Address at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California

Mr. Mayor, Mrs. Cowles, my fellow countrymen, I esteem it a great privilege to stand before this audience, and I esteem it one of the most interesting occasions that I have had to expound a theme so great that I am always afraid that I am inadequate to its exposition. I esteem it a privilege to be in the presence that I find myself in, on the stage with this committee of gentlemen representing the nations with whom we have been associated in the war, with these men who saved the Union and with these men who saved the world.

I feel that there is a certain sense in which I am rendering my account to the soldiers and sailors whose Commander in Chief I have been, for I sent them across the sea believing that their errand was not only to defeat Germany, but also to redeem the world from the danger to which Germany had exposed it, to make the world a place in which arbitration, discussion, the processes of peace, the processes of justice should supplant the brutal processes of war. I came back from the other side proud that I was bringing with me a document which contained a great constructive plan to accomplish that very thing. It is a matter of unaffected amazement on my part, my fellow citizens, that there should be men in high station who oppose its adoption. It is a matter of amazement that they should devote their scrutiny to certain details and forget the majesty of the plan, that they should actually have made it necessary that I should go throughout the country telling the people of the United States what is in the treaty of peace. For they have not told you. They have given you no conception of its scope. They have not expounded its objects. They have not shown you how it is a people's and not a statesmen's peace. They have not shown you how at its heart lies the liberation of nations. They have not shown you that in it is the redemption of our promise that we were fighting for the right of the weak and not for the power of the strong. These promises are redeemed in that great document, these hopes are realized, and the only buttress for that great structure is the league of nations. If that should fail, there is no guaranty that any part of the settlement will stand. If that should fail, nations will once more sink back into that slough of despond in which they formerly struggled, suspecting one another, rivaling one another in preparation for war, intriguing against one another, plotting against the weak in order to supplement the power of the strong.

And they did more than that, because mankind is now aware that the rights of the greater portion of mankind have not been safeguarded and regarded. Do not for a moment suppose that the universal unrest in the world at the present time, my fellow citizens, is due to any whim, to any newborn passion, to any newly discovered ambition. It is due to the fact, the sad, the tragic fact, that great bodies of men have throughout the ages been denied the mere rights of humanity. The peoples of the world are tired of a time with governments that exploit their people, and they are determined to have, by one process or another, that concerted order of conciliation and debate and conference which is set up in the great document that we know as the covenant of the league of nations. The heart of that document is not in the mere details that you have heard about. The heart of that document is that every great fighting nation in the world—for Germany at present is not a great fighting nation— solemnly engages that it will never resort to war without first having done one or other of two things, either submitted the matter in dispute to arbitration, in which case it agrees to abide by the verdict, or, if it does not choose to submit it to arbitration, submit it to the discussion and examination of the council of the league of nations, before whom it promises to lay all the documents, to whom it promises to disclose all the pertinent facts, by whom it agrees all the documents and facts shall be published and laid before the opinion of the world. It agrees that six months shall be allowed for the examination of those documents and facts by the council of the league and that, even if it is dissatisfied with the opinion finally uttered, it will still not resort to war until three months after the opinion has been rendered. All agree that there shall be nine months of deliberate discussion and frank weighing of the merits of the case before the whole jury of mankind before they will go to war.

If any one of them disregards that promise and refuses to submit the question in dispute either to arbitration or to discussion, or goes to war within less than the nine months, then there is an automatic penalty that is applied, more effective, I take leave to say, than war itself, namely, the application of an absolute boycott. The nation that disregards that promise, we all agree, shall be isolated; shall be denied the right to ship out goods or to ship them in, to exchange telegraphic messages or messages by mail, to have any dealings of any kind with the citizens of the other members of the league. First, the pressure of opinion and then the compelling pressure of economic necessity—those are the great bulwarks of peace. Do you say they are not sufficient? I put this proposition to you: You want insurance against war. Wouldn't you rather have 10 per cent insurance than none? If you could get 20 per cent insurance, wouldn't you be delighted? If you got 50 per cent insurance, wouldn't you think it Utopian? Why, my fellow citizens, if you examine the provisions of this league of nations, I think you will agree with me that you have got 99 per cent insurance. That is what we promised the mothers and wives and sweethearts of these men that they should have—insurance against the terrible danger of losing those who were dear to them, slain upon the battle field because of the unhallowed plots of autocratic governments. Autocratic governments are excluded henceforth from respectable society. It is provided in the covenant of the league of nations that only self-governing peoples shall be admitted to its membership, and the reason that Germany is for the time being excluded is that we want to wait and see whether she really has changed permanently her form of constitution and her habit of government. If she has changed her mind in reality, if her great people have taken charge of their own affairs and will prove it to us, they are entitled to come into respectable society and join the league of nations. Until then they are on probation, and to hear some of them talk now you would think the probation had to be rather long, because they do not seem to have repented of their essential purpose.

