trate classes of questions long before the questions arise. How would we arbitrate under this treaty? The form of the issue to be arbitrated would have to be formulated by our treaty making power-the President and the Senate of the United States. The award would have to be performed by that branch of the government which executes awards, generally the Congress of the United States. If it involved payment of money, Congress would have to appropriate it. If it involved limitation of armament, Congress would have to limit it. If it involved any duty within the legislative power of Congress under the Constitution, Congress would have to perform it. If Congress sees fit to comply with the report of the compromise by the conciliating body, Congress will have to make such compliance.

The covenant takes away the sovereignty of the United States only as any contract curtails the freedom of action of an individual which he has voluntarily surrendered for the purpose of the contract and to obtain the benefit of it. The covenant creates no super-sovereignty. It merely creates contract obligations. It binds nations to stand together to secure compliance with those obligations. That is all. This is no different from a contract that we make with one nation. If we enter into an important contract with another nation to pay money or to do other things of vital interest to that nation and we break it, then we expose ourselves to the just effort of that nation by force of arms to attempt to compel us to comply with our obligations. This covenant of all the nations is only a limited and loose union of the compelling powers of many nations to do the same thing. The assertion that we are giving up our sovereignty carries us logically and necessarily to the absurd result that we can not make a contract to do anything with another nation because it limits our freedom of action as a sovereign.

Sovereignty is freedom of action of nations. It is exactly analogous to the liberty of the individual regulated by law. The sovereignty that we should insist upon and the only sovereignty we have a right

to insist upon is a sovereignty regulated by international law, international morality and international justice, a sovereignty enjoying the sacred rights which sovereignties of other nations may enjoy, a sovereignty consistent with the enjoyment of the same sovereignty of other nations. It is a sovereignty limited by the law of nations and limited by the obligation of contracts fully and freely entered into in respect to matters which are usually the subjects of contracts between nations.

The President is now returning to Europe. As the representative of this nation in the conference he has joined in recommending in this proposed covenant a League of Nations for consideration and adoption by the conference. He has meantime returned home to discharge other executive duties and it has given him an apportunity to note a discussion of the league in the Senate of the United States and elsewhere. Some speeches, notably that of Senator Lodge, have been useful in taking up the league, article by article, criticising its language and expressing doubts either as to its meaning or as to its wisdom.

He will differ, as many others will differ, from Senator Lodge in respect to many of the criticisms, but he will find many useful suggestions in the constructive part of the speech which he will be able to present to his colleagues in the conference. They will be especially valuable in revising the form of the covenant and making reservations to which his colleagues in the conference may readily consent, where Senator Lodge or the other critics have misunderstood the purpose and meaning of the words used.

This covenant should be in the treaty of peace. It is indispensable in ending the war, if the war is to accomplish the declared purpose of this nation and the world in that war, and if it is to work the promised benefit to mankind. We know the President believes this and will insist upon it. Our profound sympathy in his purpose and our prayers for his success should go with him in his great mission.

M

Y Fellow Citizens: I accept the intimation of the air just played; I will not come back "till it's over, over there." And yet I pray God, in the interests of peace, and of the world, that that may be

soon.

The first thing that I am going to tell the people on the other side of the water is that an overwhelming majority of the American people is in favor of the League of Nations. I know that that is true; I have had unmistakable intimations of it from all parts of the country, and the voice rings true in every case. I account myself fortunate to speak here under the unusual circumstances of this evening. I am happy to associate myself with Mr. Taft in this great cause. He has displayed an elevation of view and a devotion to public duty which is beyond praise.

And I am the more happy because this means that this is not a party issue. No party has the right to appropriate this issue, and no party will in the long run dare oppose it.

We have listened to so clear and admirable an exposition of many of the main features of the proposed covenant of the League of Nations that it is perhaps not necessary for me to discuss in any particular way the contents of the document. I will seek rather to give you its setting. I do not know when I have been more impressed than by the conferences of the commission set up by the Conference of Peace to draw up a covenant for the League of Nations. The representatives of fourteen nations sat around that board--not young men, not men inexperienced in the affairs of their own countries, not men inexperienced in the politics of the world; and the inspiring influence of every meeting was the concurrence of purpose on the part of all those men to come to an agreement and an effective working agreement with regard to this League of the civilized world.

There was a conviction in the whole impulse; there was conviction of more than one sort; there was the conviction that this thing ought to be done, and there was also the conviction that not a man there would venture to go home and say that he had not tried to do it.

mean.

