THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1919. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS.

Wairarapa Age, 17 November 1919, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1919. THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS.

People "in New Zealand may be at a loss to understand why it is that the Senate is showing such hostility to the League of Nations. The Dunedin Star points opt that tho opposition is largely born of personal dislike of President Wilson. In the Senate, on July 23, Senator McKellar, of Tennessee, spoke pf the League of Nations as one of the greatest forward steps in the nation's history. "Opposition," he declared, 'came from those who were reactionary &nd those who personally disliked Woodrow Wilson." - "It is not the League the Senate are opposing," wrote the New Yont correspondent of The Times, "but tho President. Hence the whole campaign to defeat the League is a campaign against President Wilson, inspired, not by ordinary political motives, but by personal bitterness." In like terms Mr. Edward Price Bell, European manager of the foreign service of the Chicago Daily News, wrote as recently as September 10 to the London Times, reminding the editor that on March 21 he had written him as follows: Of the attitude of the American people, in spite of all that can be done by the Borahs and Poindexters and Harveys and Reeds, there should not bo the slightest doubt. Not only the Republicans, but the Progressives, the Democrats, the Prohibitionists, and the Socialists, in their national platforms of 1916,j endorsed the . brotherhood of j nations idea. Moreover, it has been i .endorsed within the past few weeks ;by organisations representing every- ! thing that is best in America in i . business, labour, education, and J religion. i

And that opinion Mr. Bell again repeated: "I feel that sooner of later —and quite probably sooner—the knti-Leaguers will be overwhelmed." Mr. Bell writea as one absolutely certain of his ground, and his record as an accurate interpreter of American opinion (he affirmed positively that America would enter tho war long ere she did) entitles us to resfect his opinion in this later relation. Meantime, if the cables are to be accepted aB reliable, tho reservationists would appear to be having their own way, and whittling down the League and the Treaty—the one stands or falls with the other—in such fashion that the months of intense mental labour devoted to them by their framers will be reduced to nothingness. "Any modifications of the Treaty," declared Senator Swanson, of Virginia, "would mean renewed negotiations; and any reservations would have the effect of amendments, and could not be binding until the other nations had subscribed to them. In the mekntime,'' said the Senator, "the United States would bo in the position of withholding assent to the peace terms. This would bo a humiliation." "Let not America," said Senator McKellar on another occasion, "which has given this great peace covenant to the world, bo the only one to repudiate it." The Senate has not as yet gone the length of repudiating either the Treaty or the League, but it is treading defiantly and dangerously near it. "If the United States were to qualify the document in any way," said the President on Aiigust 19, "I am confident, from what I know of the many conferences and debates which accompanied tho formulation of the Treaty, that our example would be immediately followed in many quarters, in some instances with very serious reservations, and that the meaning and operative force of the .Treaty would presently be clouded from one end of its clauses to the other." We repeat that the United States Senate has not, up to the present, consummated its critical labours by formally refusing to approve tho Treaty; but it has so far succeeded in clouding the clauses from one end to the other that the Supreme Council of the League, unable to fathom its ultimate decision, have decided to summon a meeting of tho League of Nations to consider tho weighty matters that press for attention, irrespective of whether the United States qualifies to participate therein or not. Lovers of the world's future peace need all Mr. Bell's optimism to believe that America will not 'rejoct the League and break the heart of the world."