THE COVENANT AND DRAFT OF THE CONSTITUTION OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS—PRESIDENT WILSON'S SPEECH IN SUPPORT; HE RETURNS TO AMERICA—THE UNITED STATES SENATE CRITICISES LEAGUE DOCUMENT

On February 14, 1919, President Wilson read the draft of the constitution of the League of Nations before the plenary council of the Peace Conference and afterward delivered an earnest and spirited address in support of the plan. Lord Robert Cecil, head of the British delegation, expressed his approval of the League and constitution in an eloquent speech, and the Italian Premier Signor Orlando, described his satisfaction at having collaborated in one of the greatest documents in all history.

Leon Bourgeois, for France, said that the French delegation reserved the right to present their views on certain details of the plan which made no distinction between great and small States. France and Belgium, said M. Bourgeois, were especially exposed to danger, and required additional guarantees. He urged a system of permanent inspection of existing armaments and forces as a means to avoid the renewal of wars.

The text of the document read by President Wilson at the plenary session, opening with a preamble, is here given in full.

"In order to promote international cooperation and to secure international peace and security by the acceptance of obligations not to resort to war, by the prescription of open, just, and honorable relations between nations, by the firm establishment of the understandings of international law as the actual rule of conduct among governments, and by the maintenance of justice and a scrupulous respect for all treaty obligations in the dealings of organized peoples with one another, the Powers signatory to this covenant adopt this constitution of the League of Nations."

Of the twenty-six articles which comprise the constitution of the League of Nations some were afterward amended, and such changes will be noted later in their place.

The first seven articles of the constitution which are the least important to the general reader may be thus summarized:

The action of the high contracting parties under the terms of the covenant shall be effected through the meeting of a body of delegates representing them, and the meetings of an executive council, and of a permanent international secretariat to be established at the seat of the League. Each of the high contracting parties shall have one vote, but not more than three representatives.

The executive council shall consist of representatives of the United States of America, British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan, and representatives of four other states members of the League. Meetings shall be held as occasion requires and at least once a year. Any Power shall be invited to attend a meeting of the council when matters concerning its interests are to be discussed. The first meeting of the body of delegates shall be summoned by the President of the United States.

Admission to the League of states not signatories to the covenant requires the assent of not less than two-thirds of the states represented in the body of delegates. Only full self-governing countries or dominions shall be admitted.

Article VIII. Provides that the executive council shall determine for the consideration of the several governments what military equipment and armament is fair in proportion to the scale of forces, laid down in the program of disarmament. The high contracting parties agree to examine the manufacture by private enterprise of war material and direct the executive council to advise how to prevent the evil effects attendant on such manufacture, respecting the need of those countries that cannot manufacture munitions and war implements necessary for their safety.

Article IX. Permanent commission shall be constituted to advise the council on the execution of the provisions of articles I and VIII and on military and, naval questions generally.

Article X. This and the two following, as among the most important articles in the constitution, and which became the subject of heated controversy, must be given in full:

"The high contracting parties shall undertake to respect and preserve against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all the states members of the League. In case of any such aggression, or in case of any threat of danger of such aggression, the executive council shall advise upon the means by which the obligation shall be fulfilled."

Article XI. States that any war, or threat of war, is a matter of concern to the League, and the high contracting parties reserve the right to take such action as will conserve the peace of nations.

Article XII. States in effect that if disputes arise that cannot be adjusted by the ordinary processes of diplomacy no resort to war will be made until the questions involved are submitted for arbitration of the executive council. Until three months after the award by the arbitrators war will not even then be resorted to against a member of the League which complies with the award of the arbitrators, or the recommendation of the executive council.

Article XIII. The high contracting parties agree that disputes or difficulties arising between them which cannot be settled by diplomacy they will submit the whole matter to arbitration. They agree to carry out in good faith any award that may be rendered.

