OCR Text |
Show and supporters. To say that anything in the covenant empowers foreign governments to order our soldiers to foreign soils to settle foreign disputes is to proclaim an untruth both baseless and wicked. Thirty-nine nations, including every great power except the United States, have entered the league of nations with a full understanding of every obligation assumed. Although the responsibilities respon-sibilities of the covenant apply to them precisely as they do to us, opposition has been confined to a few perfectionists on one side and to small groups of irreclaimable Tories on the other. Is it conceivable that all the progressive peoples of the earth, barring only ourselves, have signed away their liberties and surrendered sur-rendered their war-making power to an authority beyond their control ? If the United States is ever to assume a position of honor, dignity and power in the complicated affairs of the world its statesmen and its political parties must have some regard for truth. The Republican national committee's 5,000 falsifiers are going to be exposed some day, but the mischief that they will do will be lasting. It will poison our foi'eign relations for years to come. It will be an incentive to demagogy and deceit on the part of every turbulent racial cr r.ati-rrl group. Can the Republican Repub-lican party itself afford to win an election with a deliberate falsehood? false-hood? N. Y. World. FIVE THOUSAND FALSIFIERS. Friday and Saturday of last week the Republican national committee, its various treasuries well supplied with money, formally for-mally opened the presidential campaign. Five thousand speakers, all of them well coached and most of them generously paid, took the stump. Never before in the history of American politics was there a program so comprehensive and costly. With military precision, every man has ;i sphere of operations assigned to him. For six weeks to come their one objective will be the ballot box. If this mighty demonstration of partisan vigor and efficiency were honestly directed it would be inspiring in many ways, but its lack of honesty was everywhere in evidence. From the speeches delivered by the leaders we are able to estimate the utterances of all. The keynote of Senator Harding, Senator Lodge, former Justice Hughes, Candidate Miller in New York and National Chairman Hays, not to mention others, was most forcibly sounded in the words of the last-named orator when he said that the question which the people were to decide was "whether foreign governments were to order soldiers of this country to foreign soils to settle foreign disputes." We have had many political contests involving conflicting policies, misunderstandings, prejudices, ignorances and warring interests, but this is the first time that a great party has taken up its position upon an unqualified falsehood. The purpose is to discredit and defeat the existing league of nations and its authors ' |