he impulse of
self-sacrifice. With national safety as the primary object to be
attained in territorial settlements, the factors of the problem assume
generally, though not always, the following order of importance: the
strategic, to which is closely allied the geographic and historic; the
economic, affecting the commercial and industrial life of a nation; and
lastly the ethnic, including in the terms such conditions as
consanguinity, common language, and similar social and religious
institutions.

The national safety and the economic welfare of the United States were
at stake in the War of Secession, although the attempt to secede
resulted from institutional rather than ethnic causes. The same was true
when in the Papineau Rebellion of 1837 the French inhabitants of the
Province of Lower Canada attempted for ethnic reasons to free themselves
from British sovereignty. Had the right of "self-determination" in the
latter case been recognized as "imperative" by Great Britain, the
national life and economic growth of Canada would have been strangled
because the lines of communication and the commercial routes to the
Atlantic seaboard would have been across an alien state. The future of
Canada, with its vast undeveloped resources, its very life as a British
colony, depended upon denying the right of "self-determination." It was
denied and the French inhabitants of Quebec were forced against their
will to accept British sovereignty.

Experience has already demonstrated the unwisdom of having given
currency to the phrase "self-determination." As the expression of an
actual right, the application of which is universal and invariable, the
phrase has been repudiated or at least violated by many of the terms of
the treaties which brought to an end the World War. Since the time that
the principle was proclaimed, it has been the excuse for turbulent
political elements in various lands to resist established governmental
authority; it has induced the use of force in an endeavor to wrest the
sovereignty over a territory or over a community from those who have
long possessed and justly exercised it. It has formed the basis for
territorial claims by avaricious nations. And it has introduced into
domestic as well as international affairs a new spirit of disorder. It
is an evil thing to permit the principle of "self-determination" to
continue to have the apparent sanction of the nations when it has been
in fact thoroughly discredited and