America at the Crossroads
JULY, 1929
BY FRANCIS BOWES SAYRE
I
SELDOM in her history has America seemed to enjoy such serene security as now. Prosperous beyond her dreams, conscious of a power to shape world destinies such as perhaps no nation has enjoyed before, she seems to sail the very crest of the waves. Yet seldom in her history have the undercurrents of danger been running as strongly as at present. The sharp reversal of American foreign policy which followed her rejection of the Versailles Treaty is hurrying America to a crisis of serious import. The problem looming immediately ahead demands vision based upon a clear understanding of what America has stood for in the past.
American foreign policy has had its ups and its downs. It has not always been consistent. Yet running through it, like a substratum of underlying rock, there have been certain large unifying principles, which keep constantly outcropping and reappearing as if to prove the solid substance of which the whole is made.
It was Washington who first set the course of American foreign policy and outlined the direction it should take. The Revolution had left unsettled certain highly inflammable issues. The northeastern boundary between Canada and Massachusetts (or what to-day is Maine) remained in dispute; English creditors were being prevented by legal impediments adopted by various states from collecting the debts owed them by American citizens; American merchants were insisting without avail upon compensation for the damage done them by irregular or illegal captures made by British forces upon the high seas. Matters went from bad to worse; and American patriots, whose blood ran hot at the very mention of the name of England, with growing insistence demanded that Washington should take a decided stand, and if sabre rattling failed to gain the day should draw the sabre in defense of American rights. But the President, under bitter and virulent attack, calmly set his course otherwise. Instead of making blustering demands, he sent to London Mr. John Jay, Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, charged with the high duty of finding an amicable way out of the growing difficulties. In the treaty of 1794 which he negotiated, the problems of the northeastern boundary, of the American debts uncollectible through state impediments, of the war claims for illegal captures, were met by the creation of arbitral commissions — one to meet at Halifax with power to make a final decision fixing the boundary, one to meet at Philadelphia authorized to reach a final and conclusive determination as to the American debts, and a third to meet in London with power to reach a conclusive settlement of the war claims. Thus at the very outset, under Washington’s wise leadership, America made arbitration a cardinal element of her foreign policy; and although the work of the arbitration commissions set up under the Jay Treaty may have fallen short of the high hopes of the negotiators, the Treaty nevertheless helped to reintroduce into modern statecraft the practical use of international arbitration.
Copyright 1929, by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
Under Washington’s strong guidance America, youthful as she was, set for herself a course which spelled leadership in international affairs. Europe was torn in the grim struggle between England and France. Hot-heads sought to force the President into war on the side of France; he was accused of being secretly pro-English, and his enemies did not stop even at denouncing him as traitorous and demanding his impeachment. Brave and firm as always, he turned a deaf ear to popular clamor and more popular abuse; he refused to be forced into the war, and chose instead to follow the difficult path of neutrality. He demanded the recall of the French Minister, M. Genet, who was causing French privateers to be fitted out in American ports to prey upon British commerce; and he secured the passage in 1794 of the first comprehensive law defining the obligations of neutral citizens and prohibiting acts in defiance of United States neutrality. Upon that law and the subsequent American Act of 1818 amplifying its terms is directly based the modern international law of neutrality. Indeed, as a well-known British authority has remarked, ‘the proceedings of the United States from 1793 to 1818 mark an era in the development of the rights and obligations of neutral Powers.’ In the development of this important field of international law it was America that led the way.
Washington’s Farewell Address is generally quoted for its warning against entangling alliances. In an even more important, though less familiar, part of the Message, Washington laid down the fundamentals for American foreign policy: ‘Observe good faith and justice towards all Nations. Cultivate peace and harmony with all. Religion and Morality enjoin this conduct; and can it be that good policy does not equally enjoin it? It will be worthy of a free, enlightened, and, at no distant period, a great nation, to give to mankind the magnanimous and too novel example of a People always guided by an exalted justice and benevolence.’
After Washington’s day, in spite of lapses now and again, the effort to supplant war by judicial settlement still remained a cardinal principle of American foreign policy. The United States during the nineteenth century was a formal party to no less than sixty arbitrations. When, immediately after the Civil War, feeling was tense between the United States and England and a heated dispute arose over the Alabama claims, the submission of the controversy, involving over fifteen million dollars, to arbitration and its successful settlement in Geneva in 1872 attracted world-wide attention and lent fresh impetus to the growing movement. In 1893 America was arbitrating the Bering Sea dispute; in 1903 the Alaskan Boundary dispute; in 1909 the important and complicated North Atlantic Fisheries dispute.
