xt7gqn5z6g1b_10 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7gqn5z6g1b/data/mets.xml https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7gqn5z6g1b/data/50w29.dao.xml Woman's Democratic Club of Fayette County (Ky.) 0.68 Cubic Feet 2 boxes archival material 50w29 English University of Kentucky The physical rights to the materials in this collection are held by the University of Kentucky Special Collections Research Center.  Contact the Special Collections Research Center for information regarding rights and use of this collection. Mary Shelby Wilson Woman's Democratic Club papers Women -- Kentucky -- Societies and clubs Women -- Suffrage Women -- Political activity -- Kentucky. Mary Shelby Wilson Woman's Democratic Club papers text Mary Shelby Wilson Woman's Democratic Club papers 2016 https://exploreuk.uky.edu/dips/xt7gqn5z6g1b/data/50w29/Box_1/Folder_11/18074.pdf 1926 1926 1926 section false xt7gqn5z6g1b_10 xt7gqn5z6g1b a" a u‘ H

”—_T_——__—”“
A s A F E l
l INTERNATIONAL POLICY :
i
1 A N A D D R E s s l
l BY I,
l PROFESSOR JAMES T. SHOTWELL E
I, ('nrncu'iu l-Znuiuumvm: [or lnlvl'nniiuml l'mnvu ;
. I l
l BEFORE TIIE DEMOCRATIC ;
, WOMEN'S LUNCHEON CLUB ;
l OF PHILADELPHIA :
l e
I a
l
3 r
I |I
i i!
l i
l E
a i
r 3 1
| 81 l
i i
l
l

I .
l JANUARY TWENTYi—FIFTH, NINETEEN TWENTY—SIX ‘

 l
l
l
1
l
l
l
i
E

l

3,
l

l

l

l

l

l

l

V l
l

' i
‘i

f

l

I

l

I

I

 1
l
l
l
l
l
I
i A SAFE INTERNATIONAL POLICY
3. Address before the Democratic Women’s
Luncheon Club, January 25, 1926
By PROFESSOR JAMES T. SHOTWELL
i The other day, at a great luncheon in New York, I heard
i a speech by a distinguished American banker in eulogy of
1’ Mussolini and in praise of the achievements of Fascism. I
wish to begin my survey of the possibilities of American
foreign policy by a comment on that speech. There were a
. thousand men and women of rather unusual education and
; enlightenment who listened with hardly any outward sign
' of dissent, to the praise bestowed upon the great Italian
1 leader, and who applauded rather generously the thesis that
Italians should be left free to choose their own form of
' government, and we should not judge them by our standards.
i Now I shall have a word to say later about how free
i the Italian people are to choose their own form of Fascism.
l . But I want first to bear witness as well as the apologist for
i Mussolini, to the splendid achievements of his administra—
i tion. I am ready to admit, as any of us must who have
i} travelled in Italy since the Fascist Revolution, that the gov~
' ernment of Mussolini has done very remarkable things. It
has achieved what had not been achieved in Italy under
parliamentary government. The material development of
i Italy, as a result of the stern, thorough—going measures ‘un—
: der Mussolini, has been outstanding and even spectacular,
It is very much admired by efficiency experts the world over,
i and I have no desire to try in any way to discount that
I great national achievement. Moreover, it is not only a ma:
1‘ terial development that Fascism has to its credit; there is a
i [3]
l
l
I

