Can we sit still and allow the old world to roll along in an easy and complacent assurance that somehow some deus ex machina is going to save us from the folly of negligence and that there will be no other catastrophe of this kind? The League which we are speaking for here, the League of Nations, which our great captain in France is seeking to have formed, is an effort to thrust in between mankind and a repetition of that catastrophe the concerted powers of the intelligent and conscientious men and women of the world.

I do not know what the alternative is. I asked the War College just before I left Washington to tell me what the annual expenditures for war preparation by the great nations were before we went into the war, and they brought me the figures. In 1914 pre-war expenditures Great Britain spent $386,000,000; France, $344,000,000; the United States, $281,000,000; Germany, $443,000,000; or $1,454,000,000 for those four nations alone.

We have created a vast burden of debt. The great-grandchildren of the youngest persons within the sound of my voice will go through life carrying on their backs packs which will be a part of the obligation they have to pay, the waste and cost of this war. Every hammer stroke of industry, every transaction of commerce, every accumulation of money, will have to pay its toll of taxes from now as far as the eye of mind can reach, in order to rehabilitate this world, and restore the

wealth which has been destroyed. If we allow the old kind of arrangements to be made, if the world is to depend upon a balance of power in the future, instead of the League of Nations, then, in addition to that great burden, we shall have to appropriate annually sums vaster than these I have been describing in order that we may build new navies, larger navies, and greater guns and equipment of war.

We are at the parting of the ways. We can blunder along as we have blundered. Why, in 1914, I said: "War in Europe, a general European war, is impossible and unthinkable;" and you said it. We can keep on believing that way if we want to, or we can take time by the forelock; we can be provident, in providing. We can say to the peoples of Europe who have suffered these incalculable these incalculable sacrifices and wastes, "Join hands with us. Let us make of the world a place of beauty and of justice. Let us make such arrangements that when nations fall afoul of one another and tempers become exasperated there will be a moment of calm until we can get before a judicial tribunal which will make an award." We can make that kind of arrangement as an insurance policy for the future generations if

we want to.

The last time I was in France I saw the battle of St. Mihiel, and I saw the first five days of the battle of the Argonne Forest. I saw our men romp over the tops of the trenches, your sons, the 26th division, and all the rest of them, per

fectly irresistible, singing as they went.

But the picture one has of that sort of thing has implications. On the one side there were German soldiers and on the other side American soldiers. Back of one side there was tyranny and autocracy and miseducation. I think it is fair to say there was a perversion of religion itself. The German emperor was impiously accustomed to proclaiming a partnership between himself and the Almighty. Back of the American soldiers there was Bunker Hill and Concord and Lexington and the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States and more than a hundred years of the traditions of self-government, the aspirations of a free people, the intelligence that comes with universal education. On our side the forces of morality and intelligence had at last come into their own and the victory went with the imponderables. The things seen were temporal; the things unseen were eternal, and the victory rested with the right. America had joined in this great company of brave people.

We have lost some 90,000, if I recall the figure right, American soldiers. We have mingled our blood with that of the British and

that of the French, and they died so bravely. They died for a cause and that cause was not the old-time triumph which military victory used to entail. No one of those men wanted to bring captives at his chariot wheels. No one of them wanted to add a rood of land to the national domain. No one of them wanted to take Naboth's vineyard from him. They were fighting for justice, fighting for you, fighting for me; but, oh, very much more, fighting for the children who are to come after us, who are yet to play their part on the world's stage.

If we could on some Halloween night go among these silent places along the front line and get an answer to the questions we might ask those who lie there and are to lie there forever, what they think about this business, is there any doubt as to what their answer would be? They would lift up their voices-ah! if I may quote Dana Burnet, "Their ashes would stir, and their souls would be our captains as they march in solid phalanx to the council seats of the mighty at Versailles, while we present their demand that such arrangements should be made as would forever prevent the possibility of their children having to make the sacrifice they made."

During the month of February, William Howard Taft and a group of eminent speakers addressed nine congresses in different sections of the country as a part of the campaign conducted by the League to Enforce Peace in favor of the consummation of the League of Nations. To all of

these meetings, in New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Portland, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, St. Louis and Atlanta, the World Court League sent accredited delegates by way of indicating the cooperation of the association in this coast-to-coast journey of argument and persuasion.

I.

