them in the name of honor. Again has England with enthusiasm just
offered us unrestricted arbitration. Again she is repulsed by our
Senate in the name of honor. France, too, bears to our doors an
unqualified pledge of arbitration. France, too, is repulsed by our
Senate in the name of honor. Germany and Japan express a desire to
settle every question at the bar of justice. Impelled by honor we pass
their desire unheeded. Our Clevelands, our Olneys, our Edward Everett
Hales, our Carl Schurzes, our John Hays, have all urged unlimited
arbitration. Our Davises and Clarks and Platts and Quays in Senate
seats have undone their work in the name of honor. Our Charles Eliots
and Nicholas Butlers, our Albert Shaws and Hamilton Holts, now plead
for universal peace through unlimited arbitration. Senators Bacon and
Lodge and Heyburn and Hitchcock, apparently impelled by constitutional
prerogative, party prejudice, or personal animosity, now cast their
votes for limitations in the name of honor. From the platform of peace
conferences, from the halls of colleges, from the pulpit and the
bench, from the offices of bankers and merchants and manufacturers,
from the press, with scarcely a column's exception, there arises a
swelling plea for treaties of arbitration that know no exceptions. In
the name of honor that plea is defied.

Honor? No, an ocean of exception large enough to float any number of
battleships for which pride and ambition may be willing to pay! Honor?
No, a finical and foolish reservation that at any moment may become a
maelstrom of suspicion and rage and hatred and destruction and death!
Honor? No, a mountainous barrier to peace that must be leveled before
there can be progress! Honor? No, the incarnation of selfishness, the
cloak of shrewd politics, the mask of false patriotism! National
honor? No, national dishonor!

Before the nations of the world the United States stands to-day in an
unenviable light. It is a false light. Since the days of William Penn
and Benjamin Franklin our people have led in much of the march upward
from the slough of weltering strife. Many a stumbling block to
progress we have removed from the rugged pathway, but for fifteen
years our government has refused to touch the barrier of national
honor and vital interests. England and France have now laid this duty
squarely at our door. "It is a social obligation as imperative as the
law of Moses, as full of hope as the Great Physician's healing touc