world!” (great applause and cheers)

#An Address in the Portland Auditorium, September 15, 1919

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Irvine,1 my fellow countrymen: Mr. Irvine has very eloquently stated exactly the errand upon which I have come. I have come to confer, face to face, with you on one of the most solemn occasions that has ever confronted this nation. As I have come along through the country and stopped at station, after station, the first to crowed around the train have almost always been little children—bright-eyed little boys, excited little girls, children all seeming sometimes of the same generation. And I thought, as I [284page icon] looked upon them from the car platform, that, after all, it was they to whom I had come to report.

I had come to report with regard to the safety and honor of subsequent generations of America. And I felt that, if I could not fulfill the task to which I had set my hand, I would have to say to mothers with boy babies at their breasts: “You have occasion to weep. You have occasion to fear the past as only a prediction of the future, and all this terrible thing that your brothers and husbands and sweethearts have been through may have to be gone through with again.” Because, as I was saying to some of your fellow citizens today, the task—that great and gallant task—which our soldiers performed is only half finished. They prevented a great wrong. They prevented it with a spirit and courage and with an ability that will always be written on the brightest pages of our record of gallantry and of force.

I do not know when I have been so proud, as an American, as when I have seen our boys deploy on the other side of the sea. On Christmas Day last, on an open stretch of country, I saw a great division march past me,2 with all the arms of the service, walking with that swing which is so familiar to our eyes, with that sense of power and confidence and audacity which is so characteristic of America. And I seemed to see the force that had saved the world. But they merely prevented something. They merely prevented a particular nation from doing a particular, unspeakable thing to civilization. And their task is not complete only we see to it that it has not to be done over again, unless we fulfill the promise which we made to them and to ourselves. This was not only a war to defeat Germany, but a war to prevent the recurrence of any such wrong as Germany had attempted; it was a war to put an end to the wars of aggression forever.

There is only one means of doing that, my fellow citizens. I found quoted in one of your papers the other day a passage so apposite that I do not know that I can do better than read it as the particular thing that it is found necessary to do:

“Nations must unite as men unite in order to preserve peace and order. The great nations must be so united as to be able to say to any single country, ‘You must not go to war,’ and they can say that effectively when the country desiring war knows that the force which the united nations apply behind peace is irresistible. In differences between individuals, the decision of a court is final, because in the last resort the entire force of the community is behind the court decision. In differences between nations which go [285page icon] beyond the limited range of arbitral questions, peace can only be maintained by putting behind it the force of united nations determined to uphold it and prevent war.”

That is a quotation from an address said to have been delivered at Union College in June 1915, a year after the war began, by Mr. Henry Cabot Lodge, of Massachusetts. (laughter and applause) I entirely concur in Senator Lodge’s conclusion, and I hope I shall have his cooperation in bringing about the desired result. (laughter and applause) In other words, the only way we can prevent the unspeakable thing from happening again is that the nations of the world should unite and put an irresistible force behind peace and order. There is only one conceivable way to do that, and that is by means of a league of nations. The very description is a definition of a league of nations, and the only thing that we can debate now is whether the nations of the world, having met in a universal congress and formulated a covenant as the basis for a league of nations, we are going to accept that or insist upon another. I don’t find any man anywhere rash or bold enough to say that he does not desire a league of nations. I only find men here and there saying that they do not desire this League of Nations, and I want to ask you to reflect upon what that means. And in order to do that I want to draw a picture for you, if you will be patient with me, of what occurred in Paris.

In Paris were gathered the representatives of nearly thirty nations from all over the civilized globe, and even from some parts of the globe which in our ignorance of it we have not been in the habit of regarding as civilized. And out of that great body were chosen the representatives of fourteen nations, representing all parts of the great stretches of people of the world which the conference as a whole represented. The representatives of those fourteen nations were constituted a Commission on the League of Nations. The first resolution passed by the conference of peace in Paris was a resolution in favor of a league of nations, setting up a commission to formulate a league of nations. It was the thought foremost in the mind of every statesman there, who knew that his errand was in vain in Paris if he went away without achieving the formation of a league of nations, that he dared not go back and face his people unless he could report that the efforts in that direction had been successful.

That commission sat day after day, evening after evening. I had the good fortune to be a member of the commission, and I want to testify to the extraordinary good temper in which the discussions were conducted. I want to testify that there was a universal endeavor to subordinate as much as possible international rivalry and [286page icon] conflicting international interests and come out upon a common ground of agreement in the interest of the world. I want to testify that there were many compromises, but no compromises that sacrificed the principle, and that, although the instrument as a whole represented certain mutual concessions, it is a constructive instrument and not a negative instrument. I shall never lose, so long as I live, the impression of generous, high-minded, statesmanlike cooperation which was manifested in that interesting body. It included representatives of the most powerful nations, as well as the representatives of some of those that were less powerful.

I could not help thinking, as I sat there with the representatives of Italy, speaking, as it were in the tones of the long tradition of Rome, that we heard the great Latin people who had fought, fought, fought through generation after generation of strife down to this critical moment, speaking now in the councils of peace. And there sat the Prime Minister of Greece—of the ancient Greek people—lending his singular intelligence, his singular high-minded and comprehensive counsel, to the general results. There were representatives also of France, our ancient comrade in the strife for liberty. And there were the representatives of Great Britain, supposed to be most ambitious, the most desirous of ruling the world of any of the nations of the world, cooperating with a peculiar interest in the result, with a constant and manifestly sincere profession that they wanted to subordinate the interests of the British Empire, which extended over the world, to the common interests of mankind and of peace. (applause) The representatives of Great Britain I might stop and speak of for a moment. There were two of them. One of them was Lord Robert Cecil, who belonged to an ancient family in Great Britain, some of the members of which—particularly Lord Salisbury of a past generation—had always been reputed as men particularly keen to seek and maintain the advantage of the British Empire. And yet I never heard a man speak whose heart was evidently more in the task of the humane redemption of the world than Lord Robert Cecil. (applause) And alongside of him sat General Smuts, the South African Boer, the man who had fought Great Britain, the man who had fought Great Britain so successfully that, after the war was over and the Boers nominally defeated, Great Britain saw that the wisest thing she could do was to hand the government of the country over to the Boers themselves. General Botha and General Smuts were both members of the peace conference; both had been successful generals in fighting British armies. Nobody in the conference was more outspoken in criticizing some of the aspects of British policy [287page icon] than General Botha and General Smuts, and General Smuts was of the same mind with Sir Robert Cecil—they were both serving the common interests of every people everywhere.

You seem to see a sort of epitome of the history of the world in that conference. There were nations that had long been subordinate and suffering. There were nations that had been indomitably free but, nevertheless, not so free that they could really accomplish the peace that they had always held dear. And I want you to realize that this conference, made up of many minds and many nations and of many traditions, came to the same conclusion with a unanimity, an enthusiasm, and a spirit which speaks volumes for the future hopes of mankind. (applause)

Not only that, but when this Covenant was drawn up in its first form, I had the occasion—for me a very happy occasion—to return for a few weeks to this country in March last. I brought the covenant in its first shape. I submitted it in intimate conference to the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate of the United States or, rather, to the two committees of the two houses—the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate and the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the House. We discussed all parts of the document. Many suggestions were made. I took all of those suggestions with me back to Paris, and the conference on the League of Nations adopted every one of the suggestions made. (applause) No counsels were listened to more carefully or yielded to more willingly in that conference than the counsels of the United States. (applause) Some things were put into the Covenant which, personally, I did not think necessary, which seemed to me to go without saying, but which they had no objection to putting in explicitly.

For example, take the Monroe Doctrine. As a matter of fact, the Covenant sets up for the world a Monroe Doctrine. (applause) What is the Monroe Doctrine? The Monroe Doctrine is that no nation shall come to the western hemisphere and try to establish its power or interfere with the self-government of people in this hemisphere; that no power shall extend its governing and controlling influence in any form to either of the Americas.

Very well; that is the doctrine of the Covenant. No nation shall anywhere extend its power or seek to interfere with the political independence of the peoples of the world. (applause) And, inasmuch as the Monroe Doctrine had been made the universal doctrine, I did not think that it was necessary to mention it particularly. But when I suggested that it was the desire of the United States that it should be explicitly recognized, it was explicitly recognized, for it is written in there that nothing in the Covenant shall [288page icon] be interpreted as affecting the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. (applause) The Monroe Doctrine is left intact, and the United States is left free to enforce it. (applause)

But that is only an example. The members of the Foreign Relations Committee and the Committee on Foreign Affairs did not see it anywhere stated explicitly in the Covenant that a member of the League could withdraw. I told them that the matter had been discussed in the Commission on the League and that it had been the universal opinion that, since it was a combination of sovereigns, any of the sovereigns had the right to withdraw from it. But when I suggested that that could be explicitly put in, no objection was made whatever, and, at the suggestion of the United States, it was explicitly provided that any member of the League could withdraw. Provision was made that two years’ notice should be given, which I think everybody will recognize as perfectly fair, so that no nation is at liberty suddenly to break down this thing upon which the hope of mankind rests. But, with that limitation and with the provision that when they withdraw they shall have fulfilled all their international obligations, they are perfectly free to withdraw. And when gentlemen dwell upon that provision—that we must have fulfilled all our international obligations—I answer all their anxieties by asking them another question: “When did America ever fail to fulfill her international obligations?” (applause) There is no judge in the matter set up in the Covenant, except the conscience of the withdrawing nation and the opinion of mankind. And I, for one, am proud enough American to dismiss from my mind all fear of at any time going before the judgment of mankind on the conduct of the United States, knowing that we will go with clean hands and righteous purpose. (applause)

But I am merely illustrating now the provisions that were put in at the suggestion of the United States. Without exception, the suggestions of the United States were adopted, and I want to say, because it may interest you, that most of these suggestions came from Republican sources. (applause) I say that, my fellow citizens, not because it seems to me to make the least difference among Americans in a great matter like this which party such things came from, but because I want to emphasize in every discussion of this matter the absolutely nonpartisan character of the Covenant and the treaty. (great applause and cheers) I am not in favor of the ratification of this treaty, including the Covenant of the League of Nations, because I am a Democrat. I am in favor of it because I am an American and a lover of humanity. (applause) And, if it will relieve anybody’s mind, let me add that it is not my work, that practically every portion of the Covenant of the League of Nations [289page icon] emanates from counsels running back ten, twenty, thirty years, among the most thoughtful men in America, and that it is the fulfillment of a dream which five years ago, when the war began, would have been deemed unattainable. So that what we are discussing ought not to be disfigured, ought not to be tinged, with the least thought of domestic politics. If anybody in this audience allows himself, when thinking of this matter, to think of the elections of 1920, I want to declare that I separate myself from him. (applause)

I draw all this picture of the care with which the Covenant was drawn—every phrase scrutinized, every interest considered, the other nations at the board just as jealous of their sovereignty as we could possibly be of ours, yet willing to harness all these sovereignties in a single great enterprise of peace, and how the whole thing was not the original idea of any man in the conference, but had grown out of the counsels of hopeful and thoughtful and righteous men all over the world—because, just as there was in America a League to Enforce Peace, which even formulated a constitution for the league of peace before the conference met, before the conference was thought of, before the war began, so there were in Great Britain and in France and in Italy and, I believe, even in Germany similar associations of equally influential men, whose ideal was some time there might come an occasion when men would be sane enough and right enough to get together to do a thing of this great sort.

I draw that picture in order to show you the other side of what is going on, and I want to preface this part by saying that I hope you will not construe anything I say as indicating the least lack of respect for the men who are criticizing any portion of this treaty. I must frankly say I haven’t any respect at all for some of them, (laughter, applause and cheers) but for others, and for most of them, I have reason to have respect, for I have come into close contact and consultation with them. They are just as good Americans as I am, or as I claim to be. They are just as thoughtful of the interests of America as I try to be. They are just as intelligent as anybody who could address his mind to this thing. And my contest with them is a contest of interpretation, not a contest of intention.

All I have to urge with those men is that they are looking at this thing with too critical an eye as to the mere phraseology, without remembering the purpose that everybody knows to have been in the minds of those who framed it, and that if they go very far in attempting to interpret it by resolutions of the Senate they may, in appearance at any rate, sufficiently alter the meaning of the document to make it necessary to take it back to the council board.

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And taking it back to the council board means, among other things, taking it back to Germany. And I frankly tell you, my fellow citizens, it would set very ill upon my stomach to take it back to Germany. (laughter and applause) Germany, at our request—I may say almost at our dictation—signed the treaty and has ratified it. It is a contract, so far as her part in it is concerned. I can testify that we tried to be just to Germany. When we had heard her arguments and examined every portion of the counterproposals that she made, we wrote the treaty in its final form and then said, “Sign here.” (applause and cheers)

What else did our brave boys die for? Did they die in order that we might ask Germany’s leave to complete our victory? They died in order that we might say to Germany what the terms of victory were in the interest of justice and peace, (applause) and we were entitled to take the course that we did take. And I can only beg these gentlemen in their criticism of the treaty and in their action in the Senate not to go so far as to make it necessary to ask the consent of other nations to the interpretations which they are putting upon the treaty. I have said in all frankness that I do not see a single phrase in the Covenant of the League of Nations which is of doubtful meaning. But if they want to say what that undoubted meaning is, in other words that don’t change the undoubted meaning, I have no objection. (laughter) If they change the meaning of it, then all the other signatories have to consent. And what has been evident in the last week or two is that, on the part of some men—I believe a very few—the desire is to change the treaty, and particularly the Covenant, in a way to give America an exceptional footing.

Now, my fellow countrymen, the principle that America went into this war for was the principle of the equality of sovereign nations. (applause) I am just as much opposed to class legislation in international matters as in domestic matters. (applause) I do not, I tell you plainly, believe that any one nation should be allowed to dominate—even this beloved nation of our own—(applause) and it does not desire to dominate. I said in a speech the other night in another connection that, so far as my influence and power as President of the United States went, I was going to fight every attempt to set up a minority government. (applause)

And I was asked afterwards whom I was hitting at, what minority I was thinking of. I said: “Never mind what minority I may have been thinking of at the moment; it does not make any difference with me which minority it is, whether it is capital or labor. No sort of privilege will ever be permitted in this country.” (applause) It is a partnership or it is a mockery. It is a democracy, where the [291page icon] majority are the masters of its hopes and purposes, or the men who founded this government have been defeated and forgotten. And I am for the same principle in international affairs.

One of the things that gave the world a new and founding hope was that the great United States had said that it was fighting for the little nations as well as the great; that it regarded the rights of the little nations as equal to its own rights; that it would make no distinction between free men anywhere; that it was not fighting for a special advantage for the United States, but for an equal advantage for all free men everywhere. (applause)

Let gentlemen beware, therefore, how they disappoint the world. Let gentlemen beware how they betray the immemorial principles of the United States. Let men not make the mistake of claiming a position of privilege for the United States which gives it all the advantages of the League of Nations and none of the risks and responsibilities. (applause) The principle of equity everywhere is that, along with a right goes a duty; that if you claim a right for yourself, you must be ready to support that right for somebody else. And if you claim to be a member in a society of any sort, you must not claim the right to dodge the responsibilities and avoid the burden, but you must carry the weight of the enterprise along with the hope of the enterprise. That is the spirit of free men everywhere, and that I know to be the spirit of the United States.

Our decision, therefore, my fellow citizens, rests upon this: if we want a league of nations, we must take this League of Nations, (applause) because there is no conceivable way in which any other league of nations is obtainable. We must leave it or take it. I should be very sorry to have the United States indirectly defeat this great enterprise by asking for something—some position of privilege—which other nations in their pride cannot grant. I had a great deal rather we should say flatly, “We won’t go into the enterprise at all.”

And that, my fellow citizens, is exactly what Germany is hoping and beginning to dare to expect. I am not uttering a conjecture. I am speaking of knowledge, from things that are said in the German newspapers and by German public men. They are taking heart because the United States, they hope, is not going to stand with the other free nations of the world to guarantee the peace that has been forced upon them. They see the hope that there will be two nations standing outside the League—Germany and the United States. Germany because she must; the United States because she will. She knows that that will turn the hostility and enmity of all the other nations of the world against the United States, as their hostility is already directed against her. They do not expect that now the United States will in any way align themselves with [292page icon] Germany. They do not expect the sympathy of the United States to go out to them now. But they do expect the isolation of the United States to bring about an alienation between the United States and the other free nations of the world, which will make it impossible for the world ever to combine again against such enterprises as she was defeated in attempting. And all over this world, pro-German propaganda is beginning to be active again, beginning to try to add to the force of the arguments against the League in particular and against the treaty and the several items of the treaty. And the poison of failure is being injected into the whole fine body politic of the united world—a sort of paralysis, a sort of fear, as we should say.

What have we created? A great power which will bring peace. Will that power be amiable to us? Can we control that power? We can control it for anybody’s proper purpose—the purpose of righteousness and peace. But for that purpose we are invited to control it by the opinion of mankind, for all over the world peoples are looking to us with confidence, our rivals along with the weaker nations. They believe in the honesty of purpose and the indomitable rectitude of purpose of the United States, and they are willing to have us lead.

And I pray God that the gentlemen who are delaying this thing may presently see it in a different light. (applause) I fain would appeal to their hearts. I wonder if they have forgotten what this war meant. I wonder if they have had mothers who lost their sons take them by the hand, as they have taken mine, and looked things that their hearts were too full to speak, praying me to do all in my power to save the sons of other mothers from this terrible thing. And I have had some fine women come to me and say, as steadily as if they were saying a commonplace, “I had the honor to lose a son in the war.” How fine that is—“I had the honor to sacrifice a son for the redemption of mankind!” And yet there is a sob back of the statement, there is a tear brushed hastily away from the cheek.

A woman came up to the train the other day and seized my hand and was about to say something but turned away in a flood of tears. And I asked a stander-by what was the matter, and he said, “Why, Sir, she lost a son in France.” Now, mind you, she didn’t turn away first. I ordered her son overseas. I advised the Congress of the United States to sacrifice that son. She came to me as a friend. She had nothing in her heart except the hope that I could save other sons, though she had given hers gladly. (applause) And, God help me, I will save other sons. (applause) Through evil report and good report, through resistance and misrepresentation and every other vile thing, I shall fight my way to that goal.

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I call upon the men to whom I have referred—the honest, patriotic, intelligent men, who have been too particularly concerned in criticizing the details of that treaty—to forget the details, to remember the great enterprise, to stand with me to fulfill the hopes and traditions of the United States. (applause)

My fellow citizens, there is only one conquering force in the world. There is only one thing you can’t kill, and that is the spirit of free men. (applause) I was telling some friends today of a legendary story of the Middle Ages, of a chieftain of one of the halfcivilized peoples that overran Europe commanding some of his men to do a certain thing which they believed to be against the traditions of their tribe. They refused, and he blazed out upon them, “Don’t you know that I can put you to death?” “Yes,” they said, “and don’t you know that we can die cursing you?” He could not kill their spirits; and they knew perfectly well that if he unjustly slew them the whole spirit of their tribe would curse him. They knew that, if he did an unjust thing, out of the blood that they spilled would spring up, as it were, armed men, like dragons’ teeth, to overwhelm him. Because the thing that is vindicated in the long run is the right, and the only thing that is unconquerable is the truth. And America is believed in throughout the world because she has put spirit before material ambition. She has said that she is willing to sacrifice everything that she is and everything that she has, not only that her people may be free, but that freedom may reign throughout the world. (applause)

I hear men say—how often I heard it said on the other side of the water!—how amazing it was that America went into this war. I tell you, my fellow citizens, and I tell it with sorrow, it was universally believed on the other side of the water that we would not go into the war because we were making money out of it, and loved the money better than we loved justice. They all believed that. And when we went over there, they greeted us with amazement. They said: “These men didn’t have to come. Their territories are not invaded. Their independence is not directly threatened. Their interests were not immediately attacked, only indirectly. They were getting a great prosperity out of this calamity of ours. We were told that they worshiped the almighty dollar, and here come tramping, tramping, tramping these gallant fellows with something in their faces we never saw before, eyes lifted to the horizon, a dash that knows no discouragement, knowledge only of how to go forward, no thought of how to go backward, (great applause) 3,000 miles from home. What are they fighting for? Look at their faces and you will see the answer. They see a vision. They see a call. They see mankind redeemed. They see a great force which would wreck [294page icon] civilization. They love something they have never touched. They love the things that emanate from the throne of justice. They have come here to fight with us and for us, and they are our comrades.”

We were told by certain people in France that they went to the Fourth of July celebration last calendar year in Paris with sinking hearts. Our men had come over in numbers. They didn’t expect they would come soon enough or fast enough to save them. They went out of curiosity; and before the day was over, having merely been in the presence of these boys, they knew that Europe was saved, because they had seen what that blind man saw in the song.

You have heard that spirited song of the blind Frenchman, his boy at the window, music in the streets, the marching of troops, and he says to the lad: “See what it is. Do you see, lad? What are the colors? What are the men? Is there a banner with red and white stripes upon it? Is there a bit of heaven in the corner? Are there stars in that piece of the firmament? Ah, thank God, the Americans have come!” (applause)

It was the revelation to Europe of the heart of a great nation. They believe in that heart now. You never hear the old sneers. You never hear that we will seek our interests and not our honor. You never hear the old fear that we shall not stand by free men elsewhere who make common cause with us for justice to mankind. You hear, on the other hand, confident predictions, confident expectations, confident hope that the whole world will be steadied by the magnificent purpose and force of the United States. (applause) If I was proud as an American before I went over there—and I hope my pride has just foundation—I was infinitely more proud when I came back to feel—(applause) to feel that I could bring you this message.

And now, my fellow citizens, let us—every one of us—bind ourselves in a solemn league and covenant of our own that we will redeem this expectation of the world, that we will not allow any man to stand in the way of it, that the world shall hereafter bless and not curse us, that the world hereafter shall follow us and not turn aside from us, and that in leading we will not lead along the paths of private advantage, we will not lead along the paths of national ambition, but we will be proud and happy to lead along the paths of right, so that men shall always say that American soldiers saved Europe and American citizens saved the world. (applause)

#A Luncheon Address in San Francisco, September 17, 1919

Mrs. Mott and my fellow citizens: Mrs. Mott has very happily interpreted the feeling with which I face this great audience. I have come to get the consciousness of your support and of your sympathy at a time in the history of the world, I take leave to say, more critical than has ever been known during the history of the United States.

I have felt a certain burden of responsibility as I have mixed with my fellow countrymen across the continent, because I feared at times that there were those amongst us who did not realize just what the heart of this question is. I have been afraid that their thoughts were lingering in the past days, when the calculation was always of national advantage, and that they had not come to see the light of the new day in which men are thinking of the common advantage and safety of mankind. Because the issue is nothing else. Either we must stand apart, and in the phrase of some gentlemen, take care of ourselves, which means to antagonize others, or we must join hands with the other great nations of the world and with the weak nations of the world in seeing that justice is everywhere maintained.

And quite apart from the merits of any particular question which may arise about the treaty itself, I think we are under a certain moral compulsion to accept this treaty.

In the first place, my fellow citizens, it was laid down according to American specifications. The initial suggestions upon which this treaty is based emanated from America. I would not have you understand me as meaning that they were ideas confined to America, because the promptness with which they were accepted, the joy with which they were acclaimed in some parts of the world, the readiness of the leaders of nations that were supposed to be seeking chiefly their own interest in adopting these principles as the principles of the treaty, show that they were listening to the [312page icon] counsels of their own people, they were listening to them and knew the critical character of the new age and the necessity we were under to take any measures for the peace of the world.

Because the thing that had happened was intolerable. The thing that Germany attempted, if it had succeeded, would have set the civilization of the world back a hundred years. We have prevented it, but prevention is not enough. We have shown Germany that upon occasion—and not Germany only, but the world—that upon occasion the great peoples of the world will combine to prevent an iniquity. But we have not shown how that is going to be done in the future with a certainty that will make every other nation know that a similar enterprise must not be attempted.

Again and again, as I have crossed the continent, generous women, women I did not know, have taken me by the hand and said, “God bless you, Mr. President.” Some of them, like many of you, had lost sons and husbands and brothers. Why should they bless me? I advised Congress to declare war. I advised Congress to send their sons to their death. As commander in chief of the army, I sent them over the seas, and they were killed. Why should they bless me? Because in the generosity of their hearts, they want the sons of other women saved henceforth. And they believe that the methods proposed, at any rate, merit a very hopeful expectation that similar wars will be prevented, and that other armies will not have to go from the United States to die upon distant fields of battle. And so the moral compulsion among us, among us who at the critical stage of the world saved the world and who threw in our fortunes with all the forward-looking peoples of the world—the moral compulsion upon us to stand by and see it through is overwhelming. We cannot now turn back. We made the choice in April 1917. We cannot with honor reverse it now.

And not only is there the compulsion of honor, but there is the compulsion of interest. I never like to speak of that, because, notwithstanding the reputation that we had throughout the world before we made the great sacrifice of this war, this nation does love its honor better than it loves its interest. It does yield to moral compulsion more readily than to material compulsion. That is the glory of America. That is the spirit in which she was conceived and born. That is the mission which she has in the world. And she always has lived up to it, and, God helping her, she always will live up to it.

But if you want, as some of our fellow countrymen insist, to dwell upon the material side of it and our interest in the matter—our commercial interest—draw the picture for yourselves. The other great nations of the world are drawing together. We, who [313page icon] suggested that they should draw together in this new partnership, stand aside. We at once draw their suspicion upon us. We at once draw their intense hostility upon us. We at once renew the thing that had begun to be done before we went into the war. There was a conference in Paris2 not many months before we went into the war in which the nations then engaged against Germany attempted to draw together in an exclusive economic combination, where they should serve one another’s interest and exclude those who had not participated in the war from sharing in that interest. And just so certainly as we stay out, every market that can possibly be closed against us will be closed. So that if you merely look at it from the material point of view, of the material prosperity of the United States, we are under compulsion to stay in the partnership.

I was putting it to some gentlemen the other day who were engaged in commerce of various sorts, and I asked them, “Can you sell more easily to a man who trusts you or to a man who distrusts you?” There can be but one answer to that question. Can you sell most easily to a man who takes your goods because he cannot do without them or because he wants them and believes them the best? The thing demonstrates itself. You make all the lines of trade lines of resistance unless you prove true to the interests you have attempted.

And, then, there is a deeper compulsion even that that—the compulsion of humanity. If there is one thing that America ought to have learned more promptly than any other country, it is that, being made up out of all the ranks of humanity, in serving itself it must serve the whole human race.

Because I suppose I could not command the words which would exaggerate the present expectations of the world with regard to the United States. Nothing more thrilling, nothing more touching, happened to me on the other side of the water than the daily evidence that, not the weak peoples merely, not the peoples of countries that had been allowed to shift for themselves and had always borne the chief burden of the world’s sufferings, but the great peoples as well, the people of France as well as the people of Serbia, the people of all the nations that had looked this terror in the face, were turning to the United States and saying: “We depend on you to take the lead, to direct us and get us out of this wilderness of doubt and fear and terror.” We cannot desert humanity. We are the trustees of humanity, and we must see that we redeem the pledges which are always implicit in so great a trusteeship.

And so, feeling those compulsions—the compulsion of honor, [314page icon] the compulsion of interest, and the compulsion of humanity—I wonder what it is that is holding some minds back from acquiescence in this great enterprise of peace. I must admit to you, my fellow citizens, that I have been very much puzzled. I cannot conceive a motive adequate to hold men off from this thing. And when I examine the objections which they make to the treaty, I can but wonder if they are really thinking, or if, on the other hand, there is some emotion coming from fountains that I don’t know of which are obliging them to take this course.

Let me take the point in which my initial sympathy is most with them—the matter of the cession to Japan of the interests of Germany in Shantung, in China. I have said, I said to my Japanese colleagues on the other side of the sea, and therefore I am at liberty to say it in public, that I am not satisfied with this settlement. I think it ought to be different. But when gentlemen propose to cure it by striking that clause out of the treaty or by ourselves withholding our adherence to the treaty, they propose an irrational thing.

Let me remind you of some of the history of this business. It was in 1898 that China ceded these rights and concessions to Germany. The pretext was that some German missionaries had been killed. My heart aches, I must say, when I think how we have made an excuse of religion sometimes to work a deep wrong. The central government of China had done all it could to protect those German missionaries; their death was due to local disturbances, to local passions, to local antipathy against the foreigner. There was nothing that the Chinese government as a whole could justly be held responsible for. But suppose there had been? Two Christian missionaries are killed, and therefore one great nation robs another nation and does a thing which is fundamentally un-Christian and heathen! For there was no adequate excuse for what Germany exacted of China. I read again only the other day the phrases in which poor China was made to make the concession. She was made to make that in words dictated by Germany, in view of her gratitude for Germany for certain services rendered—the deepest hypocrisy conceivable! She was obliged to do so by force.

Then, what happened, my fellow citizens? Then Russia came in and obliged China to cede to her Port Arthur and Talien-Wan,3 not for quite so long a period, but upon substantially the same terms. Then England must needs have Weihaiwei as an equivalent concession to that which had been made to Germany. And presently certain ports and territory back of them were ceded upon similar principles to France. Everybody got in, except the United [315page icon] States, and said, “If Germany is going to get something, we will get something.” Why? No one of them was entitled to it; no one of them had any business in there on such terms.

And then, when the Japanese-Russian war came, Japan did what she has done in this war—she attacked Port Arthur and captured Port Arthur, and Port Arthur was ceded to her as a consequence of the war. Not one voice was raised in the United States against that cession—I mean, official voice. No protest was made. No protest was made by the government of the United States against the original concession of this Shantung territory to Germany. One of the highest minded men of our history was President at that time—I mean Mr. McKinley. One of the ablest men we ever had as Secretary of State, Mr. John Hay, occupied that great office. And in the message of Mr. McKinley about this transaction, he says—and I am not quoting his language—that, inasmuch as the powers that had taken these territories had agreed to keep the doors open there for our commerce, there was no reason why we should object. Just so we could trade with these stolen territories, we were willing to let them be stolen. Which of these gentlemen who are not objecting to the cession of the German rights in Shantung in China were prominently protesting against the original cession, or any one of those original cessions? It makes my heart burn when some men are so late in doing justice.

Now, in the meantime, before we got into this war, but after the war had begun, because they deemed the assistance of Japan in the Pacific absolutely indispensable, Great Britain and France both agreed that if Japan would enter the war, she could do the same thing with regard to Shantung that she had done with regard to Port Arthur, that is, she would take what Germany had in Shantung, she could keep it. She took it. She has it now—her troops are there—as spoils of war. Observe, my fellow citizens, we are not taking this thing away from China; we are taking it from Germany. China had ceded it for ninety-nine years, and, if my reckoning is correct,4 there are eighty-three of those ninety-nine to run yet.

It was Germany’s rights in Shantung, and not Chinese, that we conceded by the treaty to Japan, but with a condition—a condition which never occurred in any of these other cases—a condition which was not insisted upon at the cession of Port Arthur—upon a condition that no other nation in doing similar things in China has ever yielded to. Japan is under solemn promise to forego all sovereign rights in the province of Shantung and to retain only what private corporations have elsewhere in China—the right of [316page icon] concessionaires with regard to the operation of the railway and exploitation of the mines. Scores of foreign corporations have that right in other parts of China.

But it doesn’t stop there. Coupled with this arrangement is the League of Nations, under which Japan solemnly undertakes, with the rest of us, to respect and protect the territorial integrity of China, along with the territorial integrity of other countries of the world. And back of her promise is likewise the similar promise of every other nation—that nowhere will there come a disregard for the territorial integrity or the political independence of that great helpless people, lying there hitherto as an object of prey in the great Orient. It is the first time in the history of the world that anything has been done for China. And, sitting around our council board in Paris, I put this question: “May I expect that this will be the beginning of the retrocession to China of the exceptional rights which other governments have enjoyed there?” And the responsible representatives of the other great governments said, “Yes; you may expect it.”

Expect it? Why, of course I expect it. Your attention is constantly drawn to Article X, and that is the article—the heart of the Covenant—which guarantees the political integrity, not only of China, but of other countries more helpless even than China. But besides Article X, there is Article XI, which makes it the right of every member of the League, big or little, influential or not influential, to draw attention to anything, anywhere, that is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends.

Whenever formerly anything was done in detriment of the interests of China, we had to approach the government that did it with apologies. We had to say, as it were, “This is none of our business, but we would like to suggest that this is not in the interests of China.” I am repeating, not the words but the purport, of notes that I have myself signed to Japan, in which I was obliged to use all the genuflections of apology and say, “The United States Government believes that this is wrong in principle and suggest to the Japanese government that the matter be reconsidered.”

Now, when you have the treaty and the League of Nations, the representative of the United States has the right to stand up and say, “This is against the covenant of peace; it can’t be done.” And if occasion arises, we can add, “It shall not be done.”

The weak and oppressed and wronged peoples of the world have never before had a forum made for them to which they could summon their enemies in the presence of the judgment of mankind. And if there is one tribunal that the wrongdoer ought to dread [317page icon] more than any other, it is that tribunal of the opinion of mankind. Some nations keep their international promises only because they wish to obtain the respect of mankind. You remember those immortal words in the opening part of the Declaration of Independence. I wish I could quote them literally, but they run this way, that, out of respect for the opinion of mankind, the leaders of the American Revolution now state the causes which have led them to separate themselves from Great Britain. America was the first to set that example, the first to admit that right and justice and even the basis of revolution are a matter upon which mankind are entitled to form a judgment.

If we do not take part in this thing, what happens? France and England are absolutely bound to it without any qualification. The alternative, therefore, is to defend China in the future, to begin with, or else let the world go back to its old methods of rapacity, or else take up arms against France and England and Japan, and begin the shedding of blood over again, almost a fratricidal blood. Does that sound like a practical program? Does that sound like doing China a service? Does that sound like anything that is rational?

Now, to go to other matters with which I have less patience, other objections to the League.

I have spoken of Article X. Those who object to Article X object to entering the League with any responsibility whatever. They want to make it a matter of opinion merely, and not a matter of action. And they know just as well as I do that there is nothing in Article X that can oblige the Congress of the United States to declare war if it does not deem it wise to declare war. We engage with the other nations of the world to respect and preserve as against external aggression—not as against internal revolution—the territorial integrity and the independence of the other members of the League. And then, in the next sentence, it is said that the Council of the League of Nations shall advise with regard to measures which may be necessary to carry out those promises on the part of the members. And, as I have said several times in my speeches, I have in vain searched the dictionary to find any other meaning for the word “advise” than “advise.”

These gentlemen would have you believe that our armies can be ordered abroad by some other powers or by a combination of powers. They are thinking in an airtight compartment. America is not the only proud nation in the world. I can testify from my part in the councils on the other side of the sea that the other nations are just as jealous of their sovereignty as we are of ours. They would no more agree to give us the right to order out their armies than [318page icon] we would agree to give them the right to order out our army. And the advice can come from the Council only if the United States representative votes in the affirmative.

We have an absolute veto on the thing, unless we are parties to the dispute. And I want again, for I have done it several times, to call your attention to what that means. That means unless we want to seize somebody’s territory or invade somebody’s political independence. Or unless somebody else wants to seize our territory and invade our political independence. Now, I regard either of those contingencies as so remote that they are not troubling me in the least. I know the people of this country know that we will not be the aggressors in trying to execute a wrong, and, in looking about me, I don’t see anybody else that would think it wise to try it on us.

But suppose we are parties. Then is it the Council of the League that is forcing war upon us? The war is ours anyhow. We are in circumstances where it is necessary for Congress, if it wants to steal somebody’s territory or prevent somebody from stealing our territory, to go to war. So it is not the Council of the League that brings us into war at that time.

In such circumstances, it is the unfortunate circumstances which have arisen in some matter of aggression. And I want to say again that Article X is the very heart of the Covenant of the League, because all the great wrongs of the world have had their root in the seizure of territory or the control of the political independence of other people. And I believe that I speak the feeling of the people of the United States when I say that, having seen one great wrong like that attempted and having prevented it, we are ready to prevent it again.

Those are the two principal criticisms—that we do not do the impossible with regard to Shantung, and that we may be obliged to go to war. And that is all there is in either of them.

But they say, “We want the Monroe Doctrine more distinctly acknowledged.” Well, if I could have found language that was more distinct than that used, I should have been very happy to suggest it. When it is said in so many words that nothing in that document shall be construed as affecting the validity of the Monroe Doctrine, I don’t see what more it can say. But, as I say, if the clear can be clarified, I have no objection to its being clarified. The meaning is too obvious to admit of discussion. And I want you to realize how extraordinary that is—I mean, how extraordinary the provision is. Every nation in the world has been jealous of the Monroe Doctrine and studiously avoided doing or saying anything that would admit its validity. And yet here all the great nations of the world sign a document which admits its validity. That constitutes nothing less [319page icon] than a moral revolution in the attitude of the rest of the world towards America.

What does the Monroe Doctrine mean in that Covenant? It means that, with regard to aggressions upon the western hemisphere, we are at liberty to act without waiting for other nations to act. That is the Monroe Doctrine. For the Monroe Doctrine says that, if anybody tries to interfere with force in the western hemisphere, it will be regarded as an unfriendly act to the United States—not the rest of the world. And that means that the United States will look after it and won’t ask the permission of anybody else to look after it. And the document says, “Nothing in this document must be construed as interfering with that.”

So I dismiss the objections to the Monroe Doctrine, and I do so all the more because this is what happened. I brought the first draft of the Covenant to this country in March last. I then invited the Foreign Affairs Committee of the House and the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate to the White House to dinner, and after dinner we had the frankest possible conference with regard to this draft. And when I got back to Paris I carried every suggestion that was made in that conference to the conference of peace itself, or rather to the Commission on the League of Nations, which consisted of representatives of fourteen nations. And every one of the suggestions of those committees of our Senate and House was embodied in the document.

