The Goldfield news and weekly tribune. [volume] (Goldfield, Nev.) 1911-1947, 1919-04-12
HONOR TO THOSE WHO DARED

While it may be true that there is an occasional poliG-
cal note in the criticisms of the league of nations, it is
equally true, or more so, that there is a great deal of poll
tics and even political buncombe in the kowtowing of those
who regard the person of the president as so sacred that
nothing he utters must be gainsaid. We have never before
had so many people obsessed with the makwish idea that
there is something infallible in a man who happens to have
been elected to a high office.
So far as politics go, the president himself has been the
most violent of partisans. No president in the history of the
country has ever been more partisan than Woodrow Wilson,
and he should be the last to complain, even if there were
ground for complaint. He is the only president in American
history who ever made a wholly partisan appeal to the peo-
pie on the eve of an election. And he tried to use the pa
triotism of a people engaged in a foreign war to bolster his
plea.
And so it is fortunate that there were men in this coun-
try, and many of them in the United States senate, who did
not hesitate to speak out when it came to the constitution
of the proposed league of nations. To have kept still in
the face of what it was proposed to saddle upon America
would have been criminal turbulence to a man who had be-
come so obsessed with his own idealistic notions that he
must have been unable, to see clearly into some of the prac-
teal consequences of his proposals. s
Instead of reviling the men who stood up as critics-and
it took some courage to do that, especially if the critics hap
pened to be members of his own ~party-instead of reviling
them for it, he should honor them. They have saved the
integrity of America, saved the Monroe doctrine, which
means non-interference in American affairs, saved the home
control of our immigration and saved our own right to
make war, and not have it made for us by a commission Of
foreigners. If, as he intimated, he wanted to and couldn't, he
should honor them because they did.
The fact that these three valuable rights are to be re-
written into the constitution of the league of nations is of
the greatest and most vital importance. Instead of having
this republic thrown into the jackpot of nations, we are 60
ing to retain our national integrity. We are going to hold it
against the stubborn efforts and arrogant threats of one who
happened for the brief and critical hour to hold the proxies
of one hundred million free people and refused to even con-
suit those they had appointed to advise with him. We are go
ing to remain the United States of America, remain our
selves, and we are not going to be a part and parcel of an
internaionalzed hysteria which borders on socialism.
ml And so we say, all honor to those Americans who in the
h0uf OF danger dared TO speak out ana VINO dared to brave
those truculent and fawning political time-servers who told
us we must not oppose or even discuss a doctrine our presi
dent had already approved-who seem to labor under the de-
fusion that while ~ostensibly making the world safe for dem
ocracy, that we must set up an autocracy over ourselves.
Again the Tribune will repeat, this is not a time for cow
ards in the senate. - s&@a Fa1TSHgF.