EDUCATING PUBLIC OPINION

The debate on the League of Nations between President Lowell and Senator Lodge should do much to educate public opinion. More such open discussions are needed on this all-important subject. The average man has not very clear ideas of his own on the advisability of the United States entering the League. He takes the word of his party leaders, and is often influenced by personal likes and dislikes. His prejudices once formed, he doesn't want to read arguments or hear speeches to the contrary. But if he can go to a meeting where his own leaders are arrayed against an intelligent opposition, he cannot help hearing facts which will set him thinking for himself.

The committee of the League to Enforce Peace naturally believes that the people strongly advocate ratification of the League constitution. The anti-League senators who are now touring the country are just as firmly convinced that the people do not. Both parties are deceived by the fact that only those who sympathize with their views, attend their mass meetings. But if debates were made common practice statesmen could get a much better idea of the sentiment of the nation.

President Lowell and Senator Lodge are relatively of the same attitude on the League of Nations as were Webster and Hayne in their famous debate over the theory of "states' rights." In his life of Webster, Senator Lodge says that Webster's argument on the supremacy of the central government was historically unsound. He asserts that in 1787-88 "there was not a man in the country . . . who regarded the new system as anything but an experiment entered upon by the states, and from which each and every state had the right peaceably to withdraw, a right which was very likely to be exercised." The country has accepted the tendency toward strengthening the federal government. Do we wish to enter a League which may place the nation on the same footing as a state of the Union holds today?

Senator Lodge is endeavoring to point to the danger of foreign control. President Lowell maintains there is no such danger. In any event, the debate will make one of the great landmarks in American history.