 spiritual development as well, one that appeals to me much
more. They have galvanized into existence a new, vital ‘3'
sense of patriotism, which calls for and receives an almost l
idolatrous sacrifice on the part of the Italian citizens. This ii
is a new thing in a country which had not yet fully de- {1
veloped its natiOnality; for Italy had kept much of its local 5
divisions, down to the Great War, and the smaller loyalty I
of locality and faction had not sufficiently yielded before the .
greater loyalty to the State. I myself saw the symbol of i
this new Italy, the new spiritual Italy in the celebration by
the Fascists a year ago or so in Rome, when they assembled
from all parts of the country, and on a brilliant Sunday
morning marched up the hill before the Quirinal before ‘
their king, who reviewed the procession from the balcony of j
the palace. They came with glittering banners hearing all
kinds of devices, symbols of the sense of communal adher— ‘V
ence to a new conception of loyalty for the fatherland. It
was a magnificent, inspiring spectacle. As these young 1
men—~and they were mostly young men—as these youths l
marched by, they were humming a refrain of which the first i
and last words had a strange antithesis. The opening line i
of the refrain was “Benito Mussolini," and the last word v
was “Liberta.” Now, there is no possibility of joining these I
two words by any rhetoric nor by any enthusiasm that the
Fascists may bring around the name of their great leader. 1
For the one thing they have sacrificed in Italy for this move-
ment is liberty. At the present time in Italy there is no l
liberty of the kind that we think most precious in the de- I
velopment of this country, the liberty of'the individual of l
free—speech and the right to protest against even an effi- l
cicnt government. And I am going to ask you as a body of 1
students of politics to consider the bearing of such an i,
experiment in efficiency with its immediate results in 1121- l
tional development, upon the institutions of liberty, which f
democracy seeks to establish and maintain. I i
There is a parallel for Italian efficiency, not an exact '
parallel, but much closer than one would think at first, in
the old Germany before the war. There was an efficient 1
[4]
l
l

 state whose achievements in government, in national and
5 local administration, marked it out in such a way that the
5 German citizens of the pre—war period felt it so safeguarded,
5 their cultural heritage so furthered their new science, with
5 its application of invention and discovery to the needs of
5 daily life, that it was almost a crusading duty to impose
5 both form and content—their Kultur—upon the rest of the
. world. It was an efficient State which had brought into its
5 cities ideas of hygiene and of local control, such as were
3 unknown in some of the neighboring States that were our

allies in the late war. It was a country that had safe~

guarded its workmen and aged by social insurance and gave
’ ample scope to popular education. I can’t take time to
. remind you of further ways by which efficient Germany had
really carried the devices of civilization, if not farther than

other countries, at least to the very parallel with the far-
; thest point of advance. And then what happened? There
5. was not the fullest degree of participation in the organiza-
5 tion of government of administration, because there had
5 been, two generations ago, a loss of liberty in our sense

of the word, and because of their very efficiency, they failed

to realize, and do not yet realize, that they lacked the effec-
f tive instruments of political control, without which liberty

cannot function except to check and frustrate good and
5 bad policies alike. Germany passed over into the great ad-

venture. I am not speaking now of relative war guilt at
5 all; that would take more than another hour. But there is
5 no doubt at all that the German people had no appropriate
5 means for expressing its will in terms of responsible action.
5 This was not the fault of anything in 1914. It was because

back in the 60’s Bismarck, by his remarkable success—the
5 success of a single genius—overthrew by a fascist act the
5 parliamentary control of the executive. I want you to
5 weigh this thing. Bismarck’s assertion of his power, his
5 defiance of his parliament, was a fascist act. It destroyed
1 the safeguards of effective parliamentary action which Eng-
5 land, France, and this country maintained. And even now
Locarno on the German side of the negotiations is put
, through more by the inspired leadership of the German

[5]

