Moderate and sensible treaties which mean something and which can and will be enforced mark a real advance for the human race. As has been well said: “It is our business to make no treaties which we are not ready to maintain with all our resources, for every such ‘scrap of paper’ is like a forged check--an assault on our credit in the world.” Promises that are idly given and idly broken represent profound detriment to the morality of nations. Until no promise is idly entered into and until promises that have once been made are kept, at no matter what cost of risk and effort and positive loss, just so long will distrust and suspicion and wrong-doing rack the world. No honest lawyer will hesitate to advise his client against signing a contract either detrimental to his interests or impossible of fulfilment; and the individual who signs such a contract at once makes himself either an object of suspicion to sound-headed men or else an object of derision to all men. One of the stock jokes in the comic columns of the newspapers refers to the man who swears off or takes the pledge, or makes an indefinite number of good resolutions on New Year’s Day, and fails to keep his pledge or promise or resolution; this was one of Mark Twain’s favorite subjects for derision. The man who continually makes new promises without living up to those he has already made, and who takes pledges which he breaks, is rightly treated as an object for contemptuous fun. The nation which behaves in like manner deserves no higher consideration. The conduct of President Wilson and Secretary Bryan in signing these all-inclusive treaties at the same time that they have kept silent about the breaking of the Hague conventions has represented the kind of wrong-doing to this nation that would be represented in private life by the conduct of the individuals who sign such contracts as those mentioned. The administration has looked on without a protest while the Hague conventions have been torn up and thrown to the wind. It has watched the paper structure of good-will collapse without taking one step to prevent it; and yet foolish pacificists, the very men who in the past have been most vociferous about international morality, have praised it for this position. The assertion that our neutrality carries with it the obligation to be silent when our own Hague conventions are destroyed represents an active step against the peace of righteousness. The only way to show that our faith in public law was real was to protest against the assault on international morality implied in the invasion of Belgium.