forces and can withdraw them whenever the lawful and commendable purpose of preserving the peace of the world shall cease to be the object of the military campaign.

Those who are promoting the League are not committed to any particular means by which the necessary military preparation shall be secured. Personally, I favor universal compulsory military training, for a year, of our youth between the ages of nineteen and twenty-four as the most effective and most democratic plan that can be adopted. It will fall equally upon the rich and poor. It will give a year of valuable disciplinary education to our youth who need it much. It will furnish a citizenship from which we can summon a trained army to defend our country. I repeat, however, this is not a part of the League plan.

The war with Germany which we now face, after every effort to escape it and when our national conscience is wholly void of offence toward her, is a sufficient answer to Mr. Bryan's view that love is all that is needed to make effective a world league to insure peace. If this war teaches us anything, it is that our civilization has not advanced beyond the time when the major force of the world is sometimes needed for defense against selfish greed and ambition on the part of nations. If we fail to prepare ourselves to defend our rights against lawless aggression by ruthless military and naval power, we are blind to the simplest lessons of current history. If we can avail ourselves of the same preparation to do our part in defending the peace of the world, should we not seize the opportunity?

X

We have now reached the end of the discussion. This tenth article offers an opportunity for a summary of the positions taken in the previous papers. The program of the League looks to a treaty binding all nations to adopt, in the settlement of controversies likely to lead to war between them, a peaceable procedure for the hearing and decision of issues capable of being settled on principles of law and of issues that may not be so settled. It does not attempt to enforce the decisions. The aim of the League is, by elucidation of the facts and arguments on both sides of the issue and by a decision of it by an impartial tribunal, to practice nations in the art of settling irritating questions by judicial investigation and conclusion. The example of our relations with Canada and the constant use of arbitration to settle our difficulties which has become a habit — offer a precedent from which we believe that, when such a procedure is enforced, it will train all nations to adopt it rather than to resort to war. . . The force of the world is to be used to compel nations to adopt this procedure before resorting to hostilities. . A pacifist who will admit a policeman to be a proper official in the community yields the whole case against the creation of an international police force in our League.

Mr. Bryan attempts to meet this argument by saying that the analogy is misleading and uses these words:

"The nations cannot, in fairness, be likened to criminals, although we often describe their public acts as criminal, especially in time of war. The criminal is one who intentionally violates a law duly enacted by those having authority to make laws. He disregards an obligation confessedly binding upon him; and the

policeman, acting for the outraged community, arrests the guilty party and brings him before the bar of justice. There is no international law-making power; and, if such a law-making power existed, there are certain questions upon which it would not assume to act - certain questions upon which each nation, whether large or small, is conceded the right to decide for itself without regard to the views or interests of other nations. Our arbitration treaties, the most advanced in the world, contain exceptions, questions of honor, questions of independence, vital interests and the interests of third parties. These questions are not to be submitted to arbitration; and yet these are the very questions out of which wars grow."

Of all men in the world, Mr. Bryan, by reason of his general views, is the one least entitled to put forth these reasons in order to escape the analogy of state police. No one has spoken more eloquently against war as a crime than Mr. Bryan. No one has upheld more fully international law as a binding force upon the nations. International law is the law of nations agreed to between the nations and deriving its sanction from their general acquiescence. A nation which violates international law is a criminal before the bar. The exceptions from our existing treaties of arbitration of questions of vital interest and national honor, to which Mr. Bryan refers, were exceptions which were not recognized in the unratified general arbitration treaties made with France and Great Britain which Mr. Bryan approved and to which he gave effective support. More than that, the Senate itself did not seek, in its proposed amendments, to except questions of honor and vital interest from arbitration. Mr. Bryan's distinction is a forced one and has no foundation, certainly as applied to the plan of the League to Enforce Peace. The treaty forming the League is an agreement by all nations to comply with its stipulations and

not only to comply with its stipulations, but, in case of noncompliance by any member, to contribute their quotas to an international police to restrain and punish that member for non-compliance. In other words, it furnishes an international constitution. It creates an international law and denounces as a crime violation of the legal obligations into which the nations voluntarily enter. The very object of the League is to organize the world politically; and that means to enact law and to provide for its enforcement. I submit that the analogy of the state police is not only a fair one but a clinching and convincing one in showing the fundamental fallacy and error of those who have the international pacifist views of Mr. Bryan and still are in favor of a state and city police.

That the League is practical may be inferred from the approval which its general principles have received from the leading statesmen of the Great Powers in answer to direct questions upon the subject, and also in official expression in the correspondence between President Wilson and the belligerent Powers engaged in the present war. It is practical because there is precedent for every detail in the League, and because it embodies the elemental principle of government as it should be in city, state, and nation and in the world to wit, the organization of the force of all to suppress lawless force of the few. The lines upon which the League has been framed are very general; the plan is only a working hypothesis. That it may be changed in international conference in detail goes without saying. But that it furnishes a broad and correct foundation for the political organization of the world, as Kant foresaw it, I submit, is clear.

The United States should enter the League; first, because

of all nations in the world, it wishes to avoid war and to make it as remote as possible; second, because its interests have now become so world-wide and it has become so close a neighbor of all the Great Powers of Europe and of Asia that a general war must involve the United States. It is therefore of the highest importance to the United States, viewed from the standpoint of self-interest, to secure the joint effort of the world to prevent such a war or to confine it to a local struggle. The present difficulty with Germany is a most striking demonstration of the danger in which the United States will be involved in every general war in the future, struggle as it may to escape being drawn in.

Nor does the League involve the delegation to an international council, in which the United States has but one vote, of the power to hurry this country into war. The President and the Senate sign the treaty of the League and bind the United States to its obligations. Congress is the authority which will decide whether the fact exists, calling for action by the United States, and then will take such action as the obligation requires. Should the purpose of the International Police under the League be perverted to anything other than enforcing the peaceable procedure in the settlement of international controversies, Congress will have full power to withdraw the United States forces and decline further to take part in the proceedings.

With the blessings which God has showered on this country, it should not hesitate to help the world and the family of nations to protect itself against the recurrence of such an awful disaster and retrograde movement in Christian civilization as the present war.