sage: "The presence and influence of
America in the council of peace after the war will be most welcome to us
provided we can be assured of two things: First, that America stands for
the restoration of all that Germany has seized in Belgium and France.
Second, that America will enter and support, by force if necessary, a
league of nations pledged to resist and punish any war begun without
previous submission of the cause to international investigation and
judgment."

This was the message that I took to Washington in 1914. Since that time
the "League to Enforce Peace" has been organized in America (June 17,
1915). In my opinion it would be better named the "League to Defend
Peace." But the name makes little difference. It is the principle, the
idea, that counts.

This idea has been publicly approved by the leading spokesmen of all the
allied nations, and notably by President Wilson in his speech at the
League banquet, May 27, 1916, and in his address to the Senate, January
22, 1917, in which he said:

"Mere terms of peace between the belligerents will not satisfy even the
belligerents themselves. Mere agreements may not make peace secure. It
will be absolutely necessary that a force be created as a guarantor of
the permanency of the settlement so much greater than the force of any
nation now engaged in any alliance hitherto formed or projected that no
nation, no probable combination of nations, could face or withstand it.
If the peace presently to be made is to endure it must be a peace made
secure by the organized major force of mankind."

Consider for a moment what such an organization would mean.

It would mean, first of all, the strongest possible condemnation of the
attitude and action of Germany and her assistants in plotting, choosing,
beginning, and forcing the present war upon the world.

It is precisely because she disdained and refused to submit the
Austro-Servian quarrel, and her own secret plans and purposes to
investigation, conference, judicial inquiry, that her blood-guiltiness
is most flagrant, and her criminal assault upon the world's peace cries
to Heaven for punishment.

Moreover, such an organization of free democratic states would mean a
practical step toward a new era of international relations. It would
amount, in effect, to what Premier Ribot, in his recent address at the
anniversary of the battle of the Marne, called "a league of common
defense." It would be a new kind of treaty of allia