"Fourth, it attempts to take advantage of the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles without becoming a party to that treaty and,
"Fifth, it requests the President to negotiate a separate peace with Austria.
"These are the outstanding features of the resolution. If any group of leaders a year ago had dared to suggest that we should abandon our allies and negotiate a separate treaty of peace, they would have found themselves isolated and discredited. Republican leaders have lost their moral sense in their mad lust for power.
"There has not been one moment since November, 1918, during which America has not suffered in honor, prestige, and power, as the result of the elections of that year. Since that time everything has been in confusion, and the frantic attempt of Republican leaders to find a legal method in which to do the dishonorable thing merely adds to the confusion. There is but one clear path of duty. It is likewise the path of honor and of peace and of permanent security.
"The path lies straight before us, and consists simply in ratifying the treaty of peace which our companions in arms have already ratified. The more the matter is debated the more it will become apparent that there are no substitutes for the requirements of plain duty and American honor."
KNOX URGES SEPARATE PEACE WITH GERMANY
On May 5th the debate on the resolution was opened in the Senate with a carefully prepared speech by Senator Knox, which outlined in detail arguments not only for the propriety and validity of the resolution, but for the absolute necessity of its adoption. Senator Knox contended that the war had ended, in fact and in law; that the objects for which the United States had entered the struggle had been achieved; that a "power-maddened administration" was continuing the technical state of war solely for the purpose of coercing the Senate into ratifying the Versailles Treaty, which had been universally discredited in all its parts; and that, since there was no hope of co-operation from the President, Congress must find means of ending the technical state of war independently of him. Said Senator Knox:
"The welfare and safety of the nation imperatively demands that we know we have peace. The whole world seethes with revolution. Our own nation is in ferment and turmoil. Force and strife are rampant and threaten the destruction not only of our property, but of our free institutions and even of our very lives. And yet we stand, and have stood for months, as a rudderless ship foundering in the trough of tremendous seas. We must not dare longer to delay a return to the ordered government of peace. As a preliminary step, the Executive must be returned to his peace-time powers and prerogatives. Need, propriety, wisdom, cannot question this. The resolution before us is designed to bring us to this.
WILSON TO BLAME
"The course of the President ever since he cruised to Europe to participate in the Peace Conference leaves no chance for doubt that he will continue hereafter as heretofore to thwart, so far as he is able, every attempt on the part of the Senate, the Congress, or the people, to take any action immediately or remotely affecting, in however slight a degree, through change or modification, the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles as it came to us fresh from his signature. He preferred to keep the country in an alleged state of war for now almost a year rather than abate one jot or tittle of the full measure his isolated will had set for the nation. Constitutional order, lawful functions, rights and duties of position, oaths of office as affecting the members of this body, he has noticed only to bring into contempt. He has conjured up every power within the whole vast executive domain in his efforts to compel this Senate to surrender its will and judgment to him, to become mere automatons to register his mandate—to approve this treaty in its last minutiæ of detail as he sent it to us.