Speaking to the National Guardsmen at the National Rifle Matches at Camp Perry, Ohio, on August 12, he said: 

“I recognize that in a sense you are assembled here for the purpose of increasing the efficiency of our military strength, and yet I am convinced that the great mass of our soldiers are united in purpose and prayer, to prevent wars in the future, if it can be honorably done.  They know the meaning of modern warfare.  There was very little romance in the long hours and the slaughter of the front trench.  The thought that must have run through the mind of every solder in the midst of it all, was how such a thing was possible in modern civilization.

“The cost to the United States was more than one million dollars an hour for over two years.  The total expense of twenty-two billion dollars was almost equal to the total disbursements of the United States government from 1791 to 1918.  It was sufficient to have run the Revolutionary War for more than one thousand years at the rate of expenditure which that war involved.  The army expenditures alone, so experts claim, are a near approach to the volume of gold produced in the United Sates from the discovery of America up to the outbreak of the European War, and yet the United States spent only about one-eighth of the entire cost of the war, and less than one-fifth of the expenditure of the allied side.

“If civilization has not had its lesson, then there is no hope for it.  It could not stand such a war again and survive.  The genius of man, if that is a happy term in discussing the horrors of conflict, has always made the latest war the most frightful.  When we consider the development in the methods of human destruction between 1914 and 1918 and apply the problem of simple proportion, we are staggered even to think of the possibilities of the sons of men being again brought into combat.

“There will always be a national guard in the States, if for no other reason than domestic defense, and the military arm of the federal government will be maintained, but the hope that vast expenditures for armaments are a thing of the past, possesses every home in America, while the common impulse that moves the great mass of people world-wide is inspired by the vision of peace and the settlement of controversy by the arbitrament of reason rather than of force.”

At the very beginning of his canvass for the Presidency Governor Cox has gone upon the theory that the League of Nations needed simple explanation to the people of the Country.  In his own phrase, he has talked the ABC’s of the League, finding that the technical discussions had failed to hold the interest of the people.  Illustrating this policy are two addresses made to state conventions early in August.  At Wheeling, to the West Virginia Democratic Convention, he said: 

“We resisted a world-wide menace, and we intend now to establish permanent protection against another menace.  We know how easily wars came in the past.  We want to make their coming difficult in the future.  We have a definite plan; the American people understand it, and after the 4th of March, 1921, it is our purpose to put it into practical operation, without continuing months of useless discussion.