fraternity. I have no quarrel with the President on this score. What
I contest is the self-exploitation to which he is prone, so lacking in
dignity and open to animadversion.

V

Thus it was that instant upon the appearance of the proposed League of
Nations I made bold to challenge it, as but a pretty conceit having no
real value, a serious assault upon our national sovereignty.

Its argument seemed to me full of copybook maxims, easier recited than
applied. As what I wrote preceded the debates and events of the last six
months, I may not improperly make the following quotation from a screed
of mine appearing in The Courier-Journal of the 5th of March, 1919:

"The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like society and letters,
has its fads. In society they call them fashion and in literature
originality. Politics gives the name of 'issues' to its fads. A taking
issue is as a stunning gown, or 'a best seller.' The President's mind
wears a coat of many colors, and he can change it at will, his mood
being the objective point, not always too far ahead, or clear of vision.
Carl Schurz was wont to speak of Gratz Brown as 'a man of thoughts
rather than of ideas.' I wonder if that can be justly said of the
President? 'Gentlemen will please not shoot at the pianiste,' adjured
the superscription over the music stand in the Dakota dive; 'she is
doing the best that she knows how.'

"Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow Wilson can have a third
nomination for the presidency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked
by it, which proves that the people grow degenerate and foreshadows that
one of these nights some fool with a spyglass will break into Mars
and let loose the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that freak
luminary, thence to slide down the willing moonbeam and swallow us every
one!

"In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. Oblivious to Canada, and
British Columbia and the Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of
Europe off the grass in America. We actually went to war with Mexico,
having enjoyed two wars with England, and again and again we threatened
to annex the Dominion. Everything betwixt hell and Halifax was Yankee
preempted.

"Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a jingo. But your Cousin
Woodrow, enlarging on the original plan, would stretch our spiritual
boundaries to the ends of the earth and make of us the moral custodian
of the universe. This much, no less, he got of the school