The Indianapolis times. [volume] (Indianapolis [Ind.]) 1922-1965, 1935-09-23

more closely to resemble
theirs while no one ap-
peared to realize to what
prof 0 und contradictions
this tendency toward right
eous intervention upon the
world stage might lead.
The New Freedom be-
lieved in a vague, uncritical
way in international peace,
arbitration and disarma-
ment. Mr.. William Jennings
Bryan, its Secretary of
State, had been preaching
arbitration in The Com
moner for years, and even
Mr.. Wilson had joined the
American Peace Society in
1908.
Foreign policy had played no
part in the electoral campaign.
Yet curiously premonitory
thought had passed through Mr..
Wilson's mind a few days before
his Inauguration. 1T would be
the irony of fate" he had unused,
IF my Administration had to deal
chiefly with foreign affairs; and
almost Immediately the great
ironist had begun to spin her web.
Within few days after taking Of
flee the Administration discov-
cred itself with the Chinese con-
sortium, the Japane land ques-
ton in California and a Mex
lean revolution upon its hands.
TN retrospect one now seems to
- feel through all the first six
months of 1914 a curious feverish-
ness, a sense of strain and ex-
element beneath the confident
surfaces Of the times.
At home and abroad events seen
to take on a suddenly violent,
ominous or cratic quality, as if
in evidence of a change impend-
ing. Today one sees those months
iilumined, not by the long, level
rays of a placid sunset, but by
the last strange and Sultry tWi-
light before the bursting of
hurricane.
And now our own Mexican prob
lem was suddenly to take a most
extraOrdinary-and strangely mil
itaristic-turn.
Suddenly and unaccountably-
for was it not the people who
suffered in war and was not a
democracy like the United States
therefore peace-loving by oef1ni-
tion?-there had developed pow
erful popular pressure for military
action in Mexico.
Action of some sort had already
begun to seem polite, even to
some of the leaders of the New
Freedom when, in the early days
of April there came the fan
tastic "Tampico incident" A
party going ashore from one of
our naval vessels off that port
was arrested by the Huerta forces;
the men were released immedi-
ately, but when Admiral Fletcher
demanded a salute to repair the
insult to our flag. it was refused.
Il ARLY OH the morning of
Il April 81 Mr.. Wilson, appar-
emily never Supposing the MeXi-
cans would resist an actual show
of force, authorized the seizure of
the customs house at Vera Cruz
by the squadron lying off that
harbor; and a few hours later
the strings of boats were going
in, packed with armed and eX-
cited men dispatched for the first
time since 1898 upon the conquest
of foreign soil.
Two years before Mr.. Norman
Angel had proved in The Great
Illusion" that modern war could
not pay. The immense sensation
produced by that rather simple
thesis is sufficiently suggestive as
to the attitude of the times.
Yet at a dinner party AmbaS-
sador Page learned from Admiral
JellicOe that the latter never, day
or night, was beyond telephone
reach of the admiralty for more
than half an hour.
The Admiralty" the Sea Lord
had told him, never sleeps"
Mr.. Page did not think that
they really expected a German
naval attack on a half-hour's no
tice; but they talk all the time
of the danger and probability OF
war: and they are all the
time prepared
UNFORTUNATELY, Mr.. Page,
~ like the other representatives
whom Mr.. Wilson had scattered
through Europe-like most Amer
lean diplomats, indeed, in the
opening years of the twentieth
century-knew almost nothing
about European diplomacy.
Yet even Mr.. Page perceived,
as the Balkan War receded with
out clearing the unhealthy atmos-
phere around him, that some
forces were at work, that "a
great European war" was bound
to come if the Continent could
not find some way of escape from
the tragic armed truce in which
it had involved itself.
AS early as January. 1918, while
the Balkan crisis was at its
height and while Mr.. Taft was
still in the presidency, Colonel"
Z. M. House, of Texas, lunching
quietly with a friend, had con-