“These are fateful times.  Organized government has a definite duty all over the world.  The house of civilization is to be put in order.  The supreme issue of the century is before us and the nation that halts and delays is playing with fire.  The finest impulses of humanity, rising above national lines, merely seek to make another horrible war impossible.  Under the old order of international anarchy war came overnight, and the world was on fire before we knew it.  It sickens our senses to think of another.  We saw one conflict into which modern science brought new forms of destruction in great guns, submarines, airships, and poison gases.  It is no secret that our chemists had perfected, when the contest came to a precipitate close, gases so deadly that whole cities could be wiped out, armies destroyed, and the crews of battleships smothered.  The public prints are filled with the opinions of military men that in future wars the method, more effective than gases or bombs, will be the employment of the germs of disease, carrying pestilence and destruction.  Any nation prepared under these conditions, as Germany was equipped in 1914, could conquer the world in a year.

“It is planned now to make this impossible.  A definite plan has been agreed upon.  The League of Nations is in operation.  A very important work, under its control, just completed, was participated in by the Hon. Elihu Root, Secretary of State under the Roosevelt administration.  At a meeting of the Council of the League of Nations, February 11, and organizing committee of twelve of the most eminent jurists in the world was selected.  The duty of this group was to devise a plan for the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice, as a branch of the League.  This assignment has been concluded by unanimous action.  This augurs well for world progress.  The question is whether we shall or shall not join in this practical and humane movement.  President Wilson, as our representative at the peace table, entered the League in our name, in so far as the executive authority permitted.  Senator Harding, as the Republican candidate for the presidency, proposes in plain words that we remain out of it.  As the Democratic candidate, I favor going in.  Let us analyze Senator Harding’s plan of making a German-American peace, and then calling for a ’new relationship among nations,’ assuming for the purpose of argument only, that the perfidious hand that dealt with Germany would possess the power or influence to draw twenty-nine nations away from a plan already at work, and induce them to retrace every step and make a new beginning.  This would entail our appointing another commission to assemble with those selected by the other powers.  With the Versailles instrument discarded, the whole subject of partitions and divisions of territory on new lines would be reopened.  The difficulties in this regard, as any fair mind appreciates, would be greater than they were at the peace session, and