Page:William Howard Taft - America Can't Quit (1919).djvu/22

 those wars. The Council is to prepare a plan and advise the means of preparing obligations under Article X. While the Council can not compel the nation to comply with their plans, the report of the Council will be a reasonable limitation upon the obligations of the nations which they may themselves honorably and sincerely adopt. We have a member on that Council; therefore, we can be sure of a reasonable plan and that reasonable plan must necessarily involve a reasonable distribution of the burdens of the obligations of Article X. It would be reasonable, therefore, to limit the activities under Article X for any small war of this kind between one nation and another,—(a bullying nation picking on a small nation in Asia) to the Asiatic government, or those who have the convenient forces there, if military force is needed. And so, too, with the European countries, the policing of that country, if necessary, would primarily fall under such reasonable plan, upon the European nations. And so with us in the Western Hemisphere. The policing of this Western Hemisphere would naturally fall to us. It would be in accordance with the view of those who are most sensitive to the subject of the extent of the Monroe Doctrine.

Now this suggestion is directed to the argument that we will have a constant series of small wars. If we have a general war, I don't need to make the argument because if we have a general war, or large enough so that if the conflagration spreads, it must be a general war, then we want to get into that war "with both feet" as quickly as possible; because as we look back upon this war—and without criticising anyone, we realize that it would have been a great deal better if we had gone in originally and that the war would have been ended much more promptly.

But, secondly, if the League operates as it should operate, there will not be these small wars which are suggested as a reason why we are going constantly to need an army and be constantly engaged in war. Why not? In the first place, when any such war is begun, under Article XVI all the nations of the world are under immediate obligation to levy a universal boycott against the outlaw nation. They put a Chinese wall around that country. They shut off all food supplies,—all supplies of raw material; they refuse a market to any product of the country that is beginning the war and must have the means of continuing it. We cut off all business relations of every sort; we do not pay any debts that we owe them; we cut off the cables and the postal facilities and we sever diplomatic relations. We subject them to a withering isolation—such an isolation as no