ADDRESS. September 3, 1919

Speech at Columbus, Ohio, on September 4, 1918, to persuade Americans to support the World War I peace treaty, including the League of Nations proposal contained therein. qqq

[When the United States Senate opened the discussion of the peace treaty with Germany, in which the Covenant of the League of Nations was included as an integral part, there was strong opposition on the part of many Senators to the ratification of the treaty. Most of the opposition centered around the Covenant of the League of Nations, although there was strong opposition also to the grant of the Shantung peninsula of China to Japan for an indefinite period of time. Some Senators were altogether opposed to the treaty in the form submitted; others were in favor of amending it; others were in favor of qualifying clauses. Naturally, the President was able to swing most of the Democratic Senators behind the treaty, but by the elections in the fall of 1918, the Republicans had achieved a majority in the Senate. After some eight weeks’ consultation and discussion of the treaty with Senators in Washington, President Wilson undertook a "swing around the circle" to present the case for the treaty directly to the American people. The President’s tour began on September 3, 1919, and in the course of it he reached the Pacific Coast. The tour was suddenly abandoned at Wichita, Kansas, on September 26, when the President was headed back toward Washington, five days before its scheduled termination, because of the complete prostration of the President as a result of nervous exhaustion due to overwork, both during and after the Peace Conference in Europe.]

Mr. Chairman, Governor Campbell and My Fellow-Citizens:

It is with very profound pleasure that I find myself face to face with you. I have for a long time chafed at the confinement of Washington. I have for a long time wished to fulfill the purpose with which my heart was full when I returned to our beloved country, namely, to go out and report to my fellow-countrymen concerning those affairs of the world which now need to be settled.

The only people I owe any report to are you and the other citizens of the United States, and it has become increasingly necessary, apparently, that I should report to you. After all the various angles at which you have heard the treaty held up perhaps you would like to know what is in the treaty. I find it very difficult in reading some of the speeches that I have read to form any conception of that great document. It is a document unique in the history of the world for many reasons, and I think I cannot do you a better service or the peace of the world a better service than by pointing out to you just what this treaty contains and what it seeks to do.

In the first place, my fellow-countrymen, it seeks to punish one of the greatest wrongs ever done in history, the wrong which Germany sought to do to the world and to civilization, and there ought to be no weak purpose with regard to the application of the punishment. She attempted an intolerable thing, and she must be made to pay for the attempt. The terms of the treaty are severe, but they are not unjust. I can testify that the men associated with me at the Peace Conference in Paris had it in their hearts to do justice and not wrong, but they knew, perhaps with a more vivid sense of what had happened than we could possibly know on this side of the water, the many solemn covenants which Germany had disregarded, the long preparation she had made to overwhelm her neighbors, the utter disregard which she had shown for human rights, for the rights of women and children and those who were helpless. They had seen their lands devastated by an enemy that devoted itself not only to the effort of victory, but to the effort of terror, seeking to terrify the people whom he fought, and I wish to testify that they exercised restraint in the terms of this treaty. They did not wish to overwhelm any great nation, and they had no purpose of overwhelming the German people, but they did think that it ought to be burned into the consciousness of men forever that no people ought to permit its government to do what the German Government did.

In the last analysis, my fellow-countrymen, as we in America would be the first to claim, a people are responsible for the acts of their Government; if their Government purposes things that are wrong, they ought to take measures and see to it that that purpose is not executed. Germany was self-governed. Her rulers had not concealed the purposes that they had in mind, but they had deceived their people as to the character of the methods they were going to use, and I believe from what I can learn that there is an awakened consciousness in Germany itself of the deep .iniquity of the thing that was attempted.

