Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/173

 of State Blaine called the first conference with Latin America, he set up a milestone on the road to permanent peace.

So strong indeed had become this desire and hope among most Western European nations that the very militarists among the Allies were forced during the late war to use the phrase “the war against war” in order to keep up the fighting spirit among their people. And when the war was over, the attempt to form a League of Nations afforded still another proof. I shall not enter into the late controversy. But the League was the work of politicians, all responsible to democracies for their jobs. They would never have made the attempt had they not believed that it would be popular.

The Peace of Versailles, imperfect though it may have been, proved in other ways how far we had moved beyond old conceptions of national glory. After former wars, the conquerors usually took over without shame the territory of the conquered, no matter how the inhabitants felt. Even as late as 1871, the neutrals did not protest officially and but very little unofficially when Germany seized the unwilling Alsace-Lorraine. But in the Peace of Versailles, European statesmen had to give at least lip-service to the principle that no nation or no part of a nation may permanently be held by a conqueror against the will of the inhabitants, Again: they did this because they were politicians, and had satisfied themselves that a new moral consciousness in