tion has been a matter of grave concern to a relatively small group of distinguished patriots whose chief object in life is the preservation of American traditions.

LESSON VI

The Treaty of the League of
Nations

The discerning student is now prepared to understand the final act in the tragedy of national sovereignty. From the mountain top of our disgrace, we can see the slimy thread of weakening will running unbroken from the first apparently innocent treaty to this all but universal surrender. How are the mighty fallen! Thrice blessed art thou, O Napoleon, to be spared this evil day! Alas, the golden age, when knighthood was in flower!

Yes, my students, in spite of the worthy senators at Washington who are fighting so valiantly for the principles of a day that is dead, it seems that the peoples of the earth are hell-bent for peace. They have, consciously or unconsciously-perhaps we should not hold them responsible for the fateful deeds of their ancestors-substituted in the proposed world constitution the principle of co-operation between

The New York City Labor Party Platform says: "We indorse the program of peace aims and guarantees for world democracy contained in the 14 points enunciated by our President, Woodrow Wilson. In accordance with these principles, we demand the application of the principle of self-determination to Ireland. We further demand that our government refrain from interfering in the internal affairs of Russia, or any other country, and the immediate withdrawal of the armed forces of the United States from Russia. We favor the

nations for that of competition. At least so it appears to the historian, who can see no means of forestalling a consummation in the present that is so deeply rooted in the past. While the document, with all of its national restrictions, does not quite satisfy those sentimentalists among us who actually believe that a practical policy can be based on the idea of the brotherhood of man, we may none the less regard its adoption to be as certain as is the morrow's sun.

Mark you, however, it behooves each individual to choose for himself the side on which to cast the weight of his influence; for indecision is a cardinal sin, and there is no biblical sanction for the doctrine of the wisdom of majority opinion. Far be it from me to endeavor to influence your choice by stating my own, but there is no virtue in a teacher's withholding his personal views. Being of a philosophical turn of mind, it is my nature to bow to the inevitable. So with a sigh of resignation, I have decided to connect the crude wagon of my influence with the Liberty-motored biplane in which our great President soars, trusting that in the far-off divine event both may ultimately be hitched to the star of the world's hope.

efforts to make the peace of the world permanent by the establishing of a League of Nations.

"Supplementing the League of Nations, and to make that instrument of international democracy vitally effective for humanity, we favor a league of the workers of all nations pledged and organized to enforce the destruction of autocracy, militarism and economic imperialism throughout the world and to establish an international labor standard to bring about worldwide disarmament and open diplomacy, to the end that there shall be no more kings and no more wars."

E

UROPE has been surprised by

the sharp reaction in the United States against the proposed constitution of the League of Nations. It is premature to assess the strength or to predict the ultimate issue of the movement against ratification by this country of the compact which would bring the League into existence, but it is timely to observe some of the tendencies and to point out, even to emphasize, a few of the dangers in the way of the realization of the world's emancipation from the tyranny of the universally condemned diplomatic system which made possible the catastrophe of 1914.

Opposition in America to the League of Nations as it would be composed and function under the constitution reported to the peace conference at Paris is based on personal, political and national grounds. Not since Andrew Johnson has a PresiIdent of the United States been so hated in Congress. It would be idle, and misleading as well, to employ soft terms in characterizing the feeling of most Republican Senators and Representatives as well as some Demo

cratic members of the two Houses towards the President. They resent his arrogation to himself, consciously in their belief, of the conscience and intelligence of the nation. They denounce him as an ambitious demagogue. They smart under the verbal chastisements he has administered to them. If President Wilson's purely personal enemies can compass the defeat of the League of Nations, they will not hesitate to resort to any method, any means, any agencies.

There is another legislative group of enemies whose hostility to the President is primarily political, and this group, so blind to the virtues in any project which may not originate with or be sponsored by its party, would find sufficient cause in the paternity of any project in another party to fight it to the bitter end. The consciousness of such opponents is not even national in its depth and breadth, but limited strictly to party.

By far the most important opposition to the League of Nations constitution, however, is found among those Republicans who, with every appearance of honesty, of conviction

and love of their country, establish their hostility to it upon the ground of nationalism. It is they who will lead the most important fight against it, and they are cheerfully, even in a crusading spirit, going before the country, accepting every challenge and attempting to make the League of Nations the great political issue of the moment not only, but for the next Presidential election also. A tactful error, a very serious blunder of the proponents of the League of Nations, has been the undignified damning of its opponents. It has not been denied that President Wilson, speaking to the members of the Democratic National Committee at the White House, referred to the critics of the League constitution as "pigmy minds." Even if such a re

mark were made in the bosom of the Democratic party family, so to speak, it rankles. Secretary of the Navy Daniels, in addressing the National Press Club in Washington, declared that the American Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States are to have a briefer existence than the constitution of the League of Nations, which may or may not prove to be true, but he then re-echoed what is considered undignified denunciation of the critics of that document. It seems to critical observers as if advocates of the League would like to abolish opposition to it by invective rather than reasoning. Administration advocates give the appearance of a desire to stigmatize as enemies of the country those elected representatives of the people and of the

States who raise their voices in question. There is no doubt that some enemies of the project have been made by the very harsh treatment they feel they have received when requesting information about it.