Article XIV. Provides for the establishment of an international court of justice to hear and determine any matters suitable for submission to it for arbitration. Article XV. Disputes between members of the League not submitted to arbitration shall be referred to the executive council. If the dispute has not been settled, a report by the council shall be published and recommendation made by the council for the settlement of the difficulty. If the report is unanimously agreed to by the council other than the parties to the dispute, the high contracting parties agree that they will not go to war with any party which complies with the recommendations.

Article XVI. "Should any of the high contracting parties break or disregard its covenants under Article XII, it shall thereby ipso facto be deemed to have committed an act of war against all the other members of the League, which hereby immediately undertakes to subject it to the severance of all intercourse between their nationals, trade or financial relations, the prohibition of all intercourse between their nationals and the nationals of the covenant-breaking state, and the prevention of all financial, commercial, or personal intercourse between the nationals of the convenant-breaking state and the nationals of any other state, whether a member of the League or not.

"It shall be the duty of the executive committee council in such a case to recommend what effective military or naval force the members of the League shall severally contribute to the armed forces to be used to protect the covenant of the League." This article further states that the high contracting parties agree to mutually support each other financially and economically, and in resisting any special measures aimed at one of their number by the convenant-breaking state.

Article XVII. Considers disputes between one state member of the League and another state which is not a member of the League, or between states not members of the League. In such event the high contracting parties invite the state, or states, not members of the League to become members and accept the obligations of the League membership for the dispute in such conditions as the executive council shall deem just. The executive council will immediately inquire into the merits of the dispute and recommend such action as may be deemed just and equitable. Any Power refusing to accept the obligations of membership in the League for the purposes of the League would constitute a breach of Article XII. The provisions of Article XVI shall be applicable too against a state taking such action.

Article XVIII. In this article the League is empowered with general supervision of the trade in arms and ammunition with countries where control of the traffic is necessary.

Article XIX. Deals with the question of colonies and territories which through the war have ceased to be under the old sovereignty. "Inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves ... there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization, and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in the constitution of the League." The tutelage of such peoples, it was advised, should be intrusted to the advanced nations, and should be exercised by them as mandatories on behalf of the League. Communities that have reached a stage of development as in Turkey could be provisionally recognized as independent nations, subject to administrative advice and assistance by mandatory power until they were strong enough to stand alone.

Article XX. In this the League promises to endeavor to secure and maintain fair conditions of labor for men, women, and children in all countries where their commercial and industrial relations extend, and agree to establish a permanent bureau of labor.

Article XXI. Provision through the instrumentality of the League to secure and maintain freedom of transit and equitable treatment for the commerce of all states members of the League. Special arrangements with regard to the necessities of the regions devastated during the war.

Article XXII. The high contracting parties agree to place under control of the League all international bureaus already established if the parties to such treaties consent. All such international bureaus in the future shall be placed under the League. Article XXIII. Every treaty or international engagement entered into by any member of the League shall be registered with the secretary general and published by him. No treaty or international engagement shall be binding until so registered.

Article XXIV. The body of delegates shall have the right to advise the reconsideration by states members of the League of treaties which have become inapplicable, and of international conditions of which the continuance may endanger world peace.

Article XXV. The high contracting parties agree to abrogate all obligations inconsistent with the terms of the covenant, and will not hereafter enter into any engagements inconsistent with those terms. Powers signatory hereto, or subsequently admitted to the League, who have undertaken any obligations inconsistent with the terms of this convenant shall take steps to secure release from such obligations.

Article XXVI is concerned with amendments to the covenant. These are to take effect when ratified by the states whose representatives compose the executive council, and by three-fourths of the states whose representatives compose the body of delegates.

At the conclusion of his reading of the draft of the constitution of the League, President Wilson said in part:

"It is not a vehicle of power, but a vehicle in which power may be varied at the discretion of those who exercise it, and in accordance with the changing circumstances of the time. And yet, while it is elastic, while it is general in its terms, it is definite in the one thing that we were called upon to make definite. It is a definite guaranty of peace. It is a definite guaranty by word against aggression. It is a definite guaranty against the things which have just come near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin.

