The United States assumes no obligation to employ its military or naval forces, its resources, or the economic boycott to preserve the territorial integrity or political independence of any other country under the provisions of Article X., or to employ the military or naval forces of the United States under any other article of the Treaty for any purpose, unless in any particular case the Congress, which, under the Constitution, has the sole power to declare war, shall, by act or joint resolution, so provide.
ARTICLE X, SAYS WILSON, NULLIFIES A SACRED OBLIGATION
The President expressed his views on Article X and the proposed reservations to it in a letter to Senator Hitchcock under date of March 8th, in which he said:
"There is no escaping the moral obligations which are expressed in positive terms in this article of the covenant. We won a moral victory over Germany, far greater even than the military victory won on the field of battle, because the opinion of the whole world swung to our support and the support of the nations associated with us in the great struggle. It did so because of our common profession and promise that we meant to establish 'an organization of peace which should make it certain that the combined power of free nations would check every invasion of right, and serve to make peace and justice the more secure by affording a definite tribunal of opinion to which all must submit and by which every international readjustment that cannot be amicably agreed upon by the peoples directly concerned shall be sanctioned.'
"This promise and assurance were written into the preliminaries of the armistice and into the preliminaries of the peace itself and constitute one of the most sacred obligations ever assumed by any nation or body of nations. It is unthinkable that America should set the example of ignoring such a solemn moral engagement.
"For myself, I feel that I could not look the soldiers of our gallant armies in the face again if I did not do everything in my power to remove every obstacle that lies in the way of the adoption of this particular article of the covenant, because we made these pledges to them as well as to the rest of the world, and it was to this cause they deemed themselves devoted in a spirit of crusaders. I should be forever unfaithful to them if I did not do my utmost to fulfill the high purpose for which they fought."
"A NEW DOCTRINE IN THE WORLD'S AFFAIRS"
The President said he regarded the stipulations as to constitutional methods required by the proposed compromise reservation as superfluous, because it was understood at Paris that whatever duties any nation undertook under the Treaty would as a matter of course "have to be fulfilled by its usual and established constitutional methods of action." He said further:
"Any reservation which seeks to deprive the League of Nations of the force of Article X. cuts at the very heart and life of the covenant itself. Any League of Nations which does not guarantee as a matter of incontestable right the political independence and integrity of each of its members might be hardly more than a futile scrap of paper, as ineffective in operation as the agreement between Belgium and Germany which the Germans violated in 1914.
"Article X. as written into the Treaty of Versailles represents the renunciation by Great Britain and Japan, which before the war had begun to find so many interests in common in the Pacific; by France, by Italy, by all the great fighting powers of the world, of the old pretensions of political conquest and territorial aggrandisement. It is a new doctrine in the world's affairs and must be recognized or there is no secure basis for the peace which the whole world so desperately needs.