Mr. Roosevelt is not tied by official responsibility, and can speak with less restraint and more freedom.  In The Outlook he has substantially accepted and indorsed all that is material in the Belgian case.

America should help in securing a peace which will not mean the “crushing the liberty and life of just and inoffending peoples or consecrate the rule of militarism,” but which “will, by international agreement, minimize the chances of the recurrence of such worldwide disaster,” and “will, in the interests of civilization, create conditions which will make such action” as the violation of Belgian treaty rights “impossible in the future.”

Like President Wilson, he seems to think that the time for judicial pronouncement on acts presumably guilty and wrongful will come at the conclusion of the war.  At the same time he surrenders no part of America’s responsibility, but reaffirms it with all the force of his trenchant style.

But elsewhere, and later, he has insisted on the “helplessness”—­the “humiliating impotence created by the fact that our neutrality can only be preserved by failure to help to right what is wrong.”

Mr. Roosevelt’s Remedy.

And he has gone on to adumbrate his practical remedy—­“a world league” with “an amplified Hague Court,” made strong by joint agreement of the powers, to secure “peace and righteousness,” and to vindicate the just decisions of such a court by “a union of forces to enforce the decree.”  He adds that this might help to obtain a “limitation of armaments that would be real and effective.”

That so happy a plan may be capable of realization would be the hope of all wise men.

But where I take exception with Col.  Roosevelt is as to America’s present “impotence”—­that nothing effectual can be done by America without breaking her own neutrality.

That view I wholly traverse.  It might conceivably be felt by America, under certain grave eventualities, that neutrality must be broken.

But it is clear that the articles of The Hague Convention of 1907 amply provide for the type of action here and now by the United States which I have ventured to lay before American statesmen in this paper.  And, in my opinion, it is conceivable that more good might be achieved by America taking that action, while maintaining her neutrality.

It goes without saying, it really needs no demonstration, that nearly every international agreement embodied in The Hague Convention has been broken, wholly or in part, in the letter and in the spirit, in the proceedings of this unhappy year.

The violation of the territory of a neutral State by the transit of belligerent troops and other acts of war is forbidden, (Articles 1, 2, 3, 4, &c.) It is the duty of the neutral State not to tolerate, (Article 5,) but to resist such acts, and her forcible resistance is not to be regarded as an act of war, (Article 10.)

Interference with Neutrals.