"Its purposes do not for a moment lie vague. Its purposes are declared and its powers are unmistakable. It is not in contemplation that this should be merely a league to secure the peace of the world. It is a league which can be used for cooperation in any international matter. That is the significance of the provision introduced concerning labor. There are many ameliorations of labor conditions which can be effected by conference and discussion. I anticipate that there will be a very great usefulness in the bureau of labor which it is contemplated shall be set up by the League. Men, women, and children who work have been in the background through long ages, and sometimes seemed to be forgotten.... Now these people will be drawn into the field of international consultation and help and will be the wards of the combined governments of the world.

"As you will notice there is an imperative article concerning the publicity of all international agreements. Henceforth no member of the League can claim any agreement valid which it has not registered with the secretary general.... And the duty is laid upon the secretary general to publish every document of that sort, at the earliest possible time....

"Then there is a feature about this covenant which to my mind is one of the greatest and most satisfactory advances that have been made. We are done with annexations of helpless peoples, meant in some instances by some Powers to be used merely for exploitation. We recognize in the most solemn manner that the helpless and undeveloped peoples of the world ... put an obligation upon us to look after their interests primarily before we use them for our interests and that in all cases of this sort hereafter it shall be the duty of the League to see that the nations who are assigned as the tutors and advisers and directors of these peoples shall look to their interests and their development before they look to the interests and desires of the mandatory nation itself....

"It has been one of the many distressing revelations of recent years that the great Power which has just been happily defeated put intolerable burdens and injustice upon the helpless peoples of some of the colonies which it annexed to itself, that its interest was rather their extermination than their development, that the desire was to possess their land for European purposes and not to enjoy their confidence in order that mankind might be lifted in these places to the next higher level.

"Now the world, expressing its conscience in law, says there is an end of that, that our consciences shall be settled to this thing. States will be picked out which have shown that they can exercise a conscience in this matter and under their tutelage the helpless peoples of the world will come into a new light and into a new hope.

"So I think that I can say of this document that it is at one and the same time a practical document, a human document. There is a pulse of sympathy in it. There is a compulsion of conscience throughout it. It is practical, and yet it is intended to purify, to rectify, to elevate.

"It was in one sense, said Mr. Wilson, a belated document, for he believed the conscience of the world had long been prepared to express itself in some such way.

"We are not just now discovering our sympathy for these peoples and our interest in them. We are simply expressing it, for it has long been felt and in the administration of the affairs of more than one of the great states represented here—so far as I know all of the great states that are represented here—that humane impulse has already expressed itself in their dealings with their colonies whose peoples were yet at a low stage of civilization.

... "Many terrible things have come out of this war, gentlemen, but some very beautiful things have come out of it. Wrong has been defeated, but the rest of the world has been more conscious than it ever was before of the majority of right. People that were suspicious of each other can now live as friends and comrades in a single family, and desire to do so. The miasma of distrust, of intrigue is cleared away. Men are looking eye to eye and saying: 'We are brothers, and have a common purpose. We did not realize it before, but now we do realize it, and this is our covenant of friendship.'"

After notifying by cable the Congressional Committee on Foreign Affairs at Washington, that he would return to America and confer with them at the White House, President Wilson sailed from Brest for home on February 15, 1919. Greeted at Boston by a great multitude of enthusiastic citizens, he delivered an address in the afternoon to 7,000 people assembled in Mechanic Hall on the subject of the League of Nations. Traversing much of the ground he had covered in his speech on the draft of the League in Paris, Mr. Wilson said he had been impressed with the wonderful fact during his work at the Peace Conference that there was no nation in Europe that suspected the motives of the United States....

"Before this war, Europe did not believe in us as she does now. She did not believe in us during the first three years of the war. She seems to have believed that we were holding off because we thought we could make more by staying out than by going in. And, all of a sudden, in a short eighteen months, the whole verdict is reversed.... They saw what we did—that, without making a single claim, we put all our men and all our means at the disposal of those who were fighting for their homes, in the first instance, but for a cause, the cause of human rights and justice, and that we went in, not to support their national claims, but to support the great cause which they held in common. And when they saw that not only America held ideas, but acted ideals, they were converted to America and became firm partisans of those ideals....