I suppose it is a pride of style. I suppose that, although the substance was embodied, they would rather write it differently. But, after all, that is a literary matter. After all, that is a question of pride in the command of the English language. And I must say that there were a great many men on that Commission on the League of Nations who seemed perfectly to understand the English language and who wished to express, not only in the English text, but in its French equivalent, exactly what we wanted to say.

One of the suggestions I carried over was that we should have a right to withdraw. I must say that I did not want to say to them, “We will go into this if you will promise us that we can scuttle the ship whenever we want to.” That did not seem a very handsome thing to propose, and I told the conference at the White House, when they raised the question, that it had been raised in the conference on the League of Nations, and that it was the unanimous opinion of the international lawyers who constituted that body that, insasmuch as this was an association of sovereigns, they had the right to withdraw. But I conceded that if that right was admitted there could be no harm in stating it. And so in the present draft of the Covenant it is stated that any member may withdraw upon two [320page icon] years’ notice, which, I think, is not an unreasonable length of time, provided that at the end of two years all the international obligations of that power under the Covenant shall have been fulfilled.

Would you wish any other conditions? Would you wish the United States to withdraw without fulfilling its obligations? Is that the kind of people we are? Moreover, have we ever failed to fulfill our international obligations? It is a point of principle with me, my fellow citizens, not to debate this question. I will not debate it with anybody—whether the United States is likely to withdraw without fulfilling its obligations. And if other gentlemen entertain that posibility and expectation, I separate myself from them.

But there is another matter of pride. They say that Great Britain—the British Empire—has six votes and we have only one. Well, it happens that our one is as big as the six, and that suits me entirely. Let me explain what I mean. There is only one thing, and that is in the Assembly, wherein the British Empire has six votes. That is not true in the Council. And there is only one thing that the Assembly votes on in which it can decide a matter without the concurrence of all the states represented upon the Council, and that is the admission of new members to the League of Nations. With regard to every other matter, for example, an amendment to the Covenant, with regard to cases referred out of the Council to the Assembly, it is provided that, if a majority of the Assembly and the representatives of all the states represented on the Council concur, that the vote shall be valid and conclusive, which means that the affirmative vote of the United States is in every instance just as powerful as the six votes of the British Empire.

I took the pains yesterday, I believe it was, on the train, to go through the Covenant again, almost sentence by sentence, to find if there was any case other than the one which I have mentioned in which that is not true, and there is no other case in which that is not true.

Of course, you will understand that, wherever the United States is a party to a quarrel and that quarrel is carried to the Assembly, we cannot vote. But, similarly, if the British Empire is a party her six representatives cannot vote. So it is an even break any way you take it, and I would rather count six as one person than six as six persons. So far as I can see, it makes me a bigger man. But the point to remember is that the energy of the League of Nations resides in the Council, not in the Assembly, and that in the Council there is a perfect equality of votes. That settles that matter, and even some of my fellow countrymen who insist upon keeping a hyphen in the middle of their names should be satisfied with that, though I must admit that I don’t care to argue anything with a [321page icon] hyphen. A man that puts anything else before the word “American” is no comrade of mine. And yet I am willing to discomfort him with the statement of a fact.

Those are the objections to yielding to these compulsions of honor, interest, and humanity. And it is because of the nature of these objections—their flimsiness, the impossibility of supporting them with conclusive argument—that I am profoundly puzzled to know what is back of the opposition to the League of Nations. I know one of the results, and that is to raise the hope in the minds of the German people that, after all, they can separate us from those who were our associates in the war. I know that the pro-German propaganda, which had heretofore not dared to raise its head again, has now boldly raised its head and is active all over the United States. These are disturbing and illuminating circumstances.

Pray understand me. I am not accusing some of the honorable men whose objections I am trying to answer with trying to draw near to Germany. That is not my point. But I am saying that what they are attempting to do is exactly what Germany desires, and that it would touch the honor of the United States very much if, at the end of this great struggle, we should seek to take the position which our enemies desire and our friends deplore.

But I am arguing the matter only because I am a very patient man. I haven’t the slightest doubt as to what the result is going to be. I have felt the temper and high purpose of this great people as I have crossed this wonderful land of ours. And one of the things that make it most delightful to stand here is to remember that the people of the Pacific Coast were the first to see the new duty in its entirety. It is a remarkable circumstance that you people, who were farthest from the field of conflict, most remote from the conflict of interests which stirred so many peoples, yet outdid the rest of the country in volunteering for service and volunteering your money.

As I came through that wonderful mountain country to the north of us it occurred to me one day that the aspiring lines, those wonderful lines of the mountains, must lead people’s eyes to be drawn upwards, to look into the blue serene and see things apart from the confusions of affairs, to see the real, pure vision of the interests of humanity; and that, after all, the spirit of America is best expressed where people withdraw their thoughts from the entangling interests of everyday life, purify their motives from all that are selfish and groveling and animal, based upon the desire to seize and get, and turn their thoughts to those things that are worth living for.

The only thing that makes the world inhabitable is that it is [322page icon] sometimes ruled by its purest spirits. I want to leave this illustration, which I have often used, in your minds as containing what I mean. Some years ago, someone said to me that the modern world was a world in which the mind was monarch. And my reply was that, if that was true, it must be one of those modern monarchs that reigned and did not govern, and that, as a matter of fact, the world was governed by a great popular assembly made up of the passions, and that the constant struggle of civilization was to see that the handsome passions had a working majority. That is the problem of civilization—that the things that engage the best impulses of the human spirit should be the prevailing things, the conquering things, the things that one can do comfortably after achieving. How do men ever go to sleep that have conceived wrong? How do men ever get their own consent to laugh who have not looked the right in the face and extended their hands to it? And if America can in the future look the rest of the world in the face, it will be because she has been the champion of justice and of right.

#An Address in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium, September 17, 1919

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Rolph, my fellow countrymen, you have given me a very royal welcome, and I am profoundly appreciative of the greeting that you have given me. It is a matter of great gratification to be permitted to speak to this great audience, representing, as it does, one of the most forward-looking states of the Union, representing, as it does, a great body of people who are accustomed to look and plan for the future.

As I picture to myself the history of this great country which we love, I remember the surging tides of humanity moving always westward, from the eastern mountains and the plains, deploying upon the great further slopes of the Rockies, then traveling into these beautiful and fertile valleys by the Pacific. And that is a picture to me of the constant, forward, hopeful movement of the [324page icon] American people. So that I feel that it is not without significance that this was the portion of the country which responded with the most extraordinary spirit to the call to arms, responded with the utmost spontaneity and generosity to the call for the money to be loaned to the government for the conduct of the Great War, responded to all these impulses with the purpose of freedom which underlay the great struggle which we have just passed through.

You have made me feel, as I have passed through the streets today, and in the many other communities north and east of you, how the spirit of the American people is coming to a single vision, how the thought of the American people is back of a single purpose. I have come to you, my fellow citizens, to discuss a very serious theme to which it is necessary that we should give our very thoughtful attention, and I would be very much obliged if my fellow countrymen near the door would devote a little more thought to it and a little less noise to it.

While in ordinary circumstances, I can hope that my voice will reach a considerable number of persons, I cannot compete against several hundred voices, and I am particularly anxious that you should give me your attention tonight, in order that I may analyze, for those of you who may care to listen, the very important issue with which this nation is now face to face. It is by far the most important question that has ever come before this people for decision, and the reason I have come out upon this long journey is that I am conscious that it is the people, their purpose, their wish, which is to decide this thing, and not the thought of those who have any private purpose of their own.

What I want to call to your attention, my fellow citizens, is this. You know that the debate in which we are engaged centers first of all upon the League of Nations, and there seems to have arisen an idea in some quarters that the League of Nations is an idea recently conceived by a small number of persons, somehow originated by the American representatives at the council table in Paris. Nothing could be further from the truth than that. I would not feel the confidence that I feel in the League of Nations if I felt that it was so recent and novel a growth as that. On the contrary, it is the fruit of many generations of thoughtful, forward-looking men, not only in this country, but in the other countries of the world, which have been able to look forward to the combined fates of mankind. I would be ashamed of myself, as I am frankly ashamed of any fellow countryman of mine, who discusses this great question with any portion of his thought devoted to the contest of the parties and the elections of next year. Some of the great spirits, some of the most instructed minds of both parties, have been devoted to this [325page icon] great idea for more than a generation. It has come up before the Paris conference in the stage of ideal conception. But long before that it began to assume the shape of a definite program and plan for the concert and cooperation of the nations in the interest of the peace of the world. And when I went to Paris, I was conscious that I was carrying there no plan which was novel either to America or to Europe, but a plan which all statesmen, who realized the real interests of their people, had long ago hoped might be realized in some way when the world would realize what the peace of the world meant and what were its necessary foundations.

So that when I got to Paris, I felt that I was merely the spokesman of thoughtful minds and hopeful spirits in America, not representing anything that had not been long considered. I was not putting forward any purpose of my own. So that I beg you will dismiss any personal appearance or personal relationship which this great plan may bear. I would indeed be a very proud man if I had personally conceived this very great idea, but I can claim no such honor. I can only claim the privilege of having been the obedient servant of the great ideals and purposes of beloved America.

And I want you to realize, my fellow countrymen, that those Americans who are opposing this plan of the League of Nations offer no substitute. They offer nothing that they pretend will accomplish the same object. On the contrary, they are apparently willing to go back to that old and evil order which prevailed before this war began and which furnished a ready and fertile soil for those seeds of envy which sprang up like dragon’s teeth out of the bloody soil of Europe. They are ready to go back to that old and ugly plan of armed nations, of alliances, of watchful jealousy, of rabid antagonisms, of purposes concealed, running by the subtle channels of intrigue through the veins of people who do not dream what poison is being injected into their systems. They are willing to have the United States stand alone, withdraw from the concert of nations.

And what does that mean, my fellow citizens? It means that we shall arm as Germany was armed, that we shall submit our young men to the kind of constant military service that the young men of Germany were subjected to. It means that we shall pay, not lighter, but heavier taxes. It means that we shall trade in a world in which we are suspected and watched and disliked, instead of in a world which is now ready to trust us, ready to follow our leadership, ready to receive our traders, along with our political representatives, as friends, as men who are welcome, as men who bring goods and ideas for which the world is ready and for which the world has been waiting. That is the alternative which they offer.

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It was my purpose, my fellow citizens, to analyze the objections which are made to this great League, and I dare say I must be very brief. In the first place, you know that one of the difficulties which has been experienced by those who are objecting to this League is that they do not think that there is a wide enough door open for us to get out. For my own part, I am not one of those who, when I go into a generous enterprise, think first of all how I am going to turn away from those with whom I am associated. I am not one of those who, when he goes into a concert for the peace of the world, wants to sit close to the door with his hand on the knob and constantly try the door to be sure that it is not locked.

If we want to go into this thing—and we do want to go into it—we will go into it with our whole hearts, with settled purpose to stand by the great enterprise to the end. But nevertheless, you will remember—some of you, I dare say—that, when I came home in March for an all too brief visit to this country, which seems to me the fairest and dearest in the world, I brought back with me the first draft of the Covenant of the League of Nations. I called into consultation the committees on foreign relations of the House and Senate of the United States. I laid the draft of the Covenant before them. One of the things that they proposed was that it should be explicitly stated that any member of the League should have the right to withdraw. I carried that suggestion back to Paris, and without the slightest hesitation it was accepted and acted upon. And their suggestion, which was made in that conference at the White House, was accepted by the peace conference in Paris. There is not a feature of the Covenant, except one now under debate, upon which suggestions were not made at that time, and there is not one of those suggestions that was not adopted by the conference of peace.

These gentlemen say: “You have laid a limitation upon the right to withdraw. You have said that we can withdraw upon two years’ notice, if at that time we shall have fulfilled all our international obligations and all our obligations under the Covenant.” “Yes,” I reply. “Is it characteristic of the United States not to fulfill her international obligations? Is there any fear that we shall wish to withdraw dishonorably? Are gentlemen willing to stand up and say that they want to get out, whether they have the moral right to get out or not?” I for one am too proud as an American to debate the subject on that basis. The United States has always fulfilled its international obligations, and, God helping her, she always will. And there is nothing in the Covenant to prevent her acting upon her own judgment with regard to that matter. The only thing she has to fear, the only thing she has to regard, is the public opinion [327page icon] of mankind. And, inasmuch as we have always scrupulously satisfied the public opinion of mankind with regard to justice and right, I for my part am not afraid at any time to go before that jury. It is a jury that might condemn us if we did wrong, but it is not a jury that could oblige us to stay in the League, so that there is absolutely no limitation upon our right to withdraw.

One of the other suggestions I carried to Paris was that the committees of the two houses did not find the Monroe Doctrine safeguarded in the Covenant of the League of Nations. I suggested that to the conference in Paris, and they at once inserted the provision which is now there that nothing in that Covenant shall be construed as affecting the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. What is the validity of the Monroe Doctrine? The Monroe Doctrine means that, if any outside power, any power outside this hemisphere, tries to impose its will upon any portion of the western hemisphere, the United States is at liberty to act independently and alone in repelling the aggression; that it does not have to wait for the action of the League of Nations; that it does not have to wait for anything but the action of its own administration and its own Congress. This is the first time in the history of international diplomacy that any great nation has acknowledged the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. And now, for the first time, all the great fighting powers of the world except Germany, which for the time being has ceased to be a great fighting power, acknowledge the validity of the Monroe Doctrine and accept it as part of the international practice of the world.

But they are nervous about domestic questions. They say, “It is intolerable to think that the League of Nations should interfere with domestic questions.” And, whenever they begin to specify, they speak of the question of immigration, of the question of naturalization, of the question of the tariff. My fellow citizens, no competent or authoritative student of international law would dream of maintaining that these were anything but exclusively domestic questions. And the Covenant of the League expressly provides that the League can take no action whatever about matters which are in the practice of international law regarded as domestic questions. We did not undertake to enumerate examples of domestic questions for the very good reason, which will occur to any lawyer, that if you made a list it would be inferred that what you left out was not included. Nobody with a thoughtful knowledge of international practice has the least doubt as to what are domestic questions. And there is no obscurity whatever in this Covenant with regard to the safeguarding of the United States, along with other sovereign countries, in the control of domestic questions. I beg that you will [328page icon] not fancy, my fellow citizens, that the United States is the only country that is jealous of its sovereignty. Throughout these conferences, it was necessary at every turn to safeguard the sovereign independence of the several nations who were taking part in the conference, and they were just as keen to protect themselves against outside intervention in domestic matters as we were. Therefore the wholeheartedness of their concurrent opinion runs with this safeguarding of domestic questions.

But it is objected that the Empire of Great Britain has six votes and we have one. The answer to that is that it is most carefully arranged that our one vote equals the six votes of the British Empire. Anybody who will take pains to read the Covenant of the League of Nations will find out that the Assembly—and it is only in the Assembly that the British Empire has six votes—will find that the Assembly is not a voting body. There is a very limited number of subjects upon which it can act at all. And I have taken the pains to write them down here, after again and again going through the Covenant for the purpose of making sure that I had not omitted anything, in order that I may give you an explicit account of this thing.

There are two things which a majority of the Assembly may do without the concurrent vote of the United States. A majority of the Assembly can admit a new member to the League of Nations. A majority of the Assembly can recommend to any nation a member of the League a reconsideration of such treaties as are apparently in conflict with the provisions of the Covenant itself. It can advise any member of the League to seek a reconsideration of any international obligation which seems to conflict with the Covenant itself. But it has no means whatever of obliging it to reconsider even so important a matter as that, which is obviously a moral duty on the part of any member of the League.

All the action, all the energy, all the initiative, of the League of Nations is resident in the Council, and in the Council a unanimous vote is necessary for action, and no action is possible without the concurrent vote of the United States. I would rather, personally, as one man, count for six than be six men. And by one vote, the United States can offset six votes. Here are the cases. When a matter in dispute is referred by the Council to the Assembly, its action must be taken by a majority vote of the Assembly, concurred in by the representatives of all the governments represented in the Council, so that the concurrence of the vote of the United States is absolutely necessary to an affirmative vote of the Assembly itself. In the case of an amendment to the Covenant, it is necessary that there should be a unanimous vote of the representatives of the [329page icon] nations which are represented in the Council, in addition to a majority vote of the Assembly itself. And there is all the voting that the Assembly does.

Not a single affirmative act or negative decision upon a matter of action taken by the League of Nations can be validated without the vote of the United States of America. We can dismiss from our dreams the six votes of the British Empire. The real underlying conception of the Assembly of the League of Nations is that it is the forum of opinion, not of action. It is the debating body; it is the body where the thought of the little nation, along with the thought of the big nation, is brought to bear upon those matters which affect the peace of the world, is brought to bear upon those matters which affect the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. It is the body where this stifled voice of humanity is at last to be heard, where nations that have borne the unspeakable sufferings of the ages—it must have seemed to them like aeons—will find voice and expression, where the moral judgment of mankind can sway the opinion of the world. That is the function of the Assembly. The Assembly is the voice of mankind. And the Council, where unanimous action is necessary, is the only means through which that voice can accomplish action.

But you say, “We have heard a great deal about Article X.” I just now said, while some of you were not listening, that the only substitute for the League of Nations which is offered by the opponents of the League is a return to the old system. What was the old system? That the strong had all the rights and never did pay any regard to the rights of the weak; that if a great powerful nation would say that what it wanted, it had the right to go and take, that the weak nations could cry out and cry out as they pleased, and there would be no harking ear anywhere to their rights.

I want to bring in another subject connected with this treaty, but not with the League of Nations, to illustrate what I am talking about. You have heard a great deal about the cession to Japan of the rights which Germany had acquired in Shantung Province in China. What happened under the old order of things, my fellow citizens? The story began in 1898. Two German missionaries were killed in China by parties over whom the central government of China was unable to exercise control. It was one of those outbreaks, like the pitiful Boxer Rebellion, where a sudden hatred of foreigners wells up in the heart of a nation uninformed, aware of danger, aware of wrong, but not knowing just how to remedy it, not knowing just what was the instrumentality of right. And, my fellow citizens, why should not a Chinaman hate the foreigner? The foreigner has always taken from him everything that he could [330page icon] get. And when, by irresponsible persons, these German missionaries were murdered, the German government insisted that a great part of the fair province of Shantung should be turned over to them for exploitation. They insisted that Kiaochow Bay, an accessible part of it, a part where trade entered and left these rich regions, should be delivered over to them for sovereign control for ninety-nine years, and that they should be given a concession for a railway into the interior and for the right to exploit mines in the rich mineral country for thirty miles on either side of the railroad.

This was not unprecedented, my fellow countrymen. Other civilized nations had done the same thing to China, and at that time what did the government of the United States do? I want to speak with the utmost respect for the administration of that time, and the respect is unaffected. That very lovable and honest gentleman, William McKinley, was President of the United States. His Secretary of State was one of the most honorable of the long series of our Secretaries of State, the Honorable John Hay. I ought to pause to say that I believe Mr. Hay, if he had seen any way to accomplish more than he did accomplish, would have attempted to accomplish it. But this is all that the administration of Mr. McKinley accomplished; they did not even protest against this compulsory granting to Germany of the best port of her rich province of a helpless country, but only stipulated that the Germans should keep it open to the trade of the United States. They did not make the least efforts to save the rights of China; they only tried to save the commercial advantages of the United States.

There immediately followed upon that cession to Germany a cession to Russia of Port Arthur and the region called Talien-Wan for twenty-five years, with the privilege of renewing it for a similar period. And when, soon afterwards, Japan and Russia came to blows, you remember what happened. Russia was obliged to turn over to Japan Port Arthur and Talien-Wan, just exactly as she is now allowed to take over the German rights in Shantung. And this government, though the conference which determined those things was held on our own soil, did not, so far as I have been able to learn, make the slightest intimation of objecting.

At that very same time, England came in and said that, since Germany was getting a piece of Shantung and Russia was getting Port Arthur and Talien-Wan, they insisted on having their slice of China, and the region of Weihaiwei was ceded to them. Immediately after that, France got into the unhandsome game, and there was ceded to France for ninety-nine years one of the ports of China with the region lying behind it. In all of these transactions there was not a single attempt made by the government of the United [331page icon] States to do anything except keep those regions open to our traders.

You now have the historic setting of the settlement about Shantung. What I want to call to your attention is that the treaty of peace does not take Shantung from China; it takes it from Germany. There are seventy-eight years of the ninety-nine of that lease still to run, and not only do we not take it from China, but Japan agrees in an agreement which is formally recorded—which is acknowledged by the Japanese government—to return all the sovereign rights which Germany enjoyed in Shantung without qualification to China, and to retain nothing except what foreign corporations have throughout China—the right to run a railroad and to exploit those mines.

There is not a great commercial and industrial nation in Europe that does not enjoy privileges of that sort in China, and some of them enjoy them at the expense of the sovereignty of China. And Japan has promised to release everything that savors of sovereignty and return it to China itself. She will have no right to put armed men anywhere into that portion of China. She will have no right to interfere with the civil administration of that portion of China. She will have no rights but economic and commercial rights. Now, if we choose to say that we will not assent to the Shantung provision, what do we do for China? Absolutely nothing. Japan has what Germany had in China in her commercial possession now. She has the promise of Great Britain and France that, so far as they are concerned, she can have it without qualification. And the only way we can take it away from Japan is by going to war with Japan and Great Britain and France.

The League of Nations for the first time provides a tribunal in which not only the sovereign rights of Germany and of Japan in China, but the sovereign rights of other nations can be curtailed, because every member of the League solemnly covenants to respect and preserve the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members, and China is to be a member. Never before, my fellow citizens, has there been a tribunal to which people like those of China could carry the intolerable aggravations to which they have been subjected. Now a great tribunal has been set up in which the pressure of the whole judgment of the world will be exercised in her behalf.

That is the significance of Article X. Article X is the heart of the whole promise of peace, because it cuts out of the transactions of nations all attempts to impair the territorial integrity or invade the political independence of the weak as well as of the strong. Why did not Mr. Hay protest the acquisition of those rights in Shantung [332page icon] by Germany? Why did he not protest what England got, and what France got, and what Russia got? Because under international law, as it then stood, that would have been a hostile act toward those governments. The law of the world was actually such that if you mentioned anybody else’s wrong but your own, you spoke as an enemy. After you have read Article X, read Article XI. Article XI says that it shall be the right, the friendly right, of any member of the League, strong or weak, to call the attention of the League to any matter, anywhere, that affects the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. So that for the first time it affords fine spirits like Mr. McKinley and Mr. John Hay the right to stand up before mankind and protest, and to say, “The rights of China shall be as sacred as the rights of those nations that are able to take care of themselves by arms.” It is the most hopeful change in the law of the world that has ever been suggested or adopted.

But there is another subject upon which some of our fellow citizens are particularly sensitive. They say, “What does the League of Nations do for the right of self-determination?” I think I can answer that question, if not satisfactorily, at any rate very specifically. It was not within the privilege of the conference of peace to act upon the right of self-determination of any peoples except those which had been included within the territories of the defeated empires—that is to say, it was not then within their power. But the moment the Covenant of the League of Nations is adopted, it becomes their right. If the desire for self-determination of any people in the world is likely to affect the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations, it becomes the business of the League, it becomes the right of any member of the League, to call attention to it. It becomes the function of the League to bring the whole pressure of the combined world to bear upon that very matter.

Where before, and when before, may I ask some of my fellow countrymen who want a forum upon which to conduct a hopeful agitation, were they ever offered the opportunity to bring their case to the judgment of mankind? If they are not satisfied with that, their case is not good. The only case that you ought to bring with diffidence before the great jury of men throughout the world is the case that you cannot establish. The only thing I shall ever be afraid to see the League of Nations discuss, if the United States is concerned, is a case which I can hardly imagine, where the United States is wrong, because I have the hopeful and confident expectation that, whenever a case in which the United States is affected is brought to the consideration of that great body, we would [333page icon] naturally feel no nervousness as to the themes of the argument, so far as we were concerned. Because the glory of the United States is that it never claimed anything to which it was not justly entitled.

Indeed, my fellow citizens, I look forward with a quickened pulse to the conditions that lie ahead of us as a member of the League of Nations—for we shall be a member of the League of Nations—I look forward with confidence and with exalted hope to the time when we can indeed legitimately and constantly be the champions and friends of those who are struggling for right anywhere in the world.

And no nation is likely to forget, my fellow citizens, that behind the moral judgment of the United States resides the overwhelming force of the United States. We were respected in those old Revolutionary days when there were three millions of us. We are, it happens, very much more respected now that there are more than a hundred millions of us and now that we command some of the most important resources of the world.

Back of the majesty of the United States lies the strength of the United States. If Germany had ever dreamed, when she conceived her great ungodly enterprise, that the United States would have come into the war, she never would have dared to attempt it.

But now, my fellow citizens, the hope of Germany has revived. It has revived, because, in the debates now taking place in the United States, she sees a hope of at least doing what her arms could not do—dividing the United States from the great nations with which it was associated in the war. Here is a quotation from a recent utterance of one of her Counselors of State:2

“All humanity, Germany particularly, is tensely awaiting the decision of the American Senate on the peace treaty,” ex-Minister Von Scheller-Steinwartz said today. “Apparently Senator”3—out of respect for him, I won’t mention the name he mentions—“apparently Senator [pause] is the soul of the opposition. The Senator is no German hater. He hates all non-Americans equally, and he is absolutely a just man of almost anchor-like moral strength.”

How delightful to receive such praise from such a source! “When he and other important Senators fight the peace treaty, their course means that the treaty displeases them because of the excessive enslavement of Germany, for which America would be forever responsible. They see grave danger of future complications. That course is thus to be hailed as the morning red of a new dawn.” A new dawn for the world? Oh, no; a new dawn for [334page icon] Germany. “And there is promise of a still better realization of the conditions in the prospect that America, in all seriousness, may express the wish for a separate peace with the Central Empires.”

A separate peace with the Central Empires could accomplish nothing but our eternal disgrace. And I would like, if my voice could reach him, to let this German Counselor know that the red he sees upon the horizon is not the red of a new dawn, but the red of a consuming fire which will consume everything like the recent purposes of the Central Powers. It is not without significance, my fellow citizens, that coincidentally with this debate with regard to the adoption of this treaty, the old pro-German propaganda has shown its head all over the United States.

I would not have you understand me to mean that the men who are opposing the adoption of the treaty are consciously encouraging the pro-German propaganda. I have no right to say that or think it, but I do say that what they are doing is encouraging a pro-German propaganda, and that it is bringing about a hope in the minds of those whom we have just spent our precious blood to defeat that they separate us from the rest of the world and produce this interesting spectacle—only two nations standing aside from the great concert and guarantee of peace: beaten Germany and triumphant America.

See what can be accomplished by that. By that the attitude of the rest of the world towards America will be exactly what its recent attitude was towards Germany. We will be in the position, absolutely alien to every American conception, of playing a lone hand in the world for our selfish advantage and aggrandizement. The thing is inconceivable. The thing is intolerable. The thing can and will never happen.

I speak of these things in order that you may realize, my fellow citizens, the solemnity and the significance of this debate in which we are engaged; its solemnity because it involves the honor of the United States and the peace of humanity; its significance because, whether gentlemen plan it or not, not only refusal on our part, but long hesitation on our part to cast our fortunes permanently in with the fortunes of those that love right and liberty will be to bring mankind again into the shadow of that valley of death from which we have just emerged.

I was saying to some of your fellow citizens today how touching it had been to me, as I came across the continent, to have women, who I subsequently learned had lost their sons or their husbands, come and take my hand and say, “God bless you, Mr. President.” Why should they say “God bless” me? I advised the Congress of the United States to take the action which sent their sons to their death. As commander in chief of the army and navy, I ordered their [335page icon] sons to their death. Why should they take my hand and with tears upon their cheeks say, “God bless you”? Because they understood, as I understood, they understood as their sons who are dead upon the fields of France understood, that they had gone there to fight for a great cause, and, above all else, they had gone there to see that, in subsequent generations, women should not have to mourn their dead. And as little children have gathered at every station in playful lightheartedness about the train upon which I was traveling, I have felt as if I were trustee for them. I have felt that this errand that I am going about upon was to save them the infinite sorrows through which the world has just passed, and that, if by any evil counsel or unhappy mischance, this great enterprise for which we fought should fail, then women with boys at their breasts ought now to weep, because, when those lads come to maturity, the great battle will have to be fought over again.

But my fellow citizens, there is another battle upon which we are now on the eve. That is the battle for the right organization of industrial society. I do not need to tell an audience of this great progressive state what I mean by that. But we cannot work out justice in our communities if the world is to continue under arms and ready for war. We must have peace, we must have leisure of mind and detachment of purpose, if we are going to work out the great reforms for which mankind is everywhere waiting. And I pray God that normal times will not much longer be withheld from us.

The world is profoundly stirred. The masses of men are stirred by thoughts which never moved them before. We must not again go into the camp. We must sit down at the council table and, like men and brethren, lovers of liberty and justice, see that the right is done to those who bear the heat and burden of the day, as well as to those who direct the labor of mankind.

I am not a partisan of any party to any of these contests. And I am not an enemy of anybody, except the minority that tries to control. And I do not care where the minority is drawn from. I do not care how influential or how insignificant. I do not care which side of the labor question it has been on. If the power of the United States under my direction can prevent the domination of a minority, it will be prevented.

Because, there again, I am a champion of that sort of peace, that sort of order, that sort of common counsel out of which, and out of which alone, can come the satisfactory solutions of the problems of society. You cannot solve the problems of society amidst chaos, disorder, and strife. We can only solve them when men have agreed to be calm, agreed to be just, agreed to be conciliatory, agreed that the right of the weak is as majestic as the right of the [336page icon] strong. And when we have come to that mind in the counsels of nations, we can the more readily come to that mind in our domestic counsels, upon which the happiness and prosperity of our own beloved people so intimately and directly depend.

I beg, my fellow citizens, that you will carry this question home with you, not in little pieces, not with this, that, and the other at the front of your mind, but as a great picture, including the whole of the nation and the whole of humanity, and know that now is the golden hour when America can at last prove that what she promised in the day of her birth was no dream, but a thing which she saw in its concrete reality—the rights of man, the prosperity of nations, the majesty of justice, and the sacredness of peace.

#A Luncheon Address in San Francisco, September 18, 1919

Mr. Toastmaster1 and fellow citizens: I stood here yesterday, but before a very different audience, an audience that it was very delightful to address. But it is no less delightful to find myself face to face with this thoughtful group of citizens of one of the most progressive states in the Union. Because, after all, my fellow citizens, our thought must be of the present and the future. The men who do not look forward now are of no further service to the nation. But the immediate need of this country and of the world is peace, a settled peace—peace upon a definite and well-understood foundation, supported by such covenants as men can depend upon, supported by such purposes as will permit of a concert of action throughout all the free peoples of the world.

The very interesting remarks of your toastmaster have afforded me the opportunity to pay the tribute which they earn to the gentlemen with whom I was associated on the other side of the water. I don’t believe that we even now stop to consider how remarkable the peace conference in Paris has been. It is the first great international conference which did not meet to consider the interests and advantages of the strong nations. It is the first international conference that did not convene in order to make the arrangements which would establish the control of the strong. And I want to testify that the whole spirit of the conference was the spirit of men who do not regard themselves as the masters of anybody, but as the servants of the people whom they represent. I found them quick with sympathy for the peoples who had been through all those dolorous times imposed upon, on whom the whole yoke of civilization seemed to have been fastened so that it never could be taken off again.

And the heart of this treaty is that it gives liberty and independence to people who never could have got it for themselves, because the men who constituted that conference realized that the basis of wars was the imposition of the might of strong nations [342page icon] upon those who could not resist. You must settle the difficulties which gave occasion to the war or you must expect war again.

You have only to take the formula of the war in order to see what was the matter. The formula of Pan-Germanism was Bremen to Baghdad. What is the line from Bremen to Baghdad? It leads through partitioned Poland, through prostrate Rumania, through subjugated Slavonia, down through disordered Turkey, and on into distressed Persia. Every foot of the line is a line of political weakness. Germany was looking for the line of least resistance to establish her power, and, unless, gentlemen, the world makes that a line of absolute resistance, this war will have to be fought over. You must settle the difficulties which gave occasion to the war, or you must expect war again.

You know what had happened all through that territory. Almost everywhere there were German princes planted on thrones where they did not belong, where they were aliens, of a different tradition and a different people—mere agents of a political plan, the seething center of which was that unhappy city of Constantinople, where, I dare say, there was more intrigue to the square inch than there has ever been anywhere else in the world, and where not only the most honest minds, but generally the most corrupt minds, were sent to play upon the cupidity of the Turkish authorities and upon the helplessness of the people in order to make a field for German aggression. I am not saying that Germany was the only aggressor and intriguer, but I am saying that there was the field where lay the danger of the world in regard to peace. Every statesman in the world knew it, and at last it dawned upon them that the remedy was not the balance of power, but liberty and right.

An illumination of profound understanding of human affairs shines upon the deliberations of the conference that never shone upon the deliberations of any other international conference in the world. And, therefore, it is a very happy circumstance to me to be afforded the opportunity to say how delightful it was to find that these gentlemen had not accepted the American specifications for the peace—for you remember they were American specifications—because America had come in and assisted them, and because America was powerful and they desired her assistance, but they accepted them because they already believed in them. When we uttered our principles—the principles for which we were fighting—they had only to examine the thoughts of their own people to find that those were also the principles for which their people were fighting, as well as the people of the United States. And the delightful enthusiasm which showed itself in accomplishing some of the most disinterested tasks was a notable circumstance of the whole conference.

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I was glad, after I inaugurated it, that I drew together the little body that was called the Big Four. We didn’t call it the Big Four; we called it something very much bigger than that—the Supreme Council of the Allied and Associated Powers. We had to have some name, and the more dramatic it was the better; but it was a very simple council of friends. The intimacies of that little room were the center of the whole peace conference, and they were the intimacies of men who believed the same things and thought the same thoughts. The hearts of Clemenceau and Lloyd George and the heart of Orlando beat with the people of the world, as well as with the people of their own countries. They know that there is only one way to work out peace, and that is to work it out right.

Now, the peace of the world is absolutely indispensable to us, and immediately indispensable to us. There is not a single domestic problem that can be worked out in the right temper or opportunely and in time unless we have conditions that we can count on. I don’t need to tell businessmen that they cannot conduct their business if they don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. You cannot make plans unless you have certain elements in the future upon which you can depend. You cannot seek markets unless you know whether you are going to seek them among people who suspect you or people who believe in you. If the United States is going to stand off and play truant in this great enterprise of justice and right, then you must expect to be looked upon with suspicion and hostile rivalry everywhere in the world. They will say, “These men are not intending to assist us; they are intending to exploit us.” You know that there was a conference just a few months before we went into the war of the principal Allied powers held in Paris for the purpose of concerting a sort of economic league in which they would manage their purchasing as well as their selling in a way which would redound to their advantage and make use of the rest of the world. That was because they then thought what they will be obliged to think again, if we do not continue our partnership with them—that we were standing off to get what we could out of them, and they were making a defensive economic arrangement. Very well, they will do that again. Almost by instinct they will do it again, not out of a deliberate hostility to the United States, but by an instinctive impulse of their own business interests. And therefore we cannot arrange a single element of our business until we have settled peace and know whether we are going to deal with a friendly world or an unfriendly world.

We cannot determine our own economic reforms until then, and there must be some very fundamental economic reforms in this country. There must be a reconsideration of the structure of our economic society. Whether we will or no, the majority of mankind [344page icon] demand it, in America as well as elsewhere. We have got to sit down in the peace chamber passive and, in time of quiet, in time that will permit of consideration and determine what we are going to do. We cannot do it until we have peace. We cannot release the great industrial and economic power of America and let it run free until there are right channels in which it can run. And the channels of business are mental channels as well as physical channels. In an open market, men’s minds must be open.

It has been said so often that it is a very trite saying, but it remains nevertheless true, that a financial panic is a mere state of mind. There are no fewer resources in the country at the time of a panic than there were on the day before the panic. But something has frightened everybody and caused them to draw in their credits, and everybody builds a fence around himself and is careful to keep behind the fence and waits to see what is going to happen. So a panic is a waiting in fear of something that is going to happen. It doesn’t usually happen. Slowly they draw their breath and see that the world looks just the same as it did, and say to each other, “We had better go to work again.” As a friend of mine described it at the time of one of our panics some twenty-five years ago, he met a man and in talking said, “Business was not looking up.” The reply was: “Yes, it is so flat on its back it can’t look any other way.” But even if it is flat on its back, it can see the world. It is not lying on its face. But while the whole world is in doubt what to expect, the whole world is under the special apprehension that is characteristic of a panic. You do not know what is safe to do with your money now. You have got to know what the world of tomorrow is going to be. You won’t know until we settle this great matter of peace.

And I want to remind you how the permanency of peace is at the heart of this treaty. This is not merely a treaty of peace with Germany. It is a world settlement, not affecting those parts of the world, of course, which were not involved in the war, because the conference had no jurisdiction over them. But the war did extend to most parts of the world, and the scattered, dismembered assets of the Central Empires and of Turkey gave us plenty to do and cover the greater part of the distressed populations of the world. So that it is nothing less than a world settlement, and at the center of it stands this covenant for the future which we call the Covenant of the League of Nations. Without it, the treaty cannot be worked, and without it, it is a mere temporary arrangement with Germany. The Covenant of the League of Nations is the instrumentality for the maintenance of peace.

