Page:Hands off Mexico.djvu/35

 may be the causes thereof, the President was not alone in swearing allegiance to these principles.

The President's words were endorsed and echoed by every one of the rich gentlemen, every one of the newspapers, and every one of the politicians who are now asking the country to approve a program of intervention in Mexico, as well as by every one else who joined in the cry of "Stand Behind the President," or participated in any way in the war propaganda.

Wherefore, any repudiation or belittlement of these principles now by any one who claimed allegiance to them during the war would place him in the position of having deliberately participated in another conspiracy of deception, involving the death of 75,000 young Americans on foreign battlefields and in military camps, the grievous maiming of a quarter of a million others, the expenditure of thirty odd billions of the people's money, and the submission of 100,000,000 to countless forms of suffering and sacrifice.

Who, of these gentlemen of finance, of the press, or of politics, dare say that they were only fooling when they told us that the War was necessary in order to vindicate the principles of democracy? How would such a statement differ from a confession of murder in the first degree?

Yet it is difficult to see how the advocacy of a war upon Mexico, or of any interference in Mexico that might lead to war, or of any meddling whatever in the internal affairs of Mexico, is anything except just that kind of a confession. So long as intervention in Mexico is advocated, whether under that name or any other, there is every reason and necessity to quote and quote again the solemn assurances of principle upon which American armies were sent overseas.

The basic principles of the democracy for which America professed to fight were universally declared to be absolute equality among nations, great and small; equal and absolute independence of all in their domestic affairs; the self-determination of peoples; the absolute inviolability of sovereignty which is and always has been the corner-stone of international law. However the phrasing varied, every democratic pronouncement was in some sense a reaffirmation of these principles.

"We are glad ... to fight," announced the President in his War Message, "for the rights of nations, great and small and