Читать книгу Germany, The Next Republic? - Carl W. Ackerman - Страница 10

"The opinion of the world is the mistress of the world," he said, "and the processes of international law are the slow processes by which opinion works its will. What impresses me is the constant thought that that is the tribunal at the bar of which we all sit. I would call your attention, incidentally, to the circumstance that it does not observe the ordinary rules of evidence; which has sometimes suggested to me that the ordinary rules of evidence had shown some signs of growing antique. Everything, rumour included, is heard in this court, and the standard of judgment is not so much the character of the testimony as the character of the witness. The motives are disclosed, the purposes are conjectured and that opinion is finally accepted which seems to be, not the best founded in law, perhaps, but the best founded in integrity of character and of morals. That is the process which is slowly working its will upon the world; and what we should be watchful of is not so much jealous interests as sound principles of action. The disinterested course is not alone the biggest course to pursue; but it is in the long run the most profitable course to pursue. If you can establish your character you can establish your credit.

"Understand me, gentlemen, I am not venturing in this presence to impeach the law. For the present, by the force of circumstances, I am in part the embodiment of the law and it would be very awkward to disavow myself. But I do wish to make this intimation, that in this time of world change, in this time when we are going to find out just how, in what particulars, and to what extent the real facts of human life and the real moral judgments of mankind prevail, it is worth while looking inside our municipal law and seeing whether the judgments of the law are made square with the moral judgments of mankind. For I believe that we are custodians of the spirit of righteousness, of the spirit of equal handed justice, of the spirit of hope which believes in the perfectibility of the law with the perfectibility of human life itself.

"Public life, like private life, would be very dull and dry if it were not for this belief in the essential beauty of the human spirit and the belief that the human spirit should be translated into action and into ordinance. Not entire. You cannot go any faster than you can advance the average moral judgment of the mass, but you can go at least as fast as that, and you can see to it that you do not lag behind the average moral judgments of the mass. I have in my life dealt with all sorts and conditions of men, and I have found that the flame of moral judgment burns just as bright in the man of humble life and limited experience as in the scholar and man of affairs. And I would like his voice always to be heard, not as a witness, not as speaking in his own case, but as if he were the voice of men in general, in our courts of justice, as well as the voice of the lawyers, remembering what the law has been. My hope is that, being stirred to the depths by the extraordinary circumstances of the time in which we live, we may recover from those steps something of a renewal of that vision of the law with which men may be supposed to have started out in the old days of the oracles, who commune with the intimations of divinity."

Before this war, very few nations paid any attention to public opinion. France was probably the beginner. Some twenty years before 1914, France began to extend her civilisation to Russia, Italy, the Balkans and Syria. In Roumania, today, one hears almost as much French as Roumanian spoken. Ninety per cent of the lawyers in Bucharest were educated in Paris. Most of the doctors in Roumania studied in France. France spread her influence by education.

The very fact that the belligerents tried to mobilise public opinion in the United States in their favour shows that 1914 was a milestone in international affairs. This was the first time any foreign power ever attempted to fight for the good will--the public opinion--of this nation. The governments themselves realised the value of public opinion in their own boundaries, but when the war began they realised that it was a power inside the realms of their neighbours, too.

When differences of opinion developed between the United States and the belligerents the first thing President Wilson did was to publish all the documents and papers in the possession of the American government relating to the controversy. The publicity which the President gave the diplomatic correspondence between this government and Great Britain over the search and seizure of vessels emphasised in Washington this tendency in our foreign relations. At the beginning of England's seizure of American merchantmen carrying cargoes to neutral European countries, the State Department lodged individual protests, but no heed was paid to them by the London officials. Then the United States made public the negotiations seeking to accomplish by publicity what a previous exchange of diplomatic notes failed to do.

Discussing this action of the President in an editorial on "Diplomacy in the Dark," the New York World said:

"President Wilson's protest to the British Government is a clear, temperate, courteous assertion of the trade rights of neutral countries in time of war. It represents not only the established policy of the United States but the established policy of Great Britain. It voices the opinion of practically all the American people, and there are few Englishmen, even in time of war, who will take issue with the principles upheld by the President. Yet a serious misunderstanding was risked because it is the habit of diplomacy to operate in the dark.

"Fortunately, President Wilson by making the note public prevented the original misunderstanding from spreading. But the lesson ought not to stop there. Our State Department, as Mr. Wickersham recently pointed out in a letter to the World, has never had a settled policy of publicity in regard to our diplomatic affairs. No Blue Books or White Books are ever issued. What information the country obtains must be pried out of the Department. This has been our diplomatic policy for more than a century, and it is a policy that if continued will some day end disastrously."

Speaking in Atlanta in 1912, President Wilson stated that this government would never gain another foot of territory by conquest. This dispelled whatever apprehension there was that the United States might seek to annex Mexico. Later, in asking Congress to repeal the Panama Tolls Act of 1912, the President said the good will of Europe was a more valuable asset than commercial advantages gained by discriminatory legislation.

Thus at the outset of President Wilson's first administration, foreign powers were given to understand that Mr. Wilson believed in the power of public opinion; that he favoured publicity as a means of accomplishing what could not be done by confidential negotiations; that he did not believe in annexation and that he was ready at any time to help end the war.