Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1919-03-21
THE MAN IN THE STREET
VS.. LODGES STANDPATS
The League Of Nations Poll Shows That
United States Senators Need TO Go
Home Occasionally

~ ing a bit in his opposition to the
league of nations.
Senator Reed took his Senate aberra
tions home to Missouri and fifty of the
sixty-seven Democratic Representatives
in the Legislature promptly demanded
his resignation.
Medll Mccormick was hooted down
at banquet in this city for a speech
that would have won him applause and
congratulations in the Senate chamber.
The city of Washington is not the
United States!
1t was intended when the President
insisted upon an adjournment, that the
members should leave their cloister on
Capitol Hill and learn from the home
folks something of what is going on in
the world. That was wise provision.
The light seems to be breaking in a good
many quarters. And the forces that are
at work to inspire second thoughts in
the Lodges and the Reeds of America are
revealed in the league e-of-natons poll
now being made in Philadelphia by rep
resentatives of this newspaper. Two
men and women out of every three de-
sire league of nations.
The collective mind of the American
people has come to be a saving element
in the world. 1t is fool-proof And being
an educated mind, it thinks in funda-
mentals and has little patience with the
distractions and the bgotry the theories
and the special interests that so often
befog and berumb the minds Of partisan
statesmen and partisan editors.
The wise good humor that character
ICES mass opinion in America is respon-
sible for the battlecry of the man in the
street: LET him rave!'
We let them rave. The unfit in poll
tics aren't hated or stoned. They are
tolerated, and when the time comes are
nudged into oblivion without fuss or
emotion. AS people we are too self
assured and too generally intelligent to
be long misled.
1t is fortunate for the world that we
are able to react critically and gener-
ously and with fine courage in every
emergency, and that no man lives who is
permitted to do our thinking for US.
For more depends on the President
and on the league of nations than ap-
pears upon the surface. If fixed peace
can be assured, the institutions of civili-
zation that so often have been twisted
and distorted and bedeviled by. selfish
groups will have a new beginning and an
opportunity to keep the world in equi-
librium. The faith of countless millions
everywhere will be restored and peoples
will have heart to go on and rebuild a
decent order Of government and society.
Any one who wishes to see ruin and
destruction spread over all of Europe
cannot do better than oppose the plans
which the American peace delegates have
| advanced at Paris. The validity of the
| present social order is being tested at
the Peace Conference. If the Lodges
and the Reeds of Europe or America
should manage to wreck the plan they
will inspire fresh disorder everywhere.
| All the apostles of the per-radicalism
| will have new argument.
1--WE knew you couldn't make peace"
they will say. Anything is better than
new war. Anything is better than
government by munition makers and
secret diplomatists!'
| The poll in Philadelphia is unusually
interesting. 1t has proceeded far enough
to show that the plain men and women
| of America have kept a rational middle
course between the two dangerous groups
that have opposed themselves most vio-
lently to the plan in this instance. Upon
| the one hand are the cliques which repre-
sent partisan bigotry and the special in
terests. On the other are the half-mad
preachers of anarchistic socialism who
are telling their followers that the
American President is the secret tool of
vested interests. The two things that
normal-minded America most dislikes-
neurotic radicalism on the one side and
rabid standpattism on the other--proyide
between them the most insidious propa.
ganda against the only plan adequate to
give the world new stability and a new
start.
These are elements that have made a
good deal of trouble for America in the
past. 1t will be years before mankind
can make itself free of the confusion
they have already wrought.
But if the incidental voting on the
league of nations in Philadelphia indi.
Gates anything, it shows that the mind
of the country has been in training to
deal swiftly with these agencies.
j Because plain Americans are sincere
because they love fair play, it is not sur.
prising to find signs indicating that most
of the men and women in Philadelphia
resent the nature of the attacks made
upon the league idea.
Because most Americans are not cow,
ardly and because they feel able 70 taks
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