"And now do you realize that this confidence which we have established throughout the world imposes a burden upon us, if you choose to call it a burden? It is one of those burdens which any nation should be proud to carry."

President Wilson said that all the peoples of Europe were buoyed up with a new hope, that they believed a new age was dawning, when nations would understand each other and support each other in every just cause and unite every moral and physical strength to see that right should prevail. "If America were at this juncture to fail the world, what would become of it?" He dwelt on the despair and bitterness that would follow if America failed to justify the world's hope; on the return to the old bad conditions that had prevailed before the war when all European nations were hostile camps.

Yet the most satisfactory treaty of peace, said Mr. Wilson, would have little value unless it were backed by the united nations to defend it, with great forces combined to make it good, and the assurance given to oppressed peoples of the world that they should be safe. America would not disappoint the hopes of the world, and would make men free. "If we did not do that, the fame of America would be gone and all her power would be dissipated. She then would have to keep her power for those narrow, selfish, provincial purposes which seem so dear to some minds that have no sweep beyond the nearest horizon." He spoke of the claims of Poland, and the wrongs of Armenia, and of the aspirations of the Czecho-Slovaks and Jugoslavs, and how certain powers would pounce upon them if there were not the guarantees of the world behind their liberty.

President Wilson said he had returned to report progress which would not stop short of the goal. The people were in the saddle and they would see to it that if their own present governments did not do their will some other governments shall. "And the secret is out and the present governments know it."

Before President Wilson returned to America the League of Nations covenant had already been discussed in the United States Senate. The Republican members in particular were vehement and even bitter in denouncing the project as set forth in the original draft. Senator Poindexter declared in the course of a three-hour speech that the charter of the League meant surrender of American sovereignty to European nations. Article X bound the United States as one of the contracting parties, he said, to preserve against aggressions the territory and political independence in all states members of the League. This, argued the Senator, would compel the United States to tax its people and sacrifice its soldiers to make war on behalf of a foreign country. In mixing in the affairs of small European nations, these small nations would intrude into the affairs of the United States. To place into the hands of the council of the League of Nations—all but one foreigners with different ideals and interests—such control over the sovereign action of the American people for which so many heroes had labored "would be as though it were a pitiful murder of the very souls of our fathers in their own house, builded by their hands...."

Senator Borah, Republican, attacked the League as a radical departure from the policy laid down in Washington's Farewell Address and the Monroe Doctrine. Article X, which provided for the preservation of the territorial integrity of the nations of the League, the Senator said, would first obligate America to protect the territorial integrity of Great Britain. If the British Empire was threatened in any part, not the United States Congress, or the people, or the Government would determine what should be done, but the executive council, of which the American people had one member, would determine what should be done. The British Empire, united in interest with Italy and Japan, would outvote America in the League. The whole project, he believed, would sterilize the principle of nationalism and abrogate the American Constitution.

The League found a sturdy and eloquent champion in Senator Hitchcock, Democrat, of Nebraska, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. In the course of a speech delivered on February 27, 1919, Senator Hitchcock expressed his belief that the League was a positive guaranty against future world wars. The attitude Japan might take regarding her nationals was not a cause for worry. Japan had already recognized the exclusion laws of the United States. There was no question about Mexico, which could not give guaranties of international obligations and therefore would not be admitted to the League.

Senator Hitchcock declared that those who opposed the League were thinking in the terms of the past. The fear expressed that the League would open the way to European despotism was without foundation, for the spirit of despotism had vanished. Democracy was the mastering spirit in all the nine nations represented in the executive council, yes, even in Japan. Such a league, he argued, with its provision of arbitration and delay for calm consideration, would make war improbable. The restrictions on armaments would save the great nations billions and eliminate oppressive tax burdens.