When the Austrian delegates came before the Peace Conference they, in so many words, spoke of the origination of the war as a crime, and admitted in our presence that it was a thing intolerable to contemplate. They knew in their hearts that it had done them the deepest conceivable wrong; that it had put their people and the people of Germany at the judgment seat of mankind; and throughout this treaty every term that was applied to Germany was meant not to humiliate Germany, but to rectify the wrong that she had done. And you will see that if you will look into the severe terms of reparation, for there was no indemnity-no indemnity of any sort was claimed merely reparation, merely paying for the destruction done, merely making good the losses, so far as the losses could be made good which she had unjustly inflicted, not upon the Governments (for the reparation is not to go to the Governments), but upon the people whose rights she had trodden upon, with absolute absence of everything that even resembled pity.

There is no indemnity in this treaty, but there is reparation, and even in the terms of reparation a method is devised by which the reparation shall be adjusted to Germany’s ability to pay it.

I am astonished at some of the statements I see made about this treaty, and the truth is that they are made by persons who have not read the treaty or who, if they have read it, have not comprehended its meaning. There is a method of adjustment in the treaty by which the reparation shall not be pressed beyond the point which Germany can pay, but will be pressed to the utmost point that she can pay, which is just, which is righteous. It would be intolerable if there had been anything else, for, my fellow-citizens, this treaty is not meant merely to end this single war; it is meant as a notice to every Government which in the future will attempt this thing that mankind will unite to inflict the same punishment.

There is no national triumph sought to be recorded in this treaty. There is no, glory sought for any particular nation. The thought of the statesmen collected around that table was of their people, of the sufferings that they had gone through, of the losses they had incurred, that great throbbing heart which was so depressed, so forlorn, so sad in every memory that it had had of the five tragical years that have gone. Let us never forget those years, my fellow countrymen. Let us never forget the purpose, the high purpose, the disinterested purpose, with which America lent its strength, not for its own glory, but for the defense of mankind. .

And, as I said, this treaty was not intended merely to end this war; it was intended to prevent any similar war.

I wonder if some of the opponents of the League of Nations have forgotten the promises we made our people before we went to that peace table. We had taken by processes of law the flower of our youth from every countryside, from every household, and we told those mothers and fathers and sisters and wives and sweethearts that we were taking those men to fight a war which would end business of that sort, and if we do not end it, if we do not do the best that human concert of action can do to end it, we are of all men the most unfaithful-the most unfaithful to the loving hearts who suffered in this war, the most unfaithful to those households bowed in grief, yet lifted with ` the feeling that the lad laid down his life for a great thing-among other things in order that other lads might not have to do the same thing.

That is what the League of Nations is for, to end this war justly, and it is not merely to serve notice on Governments which would contemplate the same thing which Germany contemplated, that they will do so at their peril, but also concerning the combination of power which will prove to them that they will do it at their peril. It is idle to say the world will combine against you because it may not, but it is persuasive to say the world is combined against you and will remain combined against any who attempt the same things that you attempted.

The League of Nations is the only thing that can prevent the recurrence of this dreadful catastrophe and redeem our promises. And the character of the League is based upon the experience of this very war.

I did not meet a single public man who did not admit these things that Germany would not have gone into this war if she had thought Great Britain was going into it, and that she most certainly would never have gone into this war if she had dreamed America was going into it, and they have all admitted that a notice beforehand that the greatest powers of the world would combine to prevent this sort of thing would have prevented it absolutely.

When gentlemen tell you, therefore, that the League of Nations is intended for some other purpose than this, merely reply this to them, "If we do not do this thing, we have neglected the Central Covenant that we made to our people," and there will be no statesman of any country who can thereafter promise his people any alleviation from the perils of war.

The passions of this world are not head; the rivalries of this world have not cooled; they have been rendered hotter than ever. The harness that is to unite nations is more necessary now than it ever was before, and unless there is this sureness of combined action before wrong is attempted, wrong will be attempted just as soon as the most ambitious nations can recover from the financial stress of this war.

