with and under the direction of the League of Nations.

INTERNATIONAL CONTROL OF PORTS

This resolution was adopted regarding international control of ports, waterways, and railways:

That a commission composed of two representatives apiece from the five great powers and five representatives of the other powers be appointed, to inquire and report upon the international régime for ports, waterways, and railways.

A

S I have studied history and observed the course of world affairs I have never lost the belief, acquired many years ago, that we were slowly but surely evolving international institutions. Wars had not ceased, but they were gradually assuming a changed character because of the growth of an international public opinion that called ever more loudly for justice, right and equality among men as against the rule of tyranny and brute force.

It was evident that those who took up arms were increasingly anxious to be justified in the minds of contemporaries, and in the pages of history yet to be written. The conception of war as an instrument of justice was growing clearer; while the conception of peace and good will among men, to be attained by the pursuit of fine social ideals and through ever growing bonds of trade and culture, was helping to avert from time to time some threatened rupture.

Statesmen of large caliber were

trying to solve particular problems by peaceful methods in order to create influential precedents. The civilized world was adopting voluntarily many rules and regulations which were tending to become a code of public law. Instances were accumulating of the judicial treatment of questions of difference between governments. In their own voluntary loyalty to obligations assumed in treaties and compacts, self-governing peoples were at least slightly-limiting the exercise of absolute national sovereignty. They were recognizing, even though somewhat vaguely, an international commonwealth of which they were themselves the constituent members.

The essence of government lies, not in its exercise by officials or functionaries, but in its maintenance through the conscientious submission of the people themselves to the authority of their own institutions. If this be true as regards the government of the State of Maryland and that of the

United States of America, is it not also true of the organized international life, that has long been nebulously evolving, and that is destined soon to become more visible and better recognized as the dangerous mists and fogs clear away? The future of world society, like that of national and local society, must depend upon a well-instructed public opinion. Democracy in the true sense, with the diffusion of intelligence and the acceptance of the principles of order and justice, must antedate any large development of an international control of world affairs.

Our country has been engaged in a crusade of unprecedented magnitude and intensity, with objects definitely avowed. It was our purpose to compel, once for all, the exponents of the doctrines of force, conquest, ruthlessness, tyranny and greed to bend the knee and surrender. They were to make submission and pay homage to the established fact that moral principles were henceforth to be recognized as dominating the

world.

As the war had progressed, the issues had grown clearer, until they had been acknowledged by all mankind. Even more important than the details of President Wilson's fourteen points was the fact that their acceptance on both sides meant the full admission-in advance, and as a basis for further proceedings-that each one of the great nations must henceforth set the rights of others above its own selfish ambitions, when the two things are in conflict. With

the acceptance of those principles (and we must believe that they were accepted in good faith by all the victorious Allies, while also accepted as inevitable by the defeated powers) with their acceptance, I repeat, the World League was born.

It does not follow for a moment that I regard the agreements upon which the armistice is based as sufficient or final in themselves, or as selfexecuting. Those agreements require, for their fulfilment, the forming in a definite way of a League of Nations which shall have recognized functions, a sphere of action, a method of proceeding, and a proper support for its authority.

It is highly important that the moral power and enthusiasm which America brought to the war-phase of the crusade shall in full measure assert itself in order that none of the larger possibilities of victory may be lost, in the peace adjustments. This is why, as I take it, we have come here to-day. We feel ourselves facing the fruitions of a terrible, though glorious, sacrifice for human welfare.

So long as the Allied nations were imperfectly united, somewhat jealous of each other-feeling it necessary for self-protection each to have its own aims and ambitions in mind as well as the common cause-the great conflict ebbed and flowed, with many a disaster for the nations that were on the right side. But when in great measure largely, let us believe, through America's moral leadership

the Allied nations harmonized their aims as well as their methods, the tides turned strongly in their favor;

and the very hosts of Heaven fought for a cause that could be stated in terms of the common good.

In the period of our Revolutionary War, and in the decade that followed it, we were trying to find principles and methods of united life and action. At length we abandoned the idea of self-seeking on the part of any one of the States. We pooled and nationalized the Revolutionary debts of the thirteen commonwealths. The particular States gave up their claims to Western lands, and we created the great, common, national domain. With liabilities to be faced, and with great resources to be developed, the -nation itself acquired dignity as a more important concern than any one of its constituent members.

We had not only conceived of a union based upon the principle of the common good, but we had taken the proper steps to realize that conception and make it a fact. In their very acts of renunciation, the States themselves gained incomparably more than they gave up. As for the individual citizen, he found it perfectly simple to belong to his State and to belong to the nation at the same time; and there was no conflict of loyalty involved in the double relationship.

We won the great war by uniting the armies under a single command, and by forming inter-Allied groups of control for munitions; for ships; for food; for copper, coal and steel; and for many other things.

Our Colonies, in the seven years from 1776 to 1783, had of necessity developed many lines of common

action, and so the union as later perfected was found to have been born in the period of struggle. I believe that we shall see that the union of the nations has also in a very practical sense been born in the necessities of the war years-especially the year 1918. But it will be no easy task to work out the forms and limitations of the League that is to be the permanent outgrowth of the temporary merging of effort and re

source.