Mr. Taft has set the picture for you of what a failure of this great purpose would We have been hearing for all these weary months that this agony of war has lasted of the sinister purpose of the Central Empires, and we have made maps of the course that they meant their conquests to take. Where did the lines of that map lie, of that central line that we used to call from Bremen to Bagdad? They lay through these very regions to which Mr. Taft has called your attention, but they lay then through a united empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose integrity Germany was bound to respect, as her ally lay in the path of that line of conquest; the Turkish Empire, whose interests she professed to make her own, lay in the direct path that she intended to tread. And now what has happened? The Austro-Hungarian Empire has gone to pieces and the Turkish Empire has disappeared, and the nations that effected that great result-for it was a result of liberation--are now responsible as the trustees of the assets of those great nations. You not only would have weak nations lying in this path, but you would have nations in which that old poisonous seed of intrigue could be planted with the certainty that the crop would be abundant; and one of the things that the League of Nations is intended to watch is the course of intrigue. Intrigue cannot stand publicity, and if the League of Nations were nothing but a great debating society it would kill intrigue.

It is one of the agreements of this covenant that it is the friendly right of every nation a member of the League to call at

tention to any thing that it thinks will disturb the peace of the world, no matter where that thing is occurring. There is no subject that may touch the peace of the world which is exempt from inquiry and discussion, and I think everybody here present will agree with me that Germany would never have gone to war if she had permitted the world to discuss the aggression upon Serbia for a single week. The British Foreign Office suggested, it pleaded, that there might be a day or two delay so that the representatives of the nations of Europe could get together and discuss the possibilities of a settlement. Germany did not dare permit a day's discussion. You know what happened. So soon as the world realized that an outlaw was at large, the nations began one by one to draw together against her. We know for a certainty that if Germany had thought for a moment that Great Britain would go in with France and with Russia she never would have undertaken the enterprise, and the League of Nations is meant as a notice to all outlaw nations that not only Great Britain, but the United States and the rest of the world will go in to stop enterprises of that sort. And so the League of Nations is nothing more nor less than the covenant that the world will always maintain the standards which it has now vindicated by some of the most precious blood ever spilled.

The liberated peoples of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and of the Turkish Empire call out to us for this thing. It has not arisen in the council of statesmen. Europe is a bit sick at heart at this very moment, because it sees that statesmen have had no vision, and that the only vision has been the vision of the people. Those who suffer see. Those against whom wrong is wrought know how desirable is the right and the righteous. The nations that have long been under the heel of the Austrian, that have long cowered before the German, that have long suffered the indescribable agonies of being governed by the Turk, have called out to the world, generation after generation, for justice, for liberation, for succor; and no Cabinet in the world has heard them. Private organizations, pitying hearts, philanthropic men and

women have poured out their treasure in order to relieve these sufferings; but no nation has said to the nations responsible, "You must stop; this thing is intolerable, and we will not permit it." And the vision has been with the people. My friends, I wish you would reflect upon this proposition: The vision as to what is necessary for great reforms has seldom come from the top in the nations of the world. It has come from the need and the aspiration and the self-assertion of great bodies of men who meant to be free. And I can explain some of the criticisms which have been leveled against this great enterprise only by the supposition that the men who utter the criticisms have never felt the great pulse of the heart of the world.

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.

And I want to utter this solemn warning, not in the way of a threat; the forces of the world do not threaten, they operate. The great tides of the world do not give notice that they are going to rise and run; they rise in their majesty and overwhelming might, and those who stand in the way are overwhelmed. Now the heart of the world is awake, and the heart of the world must be satisfied. Do not let yourself suppose for a moment that the uneasiness in the populations of Europe is due entirely to economic causes or economic motives; something very much deeper underlies it all than that. They see that their Governments have never been able to defend them against intrigue or aggression, and that there is no force of foresight or of prudence in any modern Cabinet to stop war. And therefore they say, "There must be some fundamental cause for this," and the fundamental cause they are beginning to perceive to be that nations have stood

singly or in little jealous groups against each other, fostering prejudice, increasing the danger of war rather than concerting measures to prevent it; and that if there is right in the world, if there is justice in the world, there is no reason why nations should be divided in the support of justice.

They are therefore saying, if you really believe that there is a right, if you really believe that wars ought to be stopped, stop thinking about the rival interests of nations, and think about men and women and children throughout the world. Nations are not made to afford distinction to their rulers by way of success in the maneuvers of politics; nations are meant, if they are meant for anything, to make the men and women and children in them secure and happy and prosperous, and no nation has the right to set up its special interests against the interests and benefits of mankind, least of all this great nation which we love. It was set up for the benefit of mankind; it was set up to illustrate the highest ideals and to achieve the highest aspirations of men who wanted to be free; and the world-the world of today-believes that and counts on us, and would be thrown back into the blackness of despair if we deserted it.

I have tried once and again, my fellowcitizens, to say to little circles of friends or to larger bodies what seems to be the real hope of the peoples of Europe, and I tell you frankly I have not been able to do so because when the thought tries to crowd itself into speech the profound emotion of the thing is too much; speech will not carry. I have felt the tragedy of the hope of those suffering peoples.

