Omaha daily bee., 1919-09-05
PRESIDENT PLEADS FOR PEACE TREATY AND LEAGUE

countrymen, on the real source O.
revolution? Men don't start revo
lutions in a sudden passion. Dc
you remember what Thomas Car
lyle said about the French revolu
ton? He was speaking of the so.
called Hundred Days Terror which
reigned, not only in Paris, but
throughout France, in the days Of
the French revolution; and he re.
minded his readers that back of thai
hundred days of terror, lay several
hundred years of agony and Of
wrong. The French people had
been deeply and consistently wrong
ed by their government; robbed
their human rights disregarded and
the slow agony of those hundreds OF
years, and after while gathered into
hot agony that could not be sup
pressed. Revolutions don't spring
up over night; revolutions gather
through the ages; revolutions come
from the long suppression OF the
human spirit; revolutions come be-
cause men know that they have
rights and that they are disregarded::
And when we think of the future OF
the world in connection with this
treaty, we must remember that one
of the chief efforts of those who
made this treaty was to remove that
anger from the heart OF great peo-
pies, great peoples who had always
been suppressed and always been
used, who had always been the tools
in the hands of governments-gen-
orally of alien governments-not
their own. And the makers of the
treaty knew that if these wrongs
were not removed, there could be
no peace in the world, because, after
all, my fellow citizens, war comes
from the seed of wrong, and not
from the seed of right. This treaty
is an attempt to right the history OF
Europe and in my humble judgment,
it is a measurable success.
Intermixture of Races.
II say measurable my fellow
citizens, because you will realize
the difficulty of this. Here are two
neighboring peoples. The one peo-
pie have not stopped at a sharp
line and the settlements of the
other people, or the nigrations. be-
gun at this sharp line; they have
intermingled. There are regions
where you can't draw a national
line and say there are Slavs on this
side and Italians on that; there
is this people there and that people
there. 1t can't be done. You have
to approximate the line. You have
to come to it, as near to it as you
can, and then trust to the process
of history to redistribute, it may be.
the people who are on the wrong
side of the line. And there are
many such lines drawn in this
treaty, and to be drawn in the Aus
trian treaty, and where perhaps
there are more lines of that sort
than in the German treaty.
when we came to draw the line
between the Polish people and the
German people, not the line between
Germany and Poland-there wasn't
any Poland strictly speaking-the
line between the German people and
the Polish people. There were dis
tricts like the upper part of Silesia.
or rather the eastern part of Silesia
which is called Upper Silesia' be-
cause it is mountainous and the
other part is not. High Silesia is
chiefly Polish and when we came
to draw line to represent Poland.
it was necessary to include High
Silesia, if we were really going to
play fair and make Poland up of
the Polish peoples wherever we
found them in sufficiently close
neighborhood to one another.
Decide on Referendum.
"But it wasn't perfectly clear that
Upper-that High Silesia wanted to
be part of Poland. At any rate
there were Germans in High Silesia
who said that it did not, and there
fore, we did there what we did in
many other places; we said very
WCli, tuCiI, VIC Will lCt luC pCOpiC
that live there decide We will
have referendum within a certain
length of time after the war, under
the supervision of an international
commission, which will have suf-
ficient armed force behind it to
preserve order and see that nobody
interferes with the election. We will
have an absolutely free vote and
High Silesia shall 60 either to Ger
many or to Poland as the people in
High Silesia prefer
"And that illustrates many other
cases where we provided for refer
endum, or a plebiscite, as they
choose to call it; and are going to
leave it to the people themselves, as
we should have done, what govern
ment they shall live under.
1T is none of my prerogatives to
allot peoples to this government and
the other. 1t is nobody's right to
do that ailotting, except the people
themselves, and I want to testify
that this treaty is shot through with