President Wilson’s First Speech on his western tour was to the
Columbus Chamber of Commerce on 4 September 1919.
This is the entire speech:
Mr. Chairman, Governor Campbell, 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, and the utter disregard which
she had shown for human rights, for the rights of women,
of children, of those who were helpless.
They had seen their lands devastated by an enemy
that devoted himself not only to the effort at victory,
but to the effort at terror—seeking to terrify
the people whom he 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 of overwhelming 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 to see to it
that that purpose is not executed.
Germany was self-governed; her rulers had not concealed
the purposes 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, 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 such 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 was 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 that treaty
by which the reparation shall not be pressed
beyond the point which Germany can pay,
but which will be pressed to the utmost point
that Germany 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 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 gone.
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 processes of law the flower of our youth
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 and yet lifted with the feeling that the lad laid down
his life for a great thing and, among other things, in order
that other lads might never have to do the same thing.
That is what the League of Nations is for, to end this war
justly, and then not merely to serve notice on governments
which would contemplate the same things that Germany
contemplated that they will do it at their peril,
but also concerning 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 the things that Germany attempted.
The League of Nations is the only thing that can
prevent the recurrence of this dreadful
catastrophe and redeem our promises.
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 dreamed America was going into it.
And they 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 then be no statesmen of any country
who can thereafter promise his people
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 assurance
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;
builds them up by gift, by largess, not by obligations;
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 toward each other, who
were constantly chafing at the bands that held them.
Hungary, though a willing partner of Austria, was willing to
be a partner because she could share Austria’s strength to
accomplish her own ambitions, and her own ambitions were
to hold under her the Jugo-Slavic peoples that lay to the
south of her; Bohemia, an unhappy partner, a partner
by duress, beating 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,
a part of her given to Germany—great bodies of Polish
people never permitted to have the normal intercourse
with their kinsmen for fear that that fine instinct of the
heart should assert itself which binds families together.
Poland could never 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 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
right 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.
When strategic claims were urged, it was matter of common
counsel that such considerations were not in our thought.
We were not now arranging for future wars.
We 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, “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 the lower and sandy shores on
her side the sea, because there will be no 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 had rather have everybody on my side
than be armed to the teeth.
Every settlement that is right, every settlement that is based
on 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 do not 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 school which set this
Government up, when it was set up as the friend
of mankind, and I know if they do not that
America has never lost that vision or that purpose.
But I have not 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 claims, it will not press them.
The heart of this 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 do not 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 authority 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 revolution?
Men do not start revolutions in a sudden passion.
Do you remember what Thomas Carlisle
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 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
hundreds of years had after a while gathered
into a hot anger that could not be suppressed.
Revolutions don’t spring up overnight.
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, who had always been
used, and who had always been the tools in the hands of
governments, generally alien governments, not their own.
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 have not begun at a sharp line.
They have intermingled.
There are regions where you cannot 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 cannot be done.
You have to approximate the line.
You have to come as near to it as you can, and then
trust to the processes of history to redistribute,
it may be, the people that 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, where there are
perhaps 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 was no Poland, strictly speaking, but the
line between the German and the Polish people—we were
confronted by such problems as the disposition of districts
like the eastern part of Silesia, which is called Upper Silesia
because it is mountainous, and the other part is not.
Upper Silesia is chiefly Polish, and when we came to draw
the 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 Upper Silesia
who said that it did not, and therefore we did
there 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 Upper Silesia shall go either to Germany
or to Poland, as the people in Upper 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
population 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 reminded 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 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 aspirations to you.
You have been brought up on them.
You have learned of them since you were children, and
it is those 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 sought 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 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 the central idea
of this treaty, it would be this—it is almost a discovery
in international conventions—that nations do not consist
of their government but consist of their people!
That is a rudimentary idea.
It seems 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 advantage, 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 is not a single act of annexation in this treaty.
But territories inhabited by people not yet to govern
themselves, either because of economical 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 to 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 they assume—not sovereignty over
whom 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 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 own
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 of the world
together it makes a mirror of the fine passions,
of its philanthropic 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 which has lifted us
along the slow road of civilization.
It is the passion which has made
ordered government possible.
It is the passion which 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 the 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 did not testify that the purposes that
I have outlined were their purposes.
