THE H.B. TRIBUNE. SATURDAY, FEB. 7, 1920. THE CASE FOR THE REPUBLICANS.

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume X, Issue 47, 7 February 1920, Page 4

THE H.B. TRIBUNE. SATURDAY, FEB. 7, 1920. THE CASE FOR THE REPUBLICANS.

It is always well to hear the other side, so we may repeat here the case for .the Republican party in the United States as set out by the Washington correspondent of the London “Times,” who may be taken to be pretty well at the heart of affairs in America’s political capital, and who provides an illustration of the anxiety that is felt for the promotion and maintenance of good will between the two great Englishspeaking peoples. It cannot be too icften repeated, he says, that the Republicans have not thrown out the Treaty because they wish ns or any other country ill; They have thrown it out because they think it commits the United States too suddenly to too much, and also largely, in order to protect the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives. The Senate has the constitutional right to reject treaties, and before the President announced himself as the’ American Plenipotentiary he should have seen to it that he had its support for his policies. His European colleagues should have satified themself in the same sense. Hie artificers of the League of Nations have, in fact, only themselves to blame if thev went ahead without reference to naif the treaty-making power of the United States and to the policies of the party that controlled it. Such is the Republican argument, and for a very great body of the American people it is an incontrovertible one. As early as last March and April it was proclaimed by half the papers in the United States that the Senate' would not ratify the Treaty unless the Covenant was altered in certain obvious respects and unless the President compromised with its views. It is necessary that people in Allied countries should understand this once and for all. * If their statesmen feel themselves duped, it is largely due to their ostrich-like policy, to tho mist of the censorship, and to the false optimism with which they surrounded themselves. The corres pondent we are quoting confesses that the Republicans may be shortsighted in refusing the full League, but he declares that they honestly do not think so, and that,, of course,they have a right to their opinion. They have, too, the support of the electorate, judging from the failure' of the President’s tour and other efforts to get it on his side. Theif object is not to plunge civilization into chaos or to score off this country or that, but to curb Presidential irresponsibility and. to prevent its committing tne United States to a foreign policy for which they do not believe she is ready. They reel that the Covenant must be altered lest another President should take advantage of loopholes for the Execu tive’s usurpation of foreign policy, in which direction it is held to tend. Ever since Mr. Wilson’s entry into office the Republicans have chafed under Mr. Wilson’s arbitrary handling of foreign affairs, under his treatment of Mexico, for which it is becoming day by day more clear that the United States will eventually have to pay the price in the shape of the pacification of that vexed Re-: public, under his prolonged neutrality, and under his efforts to act as peace-broker between the powers of Light and Darkness. The “Times” correspondent continues his exculpation of the Republican party by saying that it was not until after the elections at the end of 1918 that they had the power to curb the policies of which they disapproved so much. “What has happened/’ he writes, “is that the long-drawn domestic controversy has come to a head and upset the President when he was carrying in his basket the eggs of the Peace Conference. Not all the eggs, however, are brokn, and if the President will consent to pick them up, many may still produce useful chickens. The Republican leaders are most anxious that this view of the situation should be understood at home. They, reckon with justifiable confidence on controlling the whole Government after the next election, and do not want to enter office with Europe thinking them unsympathetic.” They realise that even if the Treaty is got out of the way this winter there will be echoes of the current controversy in the next campaign. They do not want Europe to think that because they oppose much of the work of the Peace Conference they are unfriendly to the countries concerned in it, or that they do not want to co-operate with them in reconstruction. They do wrfnt to cooperate, but in accordance with the traditions of American policy rather than in accordance with the rules laid down by what they regard as a prematurely super-national authority The policy of the Republicans is likened to that of Britain under Canning and his successors during last century. They wish to keep out of routine troubles of Europe so as to have more influence when big things come up. Over the recent war, for example, they argue they would have brought the country in on our side long before the President began to move. Hence it is that the majority of them are ready for participation in the League so long as they can do so with something like Senator Lodge’s reservations, a large number of which really concern domestic matters, such as the relation of the President to Congress. While we have thus set out at length the Republican apologia as conceived by the “Times” correspondent, we can scarcely say that it reads' very convincingly. For instance, it admits that the Republican party realised their power to defeat the President’s action before ever he went away to take part in the peace discussion. The/e was surely some more emphatic way of declaring their intention to' exercise that power than througn the .irresponsible columns of their daily press. It is certainly a very weak link in the chain of argument to have to suggest that European statesmen should have declined to receive the American President as the accredited representative of the American Republic simply' on the faith of journalistic statesments that in the American legislature there was a majority who resented his assumption of that office. If the political head of the Republic chose to ignore the warning thus conveyed, it most certainly did net lie m the mouths

of the European delegates to deny him a hearing. It may, indeed, well be wondered what sort of an outcry that same press .would have raised had a motion been tabled at tbe Peace Conference to exclude the American President on the ground that he was without a sufficient mandate from his people. The constitution of the United States .must be a very imperfect document indeed if ft does not provide for'the Legislature definitely disclaiming the authority of the President to speak for it on such an occasion, and it will take some stronger contention than that advanced by the “Times” correspondent to remove the impression that definite senatorial repudiation has come too late.