“What earthly use is it to pretend that the safety of the world would be secured by a League in which these four nations would be among the nine leading partners? Long years must pass before we can again trust in promises these four nations make. Therefore, unless our folly is such that it will not depart from us until we are brayed in a mortar, let us remember that any such treaty will be worthless unless our own prepared strength renders it unsafe to break it.... Let us support any reasonable plan whether in the form of a League of Nations or in any other shape which bids fair to lessen the probable number of future wars and to limit their scope, but let us laugh at all or any assertions that any such plan will guaranty Peace and Safety to the foolish, weak, or timid characters who have not the will and the power to prepare for their own defense. Support any such plan which is honest and reasonable, but support it as a condition to and never as a substitute for the policy of preparing our own strength for our own defense. “I believe that this preparation should be, by the introduction in this country of the principle of universal training and universal service, as practised in Switzerland, and modified, of course, along the lines enacted in Australia, and in accordance with our needs. There will be no taint of Prussian militarism in such a system. It will merely mean to fit ourselves for self-defense and a great democracy in which order, law, and liberty are to prevail.” I have quoted this speech because I am under the impression that it was his first actual declaration of any attitude toward a proposed League of Nations. In the early autumn of 1914 Theodore Roosevelt himself had written an article for the New York _Times_ syndicate in which he suggested the possibility of a League of Nations, and the fact that he did make that suggestion was frequently used after his death--and, I think, in an unjustifiable manner--by the adherents of the Wilsonian League of Nations, with the desire to make the American public feel that my brother would have been in favor of Mr. Wilson’s league. In every pronouncement in connection with a tentative or possible league, my brother invariably laid stress upon an absolutely Americanized type of association. I asked him once about his article written in 1914, and he told me that while still hoping that some good might come from a league or association of nations, his serious study of world situations during the Great War had made him less optimistic as to the possibility of reaching effective results through such a possible league or association. In another speech at about the same time, he said, in characteristic fashion: “I frequently meet one of those nice gentry in whom softness of heart has spread to the head, who say: ‘How can we guaranty that everybody will love one another at the end of the war?’ The first step in guarantying it is to knock Germany out!”