Address Following Dinner at the Hotel Alexandria in Los Angeles, California

Mr. Toastmaster and ladies and gentlemen, may I not first thank you, Mr. Toastmaster, for your very generous introduction? It spoke in the same delightful tone of welcome that I have heard in the voices on the street to-day, and, although I do not accept for myself the praise that you have so generously bestowed upon me, I nevertheless do recognize in it that you have set just the right note for the discussion which I wanted for a few moments to attempt.

There is only one thing, my fellow citizens, that has daunted me on this trip. My good father used to teach me that you can not reason out of a man what reason did not put in him, and, suspecting—may I not say knowing—that much of the argument directed against the league of nations is not based upon reason, I must say I have sometimes been puzzled how to combat it, because it is true, as your toastmaster has said, that there is a great constructive plan presented, and no man in the presence of the present critical situation of mankind has the right to oppose any constructive plan except by a better constructive plan. I will say now that I am ready to take ship again and carry back to Paris any constructive proposals which appear a suitable and better substitute for those which have been made.

There is a peculiarity about this constructive plan which ought, I think, to facilitate our acceptance of it. It is laid out in every part upon American principles. Everybody knows that the principles of peace proposed by America were adopted, were adopted as the basis of the armistice and have been acted upon as the basis of the peace, and there is a circumstance about those American principles which gives me absolute confidence in them. They were not principles which I originated. They would have none of the strength in them that they have if they had been of individual origination. I remember how anxiously I watched the movements of opinion in this country during the months immediately preceding our entrance into the war. Again and again I put this question to the men who sat around the board at which the Cabinet meets. They represented different parts of the country, they were in touch with the opinion in different parts of the United States, and I would frequently say to them, "How do you think the people feel with regard to our relation to this war?" And I remember, one day, one of them said, "Mr. President, I think that they are ready to do anything you suggest." I said, "That is not what I am waiting for. That is not enough. If they do not go in of their own impulse, no impulse that I can supply will suffice, and I must wait until I know that I am their spokesman. I must wait until I know that I am interpreting their purpose. Then I will know that I have got an irresistible power behind me." And that is exactly what happened.

That is what is now appreciated as it was not at first appreciated on the other side of the sea. They wondered and wondered why we did not come in. They had come to the cynical conclusion that we did not come in because we were making money out of the war and did not want to spoil the profitable game; and then at last they saw what we were waiting for, in order that the whole plot of the German purpose should develop, in order that we might see how the intrigue of that plot had penetrated our own life, how the poison was spreading, and how it was nothing less than a design against the freedom of the world. They knew that when America once saw that she would throw her power in with those who were going to redeem the world. And at every point of the discussion I was attempting to be the mouthpiece of what I understood right-thinking and forward-thinking and just-thinking men without regard to party or section in the United States to be purposing and conceiving, and it was the consciousness in Europe that that was the case that made it possible to construct the peace upon American principles. The American principles were not only accepted. They were acted upon, and when I came back to this country with that plan I think you will bear me out that the Nation was prepared to accept it. I have no doubt, and I have not met anybody who had any well- reasoned doubt, that if immediate action could have been secured upon the treaty at that time only a negligible percentage of our people, would have objected to its acceptance, without a single change in either the wording or the punctuation. But then something intervened, and, my fellow citizens, I am not only not going to try to analyze what that was, I am not going to allow my own judgment to be formed as regards what it was. I do not understand it, but there is a certain part of it that I do understand. It is to the immediate interest of Germany to separate us from our associates in the war, and I know that the opposition to the treaty is most acceptable in those quarters of the country where pro-German sentiment was strongest. I know that all over the country German propaganda has lifted its hideous head again, and I hear the hiss of it on every side.

When gentlemen speak of isolation, they forget we would have a companion. There would be another isolated nation, and that is Germany. They forget that we would be in the judgment of the world in the same class and at the same disadvantage as Germany. I mean sentimental disadvantage. We would be regarded as having withdrawn. our cooperation from that concerted purpose of mankind which was recently conceived and exercised for the liberation of mankind, and Germany would be the only nation in the world to profit by it, I have no doubt there are scores of business men present. Do you think we would profit materially by isolating ourselves and centering upon ourselves the hostility and suspicion and resistance of all the liberal minds in the world? Do you think that if, after having won the absolute confidence of the world and excited the hope of the world, we would lead if we should turn away from them and say, "No; we do not care to be associated with you any longer; we are going to play a lone hand; we are going to play it for our single advantage"? Do you think after that there is a very good psychology for business, there is a very good psychology for credit? Do you think that throws foreign markets open to you? Do you remember what happened just before we went into the war? There was a conference in Paris, the object of which was to unite the peoples fighting against Germany in an economic combination which would be exclusively for their own benefit. It is possible now for those powers to organize and combine in respect of the purchase of raw materials, and if the foreign market for our raw materials is united, we will have to sell at the price that they are willing to pay or not sell at all. Unless you go into the great economic partnership with the world, you have the rest of the world economically combined against you. So that if you bring the thing down to this lowest of all bases, the bases of material self-interest, you lose in the game, and, for my part, I am free to say that you ought to lose.

