Under such conditions, as I have shown, our duty is twofold. In the first place, events have clearly demonstrated that in any serious crisis treaties unbacked by force are not worth the paper upon which they are written. Events have clearly shown that it is the idlest of folly to assert and little short of treason against the nation for statesmen who should know better to pretend, that the salvation of any nation under existing world conditions can be trusted to treaties, to little bits of paper with names signed on them but without any efficient force behind them. The United States will be guilty of criminal misconduct, we of this generation will show ourselves traitors to our children and our children’s children if, as conditions are now, we do not keep ourselves ready to defend our hearths, trusting in great crises not to treaties, not to the ineffective good-will of outsiders, but to our own stout hearts and strong hands. So much for the first and most vital lesson. But we are not to be excused if we stop here. We must endeavor earnestly but with sanity to try to bring around better world conditions. We must try to shape our policy in conjunction with other nations so as to bring nearer the day when the peace of righteousness, the peace of justice and fair dealing, will be established among the nations of the earth. With this object in view, it is our duty carefully to weigh the influences which are at work or may be put to work in order to bring about this result and in every effective way to do our best to further the growth of these influences. When this has been done no American administration will be able to assert that it is reduced to humiliating impotence even to protest against such wrong as that committed on Belgium, because, forsooth, our “neutrality” can only be preserved by failure to help right what is wrong--and we shall then as a people have too much self-respect to enter into absurd, all-inclusive arbitration treaties, unbacked by force, at the very moment when we fail to do what is clearly demanded by our duty under the Hague treaties.