Ex-Ambassador Harry White is a capital appointee for the Peace Commission. He is not a Republican, but an independent in politics who has worked as closely with Mr. Cleveland and Mr. Olney as with Mr. McKinley and Mr. Root.
It is a good thing to have him on in view of the exceedingly loose talk about the League of Nations or League to Enforce Peace. Fortunately Mr. Taft has set forth the proposal for such a league under existing conditions with such wisdom in refusing to let adherence to the principle be clouded by insistence upon improper or unimportant methods of enforcement that we can speak of the League as a practical matter. I think that most of our people are in favor of the establishment of the principle of such a league under common-sense conditions which will not attempt too much and thereby expose the movement to the absolute certainty of ridicule and failure. There must be an honest effort to eliminate some of the causes that may produce future wars and to minimize the area of such wars.
Mr. Taft explicitly admits and insists that the League is to be a supplement to, and in no sense a substitute for, the duty of our Nation to prepare its own strength for its own defense. He also explicitly provides that, among the various peoples who would not be admitted to the League on an equality with the others, there shall be different spheres of interest assumed by the different powers who have entered into the League. For example, the affairs of hither Asia, the Balkan Peninsula, and of North Africa are of prime concern to the powers of Europe, and the United States should be under no covenant to go to war about matters in which its people have no concern and probably no intelligent interest. On the other hand, the Monroe Doctrine—at least for all America between the equator and the southern boundary of the United States—is a vital point of American policy, and must in no shape or way be interfered with. We do not interfere with existing conditions, but aside from these no European or Asiatic power is to have any say-so in the future of Mexico, Central America, and the lands whose coasts are washed by the Caribbean Sea. The Panama Canal must not be internationalized. It is our canal; we built it; we fortified it, and we will protect it, and we will not permit our enemies to use it in war. In time of peace all nations shall use it alike, but in time of war our interest at once becomes dominant.
Most wisely Mr. Taft’s plan reserves for each nation certain matters of such vital national interest that they cannot be put before any international tribunal. This country must settle its own tariff and industrial policies, and the question of admitting immigrants to work or to citizenship, and all similar matters, the exercise of which was claimed as a right when in 1776 we became an independent Nation. We will not surrender our independence to a league of nations any more than to a single nation. Moreover, no international court must be entrusted with the decision of what is and what is not justiciable.
In the articles of agreement the non-justiciable matters should be as sharply defined as possible, and until some better plan can be devised, the Nation itself must reserve to itself the right, as each case arises, to say what these matters are.
But let us steadily remember that before dealing with schemes such as the League of Nations, which are necessarily more or less visionary, we must join in good faith with our allies in securing practical right and justice at the Peace Conference. We should treat as an enemy to this country every man who at this time seeks directly or indirectly to stir up dissension between us and England or France, or any other of our allies. Side by side we have fought against the hideous twin terrors of Bolshevism and Kaiserism and we must stand undivided at the Peace Conference. What the distant future may hold no man can say, and this is the very reason why I insist that America must prepare its own strength for its own defense. But our duty at the moment is clear. We have fought the war through beside the Allies and we must stand with them with hearty loyalty throughout the peace negotiations. There must be no division in the face of our enemies. At the very close of the war we played an honorable and probably decisive part, but we were enabled to do so only because for the four preceding years England and France and their associates in defending their own rights had also saved us from destruction. Our sacrifice is infinitesimal compared to theirs. We have had a quarter of a million men killed and wounded; England has had over three million, France nearly four million, and the other Allies during their time of warfare against the common foe suffered in proportion. Our loss has been no more than one or two per cent of the entire loss suffered by the Allied armies and navies.
The immediate cause of bringing the war to an end was the forcing of unconditional surrender upon Bulgaria and Turkey, with whom we had shamefully refused to go to war at all. The English navy protected us exactly as it protected Britain. Under such circumstances it behooves us to remember that while we at the very end did our duty, yet that our comrades in arms for over four years performed incalculable feats and suffered incalculable losses and won the right of gratitude of all mankind. The American envoys must not sit at the peace table as umpires between the Allies and the conquered Central Powers, but as loyal brothers of the Allies, as loyal members of the league of free peoples, which has brought about peace by overthrowing Turkey, Bulgaria, and Austria, and beating Germany to her knees.
THE MEN WHOSE LOT HAS BEEN HARDEST
December 8, 1918
There recently died of pneumonia in France Major Willard Straight, of the American army. He was above the draft age, he was a man of large and many interests, he had a wife and three children. There was every excuse for him not to have gone to the front, but both he and his wife had in their souls that touch of heroism which makes it impossible for generous natures to see others pay with their bodies and not to wish to do so themselves. The one regret that Major Straight felt—and he felt it most bitterly—was that he had not been able in spite of all his efforts to get to the actual firing front. This failure was really a cause of great anguish of soul to him. In the same way I know of the four sons of an ex-Cabinet officer, all of whom instantly went into the army at the outbreak of the war. Two were at the fighting front, one was in the navy, and the other, because of the special excellence as an instructor, was kept here, and the gallant young fellow who left his wife and baby to enlist really feels as if the refusal of the War Department to permit him to go where he could be shot at had caused a blight in his life. I know three other men who, because of their excellence, were kept as instructors at one of our camps, whose feelings of regret are so bitter that they can hardly bear to look at their uniforms and the sight of wounded soldiers causes them agonies of thwarted longing.