And how does it propose to maintain it? By the means that all forward-looking and thoughtful men have desired for generations [345page icon] together—by substituting arbitration and discussion for war. To hear some gentlemen talk, you would think that the Council of the League of Nations is to spend its time considering when to advise other people to fight. That is what comes of a constant concentration of attention upon Article X. Article X ought to have been somewhere further down in the Covenant, because it is in the background; it is not in the foreground. At the heart of the Covenant—as I am going to take the liberty of expounding to you, though I presume you have all read the Covenant—at the heart of the Covenant are these words. Every member of the League solemnly agrees—and that means every fighting nation in the world, because, with the present limit of an army of 100,000, Germany is not a fighting nation—every fighting nation is in this Covenant or will be—they all solemnly agree that they will never go to war without first having done one or the other of two things, without either submitting the matter of dispute to arbitration, in which case they promise absolutely to abide by the verdict, or, if they do not agree to submit it to arbitration, submit it to discussion by the Council of the League of Nations, in which case they promise to lay all the documents and all the pertinent facts before that Council. They consent that that Council shall publish all the documents and all the pertinent facts, so that all the world shall know them, that it shall be allowed six months in which to consider the matter. And even at the end of six months, if the conclusions they come to are not unanimously arrived at, or not accepted, they will still not go to war for three months following the rendering of the decision. So that, even allowing no time for the preliminaries, there are nine months of cooling off, nine months of discussion, and not of private discussion, not of discussion between those who are heated, but of discussion between those who are distinterested, except in the maintenance of the peace of the world—when the whole purifying and rectifying influence of the public opinion of mankind is brought to bear upon the conference.

If anything approaching that had been the arrangement of the world in 1914, the war would have been impossible. And I confidently predict that there is not an aggressive people in the world who would dare bring a wrongful purpose to that jury. It is the most formidable jury in the world. Personally, I have never, so far as I know, been in danger of going to jail, but I would a great deal rather go to jail than do wrong and be punished merely by the look in the eyes of the men among whom I circulated. I had rather go to jail than be sent to Coventry. I would rather go to jail than be conscious every day that I was despised and distrusted. After all, the only effective force in the world is the force of opinion.

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And if any member of the League ignores these promises with regard to arbitration and discussion, what happens? War? No, not war, but something more tremendous, I take leave to say, than war. An absolute isolation and boycott. It is provided in the Covenant that any nation that disregards these solemn promises with regard to arbitration and discussion shall be thereby deemed ipso facto to have committed an act of war against the other members of the League, and that there shall thereupon follow an absolute exclusion of that nation from communication of any kind with the members of the League. No goods can be shipped in or out; no telegraphic messages can be obtained, except through the elusive wireless, perhaps; there would be no communication of any kind between the people of that nation and the peoples of other nations. And there isn’t a nation in Europe that can stand that for six months.

Germany could have faced the armies of the world more readily than she faced the boycott of the world. Germany felt the pinch of the blockade more than she felt the stress of the blow. There is not, so far as I know, a single European country—and I say European becaus I think our own country is exceptional—which is not dependent upon some other part of the world for some of the necessaries of its life. Some of them are absolutely dependent. Some of them are without raw materials, practically, of any kind. Some of them are absolutely without fuel of any kind, either coal or oil. Almost all of them are without that variety of supplies of war which are necessary to modern industry and necessary to the manufacture of the munitions of war. When you apply that boycott, you have got your hand upon the throat of the offending nation, and it is a proper punishment—that is, an exclusion from civilized society.

Inasmuch as I have sometimes been said to have been very, very disregardful of the constitutional rights of Congress, may I not stop to speak just for a moment of a small matter that I was punctilious to attend to in regard to that article? You will notice the language is that any member of the League that makes breach of these covenants shall be regarded as thereby ipso facto to have committed an act of war. In the original draft it read, shall ipso facto be regarded as at war with the other nations of the world, or words to that effect. I said, “No, I can’t subscribe to that, because I am bound to safeguard the right of Congress to determine whether it is at war or not. I consent to its being an act of war by the party committing it, but whether Congress takes up the gage that is thrown down or not is another matter which I cannot participate in determining in a document of this sort.”

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Germany committed several acts of war against us before we accepted the inevitable and took up her challenge. And it was only because of a sort of accumulation of evidence that Germany’s design was not merely to sink American ships and injure American citizens, but that that was incidental to her design—her design being to destroy free political society—that war was finally determined to exist. I remember saying to Congress, before we went into war, that, if Germany committed some act of war against us that was intolerable, I might have to give Congress different advice, and I remember a newspaper correspondent asked me what I thought would constitute such an act. I said: “I don’t know, but I am perfectly certain I will know it when I see it. I cannot hypothetically define it, but it will be perfectly obvious when it occurs.” And if Congress regards this act by some other member of the League as such an act of war against it as necessitates the maintenance of the honor of the United States, then it may in those circumstances declare war. But it is not bound to declare war under the engagement of the Covenant. So that what I am emphasizing, my fellow citizens, is this: that the heart of this Covenant is arbitration and discussion, and that that is the only possible basis for peace in the future.

It is a basis for something better than peace. Really, civilization proceeds on the principle of understanding one another. You know how peace between those who employ labor and those who labor depends upon conference and mutual understanding. If you don’t get together with the other side, it will be hostility to the end. And, after you have heard the case of the other fellow, it sometimes becomes a little awkward for you to insist upon the whole of your case, because the human mind does have this fine quality—that it finds it embarrassing to face the truth and deny it.

Moreover, the basis of friendship is intercourse. I know I am very fond of a very large number of men whom I know to be crooks. They are engaging fellows. When I form a judgment against them, I have to be in another room—that’s all there is about it. I cannot, because of my personal attitude toward them, form a harsh judgment. Indeed, I suppose the very thing that gives some men a chance to be crooks is their fascinating personality—they put it over on one. But you remember that very charming remark of Charles Lamb. One night, in company with some friends, they were speaking of some person, and Lamb, in his stuttering fashion, said, “I hate that fellow.” And someone said, “Why, Charles, I didn’t know you knew him.” “Oh, I don’t,” he said. “I c-c-can’t hate a fellow I know”—one of the most genial utterances of the human spirit I have ever read, and one of the truest. It is mighty hard to [348page icon] hate a fellow you know, and it is mighty hard to hate a nation you know. If you intermingle, as I have had the good fortune to mingle, with scores of people of other nations in recent months, you would have the same feeling that I do that, after you got over superficial differences of language and some differences of manner, they are the same kinds of folks.

As I have said to a number of audiences on this trip, the most thrilling thing that happened to me over there was the constant intercourse I was having with delegations of people representing nations from all over the globe, some of which, I had shamefacedly to admit, I never heard of. Do you know where Azerbaijan is? Well, one day there came in a very dignified and interesting group of gentlemen who were from Azerbaijan. I didn’t have time until they were gone to find out where they came from. But I did find this out immediately—that I was talking to men who talked the same language that I did in respect of ideas, in respect of conceptions of liberty, in respect of conceptions of right and justice. And I did find this out, that they, with all of the other delegations that came to see me, were, metaphorically speaking, holding their hands out to America, saying: “You are the disciples and leaders of the free peoples of the world. Can’t you come and help us?” Until we went into this war, my fellow citizens, it was the almost universal impression of the world that our idealism was a mere matter of words; that what we were interested in was getting on in the world and making as much as we could out of it. That was the sum and substance of the usual opinion of us outside of America. In the short space that we were in this war, that opinion was absolutely reversed.

Consider what they saw. The flower of our youth sent three and four thousand miles away from their homes, homes which could not be directly touched by the flames of that war, sent to foreign fields to mix with foreign and alien armies to fight for the cause which they recognized as the common cause of mankind, and not the peculiar cause of America. It caused a revulsion of feeling, a revulsion of attitude which, I dare say, has never been paralleled in history. And at this moment, unless the cynical counsels of some of our acquaintances should prevail—which God forbid—they are expecting us to lead the civilized world, because they trust us—they really and truly trust us. They would not believe, no matter where we sent an army to be of assistance to them, that we would ever use that army for any purpose but to assist them. They know that when we say, as we said when we sent men to Siberia, we are sending them to assist in the distribution of food and clothing and shoes so that brigands won’t seize them, and that for the rest we are ready to render any assistance which they want us to [349page icon] render, and will interfere in absolutely nothing that concerns their affairs, they believe us.

There isn’t a place in this world now, unless we wait a little longer, where America’s political ambitions are looked upon with suspicion. That was frankly admitted in the conference that I have spoken of. Not one of those gentlemen thought that America had any ulteriro designs whatever. They were constantly near us, consulting our economic experts, consulting our geographic experts; they were constantly turning to America to act as umpire. And nine times out of ten, just because America was disinterested and could look at the thing without any other purpose than that of reaching a practical solution, it was the American solution that was accepted.

In order that we may not forget, I have brought with me the figures as to what this war meant to the world. This is a body of businessmen, and you will understand these figures. They are too big for the imagination of men who do not handle big things. Here is the cost of the war in money, exclusive of what we loaned one another, the direct costs of the war: Great Britain and her Dominions, $38,000,000,000; France, $26,000,000,000; the United States, $22,000,000,000 (this is the direct cost of our operations); Russia, $18,000,000,000; Italy, $13,000,000,000; and the total, including Belgium, Japan, and other countries, $123,000,000,000. This is what it cost the Central Powers: Germany, $39,000,000,000, the biggest single item; Austria-Hungary, $21,000,000,000; Turkey and Bulgaria, $3,000,000,000—a total of $63,000,000,000. And the grand total of direct war costs is thus $186,000,000,000—almost the capital of the world. The expenditures of the United States were at the rate of $1,000,000 an hour for two years, including nighttime with daytime. That is the biggest advertising item I have ever heard of!

The record of dead during the war is as follows: Russia lost in dead 1,700,000 men—poor Russia, that got nothing but terror and despair out of it all; Germany lost 1,600,000 men; France, 1,385,000 men; Great Britain, 900,000 men; Austria, 800,000 men; Italy, 364,000 men; the United States, 50,300 in dead—a total for all the belligerents of 7,450,300 men—just about seven and a half million men killed because we could not have arbitration and discussion, because the world had never had the courage to propose the conciliatory methods which some of us are now doubting whether we ought to accept. The totals for the wounded are not obtainable, except our own. Our own wounded were 230,000, excluding those who were killed.

The total of all battle deaths in all the wars in the world from the [350page icon] year 1793 to the year 1914 was something under 6,000,000 men, so that about a million and a half more men were killed in this war than in all the wars of something more than 100 preceding years.

We can hardly realize that. Those of us who lost sons or brothers can realize it. We know what it meant. The women who have little children crowding about their knees know what it means. They know that the world has hitherto been devoted to brutal methods of settlement. And every time a war occurs, it is the flower of the manhood of the belligerents that is destroyed. It is not so much the present generation as the next generation that goes off the stage, goes maimed off the stage, or is laid away in obscure graves upon some battlefield. And the great nations are impaired in their vitality for two generations to come, and all their lives are embittered by a method of settlement for which we could find, and have now found, a substitute.

My fellow citizens, I believe in divine Providence. If I did not, I would go crazy. If I thought the direction of the disordered affairs of this world depended upon our finite endeavor, I should not know how to reason my way to sanity. But I do not believe there is any body of men, however they concert their power or their influence, that can defeat this great enterprise, which is the enterprise of divine mercy and peace and goodwill.

#An Address in the Greek Theater in Berkeley, September 18, 1919

Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mayor,2 ladies and gentlemen. I feel an old feeling coming over me as I stand in this presence. My great danger and temptation is to revert to type and talk to you as college men from a college man.

I was reminded as I received your very generous welcome of a story of Mr. Oliver Herford, a very delightful wit and artist. He was one day seated in his club, and a man came up who did not know him very well, but took many liberties and slapped him on the back and said, “Hello, Ollie, old boy, how are you?” Herford writhed a little, naturally, looked at him a little coldly, and said: “I don’t know your name; I don’t know your face; but your manners are very familiar.”

I think also of an admonition I used often to address to my classes—perhaps I should not call it an admonition so much as a [351page icon] rebuke. I used to say that the trouble about the college youth of America was that they had refused to grow up; that the men and women alike continued to be schoolboys and schoolgirls. I used to remind them that, on the continent of Europe, revolutions were often made in the universities, and statesmen were nervous of nothing so much as a concerted movement of opinion at the centers of learning. And I asked them what cabinet at Washington ever cared a peppercorn of what they were thinking about.

It is your refusal, my fellow students, to grow up, that I am glad of. And one reason that I am glad to see the boys who have been to the front come back is that they have grown up. They have seen the world, seen it at its worst, but nevertheless seen it in action; seen it with its savage and its liberal passions in action. They have come back, and now they are preparing for but one kind of work, not to do physical fighting, but to do the kind of thinking that is better than fighting—the kind of thinking that makes men conscious of their duties, the kind of thinking that purifies the impulses of the world and leads it on to better things.

The burden upon my heart as I go about this errand is that men are hesitating to give us the chance. We cannot do any effective thinking for the world until we know that there is a settled peace. We cannot make any long plans for the betterment of mankind until these initial plans are made, until we know that there is going to be an opportunity to make plans that will last and become effective. That is the ground of my impatience with the debate.

I admit that there are debatable things, but I do not admit that they need to be debated so long. Not only that, but I do insist that they should be debated more fairly. I overheard a remark, or rather a remark was repeated to me which was made after the address I made in San Francisco last night. Some man said, after hearing an exposition of what was in the treaty, he was puzzled. He wondered what the debate was about. It all seemed so simple. The fault was not, I need not assure you, because I was misleading anybody or stating what was not in the treaty, but because the men he had heard debate it, and some of the newspapers he had heard debate it, had not told him what was in the treaty. This great document of human rights, this great settlement of the world, had been represented to this man as containing little traps for the United States. Men had been going about dwelling upon this, that, and the other feature and distorting those features and saying that was what the treaty proposed. They are responsible for some of the most serious mistakes that have ever been made in the history of this country; they are responsible for misleading the opinion of the United States. And it is a very distressing circumstance to me to find that, [352page icon] when I recite the mere facts, they are novel to some of my fellow citizens.

Young gentlemen and young ladies, what we have to do is to see that that very thing cannot happen. We must know what the truth is and insist that everybody else shall know what the truth is. And, above all things else, we must see that the United States is not defeated of its destiny, for its destiny is to lead the world in freedom and in truth.

#An Address in the Oakland Municipal Auditorium, September 18, 1919

Dr. Reinhardt1 and my fellow countrymen: You have indeed warmed my heart with your splendid welcome, and I esteem it a great privilege to stand here before you tonight and look at some of the serious aspects of the great turning point in the history of this nation and the history of the world which affairs have brought us to. Dr. Reinhardt expressed my own feeling when she said that in my own consciousness those great ranks of little children seemed to be my real clients, seemed to be that part of my fellow citizens for whom I am pleading. It is not likely, my fellow citizens, that, with the depleted resources of the great fighting nations of Europe, there will be another war soon. But unless we concert measures and prevent it, there will be another and a final war, just about the time these children come to maturity. And it is our duty to look in the face the real circumstances of the world in order that we may not be unfaithful to the great duty which America undertook in the hour and day of her birth.

One thing has been impressed upon me more than any other as I have crossed the continent, and that is that the people of the United States have been singularly and, I sometimes fear, deliberately, misled as to the character and contents of the treaty of peace. Someone told me that, after an address I delivered in San Francisco last night, one of the men who had been present, a very thoughtful man, I was told, said that, after listening to what I had said, he wondered what the debate was about—it all seemed so simple, so obvious, so natural. And I was at once led to reflect that [353page icon] that was not because of any gift of exposition that I have, but because I had told that audience what the real character and purpose of the covenant of nations is. And they had been led to look at certain incidental features of it, either on the assumption that they had not read the document or in the hope that they would not read it and would not realize what the real contents of it were.

I have not come out from Washington, my fellow citizens, on a speech-making tour. I don’t see how anybody could get his own consent to think of the way in which he was saying the things that it is necessary for him to say. I should think that every man’s consciousness would be fixed, as mine is, upon the critical destiny of the world which hangs upon the decision of America. I am confident what that decision is going to be, because I can see the tide of sentiment, the tide of conviction rising in this country in such might that any man who tries to withstand it will be overwhelmed. But we are an intelligent and thoughtful people. We want to know just what it is that we are about. And, if you will be patient with me, I am going to try to point out some of the things I did not dwell upon last night that are the salient and outstanding characteristics of the treaty.

I am not going to speak tonight particularly of the Covenant of the League of Nations, but I am going to point out to you what the treaty as a whole is. In the first place, of course, that treaty imposes upon Germany the proper penalty for the crime she attempted to commit. It is a just treaty in spite of its severity. It is a treaty made by men who had no intention of crushing the German people, but who did mean to have it burnt into the consciousness of the German people, and through their consciousness, into the apprehension of the world, that no people could afford to live under a government which was not controlled by their purpose and will, but which was at liberty to impose secret ambitions upon the civilization of the world. It was intended as notice to all mankind that any government that attempted what Germany attempted would meet with the same concerted opposition of mankind and would have meted out to it the same just retribution.

All that this treaty amounts to, so far as Germany is concerned, is that she shall be obliged to pay every dollar that she can afford to pay to repair the damage that she did. And except for the territorial arrangements which it includes, that is practically the whole of the treaty so far as it concerns Germany. What has not been borne in upon the consciousness of some of our people is that, although most of the words of the treaty are devoted to the settlement with Germany, the greater part of the meaning of its provisions is devoted to the settlement with the world.

For the treaty begins with the Covenant of the League of [354page icon] Nations, which is intended to operate as a partnership—a permanent partnership—of the great free self-governing peoples of the world to stand sponsor for the right and for civilization. So that notice is given in the very first articles of the treaty that hereafter it will not be a matter of conjecture whether the other great nations of the world will combine against a wrongdoer, but a matter of certainty that hereafter nations contemplating what the government of Germany contemplated will not have to conjecture whether Great Britain and France and Italy and the great United States will join hands against them, but will know that mankind, in serried ranks, will defend to the last the rights of human beings wherever they are.

And it is the rights of human beings. This is the first treaty ever framed by such an international convention, whose object was not to serve and defend governments but to serve and defend peoples. This is the first people’s treaty in the history of international dealing. Every member of that great convention of peace was poignantly aware that at last the people of the world were awake, that at last the people of the world were aware of what wrong had been wrought by irresponsible and autocratic government, that at last all the peoples of the world have seen the vision of liberty, have seen the majesty of justice, have seen the doors thrown open to the aspirations of men and women and the fortunes of children everywhere. They did not dare assume that they were the masters of the fortunes of any people, but knew that in any settlement they must act as the servants, not only of their own people, but of the people who were waiting to be liberated, the people who could not win their own liberty, the people who had suffered for centuries together the intolerable wrongs of misgovernment. So that this is a treaty, not merely for the peoples who were represented at the peace table, but for the people who were the subjects of the governments whose wrongs were forever ended by the victory on the fields of France.

My fellow citizens, you know and you hear it said every day, you read it in the newspapers, you hear it in the conversation of your friends, that there is unrest all over the world. You hear that in every part of the world, not excluding our own beloved country, there are men who feel that society has been shaken to its foundations, and that it ought to have been shaken to its foundations, in order that men might awaken to the wrongs that had been done and that continue to be done.

And when you look into the history, not of our own free and fortunate continent, happily, but of the rest of the world, you will find that the hand of pitiless power has been upon the shoulders of the [355page icon] great mass of mankind since time began, and that only with that little glimmer of light which came at Calvary, that first dawn which came with the Christian era, did men begin to awake to the dignity and right of the human soul, and that, in spite of professions of Christianity, in spite of purposes of reform, in spite of theories of right and of justice, the great body of our fellow beings have been kept under the will of men who exploited them and did not give them the full right to live and realize the purposes that God had meant them to realize.

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath. And, when you look, as we were permitted to look in Paris, into some of the particular wrongs which the peoples of Central Europe, the peoples upon whom the first foundations of the new German power were to be built, had suffered for generations together, you wonder why they lay so long quiet, you wonder why statesmen, men who pretended to have an outlook upon the world, waited so long to deliver them. And this great treaty is the first attempt to deliver them.

The characteristic of the treaty is that it gives liberty to peoples who never could have won it for themselves. By giving them liberty, it limits the ambitions and defeats the hopes of all imperialistic governments in the world. Governments which had theretofore been considered to desire dominion, here in this document foreswore dominion, renounced it, said: “The fundamental principle upon which we are going to act is this, that every great territory of the world belongs to the people who live in it, and that it is their right, and not our right, to determine the sovereignty they shall live under and the form of government they shall maintain.” It is astonishing that this great document did not come as a shock upon the world. If the world had not already been rent by the great struggle which preceded this settlement, men would have stood at amaze at such a document as this. But there is a subtle consciousness throughout the world now that this is an end of governing people who do not desire the government that is over them.

Going further than that, the makers of the treaty proceeded to arrange those things which had always been arranged upon a competitive basis, upon a cooperative basis. I want to mention a very practical thing, which most of you, I dare say, never thought about. Most of the rivers of Europe traverse the territory of several nations, and up to that time there had been certain historic rights and certain treaty rights over certain parts of the courses of those rivers which had embarrassed the people who lived higher up upon the streams, just as if the great Mississippi, for example, passed through half a dozen states and the people down at New Orleans [356page icon] lived under a government which could control the navigation of the lower part of the Mississippi and so hamper the commerce of the states above them to the north who wished to pass to the sea by the course of the Mississippi.

There were abundant instances of that sort in Europe, and this treaty undertakes to internationalize all the great water highways of that continent, to see to it that their several portions are taken out of national control and put under international control, so that the stream that passes through one nation shall be just as free in all its length to the sea as if they owned the whole of it, and nobody shall have the right to put a restriction upon their passage to the sea. I mention this in order to illustrate the heart of this treaty, which is to cut out national privileges and give to every people the full right attaching to the territory in which they live.

Then the treaty did something more than that. You have heard of the Covenant of the League of Nations until, I dare say, you have supposed that is the only thing in the treaty. On the contrary, there is a document almost as extensive in the latter part of the treaty, which is nothing less than a great charter of liberty for the working men and women. One of the most striking and useful provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations is that every member of the League undertakes to advance the humane conditions of labor for men, women, and children, to consider the interests of labor under its own jurisdiction, and to try to extend to every nation with which it has any dealings the standards of labor upon which it itself insists. So that America, which has by no means yet reached the standards in those matters which we must and shall reach, nevertheless is the most advanced nation in the world in respect of the conditions of labor, undertakes to bring all the influences it can legitimately bear upon every nation with which it has any dealings to see that labor there is put upon as good a footing as labor in America.

Perhaps some of you have not kept in mind the Seamen’s Act,2 which was passed at a recent session of Congress. Under the law before that Act, seamen could be bound to the service of their ship in such fashion that, when they came to the ports of the United States, if they tried to leave their ship, the government of the United States was bound to arrest them and send them back to their ships. And the Seamen’s Act abrogates that law and practically makes it necessary for every ship that would take away from the United States the crew that it brings to it shall pay American wages to get it.

Before this treaty was entered into, the United States had [357page icon] entered upon the business of trying to extend to laboring men elsewhere the advantages which laboring men in the United States enjoyed, and, supplementing that promise in the Covenant of the League, there is an elaborate arrangement for a continuing, that is to say, a periodic international conference in the interest of labor. It provides that that conference shall be called next month in the City of Washington by the President of the United States, and the President of the United States has already called it. We are waiting to learn from the Senate of the United States whether we can attend it or not. We can at least sit and listen and wonder how long we are going to be kept out of membership of this great humanendeavor to see that working men and women and children everywhere in the world are regarded as human and taken care of as they ought to be taken care of.

This treaty does not stop there. It attempts to coordinate all the great humane endeavors of the world. It tries to bring under international cooperation every effort to check international crime. I mean like that unspeakable traffic in women, like that almost equally unspeakable traffic in children. It undertakes to control the dealing in deadly drugs like opium. It organizes a new method of cooperation among all the great Red Cross societies of the world. I tell you, my fellow citizens, that the simple red cross has come to mean to the world more than it ever meant before. Everywhere—in the remotest recesses of the world—there are people who wear that symbol. And every time I look at it, I feel like taking off my hat, as if I had seen a symbol of the world’s heart.

So that this treaty is nothing else than an organization of liberty and mercy for the world. I wish you would get a copy of it and read it. A good deal of it is technical, and you could skip that part, but read all of it that you do not need an expert to advise you with regard to the meaning of. The economic and financial clauses, which particularly affect the settlements with Germany, are, I dare say, almost unintelligible to most people. But you do not have to understand them; they are going to be worked out by experts. The rest of it is going to be worked out by the experience of free self-governed peoples.

One of the interesting provisions of the Covenant of the League of Nations is that no nation can be a member of that League which is not a self-governing nation. No autocratic government can come into its membership, no government which is not controlled by the will and vote of its people. So that it is a league of free, independent peoples all over the world. And when that great arrangement is consummated, there is not going to be a ruler in the world that does not take his advice from his people.

Germany for the present is excluded, but she is excluded only in [358page icon] order that she may undergo a period of probation, during which she shall prove two things—first, that she has really changed her constitution permanently, and, secondly, that she intends to administer that constitution in the spirit of its terms.

You read in the newspapers that there are intrigues going on in Germany for the restoration of something like the old government, perhaps for the restoration of the throne and placing upon it some member of the family of Hohenzollern. Very well, if that should be accomplished, Germany is forever excluded from the League of Nations. It is not our business to say to the German people what sort of government they shall have; it is our fundamental principle that that is their business and not ours. But it is our business to say who we will keep company with, and if Germany wishes to live in respectable society she will never have another Hohenzollern.

The other day, you will notice, Hungary for a little while put one of the Austrian princes upon her throne, and the peace conference, still sitting in Paris, sent word that they could not deal with a government which had one of the Hapsburgs at its head. The Hapsburgs and the Hohenzollerns are permanently out of business. I dare say that they personally, from what I can learn, feel antiquated and out of date. But they are out of date because, my fellow citizens, this treaty, or, rather, this great war, with its triumphant issue, characterized a new day in the history of the world.

There can no more be any such attempts as Germany made if the great leading free people of the world lends its countenance and leadership to the enterprise.

I say if, but it is a mere rhetorical if. There is not the least danger that Americans, after a treaty has been drawn up exactly along the specifications supplied by America, will desert its associates. We are a people that redeem its honor. We are not, and never will be quitters.

You notice that one of the grounds of anxiety of a small, small group of our fellow citizens is whether they get out of the League if they ever get in. So they want to have the key put in their pockets. They want to be assigned a seat right by the door. They want to sit on the edge of their chairs and say, “If anything happens in this meeting I am in the least sensitive about, I leave.” That, my fellow citizens, is not the spirit of America. What is going to happen is this. We are not going to sit by the door. We are going to sit in the high seats, and if the present attitude of the peoples of the world towards America is any index of what it will continue to be, the counsels of the United States will be the prevailing counsels of the League. If we should humbly at the outset take a seat by the door, we would be invited to go up and take the chair. I, for one, do [359page icon] not want to be put in the attitude of children who, when the game goes against them, won’t play, because I have such an unbounded confidence in the rectitude of the purpose of the United States that I am not afraid she will ever be caught proposing something which the other nations will defeat. She did not propose anything in Paris which the other nations defeated. The only obstacles, the only insuperable obstacles, met there were obstacles which were contained in treaties of which she had had no notice, in secret treaties which certain great nations were bound in honor to respect. And the Covenant of the League of Nations abolishes secret treaties.

From this time forth, all the world is going to know what all the agreements between nations are. It is going to know, not their general character merely, but their exact language and contents, because the provision of the League is that no treaty shall be valid which is not registered with the General Secretary of the League, and the General Secretary of the League is instructed to publish it in all its terms at the earliest possible moment. So that just as you go to the county courthouse and see all the mortgages on all the real estate in your county, you can go to the general secretariat of the League of Nations and find all the mortgages on all the nations. This treaty, in short, is a great clearance. It is very little short of a canceling of the past and an insurance of the future.

Men have asked me, “Do you think that the League of Nations is an absolute guarantee against war?” Of course it is not; no human arrangement can give you an absolute guarantee against human passions. But I answer that question with another: “If you thought you had 30 per cent insurance against war, wouldn’t you take it? If you thought you had even 10 per cent insurance against war, wouldn’t you think it better than nothing? Whereas, in my judgment, this is 98 per cent insurance.

Because the only thing that a wrong cause cannot stand is exposure. If you think you have a friend who is a fool, encourage him to hire a hall. And the particular things that this treaty provides in the Covenant of the League of Nations is that every cause shall be deliberately exposed to the judgment of mankind. It substitutes what the whole world has been longing for, namely, arbitration and discussion for war. In other words, all the great fighting nations of the world—for Germany at the time being, at any rate, is not a great fighting nation—it is a promise by all of the great fighting nations of the world to lay their case, whatever it may be, before the whole jury of humanity. If there had been any arrangement comparable with this in 1914, the calamitous war through which we were just passed would have been inconceivable.

Look what happened. An Austrian Crown Prince was [360page icon] assassinated inside the Austrian dominions, in Bosnia, which was under the empire of Austria-Hungary, though it didn’t belong to it, and it had no business to have it. And, because it was suspected that the assassination was connected with certain groups of agitators and certain revolutionary societies in Serbia, war was made on Serbia, because the Austrian Crown Prince was assassinated in Austria! It was just as if some great personage were to be assassinated, let us say, in Great Britain, and because that individual was found to have certain society connections—I mean certain connections with a society that had an active membership in the United States—Great Britain should declare war on the United States. That is a violently improbable supposition, but I am merely using it as an illustration.

Every foreign office in Europe, when it got sudden news of what was afoot, sent messages to its representative in Berlin asking the German government to hold an international conference to see if the matter could not be adjusted, and the German government would not wait twenty-four hours. Under the treaty of the League of Nations, every fighting nation is bound to wait at least nine months, and to lay all the facts pertaining to the case before the whole world.

There is nothing so overpowering and irresistible, my fellow citizens, as the opinion of mankind. When this great republic was set up, one of the most interesting and, I think, in one way, one of the most moving sentences in the great Declaration of Independence, is one of the opening sentences in which it is said that, out of respect to the opinion of mankind, the causes which have led the people of the American colonies to declare their independence are here set forth. America was the first country in the world which laid before all mankind the reason why it went to war. And this treaty is the exaltation and permanent establishment of the American principle of warfare and of right.

Why, therefore, do we hesitate to redeem the destiny of America? Why do we hesitate to support the most American thing that has ever been attempted? Why do we debate details when the heart of the thing is sound? And the beauty of it, my fellow citizens, is that the heart of America is sound.

We sent our boys across the sea to beat Germany, but that was only the beginning. We sent them across the sea to assure the world that nothing such as Germany attempted should ever happen again. That is the halo that is going to be about the brows of those fine boys that have come back from overseas. That is the light that is going to rest upon the graves overseas of the boys we could not bring back. That is the glory that is going to attach to the [361page icon] memories of that great American army, that had made the conquest of the armies of Germany, not only, but made conquest of peace for the world—greater armies than sought the Holy Grail, greater armies than sought to redeem the Holy Sepulchre, greater than fought under that visionary and wonderful girl, Joan of Arc, greater armies than sought to redeem the Holy Sepulcher, greater redeem us from the unjust rule of Britain, greater even than the armies of our Civil War which saved the Union, will be this noble army of Americans who saved the world!

#An Address in the San Diego Stadium, September 19, 1919

Mr. Mayor, my fellow countrymen: As you know, I have come from Washington on a very serious errand, indeed, and I need not tell you with what a thrill the sight of this great body of my fellow citizens fills my heart, because I believe that one of the most important verdicts of history is now to be rendered by the great people of the United States. I believe that this is a choice from which we cannot turn back. Whether it be a choice of honor or dishonor, it will be a final choice which we will make in this court of our history.

One of the unexpected things I have found on my journey is that the people of the United States have not been informed as to the real character and scope and contents of the great treaty of peace with Germany. Whether by omission or by intention, they have been directed in all of the speeches that I have read to certain points of the treaty which are incidental, and not central. Their vision has been drawn away from the real meaning of this great human document.

For that, my fellow citizens, is just what it is. It not only concludes a peace with Germany and imposes upon Germany the proper penalties for the outrages she attempted upon mankind, but it also concludes the peace in the spirit in which the war was undertaken by the nations opposed to Germany. That challenge of war was accepted by them, not with the purpose of crushing the German people, but for the purpose of putting an end, once and for all, to such plots against the free nations of the world as had been conceived in Wilhelmstrasse, in Berlin, unknown to the people of Germany, not by their advice, but by little groups of men who had the military power to carry out private ambition.

We went into this war not only to see that power of that sort [372page icon] never threatened the world again, but we went into it for even larger purposes than that.

Other autocratic powers may spring up, but there is only one soil in which they can spring up—that is the wrongs done to free peoples of the world. And the heart and center of this treaty is that it sets at liberty people all over Europe and in Asia who have hitherto been enslaved by powers which were not their rightful sovereigns and masters.

So long as wrongs like that exist in the world, you cannot bring permanent peace to the world. I would go further than that. So long as wrongs of that sort exist, you ought not to bring permanent peace to the world, because those wrongs ought to be righted, and enslaved peoples ought to be freed to right them.

For my part, I will not take any part in composing difficulties that ought not to be composed, and a difficulty between an enslaved people and its autocratic rulers ought not to be composed.

We in America have stood from the day of our birth for the emancipation of people throughout the world who were living unwillingly under governments which were not of their choice. The thing that we have held more sacred than any other is that all just government rests upon the consent of the governed. All over the world that principle has been disregarded by the strong, and only the weak have suffered.

The heart and center of this treaty is the principle adopted, not only in this treaty, but put into effect in the treaty also with Austria, in the treaty with Hungary, in the treaty with Bulgaria, in the treaty with Turkey—that every great territory in the world belongs to the people who are living on it, (applause) and that it is not the privilege of any authority anywhere—certainly not the privilege of the peace conference at Paris—to impose upon those people any government which they accept unwillingly and not of their own choice.

So that nations that never before saw the gleam of hope have been liberated by this great document. Pitiable Poland, divided up as spoil among half a dozen nations, is by this document united and set free. And similarly, in the treaty with Austria, the Austrian power is taken off of every people over whom they have no right to reign. You know that great portions of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which lay between Austria and the Balkan Peninsula, were unjustly under the power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it was in a city of Bosnia that the Crown Prince of Austria was assassinated—Bosnia, which was under the power of Austria. Though it was part of Austrian territory, Austria had the audacity to hold Serbia, an outside neighbor, responsible for the act of the assassin. [373page icon] And this war was started because an Austrian prince was assassinated in Austrian territory, and the Austrian government chose to believe that certain societies with which it connected the assassin, societies active in Serbia, had planned and executed the assassination.

And so the world was deluged in blood, and 7,400,000 men lie dead, not to speak of the pitiable wounded, not to speak of the blind, not to speak of those with distracted brain, not to speak of all the pitiful, shattered nerves of millions of men all over the world—because of an insurgent feeling in a great population which was ruled over by rulers not of their own choice. And the peace conference at Paris knew that it would not go to the root of this business unless it destroyed power of that kind. This treaty sets those great people free. (applause)

But it does not stop with that. In the heart of the treaty, you will find a new charter for those who labor—men, women, and children all over the world. The heart of the world is depressed, my fellow citizens, the heart of the world is uneasy. The heart of the world is a little despairful of its future, because the economic arrangements of the world have not been just, and the people having unjust conditions imposed upon them are, of course, not content to live under them. When the whole world is at unrest, you may be sure that there is some real cause for the unrest. It is not whimsical. Men do not disturb the foundation of their lives just to satisfy a sudden impulse.

All these troubles, whatever shape they take, whether the action taken is just or unjust, have their root in age-long wrongs, which ought to be, must be, and will be righted. (applause)

And this great treaty makes a beginning in that great enterprise of humanity. For it provides an arrangement for recurrent and periodic international conferences, the main and sole object of which will be to improve the conditions of labor, safeguard the lives and the health of women and children who work and whose lives would otherwise be impaired or whose health rendered subject to all the inroads of disease.

So that the heart of humanity beats in this document. It is not a statesman’s arrangement. It is a liberation of the peoples and the human forces of the world, and yet I never hear the slightest hint of any of these great features in the speeches of the gentlemen who are opposing this treaty. They never tell you what is really in this treaty. If they did, your enthusiasm would sweep them off their feet. If they did, they would know it was an audacity, which they had better not risk, to impair the peace and humane conditions of mankind.

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And at the front of the treaty, at the very front of and part of the treaty, is the part which is most criticized, namely, the great Covenant for a League of Nations. This treaty could not be executed without such a powerful instrumentality. Unless all the right-thinking nations of the world are going to concert their purposes and their power, this treaty is not worth the paper it is written on, because it is a treaty where peace rests upon the right of the weak, and only the power of the strong can maintain the right of the weak.

If we as a nation indeed mean what we have always said—that we are the champions of human right—now is the time when we shall be brought to the test, the acid test, as to whether we mean what we said or not. I am not saying that because I have the least doubt as to the verdict. I am just as sure of it as if it had been rendered already. I know this great people among whom I was born and brought up and whom I have had the signal honor to serve, whose mouthpiece it has been my privilege to be on both sides of the sea. I know it is your consciousness that it is the duty of America which will be assumed and performed.

And you have been allowed to believe that the Covenant of the League of Nations is in some sense a private invention. It is not always said by whom, and I need not mention who is suspected. It is supposed that, out of some sort of personal ambition or party intention, some advantage of distinction and authorship, an origination is sought. Why, my fellow countrymen, I wish that I could claim the great distinction of having invented this great idea. But it is a great idea which has been growing in the minds of all generous men for several generations. Several generations? Why, it has been the dream of the friends of humanity through all the ages. And, now for the first time, a great body of practical statesmen, immersed in the business of guiding nations, gets together and realizes the dream of honest men.

