A. Yes, if we do our duty and make it possible for the League to work. We blew the old League up when we refused to join it, and rejected the Versailles treaty and declined to join France and England in a treaty of mutual guarantee. With us not participating, the League was doomed from the start. Our withdrawal from Europe upset the balance of power so heavily in Germany’s favor that France, and eventually Britain, had to make out of the League a coalition against Germany. This they did. Even so it failed to keep the peace because Germany was stronger than all the League members together. Had we stayed in the League we might have made collective security really work. Q. _How could America have made the League work?_ A. There is a popular belief that Germany might have remained a good neighbor and respectable member of society if the Weimar Republic had been better treated by France and her Allies. I am not sure of that, but if it is true, let us ask why France treated Germany harshly throughout the life of the Weimar Republic. The answer is that France was afraid of Germany, and as we see today, with good reason. The French fear was based on the facts that there were twice as many Germans as French, and that these Germans had just about beaten France and all her Allies, including Great Britain, until the United States stepped in. Obviously the French reasoned the United States’ protection was indispensable to French security. Without the United States in the League the French had to look for security elsewhere. They sought it in encirclement of Germany and conversion of the League into an anti-German alliance. If you object that the League is impracticable, let us ask what there is to put in its place. I use the term League to indicate any association of nations for collective security. Isolationism was our policy from 1919 to 1941. Its failure has been cosmic. The group of Senators and Congressmen who killed the League by preventing us from joining it were as responsible as Hitler for the war today. Twenty-two years later the political successors of Wilson’s “willful men” made it appear to Hitler and Mussolini and the war party in Japan that we would never stir and that aggressors could leave the United States completely out of their reckoning. Many of these men in the Senate and the House are today, as the isolationists were in 1919, actuated chiefly by an ignoble hatred for their political opponent, the President.