We are told that we are strong and they are weak; that we still have economic of financial independence and they have not. Why, my fellow citizens, what does that mean? That means that they went into the redemption of the freedom of the world sooner than we did and gave everything that they had to redeem it. And now we, because we did not go in so soon or lose so much, want to make profit of the redeemers! The thing is hideous. The thing is unworthy of every tradition of America. I speak of it not because I think that sort of thing takes the least hold upon the consciousness or the purpose of America but because it is a pleasure to condemn so ugly a thing.

When we look at the objections which these gentlemen make, I have found in going about the country that the result has been that in the greater part of the United States the people do not know what is in the treaty. To my great surprise, I have had to stand up and expound the treaty—tell the people what is in it—and I have had man after man say, "Why, we never dreamed that those things were in the treaty. We never heard anything about that." No; you never heard anything about the greater part of the enterprise; you only heard about some of the alleged aspects of the method in which the enterprise was to be carried out. That is all you have heard about. I remember saying—and I believe it was the thought of America—that this was a people's war and the treaty must be a people's peace. That is exactly what this peace treaty proposes. For the first time in the history of civilized society, a great international convention, made up of the leading statesmen of the world, has proposed a settlement which is for the benefit of the weak and not for the benefit of the strong. It is for the benefit of peoples who could not have liberated themselves, whose weakness was profitable to the ambitious and imperialistic nations, whose weakness had been traded in by every cabinet in Europe; and yet these very cabinets represented at the table in Paris were unanimous in the conviction that the people's day had come and that it was not their right to dispose of the fortunes of people without the consent of those people themselves.

At the front of this great settlement they put the only thing that will preserve it. You can not set weak peoples up in independence and then leave them to be preyed upon. You can not give a false gift. You can not give to people rights which they never enjoyed before and say, "Now, keep them if you can." That is an Indian gift. That is a gift which can not be kept. If you have a really humane purpose and a real knowledge of the conditions of peace in the world, you will have to say, "This is the settlement and we guarantee its continuance." There is only one honorable course when you have won a cause, to see that it stays won and nobody interferes with or disturbs the results. That is the purpose of the much-discussed article 10 in the covenant of the league of nations. It is the Monroe doctrine applied to the world. Ever since Mr. Monroe uttered his famous doctrine we have said to the world, "We will respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and the political independence of every State in the Western Hemisphere," and those are practically the words of article 10. Under article 10 all the members of the league engage to respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of the other member States, and if that guaranty is not forthcoming the whole structure of peace will crumble, because you can not point out a great war that has not begun by a violation of that principle; that has not begun by the intention to impair the territorial integrity or to interfere with the political independence of some body of people of some nation. It was the heart of the Pan-German plan. It is the heart of every imperialistic plan, because imperialism is the design to control the destinies of people who did not choose you to control them. It is the principle of domination. It is at the opposite extreme from the principle of self-determination and self-government, and in that same covenant of the league of nations is the provision that only self-governing States shall be admitted to the membership of the league. No influence shall be injected there which is not sympathetic with the fundamental principle, namely, that ancient and noble principle that underlies our institutions, that all just government depends upon the consent of the governed.

You have no choice, my fellow citizens, because the peoples of the world, even those that slept, are awake. There is not a country in the world where the great mass of mankind is not now aware of its rights and determined to have them at any cost, and the present universal unrest in the world, which renders return to normal conditions impossible so long as it continues, will not stop until men are assured by some arrangement they can believe in that their rights will be protected and that they can go about the normal production of the necessaries of life and begin to enjoy the ordinary pleasures and privileges of life without the constant shadow of some cloud of terror over them, some threat of injustice, some tyranny of control. Men are not going to stand it. If you want to quiet the world, you have got to reassure the world, and the only way in which you can reassure it is to let it know that all the great fighting powers of the world are going to maintain that quiet, that the fighting power is no longer to be directed toward aggression, but is to be directed toward protection. And every great fighting nation in the world will be in the league—because Germany for the time being is not a great fighting power. That great nation of over 60,000,000 people has consented in the treaty to reduce its standing armed force to 100,000 men and to give up all the war material over and above what is necessary to maintain an army of 100,000 men; so that for the time being we may exclude Germany from the list of the fighting nations of the world. The whole power of the world is now offered to mankind for the maintenance of peace, and for the maintenance of peace by the very, processes we have all professed to believe in, by substituting arbitration and discussion for war, by substituting the judgment of mankind for the force of arms.