 government than by the participation or anticipatory partici-
pation of the German people. Now I take it that in a
democratic country, dedicated to the principles of self—
government from its very beginning, we ought to be more
aware than we seem to be, of the danger of the laudation of
enterprises of that kind which have, for the present at least, ‘
brought prosperity and spiritual rejuvenation to Italy. The
long vision of history must be kept in mind, not merely im— l
mediate advantage. 1
The only thing that makes the Fascism of Italy safe, l
even for itself, is that there is _now a League of Nations I
as a great cautionary body in Europe, an organization of 1
nations against which the adventurous elements in Fascism {
now run up, and find to their surprise that a new interna- .
tional safeguard for peace exists to supplement the irre- ‘
sponsible national structure. Can you conceive of what the l
Mussolini government would have been doing in the pre—
war days, how it would have been tempted, almost beyond
the power to resist, by this militant spirit of nationalism,
to join with others in “glorious” adventures, to extend the
power of its country beyond its frontiers by joining up,
either with a France or a Serbia, as against Germany and 1
Austria or with a Germany militant as against the others.
The Mussolini government, had it existed in 1904 to 1914,
would have endangered at every critical turn in the diplo- j
macy of that period, the peace of the world. It narrowly 3
escaped endangering the peace of the world, as you know, f
in the Greek-Italian incident. Mussolini learned in that
incident the strength of the co—operative movement for 1
peace, which has recently become incarnate in the Treaty ‘
of Locarno. It is the League of Nations rather than Fas~ i
cism which makes Italy safe for the world and itself at the l
present time. ‘.
Now, what about applying the lesson of European his- ‘
tory to ourselves? Is there a way to secure efliciency for
democracy and at the same time safeguard its responsible »
organs of government? We, in this country, have had
glimpses of an even greater problem. We stated once be-
fore the world that we wish to see the world made safe
[6]

 for democracy; and, in spite of cynic and partisan, that
inspired phrase still has meaning. But we learned before
the war was over, that such a task could not be taken over
by inspired leaders alone, no matter how great their in—
spiration. We have learned since the war, I hope, that it
, can’t be achieved by organization alone, by the injection
into the living tissue of international affairs of a single con-
, stitution, to be there left to work unsupported by new and
, continued effort. The organization of the League of Na—
] tions as outlined in the Covenant, if left by itself, and not
I made to function according to the real and necessary in-
, terests of the nations composing it, will not achieve safety
" of democracy. There is only one way by which we can
1 bring these two great safeguards, inspired leadership and
‘ institutional organization, to work through the ages for
3 the purposes which I suppose are most dear to all Amer-
icans—and that is by the education of democracy. It is a
slow and long process; but it is a process that gains in
swiftness with each accretion to the forces engaged upon it.
At first, however—and we are at the beginning—it is a slow,
I long, discouraging thing. For. the first thing that we must
do in political education is to get rid of our prejudices;
and if we get rid of our prejudices, we haven't much left!
It is the most radical step we can take. Most people’s
' reasoning, you know——including my own, I suppose—is
i hardly more than an excuse for our prejudices. If you
i actually take up a problem on which a person says he has
i made up his mind, it generally means adjusting new facts
to existing prejudices. A long weight of habit lies behind
‘ this process which we call reasoning, pressure of previous
i convictions on all sorts of other things, all involved in a
l vast maze which we call our intelligence. Much of it is
, subconscious, eluding analysis, and political ideas are mainly
i of this kind. The weight of habit, of custom, of prejudice,
has been in a large degree imbedded in the political parties
» of our country. Just as I am willing to admit that I have
these prejudices in my own make-up, I think that the
Democratic as well as the Republican party, might admit
as well that it is largely made up out of the persistence
[71