Now look what else is in the treaty. This treaty is unique in the history of mankind because the centre of it is the redemption of weak nations. There never was a congress of nations before that considered the rights of those who could not enforce their rights. There never was a congress of nations before that did not seek to effect some balance of power brought about by means of serving the strength and interest of the strongest powers concerned, whereas this treaty builds up nations that never could have won their freedom in any other way. It builds them up by gift, by largess, not by obligation; builds them up because of the conviction of the men who wrote the treaty that the rights of people transcended the rights of Governments, because of the conviction of the men who wrote that treaty that the fertile source of war is wrong; that the Austro-Hungarian Empire, for example, was held together by military force and consisted of peoples who did not want to live together; who did not have the spirit of nationality as toward each other; who were constantly chafing at the bonds that held them.

Hungary, though a willing partner of Austria, was willing to be her partner because she could share Austria’s strength for accomplishing her own ambitions, and her own ambitions were to hold under her the Jugo-Slavic peoples that lay to the south of her; Bohemia, an unhappy partner-a partner by duress, beating in all her veins the strongest national impulse that was to be found anywhere in Europe; and north of that, pitiful Poland, a great nation divided up among the great powers of Europe, torn asunder-kinship disregarded, natural ties treated with contempt and an obligatory division among sovereigns imposed upon her, a part of her given to Russia, a part of her given to Austria, and a part of her given to Germany, and great bodies of Polish people never permitted to have the normal intercourse with their kinsmen for fear that that fine instinct of the heart should assert itself which binds families together.

Poland could never have won her independence. Bohemia never could have broken away from the Austro-Hungarian combination. The Slavic peoples to the south, running down into the great Balkan peninsula, had again and again tried to assert their nationality and their independence, and had as often been crushed, not by the immediate power they were fighting, but by the combined power of Europe.

The old alliances, the old balances of power, were meant to see to it that no little nation asserted its rights to the disturbance of the peace of Europe, and every time an assertion of rights was attempted it were suppressed by combined influence and force. And this treaty tears away all that and says these people have a right to live their own lives under the governments which they themselves choose to set up. That is the American principle and I was glad to fight for it, and when strategic consideration were urged I said (not I alone, but it was a matter of common counsel) that strategic conditions were not in [p.8789] our thoughts; that we were not now arranging for future wars, but were giving people what belonged to them.

My fellow-citizens, I do not think there is any man alive who has a more tender sympathy for the great people of Italy than I have, and a very stern duty was presented to us when we had to consider some of the claims of Italy on the Adriatic, because strategically, from the point of view of future wars, Italy needed a military foothold on the other side of the Adriatic, but her people did not live there except in little spots. It was a Slavic people, and I had to say to my Italian friends

"Everywhere else in this treaty we have given territory to the people who lived on it, and I do not think that it is for the advantage of Italy, and I am sure it is not for the advantage of the world, to give Italy territory where other people live."

I felt the force of the argument for what they wanted, and it was the old argument that had always prevailed, namely, that they needed it from a military point of view, and I have no doubt that if there is no League of Nations they will need it from a military point of view. But if there is a League of Nations they will not need it from a military point of view. If there is no League of Nations the military point of view will prevail in every instance and peace will be brought into contempt, but if there is a League of Nations Italy need not fear the fact that the shores on the other side of the Adriatic tower above her sandy shores on her side of the sea, because there will be no threatening guns there, and the nations of the world will have concerted not merely to see that the Slavic peoples have their rights but that the Italian people have their rights as well. I would rather have everybody on my side than be armed to the teeth; and every settlement that is right, every settlement that is based upon the principles I have alluded to, is a safe settlement because the sympathy of mankind will be behind it.

Some gentlemen have feared with regard to the League of Nations that we will be obliged to do things we don’t want to do. If the treaty were wrong, that might be so; but if the treaty is right, we will wish to preserve right. I think I know the heart of this great people, whom I for the time being have the high honor to represent, better than some other men that I hear talk.

I have been bred and am proud to have been bred in the old Revolutionary stock which set this Government up when America was set up as a friend of mankind, and I know; if they do not, that America has never lost that vision or that purpose.