Now, offset against this, my fellow citizens, some of the things that are being said about the covenant of the league and about the treaty. I want to begin with one of the central objections which are made to the treaty, for I have come here disposed to business. I do not want to indulge in generalities. I do not want to dwell more than it is proper to dwell upon the great ideal purposes that lie behind this peace and this covenant. I want to contrast some things that have been said with the real facts. There is nothing that is formidable in this world in public affairs except facts. Talk does not matter. As I was saying the other night, if you suspect any acquaintance of yours of being a fool, encourage him to hire a hall. Your fellow citizens will then know whether your judgment of him was right or wrong, and it will not be you that convinced them, it will be he who does the convincing. The best way to dissipate nonsense is to expose it to the open air. It is a volatile thing, whereas fact and truth are concrete things and you can not dissipate them that way. perhaps I may tell a rather trivial story. When I was governor of New Jersey I got rather reluctant support for a certain measure of reform that I was very much interested in from a particular member of the senate of the State who, I think, if he had been left to his own devices, would probably have not voted for the measure, but to whom an influential committee of his fellow towns-men came and, so to say, personally conducted his vote. After they had successfully conducted it in the way that they wished, they solemnly brought him into my office to be congratulated. It was a great strain upon my gravity, but I pulled as straight a face as I could and thanked him and congratulated him. Then, tipping a very heavy wink indeed, he said, "Governor, they never get me if I see them coming first." Now, I have adopted that as my motto with regard to facts. I never let them get me if I see them coming first. The danger for some of the gentlemen we are thinking about tonight, but not mentioning, is that the facts are coming and they do not see them. My prediction is that the facts are going to get them and make a very comfortable meal off of them.

Let us take up some of these things, to grow serious again. In the first place, there is that very complex question of the cession of the rights which Germany formerly enjoyed in Shantung Province, in China, and which the treaty transfers to Japan. The only way in which to clear this matter up is to know what lies back of it. Let me recall some circumstances which probably most of you have forgotten. I have to go back to the year 1898, for it was in March of that year that these cessions which formerly belonged to Germany were transferred to her by the Government of China. What had happened was that two German missionaries in China had been murdered. The central Government at Peking had done everything that was in its power to do to quiet the local disturbances, to allay the local prejudice against foreigners which led to the murders, but had been unable to do so, and the German Government held them responsible, nevertheless, for the murder of the missionaries. It was not the missionaries that the German Government was interested in. That was a pretext. Ah, my fellow citizens, how often we have made Christianity an excuse for wrong! How often in the name of protecting what was sacred we have done what was tragically wrong! That was what Germany did. She insisted that, because this thing had happened for which the Peking Government could not really with justice be held responsible, a very large and important part of one of the richest Provinces of China should be ceded to her for sovereign control, for a period of 99 years, that she should have the right to penetrate the interior of that Province with a railway, and that she should have the right to exploit any ores that lay within 30 miles either side of that railway. She forced the Peking Government to say that they did it in gratitude to the German Government for certain services which she was supposed to have rendered but never did render. That was the beginning. I do not know whether any of the gentlemen who are criticizing the present Shantung settlement were in public affairs at that time or not, but I will tell you what happened, so far as this Government was concerned.

