ouse our anger. Let the _Maine_ blow up and we
fight. A treaty with an elastic exception like this is a farcical sham
and a delusion.

It is high time the true and humiliating significance of these
fearsome phrases should be as familiar to every taxpayer as is the
burden of bristling camps and restless navies. Read the record of
Great Britain's first offer of unlimited arbitration in the
Olney-Pauncefote treaty of 1897. There, too, you will find national
honor and vital interests clogging the machinery of universal peace.
By these same exceptions the Senate emasculated that treaty and
defeated the spirit of the agreement. Is it conceivable that the
Senate actually feared that our interests would be imperiled by that
treaty? Did it delve out some hidden dangers which escaped the careful
scrutiny of both the English and American embassies, some peril
unforeseen by the keen judicial mind of President Cleveland, who
characterized the defeat of the treaty as "the greatest grief" of his
administration.

But this is not all. The American representatives at both Hague
Conferences were the first to place these same limitations on all
arbitration proposals.

Look at it from what point of view you will, our government's conduct
must appear humiliating. Considering the fact that universal
arbitration treaties have proved practical, it is well-nigh
incredible. Behold our bellicose sister American republics. Argentina
and Chile, Brazil and Argentina, Bolivia and Peru, all have agreements
for the arbitration of all questions whatsoever. All the Central
American republics are bound by treaty to decide every difference of
whatever nature in the Central American Court of Justice. Denmark's
three treaties with Italy, Portugal, and the Netherlands withhold no
cause, however vital, from reason's peaceful sway. Norway and Sweden
likewise have an agreement to abide by the decision of the Hague Court
in whatever disputes may occur. The very existence of all these
treaties is significant, yet even more significant is the fact that
they have been triumphantly tested. Norway and Sweden at one extremity
of the globe and Argentina and Chile at the other have thus quietly
settled disputes in which their honor and interests were seriously
involved.

Do you ask further evidence of the hypocrisy with which our Senate
parades our national honor and our vital interests to the undoing of a
grand work? Search our history and you will find it in abund