But it is quite indefensible to make agreements and not live up to them. The climax of absurdity is for any administration to do what the present administration during the last five months has done. Mr. Wilson’s administration has shirked doing the duty plainly imposed on it by the obligations of the conventions already entered into; and at the same time it has sought to obtain cheap credit by entering into a couple of score new treaties infinitely more drastic than the old ones, and quite impossible of honest fulfilment. When the Belgian people complained of violations of the Hague tribunal, it was a mockery, it was a timid and unworthy abandonment of duty on our part, for President Wilson to refer them back to the Hague court, when he knew that the Hague court was less than a shadow unless the United States by doing its clear duty gave the Hague court some substance. If the Hague conventions represented nothing but the expression of feeble aspirations toward decency, uttered only in time of profound peace, and not to be even expressed above a whisper when with awful bloodshed and suffering the conventions were broken, then it was idle folly to enter into them. If, on the other hand, they meant anything, if the United States had a serious purpose, a serious sense of its obligations to world righteousness, when it entered into them, then its plain duty as the trustee of civilization is to investigate the charges solemnly made as to the violation of the Hague conventions. If such investigation is made, and if the charges prove well founded, then it is the duty of the United States to take whatever action may be necessary to vindicate the principles of international law set forth in these conventions.