One of the most enlightened and humane Presidents we have ever had was at the head of the Government—William McKinley, a man who loved his fellow men and believed in justice—and associated with him was one of our ablest Secretaries of State—Mr. John Hay. The state of international law was such then that they did not feel at liberty to make even a protest against these concessions to Germany. Neither did they make any protest when, immediately following that, similar concessions were made to Russia, to Great Britain, and to France. It was almost immediately after that that China granted to Russia the right of the possession and control of Port Arthur and a portion of the region of Talien-Wan. Then England, not wishing to be outdone, although she had similar rights elsewhere in China, insisted upon a similar concession and got Wei-Hai-Wai. Then France insisted that she must have a port, and got it for 99 years. Not against one of those did the Government of the United States make any protest whatever. They only insisted that the door should not be shut in any of these regions against the trade of the United States. You have heard of Mr. Hay's policy of the open door. That was his policy of the open door—not the open door to the rights of China, but the open door to the goods of America. I want you to understand, my fellow countrymen, I am not criticizing this because, until we adopt the covenant of the league of nations, it is an unfriendly act for any government to interfere in the affairs of any other unless its own interests are immediately concerned. The only thing Mr. McKinley and Mr. Hay were at liberty to do was to call attention to the fact that the trade of the United States might be unfavorably affected and insist that in no circumstances it should be. They got from all of these powers the promise that it should not be--a promise which was more or less kept. Following that came the war between Russia and Japan, and at the close of that war Japan got Port Arthur and all the rights which Russia enjoyed in China, just as she is now getting Shantung and the rights her recently defeated enemy had in China—an exactly similar operation. That peace that gave her Port Arthur was concluded, as you know, on the territory of the United States—at Portsmouth, N.H. Nobody dreamed of protesting against that. Japan had beaten Russia. Port Arthur did not at that time belong to China; it belonged for the period of the lease to Russia, and Japan was ceded what Japan had taken by the well- recognized processes of war.

Very well, at the opening of this war, Japan went and took Kiaochow and supplanted Germany in Shantung Province. The whole process is repeated, but repeated with a new sanction. In the mean time, after this present war began, England and France, not at the same time, but successively, feeling that it was essential that they should have the assistance of Japan on the Pacific, agreed that if Japan would go into this war and take whatever Germany had in the Pacific she should retain everything north of the equator which had belonged to Germany. That treaty now stands. That treaty absolutely binds Great Britain and France. Great Britain and France can not in honor, having offered Japan this inducement to enter the war and to continue her operations, consent to an elimination of the Shantung provision from the present treaty. Very well, let us put these gentlemen who are objecting to the Shantung settlement to the test. Are they ready to fight Great Britain and France and Japan, who will have to stand together, in order to get this Province back for China? I know they are not, and their interest in China is not the interest of assisting China, but of defeating the treaty. They know beforehand that a modification of the treaty in that respect can not be obtained, and they are insisting upon what they know is impossible; but if they ratify the treaty and accept the covenant of the league of nations they do put themselves in a position to assist China. They put themselves in that position for the very first time in the history of international engagements. They change the whole faith of international affairs, because after you have read the much debated article 10 of the covenant I advise you to read article 11. Article 11 says that it shall be the friendly right of any member of the league to call attention at any time to anything, anywhere, that threatens to disturb the peace of the world or the good understanding between nations upon which the peace of the world depends. That in itself constitutes a revolution in international relationships. Anything that affects the peace of any part of the world is the business of every nation. It does not have simply to insist that its trade shall not be interfered with; it has the right to insist that the rights of mankind shall not be interfered with. Not only that, but back of this provision with regard to Shantung lies, as everybody knows or ought to know, a very honorable promise which was made by the Government of Japan in my presence in Paris, namely, that just as soon as possible after the ratification of this treaty they will return to China all sovereign rights in the Province of Shantung. Great Britain has not promised to return Weihaiwei; France has not promised to return her part. Japan has promised to relinquish all the sovereign rights which were acquired by Germany for the remaining 78 of the 99 years of the lease, and to retain only what other Governments have in many other parts of China, namely, the right to build and operate the railway under a corporation and to exploit the mines in the immediate neighborhood of that railway. In other words, she retains only the rights of economic concessionaires. Personally, I am frank to say that I think all of these nations have invaded some of the essential rights of China by going too far in the concessions which they have demanded, but that is an old story now, and we are beginning a new story. In the new story we all have the right to talk about what they have been doing and to convince them, by the pressure of the public opinion of the world, that a different course of action would be just and right. I am for helping China and not turning away from the only way in which I can help her. Those are the facts about Shantung. Doesn't the thing look a little different?

