NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW

MAY, 1919

PEACE WITH VICTORY

It will be peace with victory. Be sure of that. Amid the multitude of wild and whirling words, which darken counsel, that fact stands regnant and supreme. There will be peace with victory.

We do not, it is true, know at this early writing what will be the details of the treaty which, after innumerable postponements, is promised to be made public before these pages meet their readers' eyes. The exigencies of "open covenants, openly arrived at," seem to require a cryptic secrecy. That treaty may, as it should, secure a peace

Proud, to meet a people proud,

With eyes that tell of triumph tasted.

Or it may-God forgive the abhorrent possibility!—provide for a negotiated peace, a patched-up peace, a peace in which the wrongs of the injured will not be righted and the crimes of the guilty will not be punished. It may be a peace so based on compromise with sin as to contain within itself the pregnant menaces of future wars. It may be a peace of pusillanimous surrender to Boches' bluster and Bolshevists' blackmail.

Yet, in what must after all ever be to Americans the supreme sense, it will be peace with victory; for it will be marked with the victory of American nationality and independence over the insidious and pernicious attempt which was made to subvert them to a mawkish and malign internationalism.

Copyright, 1919, by North American Review Corporation. All Rights Reserved. VOL. CCIX.-No. 762

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We do not at this writing know, though it will probably be known to our readers before they scan these words, what will become of the Covenant of the League of Nations. It may be altogether committed to the discard. It may be modified, transmogrified—as indeed it has already beenand adopted. It may be embodied in the treaty of peace. It may be added as an appendix to that instrument. It may be left for after consideration. We do not know. We do not prophecy. We do not greatly care.

But this we do care, and this we do know, that the thing in the detestable form in which the President first arrogantly sought to foist it upon us and to force it to adoption letter perfect, will never again affront the American mind. It will not be presented to the Senate for ratification. It will not be "inextricably intertwined" with the treaty of peace so that, as the President boasted, the two would have to stand or fall together. It will not be adopted by the "Big Four," or by the Grand Council, or by the Plenary Council, or by any other body. The thing is dead and damned. And its successor, whatever its form, and in whatever way it is presented to us, will be a radically different thing; and whatever it may be, it will have to stand successfully the severest tests of American principles and American policy, of American nationality and American independence, or it too will be cast into the discard.

The destinies of the American Republic are not to be determined by any council at the Quai d'Orsay, however august and friendly, nor by any cabal at the Hotel Crillon, however secret and autocratic, but by the American people themselves.

This, then, is the supreme victory which we shall have with the impending peace, a victory which is already assured in advance of the making of peace. And for this victory we owe thanks to the brave and resolute men, in the Senate and out of it, who in the face of unprecedented obloquy from exalted sources took to themselves the words of the hero of Verdun, and said of the President's denationalizing monstrosity, "It shall not pass!"

We expect that we shall have peace. But whether we do or not, we shall have victory.

We shall have victory for nationality over denationality; for the Declaration of Independence over a confession of dependence. We shall have the victory which is implied

in this country's remaining a national integer among other integral States instead of its becoming a mere vulgar fraction of a heterogeneous mass of fractions.

We shall have victory for the Monroe Doctrine over a proposal to abrogate it and to throw American affairs into the olla podrida of Europe, Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea.

We shall have victory for our right to enact and to enforce our own immigration laws, and thus to determine for ourselves what aliens we shall receive into the fellowship of the State, and on what terms we shall receive them.

We shall have victory for our national right to regulate our foreign commerce, and to say what tariff, if any, shall be paid by alien producers for the privilege of competing with our own artisans in our own markets.

We shall have victory for the right to determine for ourselves how large an army and navy we need, and how they shall be organized and for what purposes they shall be used.

We shall have victory for the right to mind our own. business, to be free from foreign meddling in our affairs and to be free from any obligation to meddle in the affairs of other nations.

We shall, in brief, have victory for America, as our fathers designed America to be, over the malefic attempt to make it merely the ninth part of a hybrid league.

This victory was assured for us when patriotism startled into aggressive life at the very menace of the Presidential Covenant; when loyal Senators pledged themselves that the thing should not pass; and when the sound judgment of the nation, without regard to partisan affiliations, asserted itself in self-defence and made it clear that not even a misguided President could seduce it from the way of righteousness and safety.

THE VICTORY LOAN

DECATUR'S toast is apt. There have been those who have dissented from it; good patriots, too. If we remember aright, John Quincy Adams's New England conscience protested against its spirit, though he would have fought for the substance of it to the bitter end. We all wish our country