But I haven’t the slightest fear that arms will be necessary if the purpose is there. If I know that my adversary .is armed and I am not, I do not press the controversy; and if any nation entertains selfish purposes set against the principles established in this treaty, and is told by the rest of the world that it must withdraw its claims, it will not press them.

The heart of this treaty, then, my fellow-citizens, is not even that it punishes Germany-that is a temporary thing-it is that it rectifies the age-long wrongs which characterized the history of Europe.

There were some of us who wished that the scope of the treaty would reach some other age-long wrongs. It was a big job, and I don’t say that we wished that it were bigger; but there were other wrongs elsewhere than in Europe, and of the same kind, which no doubt ought to be righted, and some day will be righted, but which we could not draw into the treaty because we could deal only with the countries whom the war had engulfed and affected. But, so far as the scope of our authority went, we rectified the wrongs which have been the fertile source of war in Europe.

Have you ever reflected, my fellow-countrymen, on the real source of revolutions? Men don’t start revolutions in a sudden passion. Do you remember what Thomas Carlyle said about the French revolution

He was speaking of the so-called Hundred Days Terror which reigned, not only in Paris, but throughout France, in the days of the French revolution; and he reminded his readers that back of that Hundred Days of Terror lay several hundred years of agony and of wrong. The French people had been deeply and consistently wronged by their Government; robbed; their human rights disregarded; and the slow agony of those hundreds of years had after a while gathered into a hot anger that could not be suppressed.

Revolutions don’t spring up over night; revolutions gather through the ages; revolutions come from the long suppression of the human spirit; revolutions come because men know that they have rights and that they are disregarded.

And when we think of the future of the world in connection with this treaty, we must remember that one of the chief efforts of those who made this treaty was to remove that anger from the heart of great peoples-great peoples who had always been suppressed and always been used, who had always been the tools in the hands of governments -generally of alien governments-not their own. And the makers of the treaty knew that if these wrongs were not removed, there could be no peace in the world, because, after all, my fellow-citizens, war comes from the seed of wrong, and not from the seed of right. This treaty is an attempt to right the history of Europe, and in my humble judgment it is a measurable success.

I say "measurable," my fellow-citizens, because you will realize the difficulty of this:, Here are two neighboring peoples. The one people have not stopped at a sharp line, and the settlements of the other people, or their migrations, begun at that sharp line; they have inter mingled. There are regions where you can’t draw a national line and say there are Slavs on this side and Italians on that; there is this people here and that people there. It can’t be done. You have to approximate the line. You have to come as near to it as you can, and then trust to the process of history to redistribute, it may be, the people who are on the wrong side of the line. And there are many such lines drawn in this treaty and to be drawn in the Austrian treaty, and where, perhaps, there are more lines of that sort than in the German treaty.

When we came to draw the line between the Polish people and the German people (not the line between Germany and Poland-there wasn’t any Poland, strictly speaking) there were districts like the upper part of Silesia, or rather the eastern part of Silesia, which is called "Upper Silesia" because it is mountainous and the other part is not. Upper Silesia is chiefly Polish, and when we came to draw a line to represent Poland it was necessary to include Upper Silesia if we were really going to play fair and make Poland up of the Polish people wherever we found them in sufficiently close neighborhood to one another. But it wasn’t perfectly clear that Upper or High Silesia wanted to be part of Poland. At any rate, there were Germans in Upper Silesia who said that it did not, and therefore we did there what we did in many other places-we said, "Very well, then, we will let the people that live there decide. We will have a referendum within a certain length of time after the war under the supervision of an international commission which will have a sufficient armed force behind it to preserve order and see that nobody interferes with the elections. We will have an absolutely free vote, and Upper Silesia shall go either to Germany or to Poland, as the people in Upper Silesia prefer."

And that illustrates many other cases where we provided for a referendum, or a plebiscite, as they choose to call it; and are going to leave it to the people themselves, as we should have done, what Government they shall live under.

