shall be put under some other power more to be trusted in securing the welfare of backward peoples. Thus we are to set up a new government in East and West Africa, in Australasia, in China, and in some of the islands of the Pacific. Then we are to deal with Russia. If we separate from her the Ukraine, and the Baltic Provinces and Finland, there are three or four new nations to establish. Great Russia is now under the domination of bloody anarchists, and we must free her and give to her good people the opportunity to organize and establish a free and useful government. This is a problem of the utmost complexity. In Austria we are to create a nation of the Czecho-Slavs, embracing Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia. We are to cut this nation out of the Dual Empire, and take it from Austria and from Hungary. We are to do the same thing with the Jugo-Slavs on the south of Austria and Hungary and establish new boundaries there. We are to settle the boundaries of the Balkans. We are likely to give to Rumania the Rumanians of Hungary and of Bessarabia. We are to establish a new state of Poland out of Russian, Austrian and German Poland, and we are to give this state access to the sea. The fixing of these boundaries and the determination of the method of reaching the sea present issues of the utmost delicacy and difficulty. We are to determine the status of Constantinople and the small tract now known as Turkey in Europe. We are to fix the limits of Turkey in Asia, to set up a new government in Palestine, to recognize a new government of Arabia, to father, it may be, the creation of a new state in the Caucasus and to establish the freedom of Armenia.

The mere recital of them is most convincing of the intricacy of these problems. The Congress of Nations will

probably find it impossible definitely to settle them all. It will have to create Commissions, with judicial and conciliatory powers, able to devote time enough to make proper investigation and thus to reach just, defensible and practical conclusions. When the boundaries are all fixed, when the innumerable rights growing out of access to the Baltic, access to the Danube, access to the Black Sea and access to the Aegean, together wtih rights of way across neighboring states for freedom of trade, are defined, with as much clarity as possible, there still will arise, in the practical operation of the treaty, a multitude of irritating questions of interpretation. In fixing boundaries on distinctions of race and language, the Congress will encounter the obstruction of racial prejudice and blindness to reasonable conclusions. Lines of race and of language are not always so clearly drawn that convenient and compact states may be established within them. To attempt in a great world-agreement to settle the boundaries and mutual rights of so many new nations, without providing a tribunal whose decisions are to control and are to be enforced by the major force of the world, will be to make a treaty that will become a laughing stock.

We know that we have got to rearrange the map of Europe, and, in so far as it is practicable in that arrangement, to follow popular choice of the peoples to be governed. But such a flowing phrase will not settle the difficulty. It is merely a general principle that in its actual application often does not offer a completely satisfactory solution; and after the Congress shall have made the decisions, sore places will be left, local enmities will arise, and if that permanent peace which is to justify the war is to be attained, the world compact must itself contain the machinery for settlement of such

inevitable disputes. In other words, we do not have to argue in favor of a League to Enforce Peace the nations which enter this Congress can not do otherwise than establish it. It faces them as the only possible way to achieve their object.

Germany and Austria and Bulgaria and Turkey are to indemnify the countries which they have outraged and devastated. Commissions must be created, judicial in their nature, to pass upon what the amount of the indemnity shall be, and then an international force must exist to levy execution if necessary for the judgment upon the countries whose criminal torts are to be indemnified. We must, therefore, not only have, as a result of the Congress, the machinery of justice and conciliation, but we must retain a combined military force of the Allies and victors to see to it that these just judgments are carried out. Moreover, the Congress can not meet without enlarging the scope of international law and making more definite its provisions. The very functions which the Congress is to exercise in fixing the terms of peace will necessitate a statement of the principles upon which it has been guided. That will lead to a broadening of the scope of existing principles of international law and a greater variety in their applications. Therefore, whether those who are in the Congress wish it or not, they can not solve the problems which are set before them without adopting the principles of our League to Enforce Peace as embodied in the four planks of our original platform — Court, Commission of Conciliation, enforcement of submission and a Legislative International Congress to make International Law. They will have to create such machinery for the administration and enforcement of the treaty as to the Central Powers, the new nations created and Russia.

Having gone so far as they must, can they fail to extend their work only a little to include the settlement of all future differences between all the nations that are parties to the League? A League for such future purposes will be no more difficult to make and maintain than the temporary League into which they are driven by the necessities of the situation.

Now I want to take up some of the arguments made against the League. In the first place, a good many have created a straw League which they have knocked down without difficulty. They have attributed to us the views and principles held by extremists who perhaps support our League, but whose extreme views we do not and need not adopt. Thus it is said that we favor internationalism, that we are opposed to nationalism, that we wish to dilute the patriotic spirit into a vague universal brotherhood. That there are socialists and others who entertain this view, and who perhaps support the League to Enforce Peace, may be true; but the assumption that such views are necessary to a consistent support of the League is entirely without warrant. I believe in nationalism and patriotism, as distinguished from universal brotherhood as firmly as any one I believe that the national spirit and the patriotic love of country are as essential in the progress of the world as the family and the love of family are essential in domestic communities. But as the family and the love of family are not inconsistent with the love of country, but only strengthen it, so a proper, pure and patriotic nationalism stimulates a sense of international justice and does not detract in any way from the spirit of universal brotherhood.

can.

Again, it is said that in the League we injure nationalism by abridging the sovereignty of our country in that we are

to yield to an international council and an international tribunal, in which we have only one representative, the decisions of questions of justice and of national policy.

1

1 Mr. Taft has expressed himself elsewhere on this topic as follows:

Certainly we do not wish to contend for a sovereignty that shall not be limited by international law. That law should prevail in a decent community of nations- I mean the law of good form, the law of universal brotherhood, the law of neighborly feeling, which is over and above the absolute rules of international law. All that this League proposes is that every nation shall enjoy complete sovereignty within the limitations of that international law and that good form among nations.

"What is this League of Nations to do to uphold that sovereignty? It agrees to give sanction to law that regulates sovereignty. That sovereignty, regulated by law, is to be clinched through the organized action of all the nations of the world.

"Any other view, any objection to that view, savors of what? It savors of the desire to use the sovereignty of our nation to achieve purposes that will be defeated by the restraints which the League offers. That is what it means. It is the German idea of sovereigntythe power to use that sovereignty to achieve your purpose even when that purpose transgresses international law or moral law."- The Atlantic Congress for a League of Nations, New York, Feb. 5, 1919. "To recur again to the objections which run as a thread through all of Senator Poindexter's attacks upon the constitution of the League, namely, that the League minimizes the sovereignty of the United States and of every nation which joins it, there is a misconception in the mind of the Senator as to sovereignty that needs to be pointed out. No reasonable and patriotic and properly self-respecting citizen of the United States can claim that our sovereignty should be more than a right to freedom of action within the limitations of international law, international morality, and a due regard for the rights of other nations. The only sovereignty which we ought to claim is sovereignty regulated by these limitations. It is exactly analogous to the liberty that we enjoy as individuals, which is liberty curtailed and regulated by law in order that other citizens may enjoy the same liberty. It is an exercise of rights on my part consistent with the exercise of the same rights on the part of every other man. It is not complete liberty of action. Proper national sovereignty is similarly restricted. Now the League does not proceed to restrict that sovereignty further than, through the