A GOLDEN PEACE

Senator Lodge's restatement of the treaty issue, which is politely termed a compromise, is the latest noise in the Of course nothing has really happened; nothing is likely to happen until one side or the other is ready actually to yield.

If the issue of the treaty is ever decided, and if we live to hear about it, we expect the hear that it was decided because the staying power of either Senator Lodge or senator Hitchcock has given away.

What the people really want has little to do with the matter. Mr. Lodge knows the will of the people. Mr. Hitchcock knows the will of the people. "Mirabile Dictu." To each it appears a different thing. For such deadlocks as these unprofitable trials of brute strength our government provides no solution except compromise.

Compromis is an excellent and necessary thing in the ordinary work of legislation. In an issue like the present each side is fain to consider a compromise as a compromise with the devil. The only thing the would make Senator Lodge desert the American flag is the voce of the people. Only the voce of the people can turn Senator Hitchcock from the cause of humanity. But the voice of the people says to each of these men different things.

Why not vote on the question? If the "die first" Republicans cannot read popular opinion in the certain terms in which it has been expressed let us vote and till them in terms which will require action.

A National referendum is a clumsy, expensive thing, but it is not half as clumsy as a Senate which seems to have been talking treaty even since the world began, which will apparently stop only under the cloture power of death, perhaps only under the cloture power of the millenium. Give us Peace--Oh! Senators: Pace with Germany, Peace with Austria, Peace with the world, and, best of all, Oh! Senators the sweet peace of silence in the halls of Washington.