We differed as to the method 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 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 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 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 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.1
President Wilson’s Second Speech also on
4 September 1919 on his western tour was
from a train in Richmond, Indiana.
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 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 chance to people who
never could have won it for themselves.
It is for the first time in 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 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.2
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, my fellow citizens, I realize 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
conserving the purposes and objects of that war.
I was in the city of Columbus this forenoon.
I was endeavoring to explain to a body of our fellow citizens
there just what it was that the treaty of peace contained,
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 slain in one of the cities of Serbia.
Serbia was one of the little 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 of the weak and helpless Kingdom of Serbia,
not with a view to 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 those 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 of Serbia or
the purposes which they had in view.
It is universally admitted on the other side of the water,
that if they had ever gone into 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 is that the nations solemnly Covenant not to go to
war for nine months after a controversy becomes acute.
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 the
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 the proper frontage on the sea and a proper
advantage in her contest with the other nations of the world.
So that act, which was characteristic of the beginning of this
war, was the 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.
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 was taken away, and those parts of
the machinery that could not be taken 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
went there to see to it that that competition was removed.
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 (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 a case 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 includes our 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.
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 these 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 see what
is in this treaty, very few have taken the pains to see
what is in the Covenant of the League of Nations.
They have discussed, 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 shall be discussion,
instead of war there shall be the closure of intercourse,
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 the 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 for the Covenant of the
League of Nations that it is certain to stop war, but I
confidently assert that it makes war violently improbable,
and even if we cannot guarantee that it will stop war,
we are bound in conscience to do our utmost
in order to avoid it and prevent it.
I was pointing out, my fellow citizens, this forenoon,
that this Covenant is part of a great document.
I wish I had brought a copy with me to show you its bulk.
It is an enormous volume, and most of 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 American delegates 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 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
which 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 they love in that country.
And I call them to witness that Poland never could
have won unity and independence for herself.
Those gentlemen sitting at Paris presented Poland
with a unity which 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 meant 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 that 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 then 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 arguing this thing with you, my fellow citizens,
as if I had a 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 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 do not 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 a 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 is
never dilated upon in connection with the League of Nations.
I am treading now 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 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 nations associated against Germany to dispose
of, and therefore, we had often, with whatever regret,
to turn away from questions that ought to someday
be discussed and settled and upon which the opinion
of the world ought to be brought to bear.
I therefore, I 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, 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; 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 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 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 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 that those who are doing injustice 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 can’t only be told to mind its own business,
but it risks the cordial relationship between itself and the
nation whose affairs it draws under 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
which 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 need not tell you that at every turn in those discussions
we came across some secret treaty, some understanding
that had never been made public before, some
understanding which 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 matter
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 to the Republic of China,
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 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 them when they went to this war that it 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 of the men discuss
this Covenant that it is an arrangement for sending
our 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 wins against a program
is a better program.
If this is not the way to secure peace,
I beg that the way will 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 what kind of peace it is to be.
If the gentlemen who do not like what was done
at Paris think 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.”3
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 less
desirable thing, passion in contact with passion.
I am glad to hear the Mayor say, and I believe
that it is true, that politics is adjourned.
Party politics has no place, I mean party politics
has no place, my fellow citizens, in the subject
we are now obliged to discuss and to decide.
Politics in the wider sense has a great deal to do with it.
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, and the greatest nation
(applause) 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 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.
I don’t hear about anything else in it.
Why, my fellow citizens, those 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 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 in the European combination of families and of
nations should be under the influence and control of one set
of nations and how many of the weak elements should be
under the influence and control of another set of nations.
One of the centers of all the bad business
was in that town of Constantinople.
I don’t believe that intrigue was ever anywhere
else reduced to such a consummate art or practiced
with such ardor and subtlety 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 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 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 Bagdad, wasn't it?
Well, look at the map.
What lies between Bremen and Bagdad?
After you get past the German territory, there is Poland.
There is Bohemia, which we have
made into Czechoslovakia.
There is Hungary, which is divided from Austria
and does not share Austria’s strength.
There is Rumania.
There is Yugoslavia.
There is broken Turkey; and then Persia and Bagdad.
The route is open.
The route is wide open, and we have
undertaken to say, “This route is 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.