One of the principal arguments against the League was that in joining it America would have to renounce the Monroe Doctrine and relinquish the right to attack any nation that attempted to establish itself in the Western Hemisphere. Senator Hitchcock argued that the League of Nations included the very purposes of the Monroe Doctrine in that it prevented the aggression of nations upon each other. An unfriendly act, or attack, upon any American republic, or upon the United States, would at once be the subject of inquiry and action by the League of Nations. America also would no longer be compelled to defend alone the Western Hemisphere, but would be backed by the sympathy and help of the League of Nations.

"We have been told that this is one of those entangling alliances against which Washington warned us. I deny it. In Washington's day the world was full of alliances, the nations of the world were seeking to maintain, through the theories of the balance of power, their rival interest. Alliances were for the very purpose of waging war, whereas the League of Nations is a great covenant among the democracies of the world for the purposes of preserving peace."

Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, Republican leader in the Senate, expressed the definite opposition of his party to the League as proposed in a speech before the Senate on February 28, 1919.

Senator Knox, Republican, of Pennsylvania, ex-Secretary of State and a member of the Foreign Relations Committee, speaking on March 1, 1919, before the Senate, expressed himself in favor of a modified League that would preserve our sovereignty. The chief points in his argument may be summarized.

The Central Powers must not be left out of the League, or it would force them for mutual protection to form a second League of Nations, which the neutral states would almost certainly join. The result would be two great camps, each preparing for a new and greater life-and-death struggle.

Even the term League of Nations was a misnomer, for according to the proposed plan the nations of the world were divided into three classes.

First.—Signatories to the covenant confined perhaps to the five great Entente Powers—British Empire, France, Italy, Japan, and United States.

Second.—States not signatory, but named in the protocol, including possibly such Entente Powers, if any, as were not signatories, as well as other states neutral in the war.

Third.—Those states which are neither signatories nor protocol states which must furnish guaranties as to their intention to be bound by their international obligations, to be admitted to the League.

Thus the League of Nations, said Senator Knox, in the sense of all the nations was not created by the document, nor were the states members of the League treated as equals. He pointed out the difficulties in withdrawing from the League. "Once in this union we remain there no matter how onerous its gigantic burdens may become."

The climax to the senatorial discussion came when Senator Lodge circulated a proposal to reject the League of Nations constitution as then drafted. Thirty-nine members of the next Senate, said Senator Lodge, approved of the proposal, and read out their names. The thirty-nine members of the next Senate, if they stood fast for rejecting the League's constitution, would represent more than one-third of the body which must ratify any treaty by a two-thirds vote before it became effective.

Immediately after Congress adjourned on March 4, 1919, President Wilson left Washington for New York, where he delivered an address on the League in the evening of that date at the Metropolitan Opera House.

President Wilson in his address covered much the same ground he had traversed in his Boston speech, and paid his respects to the critics of the covenant in somewhat scathing terms. He was amazed that there should be in some quarters such ignorance of the state of the world. "These gentlemen do not know what the mind of men is just now. Everybody else does. I do not know where they have been closeted. I do not know by what influences they have been blinded; but I do know that they have been separated from the general currents of the thought of mankind.... I have heard no counsel of generosity in their criticism. I have heard no constructive suggestions. I have heard nothing except 'will it not be dangerous to us to help the world?' It will be fatal to us not to help it." After concluding his address President Wilson and party boarded the George Washington and sailed again for France.

The attacks on the League of Nations in the United States affected the attitude of the French press and of the delegates in Paris, who had been critical of the project. But as soon as it became apparent that the Wilson program was in danger of defeat at home the press rallied to its support and the delegates, fearing failure of the whole project, became advocates of the covenant as it stood. Only Germany denounced it as unjust to the German people. Italy gave unqualified support, and England's attitude, as expressed through Mr. Balfour, was that an immense responsibility rested on the American people. "They have come into the war. Their action has had profound importance. Their service to mankind in this crisis will make a great page in their history. But that service is only half accomplished if they do not take a share in the even more responsible labors of peace."

The effect of the assaults upon the League was to speed up the preliminary work on the Peace Treaty.