HE League is the result of the

TH

logic of events rather than of the will of statesmen or of the theories of political philosophers. Nationalism, in many respects a beneficent principle, is also in many cases a disruptive force. It succeeded to and replaced those traditions of European unity embodied in the concept of the Roman Imperium. The national movement slowly developing through the Eighteenth Century and breaking out with fury during the French Revolution, led, like the Reformation, to a quarter of a century of war. Present conditions in Europe are calculated to lead to indefinite warfare in the attempt to realize national aspirations. Such warfare can only be avoided by co-operative action upon the part of the great nations. Necessary self-interest at a time of continuing peril dictates a permanent League of Nations as in similar fashion the temporary union of free democratic peoples was essential to save civilization from the assault of Prussianism.

II.

The instinct of peoples the world over understands this necessity. Two powerful forces or ideas are at work.

That which makes for national selfconsciousness and that which aims at a wider organization of humanity. They are the two great dynamic forces of world politics to-day. Nationality must be recognized and its rights asserted and maintained not by an appeal to force but to the Association of Nations which, having recognized in principle the justice of those claims, is now creating a mechanism for overcoming the difficulties incident to their just application.

III.

The League of Nations has been injured by its more enthusiastic adherents who, in declaring that it will end war and inaugurate the millenium, play into the hands of its enemies.

What it can do and will do is to adopt Federation, as a working principle under which the nations may maintain their national existence without necessary recourse to war. This principle has made America what it is; its application can alone save Europe from an indefinite vista of conflict.

IV.

The pivot upon which the League of Nations must mainly revolve is the solidarity of the English speak

2. It makes provision for a taboo or "outlawry" of any nation refusing to abide its decision.

3. It furnishes machinery for solving one of the world's fundamental difficulties to wit, the exploitation of undeveloped peoples.

4. The difference between the proposed plan and the mere opportunity for arbitration afforded by the Hague Conference is, of course, fundamental. fundamental. The latter assists the established practices of arbitration and aims at some codification of international law, while the proposed League institutes a new world order, designed to correct the inherent, disruptive tendencies, inevitable in the system of theoretical, sovereign, independent, unrelated nations.

5. Above all it places preponderant power in the hands of the world's great Democracies and gives to

France, the United States, Great Britain and Italy an influence which can always be decisive against predatory power under whatever forms disguised. The agreed plan marks a capital event in history and furnishes a basis for infinite development toward international co-operation and the marshalling of material and moral force behind law. World opinion is at last given an organ of expression. The part of America in bringing about this result is one for just patriotic congratulation.

6. The Monroe Doctrine announced to the world that the United States would protect the integrity of South American States against foreign aggression. The League extends that principle of protection to all nations. The rights of the United States are not impaired; the guarantees of the states of South Amer

ica are strengthened. It is a misapprehension of the meaning of the Monroe Doctrine to believe it endan gered by the proposed plan.

President Monroe defined his own doctrine as follows:

"We owe it, therefore, to candor, and to the amicable relations existing between the United States and those (European) powers, to declare that we should consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety. With the existing colonies or dependencies of any European power we have not interfered and shall not interfere. But with the Governments who have declared their independence and maintained it and whose independence we have, on great consideration and on just principles, acknowledged, we could not view any interposition for the purpose of suppressing them, or controlling

in any other manner their destiny, by any European power, in any other light than as a manifestation of an unfriendly disposition toward the United States."

One of the latest official exponents of the Doctrine, President Theodore Roosevelt, so defined it:

"The Monroe Doctrine should be the cardinal feature of the foreign policy of all the nations in the two Americas, as it is of the United States. * The Monroe Doctrine is a declaration that there must be no territorial aggrandizement by any non-American power at the expense of any American power on American soil. It is in no wise intended as hostile to any nation in the old world. Still less is it intended to give cover to any aggression by one new world power at the expense of any other. It is simply a step, and a long step, toward assuring the universal peace bility of permanent peace on this of the world by securing the possihemisphere. During the past century other influences have established the permanence and the independence of the smaller states of Europe. Through the Monroe Doctrine we hope to be able to safe-guard like independence and secure like permanence for the lesser among the new world nations."

I know of no more completely adequate or satisfactory definition.

Senator Root has lucidly defined the now traditional doctrine as follows:

"It is the substance of the thing to which the nation holds, and that is and always has been, that the safety of the United States demands that