'"
I am sorry to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latest
of the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is,
as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press since
Horace Greeley. But he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeley
was, and there is nothing but sentiment--gush and gammon--in the proposed
League of Nations.
It may be all right for England. There are certainly no flies on it for
France. But we don't need it. Its effects can only be to tie our hands, not
keep the dogs away, and even at the worst, in stress of weather, we are
strong enough to keep the dogs away ourselves.
We should say to Europe: "Shinny on your own side of the water and we will
shinny on our side." It may be that Napoleon's opinion will come true that
ultimately Europe will be "all Cossack or all republican." Part of it has
come true already. Meanwhile it looks as though the United States, having
exhausted the reasonable possibilities of democracy, is beginning to turn
crank. Look at woman suffrage by Federal edict; look at prohibition by
act of Congress and constitutional amendment; tobacco next to walk on the
plank; and then!--Lord, how glad I feel that I am nearly a hundred years
old and shall not live to see it!
Chapter the Thirty-First
The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs
Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional
Shortcomings
I
The years intervening between 1865 and 1919 may be accounted the most
momentous in all the cycles of the ages.
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