What is 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 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, 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 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 and 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 senses 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, 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 was
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 14 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, 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 natural 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 fairness, for it wouldn’t be fair
if I did not 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 those promises.
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 that 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 arrangement 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 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 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 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 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.
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 was 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.4
Mr. Chairman, Governor Gardner, my fellow countrymen.
We have met upon an occasion which is much too solemn.
(He responds to a photographer.)
This is much too solemn an occasion to care how we look.
We ought to care how we think.
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, 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 single 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 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.
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 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 business man,
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
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, 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.
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 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 do not 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 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 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 German 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 that comes.
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 cannot
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 arms 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.
You cannot handle an armed nation by vote.
You cannot handle an armed nation if it is democratic,
because democracies do not go to war that way.
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 cannot do that under free debate.
You cannot 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)
You can’t watch other nations with 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 government 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 disassociated party, the party
standing off 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.
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 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 the 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 say,
“Come and 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 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.
It is the plainest English that you could desire,
particularly the Covenant of the League of Nations.
There is not 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 discusses Article X.
Well, there are 25 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 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 away 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
either 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,
submitting it to discussion by the 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.
“Ah,” but somebody says,
“suppose they do not abide by that?”
Because all the arguments you hear are based
upon the assumption that we are all 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
cannot 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
circumstance that there was no politics in this business.
I mean no party politics, and 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.
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 of those platforms they advocate 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.
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 do not 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)
I wanted to come out 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 were not 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 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 wholesale currents of society—
those are the things that one can talk about with 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.
This Nation went into this war to see it through
to the end, 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 the 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 throughout 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 upon before the tribunal
of mankind to redeem that immortal pledge.5
President Wilson gave this speech at Bismarck
on 10 September 1919:
This is the entire speech:
Governor Frazier, 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 that it is pending for our determination,
because, after all, it is a question for the
thoughtful 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 are trying to embody and 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 of conference
in Paris, where the minds of more than 20 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—
that while every other country concerned has
stopped debating the peace, America is debating it.
It seems very strange to me, my fellow countrymen,
because, as 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 cannot 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 those dangers
and distractions armed conflict will arise?
Or shall we expect that the world will be willing
to sit down at the council table to talk the thing over;
to delay all use of force until the world has had time
to express its judgment upon the matter at issue?
If that is not to be the solution, if the world is not to substitute
discussion and arbitration 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, if has
been won only over the force of a particular group of nations.
It has not been won over the passions of those nations, or
over the passions of the nations that were set against them.
This treaty which I 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 which did blaze 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 and submitting to nothing but force;
their spirits insurgent; and so long as that continued,
there could not be the expectation of continued peace.
This great settlement at Paris for the first time
in the world considered the cry of the peoples
and did not listen to the plea of governments.
It did not listen to dynastic claims.
It did not read over the whole story
of rival territorial ambitions.
It said, “The day is closed for that.
These lands belong to the stocks, the ancient stocks of people
that live upon them, and we are going to give them to those
people and say to them, ‘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 upon it the passion that dwelt
in the hearts of those peoples, a despair
which will bring 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 transportation are so disordered that
they cannot get food, that they cannot get clothes,
that they cannot turn to any authority
that can give them anything, run amuck.
They do not stop to ask questions.
I heard a very thoughtful pastor once preach
a sermon which 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 Savior 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 any government;
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 if disordered, who is going to buy wheat?
There is more wheat in this country than we can consume.
There is more foodstuffs in this country
of many sorts than we can consume.
There is no foreign market that anybody
can count on wherein there is settled peace.
Men are not going to buy until they know what
is going to happen tomorrow, for the very
good reason that they cannot get any money;
they cannot earn any money amid a disordered
organization of industry and 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 dovetailed and intimately fitted with
one another, and unless you assemble them as you do the
intimate parts of a great machine, civilization will not work.
I believe that, with the exception of the United States,
there is not a country in the world
that can live without importation.
There are only one or two countries
that can live without imported foodstuffs.
There are no countries that I know of that can live
in their ordinary way without importing manufactured
goods or raw materials, raw materials of many kinds.
Take that great kingdom, for example, for which I have
the most intimate sympathy, the great Kingdom of Italy.
There are no raw materials worth mentioning in Italy.