I wish that I could claim some originative part in so great an enterprise, but I cannot. I was the spokesman in this matter, so far as I was influential at all, of all sorts and kinds of Americans and of all parties and factions in America. I would be ashamed, my fellow countrymen, if I treated a matter of this sort with a single thought of so small a matter as the national elections of 1920. If anybody discusses this question on the basis of party advantage, I repudiate him as a fellow American. (applause) And in order to validate what I have said, I want to make one or two quotations from representatives of a party to which I do not belong. The first I shall make from a man who has for a long time been a member [375page icon] of the United States Senate. In May 1916, just about two years after the Great War began, this Senator, at a banquet at which I was myself present,1 uttered the following:

“I know of no one that would know better than one who has served long in the Senate, which is charged with the great responsibility of the ratification and confirmation of treaties, no one, I think, can feel more deeply than I do the difficulties which confront us in the work which this league—that great association extending throughout the country known as the League to Enforce Peace—which this league undertakes, but the difficulties cannot be overcome unless we try to overcome them. I believe it can be done. Probably it will be impossible to stop all wars, but it certainly will be possible to stop some wars, and thus diminish their number. The way in which this problem is to be worked out must be left to this league and to those who are giving this great question the study which it deserves, and which some gentlemen have not given. I know the obstacles. I know how squarely we shall be met with the statement this is a dangerous question which you are putting into this agreement, that no nation can submit to the judgment of other nations, and we must be careful at the beginning not to attempt too much. I know the difficulties which arise when we speak of anything which seems to involve an alliance, but I do not believe that when Washington warned us against entangling alliances he meant for one moment that we should not join with the other civilized nations of the world if a method could be found to diminish war and encourage peace. (applause)

“It was a year ago, while delivering the Chancellor’s address at Union College, I made an argument on this theory, that if we want to promote international peace at the close of the present terrible war, if we are to restore international law as it must be restored, that men find some way in which the united forces of the nations could be put behind the cause of peace and law. I said then that my hearers might think I was picturing a Utopia, but it is in the search for Utopias that great discoveries have been made. This league certainly has the highest of all ambitions for the benefit of humanity, and because the pathway is sown with difficulties is no reason that we should turn from it.”

That quotation is from the Honorable Henry Cabot Lodge. [376page icon] Another quotation from one of the most energetic, frank, and distinguished leaders of the Republican party, which was in an article published in the New York Times in October 1914:

“The only permanent move for obtaining peace which has not been suggested with any reasonable chance of obtaining its object is by an agreement among the great powers, in which each should pledge itself not only to abide by the decision of a common tribunal, but to back with force the decision of that common tribunal. The great civilized nations of the world which do not possess force, actually or immediately, potentially should combine by solemn agreement in a great world league for peace and righteousness.”

A very worthy utterance by Theodore Roosevelt.2 (applause) I am glad to align myself with such utterances as that. I subscribe to every word of it. And here in concrete form is the fulfillment of the plan which they advocate. We cannot in reason, we cannot as lovers of liberty, we cannot as supporters of right turn away from it.

And those who advise us to turn away from it, what are they afraid of? In the first place, they are afraid that it impairs in some way that long traditional policy of the United States which was embodied in the Monroe Doctrine. But how they can fear that I cannot conceive, for the document expressly says, in words which I am now quoting, that nothing in this Covenant shall be held to affect the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. (applause) The phrase was inserted under my own eye—not the phrase, but the principle—at the suggestion of the foreign relations committees of both houses of Congress. I think I am justified in dismissing all fear that the Monroe Doctrine is in the least impaired.

And what is the Monroe Doctrine? It is that no outside power shall attempt to impose its will in any form upon the western hemisphere, and if it does the United States, acting upon its own initiative and alone, if it chooses, can resist and will resist the attempt. (applause) Could anything leave the United States freer as a champion of the independence of the western hemisphere than this world acknowledgement of the validity and competency of the Monroe Doctrine? (applause)

But they are afraid that the League will in some way deal with our domestic affairs. The Covenant expressly says it will have no right to deal with the domestic affairs of any member of the League, and I cannot imagine anything more definite and satisfactory than that. There is no ambiguity about any part of this Covenant, for the matter of that, but there is certainly no ambiguity [377page icon] about the statement regarding domestic affairs. For it is provided that if any matter brought before the Council is found to be a matter which, under international law, lies within the exclusive jurisdiction of the state making the claim, that the Council shall dismiss consideration of it and shall not even make a report about it.

The subjects which are giving these gentlemen the most concern are agreed by all students of international law to be domestic questions; for example, immigration, naturalization, or the tariff—these are the subjects most frequently spoken of. No one of these can be dealt with by the League of Nations, so far as the sovereignty of the United States is concerned. We have a perfectly clear field there, as we have in regard to the Monroe Doctrine.

But it is feared that our delegates will be outvoted, because I am constantly hearing it said that the British Empire has six votes and we have one. I am perfectly content to have only one vote when the one counts six, (applause) and that is exactly the arrangement under the League. But let us examine that matter a little more particularly. Besides the vote of Great Britain herself, the other five votes are the votes of Canada, of South Africa, of Australia and New Zealand, and of India. We ourselves were champions and advocates of giving a vote to Panama, of giving a vote to Cuba—both of them under the direction and directorate of the United States. And if a vote was given to Panama and to Cuba, could it reasonably be denied to the great Dominion of Canada? Could it be denied to that republic in South Africa, that is now living under a nation which did, indeed, overcome it at one time, but which did not dare retain its government in its hands, but turned it over to the very men whom it had fought? Could it be denied to Australia, that independent republic in the Pacific, which has led the world in so many liberal reforms? Could we deny it to New Zealand? Could we deny it to the hundreds of millions who live in India?

But, having given the six votes, what are the facts? The League can take no active step without the unanimous vote of all the nations represented on the Council, added to a vote of the majority in the Assembly itself. These six votes are in the Assembly, not in the Council. The Assembly is not a voting body, except upon a limited number of questions. And whenever those questions are questions of action, the affirmative votes of every nation represented on the Council is needed, and the United States is represented on the Council.

So that the six votes that you hear about can do nothing without the consent of the United States. (applause) I mean nothing in the way of action. There are two matters in which the Assembly can act, but I do not think we will be jealous of it. A majority of the [378page icon] Assembly can admit new members into the League. A majority of the Assembly can advise a member of the League to reconsider any treaty which, in the opinion of the Assembly of the League, is apt to conflict with the operations of the League itself. But that is advice. It can be disregarded. It has no validity and action in it, it has no compulsion and law in it.

So that, with the single exception of admitting new members to the League, there is no energy in the six votes which is not offset by the energy in the one vote of the United States. (applause) And I am more satisfied to be one and count six than to be six and count six. This thing that has been talked about is a delusion. The United States is not easily frightened, and I dare say it is less easily frightened by things that are not true.

It is also feared that causes in which we are interested will be defeated. Well, the United States is interested in a great many causes, for a very interesting and compelling reason—that the United States is made up out of all the civilized peoples of the world.

There is not a national cause, my fellow citizens, which has not quickened the heartbeat of men in America. There is not a national cause which men in America do not understand, because they come of the same people, they come of the same traditions, they recollect through long tradition the wrongs of their peoples, the hopes of their peoples, the passions of their people. And everywhere in America there are men to stand up and speak words of sympathy for great causes. And for the first time in the history of the world, the League of Nations presents a forum, a world forum, where any one of these ambitions or aspirations can be brought to the consideration of mankind. Never before has this been possible. Never before has there been a jury of mankind to which the nations could take their causes, whether they were weak or strong.

You have heard a great deal about Article X of the Covenant. Very well, after you have read it, please read Article XI. Article XI provides that it shall be the right of any member of the League, big or little, strong or weak, to call attention to anything, anywhere, which is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. And when any of our kinsmen in America are done wrong by any foreign government, it is likely to disturb the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world rests. And any one of the causes represented in the hearts of the American people can be brought to the attention of the whole world.

And one of the most effective means of winning a good cause is to bring it before a great jury. A bad cause will fare ill, but a good [379page icon] cause is bound to be triumphatn in such a forum. And until this, international law made it an unfriendly act for any nation to call attention to any matter which did not immediately affect its own fortunes and its own rights. I am amazed that they do not see the extraordinary change which this will bring in the transaction of human affairs. I am amazed that they do not see that now, for the first time, not selfish national policies, but the general judgment of the world as a right is going to determine the fortunes of the peoples, whether they be weak or whether they be strong. (applause)

I myself glory in the provisions of Article XI more than I glory in any other part of the Covenant, for it draws all men together in a single friendly court, where they may discuss their own affair and determine the issues of justice—just exactly what was desired in the hearts of the men from whom I have read extracts of opinion.

But what disturbs me, perhaps, and the only thing that disturbs me, my fellow countrymen, about the form which the opposition to the League is taking is this. Certain reservations, as they are called, are perhaps in effect—I am not going to offer an opinion as to whether that is the intention or not; I have no right to judge the intention of a man who has not stated what his intention is—but in effect some of these reservations amount to this—that the United States is unwilling to assume the same obligations under the Covenant of the League that are assumed by the other members of the League. The United States wants to disclaim any part in the responsibilities which the other members of the League are assuming. And I want to say with all the emphasis of which I am capable that that is unworthy of the honor of the United States. (applause)

The principle of justice, the principle of right, the principle of international amity is this—that there is not only an imaginary but a real equality of standing and right among all the civilized peoples of the world. I do not care to advocate the rights of a people if I must regard them as my inferior, if I must do so with condescension, if I must do so because I am strong and they are weak.

You know the men, and the women, too, I dare say, who are respectful only to those whom they regard as their social equals or their industrial equals and of whom they are more or less afraid, and who will not exercise the same amenities and the same consideration for those whom they deem beneath them. Such people do not belong to democratic society, for one thing, (applause) and, for another, their whole point of view is perverted. They are incapable of justice, because the foundation of justice is that the weakest has the same rights as the strongest.

I must admit, my fellow citizens, and you cannot deny—and I [380page icon] admit it with a certain profound regret, not only, but with a touch of shame—that, while that is the theory of democratic institutions, it is not always the practice. The weak do not always fare as well as the strong, the poor do not always get the same advantage and justice that the rich get. But that is due to passions and imperfections of human nature. But the foundation of the law is—the glory of the law is—that the weakest is equal to the strongest in the matter of right and privilege. (applause) And the glory about which we are constantly though stumblingly and with mistakes striving to go forward is the glory of actual justice, on the basis of equality and right, and unless you are going to establish all nations upon the actual foundation of equality, unless the United States is going to assume the same responsibility, and jsut as much responsibility as the other nations, we ought not to permit the mockery of going into the arrangement at all.

I will not join in claiming under the name of justice an unjust position of privilege for the country which I love and honor. (applause) Neither am I afraid of responsibility. Neither will I scuttle. Neither will I be a little American. America, in her makeup, in her purposes, in her principles, is the biggest thing in the world, and she must measure up to the measure of the world. (applause)

Why, if we were to decline to go into this great humane arrangement, we would be declining the invitation which all the world extends to us to lead them in the enterprise of liberty and of justice. I, for one, will not decline that invitation. I, for one, believe more profoundly than in anything else human in the destiny of the United States. (applause) I believe that she has a superior energy in her which no other nation can contribute to the liberation of mankind. I know that the heart of America is stronger than her business calculations.

That is what the world found out when we went into the war. When we went into the war, there was not a nation in the world that did not believe we were more interested in making money out of it than in saving the cause of liberty. And when we went in, in those few months, the whole world stood at amaze. They now believe that America will stand by anybody that is fighting for justice and for right. (applause) And we shall not disappoint her.

The age is opening, my fellow citizens, upon a new era. We are substituting in this Covenant—and this is the main purpose of it—arbitration and discussion for war. Senator Lodge says if we can stop some war, it is worthwhile. If you want insurance against war, I take it you would rather have 10 per cent insurance than none; I take it you would be delighted with 50 per cent insurance; and here I verily believe is 98 per cent insurance against war. 381page icon Because all the great fighting nations of the world, without exception—because for the time being Germany is not a great fighting nation—all the great fighting nations of the world solemnly covenant with one another that they will never go to war without first having either submitted the matter in dispute to arbitration and bound themselves to abide by the verdict, or, having submitted it to discussion by the Council of the League of Nations, in which case they will lay all the facts and documents before the League and, by publication, before the world, wait six months for the opinion of the Council, and if they are dissatisfied with that opinion—they are not bound by it—they will wait another three months before they go to war. There is a period of nine months of the process which is absolutely destructive of unrighteous causes—exposure to public opinion. (applause) When I find a man who in a public matter will not state his side of the case, and state it fully, I know that his side of the case is the losing side, that he dare not state it.

And at the heart of most of our industrial difficulties, my fellow citizens—and most of you are a witness to this—lies the unwillingness of men to get together and talk it over. Half of the temper which now exists between those who perform labor and those who direct labor is due to the fact that those who direct labor won’t talk differences over with the men whom they employ. (applause) I am in every such instance convinced that they are wrong and dare not talk it over. (applause) Not only that, but every time the two sides do get together and talk it together, they come out of the conference in a different temper from that with which they went in. There is nothing that softens the attitude of men like really, frankly, laying their minds alongside each other and their characters alongside each other and making a fair and manly and open comparison. And that is what all the great fighting nations of the world agree to do with every matter of difference between them—that they will either put it before a jury by whom they are bound, or before a jury which will publish all the facts to mankind and express a frank opinion in regard to it.

And so you have here what the world must have—what America went into this war to obtain. You have here an estoppel of the brutal, sudden impulse of war. You have a restraint upon the passions of ambitious nations. You have here a safeguard of the liberty of weak nations, and the world is at last ready to stand up in council and discuss the fortunes of men and women and children everywhere.

Why, my fellow citizens, nothing brings a lump into my throat quicker on this journey that I am taking than to see the thronging [382page icon] children that are everywhere the first, just out of their curiosity and no doubt of glee, to crowd up to the train when it stops. Because I know, if by chance, we should not win this great fight for the League of Nations, it would be their death warrant.

They belong to the generation which would then have to fight the final war, and in that final war there would not be merely seven and a half million men slain. The very existence of civilization would be in the balance. And I, for one, dare not face the responsibility of defeating the very purpose for which we sent our gallant men overseas. Every mother knows that her pride in the son that she lost is due to the fact, not that he helped to beat Germany, but that he helped to save the world. And there was in that light in the eyes of the boys that went over there that light as of men who have caught the gleam of inspiration of a great cause. The armies of the United States seemed to those people on the other side of the sea like bodies of crusaders come out of a free nation to give freedom to their fellows, ready to sacrifice their lives for an idea, for an ideal, for the only thing that is worth living for—the spiritual purpose of redemption that rests in the hearts of mankind. (applause)

#An After-Dinner Speech in San Diego, September 19, 1919.

Mr. Mayor, ladies, and gentlemen: I am sure I may take it for granted that I have Mrs. Wilson’s permission to explain about the asparagus. You will be amused, perhaps, at the origin of her advising the honorable Mayor. When we went across the water as simple republicans, we were naturally not accustomed to entertaining royalty, and when we were in Rome we gave a dinner at the American embassy, which was American territory, of course, to the King and Queen of Italy. And, not knowing the order of procedure upon such occasions and being the host, I asked instructions from the American Minister there1 as to when I was to propose the King’s health, and he said “After the asparagus.”

I watchfully waited for the appearance of the asparagus. The Ambassador had spoken without consulting Mrs. Page,2 and we learned from Mrs. Page afterwards that she had intended to have [383page icon] asparagus but could not get any, and therefore I was very much embarrassed and had to choose my own moment to get up and propose the health of the King. That is the reason we are always watching for the asparagus.

It is very agreeable to have been indirectly introduced by my friend, Mr. Gage, for whom I have so affectionate a regard. I know he will not mind my saying that I first met him when we were both “lame ducks.” I had just come out of the hospital after an operation,3 and he had one arm out of commission from neuritis. And we met sitting, rather helplessly and perhaps hopelessly, on one of the broad piazzas of one of the hotels at Palm Beach. Being fellow sufferers and comrades in misery, we were drawn toward each other and drawn into confidences which I greatly enjoyed, and which I now recall with peculiar pleasure in seeing Mr. Gage without his hand bound up and in the sort of health I would wish to see him in.

What he has said has reminded me of one of the thoughts which has been prominent in my mind of late. He has spoken of our dealings with the Philippine Islands. One of the perplexities under which we have suffered is that, although we are leading the Philippine Islands towards independence, we were in doubt of what would happen to them when they obtained their independence. Before this conference at Paris, the only thing that could be suggested was that we should get a common guarantee from all the nations of the world that the Philippines should be regarded as neutral, just as Belgium was once regarded as neutral, and that they should guarantee her inviolability, because it was certainly to be expected that she would not be powerful enough to take care of herself against those who might wish to commit aggression against her.

That serves as a very useful illustration of one of the purposes for which the League of Nations has been established, for do you not observe that the moment we are ready to give independence to the Philippines, her independence is already guaranteed, because all the great nations of the world are under engagement of the most solemn sort to respect and preserve her territorial integrity and her existing political independence as against external aggression?

Those words “external aggression” are sometimes left out of the exposition of Article X. There was not a member of that peace [384page icon] conference with whom I conferred who did not hold the same opinion that I hold as to the sacred right of self-determination and did not hold the principle which all Americans hold—that it was not the right of any nation to dictate to another nation what sort of government it should have or under what sort of sovereignty it would live.

For us, the problem of the future of the Philippines is solved by the League of Nations. It is the first time that the world has come to this mind about matters of that sort. And what brought it to that mind? The breakdown of the neutrality of Belgium. You know you cannot establish civil society if anybody is going to be a neutral with regard to the maintenance of the law. We are all bound in conscience, and all public officers are bound in oath, not to remain neutral with regard to the maintenance of the law and the vindication of the right. And one of the things that occurred in this conference, as a sort of practical joke on myself, was this. One of the principles that I went to Paris most insisting on was the freedom of the seas. Now, the freedom of the seas means the definition of the right of neutrals to use the seas when other nations are at war. But under the League of Nations there are no neutrals. And, therefore, what I have called the practical joke on myself was that, by the very thing that I was advocating, it became unnecessary to define the freedom of the seas. All nations are engaged to maintain the right, and in that sense no nation can be neutral when the right is invaded. And, all being comrades and partners in a common cause, we all have an equal right to use the seas. To my mind it is a much better solution than had occurred to me, or than had occurred to anyone else with regard to that single definition of right.

We have no choice, my fellow citizens, in this matter except between these alternatives: we must go forward with this concert of nations, or we must go back to the old arrangement, because the guarantees of peace will not be sufficient without the United States. And those who oppose this Covenant are driven to the necessity of advocating the old order of balances of power. If you do not have this universal concert, you have what we have always avoided—necessary alignment of this nation with one other nation or with some other group of nations.

What has disturbed me most about the present debate—not because I doubt its issue, but because I regret its length—is that it is heartening the representatives of Germany to believe that at last they are going to do in this way what they were not able to do by arms—separate us in interest and purpose from our associates in the war. I am not suggesting, I have no right to suggest, that the men who are opposing this Covenant have any thought of assisting [385page icon] Germany in their minds. But my point is that, by doing what they are doing, they are assisting Germany, whether they want to do so or not. And it is not without significance, my fellow countrymen, that, coincidentally with this debate, there has been a revival of pro-German propaganda all over the United States. For this is Germany’s calculation—that, inasmuch as she is obliged to stand apart and be for the time suspected and have other nations come slowly to accommodation with her, if we hold off, other nations will be similarly alienated from us, as they will be, and that there will be, whether we design it or not, a community of interest between the two isolated nations. It is an inevitable psychological result. So we must join this arrangement to complete the psychology of it.

And the psychology of this war is so that any nation that attempts to do what Germany did will certainly have the world combined against her. Germany not only did not know she would have the world combined against her, but she never dreamed she would. Germany confidently expected that Great Britain would not go into the war. She never dreamed that America would go into the war. And, in order not absolutely to dishearten her people, she had continuously to lie to them and tell them that the submarine warfare was so effective that American troops could not be sent to Europe. Friends of mine who, before we went into the war, conversed with Germans on the other side and told them that they had come over since the submarine warfare began, were not believed. The Germans said, “Why, you cannot cross the sea.” The body of the German people actually thought that the sea was closed, and that we could send 2,000,000 men over there without losing any of them, except on a single transport, was incredible to them. If they had ever dreamed that that would happen, they never would have ventured upon so foolish an attack upon the liberties of mankind.

So that what is impressed upon my mind by my stay on the other side of the water, more than any one thing, is that, while old rivalries and old jealousies and while all the intricate threads of history woven in unhappy patterns have made the other nations of the world suspect one another, nobody doubts or suspects America. That is the amazing and delightful discovery I made on the other side of the water. If there was any place in our discussion where they wanted troops sent, they always begged that American troops be sent, because they said none of the other associated powers would suspect them of ulterior designs, and the people of the country would know they had not come there to keep anything they took, that they didn’t come to interfere in their internal affairs; that they had come, not as exploiters, but as friends. That is the reputation of American soldiers throughout Europe, and it is their [386page icon] reputation because it is true. That is the beautiful background of it. That is the temper in which they go. That is the principle upon which they go and upon which the government back of them goes, and the great people whom that government represents. So that there is something more than choosing between peace and armed isolation, for that is one aspect of the choice. We are choosing between a doubtful peace and an assured peace, guided and led by the United States of America.

I was very much interested to scan the names on a very beautifully engrossed communication that was put in my hands today by Mr. Gage, a communication from the representatives of the League to Enforce Peace. I found upon it the names of many of the principal and most representative citizens and professional men of San Diego, and it happened, I believe, unless I am misinformed, that practically all the signers were Republicans.

There is one thing against which I want to enter a protest. I have had, I do not know how many, men come to me and say, “Mr. President, I am a Republican, but I am for the League of Nations.” Why “but”? For as a Democrat, you will permit me to remind you who are Republicans that you have always boasted that your party is the party of constructive programs. Here is the most constructive, the greatest constructive, program ever proposed. Why should you say “but”? If I were in your place and had at my heart the pride which you very properly entertain because of the accomplishments of your party, I would say, “I am a Republican, and for that reason I am in favor of the League of Nations.”

But I am not going to say that I am a Democrat, and for that reason I am in favor of the League of Nations, because I am not in favor of it because I am a Democrat. I am in favor of it because I am an American and a believer in humanity. And I believe in my heart that if the people in this country, as I am going about now, were to suspect that I had political designs, they would give me evident indication that they wanted me to go back to Washington right away. They would not give me the splendid and delightful welcomes that they are giving me. Men and women would not come to me, as they are doing now, and take my hand in theirs and say, “Mr. President, God bless you!”

I wonder if you realize, as I have tried to realize, what that gracious prayer means. I have had women who had lost their dearest in the war come up to me with tears upon their cheeks and say, “God bless you!” Why did they bless me? I advised the Congress to go into this war and to send their sons to their death. As commander in chief of the army and navy, I sent their sons to their death, and they died, and their mothers come and say “God bless [387page icon] you!” There can be only one explanation. They are proud of the cause in which their sons died. And, oh, my friends, since we all have to die, the way those fellows died is the best way after all. There was nothing in it for them, no possible personal gain—nothing but the noble performance of a disinterested duty, and that is the highest distinction that any man can achieve.

I remember years ago reading an essay which left a permanent impression on my mind. It was entitled “Christmas: Its Unfinished Business.”4 And it was a discourse upon what was then a very common occurrence—the meeting of assemblies to promote peace. You know, we always used to be having conventions to promote peace, and most of the men who sat on the platforms were men who were doing everything they could to bring on war by unjustly exploiting other countries and taking advantages they ought not to take, that were sure to exasperate the feeling of people elsewhere. But they didn’t realize that they were really bringing on war; in their minds, they were trying to bring on peace, and the writer of the essay called attention to this.

His thesis was, “There will be peace when peace is as handsome as war.” He hurried to explain that what he meant was this, that, leaving aside the men who had unjustly and iniquitously plotted war—like the General Staff in Germany—the men in the ranks gave everything that they had, their lives included, for their country, and that while you would always hang the boy’s musket or his sword over the mantelpiece, you would never hang his ledger or his yardstick or his spade; not that civic implements are dishonorable, but that they are centered upon yourself, whereas the sword and the gun meant that you had forgotten yourself and remembered only the call of your country. And therefore, there was a certain sacredness about that implement that could not attach to any implement of civil life. “Now,” said my essayist, “when men are devoted to the purpose of peace with the same self-forgetfulness and the same thought for the interest of their country and the cause that they are devoted to that they display under arms in war, then there will be no more war. When the motives of peace are as disinterested and as handsome as the motives of war for the common soldier, then we will all be soldiers in an army of peace, and there will be no more wars.”

Now, that comes about when there is a common conception of peace, and the heart of this covenant of peace is to bring nations together into consultation so that they will see which of their [388page icon] objects are common, so that they will discuss how they can accommodate their interests, so that their chief object will be conciliation and not alienation. And when they understand one another, they will cooperate with one another in promoting the general interest and the common peace.

It is a parliament of nations at last, where everyone is under covenant himself to do right, to respect and preserve the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the others, and where they are engaged with one another never to go to war without first trying to settle the matter by the slow, cooling, disinterested processes of discussion.

It is what we have been striving for for generation after generation, and now some men hesitate to accept it when the golden thing is placed in their hands. It would be incredible to me, if I didn’t understand some of them, but it is not permitted to one occupying my present office to make personal remarks. And, after all, personal remarks are neither here nor there. What does any one of us matter in so great a thing as this? What difference does it make whether one man rises and another falls, whether all go down or up together? We have got to serve humanity. We have got to redeem the honor of the United States. We have got to see this thing through to its great end of justice and peace.

#An After-Dinner Speech in Los Angeles, September 20, 1919.

Mr. Toastmaster and ladies, and gentlemen: May I not first thank you, Mr. Toastmaster, for your very generous introduction, which has been in the same delightful tone of welcome that I have heard in the voices on the street. But I do not take that all to myself—the praise that you have so generously bestowed upon me. I nevertheless do recognize that you have set just the right note for the discussion that I want to indulge in for a few moments.

There is only one thing that has troubled me in this affair. My father used to say, “You cannot reason out of a man what reason did not put in him.” (laughter) May I not say that much of the argument offered directly against the League of Nations is not based on reason. I might say I have sometimes been discouraged, because it is true that there is a great constructive plan, and no man in the presence of the present critical situation of mankind has the right to oppose any constructive plan except by a better constructive plan. (applause) I will say now that I am ready to take ship again and carry back to Paris any constructive proposals which will be a suitable and better substitute than those which have been made. (applause)

And there is a peculiarity about this constructive plan which ought, I think, to facilitate our acceptance of it. It is laid out in every part upon American principles. Everybody knows that the principles of peace proposed by America were adopted, were adopted as the basis of armistice and eventually acted upon as the basis of the peace.

And there is a circumstance about these American principles which gives me absolute confidence in them. They were not the principles which I originated. They would have none of the strength that they have if they had been of individual origination. I remember how anxiously I watched the movements of opinion in this country during the months immediately preceding our entrance into the war. Again and again, I put this question to the men around the Cabinet table. They represented different parts of the [401page icon] country; they were in touch with different portions of the nation. I said to them, “How do you think the people feel with regard to our relation to this war?” I remember one of them said, “Why, Mr. President, I think they are ready to do anything that you suggest.” I said: “That is not what I have waited for. That is not enough. If they don’t go in of their own impulse, no impulse that I will supply will suffice. I must wait until I know I am their spokesman. Then I will know that I have an irresistible power behind.” (applause)

That is not wholly appreciated abroad or was not at that time. They wondered, wondered why we did not come in and came to the conclusion that we did not come in because we were making money out of the war and did not want to spoil a profitable game. Then at last they saw what we were waiting for. We were waiting in order that we might see the intrigue of what had penetrated our own life, how the poison was spreading, and how it was nothing less than a design against the freedom of the world. They knew that when America once saw that she would throw her power in with those who were going to redeem the world. And at every point of the discussion, I was attempting to be the mouthpiece of what I understood right-thinking and forward-thinking and just-thinking men, without regard to party or section in the United States, to be purposing and conceiving.

And it was the consciousness in Europe that that was the case that made it possible to construct the peace upon American principles. The American principles were not only accepted, they were acted upon. And when I came back to this country with that plan I think you will bear me out that the nation was prepared to accept it. I have no doubt, and I have not met anybody who had reason to doubt, that, if immediate action could have been secured upon the treaty at that time, only a negligible percentage of our people would have objected to its acceptance, without a single change in either wording or punctuation.

But then something intervened, my fellow citizens. I am not only not going to try to analyze what that was, I am not going to allow my own judgment to be formed as regards what it was. I don’t understand it, but there is a certain part of it I do understand. It is to the immediate interest of Germany to separate us from our associates in the war, (applause) and I know that the opposition to the treaty is most acceptable in those quarters of the country where the pro-German sentiment was strongest. I know that all over the country German propaganda had lifted its hideous head again, and I hear the hiss of it on every side.

When gentlemen speak of isolation, they forget we would have a companion. There would be another isolated nation, and that is [402page icon] Germany. They forget that we would be in the judgment of the world in the same class and at the same disadvantage as Germany. I mean sentimental disadvantage. We would be regarded as having withdrawn our cooperation from that concerted purpose of mankind, which was originally conceived and exercised for the liberation of mankind, and Germany would be the only nation in the world to profit by it.

I have no doubt there are scores of businessmen present. Do you think we would profit materially by isolating ourselves and centering upon ourselves the hostility and suspicion and resistance of all the liberal minds in the world? Do you think that if, after having won the absolute confidence of the world and excited the hope of the world, we should turn away from them and say: “No, we do not care to be associated with you any longer; we are looking after ourselves; we are going to play a lone hand; we are going to play it for our single advantage?” Is that good psychology for the establishment of friendly relations? Is that psychology for the establishment of credit? Do you think that throws foreign markets open?

Do you remember what happened just before we went into the war? There was a conference in Paris, the object of which was to unite the people fighting against Germany in an economic combination which would be exclusively for their own benefit. It is possible now for those powers to organize a combine in respect of the purchase of raw materials, and if the foreign market for our raw materials is united, we will have to sell at the price that they are willing to pay or not sell at all. Unless you go into the market and make a partnership with the world, you will have the rest of the world in a combine against you. But if you bring the thing down to this lowest of all bases—the basis of material self-interest—you lose your game, you do not win, and, for my part, I will say you ought to lose. (applause)

We are told that we are strong and they are weak; that we still have the economic advantage and they have not. Why, my fellow citizens, what does that mean? That means that when they went into the redemption of the freedom of the world, they went in to give everything that they had. They said, or thought, that, because we did not go in so soon or lose so much, we would make a profit out of the redemption. The thing is ridiculous. The thing is unworthy of every tradition of America. I speak of it, not because I think that sort of thing takes the least hold upon the consciousness or the purpose of America, but because it is a pleasure to condemn so ugly a thing. When we look at the objections which these gentlemen make, I have found in going about the country that the result has been that, in the greater part of the United States, the people [403page icon] do not know what is in that treaty. They do not know what the treaty is. To my great surprise, I have had to stand up and explain the treaty and tell them what is in it. I have had many men say: “Why, we never dreamed those things were in the treaty. We never heard anything about that, never heard anything about the greatness of the enterprise. We only heard about some of the alleged defects of the methods by which it was to be carried out.” That is all they have heard.

You remember hearing it said that this was a people’s war and it must be a people’s peace. And that is exactly what it must be. For the first time in the history of civilized society, a great international convention, made up of the leading statesmen of the world, has proposed a settlement which is for the benefit of the weak and not for the benefit of the strong. It is for the benefit of the people who could not have liberty themselves, whose weakness was profitable to the ambitious, whose weakness had been traded on by every Cabinet in Europe. And yet these very Cabinets represented at the table in Paris were united in the opinion that the people’s day had come, and that it was not their right to dispose of the fortunes of the people without the consent of those people.

At the front of this great settlement they put the only thing that will preserve it. You cannot establish independence for weak peoples and then leave them to shift for themselves. You cannot give those people rights which they never enjoyed before and say, “Now, keep them if you can.” That is an Indian gift, a gift which cannot be kept. You will have to say, “This is the settlement, and we guarantee its continuance.” (applause)

There is only one honorable course when you have won a cause—to see that it stays won, to see that nobody interferes with or disturbs the result. And that is the purpose of the much-discussed Article X of the Covenant of the League of Nations. It is the Monroe Doctrine applied to the world. We have, ever since Mr. Monroe uttered his famous doctrine, said to the world, “We will respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and political independence of every state in the western hemisphere.” Those are practically the words of Article X.

Under Article X, all the members of the League engage to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and political independence of the other member states. And if that guarantee is not forthcoming, the whole structure of peace will crumble, because you cannot point out a great war that has not begun by a violation of that principle; that has not begun by the intention to impair the territorial integrity or interfere with the political independence of some body of people or some nation.

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It was the heart of the Pan-German plan. It is the heart of every imperialistic plan, because imperialism is the design to control the destinies of people who did not choose you to control them. It is the principle of domination. It is the opposite extreme of self-determination, self-government. And in that same Covenant of the League of Nations is the provision that only self-governing nations shall be admitted to the League, only those who are in sympathy with self-determination shall be in it. It embodies that ancient and noble principle that underlies our institutions—that all just government depends on the consent of the governed. (applause)

And you have no choice, my fellow citizens, because the peoples of the world, even those that slept, are awake. There is not a country in the world where the great mass of mankind is not now aware of its rights and determined to have them at any cost. The present universal unrest in the world renders a return to normal conditions impossible so long as it continues. The present unrest will not stop until men are assured of some arrangement they can believe in, something which will assure them that their rights will be protected, that they can go about the normal production of the necessaries of life again and enjoy the ordinary pleasures and privileges of life without a constant shadow of some cloud of terror over them, some threat of injustice, some tyranny of control.

Men are not going to stand it. If you are going to quiet the world, you have got to reassure the world. And the only way to reassure the world is to let it know that all the great fighting powers of the world are a unit, and that they are to be used and directed to protect. And every great fighting nation in the world will be in the League, because Germany for the time being is not a great fighting power. (applause) That great nation of over 60,000,000 people has consented in the treaty to reduce its armed forces to 100,000 men and to give up all the war material over and above what is necessary to maintain an army of 100,000 men.

So, for the time being, we may exclude Germany from the list of the fighting nations of the world and say that the whole power of the world is now offered to mankind for the maintenance of peace, and for the maintenance of peace by the very processes we have all professed to believe in by substituting arbitration and discussion for war, by substituting the judgment of mankind for the force of arms.

I say without qualification that every nation that is not afraid of the judgment of mankind will go into this League of Nations. (applause) There is nothing for any nation to lose whose purposes are right and whose cause is just. The only nations that need fear to go into it are those that have designs that are illegitimate, those [405page icon] which have designs that are inconsistent with justice and are the opposite of peace.

So that the whole freedom of the world, not only, but the whole peace of mind of the world, depends upon the choice of America, because without America in this arrangement, the world will not be reassured.

I can testify to that. I can testify that no impression was borne in deeper on me on the other side of the water than that no great free people suspected the United States of ulterior designs, and that every nation, the weakest among them, felt that its fortunes would be safe if entrusted to the guidance of America, that America would not impose upon them. And at the peace table one of the reasons why American advice constantly prevailed—as it did—was that our experts—our financial experts and our economic experts, for you must remember that the work of the conference was not done exclusively by the men whose names you have read about every day; it was done with the most intensive labor of experts of every sort who sat down together and got down to the hardpan of every subject that they had to deal with—and in nine cases out of ten, after a long series of debates and interchanges of views and counterproposals, it was usually the American proposal that was adopted. (applause)

And that was because American experts came at last into this position of advantage—they convinced everybody they were not trying to work anything, that they were not thinking of something that they did not disclose, that they wanted all the cards on the table, and that they wanted to deal with nothing but facts. They were not dealing with national ambitions, they were not trying to disappoint anybody, and they were not trying to stack the cards for anybody. It was that conviction, and that only, which led to the success of American counsel in Paris.

Isn’t that a worthy heritage for people who set up a great free nation on this continent in order to lead men in the ways of justice and of liberty? My heart is filled with a profound pride when I realize how America was regarded, and my only fear was that we would not have the wisdom to play the part—I mean we, who were over there. Delegations from literally all parts of the world came to seek interviews with me as the spokesman of America, and there was always a plea that America should lead, that America should suggest. And I remember saying to one of the delegations, which seemed to me more childlike in its confidence than the rest: “I beg that you gentlemen will not expect the impossible. But America will do everything that she can, but she cannot do some of the things that you are expecting of her. My chief fear is to disappoint, [406page icon] because you are expecting what cannot be realized.” My fear was not that America would not prove true to herself, but that the things expected of her were so ideal that, in this practical world, full of obstacles, it would be impossible to realize the expectations. There was in the background the infinite gratification at the reputation and confidence that this country had won.

The world is in that situation industrially, economically, politically. The world will be absolutely in despair if America deserts it. But the thing is inconceivable. America is not going to desert it. (applause) The people of America are not going to desert it. The job is to get that into the consciousness of men who do not understand it. The job is to restore some of our fellow citizens to that large sort of sanity which makes a man bigger than himself.

We have had a great many successful men in America, my fellow citizens, but we seldom erect a statue to a man who has only been successful in a business way. Almost all the statues of America, almost all the memorials, are erected to men who forgot themselves and worked for other people. They may not have been rich, they may not have been successful in a worldly sense, they may have been deemed in their generation dreamers and idealists, but when they were dead America remembered that they loved mankind, America remembered that they embodied in their dreamy ideals of theirs the visions that America had had, and it remembered that they had a great surplus of character that they spent, not upon themselves, but upon the enterprises of mankind. And a man who has not got that surplus capital of character that he spends upon the great enterprises of communities and of nations will sink into a deserved oblivion. The only danger is that, in his concentration upon his own ambitions, in his centering of everything that he spends on himself, he will lead others astray and work a disservice to great communities which he ought to have served.

So that there is now an enterprise of infection ahead of us—shall I call it? We have got to infect these men with the spirit of the nation itself. We have got to make them aware that we will not be led, that we will not be controlled, that we will not be restrained by those who are not like ourselves; and that America is now in the presence of the realization of the destiny which we have awaited.

