TOPICS OF THE DAY
AMERICA'S RESERVATIONS.
SENATOR LODGE is reported to have said that the Treaty creating the League of Nations is dead. We do not agree with Senator Lodge ; but even if he is right and the Treaty is dead, all we can say is—" Le raj est mort ; vire le roi." We understand perfectly America's difficulties, and the spirit in which the Senate has been acting and public opinion has been working. When then we say that the League of Nations must go forward even if America were finally to decide that she could not take part in it, we mean it without bitterness or reproach—without a thought of carrying on the League not only without her but in spite of her. It is not too much to say, as Mr. Bell shows in his admirable letter to Tuesday's Times, that there is no party and no opinion in America hostile to the League in itself. The farthest that the most extreme opponents of the League go is to insist that, though the Treaty may be all right for Europe and may suit European temperaments, it is not suited to America or the American Constitution. The most hot-headed of antiWilsonian Senators has never dreamt of throwing obstacles in the way of the European nations combining to prevent another war so fatal to human society as that which has just ended.
And now, while America's voice is still uncertain, let us note one or two things which must be kept in mind by the British public. If these seem somewhat inconsequent, or even incoherent, our readers must remember that this is not our fault but that of a situation not merely complex but confused. In the first place, let it not be forgotten that America is always inclined to be like the man in the Gospel, who said " I go not " and went. Again and again American history has shown this national trait. Till the very moment when the North threw off the trappings of peace and declared that the South should not break the Union or retire in a savage isolation to continue the dreadful "Institution," foreign observers who had not studied or did not understand the essential Anglo-Saxon temperament believed that America would not maintain the Union. An example even more poignant was America's attitude at the beginning of the late war. Not only her President but all America in the first ten months declared that the war was not her concern, and that she must be strictly neutral, even on a moral issue. But though America had said so distinctly that she would not go, she went ; and, as is her way, when she did act it was with a self-abandonment, an unselfishness, and a generosity to which the history of international relations affords no parallel. America threw herself into the contest without a reservation, without a thought of what she was to gain as a nation. She played no huckster's part. She could have had any terms she liked from those whom she made her Allies, if not in name, in high deeds. With a magnificence of purpose which, if the world at large does not yet completely understand it, has always been understood here by her own flesh and blood, she nobly refused to make Europe's agony her opportunity even for reasonable demands. She spent not only her blood but what it is often even more difficult for nations to do, her treasure, without stint or limit. The idea of making terms for the salvation of the world never crossed the mind of her people. They were too proud to bargain. Curiously enough, the same thing often happens in American business. During the preliminaries of a business arrangement an old-fashioned English firm seems to find the American hard, unyielding, even grasping in his methods and unwilling to allow any give-and-take. Yet when the preliminaries are over and it comes to action, the other side is amazed at the trustfulness, the easy generosity, with which the American will carry on. There is nothing guarded, nothing of the half-measure, nothing paltry, in American action.
Another point which must never be forgotten is the nature of the American Constitution. There is nothing quite like it in the political world. It was designed with the purpose of throwing obstacles in the way of rapid and unchecked action by the American Executive. The Americans believed firmly in the necessity of binding so tightly the trustees who were to run the political business of the amalgamated States that they could never commit the nation without reference to the representatives of the people. Most successfully, too successfully, did they accomplish their task. The sovereignty of the mighty Federal State created by the Union was put into commission. With extraordinary ingenuity the party system was taken advantage of to prevent the trustees--that is, the Executive—from forming too potent a corporation. Hence nothing is more difficult than for an American Government to commit and bind the sovereign authority of the Republic, divided as it is between the President, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Judiciary: Unless—an almost impossible case—the President belongs to the party which has a majority both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, and can keep well within the text of the Constitution, and so avoid appeals to the Supreme Court, the Executive can never feel sure that when it draws a political bill payable to a foreign State that bill will be honoured. In the matter of foreign affairs, even when the rare and difficult conditions we have just enumerated are fulfilled, the Executive may still bo paralysed. Under the Constitution one-third of the Senators plus one, present and voting in the Senate during the proposal for the ratification of a Treaty, can veto that Treaty. It is of no use for the representatives of other nations to be critical or angry at this. It is not the fault of the American Government, or even of the American people. Till it is altered the American Constitution must be accepted like a fact of Nature. You have got to recognize it as in the old days statesmen had to recognize the personal idiosyncrasies of a particular King.
A further thing to be remembered, and it is of vital importance, is that an error was committed by President Wilson, unconsciously no doubt, but none the less unfortunately, when he did not associate with himself at the Peace Conference the chiefs of the Republican Party. He felt himself no doubt so strong, and so entirely the representative of the American people as a whole and not of any one party, that he forgot that persons in a position of less responsibility and less power were unlikely to be able to regard him as he regarded himself. He forgot that the absolute purity of his own intentions would not prevent his political opponents from lying in wait, as it were, for any sign of the President acting, with a slight variation, on the motto of Louis XIV., and telling the world " Les Etats-Unis c'est mbi." As an example of how much easier it is for lookers-on to see the game than the players, we may recall the fact of our own astonishment at the construction of the American Delegation. It seemed to us quite obvious that what Mr. Wilson would do would be to say to Mr. Taft, ex-President, and so ex-chief of the Republican Party; to Mr. Root, not only the greatest Republican jurist but the greatest jurist in America ; and to Senator Lodge, a man of life-long experience in foreign affairs and Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee of the Senate : " Whatever our old antagonisms, and whatever your personal distrust of a Democratic President, you three gentlemen must come with me to Paris and help me in the negotiations. Under our Constitution it is useless for me to attempt to bind America unless you acquiesce and so I can, not merely in name but in fact, put the Treaty before Congress as the joint work of the Democratic and Republican Parties. You gave me the double mandate for the war. You must give it me also for the peace. But you cannot give it for the peace unless you share my responsibility at the Peace Conference and take an active part in the negotiations." If President Wilson had said that, the three statesmen we have named could not have refused, and the President would have brought back from Paris a Treaty which, though not in essence very different from that now before the Senate, would have gone through Congress on a practically unanimous vote. To say this is not to rake up an old fault or to cry over spilt milk. Before the Senate is condemned for what has happened during the past week in Washington, Englishmen and Americans must remember, and give weight to, President Wilson's unfortunate blunder in the region of internal and party diplomacy. The association of the Republican leaders in his great task would not really have tied his hands, and would have given America the proud position of being the driver and not, as now, the brakesman of the great international train.
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