“In other words we have the opportunity of concluding this, the greatest movement for righteousness in all the history of the world, and then the loose ends of civilization will be put together.  The opportunity for exchange will have been restored.  America will proceed upon an era of prosperity and peace without precedent.

“I shall address no audience in America this year without puncturing the smoke screen of hypocrisy and insincerity which has been raised, in order that the reactionaries might creep in behind it and claim their main objective, the spoils of office.  That smoke screen now is the statement that the League of Nations increases the probabilities of war.  It would have been just as absurd to have said to the boys at the time our fathers won their freedom, that if you proclaim your independence you are going to have war, because you will have to fight to retain it.  Every school boy in Ohio understands there are three branches of Government, Judicial, Legislative and Executive, and when war has been brought to an end, the head of the Executive Department, the President of the United States, makes the treaty with the power with which we have been at war, and then we find that limitation of power.  The President can go no further.  He submits it to the Senate for ratification.  The President of the United States has very definite power, and there are also very specific powers reserved to the Congress of the United States.  The Congress can do nothing contrary to the Constitution; the President can do nothing contrary to the Constitution.  The Constitution provides that war can be declared by Congress, and Congress only.  In order to give point and truth to what the reactionary leaders are now contending for, it would be necessary to change the Constitution of the United States.  This would require a two-thirds’ vote of the House and Senate, and then a three-fourths’ vote of the states of the Union.  Our machinery was so adjusted that no matter who might be the Executive Officer of this Republic, he did not possess the power to declare war.  The power was placed as near to the people as it was possible to place it.  It was placed with their Representatives in Congress.

“Now—­the Republican leaders in contending that four or five potentates, four or five distinguished statesmen over seas, sitting in the council of the League of Nations, can order our soldiers anywhere, are speaking a deliberate and a willful untruth.  Presidential proprieties require that I do not characterize it in stronger language.  You know it is very hard to please the opposition, although we are under great debt to them for having made the gauge of battle in this campaign.  The proposition to disgrace America by making a separate peace with Germany was simply opening their front lines.  I have already entered that opening with the hosts of Democracy around me.