In the course of it he said:
“How small a place civilization has in the hearts and understandings of vociferous America has been most vividly and interestingly demonstrated in recent weeks. As an exhibit of its unpopularity, the reception the settlement of our struggle with Germany has met surpasses anything that I remember in our history. We were and had been for a year in a critical case. We had undertaken to force a great power to admit that she was violating international law, and to exact from her a promise to obey it.
“There were two methods of attempting to secure a reinstatement of the broken law. One was by arms. It was possible to say, ‘Withdraw your ambassador. We fight for our right.’ That way men have been trying for more than a century to do away with. Civilization means doing away with it—substituting reason for force, brains for fists, ballots for bullets. Vociferous America subscribes to this ambition. Indeed she says that it is for the sake of compelling this substitution—insuring it—that she wants armies and navies. If this be so—if she does so love civilization, why then, when she sees the complete success of civilized machinery, is she so sore?
“Nobody denies that it has been a victory. It is doubtful if we have ever had a victory of diplomacy that compared with it. England and France say so. We know in our hearts it is a rousing victory.
“Suppose that instead of forcing an abandonment of the methods which we contended were contrary to the laws of nations by arbitration as we have done, we had forced it by the use of guns—is there any doubt that vociferous America would have exulted—would have been thrilled?
“‘It took so long,’ they say. Several of the greatest nations in the civilized world have been trying twice as long to settle a dispute by war and no end is in sight. ‘They may break their compact any day and we have to fight.’ Sure—but compacts settled by war do not always hold. War means more war. Italy could not be held from the present horror. She remembered earlier wars. This war settles nothing. When exhaustion comes and arbitration begins—it will be by its wisdom that the terms of peace will be measured, not by the sons slaughtered, the villages in ruins, the debts only piled on future generations.
“‘It shames us to be at peace.’ Does it? Why? We have fought with our brains for the rights not only of ourselves but for all nations. We have won. The rights of all nations of the earth are firmer because of our victory. But greater still in far-reaching importance is the demonstration of what arbitration can do. It will make all civilized methods easier to use in the future. We have set peaceful ways ahead on the earth and done it at a time when all law, all humanity, all control between nations was in danger of breaking down.
“Why is there so little pride in the achievement? There seems to be but one explanation. We are civilized only in our skin—not clear through that. We don’t like civilization. We prefer to fight. We are afraid, too, of what other peoples that do and are fighting will think of us. They will think we are cowards. They and we say that ‘he who conquereth his spirit is greater than he who taketh a city,’ but that’s for the gallery. We do not believe it.
“Civilization is unpopular with vociferous America.”