The will to friendship--or the will to hate? Which do you choose? Which do you think is the best foundation for the League of Nations? Do you imagine that so long as nations do not like each other, that mere words of good intention, written on mere paper, are going to be enough? Write down the words by all means, but see to it that behind your words there shall exist actual good will. Discourage histories for children (and for grown-ups too) which breed international dislike. Such exist among us all. There is a recent one, written in England, that needs some changes.
“I have the will to friendship. Is there any particular thing which I can do to help?” I should answer him:
“Just now, or in any days to come, should you be tempted to remind us that we did not protest against the martyrdom of Belgium, that we were a bit slow in coming into the war,--oh, don’t utter that reproach! Go back to your own past; look, for instance, at your guarantee to Denmark, at Lord John Russell’s words: ‘Her Majesty could not see with indifference a military occupation of Holstein’--and then see what England shirked; and read that scathing sentence spoken to her ambassador in Russia: ‘Then we may dismiss any idea that England will fight on a point of honor.’ We had made you no such guarantee. We were three thousand miles away--how far was Denmark?
“And another thing. On August 6, 1919, when Britain’s thanks to her land and sea forces were moved in both houses of Parliament, the gentleman who moved them in the House of Lords said something which, as it seems to me, adds nothing to the tribute he had already paid so eloquently. He had spoken of the greater incentive to courage which the French and Belgians had, because their homes and soil were invaded, while England’s soldiers had suffered no invasion of their island. They had not the stimulus of the knowledge that the frontier of their country had been violated, their homes broken up, their families enslaved, or worse. And then he added: ‘I have sometimes wondered in my own mind, though I have hardly dared confess the sentiment, whether the gallant troops of our Allies would have fought with equal spirit and so long a time as they did, had they been engaged in the Highlands of Scotland or on the marches of the Welsh border.’ Why express that wonder? Is there not here an instance of that needless overlooking of the feelings of others, by which, in times past, you have chilled those others? Look out for that.”