It is none of my prerogatives to allot peoples to this Government and the other. It is nobody’s right to do that allotting except the people themselves, and I want to testify that this treaty is shot through with the American principle of the choice of the governed.

Of course, at times it went further than we could make a practical policy of, because various peoples were keen upon getting back portions of their populations which were separated from them by many miles of territory, and we could not spot Europe with little pieces of separated States. I even had to remind my Italian colleagues that if they were going to claim every place where there was a large Italian population, we would have to cede New York to them, because there are more Italians in New York than in any Italian city.

But I believe-I hope-that the Italians in New York City are as glad to stay there as we are to have them. I would not have you suppose that I am intimating that my Italian colleagues entered any claim for New York City.

We, of all peoples in the world, my fellow-citizens, ought to be able to understand the questions of this treaty without anybody explaining them to us; for we are made up out of all the peoples of the world. I dare say that in this audience there are representatives of practically all the peoples dealt with in this treaty. You don’t have to have me explain national ambitions to you. You have been brought up on them; you have learned of them since you were children, and it is those national aspirations which we sought to realize, to give an outlet to, in this great treaty.

But we did much more than that. This treaty contains, among other things, a Magna Charta of labor-a thing unheard of until this interesting year of grace. There is a whole section of the treaty devoted to arrangements by which the interests of those who labor with their hands all over the world, whether they be men or women or children, are all of them to be safeguarded. And next month there is to meet the first assembly under this section of the League-and let me tell you it will meet, whether the treaty is ratified by that time or not there is to meet an assembly which represents the interests of laboring men throughout the world. Not their political interests, there is nothing political about it. It is the interests of men concerning the conditions of their labor, concerning the character of labor which women shall engage in, the character of labor which children shall be permitted to engage in; the hours of labor, and, incidentally, of course, the remuneration of labor, that labor shall be remunerated in proportion, of course, to the maintenance of the standard of living which is proper for the man who is expected to give his whole brain and intelligence and energy to a particular task.

I hear very little said about the Magna Charta of labor which is embodied in this treaty. It forecasts the day, which ought to have come long ago, when statesmen will realize that no nation is fortunate which is not happy, and that no nation can be happy whose people are not contented-contented in their industry, contented in their lives, and fortunate in the circumstances of their lives.

If I were to state what seems to me to be the central idea of this treaty it would be this (it is almost a discovery in international conventions,) : "Nations do not consist of their Government, but consist of their people."

That is a rudimentary idea; it seems, to go without saying to us in America; but, my fellow-citizens, it ,was never the leading idea irk any other international congress that I ever heard of, that is to say international congress made up of the representatives of Government. They were always thinking of national policy, of national advantages, of the rivalries of trade, of the advantages of territorial conquest.

There is nothing of that in this treaty. You will notice that even the territories which are taken away from Germany, like her colonies, are not given to anybody. There isn’t a single act of annexation in this treaty. But territories inhabited by people not yet able to govern themselves, either because of economic or other circumstances or the stage of their development, are put under the care of powers who are to act as trustees-trustees responsible in the forum of the world, at the bar of the League of Nations, and the terms upon which they are to exercise their trusteeship are outlined. They are not to use those people by way of profit and to fight their wars for them; they are’ riot to permit any form of slavery among them or of enforced labor. They are to see to it that there are humane conditions of labor with regard not only to the women and children, but to the men, also. They are to establish no fortifications; they are to regulate the liquor and opium traffic; they are to see to it, in other words, that the lives of the people whose care they assume-not sovereignty over whom they assume, but whose care they assume-are kept clean and safe and wholesome. There again the principle of the treaty comes out, that the object of the arrangement is the welfare of the people who live there and not the advantages of the Government which is the trustee.

It goes beyond that, and it seeks to gather under the common supervision of the League of Nations the various instrumentalities by which the world has been trying to check the evils that were in some places debasing men, like the opium traffic, like the traffic-for it was a traffic -in men, women, and children; like the traffic in other dangerous drugs; like the traffic in arms among uncivilized peoples, who could use arms only for their detriment; for sanitation; for the work of the Red Cross.