I say without qualification that every nation that is not afraid of the judgment of mankind will go into this arrangement. There is nothing for any nation to lose whose purposes are right and whose cause is just: The only nations that need fear to go into it are those that have designs which are illegitimate, those which have designs that are inconsistent with justice and are the opposite of peace. ?The whole freedom of the world not only, but the whole peace of mind of the world, depends upon the choice of America, because without America in this arrangement the world will not be reassured. I can testify to that. I can testify that no impression was borne in. deeper upon me on the other side of the water than that no great free peoples suspected the United States of ulterior designs, and that every nation, the weakest among them, felt that its fortunes would be safe if intrusted to the guidance of America; that America would not impose upon it. At the peace table one of the reasons why American advice constantly prevailed, as it did, was that our experts—our financial experts, our economic experts, and all the rest of us, for you must remember that the work of the conference was not done exclusively by the men whose names you all read about every day; it was done in the most intensive labor of experts of every sort who sat down together and got down to the hardpan of every subject that they had to deal with—were known to be disinterested, and in nine cases out of ten, after a long series of debates and interchanges of views and counterproposals, it was usually the American proposal that was adopted. That was because the American experts came at last into this position of advantage, they had convinced everybody that they were not trying to work anything, that they were not thinking of something that they did not disclose, that they wanted all the cards on the table, and that they wanted to deal with nothing but facts. They were not dealing with national ambitions, they were not trying to disappoint anybody, and they were not trying to stack the cards for anybody. It was that conviction, and that only, which led to the success of American counsel in Paris.

Is not that a worthy heritage for people who set up a great free Nation on this continent in order to lead men in the ways of justice and of liberty? My heart was filled with a profound pride when I realized how America was regarded, and my only fear was that we who were over there would not have wisdom enough to play the part. Delegations from literally all parts of the world came to seek interviews with me as the spokesman of America, and there was always a plea that America should lead; that America should suggest. I remember saying to one of the delegations, which seemed to me more childlike in its confidence than the rest, "I beg that you gentlemen will not expect the impossible. America will do everything that she can, but she can not do some of the things that you are expecting of her. My chief fear is to disappoint, because you are expecting what can not be realized." My fear was not that America would not prove true to herself, but that the things expected of her were so ideal that in this practical world, full of obstacles, it would be impossible to realize the expectation. There was in the back- ground the infinite gratification at the reputation and confidence that this country had won.

The world is in that situation industrially, economically, politically. The world will be absolutely in despair if America deserts it. But the thing is inconceivable. America is not going to desert it. The people of America are not going to desert it. The job is to get that into the consciousness of men who do not understand it. The job is to restore some of our fellow citizens to that large sort of sanity which makes a man bigger than himself. We have had a great many successful men in America, my fellow citizens, but we have seldom erected a statue to a man who was merely successful in a business way. Almost all the statues in America, almost all the memorials, are erected to men who forgot themselves and worked for other people. They may not have been rich, they may not have been successful in the worldly sense, they may have been deemed in their generation dreamers and idealists, but when they were dead America remembered that they loved mankind, America remembered that they embodied in those dreamy ideals of theirs the visions that America had had, America remembered that they had a great surplus of character that they spent not upon themselves but upon the enterprises of humanity. A man who has not got that surplus capital of character that he spends upon the great enterprises of communities and of nations will sink into a deserved oblivion, and the only danger is that in his concentration upon his own ambitions, in his centering of everything that he spends upon himself, he will lead others astray and work a disservice to great communities which he ought to have served. It is now an enterprise of infection ahead of us—shall I call it? We have got to infect those men with the spirit of the Nation itself. We have got to make them aware that we will not be led; that we will not be controlled; that we will not be restrained by those who are not like ourselves; and that America now is in the presence of the realization of the destiny for which she has been waiting.

You know, you have been told, that Washington advised us against entangling alliances, and gentlemen have used that as an argument against the league of nations. What Washington had in mind was exactly what these gentlemen want to lead us back to. The day we have left behind us was a day of alliances. It was a day of balances of power. It was a day of "every nation take care of itself or make a partnership with some other nation or group of nations to hold the peace of the world steady or to dominate the weaker portions of the world." Those were the days of alliances. This project of the league of nations is a great process of disentanglement. I was reading only this morning what a friend of mine reminded me of, a speech that President McKinley made the day before he was assassinated, and in several passages of that speech you see the dawn of this expectation in his humane mind. His whole thought was against isolation. His whole thought was that we had by process of circumstance, as well as of interest, become partners with the rest of the world. His thought was that the world had grown little by quickened methods of intercommunication. His whole thought was that the better we knew each other and the closer we drew together, the more certain it would be that the processes of arbitration would be adopted; that men would not fight but would talk things over; that they would realize their community of interest; and shot all through that speech you see the morning light of just such a day as this. It would look as if the man had been given a vision just before he died—one of the sweetest and most humane souls that have been prominent in our affairs, a man who thought with his head and with his heart. This new day was dawning upon his heart, and his intelligence was beginning to draw the lines of the new picture which has been completed and sketched in a constructive document that we shall adopt and that, having adopted it, we shall find to reflect a new glory upon the things that we did. Then what significance will attach to the boy's sword or the boy's musket over the mantelpiece— not merely that he beat Germany, but that he redeemed the world.