Jasper County Democrat, Volume 23, Number 52, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 25 September 1920 — A LEAGUE OF PEACE [ARTICLE]

A LEAGUE OF PEACE

There is a persistent contention in some quarters that the league o£ nations is a guarantor of war rather than an insurer of peace. Let us try to see how it would work. It has been said, and seems probable, that if the league of nations had been in existence Germany would not have dared to go to war. But we may go further back than that. The trouble out of which the horror grew began, as may be remembered —though many seem to have forgotten it —with a quarrel between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. Sir Edward Grey, as he then was, labored assiduously to bring about arbitration, and the question when finally sifted down was one peculiarly fit to be arbitrated. What would have happened if there had been a league?

The process would have been simple enough. Serbia would have laid her case before it, expressed her willingness to arbitrate, and bound herself to accept the award. The league would then have । asked Austria-Hungary to come into court, and if she had refused, she would have subjected herself to all the penalties laid down in the league covenant, and the whole world would have been arrayed against her. Facing this situation, even the German government would have refused to back up Austria-Hungary, much less incite her to war. There would have been arbitration of the original dispute. And as a result not one “American boy” would have been sent abroad to fight. Without the league 2,000,000 of our _boys were sent, and many thousands of them who sleep in foreign graves, because there was no league of nations, would today be alive. The league is designed to prevent just such horrors as those through which our men were forced to go. The question is, not whether a few American troops may not at some time have tp" be sent abroad, as they have many times been when there was no league but whether we shall try to make it unnecessary to conscript millions of the youth of the land, train them to be soldiers, send them into foreign lands by the million to face hardship, danger, disease and death, as we were forced to do three years ago, ' when there was ,; no league of nations. Such is the iseue, and it is one concerning ; which

people should think soberly, honestly, and with great seriousness, quite apart from partisan . politick. The league Is a great protective charter, protective of young life of the nation, and of the peace and happiness of the fathers and mothers of the land. There are those who are trying to make it appear tKat It Is something else. All that 1b necessary to confound them Is for. the people to trace what the probable course of history would

have been it the league of nations had been in existence in July, 1914. Had it been there would not, in all /probability, have been American cemeteries tn France, not one American household disrupted by W ar —for there would have been no war. What we are asked to enter is, not a war league, but a peace league. Already it has brought Sweden and Finland together in consent to a peaceful adjustment of a controversy which, in the old (days, would certainly have Issued jn war. Such is the league which men are now trying to discredit by the fallacious argument—an argument more fallacious than ever since the new international court has been set up—that It would mean sending "our boys” abroad to fight and die. The world was bathed in blood and tears because there was no league of nations. Indianapolis News (Rep.).