Though there is likely to be a disposition among many citizens to admire the boldness and promptness with which President Lowell of Harvard has broadcast his views in favor of the concurrence of the United States with the League of Nations in a boycott upon Japan, we think that the average American opinion will be that Dr. Lowell's admonition should have been broadcast over European lines rather than over American. The Government of the United States has put plainly on record its disapproval of what is in reality an aggressive war on China by Japan. It has founded its objection to this aggressive proceeding on the moral force of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and on the Nine-Power Treaty of 1922. Dr. Lowell freely admits that any action which the United States may take or may join in with other Powers is based not on the Covenant of the League of Nations but on these two agreements, to which we have adhered. But the sanction of the boycott is a purely League of Nations proposition, with which we have nothing to do. There are no sanctions or penalties in the pact of renunciation of war. To join now in invoking a League penalty, and indeed to lead the nations in applying it, may be quite consistent with the Dr. Lowell's known favor of our entrance into the League of Nations, but it is not consistent with either the engagements of our Government or the wishes of the American people. . .

The Kellogg Pact is a formal renunciation of the means of war on the part of the signatory Powers. It assigns no penalty for the breaking of the pledge which it implies. It binds no one to the act of enforcement. The Nine-Power, like any other actual treaty, goes further in its implications than the purely declaratory utterance of the Kellogg Pact. Dr. Lowell says that "we are entitled to take the steps necessary to cause the observance of the treaty." But to be "entitled" to take such a step is one thing, and to take upon our shoulders the burden of the suspension of commercial relations with a nation which refuses to keep its word pledged in the treaty, is not a part of the national duty. Dr. Lowell's proposition, we fear, has in it a much more distinct purpose to make Uncle Sam the policeman of the universe than the sentiment of the American people will approve. If the League of Nations has proved itself impotent to carry out its own essential purposes, the condition is a justification of our decision not to join it rather than an incentive to such a course. --Boston Transcript.