There are great factories there, but they have to get all
the raw materials that they manufacture from outside Italy.
There is no coal in Italy, no fuel.
They have to get all their coal from outside of Italy,
and at the present moment because the world
is holding its breath and waiting the great coal fields
of Central Europe are not being worked
except to about 40 per cent of their capacity.
The coal in Silesia, 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 exportations, 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 suggestions of her principles, and she hesitates.
She does not know whether she wants to go or not.”
Oh, yes, she does, my fellow citizens.
Men among us do not know whether
we want to go in or not, but we know.
There is no more danger of America staying out of
this great thing than there is of her reversing
all the other processes of her history and
forgetting all the principles that she has spilt
so much precious blood to maintain.
But, in the meantime, the delay is injuring the
whole world and ourselves, 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
near-by regions, but groups of men from all over the 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 geography when I was at 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
consent of action, but before we got through
there was not a man who had not as a hard,
practical judgment, come to the conclusion
that we could not do without it,
that you could not make a world settlement
without setting up an organization that would see
that it was carried out, and that you could not
compose the mind of the world unless that
settlement included an arrangement by which
discussion should be substituted for war.
If the war that 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, and the other
governments should learn what if any
processes of mediation they might interpose.
And Germany did not dare delay it for 24 hours.
If she had, she never could have begun it.
You dare not lay a bad case before mankind.
You dare not kill the young men of the world
for a dishonest purpose.
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 does not mean
to permit any inequity 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 your attention is called to certain features
of this league—the only features to which your
attention ever is called by those who are
opposed to it, and 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 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 the United States is likely
to seize somebody else’s territory?
Do you think 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 territory, and, above all things else,
who is going to entertain the idea
if the rest of the world has said,
“No; we are all pledged to see that you do not 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.
Then what difference does it make
what advice the council gives?
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 talk about it.
I spent hours and hours in the presence of the
representatives of 13 other Governments examining
every sentence of it, up and down and crosswise,
and trying 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 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
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 the most eloquent
advocates 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.
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, someday, 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 someday
we may send 2,000,000 more men over there.
We promised the mothers and fathers and the wives
and the sweethearts that those men were fighting
there that these things should not happen again,
but we are now 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 day 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 opportunity.
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 sentiments
of good will and of fellowship than the people of Russia,
and they are in the grip of a cruel autocracy
that dare not, though challenged by every
friendly Government in Europe, assemble a constituency;
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
experience as that, my fellow countrymen.
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!6
President Wilson’s longest Speech was given
at the Marlow Theater in Helena, Montana
on 11 September 1919.
This is the entire speech:
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 must hasten to say to you that I am 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 do not know what the 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 the many aspects,
there is a very simple question
when you get to the heart of it.
That question is nothing 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 soldiers 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 do
the work over again and convince provincial statesmen that
the world is one and that only by 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 distinct in my mind.
On last Memorial Day I stood in an American cemetery
in France just outside Paris, on the slopes of Suresnes.
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 the 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 me 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 someday 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 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 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 world situation.”
When I thought I heard that voice, it was then I proposed
to the Congress of the United States that we should
include ourselves in the challenge that Germany
was giving 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 a war
and begin it with the whole strength of its people,
without so much as consulting its own people.
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 the recent war than
the other belligerents—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 free capital, capital enough for
its own industries and for the industries of the other
countries that have to build their industries anew.
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 check the growth of this Nation?
Who is going to shape the accumulation
of physical power by 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—3,000,000 people on the Atlantic
coast—how the nations 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.
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
evidences 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 toward 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 bit
to my old profession of teacher and tried
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 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 peculiar
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 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 will not 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,
and they had deemed an ideal dream,
was a demonstrable, 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 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 under a monarchy,
dual or single, it is their business and not ours, and they
can do what they please with their own government.
We have said of the Austrian territories south of Austria
and Hungary, occupied by the Yugoslavs,
never did belong to Austrians.
They always belonged to the 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 lands where the Bohemians
lived, but the Bohemians did not stop at a straight line.
If you will pardon the expression, they slopped over.
And 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 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 population 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 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 24 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 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 those 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 Bagdad—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 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 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 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 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 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 England 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 arrangement 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.
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 gentlemen 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 is 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 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 humane advantage accorded it before.
