As Senator Brandegee and others contended that the Covenant of the League of Nations was a "muddy, murky, and muddled document," so Mr. Williams of New York, in 1788, charged "ambiguity" against the proposed Constitution, saying that it was "absolutely impossible to know what we give up and what we retain."
Mandates and similar bogies had their counterpart in Washington's day. George Mason, fearful like Senator Sherman of Illinois in a later day, "apprehended the possibility of Congress calling in the militia of Georgia to quell disturbances in New Hampshire."
The attitude of George Washington in his day was very similar to that of Woodrow Wilson. Writing to Knox, on August 19, 1797, he said: "I am fully persuaded it [meaning the Federal Constitution] is the best that can be obtained at this time. And, as a constitutional door is open for amendment hereafter, our adoption of it, under the present circumstances of the union, is in my opinion desirable." And of the opponents of the proposed Constitution he said, "The major part of them will, it is to be feared, be governed by sinister and self-important motives."
The storm centre of the whole fight against the League was the opposition personally conducted by Senator Lodge and others of the Republican party against the now famous Article X. The basis of the whole Republican opposition was their fear that America would have to bear some responsibility in the affairs of the world, while the strength of Woodrow Wilson's position was his faith that out of the war, with all its blood and tears, would come this great consummation.
It was the President's idea that we should go into the League and bear our responsibilities; that we should enter it as gentlemen, scorning privilege. He did not wish us to sneak in and enjoy its advantages and shirk its responsibilities, but he wanted America to enter boldly and not as a hypocrite.
With reference to the argument made by Senator Lodge against our going into the League, saying that it would be a surrender of American sovereignty and a loss of her freedom, the President often asked the question on his Western trip: How can a nation preserve its freedom except through concerted action? We surrender part of our freedom in order to save the rest of it. Discussing this matter one day, he said: "One cannot have an omelet without breaking eggs. By joining the League of Nations, a nation loses, not its individual freedom, but its selfish isolation. The only freedom it loses is the freedom to do wrong. Robinson Crusoe was free to shoot in any direction on his island until Friday came. Then there was one direction in which he could not shoot. His freedom ended where Friday's rights began."
There would have been no Federal Union to-day if the individual states that went to make up the Federal Union were not willing to surrender the powers they exercised, to surrender their freedom as it were.
Opponents of the League tried to convey the impression that under Article X we should be obliged to send our boys across the sea and that in that event America's voice would not be the determining voice.
Lloyd George answered this argument in a crushing way, when he said:
We cannot, unless we abandon the whole basis of the League of Nations, disinterest ourselves in an attack upon the existence of a nation which is a member of that league and whose life is in jeopardy. That covenant, as I understand it, does not contemplate, necessarily, military action in support of the imperilled nation. It contemplates economic pressure; it contemplates support for the struggling people; and when it is said that if you give any support at all to Poland it involves a great war, with conscription and with all the mechanism of war with which we have been so familiar in the last few years, that is inconsistent with the whole theory of the covenant into which we have entered. We contemplated other methods of bringing pressure to bear upon the recalcitrant nation that is guilty of acts of aggression against other nations and endangering their independence.