"IF I HAD BEEN PRESIDENT."

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 135, 21 January 1916, Page 4 (Supplement)

"IF I HAD BEEN PRESIDENT."

MR ROOSEVELT SAYS HE WOULD HAVE "ACTED." LUSITANIA AND RAIDS ON PARIS AND LONDON. Mr. Roosevelt, interviewed by a special correspondent, of the "Petit Journal" in New York, said: "I think the attacks of the British Press against the diplomacy of Sir Edward Grey go much too far. The European crisis is horribly complicated. There are events and circumstances which cannot be foreseen, and some allowance must be made for men who have to deal with them. The -diplomacy of the Allies in the Balkans has all along been too optimistic and too loyal, especially towards Bulgarian Machiaevellianism. Theie is only one great and infallible principle in diplomacy as well as in politics and that is to keep one's promises and not to promise more than one can fulfil." Speaking of the attitude of the United States in the world war, the exPresident said: "I myself have a little German blood in my veins. I was a convinced admirer of the intelligence and the admirable organisation of Germany, but after the violation of Belgium, after the policy of incendiarism and useless atrocities, of the assassination of women and children at Dinant, Louvain, and Rheims, after the aerial raids on Paris and London, after the Lusitania. Germany has with intolerable cynicism trodden on the rights of neutrals and international conventions which the United States have pledged themselves to observe and to make respected. It is a criminal violation of the law of nations. The United States has failed culpably to keep the promise made when they signed the Hague Convention to defend the right. "If 1 had been President at the time of the torpedoing of the Lusitania or the raids in Paris and London on the civilian population I should have It was our dear duty. The present President allowed the opportunity to pass of playing a great and dignified part, a part as great and dignified as that of Lincoln or Washington." Mr. Roosevelt thinks that the United States failed in their duty towards themselves by not preparing sufficiently for national defence. "What the United States want," he said, "is universal military service on the Swiss model, developed and adapted to the habits and needs of America, with a navy of the first order, which might take second place in the navies of the world."