 from past generations of habitual ways of seeing things.
Political parties largely embody the habitual prejudices
that come from other incidents and are now no longer ap—
plicable in the world of today. If we are going to make
the world safe for democracy, we have to make democracy
itself a reasonable expression of thinking people who can
bring to the problems, as they come before us one after
the other, an unprejudiced, or relatively unprejudiced solu-
tion, which would be applicable for the given situation 9
at the time. t
Now in this country this process of political education, ‘
while still inadequate, has begun. In its more recent phase
of conscious effort, it dates back to the last decade of the ,
nineteenth century, when in the field of civic and municipal
affairs, and more especially in the world of big business, a
group of brilliant youngjournalists stirred the conscience
of America with what was called the muck-raking articles
in New York journals. I recall very clearly the strength
of their appeal—coinciding in point of view with political
movements of popular protest in the Middle West. When
this attack on our complacent home life was made, the rich
man was the symbol of success in our literature; even in
our Sunday schools and sermons. Wealth itself was 21 nor—
mal goal for the ambition of the young American. In two i
or three years’ time this changed. The insurance scandals
had been aired to the full, and a new assertion of the social
conscience—if one may use such a term—caused wealth
henceforth to be justified by wealthy people as a social
trust, something for which they owed the community an
accounting. 5‘
That great moral movement of the ’90’s, which is still
going on. has passed from the sensational or journalistic f
sphere into the teaching of civics in the schools. Civics in
our schools is a very recent thing. It concentrated at first i
on this immediate issue of civic reform in the town, county
and State—with minor attention to the Federal Government.
And it was still absorbed in teaching the responsibility of
citizenship in home affairs when in 1914 across this most
helpful movement of democracy came the great tragedy of
[8]

 the European war. It was largely because this threatened
to imperil the progress made, that many of those who had
been foremost in the movement for civic advancement and
political education at home were keenly against America’s
going into the World War. They felt instinctively and felt
rightly, so far as this issue was concerned, that it was going
to inject, to say the least, a new and terribly complex prob—
lem, bring distant and strange things into the familiar hor—Vl
y izon of our political thinking; that it would retard, if not
I destroy, the political education already begun, which had in
‘ it the germs of the regeneration of this country. But there
was no way to stop this new disturbing issue. The World
, War revealed that henceforth it was impossible for any
great country to stay out of a world complication of that
kind; that even neutrals were so only in name, and that a
nation so powerful as ours could not escape an international
responsibility.

While it is too soon for the historian to trace authorita-
tively the complications of the World War, it is at least
clear already that its contagion, the spread of the last
World War from that little Balkan country where it began,
was no chance event at all, but that was simply the revela-

‘ tion of the intricate interdependence of modern civilization,
and that it would have been impossible for any great nation,
to have stayed out of that conflict without very seriously
endangering its own welfare. The war revealed that in a
world of credit, of interlacing relationships, the countries of
today are something more than the countries depicted on

.1 the maps in the atlases studied in our schools, with their

5 clearly drawn political frontiers filled in with solid masses

of color. I remember down in the Balkans asking the Fi-

‘ nance Minister of a certain State where his financial capital

t was, and he said, ”Of course, it is London.” Another one
said “Paris,” and so on. This being so, it was clear that their
frontiers along the Danube were not the only frontiers of
the country, for they extend as far across as the lines of
credit reach. There is something of each country in the
financial and commercial interests of others. ‘

[9]

 The geography of the modern world has never been de—

scribed correctly; there are no atlasses to depict it, because

the fo‘rces that represent that surplus of a nation's vitality

which is the problem of politics, are forever moving back

and forth. To give you an instance of what I have in mind:

WheneVer a British ship—like the Majestic—sails into an

American harbor under the British flag, there is about as

much British Empire under that flag as in all the barren

wastes of Baflin Land. Now, it was this interaction of na-

tional interests in the modern world which was revealed for *
us by the World War. If these illustrations are signifi—

cant, they show that policies of isolation are no longer i
sound. If the last war revealed with tragic consequences ,y
the need for intelligently safeguarding our international as '
well as our national interests, we should find out in “the

next war” to what a greater extent we are now involved in

other people's affairs. The facts cannot be ignored; the

precaution should therefore be taken. ‘

But you say, “The next war will not happen,” or if

It does we can leave the belligerents to their fate. Let us

see what happened last October and November and what

prevented a war from happening. I was down in Bulgaria

at the time of the Greek incident on the frontier, and I

Would like to sketch for you in a word “the war that

never happened.” Suppose that Bulgaria had marched

against the Greeks when they came in there with an army

across the hills of Macedonia, marching with full war forma-

tion, with their batteries of artillery and all the appurte—

nance for invasion, with the Bulgarians fleeing from them

from sixty villages and more—suppose the Bulgarians had -
replied, as'they would have done in the past, and had under- i
taken to drive the Greeks back. Then when the Greek re—

s‘erves were called in from Saloniki, suppose that the Serbs ll?
found in the disorders of the war a pretext to take Saloniki, 5
which is their one possible seaport on the Aegean, and

which the Greeks suspect them of covetiug even now. The

Serb maneuvers in the mountains near that frontier, were

said by the Greeks to be of the nature of a threat of mobili-
zation. Suppose the Serbs did what the Greeks said they