You know, you have been told, that Washington advised us against entangling alliances, and that is used as an argument against the League of Nations. What Washington had in mind was exactly what these gentlemen want to lead us back to. The day we left behind us was the day of alliances. It was a day of balances of power. It was a day of every nation taking care of itself and making [407page icon] a partnership with a nation or group of nations to hold the peace of the world steady or dominate the weaker portions of the world. Those were the days of alliances.

This process of the League of Nations is a process of disentanglement. I was reading only this morning what a friend of mine reminded me of—a speech that President McKinley made the day before he was assassinated. And in several passages of that speech, you see the dawn of this expectation in his mind. His whole thought was against isolation. His whole thought was that we had, by process of the circumstances, to become the partners of the rest of the world. His thought was that the world had grown little by quickened methods of intercommunication. His whole thought was that the better we knew each other and the closer we grew together, the more certain the processes of arbitration and the better the processes of arbitration. Men would not fight but would talk things over; they would realize their community of interest. And shot all through the speech, you see the morning light of just such a day as this. It would look as if the man had been given a vision just before he died—one of the sweetest and most humane souls that has been prominent in our affairs, a man who thought with his head and with his heart. And this new day was dawning upon his heart, and his intelligence was beginning to draw the lines of the new picture which has now been completed and sketched in a constructive document which we shall adopt (continued applause) and that, having adopted it, we shall finally reflect a new glory upon the things we did.

Then what significance will attach to the boy’s gun or sword over the mantlepiece—not merely that he beat Germany, but that he redeemed the world. (continued applause)

#An Address in the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, September 20, 1919.

Mr. Mayor, Mrs. Cowles, my fellow citizens and countrymen: I esteem it a great privilege to stand before this great audience,2 and I esteem it one of the most interesting occasions that I have had to expound a theme so great that I am always afraid that I am [408page icon] inadequate to its exposition. I esteem it a privilege to be in the presence that I find myself in—on the stage with this committee of gentlemen representing the nations with whom we have been associated in the war—with these men who saved the Union and these men who saved the world. (applause)

And I feel that there is a certain sense in which I am rendering my account to the soldiers and sailors whose commander in chief I have been, for I sent them across the sea believing that their errand was not only to defeat Germany, but also to redeem the world from the danger to which Germany had exposed it, to make the world a place in which arbitration, discussion, the processes of peace, the processes of justice should stand in place of the brutal processes of war. (applause)

And I came back from the other side proud that I was bringing with me a document which contained a great constructive plan to accomplish that very thing. It is a matter of unaffected amazement on my part, my fellow citizens, that there should be men in high station to oppose its adoption. It is a matter of amazement that they should devote their scrutiny to certain details and forget the majesty of the plan, (applause) that they should actually have made it necessary that I should go through the country telling the people of the United States what is in the treaty of peace. For they have not told you. They have given you no conception of its scope. They have not expounded its object. They have not told you how it is to accomplish its purposes. They have not shown you how it is a people’s and not a statesmen’s peace. They have not shown you how in its heart lies the liberation of nations. They have not shown you that in it is the redemption of our promise that we were fighting for the right of the weak and not for the power of the strong. (applause)

These promises are redeemed in that great document, these hopes are realized, and the only buttress for that great structure is the League of Nations. (applause) If that should fail, there is no guarantee that any part of the settlement will stand. If that should fail, nations will once more sink back into that slough of despond in which they formerly struggled—suspecting one another, rivaling one another in preparation of war, intriguing against one another, plotting against the weak in order to supplement the power of the strong.

And they would do more than that, because mankind is now aware that the rights of the greater portion of mankind have not been safeguarded and regarded. Don’t for a moment suppose that the universal unrest in the world at the present time, my fellow citizens, is due to any whim, to any newborn passion, to any newly [409page icon] discovered ambition. It is due to the fact—the sad, the tragic fact—that great bodies of men have throughout the ages been denied their rights and the rights of humanity. (applause)

The peoples of the world are tired and done with governments that exploit their peoples. (applause) And they are determined to have, by one process or another, that concerted order of conciliation and debate and conference which is set up in that great document which we know as the Covenant of the League of Nations.

For the heart of that document is not Article X, or the right to withdraw, or any other things you have been talking about.

The heart of that document is that every great fighting nation in the world—for Germany at present is not a great fighting nation (laughter)—every great fighting nation in the world solemnly engages that it will never resort to war without first having done one or the other of two things—either submitted the matter in dispute to arbitration, in which case it agrees to abide by the verdict, or, if it does not choose to submit it to arbitration, submit it to the examination and discussion of the Council of the League of Nations, before whom it promises to lay all the documents, to whom it promises to disclose all the pertinent facts, by whom it agrees all the documents and facts shall be published and laid before the opinion of the world. They agree that six months shall be allowed for the examination of those documents and facts by the Council of the League and then, if they are dissatisfied with the final arbitration, they will still not resort to war until three months after the verdict has been rendered. So that they all agree that there shall be nine months of deliberate discussion and frank weighing of the merits of the case before the whole jury of mankind before they will go to war. (applause)

And if any one of them disregards that promise and refuses to submit the question in dispute either to arbitration or to discussion, or goes to war within less than nine months, then there is an automatic penalty that is applied, more effective, I beg leave to say, than war itself, namely, the application of an absolute boycott. The nation that disregards that, we all agree, shall be isolated; shall be denied the right to ship out goods or ship them in, to exchange telegraph messages or messages by mail, to have any dealings of any kind with the citizens of the other members of the League. (applause)

First, the pressure of opinion and then the compelling pressure of economic necessity—those are the great bulwarks of peace. You say they are not sufficient? I put this proposition to you. You want insurance against war. Wouldn’t you rather have 10 per cent insurance than none? If you could get 20 per cent insurance, [410page icon] wouldn’t you be delighted? If you got 50 per cent insurance, wouldn’t you think it ideal? Why, my fellow citizens, if you examine the provisions of this document, I think you will agree we will have 98 per cent insurance.

And that is what we promised to mothers and wives and sweethearts of these men that they should have—insurance against the terrible danger of losing those who were dear to them, slain on the battlefield because of the unhallowed plots of an autocratic government. Autocratic governments are excluded henceforth from respectable society. (applause) It is provided in the Covenant of the League of Nations that only self-governing peoples shall be admitted to its membership. And the reason that Germany is for the time being excluded is that we want to wait and see whether she really has changed permanently her form of constitution and her habit of government. If she has changed her mind in reality, if her people have taken charge of their own affairs and will prove it to us, they are entitled to come into respectable society and join the League of Nations. Until then, they are on probation. (laughter) And you see the way some of them talk, you would think the probation had to be rather long, because they don’t seem to have repented of their essential purposes.

Now, offset against this, my fellow citizens, some of the things that are being said about the Covenant and the League and about the treaty. I want to begin with one of the essential objections which is made to this treaty, for I have come here disposed to business. I don’t want to indulge in generalities. I don’t want to dwell more than it is proper to dwell upon the great ideal purposes that lie behind this peace and this Covenant. I want to contrast some of the things that have been said with the real facts. (applause) There is nothing that is formidable in this world in public affairs except facts. Talk doesn’t matter.

As I was saying the other night, if you suspect an acquaintance of yours of being a fool, encourage him to hire a hall. (laughter) Your fellow citizens will then know whether your judgment of him was right or wrong, and it won’t be you that convinces them, it will be he who does the convincing. Because the best way to dissipate nonsense is to expose it to the open air. It is volatile. It is a volatile thing, whereas facts and proof are concrete things.

If I may tell a rather trivial story, when I was Governor of New Jersey, I got rather reluctant support for a certain measure of reform from a member of the Senate of the state who, I think, if he had been left to his own devices, would probably have not voted for the measure, but to whom a committee of fellow townsmen came and, so to speak, personally conducted his vote. After they had [411page icon] successfully conducted it, they solemnly brought him to my office to be congratulated. It was a great strain upon my gravity, but I pulled as straight a face as I could and thanked him and congratulated him. Then, tipping a very heavy wink indeed, he said, “Governor, they never get me if I see them coming first.” And I have adopted that same motto. I never will let them get me if I see them coming first. (applause) The danger for some of the gentlemen we are thinking about tonight, but not mentioning, (laughter) is that the facts are coming, and they don’t see them. (laughter) And my prediction is that the facts are going to get them and make a very comfortable meal off of them.

Let’s take up some of these things, to grow serious again. In the first place, there is that very complex question of the cession of the rights which Germany formerly enjoyed in the Shantung Province in China, and which the treaty transfers to Japan.

The only way in which to clear this matter up is to know what lies back of it. Let me recall some circumstances which probably most of you have forgotten. I will have to go back to the year 1989, for it was in March of that year that the cessions which formerly belonged to Germany were transferred to her by the government of China. It had happened so that two German missionaires had been murdered. The central Government at Peking had done everything in its power to quiet the local disturbances and to allay the local prejudice against foreigners which led to the murder, and had been unable to do so. And the German government held them responsible, nevertheless, for the murder of the missionaries.

But it was not the missionaries that the German government was interested in. That was a pretext. Oh, my fellow citizens, how often have we made Christianity an excuse for wrong! How often! How often in attempting to protect what was sacred have we done what was tragically wrong! And that was what Germany did. She insisted that, because this thing had happened, for which the Peking government could not really with justice be held responsible, a very large and important part of one of the richest provinces in China should be ceded to them for sovereign control for a period of ninety-nine years; not only that, but they should have the right to penetrate the province with a railway and have the right to exploit any ores that lay within thirty miles on either side of the railway. And all this for ninety-nine years!

And they forced the Peking government to say that they did it in gratitude to the German government for certain services which she was supposed to have rendered but never did render. That was the beginning.

I don’t know whether any of the gentlemen who are criticizing [412page icon] the present Shantung settlement were in public affairs at that time or not, but I will tell you what happened, so far as this government was concerned. One of the most enlightened of our Presidents was at the head of the government at that time—William McKinley, (applause) a man who loved his fellow men and believed in justice. And associated with him was one of our greatest statesmen—John Hay. (applause) The state of international law was such at that time that they did not feel at liberty to make even a protest against those concessions to Germany. Neither did they make any protest when, immediately following that, similar concessions were made to Russia, to Great Britain and France. It was almost immediately after that that China granted to Russia the right of possession and control of Port Arthur and a part of the region of Talien-Wan. Then England, although she had similar rights elsewhere in China, got a similar concession of Weihaiwei. And then France insisted that she must have a port, and got it for ninety-nine years.3 And not against one of those did the government of the United States make any protest whatever. They only insisted that the door should not be shut in any of those regions against the trade of the United States. (applause)

You have heard of Mr. Hay’s policy of the open door. That was his policy of the open door—not the open door to the rights of China, but the door to the goods of America.

I want you to understand, my fellow countrymen, I am not criticizing this because, until we adopt the Covenant of the League of Nations, it is an unfriendly act for any government to interfere in the affairs of another unless its own interests are immediately concerned. And the only thing Mr. McKinley and Mr. Hay were at liberty to do was to call attention to the fact that the trade of the United States might be unfavorably affected and insist that in no circumstances should this be done, a promise which was more or less kept.

Following that came the war between Russia and Japan. At the close of that war Japan got Port Arthur and the rights which Russia enjoyed in China, just as she is now getting Shantung and the rights which our recently defeated enemy had in China—an exactly identical operation. That peace that gave her Port Arthur was concluded, as you know, on the territory of the United States—at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Nobody directed a protest against that. Japan had beaten Russia. Port Arthur did not at that time belong to China; it belonged for the period of the lease to Russia. And Japan was ceded what Japan had taken by the well-recognized processes of war.

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Very well, at the opening of this war, Japan took Kiaocow and supplanted Germany in the Shantung Province. Now, all the processes were repeated, but repeated with a new sanction. In the meantime, after this present war began, England and France, not at the same time, but successively, feeling that it was essential that they should have the assistance of Japan in the Pacific, agreed that if Japan would go into the war and take whatever Germany had in the Pacific, she should retain everything north of the Equator which had belonged to Germany. And that treaty now stands. That treaty absolutely binds Great Britain and France. Great Britain and France cannot in honor, having offered Japan this inducement to enter the war and to continue her operations, consent to an elimination of the Shantung provision from the present treaty.

Very well, let us put these gentlemen to the test who are objecting to the Shantung settlement. Are they ready to fight Great Britain, France, and Japan, who will have to stand together, in order to get this province back for China? I know that they are not. Their interest in China is not the interest of assisting China, but of defeating the treaty.

They know beforehand that a modification of the treaty in that respect cannot be obtained, and they are insisting on what they know is impossible. But if they ratify the treaty and accept the Covenant of the League of Nations, they do put themselves in a position to assist China. (applause) They put themselves in that position for the very first time in the history of international engagements. They change the whole face of international affairs, because, after you have read the much debated Article X of the Covenant, I advise you to read Article XI. Article XI says it shall be the right of any member of the League to call attention at any time to anything, anywhere, that threatens to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. (applause)

That in itself constitutes a revolution in international relationships. Anything that affects the peace of any part of the world is the business of every nation. A nation doesn’t have simply to insist that its trade shall not be interfered with; it has the right to insist that the rights of mankind shall not be interfered with. (applause)

And not only that, but back of this provision with regard to Shantung lies, as everybody knows, or ought to know, a very honorable promise which was made by the government of Japan in my presence in Paris, namely, that, just as soon as possible after the ratification of this treaty, they will return to China all sovereign rights in the province of Shantung. (applause) Great Britain has not promised to return Weihaiwei; France has not promised to return her port. Japan has promised to relinquish all the sovereign rights [414page icon] which were acquired by Germany for the remaining seventy-eight of the ninety-nine years of the lease, and to retain only what other governments have in many other parts of China, namely, the right to build and operate the railway under a corporation and to exploit the mines in the immediate neighborhood of that railway. In other words, she retains only the rights of economic concessionaires.

Personally, I am frank to say that I think all these nations have invaded some of the essential rights of China by going too far in the concessions which they have demanded, (applause) but that is an old story now, and we are beginning a new story. And in the new story, we all have the right to talk about what they have been doing and to convince them, by the pressure of the public opinion of the world, that a different course of action would be just and right. (applause) I am for helping China and not turning away from the only way in which I can help her. Those are the facts about Shantung. Doesn’t the thing look a little different? (cries of “Yes” and applause)

Another thing that is giving some of our fellow countrymen pangs of some sort—(laughter) pangs of jealousy, perhaps—(applause) is that, as they put it, Great Britain has six votes in the League and we have only one. Well, our one vote, it happens, counts just as heavily as if every one of our states were represented and we had forty-eight, because it happens, though these gentlemen have overlooked it, that the Assembly is not an independent voting body. Great Britain has only one representative and one vote in the Council of the League of Nations, which originates all actions. And its six votes are in the Assembly, which is a debating and not an executive body. (applause) And in every matter in which the Assembly can vote along with the Council, it is necessary that all the nations represented on the Council should concur in the affirmative votes to make it valid. So that in every vote, no matter how many votes for it in the Assembly, in every vote in order for it to become valid, it is necessary that the United States should vote aye. So that, so far as I am concerned, as I have said before, I would rather be one and count six than six and count one. (laughter and applause)

Inasmuch as the Assembly is a debating body, that is the place where this exposure that I have talked about to the open air is to occur. It would not be wise for anybody to go into the Assembly with purposes that will not bear exposure, because that is the great cooling process of the world, that is the great place where gases are to be burned off. I ask you, in debating the affairs of mankind, would it have been fair to give Panama a vote, as she will have, Cuba a vote, both of them very much under the influence of the [415page icon] United States, and not give a vote to the Dominion of Canada; to that great energetic republic in South Africa; to that place from which so many liberal ideas and liberal actions have come, that stout little Commonwealth of Australia? When I was in Paris, the men I could not tell apart, except by their hats, were the Americans and the Australians. They both had the swing of fellows who say, “The gang is all here, what do we care?” Could we deny a vote to that other little self-governing nation, for it practically is such in everything but its foreign affairs, New Zealand, or to those toiling—I was about to say uncounted—millions in India? Would you want to deprive these great communities of a voice in the debate? My fellow citizens, it is a proposition which has never been stated, because to state it answers it.

But they cannot outvote us. If we, as I said a minute ago, had forty-eight votes in the Assembly, they would not count any more than our one, because they would have to be combined, and it is easier to combine one than to combine forty-eight. The vote of the United States is potential to prevent anything that the United States does not care to approve. All this nonsense about six votes and one vote can be dismissed, and you can sleep with perfect quiet. In order that I may not be said to have misled you, I must say that there is one matter upon which the Assembly can vote, and which it can decide by a two-thirds majority without the concurrence of all the states represented in the Council, and that is the admission of new members to the League.

Then, there is that passion that some gentlemen have conceived, that we should never live with anybody else. You can call it the policy of isolation or the policy of taking care of yourself, or you can give any name you choose to what is thoroughly impossible and selfish. I say it is impossible, my fellow citizens. When men tell you that we are, by going into the League of Nations, reversing the policy of the United States, they have not thought the thing out. The statement is not true. The facts of the world have changed. It is impossible for the United States to be isolated. It is impossible for the United States to play a lone hand, because it has gone partners with all the rest of the world with regard to every great interest that it is connected with.

What are you going to do? Give up your foreign markets? Give up your influence in the affairs of other nations and arm yourselves to the teeth and double your taxes and be ready to spring instead of ready to cooperate? We are tied into the rest of the world by kinship, by sympathy, by interest in every great enterprise of human affairs. The United States has become the economic center, the financial center of the world. Our economic engagements run [416page icon] everywhere, into every part of the globe. Our assistance is essential to the establishment of normal conditions throughout the world. Our advice is constantly sought. Our standards of labor are being extended to all parts of the world, just so far as they can be extended. America is the producing center for all the ideas that are going to fecundate the great future. (applause)

You can no more separate this from the rest of the world than you can take all the tender roots of a great tree out of the earth and expect that tree to live. All the tendrils of our life—economic, social, and every other kind—are interlaced in and are inextricable with similar tendrils of mankind. And the only question which these gentlemen can ask us to answer is this—shall we exercise our influence in the world, which can henceforth be a profound and controlling influence, at a great advantage or at an intolerable disadvantage?

That is the only question you can ask. As I put it the other night, you have got this choice: you have got to be either provincials—little Americans—or big Americans—statesmen. You either have to be ostriches with your heads in the sand or eagles. (cries of “eagles”) I doubt if the comparison, with the head in the sand, is a good one, because I suppose even an ostrich can think in the sand. What he does not know is that people are looking at the rest of him.

And our choice is in the bird kingdom either ostriches or eagles, and in my mind in the past the eagle has been misused. You know it was the double-headed eagle that represented Austria. You have heard of the eagles of Germany. But the only proper symbol of the eagle is the symbol for which we use it—as the bird of liberty and justice and peace. (applause)

Because I want to put it as a business proposition, if I am compelled to come down as low as that, for I don’t like in debating the great traditions of a free people to bring it down to dollars and cents. But if anybody wants to bring it down to that, reason it out on that line, is it easier to trade with a man who suspects and dislikes you or with one who trusts you? Is it easier to trade with a man with a grouch or a man who opens his mind and his purse to you and treats you like a partner and a friend?

There is nothing which can more certainly put a drop of acid into every relationship we have in the world than if we now desert our former associates in this war. (applause) And that is exactly what we should be doing, and that is exactly what, unwisely and too soon, the German leaders have apprised us that they want us to do.

No part of the world has been so pleased by our present hesitation as the leaders of Germany, because their hope from the first has been that, sooner or later, we would fall out with our [417page icon] associates. Their hope was to divide us before the fighting stopped, and now their hope is to divide us after the fighting. You remember reading that a former German Privy Councillor, I think it was, said, in an interview the other day, that these debates in the Senate looked to him like the dawn of a new day. A new day for the world? No, a new day for the hopes of Germany. Because he saw what anybody can see who lifts his eyes and looks into the future—two isolated nations—one isolated nation now on probation, and then two—the other a nation infinitely trusted, infinitely believed in, that had given magnificent proof of its mettle and trustworthiness, now drawing selfishly and suspiciously apart and saying: “You may deceive us, you may draw us into broils, you may get us into trouble. We will take care of ourselves. We will trade with you, and we will trade on you.”

Why, the choice is inconceivable. America is no quitter, (applause and cries of “No! No!”)

And least of all is she a quitter in a great moral enterprise where her conscience is involved. And the only immortality in or about America is her conscience. America is not going to be great or immortal because she has immense wealth. Other great nations had immense wealth and went down in decay and disgrace, because they had nothing else. America is great because of the ideas she has conceived. America is great because of the purposes she has set herself to achieve. America is great because she has seen visions that other nations have not seen. And the one enterprise that does engage the steadfast loyalty and support of the United States is an enterprise for the liberty of mankind. (applause)

How can we make the purpose evident? I was saying in another place tonight that my dear father had once taught me that there was no use trying to reason out of a man what reason did not put in him. And yet here tonight I am trying to apply the remedy of reason. We must look about, gentlemen, and find some other remedy, because remedies in these matters are always homeopathic—like must cure like. And we must be made to see the great impulses of the nation in such fashion that they will not dare resist. I do not mean by any threat or political disaster.

Why, my fellow citizens, may I indulge in a confidence? I have had men politically disposed say to me: “As a Democrat, this is all to the good. These leaders of the Republican party in Washington are going to ruin the party.” And they seem to think I will be pleased. I don’t want to see the great Republican party misrepresented and misled. I don’t want to see any advantage reaped by the party I am a member of because another great party has been misrepresented. Because I believe in the loyalty and Americanism and [418page icon] high ideals of my fellow citizens who are Republicans just as much as I believe in those things in the Democrats. It seems almost absurd to say that; of course I do. But when we get to the borders of the United States, we are neither Republicans nor Democrats. It is our privilege to scrap inside the family just as much as we please, (laughter) but it is our duty as a nation, in those great matters of international concern which distinguish us, to subordinate all such differences and to be a united family and all speak with one voice what we all know to be the high conception of American manhood and womanhood.

And there is a tender side to this great subject. Have these gentlemen no hearts? Do they forget the sons that are dead in France? Do they forget the great sacrifice this nation has made? Why, my friends, we did not go to France to fight for anything specially for America. We did not send men 3,000 miles away to defend our own territory. We did not take up the gage that Germany had thrown down to us because America was being specially injured. We sent those men over there because we saw that free people everywhere were in danger, and we had always been, and always will be, the champions of right and of liberty. (applause)

That is the glory of these men that sit here. The hardest thing I had to do, and many of you had to do, was to continue to wear civilian clothes during the war and not don the uniform, and not to risk something besides reputation—risk life and everything. Because we knew that an altar had been erected upon which that sacrifice could be made more gloriously than upon any other altar that had ever been lifted among mankind. And we desired to offer ourselves as a sacrifice for humanity. (applause) And that is what we shall do, my fellow countrymen. All the mists will pass away. A number of halls are being hired. (laughter) All the gases are being burnt off. And when you come down, after the gases have passed away, to the solid metal of which this nation is made, it will shine as lustrously and bright as it has ever shone throughout the history of the nation we love and the nation we will always consecrate ourselves to redeem. (applause)

#Remarks in Sacramento, September 22, 1919.

My fellow countrymen: I am overjoyed at this sincere greeting. It gives me great pleasure, indeed, to see and hear you. Not so much that I am personally gratified, but because I feel that you voice approval of that great Covenant designed to make peace permanent in the world. The Covenant is a movement to make for the betterment of the world. It is the first great combination of the power of the world. We must go ahead, and it is through this agency that we will progress. We simply cannot go back. We cannot retire into the past from which we have dragged ourselves. It [427page icon] is impossible in these circumstances for me to attempt a speech, but I can’t let the occasion go by without telling you how strong it makes my heart that you should have given me so extraordinary and delightful a welcome as this. It is the more delightful to me because I believe that it is not only a desire to welcome me, but a desire to show your interest in and your support of the great cause I have come out to advocate.

The happy circumstance of this journey is that I have not come out to advocate anything personal to myself, and I have not come out to seek the fortunes of any man or group of men, but to seek the safety and guarantee of peace everywhere. We undertook a great war for a definite purpose.

That definite purpose is carried out in a great treaty. I have brought the treaty back, and we must not much longer hesitate to ratify it, because that treaty is a guarantee of peace; it is the guarantee of permanent peace, for all the great fighting nations of the world are combined in it to maintain a just settlement. So that, without this treaty, without the Covenant of the League of Nations which it contains, we would simply sink back into that slough of despond in which mankind was before this war began, with the strain of war and of terror constantly over them. We cannot go back. We will not go back.

It is more than a guarantee of peace. It is a guarantee of justice. For example, it affords the only hope of China and the hope of the restoration to her, not only of the sovereignty of Shantung, but of the sovereignty which other nations as well have taken away from her.

It affords the only expectation, in a similar case—for Belgium—that, by the pressure, the assembled, the irresistible pressure of public opinion throughout the world, its rights will be protected against aggression, that, by the combined force of the nations, right must be done to all. It is the first combination of the power of the world to see that justice shall reign everywhere. We cannot turn away from such an arrangement, and I am sure, my fellow countrymen, not only from this great outpouring here, but from the great outpourings I have seen everywhere in this country, the heart of America is right and that her purpose is irresistible.

I thank you sincerely for your welcome.

#An Address in Reno, September 22, 1919.

Governor Boyle, Mr. Chairman,1 my fellow countrymen: A charmed circle has been drawn around me here, and I have been asked to stand within it. I think it has something to do with the apparatus in front.

The Governor and your chairman have both alluded to the fact that it does not often happen that the President comes to Nevada. Speaking for this President, I beg to say that it was not because I didn’t want to come to Nevada more than once, because from the first, when I have studied the movements of the history of this great country, nothing has fascinated me so much or seemed so characteristic of that history as the movement to the frontier, the constant spirit of adventure, the constant action forward.

A wit in the East recently said, explaining the fact that we were able to train a great army so rapidly, that it was so much easier to train an American because you had to train him to go only one way. (applause) And that is and has been true of America and of the movement of population. It has always been one way. Never has there been any returning tide, always an advancing tide. And at the front of the advancing tide have always been the most adventurous spirits, the most originative spirits, the men who were ready to go anywhere and to take up any fortune to advance the things that they believed in and desired.

Therefore, it is with a sense of exhilaration that I find myself in this community, which your Governor has described as still a frontier community. You are a characteristic part of this great country which we all love.

And it is the more delightful to look at your individual aspect, because the subject that I have come to speak about is a forward-looking subject. Some of the critics of the League of Nations have their eyes over their shoulders; they are looking backward. I think that is the reason they are stumbling all the time. They are always striking their feet against obstacles which others avoid and which do not lie in the real path of the progress of civilization.

Their power to divert, or pervert, the view of this whole thing has made it necessary for me repeatedly on this journey to take the liberty that I am going to take with you tonight—of telling you just what kind of a treaty this is. Very few of them have been at pains to do that. Very few of them have given their audiences or the [429page icon] country at large any conception of what this great document contains or of what its origin and purposes are. Therefore, I want, if you will be patient with me, to set the stage for the treaty, to let you see just what it was that was meant to be accomplished, and just what it was that was accomplished.

Perhaps I can illustrate best by recalling some history. Something over a hundred years ago, the last so-called peace conference sat in Vienna—back in the far year 1815, if I remember correctly. It was made up, as the recent conference in Paris was, of the leading statesmen of Europe. America was not then drawn into that general family and was not represented at that conference, and practically every government represented at Vienna at that time, except the government of Great Britain, was a government like the recent government of Germany, where a small coterie of autocrats were able to determine the fortunes of their people without consulting them, were able to use their people as puppets and pawns in the game of ambition which was being played all over the stage of Europe. But just before that conference, there had been many signs that there was a breaking up of that old order, there had been some very ominous signs, indeed.

It was not then so long ago that, though there were but 3,000,000 people subject to the crown of Great Britain in America, they had thrown off allegiance to that crown successfully and defied the power of the British Empire on the ground that nobody at a distance had a right to govern them, and that nobody had a right to govern them whom they did not choose to be their government, founding their government upon the principle that all just government rests upon the consent of the governed.

And there had followed, as you remember, that whirlwind of passion that we know as the French Revolution, when all the foundations of French government, not only, but of French society, had been shaken and disturbed—a great rebellion of a great suffering population against an intolerable authority that had laid all the taxes on the poor and none of them on the rich, that had used the people as servants, that had made the boys and men of France play upon the battlefield as if they were chessmen upon a board.

France revolted, and then the spirit spread, and the conference of Vienna was intended to check the revolutionary spirit of the time. Those men met in order to concert methods by which they could make monarchs and monarchies safe, not only in Europe, but throughout the world.

The British representatives at that conference were alarmed, because they heard it whispered that European governments, European monarchies, particularly those of the center of Europe—those [430page icon] of Austria and Germany—for Austria was then stronger than Germany—were purposing to extend their power to the western hemisphere, to the Americas. And the Prime Minister of Great Britain suggested to Mr. Rush, the Minister of the United States at the Court of Great Britain, that he put it in the ear of Mr. Monroe, who was then President, that this thing was afoot and it might be profitable to say something about it.

Thereupon, Mr. Monroe uttered his famous Monroe Doctrine, saying that any European power that sought either to colonize this western hemisphere or to interfere with its political institutions, or to extend monarchical institutions to it, would be regarded as having done as unfriendly act to the United States. And since then no power has dared interfere with the self-determination of the Americas.

That is the famous Monroe Doctrine. We love it, because it was the first effective dam built up against the tide of autocratic power. (applause) The men who constituted the Congress of Vienna, while they thought they were building of adamant, were building of cardboard. What they threw up looked like battlements, but presently were blown down by the very breath of insurgent people, for all over Europe the middle of the last century there spread, spread irresistibly, the spirit of revolution. Government after government was changed in its character. People said: “It is not only in America that men want to govern themselves, it is not only in France that men mean to throw off this intolerable yoke. All men are of the same temper and of the same make and same rights.”

So the time of revolution could not be stopped by the conclusions of the Congress of Vienna, until it came about, my fellow citizens, that there was only one stronghold left for that sort of power—and that was at Berlin.

In the year 1914 that power sought to make reconquest of Europe and the world. It was nothing less than the reassertion of that old, ugly thing which the hearts of men everywhere always revolt against—the claim of a few men to determine the fortunes of all men, the ambition of little groups of rulers to dominate the world, the plots and intrigues of military staffs and men, who did not confide in their fellow citizens what it was that was their ultimate purpose.

So the fire burned in Europe, until it spread and spread like a great forest conflagration, and every free nation was at last aroused, saw the danger, saw the fearful sparks blowing over, carried by the winds of passion and likely to lodge in their own dear countries and destroy their own fair homes. And at last the chief champion and spokesman of liberty, beloved America, got into the [431page icon] war, (applause) and said: “We see the dark plot now. We promised at our birth to be the champions of humanity, and we have never made a promise yet that we will not redeem.” I know how the tides of war were going when our men began to get over there in force, and I think it is nothing less than true to say that America saved the world.

Then a new congress of peace met to complete the work that the Congress of Vienna tried to stop and resist. At the very front of this treaty of peace, my fellow citizens, is the Covenant of the League of Nations. And at the heart of that lies this principle—that no nation shall be a member of that league which is not a self-governing and free nation; that no autocratic power may have any part in the partnership; that no power like Germany—such as Germany was—shall ever take part in its councils.

Germany has changed her constitution, as you know—has made it a democratic constitution, at any rate in form—and she is excluded for the time being from the League of Nations only in order that she may go through a period of probation to show that she means what she professes; to demonstrate that she actually does intend permanently to alter the character of her constitution and put into the hands of her people what was once concentrated as authority in Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. If she can prove her change of heart and the permanency of her change of institutions, then she can come into respectable society. (applause) But if she cannot, she is excluded forever. At last the cycle is completed, and the free peoples who were resisted at Vienna have come into their own.

There was not a single statesman at Paris who did not know that he was the servant, and not the master, of his people. There was not one of them who did not know that the whole spirit of the times had changed, and that they were there to see that people were liberated, not dominated; that people were put in charge of their own territories and their own affairs. The chief business of the congress was to carry out that great purpose, and, at last, in the Covenant of the League of Nations, the Monroe Doctrine became the doctrine of the world. Not only may no European power impair the territorial integrity or interfere with the political independence of any state in the Americas, but no power anywhere may impair the territorial integrity or invade the political independence of another power. The principle that Mr. Canning suggested to Mr. Monroe has now been vindicated by its adoption by the representatives of mankind.

When I hear gentlemen ask the question, “Is the Monroe Doctrine sufficiently safeguarded in the Covenant of the League of Nations?”, I can only say that it is, if I understand the English [432page icon] language. It says in plain English that nothing in that Covenant shall be interpreted as affecting the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. Could anything be plainer than that? And when you add to that that the principle of the Monroe Doctrine is applied to the whole world, then surely I am at liberty to say that the heart of the document is the Monroe Doctrine itself.

We have at last vindicated the policy of America, because all through that treaty, and you will presently see all through the Austrian treaty, all through the Bulgarian treaty, all through the Turkish treaty, all through the separate treaty we must make with Hungary, because she is separated from Austria, runs the same principle, not only that no government can impose its sovereignty on unwilling people, but that governments which have imposed their sovereignty upon unwilling people must withdraw it.

All the regions that were unwillingly subject to Germany, subject to Austria-Hungary, and subject to Turkey are now released from that sovereignty. And the principle is everywhere adopted that territories belong to the people that live on them, and that they can set up any sort of government they please, and that nobody dare interfere with their self-determination and autonomy. I conceive this to be the greatest charter—nay, it is the first charter—ever adopted of human liberty. It sets the world free everywhere from autocracy, from imposed authority, from authority not chosen and accepted by the people who obey it.

By the same token, it removes the grounds of ambition. My fellow citizens, we never undertake anything that we do not see through. This treaty was not written, essentially speaking, at Paris. It was written at Château-Thierry and in Belleau Wood and in the Argonne. Our men did not fight over there for the purpose of coming back and letting the same thing happen again. They did not come back with any fear in their hearts that their public men would go back on them and not see the thing through. They went over there expecting that the business would be finished. And it shall be finished.

Nothing of that sort shall happen again, because America is going to see it through. And what she is going to see through is this, what is contained in Article X of the Covenant of the League. Article X is the heart of the enterprise. Article X is the test of the honor and courage and endurance of the world. Article X says that every member of the League, and that means every great fighting power in the world, Germany for the time being not being a great fighting power, solemnly engages to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members of the League.

[433page icon]
If you do that, you have absolutely stopped ambitious and aggressive war. There is one thing you have not stopped, and that I, for my part, do not desire to stop. And I think I am authorized to speak for a great many of my colleagues, if not all of my colleagues at Paris, that they do not wish to stop it. It does not stop the right of revolution. It does not stop the choice of self-determination. No nation promises to protect any government against the wishes and actions of its own people or of any portion of its own people. Why, how could America join in a promise like that? She threw off the yoke of a government. Shall she prevent any other people from throwing off the yoke that they are unwilling to bear? She never will, and no other government ever will, under this Covenant. But, as against external aggression, as against ambition, as against the desire to dominate from without, we all stand together in a common pledge, and that pledge is essential to the peace of the world.

I said that our people were trained to go only one way, that our soldiers were trained to go only one way, and that America will never turn back upon the path of emancipation upon which she has set out.(applause) Because not once, but several times, German orders were picked up, or discovered during the fighting, the purport of which was to certain commanders: “Don’t let the Americans capture such and such a post, because if they ever get there, you can never get them out.” (applause) They had got other troops out, temporarily at any rate, but they could not get the Americans out. The Americans were under the impression that they had come there to stay.

And I am under that impression about American political purposes. I am under the impression that we have come to the place where we have got in order to stay, and that some gentlemen are going to find that, no matter how anxious they are to know that the door is open and that they can get out any time they want to, they will be allowed to get out by themselves. We are going to stay in. We are going to see this thing finished, because, my fellow citizens, that is the only possibility of peace; and the world not only desires peace but it must have it.

Are our affairs entirely in order? Isn’t the rest of the world aflame? Have you any conception of the restlessness, of the insubordinate restlessness, of the great populations of Europe and of great portions of Asia? Do you suppose that these people are going to resume any sort of normal life unless their rulers can give them adequate and ample guarantees of the future?

And do you realize—I wonder if America does realize—that the rest of the world deems America indispensable to the guarantee? (applause) For a reason of which we ought to be very proud. They [434page icon] see that America has no designs on any other country in the world. They keep in mind—they keep in mind more than you realize—what happened at the end of the Spanish-American War. There were many cynical smiles on the other side of the water when we said that we were going to liberate Cuba and then let her have charge of her own affairs. They said: “Ah, that is a very common subterfuge. Just watch. America is not going to let that rich island, with its great sugar plantations and its undeveloped agricultural wealth, get out of its grip again.” And all Europe stood at amaze when, without delay or hesitation, we redeemed our promise and gave Cuba the liberty we had won for her. (applause) They know that we have no imperialistic purposes.

They know that we do not desire to profit at the expense of other peoples. And they know our power, they know our wealth, they know our indomitable spirit. And, when we put our names to the bond, then Europe will begin to be quiet, then men will begin to seek the peaceful solutions of days of normal industry and normal life, then men will take hope again, then men will cease to think of the revolutionary things they can do and begin to think of the constructive things they can do, will realize that disorder profits nobody and that order can at last be had upon terms of liberty and peace and justice.

Then the reaction will come on our own people, because, do you think, my fellow citizens, does any body of Americans think, that none of this restlessness, this unhappy feeling, has reached America? Do you find everybody about you content with our present industrial order? Do you hear no intimations of radical change? Do you learn of no organizations the object of which is nothing less than to overturn the government itself?

We are a self-possessed nation. We know the value of order. We mean to maintain it. We will not permit any minority of any sort to dominate us. (applause) But it is rather important for America, as well as for the rest of the world, that this infection should not be everywhere in the air, and that men everywhere should begin to look life and its facts in the face and come to calm counsels and purposes that will bring order and happiness and prosperity again.