At the First Hague Conference in 1899, convened primarily to secure limitation of armaments and to regulate the conduct of war, it was the United States delegation that went, as the other delegations did not, armed with a full and carefully adjusted plan for the creation of an international tribunal, and instructed to ‘use their influence in the Conference in the most effective manner possible to procure the adoption of its substance or of resolutions directed to the same purpose.’ Owing to the forceful efforts of the American and British representatives, in spite of grave obstacles the Conference succeeded in creating the so-called Hague Permanent Court of Arbitration — a tribunal which has settled some nineteen international disputes. The shortcomings of the Hague Court of Arbitration are obvious. It is not permanent, and it is not a court. Under the Hague Convention each of the signatory states names four judges; and from the resulting panel of some hundred and fifty names is to be chosen a special tribunal of five judges for each particular dispute. There is nothing in the Convention to compel agreement or to prevent recourse to war. Success depends upon the parties finding themselves in the very heat of the controversy able to agree upon the judges to be chosen and upon the terms under which the dispute is to be referred for settlement. As different men are usually chosen for each dispute, it is obvious that there can be neither continuity in the decisions handed down nor the gradual creation among the judges themselves of legal tradition and habits of thought. As experience has shown, the arrangement has resulted in conciliation and compromise rather than in the strict application of law. Nevertheless, in spite of its evident shortcomings, the imperfect arbitral tribunal thus created and the experience gained under it paved the way for the creation in 1920 of a world court in the true sense of the word. For the cause of arbitration the creation of the 1899 Hague Court was a step of incalculable value; and in this movement it was the United States that was at the forefront leading and stimulating world opinion in the direction of the course first set by Washington.
II
In 1900 once more the United States was playing a leading role in shaping the moral opinion of the world. China, undefended, lay at the mercy of the military Powers of the West, and for a time it looked as though she would share the fate of spoliation which had overtaken Africa. The Boxer uprising furnished an excellent excuse. But just as the European states seemed about to spring, the voice of America rang out insisting that the integrity of the Chinese Empire should be respected and that the Open Door policy should be observed. Whatever underlying motives may have originally prompted the action, the effect was electric. European Powers were shamed into acquiescence, and China was saved. American troops were the first to withdraw when their mission had been accomplished; and America’s return to China of her share of the excessive indemnities exacted wrote a new chapter in international diplomacy.
In 1908—1909, under the leadership of President Roosevelt, a series of treaties was concluded with Great Britain, France, and the principal Powers of the world, agreeing that all differences of a legal nature arising between the signatories should ‘be referred to the Permanent Court of Arbitration established at The Hague, provided, nevertheless, that they do not affect the vital interests, the independence, or the honor’ of the contracting states. Although no countries go to war over questions which do not affect their vital interests, their independence, or their honor, and although the United States Senate insisted upon extracting the teeth of the treaties by requiring in the case of each separate dispute a special agreement to be ratified by the Senate after the dispute had arisen, nevertheless this series of treaties represented a distinct advance toward the conception of general arbitration and formed stepping-stones to later more practical achievements.
In 1913-1914 a new series of treaties was entered into between the United States and twenty-one other nations. These provide that ‘all questions of whatever character and nature’ shall be submitted for investigation and report to a permanent international commission created under the treaty, and the signatories, although reserving full right freely to go to war after the report of the commission, agree not to begin hostilities until that time. It is quite clear that no nation could afford to fight in the face of an adverse report. There are no exceptions of honor or vital interest; there is no necessity of an agreement to be made and ratifications to be fought through after passions have once become aroused. It was the high-water mark of pre-war arbitration agreements between Great. Powers.