[10]

 were going to do, and marched down on Saloniki. That
would likely involve the withdrawal of all reserves from

their northern frontiers, and there is a government in Hun-

gary—this is all supposition, remember—which could hardly
refrain from pouncing at once upon those rich corn lands—

rich like the fields in Indiana—that stretch from the Danube

over to the Carpathians, long ruled by Hungary, held now

by Serbia. Then, the moment Hungary dashed in there the

_ Little Entente awakens to the fact that Jugoslavia is at-
‘ tacked by Hungary on the north, and all Slovakia is
’ aflame. On the east Roumania has to come in to fulfill its
‘ treaty obligations and protect its frontiers. And the mo—
( ment Roumania, comes in, Soviets cross that broken bridge
that separates them from their lost land of Bessarabia,

which they have never given up. Then the war spreads

north. There is a treaty between Roumania and Poland

against Soviet invasion of either one, and Poland has to

‘ attack Russia. The moment Poland attacks Russia, that
corridor between East and West Prussia can't separate the

Germans any longer; and the moment the Germans are in

the corridor, what happens? France is over the Rhine to

protect Poland. With France and Germany at war, the

world is once more aflame.

Now, that impossible story took place in 1914, and

against its repetition stands what? The League of Nations.

Recently this League of Nations has come into our

lives in less imaginary ways. Just the other day, as a

result of the Treaty of Locarno, the League put up to us the

question how far we were prepared to go in the often re-

' peated proposal of this people to call and put through a real
i disarmament conference. I put a good deal of emphasis on
ii the word “real.” Fortunately this inquiry came out of a
l setting labelled with a new name. It could be regarded as
growing out of Locarno instead of out of the League; and

around Locarno there was none of the old prejudice to

which I made reference before. So the President of the

United States called for the co—operation of the country in

going to the preliminary study conference and although

the word “League” was somewhere in the invitation, the

[11]

 House of Representatives voted him the $50,000, 359 to one,
and the Senate took only two minutes to pass the vote
unanimously. This action indicates two things. It is the
indication, I think, of a turn of the tide in this country,
with reference to our policy of, self—effacement in interna—
tional affairs; and also—and this is much more serious—it
symbolizes an idea in America that the real way to get
peace is to disarm.

Now, it is this last point that I want to concentrate
upon. It is held by most people in this country that if you
get rid of armaments you are taking a thoroughgoing step
which will insure peace; and that the way to insure peace
is, therefore, to take that thoroughgoing step. And there i
is an impatience with any nation that doesn’t share this
conviction. There is a tendency to criticize France or
Germany or England or Japan because they have some
sense of the realities behind armaments.

Now, what is this Disarmament Conference? What is
its setting in the peace movement? Is it the beginning or
the end of a process by which we shall have peaceful settle-
ments of international disputes? That question is the ques-
tion which the League of Nations has put to the world in
the questionnaire. They sent around a questionnaire to the
different governments and asked them, “What are arma—
ments? What are their uses? Are there peace armaments
and war armaments? When you propose disarmament, how
much do you propose? Are you thinking of armaments
used in war, or are you thinking of existing armaments in
time of peace P” And these questions puzzled most people.
I saw an account from a British paper in London, that
the British were not only puzzled about it, but were rather
enjoying a story that had come out about the way the
questionnaire was prepared. It was said that a British .
officer on the committee got bored with its philosophic dis-
cussions and jotted these questions down as a joke, and
the French took them up seriously and put them out before
the world! And that story was cabled over to the New
York Times. As a matter of fact, the reason that question—
naire covers these enormously far—reaching fields, is that