If you could see the stopped, the arrested factories over there, the untilled fields, the restless crowds in the cities with nothing to do, some of them, you would realize that they are waiting for something. They are waiting for peace, and not only for peace but for the assurance that peace will last. And they cannot get that assurance if America withholds her might and her power and all the freshness of her strength from the assurance. So that there is a deep sense in which what your chairman said just now is [435page icon] profoundly true. We are the hope of humanity, and I, for one, have not the slightest doubt that we shall fulfill that hope.

Yet, in order to reassure you about some of the things about which you have been diligently misinformed, I want to speak of one or two details. I have set the stage now, and I have not half described the treaty. It not only fulfills the hopes of mankind by giving territories to the people that belong to them and assuring them that nobody shall take it from them, but it goes into many details.

It rearranges, for example, the great waterways of Europe, so that no one nation can control them, so that the currents of European life through the currents of its commerce may run free and unhampered and undominated. It embodies a great charter for labor by setting up a permanent international organization in connection with the League of Nations, which shall periodically bring the best counsels of the world to bear upon the problem of raising the levels and conditions of labor for men, women, and children. It goes further than that. We did not give Germany back her colonies, but we did not give them to anybody else. We put them in trust in the League of Nations, said that we would assign their government to certain powers, but assign them as trustees, responsible to the League, making annual reports to the League and holding the power under mandates which prescribe the methods by which they should administer those territories for the benefit of the people living in them, whether they were developed or undeveloped people. So that we put the same safeguards, and as adequate safeguards, around the poor, naked fellows in the jungles of Africa that we have around those peoples almost ready to assume the rights of self-government in some parts of the Turkish Empire, as, for example, in Armenia. It is a great charter of liberty and of safety, but let me come to one or two details.

It sticks in the craw of a great many persons that in the constitution of the League of Nations, as it is said, Great Britain has been given six votes and the United States only one. That would be very interesting if true, but it does not happen to be true. That is to say, it is not true in this sense—that the one American vote counts as much as the British six. In the first place, they haven’t got six votes in the Council of the League, which is the only body that originates action, but in the Assembly of the League, which is the debating and not the voting body. Every time the Assembly participates in any active resolution of the League, that resolution must be concurred in by all the nations represented on the Council, which makes the affirmative vote of the United States in every instance necessary. The six votes of the British Empire cannot do anything [436page icon] to which the United States does not consent. Now—I am mistaken—there is one thing they can do. By a two-thirds vote, they can admit new members to the League. But I do not think that is a formidable privilege, since almost everybody is going to be in the League to begin with, and since the only large power that is not in the League enjoys, if I may use that word, a universal prejudice against it, which makes its early admission, at least, unlikely. But aside from admission of any members, which requires a two-thirds vote—in which the six British votes won’t cut a very large figure—every affirmative vote that leads to action requires the assent of the United States. And, as I have frequently said, I think it is very much more important to be one and count six than to be six and count one.

So much for this bugaboo, for it is nothing else but a bugaboo. Bugaboos have been very much in fashion in the debates of those who have been opposing this League. The whole energy of that body is in the Council of the League, for whose every action in the way of formulating policy or directing energetic measures a unanimous vote is necessary. That may sometimes, I am afraid, impede the action of the League. But, at any rate, it makes the sovereignty and the sovereign choice of every nation that is a member of that League absolutely safe.

And pray do not deceive yourselves. The United States is not the only government that is jealous of its sovereignty. Every other government, big or little or middle sized that had to be dealt with in Paris, was just as jealous of its sovereignty as the United States. The only difference between some of them and us is that we could take care of our sovereignty, and they couldn’t take care of theirs. But it has been a matter of principle with the United States to maintain that, in respect of rights, there was and should be no difference between a weak state and a strong state. Our contention has always been, in international affairs, that we should deal with them upon the principle of the absolute equality of independent sovereignty, and that is the basis of the organization of the League. Human society has not moved fast enough yet or far enough yet, my fellow citizens, for any part of that principle of sovereignty to be relinquished, by any one of the chief participants, at any rate. So that we have, at any rate, an absolute control over all the actions and measures of the League.

Then there is another matter, that lies outside of the League of Nations, that I find my fellow citizens, in this part of the continent, particularly, are deeply interested in. That is the matter of the cession of certain German rights in Shantung Province in China to Japan. I think that it is worthwhile to make that matter pretty clear, [437page icon] and I will have to ask you to be patient while I make a brief historical review in order to make it clear.

In the first place, remember that it does not take anything from China, it takes it from Germany, and I do not find that there is any very great jealousy about taking things from Germany. In 1898, China granted to Germany, for a period of ninety-nine years, certain very important rights around Kiaochow Bay, in the rich and ancient Province of Shantung, together with the right to penetrate the interior with a railway and exploit such ores as might be found in that province for thirty miles on either side of the railway.

We are thinking so much about that cession to Germany that we have forgotten that practically all of the great European powers had exacted similar cessions of China previously. They already had their foothold of control in China; they already had their control of railways; they already had their exclusive concessions over mines. Germany was doing an outrageous thing, I take the liberty of saying, as the others had done outrageous things, but it was not the first. At least, it had been done before. China lay rich and undeveloped, and the rest of the world was covetous, and it had made bargains with China, generally to China’s disadvantage, which enabled the world to go in and exploit her riches. I am not now going to discuss the merits of that question, because it has no merits. The whole thing was bad, but it was not unprecedented. Germany obliged China to give her what China had given others previously. Immediately thereafter, China was obliged, because she had done this thing, to make fresh concessions to Great Britain of a similar sort, to make fresh concessions to France, to make concessions of a similar kind to Russia. It was then that she gave Russia Port Arthur and Talien-Wan.

Now, remember what followed. The government of the United States did not make any kind of protest against any of these cessions. We had at that time one of the most public-spirited and humane men in the executive chair at Washington that have ever graced that chair—I mean William McKinley—(applause) and his Secretary of State was a man whom we have all always delighted to praise, Mr. John Hay. But they made no protest against the cession to Germany, or to Russia, or to Great Britain, or to France. The only thing they insisted on was that none of those powers should close the door of commerce to the goods of the United States in those territories which they were taking from China. They took no interest, I mean so far as what they did was concerned, in the liberties and rights of China. They were interested only in the rights of the merchants of the United States.

I want to hasten to add that I do not say this even to imply [438page icon] criticism on those gentlemen, because, as international law stood then, it would have been an unfriendly act for them to protest in any one of these cases. Until this treaty was written in Paris it was not even proposed that it should be the privilege of anybody to protest in any such case if his own rights were not directly affected. Then, some time after that, followed the war between Russia and Japan. You remember where that war was brought to a close—by delegates of the two powers sitting at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, at the invitation of Mr. Roosevelt, who was then President. In that treaty, Port Arthur—China’s Port Arthur, ceded to Russia—was ceded to Japan, and the government of the United States, though the discussions were occurring on its own territory, made no suggestion even to the contrary.

And now, the treaty in Paris does the same thing with regard to the German rights in China. It cedes them to the victorious power, I mean to the power that took them by force of arms, the power which was in the Pacific victorious in this war, namely, to Japan, and there is no precedent which would warrant our making a protest. Not only that, but, in the meantime, since this war began, Great Britain and France entered into solemn covenants of treaty with Japan that, if she would come into the war and continue her operations against Germany in the Pacific, they would lend their whole influence and power to the cession to Japan of everything that Germany had in the Pacific, whether on the mainland or in the islands north of the Equator. So that if we were to reject this provision in the treaty, Great Britain and France would not in honor be at liberty to reject it, and we would have to devise means to do what, let me say with all solemnity only war could do, force them to break their promise to Japan.

Well, you say, “Then, is it just all an ugly, hopeless business?” No, it is not, not if we adopt the League of Nations. Because the government of the United States was not bound by these treaties, the government of the United States was at liberty to get anything out of the bad business that it could get by persuasion and argument. And it was upon the instance of the government of the United States that Japan promised to return to China what none of these other powers has yet promised to return—all rights of sovereignty that China had granted Germany over any portion of the province of Shantung—the greatest concession in that matter that has ever been made by any power that has interested itself in the exploits of China—and to retain only what corporations out of many countries have long enjoyed in China—the right to run the railroad and extend its line to certain points and to continue to work the mines that have already been opened.

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Not only that, but I said a minute ago that Mr. Hay and Mr. McKinley were not at liberty to protest. Turn to the League of Nations and see what will be the situation then. Japan is a member of the League of Nations, all these other powers that have exploited China are members, and they solemnly promise to respect and preserve the territorial integrity and existing political independence of China. Not only that, but in the next article, the international law of the world is revolutionized. It is there provided that it is the friendly right of any member of the League at any time to call attention to anything, anywhere, that is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. If we had had the Covenant at that time, Mr. McKinley could, and I venture to say would, have said to Germany: “This is directly none of our business, for we are seeking no competitive enterprise of that sort in China, but this is an invasion of the territorial integrity of China. We have promised, and you have promised, to preserve and respect that integrity, and if you do not keep that promise it will destroy the good understanding which exists between the peaceful nations of the world. It will be an invasion, a violation of the essential principles of peace and of justice.” Do you suppose for one moment that, if the matter had been put in that aspect—with the attention of the world called to it by the greater power of the United States—Germany would have persisted in that enterprise?

How had she begun it? She had made the excuse of the death of two German missionaries at the hands of irresponsible mobs in certain provinces of China an excuse for taking this valuable part of China’s territory. Ah, my fellow citizens, it makes anybody who regards himself as a Christian blush to think what Christian nations have done in the name of protecting Christianity! But it cannot be done any more under the League of Nations.

It cannot be done without being cited to the bar of mankind, and if Germany had been cited to the bar of mankind before she began her recent tragical enterprise, she never would have undertaken it. You cannot expose such matters to the cool discussion of the world without disclosing all their ugliness, their illegitimacy, their brutality. This treaty sets up, puts in operation, so to say, puts into commission the moral force of the world. Our choice with regard to Shantung, therefore, is to keep out of the treaty—for we cannot change it in that respect—or go in and be an effective friend of China. I, for one, am ready to do anything or to cooperate in anything in my power to be a friend, and a helpful friend, to that great, thoughtful, ancient, interesting, helpless people, in capacity, in imagination, in industry, in numbers one of the greatest peoples in [440page icon] the world and entitled to the wealth that lies underneath their feet and all about them in that land which they have not as yet known how to bring to its development.

There are other things that have troubled the opponents of the League. One thing is they want to be sure they can get out. That does not interest me very much. If I go into a thing, my first thought is not how I can get out. My first thought is not how I can scuttle, but how I can help, how I can be effective in the game, how I can make the influence of America tell for the guidance and salvation of the world, not how I can keep out of trouble. I want to get into any kind of trouble that will help liberate mankind. I do not want always to be thinking about my skin or my pocketbook or my friendships. It is just as comfortable to die quietly in your bed, never having done anything worth anything, as to die as some of those fellows that we shall always love, when we remember them, died upon the field of freedom. Is there any choice? Do you think anybody outside the family is going to be interested in any souvenir of you after you are dead? They are going to be interested in souvenirs of the boys in khaki, whether they are of their family or not. They are going to touch with reverence any sword or musket or rapid-fire gun or cannon that was fired for liberty upon the fields of France.

I am not thinking of sitting by the door and keeping my hand on the knob, but if you want to do that, you can get out any time you want to. There is absolutely nothing in the Covenant to prevent you. I was present at its formulation, and I know what I am talking about, besides being able to understand the English language. It not only meant this, but said it, that any nation can, upon two years’ notice, withdraw at any time, provided that, at the time it withdraws, it has fulfilled its international obligations and its obligations under the Covenant. But it does not make anybody judge as to whether it has fulfilled those obligations, except the nation that withdraws.

The only thing that can ever keep you in the League is being ashamed to get out. You can get out whenever you want to after two years’ notice, and the only risk you run is having the rest of the world think you ought not to have got out.

I, for my part, am not very sensitive about that, because I have a memory. I have read the history of the United States. We are in the habit of keeping our international obligations, and I do not believe that there will ever come a time when any just question can be raised as to whether we have fulfilled them or not. Therefore, I am not afraid to go before the jury of mankind at any time on the record of the United States with regard to the fulfillment of its [441page icon] international obligations. And when these gentlemen who are criticizing it once feel, if they ever should feel, the impulse of courage instead of the impulse of cowardice, they will realize how much better it feels. Your blood is at least warm and comfortable, and the red corpuscles are in command when you have got some spunk in you. But when you have not, when you are afraid somebody is going to put over something on you, you are furtive and go about looking out for things, and your blood is cold, and you shiver when you turn a dark corner. That is not a picture of the United States. When I think of these great frontier communities, I fancy I can hear the confident tread, tread, tread of the great hosts that crossed this continent. They were not afraid of what they were going to find in the next canyon. They were not looking over their shoulders to see if the trail was clear behind them. They were making a trail in front of them, and they had not the least notion of going back. They were going to stay there, even if they had to change their names. I know you will do what I am sure all the rest of our fellow countrymen are doing—clear the deck of these criticisms that really have nothing in them, and look at the thing in its large aspect, in its majesty. Particularly, look at it as a fulfillment of the destiny of the United States, for it is nothing less. At last, after this long century and more of blood and terror, the world has come to the vision that that little body of 3,000,000 people, strung along the Atlantic Coast of this continent, had in that far year 1776. Men in Europe laughed at them, at this little handful of dreamers, this little body of men who talked dogmatically about liberty. And since then that fire which they started on that coast has consumed every autocratic government in the world, every civilized autocratic government. And now at last the flame has leaped to Berlin, and there is the funeral pyre of the German Empire.

#To the People of Utah, Sept. 23, 1919]

It is with the greatest pleasure that I find myself in the great state of Utah, and I regret that it is not possible for me to remain in Ogden long enough to express to its citizens the sense of privilege I feel in coming into contact with them, and the confidence I feel that, in common with all forward-looking Americans, they accept with enthusiasm the guarantees of peace we are now seeking to confirm.

May I not take the liberty of expressing the greatest interest in the good fortune of Ogden and northern Utah, and my hope that prosperity of the most substantial kind may continue to crown the efforts of its citizens.

#Remarks in Ogden, Utah, September 23, 1919.

I cannot make a real speech in the circumstances, but it would be ungracious of me if I did not say how delightful I have felt the welcome of Ogden to be, and how refreshing it is to me to come into contact with you, my fellow citizens, in this part of the world which I wish I knew much better. You will understand that the theme that I have most at heart needs a lot of sea room to turn in, and I would despair of making any adequate remarks about so great a matter as the treaty of peace or the League of Nations. But I do find this, my fellow countrymen, that the thing is very near the heart of the people. There are some men in public life who do not seem to be in touch with the heart of the people, but those who are know how that heart throbs deep and strong for this great enterprise of humanity, for it is nothing less than that. We must set our purposes in a very definite way to assist the judgment of public men.

I do not mean in any way to coerce the judgment of public men, but to enlighten and assist that judgment, for I am convinced, after crossing the continent, that there is no sort of doubt that 80 percent of the people of the United States are for the League of Nations, and that the chief opposition outside legislative halls comes from the very disquieting element that we had to deal with before and during the war. All the elements that tended toward disloyalty are against the League, and for a very good reason. If this League is not adopted, we will serve Germany’s purpose, because we will be dissociated from the nations with whom we cooperated in defeating Germany. Nothing is so gratifying, we now learn by cable, to public opinion in Germany as the possibility of their doing now what they could not do by arms—separating us in feeling when they could not separate us in fact. I, for my part, am in to see this thing through, because these men who fought the battles on the fields of France are not now going to be betrayed by the rest of us. We are going to see that the thing they fought for is accomplished, and it does not make any difference how long the fight or how difficult the fight, it is going to be won, and triumphantly won.

#An Address in the Tabernacle in Salt Lake City, September 23, 1919

Governor Bamberger, President Grant,1 my fellow countrymen: It is indeed inspiring to stand before this great audience, yet I feel that I have come to present a theme which deserves the greatest of all audiences. I must admit to a very considerable degree of unaffected diffidence in presenting this theme, because the theme is so much bigger than any man’s capacity to present it adequately. It is a theme which must engage the enthusiastic support of every lover of humanity, every man who professes Christian convictions, because we are now as a nation asked to make what I cannot help characterizing as the most critical decision we have ever made in the history of America.

We sent our boys across the sea to defeat the purposes of Germany. We engaged that, if they would defeat the purposes of Germany, we would complete what they had begun and make such arrangements of international concert as would make it impossible for any such attempt ever to be made again. The question, therefore, is, shall we see it through, or shall we now, at this most critical juncture of the whole transaction, turn away from our associates in the war and decline to complete and fulfill our sacred promises to mankind?

I have now crossed the continent, my fellow countrymen, and am on my way east again, and I feel qualified to render testimony as to the attitude of this great nation towards the Covenant of the League. And I say, without the slightest hesitation, that an overwhelming majority of our fellow countrymen purposes that this Covenant shall be adopted. One by one, the objections to it have melted away. One by one, it has become evident that the objections urged against it were without sufficient foundation. One by one, it has become impossible to support them as objections, and at last we come to the point of critical choice as to the very heart of the whole matter.

For, my fellow citizens, you know it troubled some of our public men because they were afraid that it was not perfectly clear that we could withdraw from this arrangement whenever we wanted. There is no justification for doubt in any part of the language of the Covenant on that point. The United States is at liberty to withdraw at any time upon two years’ notice, the only restriction being when it withdraws it shall have fulfilled its international [450page icon] obligations and its obligations under the Covenant of the League. But it is left to its own conscience and to no other tribunal. It has to determine whether those obligations have been fulfilled or not. And I, for one, am not afraid of the judgment of mankind with regard to it. The United States never has failed to fulfill its international obligations. It never will fail. I am ready to go to the great jury of humanity upon that matter at any time that we should withdraw from this arrangement.

But I am not one of those, when I go into a great enterprise, think first of how I am going to get out of it. I think first of how I am going to stay in it, with what power of influences I am going to promote the objects of the great concert and association which is being formed. And that is the temper of America.

I was quoting the other night the jest of an American wit who, commenting upon the extraordinary rapidity with which we had trained an army, said that it was easier to train an army in America than anywhere else in less time, because you had to train them to go only one way. And they showed the effect of the training. They went only one way, and the issues that we are debating were really decided at Château-Thierry, Belleau Wood, and in the Argonne. So that we are now put to the test by these men who fought, as they were put to the test by those of us who ordered them to the field of battle. And the United States, the people of the United States, have the same training as their army. They do not look back, they go only one way.

The doubt as to whether some superior authority to our own Congress could intervene in matters of domestic policy is removed. The language of the Covenant expressly excludes the authorities of the League from taking any action or expressing any judgment with regard to domestic policies like immigration, like naturalization, like the tariff, like all of those things which have lain at the center so often of our political action.

Nobody doubts any longer that the Covenant gives explicit, unqualified recognition to the Monroe Doctrine. Indeed, it does more than that. It adopts the principle of the Monroe Doctrine as the principle of the world. The principle of the Monroe Doctrine is that no nation has the right to interfere with the affairs or to impose its own will in any way upon another nation. President Monroe said to the governments of Europe that any attempt of that sort on the part of any government of Europe would be regarded as an act unfriendly to the United States. The Covenant of the League endorses that. The Covenant of the League says that nothing in that document shall be construed as affecting the validity of the Monroe Doctrine, which says that if any power seeks to impose its will [451page icon] upon any American state in North America, Central America, or South America, it now acknowledges the right of the government of the United States to take the initiative.

So that the forces of objection being driven out of one post after another are now centering upon the heart of the League itself. I have come here tonight, my fellow countrymen, to discuss that critical matter that you constantly see in the newspapers, that we call reservations. I want you to have a very clear idea of what is meant by reservations.

Reservations are to all intents and purposes equivalent to amendments. I can say, I believe with confidence, that it is the judgment of the people of the United States that neither the treaty nor the Covenant should be amended. Very well, then, look at the character of reservations. What does a reservation mean? It means a stipulation that this particular government insists upon interpreting its attitude to that Covenant in a special way; it insists upon interpreting it in a way in which other nations do not interpret it. This thing, when we ratify it, is a contract. You cannot alter so much as the words of a contract without the consent of the other parties. Any reservation that we have will have to be carried to all the other signatories, Germany included. We shall have to get the consent of Germany, among the rest, to read this Covenant in some special way in which we prefer to read it in their interests, or in the interests of the safety of America. That, to my mind, is one of the most unacceptable things that could happen. To reopen the question of the meaning of this clearly written treaty is to reopen negotiations with Germany. And I don’t believe that any part of the world is in the temper to do that. (applause) And in order to bring this matter, to put this matter, in such a shape as will lend itself to a concrete elucidation, let me read you what I understand is a proposed form of reservation:

“The United States assumes no obligation under the provisions of Article X to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country or to interfere in controversies between other nations, whether members of the League or not, or to employ military and naval forces of the United States under any article for any purpose, unless, in any particular case, Congress, which under the Constitution has the sole power to declare war or authorize the employment of military and naval forces of the United States, shall by act or joint resolution so declare.”

Now, my fellow citizens (applause)—now wait a minute. You want to applaud that? Wait until you understand the meaning of it, and if you have a knife in your hands with which you intend to cut out the heart of this Covenant, applaud. But, if you want this [452page icon] Covenant to have a heart in it, and want it to have a purpose in it, want it to be something subscribed to by a red-blooded nation, withhold your applause. Understand this thing before you form your sentiment with regard to it.

This is a rejection of the Covenant. (applause) This is an absolute refusal to carry any part of the same responsibility that the other members of the League carry. Does the United States want to be in on that special footing? (Cries of “No! No!”) Does the United States want to say to the nations with whom it stood in this great struggle, “We have seen you through on the battlefield, but now we are done. (Cries of “No!”) We are not intending to stand by you?”

Why, my fellow citizens, Article X is an engagement on the part of the great fighting nations of the world, because all the great fighting nations are going to be members of the League, that they will observe, respect, and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and the existing political independence of the other members of the League. That is cutting into the heart of all war.

Every war of any consequence that you can cite originated in an attempt to seize the territory or interfere with the political independence of some other nation. We went into this war with the sacred promise that we regarded all nations as having the same rights, whether they were weak or strong, and unless we engage to sustain the weak, we have guaranteed that the strong will prevail, we have guaranteed that any imperialistic enterprise may revive, we have guaranteed that there is no barrier to the ambition of nations that have the power to dominate, we have abdicated the whole position of right and substituted the principle of might.

This is the heart of the Covenant, and what are these gentlemen afraid of? Nothing can be done under that article of the treaty without the consent of the United States. (applause) I challenge them to draw any other deduction from the provisions of the Covenant itself. In every case where the League takes action, the unanimous vote of the Council of the League is necessary. The United States is a permanent member of the Council of the League. Its affirmative vote is in every case necessary for every affirmative, or for that matter, every negative, action. (applause)

Let us go into particulars therefore. These gentlemen say, “We don’t want the United States drawn into every little European squabble.” Why of course we don’t, and under the League of Nations, it is entirely within our choice of whether we will or not. The processes of the action of the League are certain to be this. When trouble arises in the Balkans, when somebody sets up a fire [453page icon] somewhere in Central Europe among those little nations, which are for the time being looking upon each other with a good deal of jealousy and suspicion, because the passions of the world have not yet cooled—whenever that happens, the Council of the League will confer as to the best methods of putting out the fire.

If you want to put out a fire in Utah, you don’t send to Oklahoma for the fire engine. If you want to put out a fire in the Balkans, if you want to stamp out the smoldering flames in some part of Central Europe, you don’t send to the United States for troops. The Council of the League selects the powers which are most ready, most available, most suitable, and selects them at their own consent, so that the United States would in no such circumstance conceivable be drawn in unless the flames spread to the world.

And would they then be left to themselves if they were not members of the League? You have seen the fire spread to the world once. Do you wish it to spread again? If you saw human liberty imperiled, would you wait to be a member of the League to go in? (cries of “No! No!”)

Why, my fellow citizens, the whole thing goes directly to the conscience of the United States. If the fight is big enough to draw the United States in, I predict that they will be drawn in anyhow. And if it is not big enough to bring them in, it is inevitable that they can go in or stay out according to the decisions of the Council, which are dependent upon their own votes.

Why are these gentlemen afraid? There is no force to oblige the United States to do anything except moral force. Is any man, any proud American, afraid of moral force? Is any man afraid that the United States will resist the duress of duty? Why, I am so intensely conscious of the great conscience of this nation. I so see the inevitableness, as well as the dignity and the greatness—such declarations as President Grant has made—of aligning all the great organized moral forces of the world on the same side. It is inconceivable that they should be on different sides.

So that there is no necessity for the last part of this reservation. Everybody in the whole United States, and I say that advisedly, almost every public man, every statesman, in the world knows that, in order for the United States to go to war, it is necessary for Congress to act. They don’t have to be told that, but that is not what this resolution says. This resolution says the United States assumes no obligation under the provision of Article X to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country—washes its hands of the whole business; says, “We don’t want advice to create the presumption that we will do the right thing. We don’t want to be committed to any more trouble.” But when we [454page icon] say that, every time a case arises, that Congress will independently check it up and determine whether there is any moral obligation, and, after determining that, determine whether it will feel the moral obligation of any act, it is an absolute withdrawal from the moral obligations of Article X. And that is why I say that it would be a rejection of the Covenant and thereby a rejection of the treaty, for the treaty cannot be executed without the Covenant.

So I appeal, and I appeal with confidence, my fellow countrymen, to the men whose judgment I am told has approved of reservations of this sort. I appeal to them to look into the matter again. I know some of the gentlemen who are anxious to have a reservation of that sort. I know them to be high-minded, patriotic Americans. I know them to be men of mature judgment in that respect, and I respect them as much as I respect any man. But they have not looked into the matter. Are they willing to ask the rest of the world to go into this Covenant and to let the United States assume none of its obligations, and let us have all of the advantages and none of the responsibilities? Are they willing that our America should ask for special exemption, should seek special privileges, should ask to go into the arrangement and depend upon any judgment but its own judgment?

I confidently believe, my fellow citizens, that they will do no such a thing. That is not an interpretation of the Covenant. I have been trying to interpret it to you. That is a rejection of the Covenant, and, if that is adopted, the whole treaty falls to the ground. My fellow citizens, we must realize that a great and final choice is upon the people. Either we are going to guarantee civilization or we are going to abandon it. I use the word with perhaps the admission that it may carry a slight exaggeration, but nevertheless advisedly, when I say abandon civilization, for what is the present condition of civilization? Everywhere, even in the United States, there is antagonism towards our process of government. We feel the evil influence on this side of the Atlantic, and on the other side of the Atlantic every public man knows that it is knocking at the door of his government.

While this unrest is assuming this menacing form, rebelling against authority, it cuts roads of force through the regular processes of government. The world is waiting on America. And while I say it with entire respect for the representatives of other governments, I say it with knowledge: the government of the United States is the only government in the world that the rest of the world is waiting on. The government of the United States speaks for the people of the United States, and it is devoted to the service of a great people. And the world knows that the people can always [455page icon] apply this covenant of right, knows that nobody dares invade the public judgment of the people of the United States, and knows that the public judgment is on the side of right and justice for the people. It has seen the United States do what no other nation ever did. When we fought the war with Spain, there were many cynical smiles on the other side of the water when we professed a disinterested purpose, when we said we were going to win freedom for Cuba and then present it to her. They said: “Ah, yes—under the control of the United States. They will never let go of that rich island which they can exploit so much to their own advantage.” When we kept that promise and proved our absolute disinterestedness, notwithstanding the fact that we had beaten Spain until she had to accept anything that we tendered, we paid her twenty millions of dollars for something that we could have taken, namely, the Philippine Islands, all the world stood at amaze and said: “Is it true, after all, that this people believes and means what it says? Is it true, after all, that this is a great altruistic force in the world?”

Now look what has happened, my fellow citizens. Poland, Bohemia, Armenia, Yugoslavia—there are kinsmen, I dare say, of these people in this audience—they could, none of them, have won their independence any more than Cuba could have won theirs. They were under an authority that is as reckless in the acts of its force, that is as regardless of the rights of people and of humanity, as the Spanish government ever was in the government of the Philippines by a force of might.

These people have been liberated, and now the world is waiting to see whether the United States will join in saying that it means what it fought for and guarantee their freedom and say: “What we have given to you, no man can take away.” This is our final heroic test of character. And I for one have not the slightest doubt as to what the result of the test is going to be, because I know that at heart this people loves freedom and right and justice more than it loves money and material prosperity or any of the things that anybody can get but nobody can keep unless they have elevation of spirit enough to see the horizons of the destiny of man.

Instead of wishing to ask to stand aside, get the benefits of the League, but share none of its burdens or responsibilities, I for my part want to go in and accept what is offered to us—the leadership of the world. A leadership of what sort, my fellow citizens? Not a leadership that leads men along the lines by which great nations can profit out of weak nations, not an exploiting power, but a liberating power, a power to show the world that, when America was born, it was indeed a finger pointed towards those lands in which men might deploy some of these days and live in perfect freedom, [456page icon] look each other in the eyes as equals, see that no man was put upon, that no people were forced to accept authority which was not of their own choice, and that, out of the general generous impulse of the human genius and the human spirit, we were lifted along the levels of civilization to days when there should be wars no more, but men should govern themselves in peace. And now the world offers it to us.

It is inconceivable that we should reject it. It is inconceivable to demand that we put any condition upon accepting it, particularly—for I speak this with a certain hurt pride, my fellow citizens, as an American—particularly when we are so safeguarded that the world under the Covenant cannot do a thing that we do not consent to being done. Other nations, other governments, were just as jealous of their sovereignty as we have been, and this guarantees the sovereignty of all the members of this great union of nations. There is only one nation for the time being excluded, and that is Germany. And Germany is excluded only in order that she may go through a period of probation, only in order that she may prove to the world that she has made a real permanent change in her constitution, and that hereafter, not Wilhelmstrasse, but the votes of the German people, will determine the policy of the German government.

If I may say so without even by implication involving great public men whom I entirely respect, I want to say that the only popular clamor, that, after all the various reservations, the only popular clamor back of the impulse to reject any part of this treaty proceeds from exactly the same source that the pro-German propaganda proceeded from. I ask the honorable and enlightened men who I believe thoughtlessly favor reservations such as I have read to reflect upon that and examine into the truth of it, and to reflect upon this proposition that, by holding off from this League, they serve the purposes of Germany, for what Germany has sought throughout the war was, first, to prevent our going in, then to separate us in interest and purpose from the other governments with which we were associated.

Now, shall we, by the vote of the United States Senate, do for Germany what she could not do with her arms? We shall be doing it, whether we intend it or not. I exculpate the men I am thinking of entirely from the purpose of doing it. It would be unworthy of me to suggest such a purpose. But I do suggest, I do state with confidence, that that is the only end that would be gained, because Germany is isolated from the other nations. She desires nothing so much as that we should be isolated, because she knows that the same kind of suspicion, the same kind of hostility, the same kind of unfriendliness—that subtle poison that permeates every trouble [457page icon] that comes between nations—will center on the United States, as well as upon Germany. Her isolation will be broken; she will have a comrade, whether that nation wants to be her comrade or not, and what the lads did on the field of France will be undone. We will allow Germany to do in 1919 what she failed to do in 1918!

It would be unworthy of me, my fellow citizens, in the responsible position in which you have put me, if I were to overstate any of these things. I have searched my conscience with regard to them. I believe I am telling you the sober truth, and I am telling you what I get, not by intuition—I know no more than you do about it—but through those many voices that inevitably reach the government and do not always reach you. From overseas we know what the leading men of Germany are thinking and saying, and they are praying that the United States may stand off from the League.

I call upon you, therefore, my fellow citizens, to look at this thing in a new aspect, to look upon it, not with calculations of interest, not with fear of responsibility, but with a consciousness of the great moral issues which the United States must now decide and which, having decided, it cannot reverse. If we keep out of this League now, we can never enter it except alongside of Germany. We can either go in now or come in later with our recent enemies, and to adopt a reservation such as I have read, which explicitly renounces responsibility under the central engagement of the Covenant, is to do nothing less than that.

I hope that in order to strengthen this impression on your minds you will take pains to read the treaty of peace. You need not read all of it—a lot of it is technical and you can skip that. But I want you to get a picture of what is in this great document. It is much too narrow a view of it to think of it as a treaty of peace with Germany. It is that, but it is very much more than a treaty of peace with Germany. It is a treaty in which an attempt is made to set up the rights of peoples everywhere very explicitly. The lines of this treaty are going to be projected—have been projected—into the treaty with Austria, into the treaty with Bulgaria, into the treaty with Hungary, into the treaty with Turkey.

Everywhere the same principle is adopted—that the men who wrote the treaties at Versailles were not at liberty to give the property of anybody else to anybody else. And it is the first great international agreement in the history of civilization that was not based on the opposite principle. Every other great international arrangement has been a division of spoils. And this is an absolute renunciation of spoils, even with regard to the helpless parts of the world, even with regatd to those poor benighted people in Africa, over [458page icon] whom Germany had exercised a selfish authority which exploited them and did not help them. Even they are not handed over to anybody else. The principle of annexation—the principle of extending sovereignty to territories that are not occupied by your own people—is rejected in this treaty. And all of those regions are put under the trust of the League of Nations, to be administered for the benefit of their inhabitants—the greatest humane arrangement that has ever been attempted. And the rules are laid down in the Covenant itself which prevent the selfish exploitation of these helpless people by the agents of the League who will exercise authority over them during the period of their development.

Then see how free course is given to our sympathies. I believe that there is no region in the world towards which the sympathies of the United States have gone out so abundantly as to the poor people of Armenia, those people infinitely terrified, infinitely persecuted. We have poured out money to relieve their distress. And at every turn we have known that every dollar we spent upon them might be rendered useless by the cruel authority over them. Then, under pretense of not being able to control its own affairs in those parts of the empire, the Turkish government might say that it was unable to restrain the horrible massacres which have made that country a graveyard.

Very well, Armenia is one of the regions that is to be under trust of the League of Nations. Armenia is to be redeemed. The Turk is to be forbidden to exercise his authority there. And Christian people are not only allowed to aid Armenia, but they are to be allowed to control Armenia. So that at last this great people, struggling through night after night of terror, knowing not when they would see their land stained with blood, are now given a promise of safety, a promise of justice, a possibility that they may come out into a time when they can enjoy their rights as free people that they never dreamed they would be able to exercise.

What great humane impulses of the human heart are expressed in this treaty! And we would be recreant to every humane obligation if we did not lend our whole force, if necessary make our utmost sacrifice, to maintain its provisions. We are approaching the time in the discussions of the Senate when it will be determined what we are going to say about it. And I am here making this public appeal to you and, through you, to gentlemen who have favored such utterances as I have read to you, now to take a second thought in the matter and realize that what they are after is already accomplished. The United States cannot be drawn into anything it doesn’t wish to be drawn into, but the United States ought not to put itself in the position of saying: “You need not expect of us that [459page icon] we assume the same moral obligations that you assume. You need not expect of us that we will respect and preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of other nations.”

And let me remove another misapprehension about that clause, my fellow citizens. Almost every time it is quoted, the words “external aggression” are left out. There was not a member of that conference with whom I conferred who wanted to put the least restraint upon the right of self-determination by any portion of the human family, who wished to put the slightest obstacle in the way of throwing off the yoke of any government if that yoke should become intolerable.

This does not guarantee any government against an attempt on the part of its own subjects to throw off its authority. The United States could not keep its countenance and make a promise like that, because it began by doing that very thing. The glory of the United States is that, when we were a little body of 3,000,000 people strung along the Atlantic Coast, we threw off the power of a great empire because it was not a power chosen or consented to by ourselves. We hold to that principle. We never will guarantee any government against the exercise of that right. No suggestion was made in the conference that we should. We merely ourselves promise to respect the territorial integrity and existing political independence of other members of the League and to assist in preserving them against external aggression.

And if we do not do that, the taproot of war is still sunk deep into the fertile soil of the human family. I am for cutting the taproot off. I am for making an insurance against war, and I am prudent enough to take 10 per cent insurance if I cannot get any more. I would be very pleased to get 25 per cent insurance. I would be delighted to get 50 per cent. And here, in conscience, I believe we are getting 98 per cent.

No body of men can give you absolutely 100 per cent insurance against war, any more than they could give you 100 per cent insurance against losing your temper. You cannot insure men against human passions, but notice what this Covenant does. It provides nine months as a minimum for the cooling off of human passions. It is pretty hard to be crazy mad for nine months. If you stay crazy mad, or crazy anything else, for nine months, it will be wise to segregate you from your fellow citizens. And the heart of this Covenant, to which very few opponents have ventured to draw attention, is this—that every great fighting nation in the world engages never to go to war without first having done one or the other of two things—without having either submitted the point in controversy to arbitration, in which case it promises absolutely to abide [460page icon] by the verdict or, having submitted it to the Council of the League of Nations, not for decision, but for a discussion, agreeing to lay all the documents and all the pertinent facts before the Council, agreeing that the Council shall publish the documents and the facts to mankind; that it will give six months to the Council for a consideration of the matter, that, even if it does not accept the result, it won’t go to war for three months after the opinion is rendered. So that you have nine months in which to accomplish all the gentle work of mediation, all the sane work of discussion, all the quieting work of a full comprehension of what the result of bringing the matter to the issue of war would be upon the nations immediately concerned and upon the nations of the world.

And in Article XI, which follows Article X, it is made the right of any member of the League to call attention to anything, anywhere, which is likely to affect the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. So that, as the storm begins to gather, you can call the attention of the world to it, and the cleansing, purifying, cooling process of public opinion will at once begin to operate.

When Shantung Province, or a very important part of it, or Kiaochow Bay, was ceded by China to Germany in March 1898, the government of the United States uttered not a single protest. One of the most enlightened and humane men that has ever sat in the executive chair was President William McKinley. One of the ablest Secretaries of State in the long list of distinguished men who have occupied that office was associated with him as Secretary of State, the Honorable John Hay. They made not a single intimation of protest? Why? Because under international law as it was, and as it is until this Covenant is adopted, it would have been a hostile act for them to do any such thing unless they could show that the material or political interests of the United States were directly affected. And so the only ground which they insisted upon was that Germany should not close Shantung Province to the trade of the United States. They could not lift a little finger to help China. They could only try to help the trade of the United States.