Another thing that is giving some of our fellow countrymen pangs of some sort—pangs of jealousy, perhaps—is that, as they put it, Great Britain has six votes in the league and we have only one. Well, our one vote, it happens, counts just as heavily as if every one of our States were represented and we had 48, because it happens, though these gentlemen have overlooked it, that the assembly is not an independent voting body. Great Britain has only one representative and one vote in the council of the league of nations, which originates all action, and its six votes are in the assembly, which is a debating and not an executive body. In every matter in which the assembly can vote along with the council it is necessary that all the nations represented on the council should concur in the affirmative vote to make it valid, so that in every vote, no matter how many concur in it in the assembly, in order for it to become valid, it is necessary that the United States should vote aye.

Inasmuch as the assembly is a debating body, that is the place where this exposure that I have talked about to the open air is to occur. It would not be wise for anybody to go into the assembly with purposes that will not bear exposure, because that is the great cooling process of the world; that is the great place where gases are to be burned off. I ask you, in debating the affairs of mankind, would it have been fair to give Panama a vote, as she will have, Cuba a vote, both of them very much under the influence of the United States, and not give a vote to the Dominion of Canada, to that great energetic Republic in South Africa, to that place from which so many liberal ideas and liberal actions have come, that stout little Commonwealth of Australia? When I was in Paris the men I could not tell apart, except by their hats, were the Americans and the Australians. They both had the swing of fellows who say, "The gang is all here, what do we care?" Could we deny a vote to that other little self-governing nation, for it practically is such in everything but its foreign affairs, New Zealand, or to those toiling—I was about to say uncounted—millions in India? Would you want to deprive these great communities of a voice in the debate? My fellow citizens, it is a proposition which has never been stated, because to state it answers it. But they can not outvote us. If we, as I said a minute ago, had 48 votes in the assembly, they would not count any more than our 1, because they would have to be combined, and it is easier to combine 1 than to combine 48. The vote of the United States is potential to prevent anything that the United States does not care to approve. All this nonsense about six votes and one vote can be dismissed and you can sleep with perfect quiet. In order that I may not be said to have misled you, I must say that there is one matter upon which the assembly can vote, and which it can decide by a two-thirds majority without the concurrence of all the States represented in the council, and that is the admission of new members to the league.

Then, there is that passion that some gentlemen have conceived, that we should never live with anybody else. You can call it the policy of isolation or the policy of taking care of yourself, or you can give any name you choose to what is thoroughly impossible and selfish. I say it is impossible, my fellow citizens. When men tell you that we are, by going into the league of nations, reversing the policy of the United States, they have not thought the thing out. The statement is not true. The facts of the world have changed. It is impossible for the United States to be isolated, It is impossible for the United States to play a lone hand, because it has gone partners with all the rest of the world with regard to every great interest that it is connected with. What are you going to do? Give up your foreign markets? Give up your influence in the affairs of other nations and arm yourselves to the teeth and double your taxes and be ready to spring instead of ready to cooperate? We are tied into the rest of the world by kinship, by sympathy, by interest in every great enterprise of human affairs. The United States has become the economic center of the world, the ' financial center. Our economic engagements run everywhere, into every part of the globe. Our assistance is essential to the establishment of normal conditions throughout the world. Our advice is constantly sought. Our standards of labor are being extended to all parts of the world just so fast as they can be extended. America is the breeding center for all the ideas that are now going to fecundate the great future. You can no more separate yourselves from the rest of the world than you can take all the tender roots of a great tree out of the earth and expect the tree to live. All the tendrils of our life, economic and social and every other, are interlaced in a way that is inextricable with the similar tendrils of the rest of mankind. The only question which these gentlemen can ask us to decide is this: Shall we exercise our influence in the world, which can henceforth be a profound and controlling influence, at a great advantage or at an insuperable disadvantage? That is the only question that you can ask. As I put it the other night, you have got this choice: You have got to be ?either provincials, little Americans, or big Americans, statesmen. You have got to be either ostriches with your heads in the sand or eagles. I doubt if the comparison, with the head in the sands, is a good one, because I think even an ostrich can think in the sand. What he does not know is that people are looking at the rest of him. Our choice is in the bird kingdom, and I have in my mind's eye a future in which it will seem that the eagle has been misused. You know that it was a double-headed eagle that represented the power of Austria-Hungary, you have heard of the eagles of Germany, but the only proper symbol of the eagle is the symbol for which we use it—as the bird of liberty and justice and peace.