It is not only us, 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 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 will not enter into
discussion with antagonists is that they are afraid
the other fellows’ side will be stronger than theirs.
The only thing 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 narratives
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 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.
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 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 have created,
because remove 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 will not think it inappropriate if I stop here
to express my shame as an American citizen at the
race riots that have occurred in some places in this
country where men have forgotten 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
of 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 and direct 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 it can exercise self-control.
That is what a self-governing nation is—not merely
a nation that elects people to do its jobs for it,
but a nation that can keep its head, concert its purposes,
and find out how its 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.”
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 find the team a little difficult to drive,
but they sooner or later whip it into 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.”7
Mr. Chairman, my fellow countrymen, I esteem it a
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 to-day’s papers the comments of one
of the men who were recently connected
with the Imperial Government of Germany.
He said 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
been 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?”
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.
America responds to nothing so quickly
or unanimously as a great moral challenge.
It is much more ready to carry through what now lies before
it than it was even to carry through what was 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.
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 believed absolutely in America
and was 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.
Why 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 or to the emotion 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 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.
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 whole perspective of the
great plan in a way that concentrates attention upon
certain particulars which are incidental and not central.
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 counsels 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 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 that we have supposed had imperialistic
designs—say that they will do either one or other
of two things in case a controversy arises which
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, to the council of the
League of Nations, will give the council six months
in which to discuss the whole matter and leave to
publish the whole matter, and at the end of the 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 never would have
dared to attempt the aggression 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 and make it certain that the German case
would fall, Germany 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 if Germany had
thought that England would be added to 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 got within
striking distance the story was done.
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.
If you are fighting mad and yet I can induce you
to talk it over for half an hour, you will not be
fighting mad at the end of the half hour.
I knew a very wise schoolmaster in North Carolina
who said that if any boy in that school fought another,
except according to the rules, he would be expelled.
There would not be any great investigation;
the fact that he had fought would be enough;
he would go home; but if he was so mad that
he had to fight, all he had to do was to come to
the head master and tell him that he wanted to fight.
The head master would arrange the ring, would see
that the fight was conducted according to the Marquis of
Queensberry rules, that an umpire and a referee were
appointed, and that the thing was fought to a finish.
The consequence was that
there were no fights in that school.
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.
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.
When Republicans take that road, I take off my hat
and follow; I do not 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 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 that member State,
or any outside State, for that matter, refuses to submit
its case to the public opinion of the world its doors will
be closed and locked; that nobody 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.
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.
The boycott is an infinitely more terrible instrument of war.
Excepting our own singularly fortunate country,
I cannot think of any other country
that can live upon its own resources.
The minute you lock the door, then the pinch of the thing
becomes intolerable; not only the physical 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.
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 that Article X can we be
said to have underwritten civilization.
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 her first soldier’s foot fell 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 specially
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 you want and mean to get.
That is the heart of war, and unless you accept Article X,
you do not cut the heart of war out of civilization.
Belgium did not hesitate to underwrite civilization.
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 that made 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 and fields
that had once been cultivated, and towns with their
factories standing, but standing empty;
not empty of workers merely, 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 the thing through.
The red that this German counsellor of state saw upon
the horizon was not the red of any dawn that will reassure
the people who attempted the wrong that Germany did.
It was the first red glare of the fire that is going
to consume the wrong in the world.
And as that moral fire comes creeping on,
it is going to purify every field of blood upon which
free 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 “to advise.”
(laughter and applause)
But let us suppose that it means something else;
let us suppose that there is some
legal compulsion behind 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, let me 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, general disarmament.
You have heard that this Covenant was a plan for
bringing on war, but is going to bring on the 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 navel
appropriation bill passed in 1916, it was provided—
it was declared—to be 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.
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.
All private agreements and secret treaties are
swept from the table, and thereby 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 the 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 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 counsels
of mankind shall attempt to lift the levels of labor and
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 the 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 the
mitigation of suffering throughout the world.
I ask you, my fellow citizens, is that not a great peace
document and a great human 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 profoundly disturbed about
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 own 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 face of 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 have 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 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)
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 counsels of the world.
