Jasper County Democrat, Volume 23, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 1 May 1920 — THE LEAGUE AND WAR [ARTICLE]

THE LEAGUE AND WAR

It may help some people to think of the league of nations from the problems growing directly out of the war, which are temporary in character, and belong under the jurisdiction of the supreme council, or what is left of it, rather than under that of the league. , Suppose these were all adjusted—would the league then be a good thing? Suppose the league had been launched before the war broke out, would it have been helpflUl? Its main purpose is, very obviously, to prevent war, or to make it difficult, in a world that is at peace. Arthur Sweetzer, writing in the New York Evening Post, reminds us of Lord Grey’s declaration that if the league of nations had been in existence in 1914 there would

have been no war, and if any man is entitled to speak on the subject it is the man who so ably filled the office of secretary for foreign affairs in Great Britain in the fateful days just before the storm broke. Only the other day a Frenchman said that there would have been no war if Great Britain had at once announced her intention to support France —which was hardly possible, as her government was parliamentary. But it is altogether likely that such an announcement would have given Germany a serious check. We have, it is feared, forgotten many things, but hardly the terrible shock experienced by Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg when the British ambassador. Sir Edward Goschen, told him that his government would go to war to uphold the treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of Belgium, and asked for his passports. The chancellor w’as “very agitated,” and said that “the step taken by his majesty’s government was terrible to a degree.” He was, reported Sir Edward, “so excited, so evidently overcome by the news of ouj action, and so little disposed to hear reason that I refrained from adding fuel to the flame by further argument.” This was due to the fact that the Gei\ man government had confidently counted on British neutrality. We may be reasonably sure that a blow that was recognized as so terrible would never have been invited had Germany believed, till too late to change her policy, that it would be struck.

If all this is true, the veto of the United States, Italy, Japan and 40 other nations would have been ab-> solutely conclusive against the war. In other words, what was needed in those awful days, for the lack of which the world tragedy could not be prevented,’ was something very like the league of nations to which this government has so far refused to commit itself. There was no adequate machinery at hand to deal with the emergency and prevent the catastrophe. Mr. Sweetzer quotes from a speech of President Wilson, who then, whatever may be true now, undoubtedly spoke for the American people, in which he said: I pray God that if this contest have no other result, it will at least have the result of creating an international tribunal and producing some sort of joint guaranty of peace on

the part of the nations of the world. Those words were spoken 14 months before we got Into the war. In his instructions to the American delegates to the first Hague conference, in 1909, John Hay, American secretary of state, said: The duty of sovereign states to promote international justice by ail wise and effective means is,, second only to 'the fundamental necessity of protecting their own existence. Next in importance to their inde. pendence is the great fact of their Interdependence. Nothing can secure for human government and for the authority of law which it represents so deep a respect and so firm a loyalty as the spectacle of sovereign and independent states, whose duty it is to prescribe the rules of justice and impose penalties on the lawless, bowing with reverence before / the august supremacy of those princi£jles of right which give to the law 'its eternal foundation. The American people should try to think themselves back into the days before the war, into the days of the war itself, and try to recover something of the splendid—yet most practical —idealism that then flamed in their breasts. —Indianapolis News.