Jasper County Democrat, Volume 22, Number 60, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 October 1919 — LODGE VERSUS LODGE [ARTICLE]

LODGE VERSUS LODGE

Nobody could have been more scandalized by a proposal to amend or reject a treaty of peace than was Henry Cabot Lodge in 1899, says the New York World. At that time Senator Lodge’s Republican colleague from Massachusetts was opposed to the treaty of peace with Spain which President

McKinley had negotiated, and many Democrats were against it because of the acquisition of the Philippines. There was the possibility that a minority of the senate would prevent the ratification of the treaty, and Senator Lodge was appalled at the possibility that the treaty might be rejected. “We must either ratify the treaty or reject it,” he said. “Suppose we reject the treaty, what follows?’’ This was his answer: Let us look at it practically. We continue the state of war, and every sensible man in the country, every business Interest, desires the re-establiehment of peace in law as well as in fact. At the same time we repudiate the president and his action' before the whole world, and the repudiation of the president in such a matter as this is, to my mind, the humiliation of the United States in the eyes of civilized mankind and brands us as a people incapable of great affairs or of taking rank where we belong as one of the greatest of the great world powers. This is what Henry Cabot Lodge thought on Jan. 24, 1899, about the kind of politics that Henry Cabot Lodge is playing with a treaty of peace in October, 1919. To continue:

The president cannot be sent back across the Atlantic in .the person of his commissioners, that in hand, to say to Spain with bated breath, “I am here in obedience to the mandate of a minority of onethird of the senate to tell you that we have been too victorious, and that you have yielded us too much and that I aim very sorry that I took the Philippines from you.” I do not think any American president would do that, or that any American would wish him to. But that is exactly what Senator Lodge now demands of President Wilson. He insists that the treaty must be so amended that it will be sent back to the peace congress, which means that it must be sent back to Germany and that the president imiust be sent back across the Atlantic, hat in hand, to ask Germany if it will make peace in accordance with the mandate of a minority of one-third of the senate.