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 toward 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 accomplish 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,
they 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, which knew that the
armies of God were on their way. (applause)
President Wilson at a luncheon in San Francisco on
18 September 1919 concluded this speech with a
report on the costs of the Great War:
Mr. Toastmaster, my fellow countrymen: 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 often enough 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 these 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 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 Bagdad.
What is the line from Bremen to Bagdad?
It leads through partitioned Poland, through prostrate
Rumania, through subjugated Slavia, 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 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
balance of power, but liberty and right.
An illumination of profound understanding of
human affairs shines upon the deliberations of that
conference that never shone upon the deliberations
of any other international conference in the world.
And therefore it is a 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 the 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.
I was glad, after I inaugurated it, that I drew
together the little body which 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 in 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 business men 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 of 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
demand it, in America as well as elsewhere.
We have got to sit down in the peace chamber passive,
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 a 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
that it cannot 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 it 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 covered
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 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 that 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 another of two things, without either submitting
the matter in 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 the 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 disinterested, 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 would 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 overwhelming force
in the world is the force of opinion.
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, a 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 shall be no communication
of any kind between the people of that nation
and the peoples of other nations.
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 because 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 cannot 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.”
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—but that her design
was to destroy free political society—
that war was finally determined to exist.
I remember saying to Congress, before we went into the
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 peace between those who employ
labor and those who labor depend 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, 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-cant 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 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 kind 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 had never heard of.
Do you know where Azerbaijan is?
Well, one day there came in a very dignified
and interesting group of gentlemen 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 and 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 render, and will interfere in absolutely nothing that
concerns their own affairs, they believe us.
There isn’t a place in this world now, unless
we wait a little while longer, where America’s
political ambitions are looked upon with suspicion.
That was frankly admitted in this little conference
that I have spoken of.
Not one of those gentlemen thought that
America had any ulterior designs whatever.
They were constantly near us, consulting our economic
experts, consulting our geographical experts; they
were constantly turning to America to act as umpire.
And nine cases out of ten, just because America was
disinterested and could look at the thing without any
other purpose than that of reaching a practicable 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 business men, 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: 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 $39,000,00,000, the biggest 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 the 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 7,450,000 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 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.8
President Wilson spoke briefly at Berkeley’s
Greek Theater on 18 September 1919:
Mr. Chairman, Mr. Mayor, ladies and gentlemen.
I feel an old feeling come 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 and women from a college man.
I was reminded as I received your very generous
welcome of a story told of Mr. Oliver Herford,
a very delightful wit and artist.
He was one day sitting 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 rebuke.
I used to say that the trouble about the college youth of
America was that it 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 on 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 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 him
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.
It is a very distressing circumstance to me
to find that when I recite the mere facts,
they are novel to some of my fellow citizens.
Young gentlemen and young ladies, what we have
got to do is to see that that sort of 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.9
President Wilson’s last lengthy speech on his tour
to a crowd of over 3,000 people was in the
City Auditorium at Pueblo, Colorado
on 25 September 1919.
After that his health collapsed,
and he went directly back to Washington DC.
This is the entire speech:
Mr. Chairman 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 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 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 got 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, in order to clear away the mists, in order
to remove misapprehensions, in order to 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 underlie
the whole structure of European and Asiatic society.
This is only the first of several treaties.
They are all constructed upon the same plan.
The Austrian treaty follows 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 upon the principle to see 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
under such governments as they chose themselves 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 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 never will 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 the 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 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.
The assembly was created in order that anybody that
purposed anything wrong should 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 that little republic 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 realest 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, 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 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.
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 whatever.
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 demanded 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.
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 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.”
Now, the other specification is in the Covenant.
The Covenant in another portion guarantees to the members
the independent control of their domestic questions.
There is not a leg for these gentlemen to stand on
when they say that the interests of the 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 to 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 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,
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 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 of 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 street car 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 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 it is not an absolute insurance against war,
do you want no insurance 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)10
Notes
1. The Papers of Woodrow Wilson, Volume 63
September 4-November 5, 1919, p. 7-18.
2. Ibid., p. 18-19.
3. Ibid., p. 19-29.
4. Ibid., p. 33-42.
5. Ibid., p. 43-51.
6. Ibid., p. 153-162.
7. Ibid., p. 180-197.
8. Ibid., p. 349-350.
9. Ibid., p. 350-352.
10. Ibid., p. 500-513.