Thus for more than a century international justice has been one of the guiding stars of American foreign policy; the United States has proved herself perhaps the leading exponent of the policy of seeking to supplant by law the war method of settling international disputes. There have been times a-plenty when the United States has departed from this high ideal; nations directed by successions of executives with differing policies and diverging aims never can attain the sustained consistency of individuals. Yet, in spite of the Mexican War and ’dollar diplomacy’ and a hundred other uncomfortable memories, there has run throughout American history from its very beginning a deep undercurrent and moving force in the direction of peace through justice and international fair dealing. It is this note which has never failed to touch the hearts and kindle the imaginations of the American people; it is this ideal which seems to reach a depth in the American consciousness which merely imperialistic ambitions, as scheming politicians have more than once discovered, do not touch. The foreign policy of President Wilson was no more than the concrete expression of this deeply rooted aspiration — a renewed expression of the traditional American policy which began with Washington. ’I want to take this occasion to say,’ President Wilson declared in his Mobile speech of 1913, ‘that the United States will never again seek one additional foot of territory by conquest. She must regard it as one of the duties of friendship to see that from no quarter are material interests made superior to human liberty and national opportunity.’
The outbreak of the World War revealed startlingly the lack of adequate machinery for keeping t he peace. Hague courts and general arbitration treaties have their uses when there exists the will to peace; they are utterly futile in the face of a will to war. It became clear that the keeping of the peace is as vitally dependent upon psychological as upon economic and material forces; and that if disrupting and trouble-breeding factors are not brought out into the open, discussed and dealt with at the beginning before they have had a chance to inflame whole nations, arbitral machinery can do but little to prevent war. When, in the early days of July 1914, the Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in an obscure corner of Europe, Americans felt little concern; it did not occur to us that we could be affected in any way. Yet that obscure incident, the culmination of years of suppressed feeling, pent racial rivalries, and international intrigue, blazed into the World War; and as the months went by it became more and more inevitable that America would be drawn into the raging conflict. President Wilson conceived that, when the assassination had taken place in 1914, America had already waited too long; that, if Western civilization was to be made secure, organized effort must begin long before international rivalries culminated in assassinations. If the peace of America was to be assured, some form of organized effort must be undertaken to deal with international sores before they became abscessed. It was not by chance that an American president took the lead in formulating and forcing into being the League of Nations, for it was the traditional aims of America herself which the League was formed to realize.
III
The League of Nations from the outset has never been in any sense a superstate. It has no power to compel nations which keep the law to act against their will. It involves no infringement of sovereignty. The basic idea of the League is simply a gathering of responsible representatives of the peoples of the world at periodic meetings in order to bring to the attention of all nations the problems of any which potentially may menace the peace of the world, and by group discussion to make possible the formulation of common policies and the taking of united action to meet such problems. Writing letters back and forth at arm’s length is not a practical way of settling difficulties which are many-sided and of real complexity. If the solution of such problems is to be found, it must be not through formal, diplomaticcommunications, but through the give and take of open discussion — through the magic of personality playing upon personality. Only thus will each come to appreciate the points of view and difficulties of the others; and when such appreciation comes the spirit of understanding and reasonableness gradually creeps in and makes possible solutions otherwise unattainable.
Similarly, the League exists to facilitate the taking of united action in those fields of endeavor where progress is impossible without it. For instance, no nation can suppress opium even within its own borders by its own unaided efforts, because of the comparative ease with which opium can be smuggled across national frontiers. Its suppression is practically realizable only through the united action of opiumproducing as well as opium-consuming states. Again, serious and substantial limitation or reduction of armaments cannot be practically effected by the action of any single state. A nation which alone strips itself of its armament only renders itself a prey for the lawless. Limitation or reduction of armament cannot be achieved except by common and united action.
Also, the League exists to turn the searchlight of publicity upon those dark places of the earth where microbes of trouble may be breeding. What begins in a petty border struggle may end in a world war. In 1925, Greece and Bulgaria stood face to face upon their frontier with swords drawn and guns in position, expecting the order to attack at any moment. Word was telegraphed to the League. In three days the Council of the League was meeting, hearing representatives of Greece and Bulgaria explaining their points of view and giving their versions of the trouble. That night the League dispatched telegrams to Greece and Bulgaria requesting The representatives of the two states to inform it within twenty-four hours that the Bulgarian and Greek Governments have given unconditional orders to their troops to withdraw behind their respective national frontiers.’ At the time the Greek army had in fact penetrated five miles into Bulgarian territory and was under orders to attack Petrich the following morning at 8.30. There were sufficient forces on both sides to make serious consequences probable. Upon receipt of the League telegram each government issued orders to suspend operations; the order of the Greek Government reached the scene of action exactly two and a half hours before the time of attack. As a result both armies were withdrawn, and war was averted. There followed a careful investigation by a commission appointed by the League; and with the final payment by Greece of an indemnity fixed as a result of the investigation, the whole affair became a closed incident.
