This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1914 edition. Excerpt: ...of government, to destroy our political institutions, or to take away those individual rights and sacred privileges upon which our government was founded? Yet to save us from such fate they refused unlimited arbitration. For the United States to except from arbitration her vital interests is obvious pretense. To add thereto her national honor is extreme hypocrisy. What is national honor? No man knows. It is one thing to-day; another, to-morrow. It may involve an indemnity claim, a boundary line, a fisheries dispute. In fact, any controversy may be declared by either party, at will, to be a question of national honor. Thus in the hands of an unskilled or malicious diplomacy, any question which was originally a judicial one may become a question of national honor. What, then, will we arbitrate? Every case in which a favorable award is assured us. If we want Texas, we send an army after it. Every case that does not rouse our anger. Let the Maine blow up and we fight. A treaty with an elastic exception like this is a farcical sham and a delusion. It is high time the true and humiliating significance of these fearsome phrases should be as familiar to every taxpayer as is the burden of bristling camps and restless navies. Read the record of Great Britain's first offer of unlimited arbitration in the Olney-Pauncefote treaty of 1897. There, too, you will find national honor and vital interests clogging the machinery of universal peace. By these same exceptions the Senate emasculated that treaty and defeated the spirit of the agreement. Is it conceivable that the Senate actually feared that our interests would be imperiled by that treaty? Did it delve out some hidden dangers which escaped the careful scrutiny of both the English and American...