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About The Columbia sentinel. (Harlem, Ga.) 1882-1924 | View Entire Issue (April 3, 1922)
1 fol. 40 Day after day, we learn bit by bit, some thing more of the mysterious workings of the Peace Conference which was opened here in Washington last year. the. order in Bear the facts well in mind, in which they happened, because it is of the ut¬ most consequence that you should remember how events developed. First, there was the Borah Resolution, which requested the President of the United States to invite the two other great Naval Powers, Japan and England, to the a conference, builcliny of with a view to the limitation of armored cruisers and battleships. This Resolution was, naturally and prop¬ erly, heralded and welcomed as a movement toward world-wide peace. It hung fire in the Senate week after week and month after month. The White House was understood to he opposed to it. The Republican leadership was also in opposition. Suddenly, one day while the Senate was in session, a whisper ran through lire corridors that the antagonism of the White House had ceased, and that the entire Republican vote would be thrown to the Borah Resolution.”^ This turned out to he true, and when the vote came, the Republican were unanimously in its favor. Although I had been supporting it from the very first day of its introduction, I could not vote for fit, because it had been attached as a rider to a Naval Appropriation Bill to carry $500,000,000 of the people’s money, which sum I thought, was much too large; and besides, I had begun to suspect that the Ad¬ ministration meant to come as near the League of Nations as it could possibly do, without openly wearing the clothes of Woodrow Wil¬ son. It gives me no pleasure to say that my fore¬ bodings were well-founded, and that w.e The are now, by the treaties which were batched at .Washington Conference, placed at the mercy of the League of Nations; and, being thus placed, we may find it to our advantage to MR. WILLIAM JENNINGS BRYAN AND THE FOUR POWER TREATY. After the end of the Spanish-American War of 1898, Mr. Bryan came here to Wash¬ ington and used his influence to take away from the Democratic Party a sufficient num¬ ber of Senators to help out the Republicans' in their difficult fight to ratify the Treaty of Paris, by which we paid, to the Spanish, Eng¬ lish, and French bondholders, $20,000,000. for the Philippine Islands, which we had already conquered, and of which we had taken posses¬ sion. In doing this, we acted in bad faith with Aguinaldo, to whom Admiral Dewey and Pres¬ ident McKipley had promised independence for the Philippines, as the price of their as¬ sistance in expelling the Spanish. One of the Senators who was prevailed upon by Mr. Bryan was my friend"; Steve Clay, of Georgia. Shortly before his death, I had an en¬ gagement to speak at Marietta, and he invited me to dine with him, after the address had been delivered. » * This I did, and during our conversation at the table, he told me that Mr. Bryan had persuaded him to vote for the Treaty against his convictions, and that he regretted it more than any vote he had ever cast. Senator Clay was then suffering from an incurable disease, and he knew that his days on earth were numbered; and, therefore, his statement to me has all the solemnity that the law gives to the statements of the dying. By his action at that time, Mr. Bryan committed us to that policy of imperialism which has led us into this Four Power Pact, which in turn commits us to a partnership with ■ the imperialism of Great Britain ana Japan. He has come here to Washington, again, to use his influence on behalf of this Republi¬ can Treaty, and I fear that at least three of our Democratic Senators have been controlled by Mr. Bryan’s sinister and selfish influence. There are few men who have had it in their power to do their country more harm than Mr. Bryan has done to his. s A more inordinately ambitious man never X > §r W ffm rs mi Price $2.00 Per Year NOTES FROM THE UNITED STATES SENATE join, rather than to war with the fifty-odd na tions which are already members of the Wil son League, which our people repudiated at the elections, less than two years ago. When the Conference opened, there was no talk except about the naval holiday, the scrapping of battleships, and the inauguration of an era of universal peace. The whole country and the whole world went into raptures over the sudden turn to wards peace on earth and good will to men; and there was no thought of the resurreettion of an alliance between the Bio Four, which had dominated at Paris. There was an ominous and persistent si¬ lence for several weeks as to what the Confer¬ ence was doing, ard nobody could obtain the slightest information. The Democratic leader, Mr. Underwood, did not take any of us into hist confidence; and if Mr. Lodge, the Republican leader, took any of his colleagues into his confidence, we Democrats were not aware of it. As Minerva sprang full-armed out of the head of Jove, Tn the ancient fable, this Four Power Treaty sprang upon us one day, and clashed its sword upon its shield, saying in¬ solently and defiantly: “I come, I seek, l wit conquer.” .This is what it did. The power behind it was invisible, but ir resistable. / We who fought the League in 1920, flung ourselves against this bastard, and did our level best to pull him down, but he was too strong for us. Almost every daily paper was against us, every magazine was against us, the church papers were against us, the country weeklies were against us, the farm leaders were against us, the farm bloc was against us, the Sunday congregations in the churches were against us, schoolboys and schoolgirls in the academies., were against us, Democratic Senators, who should have been with us, were against us, and we went down in defeat. The historic policy of our Government lived, and few men have had such aspirations based upon such slender foundations. He has hot, by study and research, mas¬ tered any great question, but he can fluently talk upon all. He was an open saloon man in Nebraska, until the prohibitionists took up most of the Send in your subscription to THE COLUMBIA SENTINEL and keep posted on both State and National affairs. Important measures are now before Congress, and you will want to know what is going on in our National Capitol, this paper will furnish in a clear, concise way all the important matters that will come