A fourth function of the League is international arbitration. The League Covenant provides that all disputes likely to lead to rupture must be referred to arbitration, judicial settlement, or inquiry by the League Council. If the dispute is submitted to arbitration or judicial settlement, the member states agree to ‘carry out in full good faith any award or decision that may be rendered,’ and not to ‘resort to war against a Member of the League which complies therewith.’ If the dispute is submitted to inquiry by the League Council, the Covenant, following the example of the American Treaties of Conciliation of 1913, provides that neither disputant shall resort to war until three months after a report has been rendered, but that thereafter, unless the report is unanimous, the parties shall be free to take such action as they please.
After the war Europe, bled white, realized that another world war would mean the end of Western civilization. In spite of her mistrust of an untried League of Nations and fear of its possibilities, Europe therefore turned to the League as the only practicable hope, and decided to try the way of cooperation. Yet even that was not enough. In the settlement of international disputes compromise must be supplanted by law; and law presupposes a genuine court. Accordingly, Europe set herself the task of achieving what had been strongly urged at the Second Hague Conference by the American delegates but had never proved practically attainable—a world court in the true sense of the word. In 1920 — with the help of American brains — Europe achieved the American dream. The new World Court is not a panel of a hundred and fifty men scattered throughout the world with no cohesive force or unifying duties, but a single tribunal of judges, elected for their outstanding juristic ability, representative of different systems of law, appointed for long tenures, and sitting as a continuous body. As a result the judges are developing a fine tradition which lifts them above narrow national prejudices and international intrigue, and has won for them the respect and confidence of the world.
One must not, however, misunderstand its power. The World Court, apart from special agreement, is not a court with jurisdiction either to compel nations against their will to bring disputes before it or to compel the execution of its judgments. It is simply a piece of machinery, kept oiled and always in readiness, so that at any moment when a dispute breaks out its services may be utilized if the disputants so desire.
But Europe wanted to go beyond even this. In 1925, Europe electrified the world by the Locarno treaties, which went further along the road of compulsory judicial settlement of international disputes than any of the Great Powers had gone before. The final Protocol, signed on December 1, 1925, provides that ‘Germany and Belgium, and Germany and France, undertake to settle by peaceful means, and in the manner laid down herein, all questions of every kind which may arise between them and which it may not be possible to settle by the normal methods of diplomacy.’ ‘Any question with regard to which the parties are in conflict as to their respective rights shall be submitted to judicial decision, and the parties undertake to comply with such decision.’ In other words, since the war Europe, to prevent the wreck of Western civilization, has been forced by the sheer necessities of the situation, in spite of fears and counter-fears, to follow the direction pointed out by traditional American policy. And at the very moment when Europe turned her face in this direction the American Government abandoned the policy.
IV
For over nine years America has steadfastly refused to join the League of Nations; she has refused to accept membership in the World Court even though membership involves no obligation to submit disputes to it; in her 1928 series of arbitration treaties it is the old Permanent Court of Arbitration as established under the Convention of 1907 and not the new World Court to which, if the Senate yield its consent, disputes may be referred. For the past nine years, until the signing of the Kellogg Peace Pact, America has lifted not a finger to forward the movement of international arbitration.
As this post-war decade draws to a close, America is approaching, partly as a result of her changed policy, and partly as a result of the general world situation, a parting of the ways, involving a coming crisis in her affairs as grave as any she has yet faced.
In the first place, there is the problem of the war debts. The position of America as a result of the war has changed from that of a debtor nation into that of the general creditor nation of the world. Creditors insisting upon payment find themselves in an embarrassing position if they wish to retain the good will and friendship of their debtors. In the case of the international debts owed America the difficulties of the situation are vastly increased by their size. Many able economists maintain that they are of such magnitude that they never can actually be paid in full, and that any serious attempt to do so could be made only through dumping such quantities of foreign commodities in America as to ruin American domestic industry. The maintenance of high American tariff barriers adds to the problem. Even though there is room for an honest difference of opinion as to whether the debts can ever be satisfied in full, if the growing difficulties and burdens convince a substantial part of the populations of the debtor states that the economists are right, America’s unyielding insistence upon full payment, and her continued refusal to modify her position, may cause the relations between herself and the debtor states to become seriously strained. The danger is that the United States may be stripped of her friends. Furthermore, America’s insistence upon payment forces the debtor states to look at the problem from a common point of view and to make common cause; the inherent nature of the situation inevitably separates the interests of America from those of the European nations. If nothing is done to counteract this tendency, a wider and wider divergence is bound to arise between the policies of the United States, formulated to protect and further her interests, and those of Europe. If no constructive steps are taken, this problem will grow more acute and dangerous with every passing year.
