After leaving Senator Kellogg, we again called on Senator Hitchcock. In all of these conferences between the Senators of the various groups, we acted as the "honest brokers" for the League. Senator Hitchcock thought very favorably of our plan and believed it would work out advantageously. Dr. Lowell and I felt gratified with our day's work, though, as matters developed, nothing came of this plan.
In this connection I cannot refrain from quoting a story which Dr. Lowell told apropos of the problem. The story, as I recall it, was that a noted colored preacher was holding a service in which he read a chapter from Isaiah referring to the Seraphim. After the service one of the colored brethren asked the preacher what was "the difference between a Seraphim and a terrapin." The latter, rubbing his head, replied: "My son, I grant you there is a difference, but they have made it up."
Unfortunately, while there was, in words at least, if not in context, a difference between the reservations offered by the Administration group, the group of mild reservationists, and the majority group, yet, for reasons that I need not enter into here, they did not "make it up."
In concluding this chapter and in closing these memoirs, I cannot resist reflecting how much wiser the Allied Powers and America were in the conduct of the war than in the making of peace, and afterwards. In war they finally pooled their strength and won; in the peace terms they again drew measurably apart. The men who framed the peace terms subordinated world policies to home politics. The United States, by reason of a contest between the Administration and the majority group in the Senate, allowed its sense of world responsibility to be negated by partisan differences. Reconstruction is being halted. And why? Because the leading statesmen of the Entente Powers still lack the economic wisdom, or, what is the equivalent, the courage, to shape their international policies along world economic lines. My own country, in withholding its coöperation, is equally culpable. The result is tension and derangement in the relationship of nations.
As the malady from which this and other countries are suffering is world-wide, so must the remedy be world-wide. And America cannot free herself from the responsibility by isolating herself and refusing to do her part in applying the remedial measures necessary to restore normal conditions. The remedy does not consist in the lessening or weakening of sovereignty by individual states. It consists in the enlargement of their sovereign functions in concert with and in just relations to other states for the administration of common interests. It requires no surrender of sovereignty for individual states to conform their policies to the world's common needs.
THE END