Henry
Cabot Lodge: The League of Nations Must Be Revised (Aug. 1919)
[From Congressional
Record, 66th Cong., 1st sess., 1919, 3779-84.]
. . . All the great energy and power of the Republic
were put at the service of the good cause. We have not been ungenerous. We have
been devoted to the cause of freedom, humanity, and civilization everywhere. Now we are asked, in the making
of peace, to sacrifice our sovereignty in important respects, to involve
ourselves almost without limit in the affairs of other nations and to yield up
policies and rights which we have maintained throughout our history. We are
asked to incur liabilities to an unlimited extent and furnish assets at the
same time which no man can measure. I think it is not only our right but our
duty to determine how far we shall go. Not only must we look carefully to see
where we are being led into endless disputes and entanglements, but we must not
forget that we have in this country millions of people of foreign birth and
parentage.
Our one great object is to make all these people
Americans so that we may call on them to place America first and serve America
as they have done in the war just closed. We can not Americanize them if we are
continually thrusting them back into the quarrels and difficulties of the
countries from which they came to us. . . . We shall have a large portion of
our people voting not on American questions and not on what concerns the United
States but dividing on issues which concern foreign countries alone. That is an
unwholesome and perilous condition to force upon this country. We must avoid
it. We ought to reduce to the lowest possible point the foreign questions in which we involve ourselves. . . . It will all
tend to delay the Americanization of our great population, and it is more
important not only to the United States but to the peace of the world to make
all these people good Americans than it is to determine that some piece of
territory should belong to one European country rather than to another. . . .
In what I have already
said about other nations putting us into war I have covered one point of
sovereignty which ought never to be yielded—the power to send American soldiers
and sailors everywhere, which ought never to be taken from the American people
or impaired in the slightest degree. Let us beware how we palter with our
independence. We
have not reached the great position from which we were able to come down into
the field of battle and help to save the world from tyranny by being guided by
others. Our vast power has all been built up and gathered together by ourselves
alone. We forced our way upward from the days of the Revolution, through a
world often hostile and always indifferent. We owe no debt to anyone except to
France in that Revolution, and those policies and those rights on which our
power has been founded should never be lessened or weakened. It will be no
service to the world to do so and it will be of intolerable injury to the
United States. We will do our share. We are ready and anxious to help in all ways
to preserve the world's peace. But we can do it best by not crippling
ourselves. . . .
. . . I am thinking of what is best for the world, for if the United States
fails the best hopes of mankind fail with it. I have never had but one
allegiance—I can not divide it now. I have loved but one flag and I can not
share that devotion and give affection to the mongrel banner invented by a
league. Internationalism, illustrated by the Bolshevik and by the man to
whom all countries are alike provided they can make money out of them, is to me
repulsive. National I must remain, and in that way I like all other Americans
can render the amplest service to the world. The United States is the world's best hope, but if you
fetter her in the interests and quarrels of other nations, if you tangle her in
the intrigues of Europe, you will destroy her power for good and endanger her
very existence. . . .
No doubt many excellent and patriotic people see a
coming fulfillment of noble ideals in the word "League for Peace." We
all respect and share these aspirations and desires, but some of us see no
hope, but rather defeat, for them in this murky covenant. For we, too, have our ideals, even if we differ from those who
have tried to establish a monopoly of idealism. Out first ideal is our country,
and we see her in the future, as in the past, giving service to all her people
and to the world. Our ideal of the future is that she should continue to render
that service of her own free will. She has great problems of her own to solve,
very grim and perilous problems, and a right solution, if we can attain to it,
would largely benefit mankind. We would have our country strong to resist a
peril from the West, as she has flung back the German menace from the East. We
would not have our politics distracted and embittered by the dissensions of
other lands. We would not have our country's vigor exhausted, or her moral
force abated, by everlasting meddling and muddling in every quarrel, great and
small, which afflicts the world. Our ideal is to make her ever stronger and
better and finer because in that way alone, as we believe, can she be of the greatest service to the world's peace and to the
welfare of mankind.