A second factor of the problem is aligning world forces in much the same direction. In the years immediately following the conclusion of the war the interests of the Allies were widely diverging. British interests depended upon the stabilization and strengthening of a Central Europe with sufficient credit to buy British manufactures; the Quai d’Orsay was exerting every effort to achieve the exact opposite. There were gloomy days following the war when agreement seemed impossible and the European horizon looked very dark. But in spite of seemingly insuperable difficulties, Europe, with the memory of war still burning deep, found a way to compose her differences; and the method of international cooperation, not without struggle and occasional defeat, has gradually been supplanting the older method of diplomatic manoeuvring solely for selfish interests. In this process the League gatherings have played a substantial part. To-day the representatives of some fifty nations are learning at Geneva through hard experience the difficult lesson of cooperation — how to give and take, and even, at times, to sacrifice present national interests for the sake of larger ultimate gain. But America is not sharing the experience.
If America continues to absent herself from the gatherings of fifty nations, great and small, where the world’s common problems are discussed and world policies are formulated, it seems inevitable that the policies thus adopted will come to be largely European in their conception; and sooner or later America will awake to find that her own interests have gone unprotected. That means danger of the gravest kind — the United States on one side and a unified Europe on the other, following diverging and conflicting policies.
A third factor in the problem is the relationship of the United States to Latin America. Not long ago the United States sent marines into Nicaragua. The side of the shield which United States citizens were given to see was the restoration of law and order to a distracted country and the promotion of democracy by the guarantee of a fair and free election. The side of the same shield which Latin American countries saw was the bombing of unoffending Nicaraguan villages by American airplanes, intervention with force in the affairs of a smaller state, the United States opening the way for her promoters and investors by marines and big guns. While the United States congratulates herself over the success of her efforts in restoring order and ensuring fair elections, Latin America is nursing her resentment. She will not forget for many a day the bombing by American troops of Nicaraguan villages.
The time was when South American states were of negligible importance and the United States could wield the big stick and impose her will upon them almost with impunity. But that day is passing. The Argentine contains a million more people than Canada; the population of Brazil is four times that of Canada and almost equal to that of France. In 1927 the Argentine exported goods to the value of a billion gold dollars. With the increasing power of South America, the problem of our future Latin American policy becomes every year more pressing. Shall America continue to follow the big-stick policy which gains its way at the expense of international confidence and friendship, or shall she seek the solution of Latin American problems through cooperative joint action with her sister American republics? The former course is a quicker way to gain an immediate object, and probably more efficient; but the latter does not leave America friendless.
V
The solution of these problems of foreign policy may be sought through either one of two sharply divergent courses, and upon the course which America finally chooses during the next decade or two will depend very largely her future destiny. One course lies in the direction of the newer method which Europe has been trying to learn since the tragic breakdown of the old in 1914. It is the method of seeking common understandings and of taking united action for the solution of international difficulties before they become acute. It is the method which Washington adopted when he was laying the foundations of American foreign policy — that of the pacific settlement of every international dispute. It is the way of the League of Nations, of the World Court, of Locarno. It means the supplanting of the former intense international rivalries and fears and jealousies by international cooperation, and the creation of adequate machinery to make cooperative effort effective.
The alternative course is armed isolation. The logic of the situation, in the minds of many, compels such a policy. America, as the richest country in the world and a creditor nation, needs protection. The neglect of defenses only invites armed attack and therefore war. Consequently it is now incumbent upon the United States, whether she likes it or not, to keep free of every European complication and to build up her national defenses. For the past nine years this has been the course consistently followed. In spite of the fact that in the world of reality America is inextricably bound, economically, commercially, and financially, with the nations of Europe and cannot therefore actually isolate her interests, nevertheless every effort has been made to isolate them. We are spending considerably more than twice as much to-day for national defense as before the war. In 1912 the United States spent $244,177,000. In 1926-1927 she spent $580,118,000. President Coolidge, in his address to Congress on December 5, 1928, said: ‘The cost of national defense is stupendous. It has increased $118,000,000 in the past four years. The estimated expenditure for 1930 is $668,000,000.’