It is tragedy because it is a hope which cannot be realized in its perfection, and yet I have felt besides its tragedy, its compulsion-its compulsion upon every living man to exercise every influence that he has to the utmost to see that as little as possible of that hope is disappointed, because if men cannot now, after this agony of bloody sweat, come to their self-possession and see how to regulate the affairs of the world, we will sink back into a period of struggle in which there will be no hope, and, there

fore, no mercy. There can be no mercy where there is no hope, for why should you spare another if you yourself expect to perish? Why should you be pitiful if you can get no pity? Why should you be just if, upon every hand, you are put upon?

There is another thing which I think the critics of this covenant have not observed. They not only have not observed the temper of the world, but they have not even observed the temper of those splendid boys in khaki that they sent across the seas. I have had the proud consciousness of the reflected glory of those boys, because the Constitution made me their Commanderin-Chief, and they have taught me some lessons. When we went into the war, we went into it on the basis of declarations which it was my privilege to utter, because I believed them to be an interpretation of the purpose and thought of the people of the United States. And those boys went over there with the feeling that they were sacredly bound to the realization of those ideals; that they were not only going over there to beat Germany; they were not going over there merely with resentment in their hearts against a particular outlaw nation; but that they were crossing those three thousand miles of sea in order to show to Europe that the United States, when it became necessary, would go anywhere where the rights of mankind were threatened. They would not sit still in the trenches. They would not be restrained by the prudence of experienced continental commanders. They thought they had come over there to do a particular thing, and they were going to do it and do it at once. And just as soon as that rush of spirit as well as rush of body came in contact with the lines of the enemy, they began to break, and they continued to break until the end. They continued to break, my fellow-citizens, not merely because of the physical force of those lusty youngsters, but because of the irresistible spiritual force of the armies of the United States. It was that they felt. It was that that awed them. It was that that made them feel, if these youngsters ever got a foothold, they could never be dislodged, and that therefore every foot of

ground that they won was permanently won for the liberty of mankind.

And do you suppose that having felt that crusading spirit of these youngsters, who went over there not to glorify America but to serve their fellow men, I am going to permit myself for one moment to slacken in my effort to be worthy of them and of their cause? What I said at the opening I said with a deeper meaning than perhaps you have caught; I do mean not to come back until it's over, over there, and it must not be over until the nations of the world are assured of the permanency of peace.

Gentlemen on this side of the water would be very much profited by getting into communication with some gentlemen on the other side of the water. We sometimes think, my fellow-citizens, that the experienced statesmen of the European nations are an unusually hard-headed set of men, by which we generally mean, although we do not admit it, that they are a bit cynical, that they say, "This is a very practical world," by which you always mean that it is not an ideal world; that they do not believe that things can be settled upon an ideal basis. Well, I never came into intimate contact with them before, but if they used to be that way, they are not that way now. They have been subdued, if that was once their temper, by the awful significance of recent events and the awful importance of what is to ensue; and there is not one of them with whom I have come in contact who does not feel that he cannot in conscience return to his people from Paris unless he has done his utmost to do something more than attach his name to a treaty of peace. Every man in that Conference knows that the treaty of peace in itself will be inoperative, as Mr. Taft has said, without this constant support and energy of a great organization such as is supplied by the League of Nations.

And men who, when I first went over there, were skeptical of the possibility of forming a League of Nations, admitted that if we could but form it it would be an invaluable instrumentality through which to secure the operation of the various parts of the treaty; and when that treaty comes

back, gentlemen on this side will find the covenant not only in it, but so many threads of the treaty tied to the covenant that you cannot dissect the covenant from the treaty without destroying the whole vital structure. The structure of peace will not be vital without the League of Nations, and no man is going to bring back a cadaver with him.

I must say that I have been puzzled by some of the criticisms-not by the criticisms themselves; I can understand them perfectly, even when there was no foundation for them; but by the fact of the criticism. I cannot imagine how these gentlemen can live and not live in the atmosphere of the world. I cannot imagine how they can live and not be in contact with the events of their times, and I particularly cannot imagine how they can be Americans and set up a doctrine of careful selfishness, thought out to the last detail. I have heard no counsel of generosity in their criticism. I have heard no constructive suggestion. I have heard nothing except "will it not be dangerous to us to help the world?" It would be fatal to us not to help it.

From being what I will venture to call the most famous and the most powerful nation in the world we would of a sudden have become the most contemptible. So, I did not need to be told, as I have been told, that the people of the United States would support this covenant. I am an American and I knew they would. What a sweet revenge it is upon the world. They laughed at us once, they thought we did not mean our professions of principle. They thought so until April of 1917. It was hardly credible to them that we would do more than send a few men over and go through the forms of helping, and when they saw multitudes hastening across the sea, and saw what those multitudes were eager to do when they got to the other side, they stood at amaze and said: "The thing is real, this nation is the friend of mankind as it said it was." The enthusiasm, the hope, the trust, the confidence in the future bred by that change of view are indescribable. Take an individual American and you may often find him selfish, and confined to his special interests; but take the American in the mass and he is