Why, those clauses, my fellow-citizens, draw the hearts of the world into league; draw the noble impulses of the world together and make a poem of them.

I used to be told that this was an age in which mind was monarch, and my comment was that if that were true then mind was one of those modern monarchs that reign and do not govern; but as a matter of fact we were governed by a great representative assembly made up of the human passions, and that the best we could manage was that the high and fine passions should be in a majority, so that they could control the baser passions, so that they could check the things that were wrong. This treaty seeks something like that. In drawing the humane endeavors of the world together, it makes a league of the fine passions of the world, of its philanthrophic passions, of its passion of pity, of the passion of human sympathy, of the passion of human friendliness and helpfulness, for there is such a passion. It is the passion that has lifted us along the slow road of civilization; it is the passion that has made ordered government possible; it is the passion that has made justice and established it in some happy parts of the world.

That is the treaty. Did you ever hear of it before? Did you ever know before what was in this treaty? Did anybody before ever tell you what the treaty was intended to do?

I beg, my fellow-citizens, that you and the rest of these Americans with whom we are happy to be associated all over this broad land will read the treaty for yourselves, or (if you won’t take time to do that, for it is a technical document that is hard to read) that you will accept the interpretation of those who made it and know what the intentions were in the making of it.

I hear a great deal, my fellow-citizens, about the selfishness and the selfish ambitions of other Governments, but I would not be doing justice to the gifted men with whom I was associated on the other side of the water if I didn’t testify that the purposes that I have outlined were their purposes. We differed as to the method, very often; we had discussions as to the details, but we never had any serious discussion as to the principle. And while we all acknowledge that the principles might, perhaps, in detail have been better realized, really we are all back of those principles. There is a concert of mind and of purpose and of policy in the world that was never in existence before. I am not saying that by way of credit to myself or to those colleagues to whom I have alluded, because what happened to us was that we got messages from our people; we were there under instructions, whether they were written down or not, and we didn’t dare come home without fulfilling those instructions. If I could not have brought back the kind of treaty I brought back I never would have come back, because I would have been an unfaithful servant and you would have had the right to condemn me in any way that you chose to use. So that I testify that this is an American treaty not only, but it is a treaty that expresses the heart of the peoples-of the great peoples who were associated together in the war against Germany.

I said at the opening of this informal address, my fellow-citizens, that I had come to make a report to you. I want to add to that a little bit. I have not come to debate the treaty. It speaks for itself, if you will let it. The arguments directed against it are directed against it with a radical misunderstanding of the instrument itself. Therefore, I am not going anywhere to debate the treaty. I am going to expound it and I am going, right here now today, to urge you, in every vocal method that you can use, to assert the spirit of the American people in support of it. Don’t let men pull it down. Don’t let men misrepresent it. Don’t let men lead this nation away from the high purposes with which this war was inaugurated and fought.

As I came through that line of youngsters in khaki a few minutes ago I felt that I could salute it because I had done the job in the way I promised them I would do it, and when the treaty is accepted men in khaki will not have to cross the seas again. That is the reason I believe in it. I say "when it is accepted," for it will be accepted. I have never entertained a moment’s doubt of that, and the only thing I have been impatient of has been the delay. It is not a dangerous delay, except for the temper of the peoples scattered throughout the world who are waiting. Do you realize, my fellow-citizens, that the whole world is waiting on America? The only country in the world that is trusted at this moment is the United States, and they are waiting to see whether their trust is justified or not.

That has been the ground of my impatience. I knew their trust was justified, but I begrudge the time that certain gentlemen oblige us to take in telling them so. We shall tell them so in a voice as authentic as any voice in history, and in the years to come men will be glad to remember that they had some part in the great struggle which brought this incomparable consummation of the hopes of mankind.