If the League of Nations is to become a reality, there must be a decided change in the attitude of the Administration at Washington against its critics, so the critics say. It is not to be expected that President Wilson will recall the caustic and scathing condemnation of those spokesmen in the Senate who dared to take issue with him, but there must be an innovation, distinct and radical, in the relation between the White House and Capitol Hill, if the climactic event of President Wilson's career is to be not failure but

success.

In the first place, it is to be remembered that the Republicans, having a majority in the next Congress, have a valid claim to act and to speak for America, and there is something of a shade of advantage in their position in this respect over that of President Wilson. When President Wilson appealed to the nation to return a Democratic House and Senate, informing the people that otherwise he would not know how to carry on the negotiations at Paris, the nation promptly, and, it must be allowed, with appreciation of the consequences, elected a majority of Republicans to both bodies. President Wilson himself made the issue squarecut. Democrats here are pointing now to the recent election in the Twenty-second Congressional Dis

trict of Pennsylvania, which, for the first time since the foundation of the Republican party, returned a Democrat to Congress, the significant thing claimed being that the Democratic candidate made his campaign on the League of Nations. On the other hand, the Idaho House of Representatives by a vote of 42 to 16 has adopted a memorial to Congress, calling upon the Senate to reject any treaty of peace which includes the present charter for a League of Nations. The Democratic Senate of the Colorado legislature, by a strict party vote, has adopted a resolution favoring the League of Nations as espoused by President Wilson, but the House, by a party vote also, being Republican, defeated a similar resolution.

In opening the Republican campaign for 1920, Will H. Hays, chairman of the Republican National Committee, in a speech at St. Paul, has sounded what is now regarded as the keynote for the party's fight, "Nationalism." He said: "While we seek earnestly and prayerfully for methods lessening future wars and will go far, indeed, in an honest effort to that end, we will accept no indefinite internationalization as a substitute for fervent American nationalism."

A bit of phenomenon, in this connection, which should not be overlooked, is the organization in New York of the "League for the Preservation of American Independence," whose head is Henry A. Wise Wood, chairman of the Conference Committee on National Preparedness.

Mr. Wood has been quoted as saying: "We are fighting a league that is wrong in order to get a league that is right and one that does not impair the sovereignty of the United States, infringe the Monroe Doctrine, bind us to participate in European wars and require us to administer the affairs of foreign peoples."

Most pertinent is the fact that few of the critics of the Paris Charter are opposed altogether to any kind of League of Nations. The Lodge Resolution, signed by thirtyseven Republican Senators and Senators-elect, says "the constitution of the League of Nations in the form now proposed to the peace conference should not be accepted by the United States." Two Republican members of the next Senate later added their signatures to the Lodge Resolution, and it is claimed by its authors that fifty-two Senators will uphold the sense of the resolution. The original thirty-seven would be sufficient to prevent ratification of the League constitution, and it would be dangerous to assume that they are insincere, that they are merely playing politics, that they can be either persuaded to vote for the constitution as it is presently drawn, or that they can be bulldozed into ratifying it. It is perilous, in the interests of a constitution which they would ratify, to continue the campaign of abuse against them, to change them from honest critics of the present draft to uncompromising enemies of the whole scheme. It is the consensus of opinion among Republican and even

among some Democratic supporters of the League that President Wilson damaged his own personal prestige and possibly the cause of the League itself, when, upon his arrival from Europe, in his stirring Boston speech, he delivered an ultimatum to all opponents of it by announcing his love of fight. Whether the reverence paid him in Europe, in contradistinction to the respect paid him in America on account of his official position, influenced him in adopting an attitude opposed to conciliation and accommodation, cannot, of course, be known definitely even by his enemies who think his head is turned. The truth seems to be that President Wilson, returning from the company of men who were thinking far beyond party politics, consciously or unconsciously omitted nothing that would be certain to arouse antagonism in the opposite political camp. He did not care for consistency, they say. Before he first left for Paris, he informed the Congress that he would remain in intimate touch with it, and that it would know everything that he knew. On the eve of leaving the second time, however, he declared (à propos of domestic matters), "It is not in the interest of the right conduct of public affairs that I should call the Congress in special session while it is impossible for me to be in Washington because of a more pressing duty elsewhere, to co-operate with the Houses." Then in his farewell speech at New York, just before boarding his ship, the President assailed anew and more personally those Senators who opposed him. He said: "And I

am amazed not alarmed, but amazed that there should be in some quarters such a comprehensive ignorance of the state of the world. These gentlemen do not know what the mind of men is just now. Everybody else does. I do not know where they have been closeted, I do not know by what influences they have been blinded; but I do know that they have been separated from the general currents of the thought of mankind.”

That utterance inflamed an already impassioned opposition. The Senators blanketed by it resented it as an insult. The restraint which they considered that they had previously shown in discussing an occupant of the Presidency was thrown off. His personal enemies talked in corridors and in cloak rooms-although Congress was adjourned, steps towards the reorganization of the next Houses were being takenof impeachment.

A passage from Woodrow Wilson's work on "Congressional Government," in regard to negotiations with foreign Powers, was recalled. In the chapter entitled "The Senate," the author states: "His (the President's) only power of compelling compliance on the part of the Senate lies in his initiative in negotiation, which affords him a chance to get the country into such scrapes, so pledged in the view of the world to certain courses of action, that the Senate hesitates to bring about the appearance of dishonor which would follow its refusal to ratify the rash. promises or to support the indiscreet