THE LAST CHANCE
"So far as the United States Senate is concerned, the dead of this war have died in vain." New York WORLD, March 20, 1920.
WHILE WILSON was purging his Cabinet and laying down the law to the Allies, the senators were languidly moving toward a reconsideration of their previous action. Finally, on February 9, the Senate formally voted to reconsider the treaty, and the members entered upon a rehash of their old arguments with little evident relish. Vice President Marshall weariedly remarked to the news correspondents, "Boys, why don't you just take your files on this treaty debate and print them over again?"
Yet an atmosphere of optimism pervaded the capital: this time the treaty must not be allowed to fail. Even the "irreconcilables" were privately conceding defeat. One of them remarked that, now they had "raised all the Cain possible," he would not be surprised to see most of them voting for ratifi. cation. Borah sneered that the only essential difference between the Lodge and Hitchcock reservations to Article X was the difference between "unless" and "until," and with all his oratorical talents he poured scorn upon the heads of the unlessites" and the "untillites."
Senator Hitchcock was revealing an auspicious willingness to compromise. Lodge, on his part, agreed to accept the bipartisan conference changes on nine of the original fourteen reservations. But the stumbling block was a more satisfactory reservation regarding Article X. Hitchcock emphatically declared that the new proposal of both Lodge and the "mild reservationists" was worse than the original. By February 17
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Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Wilson and the Peacemakers:Combining Woodrow Wilson and the Lost Peace and Woodrow Wilson and the Great Betrayal.
Contributors: Thomas A. Bailey - Author.
Publisher: Macmillan.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 1947.
Page number: 254.
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