The thing never to be forgotten is the practical value of the large and unselfish view. We Americans are not in the Peace Conference for objects that relate directly to our own ambitions. We are there to promote the general good, in the belief that we also shall be benefitted by that which benefits all the rest.

There is such a thing as a common civilization, and a citizenship of the world. You ladies and gentlemen are citizens of Baltimore, of Maryland, of the United States. You can be all these three, and you can also be members of a larger brotherhood, that of the right-minded, aspiring people of all nations. The future is to be secure, not so much by alliances or leagues of governments as by the good-will and high purposes of the peoples themselves, recognizing the claims of humanity and truly desiring the well-being of men and women of all races on the face of the earth.

There are others here who will speak more precisely of the tasks before the great Peace Conference; but we shall all feel that the outcome cannot fail to be successful if the spirit

of justice and good-will-of unselfish regard for human rights—shall dominate the action of those whose voices are to be potent in these memorable days of history-making at Versailles.

The League of Nations will be the crowning act of beneficent, constructive statesmanship. Its firm foundation, however, consists of a cemented sub-structure to which every public and private act of sympathy and of sacrifice for human welfare will have

been a real contribution. When we returned the indemnity to China, we gained the grateful confidence of a vast nation, and an influence for permanent good; and now American altruism in Turkey has given us a moral sway over the destinies of struggling peoples. The present effort to hasten food supplies to a starving world through systematic, interallied action under American lead, is likely to do more than any other single thing to deepen and give lasting strength to foundations of peace.

Meanwhile, we must be willing to pay the price, if we would give concrete reality to our convictions. We as a nation must not grow weary in well-doing. We have set a high mark for ourselves, and we must live up

to it. The heroic sacrifices of the past two years have been made under stimulating pressure of necessity. Now we must pay taxes, and renounce prejudices, and renew our allegiance to high purposes.

Every step towards social harmony, popular progress and upright government here at home, strengthens the fabric of the larger commonwealth of a civilized world. The dy

nastic league called the "Holy Alliance" of a hundred years ago could not give security to the nations because it denied the principles of human freedom for which the American and French Revolutions had been fought. The world has now struggled back to those principles, and they are to be made a part of its declared creed and its self-written charter.

We must indeed continue to do a

part of our thinking in parochial terms; and most men may help best to erect the new social fabric by building over against their own houses. But our statesmanship must also think in terms of continents and hemispheres; and hemispheres; and must definitely build the walls of the temple of world-peace.

It is a just cause of national pride that all of our nation's recent leaders-like those of the early periodare recognized everywhere as having made historic and notable contributions toward the established peace that is dawning. This is true of Cleveland and McKinley, of Roosevelt and Taft, as now it is true of Wilson.

In this cause we give, without impoverishing ourselves. We retain all that belongs to our national distinctiveness-all that commands our unswerving loyalty as swerving loyalty as Americans— while we help to give our methods and principles a larger sway. We shall have to invest largely, of generous effort and of material resources; but all that we give will come back to us and to our children of many generations, in the blessings of peace and prosperity.

SOM

Special Correspondent of the WORLD OME press correspondents reporting the peace conference, who had relied too trustingly upon the promises of openness in the processes of peace-making, vented their disappointment by declaring the concert of Paris to be the Congress of Vienna over again. The great Powers did purpose, as was evidenced by their original regulations concerning publicity for the conference, to allow the peoples to have less information about the negotiations than the public opinion of the world forced them to give ultimately. In a limited sense, the peace is being made in the open, but students of international affairs, knowing the vast issues at stake, never expected the European governments to lay their cards, face up, upon the green table.

There was a deal of talk of rightousness, unselfishness, altruism in the

Allied countries and the United States while the war was at its height; it was treason to suggest that secret agreements were motivating any enemy of Germany; the En-tente cause was an ideal one, and summed up in one word, civilization or universal slavery was the stake. Little was heard in those days about the proposed division of Asia Minor; that would have smacked too much of Prussianism. The American public was not aware that France was

COURT MAGAZINE at Washington, D. C. demanding the Sarre basin, with its rich mineral deposits, in addition to Alsace-Lorraine, and that she would demand either the annexation, or the neutralization, of German territory on the west bank of the Rhine. People would have asked, Does France meditate and plan the creation of a new Alsace-Lorraine question, with its inherent possibility of causing a future war, with Germany, this time, being the party sinned against? Even at this distant day from the signing of the Armistice, France has not come into the open with respect to her territorial aspirations, although in a defensive position, on account of her attitude toward the question of annexations.

It would seem that France, like the liberated Jews of old, in their migration from Egypt to the Promised Land, has little faith in the new order, and longs for the fleshpots of Egypt. Premier Clemenceau has confessed that his guiding principle at the Peace Conference, of which he is president, is the old system of the balance of power, which President Wilson, the one great, dominant personality at the conference, has repeatedly denounced. pression here that Premier Clemenceau's utterances respecting the balance of power spurred President Wilson to declare that the United States

It is the im