Reviving the World Court

...Ruth Hanna McCormick's victory in anti-British Illinois, a week later came the more-or-less successful termination of the London conference, then there was a convention of the D. A. R. devoted principally to setting our foreign affairs in order: and so within a few weeks the subject of American adherence to the World Court, dead to controversy even before the great charge of the Methodist Church South dramatically turned our attention to home problems, has come alive again...

...On the following Wednesday they applauded attacks on the naval conference and the World Court, and the next day refrained only "out of courtesy to the President" from passing a resolution asking the Senate to reject the protocol which we framed as the condition of our adherence to the Court, and which fifty nations have already accepted...

...Once more we hear of foreign guile and American innocence...

...Hughes, as Secretary of State, first came out openly in support of the Court, they have been as zealously held to by its friends as even the D. A. R. could reasonably wish...

...On a Monday the President of the United States bearded the venerable D. A. R. by telling its assembled delegates that adherence to the Court is the settled policy of this country, and that it is only a question of time before it will be put into practice...

...We should attach more importance to such opposition if the objections raised had not all been completely answered by the reservations which are the approved means of our participation in the work of the Court...

...Thus it reads: "In this time of unrest over the world, when work is being done to drag the United States into a tangle of European politics by way of the League of Nations or by way of the World Court or by a consultation pact or by any other means little or big, slight or important, to get us involved in European diplomacy or in European offensive or defensive operations, it is healthy to look back to the days of our Revolutionary fathers and mothers when the flag was born...

...Those who would resist this temptation to ruin make up in determination what they lack in numbers...

...Root, Mr...

...Harding and Mr...

...What else is one to gather from the eloquent speech of the chairman of the flag committee...

...And perhaps equally useless to point out that our adherence has been an approved policy of four presidential administrations, and as things are going now, is likely to become a tradition, in which case the D. A. R. would have to support it, willy-nilly...

...As it is we are afraid that the agitation of Mrs...

...Today it is somewhat more acceptable as news than the work of our commission in Haiti, though still inferior in this respect to the investigations of Senator Caraway's committee...

...again we are given the impression that the World Court is hardly a repository of international justice, but a species of power in which the boys all play their cards close to their stomachs (as the saying goes) but wickedly invite trusting Uncle Samuel to sit in on what is "just a friendly game...

...Hoover, Mr...

...To such a statement it would be quite useless to reply that the World Court involves us in European affairs no more definitely than the Kellogg pact, the Washington Limitation Treaty of 1922, the Versailles treaty or the world war, during which, if we remember correctly, the D. A. R. could not easily be confused with the conscientious objectors...

...McCormick and the D. A. R. is nothing more than a sentimental impulse...

...From the day when Mr...

...To join the World Court, even under the innocuous Root formula, would be like inviting Grand Rapids to restock all the museums of the land...

...These have been the subject of discussion for more time than we care to think about, and they have never been effectively attacked...

...There never has been a doubt that we might adhere to the Court without them, and to say at this late date that the Court involves a legal relationship between ourselves and the League of Nations, or the assumption of any obligation whatever by us under the Covenant of the League, or that the problem of advisory opinions has not been adjusted satisfactorily, is to say that in the language of Mr...

...Kellogg, Mr...

...Coolidge, Mr...

...Somehow American freedom from those dreadful European "entanglements" has become all mixed up with colonial furniture, old prints of Benjamin Franklin, antique hooked rugs, spinning wheels, ship models and eighteenth-century maps of the harbor of New York...

...Hughes, "shall not" is an affirmative declaration...