I want to put it as a business proposition, if I am obliged to come down as low as that, for I do not like in debating the great traditions of a free people to bring the debate down to the basis of dollars and cents; but if you want to bring it down to that, if anybody wants to bring it down to that, reason it out on that line. Is it easier to trade with a man who suspects and dislikes you or with one who trusts you? Is it easier to deal with a man with a grouch or with a man who opens his mind and his opportunities to you and treats you like a partner and a friend? There is nothing which can more certainly put a drop of acid into every relationship we have in the world than if we now desert our former associates in this war. That is exactly what we should be doing if we rejected this treaty, and that is exactly what, speaking unwisely and too soon, the German leaders have apprised us that they want us to do. No part of the world has been so pleased by our present hesitation as the leaders of Germany, because their hope from the first has been that sooner or later we would fall out with our associates. Their hope was to divide us before the fighting stopped, and now their hope is to divide us after the fighting. You read how a former German privy councilor, I believe he was, said in an interview the other day that these debates in the Senate looked to him like the dawn of a new day. A new day for the world? No; a new day for the hopes of Germany, because he saw what anybody can see who lifts his eyes and looks in the future—two isolated nations; one isolated nation on probation, and then two, the other a nation infinitely trusted, infinitely believed in, that had given magnificent purpose of its mettle and of its trustworthiness, now drawing selfishly and suspiciously apart and saying, "You may deceive us, you may draw us into broils, you may get us into trouble; we will take care of ourselves, we will trade with you and we will trade on you." The thing is inconceivable. America is no quitter, and least of all is she a quitter in a great moral enterprise where her conscience is involved. The only immortal thing about America is her conscience. America is not going to be immortal because she has immense wealth. Other great nations had immense wealth and went down in decay and disgrace, because they had nothing else. America is great because of the ideas she has conceived. America is great because of the purposes she has set herself to achieve. America is great because she has seen visions that other nations have not seen, and the one enterprise that does engage the steadfast loyalty and support of the United States is an enterprise for the liberty of mankind.

How can we make the purpose evident? I was saying in one place to-night that my dear father had once taught me that there was no use trying to reason out of a man what reason did not put in him, and yet here to-night I am trying to apply the remedy of reason. We must look about and find some other remedy, because in matters of this sort remedies are always homeopathic—like must cure like. Men must be made to see the great impulses of the Nation in such a fashion that they will not dare to resist them. I do not mean by any threat of political disaster. Why, my fellow citizens, may I indulge in a confidence? I have had men politically disposed say to me, as a Democrat, "This is all to the good. These leaders of the Republican Party in Washington are going to ruin the party." They seem to think that I will be pleased. I do not want to see the great Republican Party misrepresented and misled. I do not want to see any advantage reaped by the party I am a member of because another great party has been misrepresented, because I believe in the loyalty and Americanism and high ideals of my fellow citizens who are Republicans just as much as I believe in those things in Democrats. It seems almost absurd to say that; of course I do. When we get to the borders of the United States we are neither Republicans nor Democrats. It is our privilege to scrap inside the family just as much as we please, but it is our duty as a Nation in those great matters of international concern which distinguish us to subordinate all such differences and to be a united family and all speak with one voice what we all know to be the high conceptions of American manhood and womanhood.

There is a tender side to this great subject. Have these gentlemen no hearts? Do they forget the sons that are dead in France? Do they forget the great sacrifice that this Nation has made? My friends, we did not go to France to fight for anything special for America. We did not send men 3, 000 miles away to defend our own territory. We did not take up the gage that Germany had thrown down to us because America was being specially injured. America was not being specially injured. We sent those men over there because free people everywhere were in danger and we had always been, and will always be, the champion of right and of liberty. That is the glory of these men that sit here. The hardest thing that I had to do, and the hardest thing that a lot of you had to do, was to continue to wear civilian clothes during the war, not to don a uniform, not to risk something besides reputation—risk life and everything. We knew that an altar had been erected upon which that sacrifice could be made more gloriously than upon any other altar that had ever been lifted among mankind, and we desired to offer ourselves as a sacrifice for humanity. And that is what we shall do, my fellow citizens. All the mists will pass away. A number of halls are being hired. All the gases are being burned off; and when you come down, as the gases have passed away, to the solid metal of which this Nation is made, it will shine as lustrously and bright as it has ever shone throughout the history of the Nation we love and the Nation we will always consecrate ourselves to redeem.