Immediately after that concession, China made similar concessions to England, to Russia, and France. Again no protest, only insistence that the door should be kept open to our goods—not to our moral ideas, not to our sympathy with China, not to our sense of right violated, but to our merchandise. You don’t hear anything about the concessions out there to Great Britain or to France, because, unhappily, neither they, nor the concession to Germany, were unprecedented. Poor China had done the like, not once, but many times before.

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What happened after? In the treaty between Japan and Russia, after the Japanese-Russian war, a treaty signed on our own territory—in Portsmouth, New Hampshire—Port Arthur, the Chinese territory ceded to Russia, was transferred to Japan. Here were our own people sitting about, here was our own government that had invited these gentlemen to sit at Portsmouth. Did they object to Port Arthur being handed over—not handed back to China, but handed over to Japan?

I am not going to stop, my fellow citizens, to discuss the Shantung provision in all its aspects, but what I want to call your attention to is that, just so soon as this Covenant is signed, rather ratified, every nation in the world will have the right to speak out for China. (applause) I want to say very frankly, and I ought to add that representatives of these great nations themselves admit, that Great Britain, France, and the other powers which have insisted upon similar concessions in China will be put in a position where they will have to reconsider.

This is the only way to serve and redeem China, (applause) unless it be you want to start a war for the purpose. At the beginning of the war, during the war, Great Britain and France engaged by solemn treaty with Japan that, if she would come in the war and continue in the war, she could have, provided she in the meantime took it by force of arms, what Germany had in China. Those are treaties already in force. They are not waiting for ratification. France and England cannot withdraw from those obligations. And it will serve China not one iota if we should dissent from the Shantung arrangement. But, being parties to that arrangement, we can insist, if it is necessary to insist, upon the promise of Japan—the promise which the other governments have not matched—that she will return to China immediately all sovereign rights within the province of Shantung. (applause) Under the operations of Article XI and of Article X, it will be impossible for any nation to make any further inroads either upon the territorial integrity or the political independence of China.

And I, for one, want to say that my heart goes out to that great people, that learned people, that accomplished people, that honest people, hundreds of millions strong but never adequately organized for the exercise of force, therefore always at the mercy of anyone who has effective armies or navies, always subject to demands, never in position unassisted by the world to insist upon its own rights.

There is a test—an acid test. Are you willing to go into the great adventure of liberating hundreds of millions of human beings from a threat of foreign power? If you are timid, I can assure you you [462page icon] can do it without a drop of human blood. If you are squeamish about fighting, I will tell you that you won’t have to fight.

The only force that outlasts all others and is finally triumphant is the moral judgment of mankind. (applause) Why is it that, when a man tells a lie about you, you don’t wince? But when he tells the truth about you, if it is not creditable, then you wince? The only thing you are afraid of is the truth. The only thing you dare not face is the truth. The only thing that will get you sooner or later, no matter how you sneak or dodge, is the truth; the only thing that will conquer nations is the truth. (applause)

No nation is going to look the calm judgment of mankind in the face for nine months and then go to war. (applause) You can illustrate the great by the little. I dare say you have taken time to cool off sometimes. I know I have. It is very useful for a person, particularly with a Scotch disposition like my own, to withdraw from human society when he is mad all through and just think about the situation and reflect upon the consequences of making a conspicuous ass of himself. (applause) It is for that reason I have always said that if you have an acquaintance whom you suspect of being a fool, encourage him to hire a hall. There is nothing that tests a man’s good sense like exposure to air.

And so we are applying this great healing sanitary influence to the affairs of nations and of men. And we can apply it only by the processes of peace which are offered to us after a conference, which I can testify was taken part in in the knowledge and in the spirit that never obtained before in any such conference; that we were not at liberty to work out the policy and ambitions of any government, and that our single duty and our single opportunity was to put the peoples of the world in possession of their own affairs. (applause)

And so, as much of the case, my fellow citizens, as I can lay before you on a single occasion—as much of this varied and diversified theme—is laid before you, and I ask your assistance to redeem the reputation of the United States. I ask you to make felt everywhere that it is useful to make it felt, not by way of threat, not by way of menace of any kind, but by way of compelling judgment, that the thing for us to do is to redeem the promises of America made in the solemn presence of mankind when we entered this war. (applause) For I see a happy vision before the world, my fellow countrymen. Every previous international conference was based upon the authority of governments. This, for the first time, was based upon the authority of peoples. It is, therefore, the triumphant establishment of the principle of democracy throughout the world, but only the establishment of the principle of political [463page icon] democracy. What the world now insists upon is the establishment of industrial democracy, is the establishment of such relationships between those who direct labor and those who perform labor as shall make a real community of interest, as shall make a real community of purpose, and shall lift the whole level of industrial achievement above bargain and sale into a great method of cooperation by which men, purposing the same thing, justly organizing the same thing, may bring about a state of happiness and of prosperity such as the world has never known before. We want to be friends of each other as well as friends of mankind. We want America to be a body of brethren. Then you may be sure tht its leadership will bring the same sort of comradeship and intimacy of spirit and purity of purpose to the counsel and achievements of mankind

#An Address in the Princess Theater in Cheyenne, September 24, 1919

Governor Carey, my fellow countrymen: It is with genuine satisfaction that I find myself in this great state, which I have only too seldom visited, with a body of the citizens of this state in order that I may make clear some of the matters which have emerged in the discussion in the midst of which we now find ourselves. Governor Carey is quite right in saying that no document ever drew upon it more widespread discussion than the great treaty of peace with which your representatives returned from Paris.

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And it is not to be wondered at, my fellow citizens, because that treaty is a unique document. It is the most remarkable document, I venture to say, in human history, because in it is recorded a complete reversal of the processes of government which had gone on throughout practically the whole history of mankind.

The example that we set in 1776, which some statesmen in Europe affected to disregard and others presumed to ridicule, nevertheless set fires going in the hearts of men which no influence was able to quench. And, one after another, the governments of the world have yielded to the influences of democracy. No man has been able to stay the tide, and there came a day when there was only one bulwark standing against it. That was in Berlin and Vienna—standing in the only territory which had not been conquered by the liberal forces of the opinion of the world, continued to hold fast, where there was planted a pair of governments that could use their people as they pleased, as pawns and instruments in a game of ambition, send them to the battlefield without condescending to explain to them why they were sent, send them to the battlefield to work out a dominion over free peoples on the part of a government that had never been liberalized and made free.

The world did not realize that it had come to the final grapple of principle. It was only by slow degree that we realized that we had any part in the war. We started the forces in 1776, as I have said, that made this war inevitable. But we were a long time realizing that, after all, that was what was at issue. We had been accustomed to regarding Europe as a field of intriguing, of rival ambitions, and of attempts to establish an empire. And at first we merely got the impression that this was one of the usual European wars, to which, unhappily, mankind had become only too accustomed.

You know how unwilling we were to go into it. I can speak for myself. I made every effort to keep this country out of the war, until it came to my conscience, as it came to yours, that after all it was our war, that the ambition of these central empires was directed against nothing less than the liberty of the world, and that if we were indeed what we had always professed to be—champions of the liberty of the world—it was not within our choice to keep out of the great enterprise.

And we went in just in time. I can testify, my fellow countrymen, that the hope of Europe had sunk very low when the American troops began to throng overseas. I can testify that they had begun to fear that the terror would be realized and that the German power would be established. At first they were incredulous that our men could come in force enough to assist them. At first [469page icon] they thought that it was only a moral encouragement they could get from seeing that gallant emblem of the Stars and Stripes upon their fields. Presently they realized that the tide was real, that here came men by the thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, by the millions; that there was no end to the force which would now be asserted to rescue the free peoples of the world from the terror of autocracy. And America had the infinite privilege of fulfilling her destiny and saving the world. I do not hesitate to say, as a sober interpretation of history, that American soldiers saved the liberties of the world.

I want to remind you of all this, my fellow citizens, because it is pertinent to the discussion that is now going on. We saved the liberties of the world, and we must stand by the liberties of the world. We cannot draw back.

You remember what happened in that fateful battle in which our men first took part. You remember how the French lines had been beaten and separated and broken at Château-Thierry, and you remember how the gates seemed to open for the advancement of the Germans upon Paris. And then a body of men, a little body of men—American soldiers and American marines—against the protests of French officers, against the command of the remote commanders, nevertheless dared to fill that breach, stopped that advance, turned the Germans back, and never allowed them to turn their faces forward again. They were advised to go back, and they asked the naive American question: “What did we come over here for? We did not come over here to go back; we came here to go forward.” And they never went in any other direction. The men who went to Château-Thierry, the men who went into Belleau Wood, the men who did what no other troops had been able to do in the Argonne, never thought of turning back, they never thought of any reservations on their service. They never thought of saying, “We are going to do this much of the job and then scuttle and leave you to do the rest.” And I am here, I am on this journey, to help this nation, if I can by my counsel, to fulfill and complete the task which the men who died upon the battlefields of France began. And I am not going to turn back any more than they did. I am going to keep my face just as they kept their face—forward towards the enemy.

My friends—I use the words advisedly—the only organized forces outside—I mean outside of congressional halls—the only organized forces in this country against this treaty are the forces of hyphenated Americans. I beg you to observe that I say the only organized forces, because I would not include many individuals whom I know in any such characterization. But I do repeat that it [470page icon] is the pro-German forces, and the other forces that showed their hyphen during the war, that are now organized against this treaty. And we can please nobody in America except these people by rejecting it or qualifying it in our acceptance of it.

I want you to recall the circumstances of this great war, lest we forget. We must not forget to redeem absolutely and without qualification the promises of America in this great enterprise. I have crossed the continent now, my friends, and am a part of my way back. I can testify to the sentiment of the American people. It is unmistakable. The overwhelming majority of them demand the ratification of this treaty. And they demand it because, whether they have analyzed it or not, they have a consciousness of what it is that we are fighting for.

We said that this was a people’s war—I have explained to you that it was, though you did not need the explanation—and we said that it must be a people’s peace. It is a people’s peace. I challenge any man to find a contradiction to that statement in the terms of the great document with which I returned from Paris. It is so much of a people’s peace that, in every portion of its settlement, every thought of aggrandizement—of territorial or political aggrandizement—on the part of the great powers was brushed aside, brushed aside by their own representatives. They declined to take the colonies of Germany in sovereignty and said they would consent and demand that they be administered in trust by a concert of the nations through the instrumentality of a league of nations. They did not claim a single piece of territory. On the contrary, every territory that had been under the dominion of the Central Powers, unjustly and against its own consent, is by that treaty, and the treaties which accompany it, absolutely turned over in fee simple to the people who live in it.

The principle is adopted without qualification upon which America was founded—that all just government proceeds from the consent of the governed. No nation that could be reached by the conclusions of this conference was obliged to accept the authority of a government by which it did not wish to be controlled. It is a peace of liberation. It is a peace in which the rights of peoples are realized, and, when objection is made to the treaty, is any objection made to the substance of the treaty? There is only one thing in the substance of the treaty that has been debated seriously, and that is the arrangement by which Japan gets the rights that Germany had in Shantung Province in China. I wish I had the time to go through the story of that fully. It was an unavoidable settlement, and nothing can be done for China without the League of Nations.

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Perhaps you will bear with me if I take time to tell you what I am talking about. You know that China has been the common prey of the great European powers. Perhaps I should apoligize to the representatives of those powers for using such a word, but I think they would admit that the word is justified. Nation after nation has demanded rights, semisovereign rights, and concessions with regard to mines and railways and every other resource that China could put at their disposition. And China has never been able to say “No.” A great, learned, patient, diligent people, numbering hundreds of millions, has had no organized force with which to resist, and has yielded again and again and again to unjust demands.

One of these demands was made upon her in March 1898, by Germany—unjustly made. I will not go into the particulars, but I could justify that word “unjustly” made. A concession was demanded of her of the control of the whole district around Kiaochow Bay, one of the open doors to the trade and resources of China. She was obliged to yield to Germany practically sovereign control over that great region by the sea, and, into the interior of the province, Germany was privileged to extend a railway and to exploit all the deposits of ore that might be found for thirty miles on either side of the railway which she was to build.

And the government of the United States at that time, presided over by one of the most enlightened and beloved of our Presidents—I mean William McKinley—and the Department of State, guided by that able and high-minded man, John Hay, did not make the slightest protest. Why? Not because they would not if they could have aided China, but because under international law as it then stood, no nation had the right to protest against anything that other nations did that did not directly affect its own rights. And Mr. McKinley and Mr. Hay did insist that, if Germany took control of Kiaochow Bay, she should not close those approaches to China against the trade of the United States.

How pitiful, when you go into the court of right, you cannot protect China, you can only protect your own merchandise! You cannot say, “You have done a great wrong to these people.” You have got to say, “We yield to the wrong, but we insist that you should admit our goods to be sold in those markets!” Pitiful, but nevertheless it was international law. All nations acted in that way at that time. Immediately following these concessions to Germany, Russia insisted upon a concession and got Port Arthur and other territories. England insisted, though she had had similar concessions in the past, upon an additional concession and got Weihaiwei. [472page icon] France came into the game and got a port and its territory lying behind it for the same period of time that Germany had got her concession, namely, ninety-nine years.

Then came the war between Russia and Japan, and what happened? In a treaty signed on our own sacred territory, at Portsmouth in New Hampshire, Japan was allowed to take from Russia what had belonged to China—the concession of Port Arthur and of Talien-Wan, the territory in that neighborhood. The treaty was written under the auspices, so to say, of our own public opinion. But the government of the United States was not at liberty to protest and did not protest and acquiesced in the very thing which is being done in this treaty.

What is being done in this treaty is not that Shantung is being taken from China. China did not have it. It is being taken from Germany, just as Port Arthur was not taken from China but taken from Russia and transferred to Japan.

And in the meantime, before we got into the war, Great Britain and France had entered into solemn covenant by treaty with Japan that, if she would take what Germany had in Shantung by force of arms, and also the islands lying north of the Equator, which had been under German dominion in the Pacific, she could keep them when the peace came and its settlements were made. They were bound by a treaty of which we knew nothing, but which, notwithstanding our ignorance of it, bound them as much as any treaty binds. And this war was fought to maintain the sacredness of treaties. Great Britain and France, therefore, cannot consent to a change of the treaty in respect of the cession of Shantung, and we have no precedent in our history which permits us even to protest against it until we become members of the League of Nations.

I want this point to sink in, my fellow countrymen. The League of Nations changes the international law of the world with regard to matters of this sort. You have heard a great deal about Article X of the Covenant of the League, and I will speak of it presently, but read Article XI in conjunction with Article X. Every member of the League, in Article X, agrees never to impair the territorial integrity of any other member of the League or to interfere with its existing political independence.

Both of those things were done in all these concessions. There was a very serious impairment of the territorial integrity of China in every one of them, and a very serious interference with the political independence of that great but helpless kingdom. And Article X stops that for good and all. Then, in Article XI, it is provided that it shall be the friendly right of any member of the League at [473page icon] any time to call attention to anything, anywhere, that is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. So that the ban would have been lifted from Mr. McKinley and Mr. Roosevelt in the matter of these things if we had the Covenant of the League. They could have gone in and said: “Here is your promise to preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of this great people. We have the friendly right to protest. We have the right to call your attention to the fact that this will breed wars and not peace, and that you have not the right to do this thing.” Henceforth, for the first time, we shall have the opportunity to play effective friends to the great people of China, and I, for one, feel my pulses quicken and my heart rejoice at such a prospect. We, a free people, have hitherto been dumb in the presence of the invasion of the freedom of other free peoples, and now restraint is taken away. I say it is taken away, for we will be members of the Covenant. Restraint is taken away, and, the men that we profess to be, can speak out in the interest of free people everywhere.

But that is not all. America, as I have said, was not bound by the agreements of Great Britain and France, on the one hand, and Japan on the other. We were free to insist upon a prospect of a different settlement. And, at the instance of the United States, Japan has already promised that she will relinquish to China, immediately after the ratification of this treaty, all the sovereign rights that Germany had in Shantung Province—the only promise of that kind ever made, the only relinquishment of that sort ever achieved—and that she will retain only what foreign corporations have all over China—unfortunately, but as a matter of fact—the right to run the railroad and the right to work the mines under the usual conditions of Chinese sovereignty and as economic concessionaires, with no political rights or military power of any kind. It is really an emancipation of China, so far as that province is concerned, from what is imposed upon her by other nations in other provinces equally rich and equally important to the independence of China herself. So that inside the League of Nations we now have a foothold by which we can play the friend to China.

And the alternative? If you insist upon cutting out the Shantung arrangement, that merely severs us from the treaty. It does not give Shantung back to China. The only way you can give Shantung back to China is by arms in your hands, armed ships and armed men sent against Japan and France and Great Britain. A fratricidal strife, in view of what we have gone through! We have just redeemed France. We cannot with arms in our hands insist [474page icon] that France break a covenant, however ill-judged, however unjust. We cannot as her brothers in arms commit any such atrocious act against the fraternity of free people.

So much for Shantung. Nobody can get that provision out of that treaty and do China any service whatever, and all such professions of friendship for China are empty noise, for the gentlemen who make those professions know that what they propose will be not of the slightest service to her.

That is the only point of serious criticism with regard to the substance of the treaty. All the rest refers to the Covenant of the League of Nations. With regard to that, my fellow citizens, I have this to say. Without the Covenant of the League of Nations, that treaty cannot be executed. Without the adherence of the United States to that Covenant, the Covenant cannot be made effective.

To state it another way, the maintenance of the peace of the world, and the execution of the treaty, depend upon the wholehearted participation of the people of the United States. I am not stating it as a matter of power, I am not stating it with the thought that the United States has greater material wealth and greater physical power than any other nation. The point that I want you to get is a very profound point. The point is that the United States is the only nation of the world that has sufficient moral force with the rest of the world. It is the only nation which has proved its disinterestedness. It is the only nation which is not suspected by the other nations of the world of ulterior purposes. There is not a province in Europe in which American troops would not at this moment be welcomed with open arms, because the population would know that they had come as friends and would go as soon as their errand was fulfilled.

I have had delegations come to me, delegations from countries where disorder made the presence of troops necessary, and beg me to order American troops there. They said: “We trust them; we want them. They are our friends.” And all the world, provided we do not betray them by rejecting this treaty, will continue to regard us as their friends and follow us as their friends and serve us as their friends. It is the noblest opportunity ever offered to a great people, and we will not turn away from it.

We are coming now to the grapple, because one question at a time is being cleared away. We are presently going to have a showdown, a showdown on a very definite issue, and I want to bring your minds to that definite issue.

A number of objections have been made to the Covenant of the League of Nations, but they have been disposed of in candid [475page icon] minds. The first was the question whether we could withdraw when we pleased. That is no longer a question in the mind of anybody who has studied the language and real meaning of the Covenant. We can withdraw, upon two years’ notice, when we please. I state that with absolutely no qualification. Then there was the question as to whether it interfered with self-determination; that is to say, whether there was anything in the guarantee of Article X about territorial integrity and political independence which would interfere with the assertion of the right of great populations anywhere to change their governments, to throw off the yoke of sovereignties which they did not desire to live under. There is absolutely no such restraint. I was present and can testify that when Article X was debated, the most significant words in it were the words “against external aggression.” We do not guarantee any government against anything that may happen within its own borders or within its own sovereignty. We merely say that we will not impair its territorial integrity or interfere with its political independence, and we will not countenance other nations outside of it making prey of it in the one way or the other.

Every man who sat around that table—and at the table where the conference on the League of Nations sat there were fourteen free peoples represented—every man around that table believed in the sacred right of self-determination, would not have dared to go back and face his own people if he had done or said anything that stood in the way of it. That is out of the way.

There was some doubt as to whether the Monroe Doctrine was properly recognized, though I do not see how anybody who could read the English language could have raised the doubt. The Covenant says that nothing contained in it shall be construed as affecting the validity of the Monroe Doctrine, so that, by a sudden turn in the whole judgment of the world, the Monroe Doctrine was accepted by all the great powers of the world. I know what their first impressions were about it. I know the history of their change of mind, and I know the heartiness and unanimity of the conclusion. Nothing can henceforth embarrass the policy of the United States in applying the Monroe Doctrine according to her own judgment.

But there was apprehension that some kind of a supergovernment had been set up which could some day interfere in our domestic affairs, say that our immigration laws were too rigorous and wrong; that our laws of naturalization were too strict and severe; that our tariff policy did not suit the rest of the world. The Covenant expressly excludes interference with domestic questions, [476page icon] expressly states that it shall not be the right of any authority of the League to interfere in matters of that sort. That matter is cleared away by anybody who can understand the clauses in question.

What remains, my fellow citizens, is the heart of the whole Covenant. Anybody who proposes to cut out Article X proposes to cut all the supports from under the peace and security of the world. And we must face the question in that light, we must draw the issue as sharply as that, we must see it through as distinctly as that.

But I want to utter another preface to that part of the discussion, since you are so very gracious and patient with me. The constitution of the League of Nations is not often enough explained. It is made up of two bodies. One, a comparatively large body, which is called the Assembly. The Assembly does not vote, except on a very few matters. The Assembly is not an originative body. The Assembly is, so to say, the court of the public opinion of the world. It is where you can broach questions, but not decide them. It is where you can debate anything that affects the peace of the world, but not determine upon a course of action upon anything that affects the peace of the world. The whole direction of the action of the League is vested in another body known as the Council. And nothing in the form of an active measure—no policy, no recommendation with regard to the action of the governments composing the League—can proceed except upon a unanimous vote of the Council. Mark you, a unanimous vote of the Council. In brief, inasmuch as the United States of America is to be a permanent member of the Council of the League, the League can take no step whatever without the consent of the United States of America.

My fellow citizens, think of the significance of that in view of the debates you have been listening to. There is not a single active step that the League can take unless we vote aye. The whole matter is—in that negative sense, in the ability to stop any action—in our hands. I am some time inclined to think that that weakens the League, that it has not freedom of action enough, notwithstanding that I share with all of my fellow countrymen a very great jealousy with regard to setting up any power that could tell us to do anything. But no such power is set up. And whenever a question of any kind with regard to active policy—and there are only three or four of them—is referred to the Assembly for its vote, its vote in the affirmative must include the representatives of all the nations which are represented on the Council. So that in the Assembly, as in the Council, any single nation that is a member of the Council has a veto upon active conclusions. That is my comment upon what you have been told about Great Britain having six votes and [477page icon] our having one. I am perfectly content with the arrangement, since our one offsets the British six. I do not want to be a repeater. If any one vote goes, I do not want to repeat it five times.

And isn’t it just that in this debating body, from which, without the unanimous concurrence of the Council no active proceeding can originate, isn’t it just that these votes should have been given to the self-governing powers of the British Empire? I am ready to maintain that position. Isn’t it just that those stout little republics out in the Pacific—of New Zealand and Australia—should be able to stand up in the councils of the world and say something? Do you not know how Australia has led the free peoples of the world in many matters that have led to social and industrial reform? It is one of the most enlightened communities in the world and absolutely free to choose its own way of life independent of the British authority, except in matters of foreign relationship.

Do you not think that it is natural that that stout little body of men whom we so long watched with admiration in their contest with the British Crown in South Africa should have the right to stand up and talk before the world? They talked once with their arms, and, if I may judge by my contact with them, they can talk with their minds. They know what the interests of South Africa are, and they are independent in their control of the interests of South Africa. Why, two of the most impressive and influential men I met in Paris were representatives of South Africa, both of them members of the British peace delegation in Paris, and yet both of them generals who had made the British generals take notice through many months of their power to fight—the men whom Great Britain had fought and beaten and felt obliged to hand over their own government to, and say, “It is yours and not ours.” They were men who spoke counsel, who spoke frank counsel.

And take our neighbor on the north. Do you not think Canada is entitled to a speaking part? I have pointed out to you that her voting part is offset, but do you not think she is entitled to a speaking part? Do you not think that that fine Dominion has been a very good neighbor? Do you not think she is a good deal more like the United States than she is like Great Britain? Do you not feel that probably you think alike?

When I was in Paris, the only way I could tell Australian troops from American troops on the streets was by their hats. They looked to me like Americans, and the Canadians did too. They walked like Americans; they had a sort of walk as if the ground under them belonged to them, at any rate for the time being. And I expected to hear them break out, “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here, what do we care?” Just men who were born into a freedom of will and a [478page icon] freedom of action, and who are our natural partners in discussing the interests of free people.

And the only other vote given to the British Empire is given to that hitherto voiceless mass of humanity that lives in that region of romance and pity that we know as India. I am willing that India should stand up in the councils of the world and say something. I am willing that speaking parts should be assigned to these self-governing, self-respecting, energetic portions of the great body of humanity.

So I take leave to say that the deck is cleared of these bugaboos, of the fear that we cannot get out. I am not interested in getting out. I am interested in getting in. But we can get out. The door is not locked. You can sit on the edge of your chair and scuttle any time you want to. There are so many who are interested first of all in knowing that they are not in for anything that can possibly impose anything on them. Well, we are not in for anything that we do not want to continue to carry. We can help them in the matters of self-determination, as we never helped before. The six votes of the British Empire are offset by our own, if we choose to offset them. I dare say we shall often agree with them. But if we do not, they cannot do anything that we do not consent to. The Monroe Doctrine is taken care of. There is no danger of interference with domestic questions.

Well, what remains? Nothing except Article X, and that is the heart of the whole Covenant.

Let me repeat Article X. I do not know that I can do it literally, but I can come very near. Under Article X, every member of the League engages to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other members of the League. That cuts at the taproot of war. The wars of the past have been leveled against the liberties of people and against the territories of those who could not defend them. And if you do not cut at that taproot that upas tree is going to grow again. And I tell you, my fellow countrymen, that if you do not cut it up now, it will be harder to cut it up next time.

The next time will come; it will come while this generation is living. The children that crowd about our car as we move from station to station will be sacrificed upon the altar of that war. And it will be the last war. Humanity will never suffer another, if humanity survives.

My fellow countrymen, do you realize that, at the end of the war that has just closed, new instruments of destruction had been invented and were about to be used that exceeded in terrible force and destructive power any that had been used before in this war? [479page icon] Why, you have heard with wonder of those great cannon from which the Germans sent shells seventy miles into Paris. Just before the war closed, shells had been invented that could be made to steer themselves and carry immense bodies of explosives a hundred miles into the interior of countries, no matter how great the serried ranks of their soldiers were at the border. And this war will be child’s play as compared with another war. You have got to cut the root of the upas tree now or betray all future generations.

And we cannot without our vote in the Council, even in support of Article X, be drawn into wars that we do not wish to be drawn into. The second sentence of Article X is that the Council shall advise as to the method of fulfilling this guarantee, that the Council, which must vote by unanimous vote, must advise—cannot direct—what is to be done for the maintenance of the honor of its members and for the maintenance of the peace of the world. Is there anything that can frighten a man or a woman or a child, with just thought or red blood, in those provisions? And yet listen. I understand that this reservation is under consideration. I ask your very attentive ear:

“The United States assumes no obligation under the provisions of Article X to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country or to interfere in controversies between other nations, whether members of the League or not, or to employ the military and naval forces of the United States under any article of the treaty for any purpose, unless, in any particular case, the Congress, which under the Constitution has the sole power to declare war or authorize the employment of the military and naval forces of the United States, shall by act or joint resolution so declare.”

In other words, my fellow countrymen, what this proposes is this. That we should make no general promise, but leave the nations associated with us to guess in each instance what we were going to consider ourselves bound to do, and what we were not going to consider ourselves bound to do. It is as if you said: “We will not join the league definitely, but we will join it occasionally. We will not promise anything, but from time to time we may cooperate. We will not assume any obligations.”

Observe, my fellow citizens, as I have repeatedly said to you and cannot say too often, the Council of the League cannot oblige us to take military action without the consent of Congress. There is no possibility of that. But this reservation proposes that we should not acknowledge any moral obligation in the matter; that we should stand off and say: “We will see, from time to time. Consult us when you get into trouble, and then we will have a debate. And, [480page icon] after two or three months, we will tell you what we are going to do.” The thing is unworthy and ridiculous, and I want to say distinctly that, as I read this, it would change the entire meaning of the treaty and exempt the United States from all responsibility for the preservation of peace. It means the rejection of the treaty, my fellow countrymen, nothing less. It means that the United States would take from under the structure its very foundations and support.

Now, I happen to know that there are some men in favor of that reservation who do not in the least degree realize its meaning—men whom I greatly respect, men who have just as much ardor to carry out the promises of the United States as I have, and I am not indicting their purpose. But I am calling their attention to the fact that, if any such reservation as that should be adopted, I would be obliged as the Executive of the United States to regard it as a rejection of the treaty. I ask them, therefore, to consider this matter very carefully.

For I want you to realize, and I hope they realize, what the rejection of the treaty means—two isolated and suspected people—the people of Germany and the people of the United States. Germany is not admitted to respectable company yet. She is not permitted to enter the League until such time as she shall have proved to the satisfaction of the world that her change of government and change of heart is real and permanent. Then she can be admitted.

Now, her dearest desire, feeling her isolation, knowing all the consequences that would result, economic and social, her dearest desire is to see the United States also cut off its association with the gallant peoples with whom side by side we fought this war. I am not making this statement by conjecture. We get it directly from the mouths of authoritative persons in Germany that their dearest hope is that America will now accomplish by the rejection of the treaty what Germany was not able to accomplish by her arms.

She tried to separate us from the rest of the world. She tried to antagonize the rest of the world against the United States, and she failed so long as American armies were in the field. Shall we fail now that only American voters are in the field?

The issue is final. We cannot avoid it. We have got to make it now, and, once made, there can be no turning back. We either go in with the other free peoples of the world to guarantee the peace of the world now, or we stay out and, on some dark and disastrous day, we seek admission to the League of Nations along with Germany.

The rejection of this treaty, my fellow citizens, means the [481page icon] necessity of negotiating a separate treaty with Germany. That separate treaty between Germany and the United States could not alter any sentence of this treaty. It could not affect the validity of any sentence of this treaty. It would simply be the government of the United States going, hat in hand, to the assembly at Weimar and saying: “May it please you, we have dissociated ourselves from those who were your enemies. We have come to you asking if you will consent to terms of amity and peace which will dissociate us, both of us, from the comradeship of arms and liberty.” There is no other interpretation. There is no other issue. That is the issue, and every American must face it.

But I talk, my fellow citizens, as if I doubted what the decision would be. I happen to have been born and bred in America. There is not anything in me that is not American. I dare say that I inherit a certain stubbornness from an ancient stock from which I am remotely derived; but, then, all of you are derived, more or less remotely, from other stocks. You remember the exclamation of the Irishman who said, when he was called a foreigner, “You say we are furriners; I’d like to know who sittled this kintry but furriners!”

We were all foreigners once, but we have undergone a climatic change, and the marvel of America is its solidarity, is its homogeneity in the midst of its variety. The marvel about America is that, no matter what a man’s stock and origin, you can always tell that he is an American the minute he begins to express an opinion. He may look sometimes like a foreigner, but tap him, and you will find that the contents is American. And, having been bred in that way myself, I do not have to conjecture what the judgment of America is going to be about a great question like this. I know beforehand, and I am only sorry for the men who do not know. If I did not know the law of custom and of honor against betting on a certainty, I would like to bet with them. But it would not be fair; I would be taking advantage of them.

If I may close with a word, not of jest, but of solemnity, I want to say, my fellow citizens, that there can be no exaggerating the importance of this peace and the importance of its immediate ratification, because the world will not and cannot settle down to normal conditions, either in America or anywhere else, until it knows what the future is going to be. If it must know that the future is going to be one of disorder and of rivalry and of the old contests of power, let it know it at once, so it can make its arrangements and its calculations and lay its taxes and recruit its armies and build its ships for the next great fight. But if, on the other hand, it can be told that it will have an insurance against war, that a great body of powerful nations has entered into a solemn covenant to substitute [482page icon] arbitration and discussion for war—for that is the heart of the Covenant—that all the great fighting peoples of the world have engaged to forego war and substitute arbitration and discussion—if it can know that the minds will be quieted, the disorders will presently cease, then men will know that we have the opportunity to do that great, that transcendent duty that lies ahead of us—sit quietly down in council chamber and work out the proper reforms of our own industrial and economic life.

They have got to be worked out. If this treaty is not ratified, they will be worked out in disorder, I mean throughout the world. I am not now intimating, for I do not think that disorder will shake the foundations of our own affairs. But it will shake the foundations of the world, and these inevitable, indispensable reforms will be worked out amongst disorder and suspicion and hatred and violence, whereas if we can have the healing influences of assured peace, they will be worked out in amity and quiet and by the judgment of men rather than by the passions of men. God send that day may come, and come soon! Above all, may God grant that it may come under the leadership of America!

#An Address in the Denver Auditorium, September 25, 1919

Mr. Chairman,1 my fellow countrymen: I always feel a thrill of pride standing before a great company of my fellow citizens to speak of this great document which we shall always know as the Treaty of Versailles. I am proud to speak for it, because, for the first time in the history of international consultation, men have turned away from the ambitions of governments and sought to advance the fortunes of peoples. They have turned away from all those old plans of domination and sought to lay anew the foundations for the liberty of mankind. I say without hesitation that this is a great document of liberation. It is a new charter for the liberty of men.

And as we advanced from week to week and from month to month in the debate of this great document, I think a great many things we talked about at first have cleared away. A great many difficulties which were at first discovered, or which, unfortunately were not discovered, have been removed. Because, as a matter of [491page icon] fact, the center and heart of this document is that great instrument which is placed at the beginning of it—the Covenant of the League of Nations.

I think everybody now understands that you cannot work this treaty without that Covenant. Everybody certainly understands you have no insurance for the continuation of this treaty without the Covenant of the League of Nations. But you will notice that, with this single exception of the provision in regard to the transfer from the German Empire of the Shantung Province to Japan, practically nothing in the body of the treaty has seemed to constitute any great obstacle to its adoption. All the controversies, all the talk, has centered on the League of Nations, and I am glad to see the issue centered. I am glad to see the issue clearly drawn, for now all we have to decide is shall we stand by the settlements of liberty, or shall we not?

And I want, just by way of introduction, to call your attention and point out what is not often enough explained to audiences in this country—the actual constitution of the League of Nations. It is very simply constituted. It consists of two bodies—a Council and an Assembly. The Assembly is the numerous body. In it every self-governing state that has a vote on the League is represented, and not only the self-governing independent states, but the self-governing colonies and the Dominions, such as Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa. They are all represented in the Assembly.

And it is in the Assembly that the combined representation of the several members of the British Empire are assigned six votes. And you are constantly being told that Great Britain has six votes and we have one.

I want you to appreciate the full significance of that. They have six votes in the Assembly, and the Assembly doesn’t vote. So that bubble is exploded. There are several matters in which the vote of the Assembly must cooperate with the vote of the Council, but in every such a case a unanimous vote of the Council is necessary. Inasmuch as the United States is a permanent member of the Council, her vote is necessary to every active policy of the League. And therefore the single vote of the United States always counts six, so far as the votes of the British Empire are concerned. And, if it is a mere question of pride, I would rather be one and count six than six and count six.

And that affords emphasis to the point I wish to keep distinctly in mind with regard to reservations and all the qualifications of ratification which are being discussed. No action can be undertaken by the League without the assenting vote of the United [492page icon] States. I cannot understand the anxiety of some gentlemen for fear something is going to be put over on them. I cannot understand why, having read the Covenant of the League and examined its constitution, they are not satisfied with the fact that every active policy of the League must be concurred in by a unanimous vote of the Council, which means that the affirmative vote of the United States is in every instance necessary.

And, that being the case, it becomes sheer nonsense, my fellow citizens, to talk about a supergovernment being set up over the United States. It becomes sheer nonsense to say that any authority is constituted which can move our armies to other parts of the world. It cannot interfere with our domestic questions. It cannot direct our international policy, even, in any matter in which we do not consent to be directed. We are under our own direction, just as much under the Covenant of the League of Nations as we are now.

Of course, I do not mean to say that we do not agree, so to say, to pool our moral issues. We do that in acquiescing in the Covenant of the League and do attempt to adopt certain fundamental moral principles of right and justice, which, I dare say, we do not need to promise to live up to, but which we are certainly proud to promise to live up to. We are not turning any corner, and we do not intend to change our course of government or our standards of government. And it is American standards of government that are set up in the Covenant of the League of Nations.

And what is the Covenant for? To hear most of the debate, you would think it was an ingenious contrivance for subtle interference with the affairs of the United States. On the contrary, it is one of the most solemn covenants ever entered into by all the great fighting powers of the world—that they will never resort to war again without first having either submitted the question at issue to arbitration and undertaken to abide by the verdict of the arbitrators, or submitted it to discussion by the Council of the League of Nations, laying all the documents, all the facts, before that Council, consenting that that Council should lay all those documents and all those facts before the world; to allow six months for that discussion, and, even if they are not satisfied with the opinion—for it is only an opinion in that case, rendered by the Council—they agree not to go to war for three months after the opinion has been rendered—nine months’ submission to the moral judgment of the world. And in my judgment, that is an almost complete assurance against war.

If any such covenants as that had existed in 1914, Germany never would have gone to war. And one thing that Germany could not afford to do, and knew that she could not afford to do, was to [493page icon] submit her case to the public opinion of the world. We have now abundant proof of what would have happened, because it was the moral judgment of the world that combined the world against Germany.

We were a long time, my fellow citizens, seeing that we belonged in the war, but just so soon as the real issues of it became apparent, we knew that we belonged there. And we did an unprecedented thing—we threw the whole power of a great nation into a quarrel with the origination of which it had had absolutely nothing to do.

