Nothing in relation to the Washington Conference is more enlightening than the vast amount of international understanding that has resulted from governments sitting around the council table, and freely discussing their prob. lems.

There have been sharp clashes of opinion and interest; but even here the situation is made better and safer because these differences have been brought into the open and submitted to the public opinion of three continents.

Regardless of 7,000,000 plurality I believe in the League of Nations. I believe in all similar agencies of international conciliation and adjustment. We can never know how they will work until we have tried them, and the time to criticize them is when they have failed, not before they have had a chance to succeed. The true place of the United States is at the council table of the Nations whenever an issue arises that concerns the welfare of the Nations-honest, straightforward and shirking no responsibility. That to me is the most impressive demonstration of the Washington Conference. I submit it to you for your consideration regardless of any question of partisanship.

LORD ROBERT CECIL'S MISSION

[April 3, 1923]

No other man can discuss the League of Nations more authoritatively than Lord Robert Cecil. He believed in it long before it came into existence. He helped to establish it. The covenant is in no small part the work of his brain and his hand, and he is speaking to the 'American people as the representative of the Union of South Africa in the Assembly of the League. He owes this appointment not to a British Prime Minister or to

a British Foreign Secretary but to that eminent liberal Jan Smuts.

The League of Nations that Lord Robert Cecil has come to the United States to discuss is the real League of Nations. It bears no relation to the fantastic and almost wholly mythical League of the Senate debate on the Treaty of Versailles, which was a creation of partisan passion and personal prejudice. The League that he is talking about is the League that exists, the League that is slowly finding itself and exerting its gradually acquired influence to help stabilize the crumbling peace of the world.

Lord Robert has not come to the United States on a mission of propaganda. He is not appealing to the American people to join the League. Rather, he is trying to explain the League to them and also to explain to them the condition of the white man's civilization as he has come to see it.

The message that he brings is a message that the American people cannot ignore, for events day by day are shrieking it into their ears. In 1920 a vast majority of them still believed in what was regarded as the historical policy of isolation. This isolation, to be sure, was largely fictitious, as they might have known from their own experience, but, disillusioned by the war, they swung to the furthest extreme of foreign policy in the 'determination to have nothing more to do with Europe.

The result of that temporary decision has been anything but satisfactory, and the ranks of the uncompromising isolationists have steadily dwindled since the election of 1920. Mr. Harding began with a 'determination to have nothing to do with the League. As Ambassador Harvey expressed it after many consultations with the . President, "Our present Government could not without betrayal of its creators and masters, and will not, I assure

you, have anything whatsoever to do with the League or with any commission or committee appointed by it or responsible to it directly or indirectly, openly or furtively."

Mr. Harding is now staking his foreign policy and his candidacy for renomination on American adherence to the Permanent Court of International Justice, which was established under the covenant of the League and the Judges of which are appointed by the League.

Mr. Hughes inaugurated his career as Secretary of State by refusing to answer the League's communications to the State Department, and Mr. Hughes is now working with four of the League's commissions without exciting the Olympian wrath of the United States Senate.

There is still an aggressive faction of irreconcilables in the Republican party which is ready to die in the last 'ditch rather than permit this Government to join in the Permanent Court of International Justice. There is still a Democratic faction which believes that it is better to conciliate the hyphenated vote than to discharge the great responsibilities of the United States to modern civilization. But in both parties the advocates of outright isola. tion decline steadily in numbers and in influence, however slow the progress may be in the direction of meeting 'American obligations.

The League of Nations has survived without the support of the United States. In its most critical period it survived open and active American hostility, and it lives not because this man or that man has championed it but because it is meeting a vital need in the affairs of nations.

It is this League-the actual, living League-that Lord Robert Cecil has come to the United States to interpret. What he has to say deserves most earnest and most thoughtful consideration by the American people. Foreign policy is too important to be made forever the football of partisanship and of passion. Soon or late all the

facts must be faced, and nobody is better qualified to discuss the facts of the League of Nations than Lord Robert Cecil, who has given some of the best years of his life to the great task of finding means by which the peace of the world can be established and secured.

THE

CHAPTER XV

THE LAST ARTICLE

HE last article that came from the pen of Mr. Cobb -came, rather, from the battered typewriter that he had impetuously pounded when in better case—was printed in The World, July 19, 1923. For a few days thereafter some member of the staff would call at his home each morning and bring to the office notes from which an article would be written. Soon it was ordered that these attempts to continue work should cease, but the sudden and unexpected death of Mr. Harding and the accession of President Coolidge caused the breaking of the rule for the last time. Sincere and kindly as he always wished to be, Mr. Cobb chose his words with great care, speaking so slowly that the article as it appeared, a greeting to a new President by one who had studied the official acts of all his predecessors, is practically in his own carefully weighed phrases.

PRESIDENT COOLIDGE

[August 4, 1923]

THERE is no more 'difficult undertaking in politics than that of a Vice-President suddenly promoted by the death of a President. Vice-Presidents are always out of the sphere of administrative action. Washington little heeds them as makers of policy, and not at all as announcers of