“In short, America, refusing to enter the League of Nations (now already established by twenty-nine nations) and bearing and deserving the contempt of the world, would submit an entirely new project.  This act would either be regarded as arrant madness or attempted international bossism.

“The plain truth is, that the Republican leaders, obsessed with a determination to win the presidential election, have attempted to satisfy too many divergent views.  Inconsistencies, inevitable under the circumstances, rise to haunt them on every hand, and they find themselves arrayed, in public thought at least, against a great principle.  More than that, their conduct is opposed to the idealism upon which their party prospered in other days.”

“Illustrating these observations by concrete facts, let it be remembered that those now inveighing against an interest in affairs outside of America, criticised President Wilson in unmeasured terms for not resenting the invasion of Belgium in 1914.  They term the League of Nations a military alliance, which, except for their opposition, would envelop our country, when, as a matter of truth, the subject of a League of Nations has claimed the best thought of America for years, and the League to Enforce Peace was presided over by so distinguished a Republican as ex-President Taft, who, before audiences in every section, advocated the principle and the plan of the present League.  They charge experimentation, when we have as historical precedent the Monroe Doctrine, which is the very essence of Article X of the Versailles covenant.  Skeptics viewed Monroe’s mandate with alarm, predicting recurrent wars in defense of Central and South American states, whose guardians they alleged we need not be.  And yet not a shot has been fired in almost one hundred years in preserving sovereign rights on this hemisphere.  They hypocritically claim that the League of Nations will result in our boys being drawn into military service, but they fail to realize that every high-school youngster in the land knows that no treaty can override our Constitution, which reserves to Congress, and to Congress alone, the power to declare war.  They preach Americanism with a meaning of their own invention, and artfully appeal to a selfish and provincial spirit, forgetting that Lincoln fought a war over the purely moral question of slavery, and the McKinley broke the fetters of our boundary lines, spoke the freedom of Cuba, and carried the torch of American idealism to the benighted Philippines.  They lose memory of Garfield’s prophecy that America, under the blessings of God-given opportunity, would by her moral leadership and co-operation become the Messiah among the nations of the earth.