before both branches of Congress. Subscription price $2.00 per year. In clubs of 5 or more $1.50 for each subscription. F\ O. Box 393, Thomson, Ga. NOTICE TO SUBSCRIBERS. When you want your paper changed, give both old and new address. The change cannot be made without both addresses. Changes of address, and complaints of non-delivery of paper should be addressed to* C. E. ATKINSON, Chief of Mailing Dept., The Columbia Sentinel, P. O. BOX 393 THOMSON, GEORGIA Thomson, Georgia, Monday, April 3, 1922. was revolutionized, and the country at large did not know what was being done. Into pitfalls against which our greatest Statesmen warned us, we have been pluuged. Upon the very reefs where every great Republic of the past has gone down, we have thrown ourselves. We no longer occupy the splendid position which Nature gave us, with -die vast oceans protecting our eastern and western frontiers, while the north and south are protected by the Great Lakes and the Gulf. We have deliberately joined hands with the despotisms of Europe, Asia, aud Africa, and we have pledged ourselves to an unlimited number of expeditionary forces, whenever the international bankers havo a debt to collect, or a natural resource to exploit. It is the strangest situation the world ever saw. we linked arms with Japan, a Budd¬ hist nation, to make war upon the Christians of Russia, and to Hold in cruel subjection the Christians of Keora and China. We do this in spite of the fact that the un¬ disputed record shows that we pledged oai faith and friendship to Korea, in 1882; and that Japan herself plighted her national honor to the independence of Korea, even in her declaration of war against Russia in 1904. By that declaration, which Korea believed in, Japan secured the aid of Korea in that ti¬ tanic struggle; and without this aid of Korea on the Asiatic mainland, Japan could not have won the war. Immediately after she had won it, she ask¬ ed our Government and Great Britain for a tree hand in conquering her ally, and this per¬ mission was given— and no greater political crime teas ever committed. The partition of Poland by Austria, in conjunction with Russia aud Prussia, was not more infamous. . Austria's infamy consisted in the fact that, only a few years before:, the Polish army, under John Sobieski, had saved her from the army of the Turks, in a great battle under the walls of Vienna.. road; then, to prevent being run over, he jumped into their wagon and took the reins, with that engaging modesty which is so pro¬ nounced a feature of his character. He was against woman suffrage, until the suffragettes occupied most of the sidewalk, and then he broke through the lines, and seiz- Issued Weekiy Only those who bay come to the galleries and have heard the speeches which were made against this surrender of our national inde pendenee, can have any conception of the facts. Those who have come and who have lis¬ tened, have been with ns, heart, and soul, every man, every woman, every boy, and every girl. When my friend, Senator Jim Reed, of Missouri, finished his wonderful speech, the night before the vote was taken, there was an outburst of applause, which swept the galler¬ ies and swept the floor of the Senate, and which the occupant of the Chair did not even attempt to check. I have never seen anything like it, and I doubt whether Daniel Webster or Henry Clay ever received such an ovation. The cynicism with which the Republicans, . and those Democrats who followed Senator Underwood, have shown at this epochal change in our relation to the world, is something that mystifies me, and fills me with despair. How on earth it is that newspapers, mag¬ azines, preachers, teachers, and those who are supposed to represent public sentiment can be so misled, I simply cannot understand. There has been a rapid and systematic accumulation of the world’s supply of gold, in the coffers of the Federal Reserve bankers. There has been, coincident with this ac¬ cumulation of gold, a destruction of our paper money; my belief is, that the international bankers, headed by the House of Morgan, whose tools are Secretary Mellon, of the Unit¬ ed States Treasury, and Governor TV. P. G. Harding, of the Federal Reserve Board, aim to exploit the almost unlimited resources of China, and the huge island of Sakhalin; and they are doing this in conjunction with, the financiers of London, Paris, and Tohio. I will be happily surprised, if we are not propagandised into auother world war in less + han five years. This possibly explains the Four Power Pact, and the tremendous unseen force behind it. ed the banner which led the procession. By his aggressive assertions of purity and piety, he maintains‘a prominence which no other man could have done, after baling taken the money of Belmont and Ryan, and having vainly tried to take from old man Bennett’s widow the money that was legally heis. He retains the confidence of the honest and religious, which no other man could have done, after having betrayed and mortally wounded two such men as Richard Bland, and Champ Clark, of Missouri. At the Baltimore Convention of 1912, Mr. Bryan, when deserting Champ Clark, to whose support he was in honor bound, intended to capture the nomination for himself, as he had done in 1896, but the opportune moment never arrived, and mankind could not again be “crowned with thorns,. or crucified upon a cross of gold,” a phrase which Mr. Bryan borrowed without giving credit. As Secretary of State, he added much to the gayety of nations by commercializing the office, apd mingling his melodious voice at county cattle-shows with the ‘ yodels of the Swiss, before the prize-calf began to yodel. He contributed more than can now be known toward plunging us into the war, by telling the Austrian Ambassador, who, of course, repeated it to Count Bernstoff, that President Wilson did not mean what he said, when he told the Kaiser’s Government that he would hold them to strict accountability for any further outrages on the high seas. They took this to mean that they could continue their murderous warfare with sub¬ marines, and for this construction of Mr. Wil¬ son’s note, Mr. Bryan cannot escape respon¬ sibility. He still thinks that he is going to he President: he will never be. He would like to be Senator from Florida: he will never be. His own State cast him out, politically, and Florida will, perhaps, always find men born withip her borders who are fit to repre¬ sent her, ' v ' \* No, 25
