He insisted that the surest way of "preserving one's country from the horrors of war, was simply observance of well-established rules of neutrality known to all the world." Such a policy would "limit the area and probably the duration" of wars, and would "promote sanity recovery, and reconstruction."
"Only in recent times," he said, "has it been supposed that neutrality was immoral or illegal, or that any good can be served by intervening in foreign wars."
The present neutrality act is based on the assumption "that our neutral trade and our neutrality got us into the last war," Borchard asserted. "But it was not trade that got us in. It was sheer unneutrality--the official favoring of on side against the other."
Others Kept Out
Other countries, which actually followed accepted neutral practice, had little difficulty in staying out of the late war and have enjoyed universal respect."
This atitude was summarized by Peffer, who declared that no legislation in itself could keep us out of war.
To assure peace "you must abandon policies that can be executed only by war.