I think there is nothing that appeals to the imagination more in the history of men than those convoyed fleets crossing the ocean with millions of American soldiers aboard—those crusaders, those men that loved liberty enough to leave their home and fight for it upon distant fields of battle, those men who swung out into the open as if in fulfillment of the long prophecy of American history. There is nothing finer in the records of public action than the united support of the American people behind this great war.

And I ask your close observation to the principal events, my fellow countrymen. Out of doors, that is to say, out of the legislative halls, there is no organized opposition to this treaty except among the people who tried to defeat the purposes of this government in the war. Hyphen is the knife that is being stuck into this document.

The issue is clearly drawn, because, inasmuch as we are masters of our own participation in the action of the League of Nations, why do we need reservations? If we cannot be obliged to do anything that we do not ourselves favor, why qualify our acceptance of a perfectly safe agreement? The only object, my fellow citizens, is to give the United States exceptional advantages in the League of Nations, to exempt it from the obligations which the other members assume, or to put a special interpretation upon the duties of the United States under the Covenant, which interpretation is not applicable to the duties of the other members of the Covenant.

And, for my part, I say it is unworthy of the United States to ask for any special privileges of this kind. I am for going into a body of equals or staying out. Why, that is the very principle we have been fighting for and have been proud to fight for—that the rights of the weaker nations were just as sacred as the rights of the greater nations. That is what this treaty was drawn to establish.

You must think of this treaty along the lines of those that run out into the Austrian, the Bulgarian, and the Turkish treaties. In every one of these the principle is to liberate people who have been living under a sovereignty that is alien, unwelcome, and a burden [494page icon] to those who have lived under them. We have induced them to adopt the American principle that all government is derived from the consent of the governed.

All down through the center of Europe and the heart of Asia has gone this process of liberty, taking the alien yoke off the necks of suffering peoples and putting forth the American principle that you cannot impose on anybody a sovereignty that is not of his own choice. If the result of these great liberations are not guaranteed, they will fall like a house of cards.

What was the program of the Pan-Germans? From Bremen to Baghdad. That is the very portion of the country over which these liberations have been extended. It goes into effect in countries that have long been under Prussian domination. If we now merely set them up and leave them in their own weakness to take care of themselves, German intrigue will accomplish whatever it can accomplish. And we will have abandoned the people whom we liberated. The thing is inconceivable. The thing is impossible.

We have therefore come to the straight-cut line—adoption or rejection. Qualifying the adoption is not adoption. It is perfectly legitimate, I will admit, to say in what sense we understand certain articles. They are all perfectly obvious, so far as I can see, but if you want to make the obvious more obvious, I see no objection. If by a multiplicity of words you can make simple words speak more plainly, I think that it is simply a rhetorical exercise, nothing more.

Qualification means asking for special privileges for the United States, and we cannot ask that. We must either go in or stay out. If we go in what do we get? I am not confining our views to ourselves alone. America has joined the world; she did not stop to calculate the loss or the advantages or disadvantages. But she went in on one great principle—a willingness to serve mankind while serving herself. What we gain in this treaty is, first of all, the substitution of arbitration and discussion for war. If we got nothing else, it was worth the whole game to get that.

My fellow countrymen, we fought this war in order that there might not be another like it. I am under bond, I am under bonds to my fellow citizens of every sort, and I am particularly under bond to the mothers of this country, to the wives of this country, and to the sweethearts of this country to see to it that their sons and husbands and sweethearts never have to make the supreme sacrifice again. When I passed your state Capitol square this morning, I saw thousands of children there to greet me. And I felt a lump in my throat. And, I thought, these are the little people I am arguing for. These are my clients. These girls who stayed at home suffered more than those who died. For them the tears at home are [495page icon] more bitter than the agonies on the battlefield. So I will not turn away from the straight path I have set for myself—to redeem the promise I have made.

You may ask if this is absolute insurance against war? Certainly not. Nobody can give absolute insurance against human passions. But if you can get a little insurance against a catastrophe, is it not better than getting none at all? Let us assume that it is only 25 per cent insurance against war. Can any humane man reject that insurance? Let us suppose it is 50 per cent insurance against war. My friends, in my calm judgment it is 98 per cent insurance against war. That is what I went over to Europe to get. That is what I got. And that is what I brought back.

Stop for a moment to think of the next war, if there should be one. I do not hesitate to say that the war we have just been through, though it was fought through with terror of every kind, is not to be compared with the one we would have to face next time. There were instruments possessing methods of destruction inconceivable, which were just ready for use when the war ended—great projectiles which guided themselves, capable of one hundred miles or more, and bursting tons of explosives on helpless cities, something which the Germans, who bombarded Paris from a great distance, could not conceive. What they used were toys as compared with what would be used in the next war.

I ask any soldier if he wants to go through any hell like that again. That is what the next war would be. And that is what would be the destruction of mankind. And I am for any kind of insurance against it and the barbarous reversal of civilization.

And consequently it means disarmament. Think of the economic burden and the restriction of liberty in professional and mechanical lines in the maintenance of great armies, not only in the United States, but in Germany, Italy, France, and Great Britain. If the United States should stand off, we would have to have the biggest army in the world. There would be nobody else to take care of our fortunes. We would have to look out for ourselves.

When I hear gentlemen say, “We will be independent, and we are able to look out for ourselves,” I say, consult your fellow citizens. It will have to mean universal conscription, taxes such as we have never seen, concentration of authority in the governmental activities and for the uses of these terrible instruments.

You cannot conduct a war or command an army by a debating society. You cannot determine the war in community centers. The commander in chief is going to have to have a staff like the German staff. You will have to center it in the commander in chief of the army and navy. America will never consent to any such thing.

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Then, if we have this great treaty, we have what the world never had before—a court of public opinion of the world. I do not think you can exaggerate the significance of that. International law has been up to this time a sort of international code of manners. You could not mention to any other government anything that concerned it unless you could prove that your own interests were immediately involved. Unless you could prove that it was your own material interest that was involved, it was impolite to speak of it. There might be something brooding that threatened the peace of the entire world, but unless the interests of the United States were involved, we could not allude to it for a minute.

I am going to allude for a moment to a matter so interesting that I wish I could develop it. This cession in which China gave to Germany the Shantung Province in 1898 was an iniquitous thing at the outset. But our great President, William McKinley, and our great Secretary of State, John Hay, did not protest. It was an outrageous invasion of the rights of China. It was an invasion of the rights of China that they did not protest, but they asked that Germany, after she got what did not belong to her, would please not close the door against the trade of the United States.

I am not saying this by way of criticism. That is all, under international manners, that they had the right to ask. International law has been the principle of minding your own business, particularly when something outrageous was up. And Article XI of the League of Nations makes matters of that sort everybody’s business. Under Article XI, any member of the League can at any time call attention to anything, anywhere, which is likely to affect the interests of the world, the least nation as well as the biggest. Panama, to take one of our near neighbors—can stand up and challenge the right of any nation of the world to do a thing which threatens the peace of the world. It does not have to be the big nation to do it.

The voice of the world is at last released. The conscience of the world is at last given a forum, and the rights of nations under this treaty are given a place to be heard. If there are nations that wish to exercise the power of self-determination, but are not represented by this treaty, they can come in, they can point out their demands and show how it affects their interest and the quiet of the world. They can point out their demands, and, on account of the good understanding between nations, there is a forum here for the rights of mankind which was never before dreamed of, and in that forum any representative has the right to speak his full mind.

If that is not a wholesale moral clearinghouse, I wish somebody would suggest a better. There have been a great many things [497page icon] unspoken that ought to have been spoken. There have been nations and multitudes that had nobody to speak for them in any court of conscience anywhere, and now they are given a hearing. And all forward-looking men now see a way in which they may look forward to a real progressive civilization.

There is another matter which I am sure will interest a great many within the sound of my voice. If we do not have this treaty of peace, labor will continue to be not what it ought to be—a human function, but a purchasable commodity throughout the world. There is incorporated in the articles of this great treaty a Magna Carta of labor. There is set up a means of periodical examination of the conditions of labor all over the world, protecting the labor of women and children that have not the physical endurance to endure the burden put on them. And it is the duty of the nations of the world to study the methods of labor and raise the scale of human labor.

You know what that means. We have not done our full duty in regard to the amelioration of the conditions of labor in America, but the conditions here are better than anywhere else. And we now have an opportunity to exercise our full influence to raise the standard everywhere to the levels we have tried to raise in this country, and also as between those who employ labor and those who labor. The heart of the world has never got into this business. The conscience of the world has never been released along these lines in regard to the improvement of the conditions of labor. And, more than that, unless we find some method such as I have been alluding to, we will not have released the real energy of labor. Men are not going to work and produce what they should produce if they feel they are not justly treated. And if you want to realize the real wealth of this country, then bring about the human relationship between employers and employees which will make them co-laborers and partners and fellow workers. All that is open to us under and through the instrumentality of the League of Nations and under this great treaty. And still we debate whether we should ratify it or not.

There is a great deal of pleasure in talking, I admit. And some men, even some men I don’t agree with, I admit, talk very well, indeed. It is a pleasure to hear them when they are honest; it is a pleasure to be instructed by them when they know what they are talking about. But we have reached the stage now when all the things that need to be debated have been debated, and all the doubts are cleared up. They are cleared up just as thoroughly as the English language can clear them. The people of the United [498page icon] States are no longer susceptible to being misled as to what is in this Covenant, and they now have this exceedingly interesting choice to make.

I have said it a great many times, my fellow countrymen, but I must say it again, because it is a pleasant thing to testify to—the fundamental thing that I discovered on the other side of the water was that all the great peoples of the world are looking to America for leadership. There can be no mistaking that. The evidences were too overwhelming, the evidences were too profoundly significant, because what underlay them was this: we are the only nation which so far has not laid itself open to suspicion of ulterior motives. We are the only nation which has not made it evident that, when we go to anybody’s assistance, we mean to stay there longer than we are welcome.

Day after day I received delegations in Paris asking—what? Credits from the United States? No. Merchandise from the United States? Yes, if possible, but that was not the chief point. Asking that I send American troops to take the place of other troops, because they told us: “We will welcome them with open arms as friends, should they come, for their sakes and not for anything that America can possibly in the future have in mind.” What an extraordinary tribute to the principles of the United States! What an extraordinary tribute to the sincerity of the people of the United States! I never was so proud in my life as when these evidences began to accumulate. I had been proud always of being an American, but I never before realized fully what it meant. It meant to stand at the front of the moral forces of the world.

And so, my fellow citizens, I think we must come to sober and immediate conclusions. There is no turning aside from the straight line. We must now either accept this arrangement or reject it. If we accept it, there is no danger either to our safety or to our honor. If we reject it, we will meet with suspicion, with distrust, with dislike, with disillusionments everywhere in the world.

This treaty has to be carried out. In order to carry this treaty out, it is necessary to reconstruct Europe economically and industrially. If we do not participate in that reconstruction, we will be shut out from it, and, by consequence, the markets of Europe will be shut to us. The combinations of European governments are ready to be formed to exclude us wherever it is possible to exclude us. If you want to come to the hard and underlying basis of material interests, the United States will everywhere trade at overwhelming disadvantage just so soon as we have forfeited, and deservingly forfeited, the confidence of the world.

I ask merchants: “Who are good customers, friends or enemies? [499page icon] Who are good customers, those who open their doors to you, or those who have made some private arrangement elsewhere which makes it impossible to trade with you?” I have heard Europe spoken of as bankrupt. There may be some difficulties in paying the public debts, but there are going to be no insuperable difficulties to rebeginning the economic and industrial life of Europe. The men are there, the materials are there, the energy is there, and the hope is there. They are ready for the great enterprises of the future, and it is for us to choose whether we will enter those great enterprises upon a footing of advantage and of honor or upon a footing of disadvantage and distrust.

Therefore, from every point of view, I challenge the opponents of this treaty to show cause why it should not be ratified. I challenge them to show cause why there should be any hesitation in ratifying it. I do not understand the delay. I do not understand covert processes of opposition. It is time we knew where we shall stand, for observe, my fellow citizens, the negotiation of treaties rests with the Executive of the United States. When the Senate has acted, it will be up to me to determine whether its action constitutes an adoption or rejection. And I beg the gentlemen who are responsible for the action of the United States Senate to make it perfectly clear whether it is an adoption or a rejection. I do not wish to draw doubtful conclusions. I do not wish to do injustice to the processes of any honest mind. But when that treaty is acted upon, I must know whether it means that we have ratified it or rejected it, and I feel confident that I am speaking for the people of the United States.

When it is election time, my fellow citizens, a man ought to be doubtful of what the meaning of his intercourse with his fellow citizen is, because it is easy for applause to go to the head, it is easy for applause to seem to mean more than it is. It is easy for assurances of individual support to be given a wider implication than can properly be given them. But I thank God that, on this occasion, the whole issue has nothing to do with me. I didn’t carry any purpose of my own to Paris. I didn’t carry any purpose that I did not know from the action of public opinion in the United States was the purpose of the United States.

It was not the purpose of a party. It was not the purpose of any section of our fellow citizens. It was a purpose subscribed to by American public opinion and formally adopted by the governments with which we had to deal on the other side. And we came back with a document embodying the principles insisted upon at the outset and carried by the American delegation to Paris.

And therefore I think that I have the right to say that I have the [500page icon] support of the people of the United States. The issue is so big that it transcends all party and personal interests.

I must admit to you, with apologies to Judge White, that I was a little embarrassed by Judge White’s introduction. I knew perfectly well it would be embarrassing after that introduction to stand up here and allow you to look at the “Great Man.” If I might tell a very trifling story, my feeling was that of a very unsophisticated old country woman who went into a sideshow at a circus and saw, or thought that she saw, a man read a newspaper through a two-inch board. She said: “Let me out of here. This is no place for me to be with these thin things on.” I felt that my disguise of greatness was painfully thin, but, happily, that has nothing to do with it.

I was a spokesman; I was an instrument. (A woman’s voice in the audience: “You were a chosen spokesman.”) I did not speak any privately conceived idea of my own. I merely tried to absorb the influences of public opinion in the United States, and that, my fellow citizens, is the function of all of us. We ought not, in a great crisis like this, to follow any private opinion. We ought not to follow any private purpose. We ought, above all things else, to forget that we ever divide ourselves into parties when we vote. We are all democrats because we believe in a people’s government, and what I plead for is nothing less than a people’s peace.

#An Address in the City Auditorium in Pueblo, Colorado, September 25, 1919.

Mr. Chairman1 and fellow citizens: It is with a great deal of genuine pleasure that I find myself in Pueblo, and I feel it a compliment that I should be permitted to be the first speaker in this beautiful hall. One of the advantages of this hall, as I look about, is that you are not too far away from me, because there is nothing so reassuring to men who are trying to express the public sentiment as getting into real personal contact with their fellow citizens.

I have gained a renewed impression as I have crossed the continent this time of the homogeneity of this great people to whom we belong. They come from many stocks, but they are all of one kind. They come from many origins, but they are all shot through with the same principles and desire the same righteous and honest [501page icon] things. So I have received a more inspiring impression this time of the public opinion of the United States than it was ever my privilege to receive before.

The chief pleasure of my trip has been that it has nothing to do with my personal fortunes, that it has nothing to do with my personal reputation, that it has nothing to do with anything except the great principles uttered by Americans of all sorts and of all parties which we are now trying to realize at this crisis of the affairs of the world.

But there have been unpleasant impressions as well as pleasant impressions, my fellow citizens, as I have crossed the continent. I have perceived more and more that men have been busy creating an absolutely false impression of what the treaty of peace and the Covenant of the League of Nations contain and mean. I find, moreover, that there is an organized propaganda against the League of Nations and against the treaty proceeding from exactly the same sources that the organized propaganda proceeded from which threatened this country here and there with disloyalty. And I want to say—I cannot say it too often—any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this republic whenever he gets the chance. (applause) If I can catch any man with a hyphen in this great contest, I will know that I have caught an enemy of the republic. My fellow citizens, it is only certain bodies of foreign sympathies, certain bodies of sympathy with foreign nations that are organized against this great document, which the American representatives have brought back from Paris. Therefore, it is in order to clear away the mists, in order to remove misapprehensions, in order to do away with false impressions that have clustered around this great subject, that I want to tell you a few simple things about these essential things—the treaty and the Covenant of the League of Nations.

Don’t think of this treaty of peace as merely a settlement with Germany. It is that. It is a very severe settlement with Germany, but there is not anything in it that she did not earn. (applause) Indeed, she earned more than she can ever be able to pay for, and the punishment exacted of her is not a punishment greater than she can bear. And it is absolutely necessary in order that no other nation may ever plot such a thing against humanity and civilization.

But the treaty is so much more than that. It is not merely a settlement with Germany; it is a readjustment of those great injustices which underlay the whole structure of European and Asiatic societies. Of course this is only the first of several treaties. They are all constructed on the same plan. The Austrian treaty follows [502page icon] the same lines. The treaty with Hungary follows the same lines. The treaty with Bulgaria follows the same lines. The treaty with Turkey, when it is formulated, will follow the same lines.

What are those lines? They are based on the principle that every government dealt with in this great settlement is put in the hands of the people and taken out of the hands of coteries and sovereigns who had no right to rule over the people. (applause) It is a people’s treaty, that accomplishes by a great sweep of practical justice the liberation of men who never could have liberated themselves. And the power of the most powerful nations has been devoted, not to their aggrandizement, but to the liberation of people whom they could have put under their control if they had chosen to do so. Not one foot of territory is demanded by the conquerors, not one single item of submission to their authority is demanded by them. The men who sat around that table in Paris knew that the time had come when the people were no longer going to consent to live under masters, but were going to live their lives as they chose to live and under such governments as they chose to erect. That is the fundamental principle of this great settlement.

And we did not stop with that. We added a great international charter for the rights of labor. (applause) Reject this treaty, impair it, and this is the consequence to the laboring men of the world—there is no international tribunal which can bring the moral judgments of the world to bear upon the great labor questions of the day. What we need to do with regard to the labor questions of the day, my fellow countrymen, is to lift them into the light, is to lift them out of the haze and distraction of passion, of hostility, into the calm spaces where men look at things without passion. The more men you get into a great discussion the more you exclude passion. Just so soon as the calm judgment of the world is directed upon the question of justice to labor, labor is going to have a forum such as it never was supplied with before. And men everywhere are going to see that the problem of labor is nothing more nor less than the problem of the elevation of humanity. (applause) We must see that all the questions which have disturbed the world, all the questions which have eaten into the confidence of men toward their governments, all the questions which have disturbed the processes of industry, shall be brought out where men of all points of view, men of all attitudes of mind, men of all kinds of experience, may contribute their part to the settlement of the great questions which we must settle and cannot ignore.

But at the front of this great treaty is put the Covenant of the League of Nations. It will also be at the front of the Austrian treaty and the Hungarian treaty and the Bulgarian treaty and the treaty [503page icon] with Turkey. Every one of them will contain the Covenant of the League of Nations, because you cannot work any of them without the Covenant of the League of Nations. Unless you get the united, concerted purpose and power of the great governments of the world behind this settlement, it will fall down like a house of cards.

There is only one power to put behind the liberation of mankind, and that is the power of mankind. It is the power of the united moral forces of the world. And in the Covenant of the League of Nations, the moral forces of the world are mobilized. For what purpose? Reflect, my fellow citizens, that the membership of this great League is going to include all the great fighting nations of the world, as well as the weak ones. It is not for the present going to include Germany, but for the time being Germany is not a great fighting country. (applause) But all the nations that have power that can be mobilized are going to be members of this League, including the United States. And what do they unite for? They enter into a solemn promise to one another that they will never use their power against one another for aggression; that they never will impair the territorial integrity of a neighbor; that they will never interfere with the political independence of a neighbor; that they will abide by the principle that great populations are entitled to determine their own destiny and that they will not interfere with that destiny; and that, no matter what differences arise amongst them, they will never resort to war without first having done one or other of two things—either submitting the matter of controversy to arbitration, in which case they agree to abide by the result without question, or, having submitted it to the consideration of the Council of the League of Nations, laying before that Council all the documents, all the facts, agreeing that the Council can publish the documents and the facts to the whole world. You understand that there are six months allowed for the mature consideration of these facts by the Council, and, at the expiration of these six months, even if they are not then ready to accept the advice of the Council with regard to the settlement of the dispute, they will still not go to war for another three months.

In other words, they consent, no matter what happens, to submit every matter of difference between them to the judgment of mankind. And, just so certainly as they do that, my fellow citizens, war will be in the far background, war will be pushed out of that foreground of terror in which it has kept the world for generation after generation, and men will know that there will be a calm time of deliberate counsel.

The most dangerous thing for a bad cause is to expose it to the opinion of the world. The most certain way that you can prove that [504page icon] a man is mistaken is by letting all his neighbors know what he thinks, by letting all his neighbors discuss what he thinks, and, if he is in the wrong, you will notice that he will stay at home, he will not walk on the streets. He will be afraid of the eyes of his neighbors. He will be afraid of their judgment of his character. He will know that his cause is lost unless he can sustain it by the arguments of right and of justice. The same law that applies to individuals applies to nations.

But you say, “We have heard that we might be at a disadvantage in the League of Nations.” Well, whoever told you that either was deliberately falsifying or he had not read the Covenant of the League of Nations. I leave him the choice. I want to give you a very simple account of the organization of the League of Nations and let you judge for yourselves. It is a very simple organization. The power of the League, or rather the activities of the League, lie in two bodies. There is the Council, which consists of one representative from each of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers—that is to say, the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan, along with four other representatives of the smaller powers chosen out of the general body of the membership of the League. The Council is the source of every active policy of the League, and no active policy of the League can be adopted without a unanimous vote of the Council. That is explicitly stated in the Covenant itself.

Does it not evidently follow that the League of Nations can adopt no policy whatever without the consent of the United States? The affirmative vote of the representative of the United States is necessary in every case.

Now, you have heard of six votes belonging to the British Empire. Those six votes are not in the Council. They are in the Assembly, and the interesting thing is that the Assembly does not vote. (applause) I must qualify that statement a little, but essentially it is absolutely true. In every matter in which the Assembly is given a vote—and there are only four or five—its vote does not count unless concurred in by the representatives of all the nations represented on the Council. So that there is no validity to any vote of the Assembly unless in that vote also the representative of the United States concurs. That one vote of the United States is as big as the six votes of the British Empire. (applause) I am not jealous for advantage, my fellow citizens, but I think that is a perfectly safe situation. There isn’t validity in a vote, either by the Council or the Assembly, in which we do not concur. So much for the statements about the six votes of the British Empire.

Look at it in another aspect. The Assembly is the talking body. [505page icon] The Assembly was created in order that anybody that purposed anything wrong would be subjected to the awkward circumstance that everybody could talk about it. This is the great assembly in which all the things that are likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations are to be exposed to the general view. And I want to ask you if you think it was unjust, unjust to the United States, that speaking parts should be assigned to the several portions of the British Empire? Do you think it unjust that there should be some spokesman in debate for that fine little stout republic down in the Pacific, New Zealand? Do you think it unjust that Australia should be allowed to stand up and take part in the debate—Australia, from which we have learned some of the most useful progressive policies of modern time, a little nation only five million in a great continent, but counting for several times five in its activities and in its interest in liberal reform.

Do you think it unjust that that little republic down in South Africa, whose gallant resistance to being subjected to any outside authority at all we admired for so many months, and whose fortunes we followed with such interest, should have a speaking part? Great Britain obliged South Africa to submit to her sovereignty, but she immediately after that felt that it was convenient and right to hand the whole self-government of that colony over to the very men whom she had beaten.

The representatives of South Africa in Paris were two of the most distinguished generals of the Boer army, two of the most intelligent men I ever met, two men that could talk sober counsel and wise advice along with the best statesmen in Europe. To exclude General Botha and General Smuts from the right to stand up in the parliament of the world and say something concerning the affairs of mankind would be absurd.

And what about Canada? Is not Canada a good neighbor? I ask you, is not Canada more likely to agree with the United States than with Great Britain? Canada has a speaking part. And then, for the first time in the history of the world, that great voiceless multitude, that throng hundreds of millions strong in India, has a voice among the nations of the world. And I want to testify that some of the wisest and most dignified figures in the peace conference at Paris came from India, men who seemed to carry in their minds an older wisdom than the rest of us had, whose traditions ran back into so many of the unhappy fortunes of mankind that they seemed very useful counselors as to how some ray of hope and some prospect of happiness could be opened to its people. I, for my part, have no jealousy whatever of those five speaking parts in the Assembly. Those speaking parts cannot translate themselves into five votes [506page icon] that can in any matter override the voice and purpose of the United States.

Let us sweep aside all this language of jealousy. Let us be big enough to know the facts and to welcome the facts, because the facts are based upon the principle that America has always fought for, namely, the equality of self-governing peoples, whether they were big or little—not counting men, but counting rights, not counting representation, but counting the purpose of that representation.

When you hear an opinion quoted you do not count the number of persons who hold it; you ask, “Who said that?” You weigh opinions, you do not count them. And the beauty of all democracies is that every voice can be heard, every voice can have its effect, every voice can contribute to the general judgment that is finally arrived at. That is the object of democracy. Let us accept what America has always fought for, and accept it with pride—that America showed the way and made the proposal. I do not mean that America made the proposal in this particular instance. I mean that the principle was an American principle, proposed by America.

When you come to the heart of the Covenant, my fellow citizens, you will find it in Article X, and I am very much interested to know that the other things have been blown away like bubbles. There is nothing in the other contentions with regard to the League of Nations, but there is something in Article X that you ought to realize and ought to accept or reject. Article X is the heart of the whole matter.

What is Article X? I never am certain that I can from memory give a literal repetition of its language, but I am sure that I can give an exact interpretation of its meaning. Article X provides that every member of the League covenants to respect and preserve the territorial integrity and existing political independence of every other member of the League as against external aggression.

Not against internal disturbance. There was not a man at that table who did not admit the sacredness of the right of self-determination, the sacredness of the right of any body of people to say that they would not continue to live under the government they were then living under. And under Article XI of the Covenant, they are given the privilege to say whether they will live under it or not. For following Article X is Article XI, which makes it the right of any member of the League at any time to call attention to anything, anywhere, that is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. I want to give you an illustration of what that would mean.

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You have heard a great deal—something that was true and a great deal that was false—about that provision of the treaty which hands over to Japan the rights which Germany enjoyed in the province of Shantung in China. In the first place, Germany did not enjoy any rights there that other nations had not already claimed. For my part, my judgment, my moral judgment, is against the whole set of concessions. They were all of them unjust to China, they ought never to have been exacted, they were all exacted by duress from a great body of thoughtful and ancient and helpless people. There never was any right in any of them. Thank God, America never asked for any, never dreamed of asking for any.

But when Germany got this concession in 1898, the government of the United States made no protest whatsoever. That was not because the government of the United States was not in the hands of high-minded and conscientious men. It was. William McKinley was President and John Hay was Secretary of State—as safe hands to leave the honor of the United States in as any that you can cite. They made no protest because the state of international law at that time was that it was none of their business unless they could show that the interests of the United States were affected, and the only thing that they could show with regard to the interests of the United States was that Germany might close the doors of Shantung Province against the trade of the United States. They, therefore, demanded and obtained promises that we could continue to sell merchandise in Shantung. And what good that would be for the independence of China, it is very difficult to see.

Immediately following that concession to Germany, there was a concession to Russia of the same sort—of Port Arthur, and Port Arthur was handed over subsequently to Japan on the very territory of the United States. Don’t you remember that, when Russia and Japan got into war with one another, the war was brought to a conclusion by a treaty written at Portsmouth, New Hampshire? And in that treaty, without the slightest intimation from any authoritative sources in America that the government of the United States had any objection, Port Arthur, Chinese territory, was turned over to Japan.

I want you distinctly to understand that there is no thought of criticism in my mind. I am expounding to you a state of international law. Now, read Article X and XI. You will see that international law is revolutionized by putting morals into it. Article X says that no member of the League, and that includes all these nations that have done these things unjustly to China, shall impair the territorial integrity or the political independence of any other member of the League. China is going to be a member of the League. [508page icon] Article XI says that any member of the League can call attention to anything that is likely to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations, and China is for the first time in the history of mankind afforded a standing before the jury of the world.

I, for my part, have a profound sympathy for China, and I am proud to have taken part in an arrangement which promises the protection of the world to the rights of China. The whole atmosphere of the world is changed by a thing like that, my fellow citizens. The whole international practice of the world is revolutionized.

But, you will say, “What is the second sentence of Article X? That is what gives very disturbing thoughts.” The second sentence is that the Council of the League shall advise what steps, if any, are necessary to carry out the guarantee of the first sentence, namely, that the members will respect and preserve the territorial integrity and political independence of the other members. I do not know any other meaning for the word “advise” except “advise.” The Council advises, and it cannot advise without the vote of the United States. Why gentlemen should fear that the Congress of the United States would be advised to do something that it did not want to do, I frankly cannot imagine, because they cannot even be advised to do anything unless their own representative has participated in the advice.

It may be that that will impair somewhat the vigor of the League, but, nevertheless, the fact is so—that we are not obliged to take any advice except our own, which to any man who wants to go his own course is a very satisfactory state of affairs. Every man regards his own advice as best, and I dare say every man mixes his own advice with some thought of his own interest. Whether we use it wisely or unwisely, we can use the vote of the United States to make impossible drawing the United States into any enterprise that she does not care to be drawn into.

Yet Article X strikes at the taproot of war. Article X is a statement that the very things that have always been sought in imperialistic wars are henceforth forgone by every ambitious nation in the world.

I would have felt very lonely, my fellow countrymen, and I would have felt very much disturbed if, sitting at the peace table in Paris, I had supposed that I was expounding my own ideas. Whether you believe it or not, I know the relative size of my own ideas; I know how they stand related in bulk and proportion to the moral judgments of my fellow countrymen. And I proposed nothing whatever at the peace table at Paris that I had not sufficiently certain [509page icon] knowledge embodied the moral judgment of the citizens of the United States. I had gone over there with, so to say, explicit instructions.

Don’t you remember that we laid down fourteen points which should contain the principles of the settlement? They were not my points. In every one of them I was conscientiously trying to read the thought of the people of the United States. And, after I uttered those points, I had every assurance given me that could be given me that they did speak the moral judgment of the United States and not my single judgment. Then, when it came to that critical period just a little less than a year ago, when it was evident that the war was coming to its critical end, all the nations engaged in the war accepted those fourteen principles explicitly as the basis of the Armistice and the basis of the peace.

In those circumstances, I crossed the ocean under bond to my own people and to the other governments with which I was dealing. The whole specification of the method of settlement was written down and accepted beforehand, and we were architects building on those specifications. It reassures me and fortifies my position to find how, before I went over, men whose judgment the United States has often trusted were of exactly the same opinion that I went abroad to express. Here is something I want to read from Theodore Roosevelt:

“The one effective move for obtaining peace is by an agreement among all the great powers in which each should pledge itself not only to abide by the decisions of a common tribunal, but to back its decisions by force. The great civilized nations should combine by solemn agreement in a great world league for the peace of righteousness; a court should be established. A changed and amplified Hague Court would meet the requirements, composed of representatives from each nation, whose representatives are sworn to act as judges in each case and not in a representative capacity.” Now, there is Article X. He goes on and says this: “The nations should agree on certain rights that should not be questioned, such as territorial integrity, their right to deal with their domestic affairs, and with such matters as whom they should admit to citizenship. All such guarantee each of their number in possession of these rights.”2

Now, the other specification is in the Covenant. The Covenant in another portion guarantees to the members the independent control of their domestic question. There is not a leg for these gentlemen to stand on when they say that the interests of the [510page icon] United States are not safeguarded in the very points where we are most sensitive. You do not need to be told again that the Covenant expressly says that nothing in this Covenant shall be construed as affecting the validity of the Monroe Doctrine, for example. You could not be more explicit than that.

And every point of interest is covered, partly for one very interesting reason. This is not the first time that the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate of the United States has read and considered this Covenant. I brought it to this country in March last in a tentative, provisional form, in practically the form that it now has, with the exception of certain additions which I shall mention immediately. I asked the foreign relations committees of both houses to come to the White House, and we spent a long evening in the frankest discussion of every portion that they wished to discuss. They made certain specific suggestions as to what should be contained in this document when it was to be revised. I carried those suggestions to Paris, and every one of them was adopted.

What more could I have done? What more could have been obtained? The very matters upon which these gentlemen were most concerned were the right of withdrawal, which is now expressly stated; the safeguarding of the Monroe Doctrine, which is now accomplished; the exclusion from action by the League of domestic questions, which is now accomplished. All along the line, every suggestion of the United States was adopted after the Covenant had been drawn up in its first form and had been published for the criticism of the world. There is a very true sense in which I can say this is a tested American document.

I am dwelling upon these points, my fellow citizens, in spite of the fact that I dare say to most of you they are perfectly well known, because, in order to meet the present situation, we have got to know what we are dealing with. We are not dealing with the kind of document which this is represented by some gentlemen to be. And, inasmuch as we are dealing with a document simon-pure in respect of the very principles we have professed and lived up to, we have got to do one or other of two things—we have got to adopt it or reject it. There is no middle course. You cannot go in on a special-privilege basis of your own. I take it that you are too proud to ask to be exempted from responsibilities which the other members of the League will carry. We go in upon equal terms or we do not go in at all. And if we do not go in, my fellow citizens, think of the tragedy of that result—the only sufficient guarantee of the peace of the world withheld! Ourselves drawn apart with that dangerous pride, which means that we shall be ready to take care of ourselves. And that means that we shall maintain great standing [511page icon] armies and an irresistible navy; that means we shall have the organization of a military nation; that means we shall have a general staff, with the kind of power that the General Staff of Germany had, to mobilize this great manhood of the nation when it pleases, all the energy of our young men drawn into the thought and preparation for war.

What of our pledges to the men that lie dead in France? We said that they went over there, not to prove the prowess of America or her readiness for another war, but to see to it that there never was such a war again.

It always seems to make it difficult for me to say anything, my fellow citizens, when I think of my clients in this case. My clients are the children; my clients are the next generation. They do not know what promises and bonds I undertook when I ordered the armies of the United States to the soil of France, but I know. And I intend to redeem my pledges to the children; they shall not be sent upon a similar errand.

Again and again, my fellow citizens, mothers who lost their sons in France have come to me and, taking my hand, have shed tears upon it, not only that, but they have added, “God bless you, Mr. President!” Why, my fellow citizens, should they pray God to bless me? I advised the Congress of the United States to create the situation that led to the death of their sons. I ordered their sons overseas. I consented to their sons being put in the most difficult parts of the battle line, where death was certain, as in the impenetrable difficulties of the forest of Argonne.

Why should they weep upon my hand and call down the blessings of God upon me? Because they believe that their boys died for something that vastly transcends any of the immediate and palpable objects of the war. They believe, and they rightly believe, that their sons saved the liberty of the world. They believe that, wrapped up with the liberty of the world, is the continuous protection of that liberty by the concerted powers of all civilized people. They believe that this sacrifice was made in order that other sons should not be called upon for a similar gift—the gift of life, the gift of all that died.

And, if we did not see this thing through, if we fulfilled the dearest present wish of Germany and now dissociated ourselves from those alongside whom we fought in the war, would not something of the halo go away from the gun over the mantelpiece, or the sword? Would not the old uniform lose something of its significance? These men were crusaders. They were not going forth to prove the might of the United States. They were going forth to prove the might of justice and right. And all the world accepted [512page icon] them as crusaders, and their transcendent achievement has made all the world believe in America as it believes in no other nation organized in the modern world. There seems to me to stand between us and the rejection or qualification of this treaty the serried ranks of those boys in khaki—not only those boys who came home, but those dear ghosts that still deploy upon the fields of France.

My friends, on last Decoration Day, I went to a beautiful hillside near Paris, where was located the cemetery of Suresnes, a cemetery given over to the burial of the American dead. Behind me on the slopes was rank upon rank of living American soldiers. And, lying before me upon the levels of the plain, was rank upon rank of departed American soldiers. Right by the side of the stand where I spoke, there was a little group of French women who had adopted these boys—they were mothers to these dear boys—putting flowers every day upon those graves, taking them as their own sons, their own beloved, because they had died to save France. France was free, and the world was free because America had come! I wish that some men in public life who are now opposing the settlement for which these men died could visit such a spot as that. I wish that that feeling which came to me could penetrate their hearts. I wish that they could feel the moral obligation that rests upon us not to go back on those boys, but to see the thing through, to see it through to the end and make good their redemption of the world. For nothing less depends upon us, nothing less than the liberation and salvation of the world.

You will say, “Is the League an absolute guarantee against war?” No, I do not know any absolute guarantee against the errors of human judgment or the violence of human passion. But I tell you this: with a cooling space of nine months for human passion, not much of it will keep hot.

I had a couple of friends who were in the habit of losing their tempers, and, when they lost their tempers, they were in the habit of using very unparliamentary language. Some of their friends induced them to make a promise that they never swear inside the town limits. When the impulse next came upon them, they took a streetcar to go out of town to swear, and by the time they got out of town, they did not want to swear. They came back convinced that they were just what they were—a couple of unspeakable fools, and the habit of losing their tempers and of swearing suffered great inroads upon it by that experience.

Now, illustrating the great by the small, that is true of the passions of nations. It is true of the passions of men, however you combine them. Give them space to cool off. I ask you this: if this is not an absolute insurance against war, do you want no insurance [513page icon] at all? Do you want nothing? Do you want not only no probability that war will not recur, but the probability that it will recur? The arrangements of justice do not stand of themselves, my fellow citizens. The arrangements of this treaty are just, but they need the support of the combined power of the great nations of the world. (applause) And they will have that support.

Now that the mists of this great question have cleared away, I believe that men will see the truth, eye to eye and face to face. There is one thing that the American people always rise to and extend their hand to, and that is the truth of justice and of liberty and of peace. We have accepted that truth, and we are going to be led by it, and it is going to lead us, and, through us, the world, out into pastures of quietness and peace such as the world never dreamed of before. (applause)