[12]

 we have never yet considered the problem of disarmament
in its real setting. We have thought that it was simply a
case of cutting out this or that battleship, of lessening the
length of guns, or their elevation, of limiting the size of an
army, and nothing more. But if you were living in France
today, and you knew that across the Rhine—or, I will put
it this way: Suppose you were in Philadelphia and you
knew across the Delaware River there had grown up at
Passaic Falls—where Hamilton wanted to have a great
national factory—a factory turning out fertilizer from the
nitrogen of the air at the rate of a thousand tons or more
a day, and that the eighty engineers and sixty chemists and

- twenty thousand workmen of that factory could readjust
those retorts and the rest of the fairly simple apparatus,
so that in a week’s time or so it would be one thousand
tons a day of high explosive to fall on the city of Philadel-
phia. Then you would wonder whether getting rid of 20%
of your national guard had anything very serious to do with
the question of disarmament. The French are putting up to
us the realities not only of disarmament, but of the whole
war machinery; and this fact has not yet reached the con—
sciousness of this country.

I will say in short that the one way to disarmament,
as contrasted with the way to limit or reduce existing arma-
ments—the one way to disarm the world is to build up the
parallel for the war system which exists in the instruments
of justice between nations; such instruments of conciliation
and mediation, as already stand before the world in Court
and League. There is no other way to bring disarmament
than to have a substitute for armaments. It must be a way
by which a co-operative world will proceed to recognize
the rights and justice of other countries and not to enforce
upon them, by the fascist act of army and navy, our ideas

, of our justice and out right. We have to turn from that
world—old process to a new interacting co-operative concern,
community of nations, which is now coming into existence.

I happen to have spent a fair number of years in the
study of history, and just at this point I want to make clear
that I have not forgotten the lessons of its narrative of

[13]

 the experience of the past; for no historian can expect to
see a new millenial era arise overnight, transforming nations
in their most fundamental aspects. But all the same, I am
convinced that we are turning a corner from the past; and
that the process of co-operation for peace has begun to
supplant the world—old rule of force. This new process
now affects the public law of Europe through the Treaty
of Locarno, and the Covenant of the League of Nations.
But it has only just begun, and it is a process that
cuts at a historical past so deeply rooted that it may take
more generations to see its ultimate fruition than any of
us would like to anticipate. That the movement is long and
may be slow does not make it any the less real; and once i
we are fully conscious of it, it should receive no less sup-
port, no less ardent service upon the part of those to whom
these matters of justice and of peace are real than if it
were immediately realizable. We must learn to keep our
faith in things that don’t materialize all at once. We
mustn’t be discouraged because for a few years now, or it
may be even longer, this country slowly learns its adjust—
ment to this new world. It took the French Revolution
one hundred years or more to make France democratic,
but the forces released in 1789 slowly working through a
population inherently much more conservative than ours,
beat back from barricades a dozen times, came on with the
gathering strength of an irresistible tide. They haven’t
yet—no one in the world has yet—full liberty, equality and
fraternity, but they have at last enshrined the ideals in the
formal government of the Third Republic, and they are safe
there in spite of the imputation of outsiders that France
would surrender this thing to Fascist leadership. It took
almost a hundred years for France to assure itself the great
principles of the Revolution; one may reckon it from 1789
to 1879, when republicans finally and definitely won the re-
public. It may take us perhaps a hundred years and more
to realize the dream I have in mind, but during this
period that dream must be realized step by step, by the par—
ticipation of this government in every responsibility that
comes its way, tending toward the realization of what I
[14]

 think were the policies implanted in the sanctuary of liberty
at the beginning of the country’s life.