Since that was written the United States has passed the Naval Construction Bill, embarking upon still further expenditures. The bill provides for the building within three years of fifteen ten-thousand-ton cruisers and one aircraft carrier, and appropriates for this purpose two hundred and seventy-four million dollars. The race for bigger navies has begun again.
The big-navy group cry out confidently that this is the pathway to America’s destiny, and the only way to security. But a haunting doubt persists. Does genuine and practical security lie in this direction?
In the early days of the twentieth century, Germany, pushing vigorously her industrial development, foreseeing coming competition and international rivalry, decided to seek protection for her rapidly developing commerce through the building up of a powerful armament. On the sea she entered upon so vigorous a naval programme that England was drawn into competitive activity, and the inevitable race in naval construction was begun. On land she developed the most magnificent military machine the world had ever known. She felt herself invincible. Her fighting strength was immeasurably superior to that of any other nation. One remembers the easy confidence with which, in the terrible days of July 1914, the hordes of German gray-green troops poured across the plains of Belgium in a seemingly endless flood. Standing athwart the German line of advance stood Belgium’s army, tiny in comparison, heroically trying to stem the advancing tide. How hopeless and pathetic it seemed! Yet when the Treaty of Versailles came to be written in 1919 it was Belgium who sat on the winning side, and Germany, with all her magnificent armament, — nay, because of her magnificent armament, — lay crushed and broken.
If the World War has proved anything, it has proved the breakdown of the old methods — the positive danger of seeking security through gunpowder and poison gas. The nation which chooses to place its main reliance in its own powerful armament is courting disaster. Huge armaments breed fear, and fear breeds hate, and hate breeds war. There is no escape from that. The experience of the World War has shown with terrible clarity that the outcome of every modern war of world importance depends, not on the armament of any single nation, but upon the alignments and groupings of nations which take place before and during hostilities; and these war-deciding alignments depend in the last analysis upon international friendships, upon the degree of international cooperation which has interlocked the interests of various nations, upon the existence or nonexistence of a confidence that a given state is working for purposes and ideals shared by the majority of mankind. Guns and battleships no longer measure security; other factors have become more potent. A nation which chooses to refrain from international cooperation or to strip itself of its friends is under modern conditions depriving itself of its surest defenses. To-day, no matter what its armament, no single nation can conquer the world; armed isolation, if long continued, is the most dangerous course which a wealthy nation can pursue.
VI
By ratifying the Kellogg Peace Pact the United States has set her face once more in the direction of her traditional policy. But we must not be deceived. Under the Kellogg Pact the signatories renounce war as an instrument of national policy. But every nation in signing the pact very definitely understood, and embodied the understanding in specific written language, that the treaty should not apply to any war of defense, and that every nation should be its own judge as to whether it is fighting in self-defense. Can a war of any magnitude be recalled in which both sides were not claiming to be fighting in self-defense? In 1914, France, Russia, and Germany all stoutly made the claim. If one looks the truth in the face, the Kellogg Peace Pact is, as a purely legal document, impotent. Yet it is very far from true that the treaty is therefore without value. By pouring moral content into it we can make it one of the great steps toward peace. The treaty means exactly what we make it mean. It will not prevent war. But it can be made to serve as a magnificent rallying cry to promote and stimulate the will to peace; and in the last analysis the will to peace can prevent war more effectively than legal documents.
The future destiny of the United States is to-day hanging in the balance. The foreign problems pressing in on us are likely to become more rather than less acute. It will not be possible to straddle the problem many years longer — in the same Congress to adopt a Kellogg Peace Pact and a bill inaugurating a new navy-building programme. The time is fast coming when America must make her choice, and crowding events will make that choice irrevocable.
Will America, with all her youth and buoyancy, choose armed isolation, the old method which brought inevitably the world conflict of 1914? Or will she choose international coöperation and the effort to substitute law for war? If America is true to her traditions, to the course set by Washington and followed for over a hundred years, there can be no question what her choice will be.
We call ourselves a Christian nation. If Christianity means anything real, if the name is not a mere sham and pretense, there can be no question what America’s choice will be. That choice unquestionably will depend upon what the great rank and file of Americans — over a hundred million strong — living in quiet homes throughout the length and breadth of our land demand. It is a time when no true patriot, no genuine lover of America, no honest Christian, can afford to be silent. All the world hangs upon America’s answer.
March 4, 1929