We have before us definitely now a question whether
this country will go one little step in the path for the substi—
tute for war; whether we will enter the World Court, even
with reservations that almost render it ineffective, in my
judgment. There is little hope for our effective work in
the future unless this first step is taken now. But entry
into the World Court is only one of a number of problems
before us. Apart from that, we must decide exactly what
we will do in this Disarmament Conference. We can take
to that Conference two things: the mechanism of the .

' Washington Conference for limitation and reduction of
armaments; and an American policy enabling the world to
go ahead with the implied promise that we will not wreck
their independent plans by inadvertence.

This needs explanation; butlet us turn back to the Wash—
ington method. It was good enough as far as it went in
lessening this or that existing armament by a direct agree-
ment of ratios between different countries. We can employ
that device again, and keep it at work by attaching to it a
continuing organization to ensure that in the future mutual
recriminations between the signatories will not be fought
out in the yellow press, but that they will be the subject of
technical discussion between the signatories themselves.
We can have, on the one hand, a technical and definite
arithmetical process like the Washington Conference espe—
cially in the reduction of naval armaments; but that will
not by any means fulfill our obligations and responsibilities.
For, if we really propose to get rid of armaments as a
menace to peace, we are interested in the land armaments
of Europe no matter what protestations we may make.
Now, if the European powers proceed with the reduction
of their armaments on their own basis, getting rid of their
arsenals and reserves of supply, their Armstrongs, their
Vickers, Creusots and the like—if they destroy these great
arsenals for the production of armaments there, and still
have access to Bethlehem Steel and to Detroit and to Pitts—
burgh and to Waterbury, Bridgeport and all the rest for

[15]

 private arms, manufactured and shipped through private
traders protected by our neutrality even during wartime,
then the whole dismantling of arsenals in Europe is a de—
lusion and a snare. We must, therefore, face this situation.
Do we want them to go on with a fraudulent pretense,
fooling their people, while their arms experts from their
general staffs make the necessary arrangements by which
we become the European arsenal? There is a good deal
to be said in favor of this, you know, from the standpoint
of the arms traffic. It means very considerable addition to
our manufacturing plant; but what does it mean afterwards?
What tragedy are we heaping up in store for mankind and
what responsibility as a great nation treasuring ideals for l
which the blood of our citizens has been shed? That is a
challenge to this country. How can we meet it?

We can meet it partly by reconsidering our neutrality.
We don’t need to participate in the law—enforcing, policing
work of the League of Nations in Europe; but we can at
least avoid becoming the accomplice of an aggressor. In
case there is a war between two powers, both of which
have signed an agreement like that of Locarno, the Presi—
dent, acting upon joint resolution of both houses of Con-
gress, can make proclamation that we shall not become the
accomplice of an aggressor, self-confessed through the vio—
lation of its own signature, in the refusal to submit its case
to peaceful settlement as it had agreed.

We can do that without much difficulty, because we
have a precedent with reference to the arms traffic for
China, in a case where there was internal disturbance, within
the country itself. In the plan I propose, we reserve our
sovereign rights by making our own President, through
proclamation, the organ to establish the fact whether the
circumstance has arisen in which an aggressor stands self-
confessed by its violation of its own treaty. We reserve
all our sovereign rights, but we cease to be the potential
accomplice of the aggressor—a potential accomplice so
great, so powerful with our resources, that our influence
reaches back to the beginning of the planning for peace or
war, and neutralizes and, as maintained at present, renders

[16]

 almost nugatory every effort of peacebuilding in Europe
itself.

We tried to make the world safe for democracy by the
way of war, by the sacrifice of our youth on the field of
arms, and although the splendor of that sacrifice called out
the vibrant spirit of America—you and I have experienced
it in these tragic war years—it failed of its larger purposes.
Why? Because, while there was Faith and Hope behind it,
one cannot save democracy unless one adds to these the
third element in the great Christian trinity of Faith, Hope
and Charity. Not charity in the sense of liberal giving,